Stupid Ideas

Customer complains he was
served beef instead of chicken,
gets hit on the head with a plate.

I’m sorry to have to say it, but there really are some stupid ideas floating around out there. This talk of exhuming Leonardo da Vinci’s body should probably lead the list. I think some Italian art historians and scientists may have been drinking some bad Chianti. Whoever first came up with the idea that the Mona Lisa is really a portrait of da Vinci himself should certainly be tested for potential misuse of something or other. Strangely enough this particular issue has nothing to do with her smile (for a change). Anyway, there are clearly a lot of questions about this, certainly enough to render the whole enterprise not worth doing. First, they don’t know what they will find in the grave. The remains may be too far gone to be of much use. Second, whatever remains there are may not even be da Vinci, as he has reportedly already been exhumed at least once and reburied. Third, even if there are adequate remains, and even if they show some similarities to the facial features of the Mona Lisa, it would still not prove their thesis. I guess part of the idea has to do with Leonardo’s homosexuality and, therefore, his presumed desire to portray himself as a young woman, something that could never be proved by exhuming his skull. This whole idea in my opinion is truly far-fetched. If one of the ideas is that the smile is Leonardo’s smile because he is fooling his audience, I think that is nonsense. I have long wondered about all the controversy over her smile, it has always seemed to me to be the same smile all beautiful women have, knowing the secret of their power.

Another really stupid idea is a freeze on spending for three years, the freeze Obama is reportedly going to announce tomorrow in his state of the union address. This freeze is not going to substantially impact the deficit, will slow down things right now when they need to be accelerated, and is nothing more than a political sop to conservative Democrats and Republicans. When is Obama going to give up trying to appease these people, they are not going to vote on anything to help him no matter what he does. Indeed, they are already bitching that this freeze is not going far enough. There is just no satiating the insatiable, and these conservatives are absolutely insatiable when it comes to pleasing them about anything Obama. If Obama hadn’t wasted so much time and effort trying to achieve bipartisanship with those who had already declared they were the party of no, perhaps we would have achieved much more by now.

Of course you’d have to look a long way to find any idea more stupid than the recent Supreme Court decision that corporations are people and should have the same rights as people. I wonder that the founding fathers are rolling over in their graves, trying to get up to toss the bums out. Indeed, this is an idea so stupid that it could only have been a deliberate political decision by the conservative members of the court. Either that or those members have no business being on the court in the first place. The court is not supposed to be political, but this court has made a mockery of that idea. Some of them should be impeached.

Unfortunately, there are lots of ideas even more stupid than the above. The idea, for example, that you could ever have a decent, efficient, effective, and desirable health care system based upon an insurance for-profit system is surely one of them. For-profit prisons are another entirely stupid idea, as is the idea of a for-profit military or a for-profit water supply, or even, as we seem to have now, a for-profit political system. As I have said so often, some things cannot be left to the private sector. I suppose it wouldn’t matter much if there was a for-profit cosmetic industry, or a for-profit toy industry, or a for-profit fashion industry, or other things like that, but I’m not even so sure about a for-profit entertainment industry (but these are questions better left for another time). I’m beginning to think like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, I’ve thought of more than six impossibly stupid ideas before breakfast. I guess it’s just part of the human condition, where seemingly good ideas often turn out to be truly stupid, and seemingly stupid ideas sometimes turn out to be really clever. “No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris ... [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping.” Orville Wright. I don’t know how one would prove it, but it seems to me that seemingly good ideas turn out to be bad more often than seemingly bad ideas turn out to be good. I think I may be “losing it,” Donald Rumsfeld is starting to make sense:”Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.” Good ideas gone bad would seem to be a case in point?

LKBIQ:
As if there were safety in stupidity alone.
Henry David Thoreau

TILT:
All cats seem to have occasional bouts of mania.