Time to Reset the DUMBCON

The way things have been going lately, it's hard to keep track of the prevailing level of stupidity. I've done my part to help with that problem, starting with my creation back in 2009 (14 years ago, can you believe it?) of the original five-level National Stupidity Condition, or DUMBCON, based on the military's defense condition, or "DEFCON" plan.

I tweaked that scale numerous times over the years, adding additional levels until it reached a high of ten levels - one more than the number of levels in Dante's Hell - in July of 2018 ...

In March of 2020 I decided that the system was unwieldy and that it had become too difficult to discriminate among so many levels of stupidity, and so I returned to the original five-level structure, with a modification of colors and an update of the definitions of the individual levels ... only to go back to the ten-level version in January, 2021 - less than a year later - thanks in large part to Der Furor's incitement of a violent mob to storm the Capitol in an attempt to stay in power.

By January of 2022, I had reconsidered yet again and decided to go back to the structure I'd implemented in 2013, which added DUMBCON 0 to create a six-, rather than five-level system. I reset the DUMBCON Level to 2, where it has remained ever since.

But the DUMBCON Index, no matter how I often I tweaked it, wasn't sufficient to fully describe the level of utter stupidity represented by the likes of Empty G, Der Furor, Ted Cruz, Lauren Boebert, and Ron DeSantis, and so I created, in June of 2021, the Gohmert Stupidity Scale. Named for the proudly ignorant former Texas representative, it established the Gohmert (abbreviated ghm) as the basic unit of stupidity, and created a logarithmic scale based on the Richter Scale (used to assess the power of earthquakes) and the Scoville Scale (used to describe the heat of various peppers). The main use of the Gohmert Scale has been to quantify the stupidity of winners of my biweekly Ass Clown Awards.

But such is our brave new world of stupidity that I have decided it's time to reset the DUMBCON level and rethink the fundamentals of the Gohmert Stupidity Scale.

Effective today, February 28th, 2023,

I am increasing the DUMBCON level from 2 to 1.

Further, I am announcing a modification of the Gohmert Stupidity Scale which will attempt to better calibrate its accuracy by adding, in addition to the fundamental factors of ignorance and willingness to adapt to new knowledge, allowances for the role played in modern social-political-religious stupidity by such factors as greed, malice, and hatred. I am putting the final touches on the new scale, and will publish it in this space this coming Thursday, March 2nd*.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Readers, it seems as if the defining characteristic of our time is proudly arrogant stupidity. If we can't fight it effectively, let's at least measure and characterize it. I'm doing my part to help.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* Unlike the wonderful new GOP health care plan, better than anything else out there, which was always going to be released in two weeks.