Friedrich Hayek

A trivially obvious observation from the old kraut, one that nevertheless seems to escape most people:

...the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.

It's not just that commissars of whatever variety haven't the capacity to a) absorb the data, or b) process it usefully; they cannot, in principle, even get their hands on enough of it to fail properly at a) and b).

Memo to John Maynard Keynes:

STFU, retard.

Oh, and more on Keynes via Oliver Kamm (whence I got the Hayek talk above; hey, I thought Kamm was a "man of the left" or something?):

Keynes essentially thought that if he and other old Etonians were put in charge, everything would be fine.

Pwnxored!

STFU, Altman

After the Sept. 11 attacks, [Robart Altman] said Hollywood served as a source of inspiration for the terrorists by making violent action movies that amounted to training films for such attacks.

"Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie," Altman said.

What?! STFU, retard.

On the other hand, when I saw "Sept. 11" there, I figured he was about to admire the attacks, or jabber childish leftoplatitudes about American foreign policy, or some other idiotic thing. So the above was actually a pleasant surprise, for 0.72 seconds before I started thinking about how dumb it was.

Also on yet another hand, Short Cuts and Gosford Park were pretty good. And "Altman was a bomber pilot in World War II", sez Fox News. Which is a very fine thing to have done.

UPDATE: The one I'm thinking of as Short Cuts may have been The Player; it was the one with a multi-minute unbroken tracking shot at the beginning. Or do they all have those?

Via Blowing Smoke.

AIM TAKEN

This is the kind of lunacy you figure people must be making up. But there's no need to make it up. It's real. Some schools are forbidding games during recess.

Several school administrators around Attleboro [Massachusetts], a city of about 45,000 residents, took aim at dodgeball a few years ago, saying it was exclusionary and dangerous.

"Exclusionary and dangerous"? STFU, retard.

Oh, but it gets better. Listen to this drooling imbecile of a mother:

Another Willett parent, Celeste D'Elia, said her son feels safer because of the rule [banning tag]. "I've witnessed enough near collisions," she said.

All together now: STFU, RETARD.

If her son "feels safer", and wants to, the poor little castrato can only benefit from picking up a few healthy bruises. But she may just mean that she's pathologically overprotective.

Yeah, the standards committee's gonna get right on that...

I'd submit this to The Daily WTF, but there's nobody technical over there, just VB/CRUD clowns who shave every day. They'd think it made sense.

In 1997, in (what was then) MSJ, some idiot gibbered the following:

I'm certain that future C++ compilers and linkers will implement a natural, automatic mapping between C++ objects and COM objects...

That would be a lot like the International Standards Organization inventing a new unit of volume specially for Budweiser.

STFU, retard.