Hooz toopid? Iz ewe toopid?

If ignorance is bliss then there are a lot of really blissed out people in the world. Despite such obvious evidence as time zones, necessitated by a round world, The Flat Earth Society still clings to the notion that we live on a 2 dimensional planet. When questioned about how a flat, and static, object could have things like gravity or weather patterns they stick their thumbs in their ears and scream LAH LAH LAH LAH. In a very non-melodic way. Not to be outdone there is another segment of society, who seem to end up on the History Channel unchallenged far too often, which believes that the Earth is hollow. Like a balloon. When faced with obvious conundrums like gravity and volcanoes, they stick their thumbs in their ears and scream LAH LAH LAH LAH. In a very non-melodic way.

I’m beginning to see a theme here.

While ignorance is not knowing, stupid is refusing to find out. We are talking about the preternaturally stupid here today.

Today MSNBC reports that a third of the Russian population thinks that Copernicus was a crank and that the sun revolves around the earth.

Oh, you know I’m kidding. That 1/3 has no clue who Copernicus was.

Does the sun revolve around the earth? One in every three Russians thinks so, a spokeswoman for state pollster VsTIOM said Friday.

In a survey released this week, 32 percent of Russians believed Earth was the center of the solar system; 55 percent said that all radioactivity is human-made; and 29 percent said that the first humans lived when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

The study found that women were more likely than men to believe the scientific fallacies.

“It’s really quite amazing,” spokeswoman Olga Kamenchuk said of the survey, which polled 1,600 people across Russia’s regions in January, with a 3.4 percent margin of error.

“All of them (the questions) were absolutely obvious. … The data speaks of the low levels of education in the country.”

However, people tend to forget what they have been taught at school if it is not part of daily use, she added: “I wonder whether our colleagues in other countries would find any different.”

Some of the questions are similar to those that were asked of Americans:

Seventy-two percent of Americans agree with the scientific view that Earth goes around the sun, based on a 2008 poll cited in the National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2010.

Sixty-three percent of Americans surveyed correctly answered that not all radioactivity is human-made, in a quiz conducted as part of a 2009 Pew Research Center study.

And 59 percent of the respondents in a 2009 Harris poll agreed with the scientific view that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.

Sorry MSNBC, you DO NOT get to put a happy face on the American responses. Not when 28% of Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth, 37% think that all radioactivity is man made (ever hear of uranium?) and 41% think that The Flintsones was a documentary.

Those numbers are staggeringly stupid.

Last August Newsweek ran the results of several polls lumped together to get a broader world view. They found out that 24% of Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim. Only 46% correctly identified him as a Christian and the rest seemed unsure who the black guy with the big ears actually was.

That’s not a heartening statistic.

They also found that 75% of Americans could name (at least) 2 of the Seven Dwarfs, but barely 25% could name 2 of the seven justices who sit on the Supreme Court.

Even more disturbing, they found that 41% of Americans believe in ESP, 32% in ghosts, and a 25% in astrology. I guess the respondents all missed the memo about The Enlightenment. You know, that whole logic and reason thing that lead to the Industrial Revolution.

While the video below was shot when President Bush was in office, it’s clear not much has changed.