Quotes about stupidity

I'm posting some quotes about stupidity today, because the stupidity I see around me has really started to get to me. I don't understand how educated people can behave so stupidly in some instances, and I don't understand how some people won't use their God-given intelligence. They would rather follow a leader slavishly than use their brains and their conscience to figure out the right path for them to follow. They refuse to follow the words of Christ, yet will unthinkingly follow the words of men who are far from Christian. They don't see the hypocrisy of their situation. They don't acknowledge the lying, the self-deception, the polarization they see around them, created by the men (often quite stupid themselves) that they worship. The first and last quotes offer hope to those who want to deal with and get past the stupidity of others, and perhaps in oneself as well. 

·        The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. --John Steinbeck

·        Stupidity really gets me going, when it's just plain stupid, obvious stupidity. --Lewis Black

·        Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel. --Scott Adams

·        We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. --Stephen Hawking

·        There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. --Frank Zappa

·        Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe. --Frank Zappa

·        My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species. --Joni Mitchell

·        The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity. --Arthur Schopenhauer

·        The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. --Milan Kundera

·        The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. --Gustave Flaubert

·        No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity. --Jacques Yves Cousteau

·        Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity. --Sammy Davis, Jr.

·        That's how I was taught. That's how I was raised, to ignore the stupidity, continue on and do what I need to do. --Bubba Wallace

Things are going downhill

Six months into the pandemic, and things are starting to go downhill in terms of how people behave or do their jobs. I'm not sure why, but a good indication is that most (young) people seem to have forgotten how to social distance. There are very few of them that remember to do so, and it is always me who has to move away from them if I meet them on the sidewalk or in a store. It's incredibly annoying. Add to that the ones who hold parties with many people, and you get the picture. For them, the pandemic is over, if it ever even occurred. They are hopeless cases. Case in point: the recent bunker party that nearly ended in the deaths of many of the attendees. In my opinion, not only is there a coronavirus pandemic, but there's an epidemic of stupidity and idiocy. You can read about this incredibly stupid rave party here:   https://www.newsinenglish.no/2020/08/31/two-charged-after-illegal-bunker-party/

There are other things that have happened during the past two weeks that are an indication that people's attention spans are getting less focused and that work output is getting sloppier. The first situation concerns online shopping; I know that a lot of people are shopping on the web now, so there is probably a backlog of orders most places. I ordered four items two weeks ago from an online pharmacy here in Norway. I have ordered from before (three times) without any problems. This time, my order was not confirmed and I had to contact them to get a confirmation. Then today, I got my shipment, but it was someone else's order, so now I am in the process of trying to contact the company via telephone to find out how to return the items at no cost to me. Of course I was put on hold, because as always, there is always a long queue of people waiting to be served, which I never believe is the reality. It's rather that they only have one or two persons dealing with telephone customer service. They would prefer that you contacted them by email or used their chatbot function (which is a piece of garbage). Finally I got through, and of course the onus is on me to prove that I got the wrong shipment. I had to take photos of what I received and photos of the box the items were sent in, and send an email with the photos to customer service. I did all that, so now I wait to see what happens. I cancelled my original order and asked for a refund. I have no patience for this crap. 

Today, out of the blue, I got tossed off my hospital's email server--no warning, no explanation, no nothing. So now I have no functioning email account and cannot receive emails from people. I have two work email accounts, none of which can be accessed from home. It's pathetic. The IT service people are trying to help but they have no idea what's wrong. It won't be solved; just an intuition, but the explanations that have been advanced so far don't hold water. I could connect early this morning, and then suddenly around mid-morning, I couldn't. Go figure. It's a good thing I am retiring sooner than later, because I no longer have any patience for this. And hopefully this isn't an omen for how the rest of the week is going to be. But you never know.