So we had a (alleged) runaway gen2 Prius in San Diego last night and all the 'experts' are polluting the comment boards with their inane rantings. "Well, you just put it into neutral, duh" "Don't these idiots know to turn the key off" "That's why I only buy American cars" "A Prius can't even go 94mph, downhill" "It's an automatic, just put it in L1, or 2, duh" "Parts come out of China you know" "Never catch me in a rice burning death trap" "Hybrid drivers are too stupid to know how a car works" "Well my (insert old 'murkin POS car) has a real cable" How does America produce such wisdom and high functioning intellect from such a vast percentage of its citizens? Is it the public school system? Or is it gestational exposure to methamphetamine and Jack Daniels? These questions keep me awake at night.

The are the parents of 'every child left behind...' Grandstanding and publicity ******....
We needn't worry about Al Queda at this point. As Pogo said... "We have met the enemy... and its us!

In any population, there seems to be a small yet noisy group of people who always attempt to show their superiority by putting down everyone and everything, often without checking the facts. In the past, these people were filtered out of the public media by editors, call screeners, etc., and so did not get a very wide audience. But the internet has no such filter, so everyone gets to hear their ignorant grousing.

This is neither new, nor confined to the United States. Although such ignorant crabbing was rare in the years following the 9/11 disaster, and during the 1980's and 1990's when the economy was reasonably good and people were somewhat content, it was very popular in the late 1960's and early 1970's with the Vietnam debacle, Watergate, inflation, etc. eating away at peoples' optimism. Just listen to some of the music from that period. This sort of thing seems to go in cycles, and we are in an intensifying part of the cycle right now. It also happens in other countries, as well. A few hours ago I was on a board where people from Brazil were harping on a blogger for saying that a certain town was not located where he said it was. I pointed out that, using Google Maps, I easily found the town in the exact spot identified by the blogger. It was a case of confusing two places with the same names, like Las Vegas, Nevada vs. Las Vegas, New Mexico. The reason you don't hear about this so much in other countries is not because they are better educated, but because 1) their internet is more heavily censored, 2) they are not in the custom of publicly criticizing their own country like we are.