Help! I'm Surrounded By Assholes!

Ruminations on the obvious lack of intelligence in our daily lives, and some science, to boot...

As noted elsewhere in this mess, The Overlord is convinced that Darwin was wrong.

If we define Darwin's central thesis as being that organisms which prove themselves capable of adaptation to changing environments are best suited to survive, then I say the proof this dictum is a steaming pile of dogsqueeze is inescapable to those of room-temperature IQ, and easily disproved by simply walking out your own front door and paying strict attention to the human beings one encounters in doing so.

Let's define the variables in our "Darwin Was Full of Shit" equation before we continue.

The Organism in question here is the typical Human Being, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. For the purposes of this exploration (at least initially), such petty details as race, gender, and certification of higher learning are unnecessary. I will give you two (2) recent examples of the Overlord's interactions with average examples of The Organism, and see if you put any stock into Darwin's theories.

The first example involves Basic Math.

This past Saturday night, I entered the local Walgreens to buy cigarettes and Pepsi, since I am addicted to both, and consider them two of the Five Basic Food Groups (which are: Nicotine, Sugar, Caffeine, Alcohol, and MSG). My total tab at the register is $14.90. The Overlord gives the dullard behind the register a $20 bill, and 90-cents.

The Laws of Basic Math state that the Overlord should receive $6 in change from said misshapen lump of proletariat protoplasm. This cannot be disputed, for it is an Iron Law of Numbers. Numbers never lie.

This creates a problem for the troll at the register, for see, she has no $5 bills in her cash drawer. Mind you, she has plenty of $1 bills, but does not bother to count any out. She needs a $5 bill to make $6 change, and summons her Manager to bring her a mess of fives, so that she can give me my change.

So, I decide to fuck with her.

"Hey, Sweetheart", I say, "I have five $1 bills here in my wallet. If you have a $10 bill and a single to give me, I'll give you the five dollars, and we'll be even."

You can see the instant panic on her face. Smoke pours from her ears. The sound of the rusty wheels inside her head screeching into unaccustomed action can be heard. The Basic Math Beast has arisen from the depths of the Spooky Swamp to wreak havoc among the innumerate!

Long story short, she eventually gave in to my request, but only after two other customers -- impatiently waiting behind me on line -- assure her that, indeed, it all adds up. The Manager is nowhere to be found, probably because he doesn't know what a "5" looks like in the safe.

The Kicker? The cashier is wearing a school ring advertising the fact that she is a graduate of St. John's University.

I have a feeling that she's probably a victim of Common Core, which states that six is a five-and-a-one, and not six ones, or three twos or two threes. As far as she knows, Six is equal to Five-plus-One, and no other permutation of Six is ever possible.

Darwin was wrong: Evolution works in reverse, too. In a technologically-advanced environment, people don't even remember the basic, non-technical skills that brought them the technologically-advanced environment.

The Second Example involves an exercise in Logic versus the Dictates of Bureaucracy.

Last week, in a fit of stupid (yes, it happens to me, too, sometimes. I blame Lady Overlord and all the doo-wop shows that she has dragged me to the last few weeks. I believe I have caught an intermittent form of Alzheimer's at one of them), your Overlord entered the local post office and purchased a money order, intending to mail it out to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, and so renew the registration on his vehicle.

He did this because he kept forgetting to write a check, he was already going to the Post Office, anyway, and the forms and return envelope were on the front seat of his Nissan Tie Fighter. where they had been for the last two weeks, already. The idea was to kill two birds with a single stone, except that I forgot to actually MAIL anything. The following day, I forgot I even bought that money order, and went to the DMV to take care of the registration in person.

Lo and behold! What do I find in my glove box today? A Post Office Money Order. Which I now don't need. No trouble, just zip down to the Post Office, stand in line for about 45 minutes, and then cash the sucker. You would think this would be a simple proposition.

You would be wrong.

For while I have the Money Order, pristine, the receipt I got when I bought it, and photo id, the government-employed dipshit behind the counter is not satisfied.Because there are RULEZ, you see. Even if it's the same dipshit who sold it to me, originally.

If the U.S. Government had half the ironfisted regulations and procedures in place to fight ISIS or seal the borders  as are required to return an unused Postal Money Order, the War on Terror might actually be over, for the Other Side would have given up out of sheer frustration, and the Mexicans would be too busy rolling around on the ground laughing to hop fences, losing all hope that they could ever spoof or defeat such a ponderous, poorly-organized, Milt-Goldberg-contraption of a Federal Bureaucracy.

I'm required to present a credit card (why? No one knows). I will require a second piece of photo identification which is NOT a State-issued identification card. Then, AND ONLY THEN, I am informed by the gap-toothed, inbred I-got-this-job-because-I-passed-the-test-on-my-fifth-try-with-a-62 mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging douchebag in the window will I be able to get my money back.

Fuck this, get me your Supervisor.

The Supervisor (who is only Supervisor, presumably, because she has a few more teeth than the douchebag, and probably scored a 65 in less than three tries) apparently doesn't actually KNOW the procedure for redeeming an unused Money Order. The suggestion that I make it out to myself and then cash it as one would a check is met with glassy-eyed thousand yard stares. The two commiserate in Bureaucratic Crapspeak for what seems ages before a third -- I hesitate to call her a person -- sticks her proboscis into the swirling maelstrom of inanity.

You now know why the Post Office is losing billions every year, because each has offered their own, different solution.

Dumbass #1 says "follow the rules", or, at the very least "the rules as she knows them". Which could be construed to mean The Rules as they were in 1969, or any old shit she makes up as she goes along. Who knows?

Dumbass #2 says they should defer to Higher Authority. Because, let's face, it, she doesn't get paid to make a judgment call. Making decisions costs people their pensions, you know. A judgment call? Really?

Dumbass #3 declares that whatever it is they finally end up doing, please tell her all about it when she comes back from lunch, because she's worked here for, like, 12 fucking years, and, you know, like no one ever returned a money order in all that time. Like EVER. At least not to her, you know?

Eventually, Higher Authority (I presume his title was "Chief Fucktard") was contacted...by phone. His answer was, apparently, "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?", because Dumbass #2 actually pulled her head away from the phone.

Long story short, I made out the Money Order to myself, presented my ID, and they cashed it.

Dumbass that I am, I should have just deposited it in the bank and saved myself the aggravation.

 I caught  Alzheimer's at the doo-wop show...must be.

So, you see the problem. Stupid Abounds. I could give you many examples of The Stupid I encounter on a daily basis while shopping, working, watching television, hanging out for a smoke, dealing with people on the phone, etc, etc, etc, but I'm sure that by this point in our Apocalyptic Descent into Hell, everyone has copious examples of their own.

Which brings us to the Science portion of our program.

This past week, an article appeared on the consequences and implications of the work of Drs. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. For those of you who live under rocks, Drs. Murray and Hernnstein are the authors of a "controversial" (controversial in the sense that it makes liberals uncomfortable) book entitled "The Bell Curve".

(Author's Note: It has been a decade since I read The Bell Curve, and I will be generalizing on it's contents, spare me the nitpicky e-mail because it's not necessary to get into detailed specifics here).

The Bell Curve postulated (among other things) that human intelligence is, to some extent, conditioned by genetics. In layman's terms, this means that some races are smarter than others, and one can assume that for the average person there is no way to break The Intelligence Barrier.

To simplify even further, The Bell Curve suggests/implies there is a Stupid Gene; that it is genetically inherited, and no matter how much "education" you give someone the Stupid Gene rigidly defines the upper boundaries of IQ. More education does not automatically result in Smarter, therefore, there being a physical upper limit to the amount of Smart any one person can possess.

Well, this caused a stir back in the day, because The Doctors presented what they thought was empirical proof of their hypothesis by way of standardized testing (standard IQ tests, the SAT's), and the Iron Law of Basic Math. Simplified still further to Hillary-voter level, Asians are smarter than Whites, Whites are smarter than Latinos who are smarter than Arabs, and the least-smartest people on Planet Earth are of African descent.

The proof? Asians and Whites performed better on standardized IQ tests/SAT's, went on to get more PhD's, finished secondary education more often, etc, etc.

Naturally, The Bell Curve was attacked, viciously, as racist, among other things (because it also discovered differences in intelligence along gender lines, as well). It's detractors, mostly social scientists, attacked it with what are now familiar weapons, accusing the authors and the testing regimes of a cultural bias, not taking economic and social factors into consideration, the effects of systemic racism and sexism, blah, fuckity, blah, blah, blah.

To a social scientist (an oxymoron) all problems are "social" in nature, because when all you have in your tool belt is a hammer, everything becomes a fucking nail.

In those days, genetic science was not as advanced as it is now, and there was no means by which to map a human genome to prove/disprove the assertions of a genetic element to intelligence.

Now there is. And it's ridiculously cheap.

So, an exercise in logic here: if Medical Science can assert that there is a genetic component in Heart Disease, Diabetes, Obesity, Cancer, and a million other medical issues, then why is it impossible for there to be a genetic predisposition to Retard, and furthermore, why has no one made an effort to discover the Stupid Gene, if it indeed exists?

Well, I think you know the answers to both of those questions. Don't you.

If you proved the existence of the Stupid Gene it blows to smithereens the whole concept of "All Men Are Created Equal" because you'd be able to point to the evidence that God or Evolution shortchanged a shitload of people.

Next implication: what happens when a population is identified as an Intellectual Dead End? Does government stop spending money to educate them past a certain point? Do we bar them from higher education? Do we start selecting people for higher education on the basis of NOT having this genetic predisposition? Could one make a case that This Population is unfit for leadership roles in business, academia, government?

Does society start demanding that the Weak be culled from the herd (in Darwinian fashion)?

What would happen if one (fuck, ALL) of the Old Racist's most cherished beliefs -- for example, that African-Americans are nosepicking reprobates who are incapable of adding anything of value to society, the Jews really are the sneaky-smartest people in the world -- were to be proven correct/incorrect? And not only "correct or incorrect" but "unarguably, incontrovertibly, scientifically-proven correct or incorrect"? Like "there's-a-consensus-the-science-is-settled" correct or incorrect?

Would another democrat/feminist/race hustler EVER get elected? Or go to Harvard? Could a Bible-thumping Inbred ever raise another dollar for the Tabernacle-Theme-Park-and-Bait-and-Tackle-Shop from the webfooted ever again? What if it turns out that what we think we know is really upside down? In other words, what if the intellectual pecking order were to be inverted in terms of race and gender?

I think it's safe to assume, for the moment, that no one will ever follow the book's main dictum to it's logical conclusion, particularly since there's more money to made and mayhem to make by leaving the answer to this question a mystery, at best, and ambiguous, at worst. It is another of those arguments in American Life -- like Civil Rights -- that people will continue to argue for the sake of beating dead horses for money.

But should someone ever decide this is worth a try, I'm going to enjoy the fireworks.

It would also be interesting to know whether this epidemic of asshole is a fluke, and can be corrected, or are we finally reaching the end of our Evolutionary rope?


(Edit: Fixed a math boo-boo of my own...now who's the dumbass?)