Miscellanea Agnostica

The recent Colorado Balloon debacle is an important lesson, revealing how mindlessness, stupidity, and a lack of critical-thinking skills have become pervasive in the US. I won’t get into details of this “event,” but rather, will point out how it cascaded out of control — because pretty much everyone involved ardently refused to think about what was going on.

1. The media picked up early reports without making even the slightest effort to confirm what was happening … even though the Heene family are pathological attention-lovers and their word cannot be trusted

2. Officials also took this report on its face and plunged ahead with search and rescue efforts — including nearly launching a plan to drop onto the balloon — without going to the house to find out if the child was there after all

3. The mass media and local officials are still in denial that they were duped by this family … when quite obviously, this had been a hoax right from the start (as the boy himself admitted)

4. Officials still do not know how much their overblown search and rescue effort cost, and still have no plans to try to recover those expenses

Other examples of stupidity here: Naming your son “Falcon”? Stupid. Naming your wife “Ninjawife”? Juvenile. Calling Hillary Clinton a “reptilian”? Asinine.

Need I say more?

Lesson to Americans: Next time you hear something stupid from a suspicious source, treat it as suspicious. OK?

Tags: asinine, balloon, brainless, colorado balloon incident, critical thinking, dumb, falcon heene, ft collins CO, hoax, mindless stupidity, richard heene, skeptic, skepticism, stupid

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 5:51 am and is filed under Fuzzy Thinking, General, Off-Topic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.