Holy Fucking Shit You’re Dumb!

The longest battle in the history of humanity took place between February and December of 1916 near the French city of Verdun.  It’s only fitting that Word War I, possibly the dumbest war in the history of forever, has as its centerpiece one of the dumbest battles ever fought.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking “You’re just going to make fun of the French some more, aren’t you?”  And, well, you’re right.  I know, it’s cheap and easy to make fun of French military blunders.  But the best part about the Battle of Verdun is that the French were arguably being less dumb than the Germans who were attacking them.  Any time you have a situation where someone fucks up harder than the French while fighting a battle, you know you’ve got an all-time blunder on your hands.

Here’s the situation.  World War I started in late summer 1914, and by early fall the western front had stagnated.  The two sides (Britain and France on one side, Germany and Austria-Hungary  on the other) settled down into a network of trenches and didn’t move much for the next four years.  Throughout 1915 both sides attempted to achieve the elusive breakthrough that would end the stagnation and bring victory for their side.  Alas, all this achieved was minuscule movements of the trench lines and lots and lots and lots of casualties.

In 1916, the Germans decided to try a different tactic.  They reasoned that a breakthrough was no longer possible in the current situation, and instead they would pick a spot on the French lines that the French Army could not afford to abandon, and attack it endlessly, forcing the French to bring more and more men into the fray.  They sought to “bleed them white”, to inflict such great casualties on the French that they would either lose the will to fight or would be unable to defend other parts of the line effectively.

They picked the fortifications in and around the city of Verdun.  Verdun had played a major role in several previous French wars; it had withstood an assault by Attila the Hun in the fifth century, and had been built up after the Franco-Prussian war specifically to bolster French defenses against future German aggression.  The German plan was to attack, and bait the French into an all-out defense of the city and forts.

Well, it worked… sort of.  The Germans attacked, and the French took the bait and committed to hold the city at any cost.  It became not just a matter of military importance, but of French national pride.  Before the battle was finally over,  70% of the French army had been through “the wringer of Verdun”.  However, this might have been to France’s ultimate advantage–the French army had a policy of rotating troops out of the battle every 2-3 weeks, which is why such a high percentage of the army eventually saw action at Verdun.  By comparison, only 25% of the German army saw action at Verdun, so the French troops were comparatively fresh at any given time.

The Germans spilled a lot of French blood at Verdun, but at a price that was far too high.  The French casualties from the battle (approximately 371,000 killed, missing, or wounded) were only slightly higher than the German casualties (337,000).  By the time all was said and done, the entire thing was a wash–the Germans made small advances, but were eventually turned back by French counter attacks.  The Germans had managed to do nothing other than reduce the number of available fighting men on both sides by approximately the same amount, and also to blast the shit out of small portion of the French countryside.

The French, in turn, took their successful (if highly costly) defense of Verdun as a sign that fixed fortifications were a good idea, now and forever, and this led to the creation of the Maginot Line after the war.  And we all know how well that worked for them.  Also, the demoralizing effect of the war, and the Battle of Verdun in particular, is often credited with contributing to the French collapse at the start of World War II–they just didn’t have the heart to go through it all again.

So there you have it.  The Germans failed to either take Verdun or kill enough Frenchmen to change the course of the war, and they lost nearly as many men as they killed.  The French in turn held a line that probably didn’t need to be held, at such a huge cost that the effects were still being felt decades later.

Dumbest battle ever?  It’s in the running, for sure.

NBC seem to have a knack for setting up Kobayashi Maru situations for themselves.  First it was Jay vs Dave, now, years later, it’s Jay vs Conan.  And I’m pretty sure Conan won.

For those of you living next door to Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani cave for the past few months, here’s a quick rundown of the situation:  Jay left the Tonight Show for his own prime time gig at 10pm.  Jay flopped in prime time.  NBC says “Hey, no problem.  We’ll move you back to The Tonight Show.”  Conan says “Uh, hey, no.  That’s my gig now.”  NBC says “Oh, well fine, we’ll just move The Jay Leno Show to 11:35 (The Tonight Show’s timeslot for the past 40 some years or so) and make it half an hour.  Then you keep The Tonight Show, but it’s on at 12:05.  So then Conan is all “That would make it The Tomorrow Show.  Not gonna do it.”

At this point, to somebody with some sense, it would seem that the best solution would be for NBC to say “Ok then.  Hey, sorry Jay.  You kind of suck anyway, and your show blew, and you’re sixty years old and not funny.  So… You’re fired.”  Or something similar.  I mean, do you know anybody who thinks Jay Leno is funny?  I don’t.  Ok, I lie.  I know one person.  But he’s kind of odd in the head.  To be honest, Conan isn’t that funny either, but he’s still more funny than Jay.

But no, instead they gave Conan a huge pile of money to go away.  They’re going to give Jay back The Tonight Show, and Conan will turn up on some other network in the fall when his no-compete clause is up.

The most ridiculous part about this whole thing is that the hand-off of The Tonight Show from Jay to Conan was orchestrated five years ago, in a bid to prevent exactly this kind of stupidity–NBC went through a huge shake-up when Jay took over from Carson, because everybody and his mother (including Johnny Carson himself) thought the obvious choice to replace Carson was David Letterman, who was then hosting Late Night, the show that comes on after The Tonight Show.  Instead, NBC execs went with Jay, and Letterman took off for CBS.

This time, NBC gave everybody a five year heads up on the hand-off, and locked Conan into the job–and then paid him millions to go home after just seven months.

Good job, NBC!

Yeah, it’s that dingus John Edwards.  One-time Democratic nominee for Vice President and former Presidential candidate.  He’s finally admitting that the child his mistress gave birth to in early 2008 is his.

In case you don’t remember (or didn’t care–and I can’t say as I blame you if you didn’t), Edwards’ infidelity was a hot topic during his brief stint as an also-ran during the 2008 Democratic primary season.  Well, as hot a topic as can be expected when it involves a dude who had no shot at winning the nomination.  He and I won the same number of primaries, as I recall.

Cheating on your wife is bad enough.  But Johnny’s wife also has incurable cancer, so he’s like a double shithead for cheating on a dying woman.  Seriously man, that’s just low.  Fuck you.

But here’s the real thing.  Why on earth did you get your mistress pregnant?  That’s like the dumbest thing in the world.  This isn’t the friggin middle ages here.  We have pretty reliable methods of birth control.  Wrap it up, dumbass!  At least Clinton was smart enough to pull out.  Nothing good can come of getting your mistress pregnant.  There’s no upside to that at all.  This has already ruined him politically, and now will likely ruin him financially as well.  Not only will he have to support (and rightly so) his child, he’ll likely have to give tons of money to his ex-mistress, and it wouldn’t surprise me if his wife finally decided to stop standing by her man and took a big chunk out of him in a divorce settlement.

And it couldn’t have happened to a shittier guy!  Sayonara, asshole.

Nobody ever claimed criminals were smart.  Well, I guess super villains like Lex Luthor claim that sometimes, but for the most part, they’re wrong.  Most criminals are criminals because they’re either too dumb to know any better or too dumb to be anything else.  Or they’re Bernie Madoff.

But this guy here is about as dumb as they come.  Dude breaks into somebody’s house and… settles in.  He takes a shower, watches some TV, and fries up some chicken!

It’s a little hard to figure out what exactly he thought he was doing.  Maybe he figured he’d just stolen the house?  He broke in, and now it was his!  Just like that time he stole that car–he broke into it, and now he could use it whenever he wanted.  It must work the same way with houses, right?

Right?

So here’s a story about a doctor who removed the wrong kidney from some poor dude.

This is pretty bad.  But it’s also at least somewhat understandable.  I mean, kidneys look pretty much the same.  And everybody has two of them.  A quick screw up of right and left, and bam–you took out the wrong one.  Oops!

But that’s not all.  The same doctor apparently accidentally biopsied another patient’s pancreas instead of his kidney.

Now, I’m no doctor.  I don’t even play one on TV (or the intertubes, even).  But I do own a copy of Gray’s Anatomy (the book, not the TV show) and I’d like to think that, should I ever find myself confronted with a person with an open abdominal cavity and was asked “quick, identify the kidneys!” I’d be able to avoid pointing at the goddamn pancreas.

Here, check for yourself:

There’s a lot of crap in there, I admit.  And I’m sure when someone is cut open, there’s like blood and stuff obscuring your view.  But see those kidney bean shaped things in the back?  Those there are kidneys.  And that big thing that sort of wraps all around and goes every which way in the middleish of the picture?  That’s a pancreas.

See the difference?  Yeah, I admit, there is some stuff that’s omitted in that diagram.  For instance, I don’t see a liver in there, and I’m fairly sure there ought to be one.  And those intestines probably aren’t just cut open and disconnected like that in real life.  But still, a surgeon spends years and years learning this stuff.  They’re not expected to just cut into people and fish around randomly after just a few weeks of boot camp training.  So I feel justified in thinking that this guy is a complete incompetent asshole.

Little French bastards are choking themselves to death.  I guess because it feels good?  I don’t know, I’m not a fucking idiot, so I haven’t tried this “game”, but supposedly cutting off the blood supply to your brain gets you high.  Hey, that’s basically how alcohol works, so I guess it’s a cheap way to get briefly drunk.

Here’s a thought though.  The drinking age in France is like, what, four years old?  Why not just get drunk?  Go down to the store, buy some cheap wine, and get shitfaced like normal teenagers do.  Don’t goddamn choke yourself to death in order to get a few seconds of feeling high.  You’d think nobody would have to explain this, but apparently kids today are that stupid.

Here’s a great quote from the article.  “The medical community remains divided over whether to publicize asphyxiation games. “There’s a fear that if you raise awareness then other people will start to copy it.”"

Yeah, that’s a great reason to not tell people shit.  We also shouldn’t tell people how HIV is spread, for fear that more people will have sex.  “Wait, you mean all this time I could have been having sex?  Why didn’t anybody tell me this??”  Don’t tell people about the dangers of playing Russian Roulette, because then more people might play!   And definitely don’t tell people about the dangers of smoking, because more people might smoke!

How about we just let people be responsible for their own damn selves?  If you tell people about how choking themselves to death is bad and they still do it, well, hey.  You tried, right?  It’s probably for the best that we eliminated those genes from the pool…

So did you see this one about the woman punching out a McDonald’s drive-through window because they didn’t have any McNuggets?

Seriously lady.  There’s a McDonald’s on every corner.  Next time, try the next one.  No need to get all worked up!