The story so far….

In 1999, I wrote [gonzoed, really] News of the Stoopid [NotS]—something of a realtime observation, from 26^th November through 11^th December, of available idiocy. And that was okay; I’m just not sure it was terribly scientific.

Took some time off; did other stuff.

In 2007, from 1^st through 29^th November, partly because NotS was really a bit sloppy and, by 2007, outdated [it’s kinda cool to have a book from 1999 explaining why Y2K is a stupid myth and why the electoral college is a slight misrepresentation, but—eight years later—once every imbecile on the planet has caught up to the news, it’s really kinda boring], I kindasorta rewrote NotS, updating it as needed to make it, you know, news again; because it was in fact a new and different book, I called it News of the Stupid.

Took more time off; did yet other stuff still.

Now, it’s been three years since News of the Stupid, and eleven since NotS, and the world has changed, and not in a good way. Which is to say that, while people assure me that they’ve read one of or both books to date, usually amidst various lawls, that doesn’t seem to have helped very much: people are still morons, as quantified by their habits of doing really moronic things.

Sometime after writing the second book, but before now, one of those weird, random thoughts I tend to have happened to occur to me. It went something like this:

Preliminary answers include totally. Often augmented by lawl. So that could be something of a dead end.

But that got me thinking a little about the basic problem, which is fundamentally this: the human animal isn’t really evolving anymore. I mean: it is, obviously; allelic frequencies are still shifting generationally, by definition; but natural selection is no longer a threat to the average idiot. Even the Darwin Awards fail to take into account whether a selfmurdering moron has already reproduced; and, that occasional genepool cleaning aside, the sad fact is that, the human animal living through technology well beyond the natural lifespan of about thirty, by the time any given twerp finally gets cancer and dies, he’s likely got enough kids and grandkids and whatever extended progeny to create a fanpage at facebook.com worthy of its own customised URL.

This is, in its way, a bad, bad thing.

So, more thinking. Largely about hunting morons for sport. In one way or another.

And that leads me to a radical conclusion. I’m not convinced that morons should be considered representative of humanity. On some days [most, really], I’m not convinced that they’re technically members of the species.

Which raises the question: if they’re not human, then what the hell are they….

Are they even primates? Hominids? Couldn’t tell you. Not yet. Not until I’m done testing.

So, here’s my hypothesis, such as it is: the object of this study being morons separated by vast dozens of IQ points from what I’d prefer to think people should by the twenty-first century possess, we may have to reclassify them out of the species sapiens. Looking at other species within the genus [strictly speaking, Homo sapiens appears through genetic testing to be inaccurate; humans, being a species of chimp, should properly be moved to Pan sapiens, despite political (theocratic) whimpers to the contrary], I’m not sure it’s fair to the whole to place imbeciles even that close to humanity. And, idiots as a whole remaining so different from each other, I’m no longer certain that they’re actually all members of the same genus; they may well be dozens of genera within a new, previously undescribed family.

Being the first to discover this likelihood, I’ve taken the liberty of coining Stupidae—the Stupid Family.

Like it?

Taking that as read, the plan now is to catalogue the various genera within the Stupidae, as characterised by their various actions, beliefs, and lawlfests.

Personally, I think there might be a book in all this….