Morons of the year.

[mattd]

Subject: morons.org
What year could be complete without PETA doing something seriously dumb to get
1 0 attention? PETA is well-known for its publicity stunts and for its 
reputation of doing absolutely nothing at all to help animals, but plenty 
of things to hurt people. They're more anti-human than pro-beast. This 
year, PETA's president, Ingrid Newkirk took the cake when she said she 
hopes that foot and mouth disease spreads to the US. That clinches it. Not 
only do they not do anything to help animals, they actually want them to 
come to harm. What a strange group.
A twelve-year-old deaf girl in New Jersey was threatened with suspension 
from school. In
9 this day and age you'd think that meant she spoke the word "gun" to a 
friend on a weekend in a field 20 miles away from the nearest school, but 
that wasn't her crime in this case. No, her crime was signing. That's 
right. Being deaf, she speaks with sign language. Supposedly signing on the 
bus was creating a disturbance. Ironically, the girl's hearing was damaged 
at that same school by someone setting off fireworks in an enclosed space.
We explored the inanity of knee-jerk reactions in Zero Tolerance Gone Mad, 
part IV. A
8 Nevada school expelled a boy for an off-the-cuff remark he made outside 
of school, saying he fit the "profile" of a suicidal mass murderer, 
Columbine style. Their profile? He's a good kid, gets good grades, is well 
liked, dresses neatly, and has ADHD. Oh, and he owned a BB gun! The school 
labeled him a "habitual offender" even though he had no prior disciplinary 
record, and he was hauled off to jail.
Next we have the story of the mayor of a small Florida town who decided to 
expel the
7 devil from it. Really. I can't make things up this good. She wrote her 
proclamation out on 4 pieces of paper, which were then placed into hollowed 
out wooden posts that were placed at the four corners of town, witchcraft 
style. Presumably the dark lord is intimidated by hollowed out wooden posts 
with papers inside.
After we waited an entire year for Hollywood to turn out a watchable movie 
that didn't 6 make us run from the theater screaming, "my eyes! my eyes!" 
they gave us Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Mind you, this is no 
American Beauty or Truman Show, but at least it isn't the usual crap. As 
one might expect, fundamentalist Christians had a field day with the movie, 
going on about how its appeal would draw helpless children into Witchcraft. 
Hey guys, here's a clue for you: witchcraft is a fantasy, just like your 
religion.
Pat Robertson, the foaming-at-the-mouth, power-hungry scoundrel who 
recently retired 5 from running the Christian Coalition surprised a number 
of people by advocating abortion for Chinese women. While we agreed with 
his sentiment, it was surprising to hear it coming out of his mouth 
nonetheless. It was (and is) our suspicion that his advocacy was based on 
anti-China hatred, which got the better of his staunch anti-abortion views.
Jerry Falwell. Oh, should I say more? OK. Jerry Falwell drew harsh 
criticism from the four 4 winds, even from people sympathetic to his 
sickening views, after accusing his opponents of causing the tragic 
terrorist attacks on the US. Two weeks after he made an ass of himself on 
the 700 Club, he claimed his comments were taken out of context. His son 
sent out letters to Falwell's followers asking for $50 or $100 to help his 
dear old dad recover from "Satan's fiery darts" that were supposedly 
launched against Jerry in a "mean spirited" attack. It's not an attack when 
it's simply the truth, Jonathan Falwell. Falwell claimed he simply 
"misspoke" for 35 seconds because he was tired.
And on the topic of Jerry Falwell, we can't forget how he blamed the 
terrorist attacks on
3 his political opponents: gays, lesbians, the ACLU, the People for the 
American Way, and the general secularizing of America. What's better is one 
of our readers (who is now one of our writers!) predicted it 2 days 
beforehand. Reports of his comments were hard to believe, but we found them 
and placed the audio online for all to hear. The ironic thing is that it 
turned out that religious extremism (fundamentalism, if you will) had a lot 
more to do with the attack on the US than the existence of gays and 
lesbians. Not to be clichi, but it turns out the only difference between 
Falwell's regime and Osama bin Laden's is weaponry.
Things got a little scary toward the end of the year. OK, they actually got 
absolutely 2 terrifying. Our buddy John Ashcroft went on the record saying 
those who oppose his efforts to destroy civil liberties in this country 
might as well be terrorists. Ok, so those weren't his words exactly, but he 
did say "To those who pit Americans against immigrants, citizens against 
non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost 
liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they 
erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to 
America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of 
good will to remain silent in the face of evil." Close enough. Opposing his 
agenda, you see, is like giving aid and comfort to terrorists. He didn't 
say it like that because of the obvious implication that he was accusing 
dissenters of treason. It was so scary that we drew a parallel between 
Ashcroft and McCarthy, as this sounded a lot like McCarthyism revisited to us.
By far the largest scoring article of 2001 was Alcatel Fucks Up Bigtime. 
This was a
1 critical article for morons.org because it was one of the first pieces of 
original investigative journalism we were able to do, and because of the 
huge amount of attention it drew. Alcatel had come under fire for a nasty 
security vulnerability with its DSL modems when it announced it had no 
intention of releasing a patch and merely suggested users run firewalls 
(which wouldn't have helped anyway). We got a tip that in Alcatel's press 
release they had used a Microsoft Word feature that stores a document's 
revision history. It was relatively easy to view that revision history, and 
some of the comments it contained were terribly interesting. Comments like 
"Why don't we provide this level of security to all of our customers? Why 
don't we switch on firewalls by default for all of our customers?" Oops.
So there you have it. The year in stupidity compressed into 10 paragraphs. 
If the world continues to deteriorate into absolute brainlessness at the 
present rate, I think I'll just stay inside and hide next year.---Nick