6 Commonly Held Beliefs Among People Who Lack Common Sense

  1. There are people for whom losing weight is physically impossible.
  2. The diet industry is a multibillion dollar a year industry that thrives on people’s stupidity and weakness. They offer this quick weight loss fix, that surefire diet, those diet pills. They package them with sheik names like: the South Beach diet, or Jenny Craig. There’s Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice. We even have "fat farms."

    You can lose 20 pounds in 20 days; 6 inches in 6 minutes; you can eat whatever you want and still lose weight. There’s the chocolate cake and beer diet and yes you can still lose weight!

    Well I’ve decided to get in on the "feeding" frenzy and introduce my new weight loss plan. But I need a name for it; something sheik, hip and catchy. How about the: you’re an idiot diet? I like it!

    So, here’s the plan: eat less and exercise more. Now I realize that could be complicated for those on the Jenny Craig diet to understand so let me break it down in simpler terms: stop going out and plopping yourself on a bar stool and eating chicken wings and drinking beer because you look like Jabba the Hut.

    Go out and walk around the block once today; twice tomorrow until you can walk a mile, then two.

    Turn off your iPod, put down your cell phone, get off your ass and tune in to life. Get a grip on what everybody else already knows: you need to change your lifestyle to a healthy lifestyle and losing weight and keeping it off will be a consequence of that.

    The laws of physics are the same for everyone. It’s a physical impossibility for you not to lose weight if you use more calories than you take in. Ask a super model.

    In the immortal words of Dean Wormer: fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.

  3. The constitution is open to interpretation
  4. I love this one. I’m going to employ the transitive law of logic here: If A then B. If B then C. Hence, If A then C.

    Here’s A:

    If the constitution is open to interpretation then of course, as we’ve seen, every administration will interpret it to their advantage.

    Here’s B:

    If every administration interprets the constitution differently then that means that it has many meanings.

    Here’s C:

    If the constitution has many meanings, then it is by definition, meaningless

    Our founding fathers based our entire government, our economic system, our monetary system, our national defense, our justice system, our civil rights on this document. It’s obvious they did not intend for it to be meaningless hence it is not open to interpretation.

    Of course "interpretation" here means soulless, slick government lawyers and justices abusing and manipulating its meaning.

  5. Wage gaps between men and women are due to sexual discrimination
  6. I’ve followed with great interest Dr. Walter Block’s trials and tribulations with the politically correct thought police. Dr. Block mentioned Dr. James Gwartney at Florida State University with whom he had on occasion collaborated on labor economic issues. As it turns out I was Dr. Gwartney’s graduate assistant at FSU in the early nineties and so it’s not surprising that I received the exact sort of education back then that Dr. Block argues against now: assuming all things equal, if a woman makes a lower wage for similar work then it must be due to discrimination in the work place.

    As with losing weight, unless the laws of human nature are suspended in your world, this wage gap could not persist. What it assumes is that male entrepreneurs and business owners are so sexist that they would rather discriminate against women than make a profit. Anyone who does business like that won’t be in business long.

    If I have a new business, for example, and I can hire women to do equal work (experience, education, quality of work, productivity, travel, overtime, etc…) as men but at a significantly lower wage, then of course I’m going to do so. In doing so, I’ll be able to offer my product at a lower cost than my competitors who hire all men. Seeing their profits drop, my competitors will try to cut their costs which will include lowering wages of their male workers until they are on par with women’s wages. I challenge anyone to try and convince me that a successful business man would choose to have higher costs if he didn’t have to.

    There’s nothing in the economic or psychological literature that would indicate that misogynistic pride brings a business man more utility than increased wealth.

    So what can explain the differences in wages in the work place? Dr. Block offers some empirical explanations as do others but one thing is for sure: it’s not all due to discrimination; so get over it. That old excuse is nothing more than a cliché, a cop out, a political platform…said the middle-aged white man.

  7. We live in a free market economy and the lack of regulation by the government has caused the current economic recession

    Free market: A free market is a market that is free of government intervention and regulation, besides the minimal function of maintaining the legal system and protecting property rights.

    There is not a single market in this country that is not regulated or intervened on behalf of the state in the form of taxes, commissions, bureaus, regulatory committees, offices, departments etc…

    Therefore, there is no lack of regulation nor free markets since all markets are regulated and therefore, our free market economy does not exist and so couldn’t possibly be the cause of our current economic recession.

    A little research on the Internet will show one that prices in all markets are higher due to government regulation and inefficiency while we still have all the same problems we would have without it:

    • Even though we have the FDA we still have salmonella in food products.
    • Even though we have the FAA and the TSA we still have hijacked planes and plane crashes.
    • Even though we have the Department of Education we still have one of the world’s worst education systems.
  8. And the list goes on. This argument is so tired and worn out it’s a sure way to demonstrate that you are in fact going through life fat, drunk and stupid.

  9. Your wife is supposed to be your best friend, your soul mate, your lover and your confidant.
  10. I’d like to shoot the guy that came up with this crap. Specifically since my best friend is someone who I can trust to tell my wife that I was with him last night when she calls.

    I have absolutely no idea what a soul mate is.

    I get the lover part but it just feels wrong limiting myself to just one woman. Not my decision, but mother nature’s.

    As for a confidant: see my first point.

    Most days I go home, kiss the cat, kick the kids and sufficiently sedate myself with bourbon and hope to successfully coexist with my wife until bedtime. Anything more is a bonus.

    Moving right along …

  11. Time travel is possible

    As much respect as I have for Albert Einstein, I have to disagree with him. Time travel is in fact not possible.

    3.5 million years ago the entire continent of Africa was covered with tropical rain forests and our earliest ancestors were swinging from the treetops to get from place to place.

    Then all of a sudden the craziest thing happened: the earth started to warm and the rain forests started to dry up and die. So our ancestors had to come down out of the tree tops and move along the ground to get from place to place.

    In doing so, they realized that standing upright on two legs was faster and more efficient. Ladies and gentlemen I give you the earliest homo-sapiens.

    It’s obvious that time travel is not possible because if it were, Al Gore and the other environmental nut-jobs would have gone back in time by now, reversed the global warming and saved the rain forests and we wouldn’t be here today.