Idiot Ball/Real Life

Examples of Real Life cases of people holding the Idiot Ball include:


 * There is a whole website about people who managed quite impressing feats of stupidity. Quite honestly most of the following examples look pretty harmless in comparison.
 * Bernie Madoff ran an elaborate Ponzi scheme for years. The SEC was repeatedly given tips and warnings over the years, but completely failed to discover the massive fraud. He was only stopped when his own SONS turned him in.
 * Anyone who starts a riot in a scene with a tense atmosphere. Seriously, who comes across one of those and thinks "Wow, this could use some violence!"
 * The thing about mobs is that they become collective idiots.
 * Villains can manipulate mobs that way.
 * HBGary was a very important and security company, so much that the founder wrote the book on rootkits and it worked for the federal government and big corporations. Yet somehow, when Anonymous hacked one of their employees and then the whole company, it was evident that HBGary had made tons and tons of security mistakes that are dealt with in even a beginner's book. Unable to suspend your disbelief? Read this arstecnica article. The hindsights made in HBGary are so hard to believe that some people in the security world are speculating that maybe HBGary were acting as some kind of Honey Pot to trap Anonymous later.
 * World War I: For the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in 1915, the British very carefully calculated exactly how much artillery fire they would have to apply over how long in order to break through the German defences. They picked up the Idiot Ball after that, though, hardly even bothering to do the same calculations again until much later (with predictable results). To be fair, by the time they were running assaults on the scale of the Somme, the pre-war arms industry hadn't grown enough to supply them with enough shells and they had to settle for firing off everything they had and hoping it was enough (which it too often wasn't). Later, when they had all they wanted and could break any German defence system at will, they handed the idiot ball to the Americans... who refused to learn from experience and were determined to reinvent the wheel.
 * Adolf Hitler grabbed the idiot ball during the later years of World War II and hung on for dear death.
 * In the NHL, if a team pulls the goalie in overtime, they lose the one point they would normally acquire after forcing OT. Los Angeles Kings coach (at the time) Andy Murray pulled Cristobal Huet to bring in the extra attacker in a late season game against the Columbus Blue Jackets. Andrew Cassels scored the empty netter, and the Kings lost that overtime loss point.