Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for January 25, 2011

Always the BATTERY!

Batteries, natch.

Further confirmation of my theory that everyone should be required to pass an IQ test before they’re allowed to reproduce …

You can never run out of Idiots. there are more born every day.

@rayannia Its called eugenics and it was first invented by plato but popularized in the late 19th century (Its modern founder was Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin). I really like Wiley’s take though, the idiots self-select, and lets the researchers turn a profit!

Next door to Darwin’s Dummy Dive isTaggum & Baggums’ Mortuary and the Last Words Cemetery.

Lots of swan dives.

Who’s the idiot? You risk your job to watch this at work then yell. “Hey Charlie, you got to see this moron.” As the boss glares from the next cube.

The never ending saga of Wiley. Soon to be shown on Unemployment TV

I haven’t seen them, but isn’t this the premise for those Jackass movies?

“The Diving Morons” makes a nice twist on “The Marching Morons.”

If only it were this easy. Sigh

Suprised if ambulance wasn’t on standby.

Notice how media never mentions what serious injuries these clowns receive? Did you know that a lot of smart-bomb footage has been edited to not show people scattering at the final scene?

Coyoty said, about 4 hours ago

Lots of swan dives.

Where the swan sings while diving.

The universe will suffer heat death from entropy before we run out of idiots.

@sandeep1988 You left out Margaret Sanger!

Thin the herd!

The batteries for sure. “Think of it as evolution in action.”

At least attempt to look like a talented idiot. Try to incorporate a half ganor into the plunge. Then when you can’t pull that off either, you become the biggest idiot.

So the guy on with the camera gets to be the last one tricked to jump, BillThompson?

The cannonball. Only the cannonball would be appropriate.

“Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot.”

Another form: “Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.”

Will there be diving boards in space?

Battery life is finite. The supply of idiots, however, is infinite.

Just like lemmings….

so according to these comments the gocomics message boards are the bastion of the intellectual elite, while there is some massive hoard of idiots congregating elsewhere?

@plus4, evolution works best when there is a high rate of death due to some pressure on the population–think antibiotics on bacteria–on human populations it would likely take millennia or more.

Also, developing social networks on a planetary scale has changed evolution–now it has a much stronger cultural element: that is, we evolve less as biological “tribes” and more as cultural ones.

Plus4: for your answer, you can read C. M. Kornbluth’s story “The Marching Morons” which BillThompson already alluded to. The narrator suggests that we have halted evolution by keeping our stupid, ill and unable to learn alive. In fact, we have created a counter-evolution and are slowly dividing the populous into the very bright and the very stupid.

In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits.”

night-gaunt is correct, evolution is about adapting to an ever changing environment, not some kind of progress towards a goal. we are not “more highly evolved” than amoebas; both humans and amoebas seem to be well enough suited for their respective environments. the idea of “halting evolution” is absurd. if humans are becoming stupider, it would be because being stupid is somehow advantageous, therefore just another example of evolution “moving forward” as always.

Good one, Wiley!

You’d run out of AC power before idiots. On “reality” TV, once saw a show which claimed after every clip, “but nobody was seriously injured”. The classic was a motorcycle crash where the guy’s HEAD came off, NOT just his helmet- and they proclaimed he made a full recovery– well, maybe.

Reminds me of a video I saw of a Lithuanian guy diving into a frozen pond, painful to watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHH5T5O7tqo

Biltil,

that was painful

oh and by the way anyone other than me notice that the guy who just jumped is going to land on the guy allready embeded in the ice ?

freeholder1: Kornbluth’s story (and Mike Judge’s very similar story at the beginning of “Idiocracy), while great satire, doesn’t jibe with observed evolution. If the stupid really breed more effectively than the smart, then the species never would have developed intelligence in the first place. Besides, the process is running waaay too fast to be a mutation/selection thing.

I think there’s a much simpler explanation: we’re being culturally conditioned to be stupid. We’re better consumers if we believe everything we see on the Glowing Rectangle. We’re also better Subjects if we believe everything the Aristocracies (both governmental and corporate) tell us.

One of Douglas Addams’s Hitchhiker books featured a world that divided itself into three groups: the thinkers, the doers, and the sort of people who could barely hold down a job spraying disinfectant on telephone receivers. The thinkers and doers decided the world would be a better place if they got rid of the useless third group. They constructed a space-ark, gave them a lame story about how their world was about to be destroyed by a giant mutant space-goat, and sent them off to colonize a new planet. That left the thinkers and doers free to run the world as they saw fit. Shortly thereafter they were exterminated by a mutated bacteria that thrived on telephone receivers.

Some of the ignorance du jour is self-imposed.

I’m generally not bothered by idiots, but I am concerned that Murphy’s law says that some idiot is going to wind up in control of a bunch of nukes.

dtroutma said, about 20 shows ago

You’d run out of AC power before idiots. On “reality” TV, once saw a show which claimed after every clip, “but nobody was seriously injured”. The classic was a motorcycle crash where the guy’s HEAD came off, NOT just his helmet- and they proclaimed he made a full recovery– well, maybe.

Or, as in the old joke, “He might be practicing law somewhere.”

exotic, you obviously don’t know anything about the subject, just let it go. You’re embarrassing yourself.

@bmonk, how about “Any time you call something foolproof, some fool will prove you wrong”?

Darwin would be so proud.

Wish I always knew for sure that I’m not one of the people in line for the diving board…. Critical thinking and a willingness to learn new things are important life skills, but there just isn’t time to research everything. Some things I have time to follow up on and research on my own; for other things I find I end up having to trust the judgment of others. If anyone has the perfect recipe for finding time to becoming informed on all topics of importance, please let me know….