THE SHREWD PROBLEM | 2005-07-09
Hitler talked about the Jewish Problem. Today's respectable conservatives and liberals talk about the White Problem, which they call the Race Problem, in exactly the same way. My focus is the Shrewd Problem. I will be talking about it on my Saturday Internet show
The Untrained Eye
Oliver Hardy of Laurel and Hardy summed up the Shrewd Problem best when he said, "There is nothing dumber than a dumb man who thinks he's smart."
Hardy was from Augusta, Georgia, and he would understand what I mean by the Shrewd Problem because that is the way we used the word "shrewd" down here. It is somebody who thinks he's smart and isn't, and the consequences are disastrous.
The first person killed in a railway accident was a Shrewd Man in South Carolina. It has pretty well been expunged from history, but the first regular passenger rail line in America ran across South Carolina from Charleston to the Savannah River.
It was called "The Best Friend of Charleston."
When the railway first started, a guy who had just been hired to work in the engine, handling wood or something, was irritated by the whistling noise the engine was making. He decided to do something about it.
So he looked around and found the source of that irritating noise. It was the boiler which was right beside where he was working up in the engine. He didn't ask the engineer.
After all, he was a smart man so he knew how you deal with something that makes an irritating noise.
He tied down the steam pressure relief valve.
A couple of minutes later the clamped steam boiler exploded, literally blowing his head off. This is real history.
It is lucky that this Shrewd Man was on an early train. On later trains a real boiler explosion could kill hundreds of people. Since then, Shrewd People have been killing hundreds, thousands, millions of people.