Life is like a box of choclitts...................what yere gonna get.

Stevenlmeyer,
Personally I believe those voracious individuals that consume huge amounts of material goods, ie. waste the world's finite resources, have a Decided disability and are stupid .

They need to be put on a pension for a while while they are helped to contemplate their place in the future of the planet .

Spanky,

In diagnosing stupidity, distinguishing between a lack of education and inherent mental impairment is probably the easy part.

Mark2685,

Forest Gump presented a romantic picture of stupidity. The reality is much grimmer. It is minimum wage jobs punctuated by periods of unemployment. Alcoholism, general substance abuse, petty crime and periodic bouts of imprisonment are often part of the picture.

I am not saying that most stupid people are petty criminals. But a visit to a prison should convince you that many petty criminal are simply people who are unable to cope with 21st century life.

BTW Mark2685, my handwriting is illegible even to me.

You do not fall into my definition of stupid.

kartiya jim,

"voracious individuals that consume huge amounts of material goods" may be behaving in ways that you consider stupid. But they are not inherently stupid people. If they were they would probably not have the wherewithal to "consume huge amounts of material goods."

There are easier ways if curbing conspicuous consumption than to put the consumers on a pension.

Mark2685 again,

Agreed that diagnosis is the hard part. We face similar problems today when assessing the claims of people who claim to be mentally impaired as a result of an accident.

I think however the development of functional MRI technology will one day enable us to "see" which brains are mal-performing. However I suspect that diagnosis of INHERENT stupidity will always be difficult.

Country gal

You are distorting what I've said.

Of course diagnosis will always be a problem as this story shows:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/07/20/1983881.htm

I would have thought that this Frenchman should qualify for a partial disability pension on the grounds of stupidity.

However, most people with that much fluid in their brains are not able to function in society. This guy, lucky for him, is a fluke.

I always thought it would be a good idea to have THICK tattooed on your head when you are a bit slow on the uptake. It would save people a lot of time and trouble in dealing with you because they would know straight away. There are days when I should have had it tatooed on my own forehead and I felt sorry for the people I confused.

Then again I have days when my brain seems to be extremely perceptive.

Maybe its because of what I ate for breakfast.

Carefull Sharkfin ,
These days many of smarties of the "dodgy Knee Club" start their breakfast with a bit of Shark cartledge on their corn flakes .