They Were Lied To

Who? All those "students" who took out loans for what turned out to be mostly a four to six year party and a worthless credential. 

The first lie has been a long term, systemic practice of grade inflation casually laughed off as the Lake Wobegone effect. It is particularly frightening that this is most prevalent in math. Parents should know more and demand better.

The lie affecting society as a whole is the myth that a college education is necessary and implicitly sufficient for someone to make a whole lot more money than they would otherwise. And yet what we have now are stories of folks carrying $44K (or more) who struggle to pay $138/month to nibble away at the debt. Why? Because this borrower had a job making $28/hour ($56K/yr), got laid off and found a new job making $18.50/hour ($37K/yr). Not exactly the pot of gold they were told was at the end of the college debt rainbow. 

And these two lies are not disjoint. Throughout high school students are being told they are much better educated than they are, particularly in math. This innumeracy manifests itself in students, told they are college material, who cannot fire up a spreadsheet or an online calculator and find out whether that mountain of debt can be bought off by the mirage of a pot of gold. Forget the spreadsheet, back-of-the-envelope ciphering shows that it would take almost 27 years to retire that debt at zero percent (0%) interest. At a measly 3% interest rate this payment would take almost 53 years to retire the debt at a total cost (principal and interest) of almost $88K. This debtor would be on track to pay as much in interest as they borrowed in the first place. Should they live so long. 

Yes, they were lied to. Yet, they, college material, made a choice and now they want that choice, a bad one, to have no consequences, at least for themselves. If they are to get debt amnesty a couple of things must happen first: they must explain to those who've paid their loan or never had one exactly why these debtors get off the hook; and the CFPB must realign towards preventing bad loans rather than facilitating them.

When Elites Confront The Reality They Created For Others

Andrea Riccio was a shaker and mover behind "marketing" ObamaCare posing as a bit of a healthcare expert, at least from a political insider's perspective. This involved copious amounts of dis/misinformation, rampant in politics and a key ingredient of successful "marketing." One element persists to this day, unquestioned by those with a vocal opinion on the matter: the conflation of "healthcare" with  "health insurance." 

They are not the same. And now, Ms. [ed: can you say that?] Riccio realizes it due to a serious health issue with her husband. Reality struck:

"While I worked to stop efforts to 'repeal and replace' the law, I never thought I’d get a masterclass in  health coverage  or receive a letter from an insurer with limited explanation of why only half of a craniotomy was covered and half deemed cosmetic.'

It is even worse, as a Senator, who could vote up on down on the ACA, said to Vox News:

"I didn’t know that a good many health insurance plans had limits, I thought if you were insured, you were insured."

Perhaps the good Senator can be forgiven as he has Federal Government benefits so this holds true for him and he has never had to confront the issues the "little people" deal with on a daily basis. Makes it seem that he is preeminently unqualified to have anything to do with any legislation but suffer under it as everyone else does. 

Take a moment to pause and reflect. Ponder the depths of ignorance from which the ACA (and almost every other federal legislation) arises. Clearly these people swim in the Fourth Order of Ignorance, only making it to the Third Order with confronted with unavoidable circumstances forcing knowledge upon them.

Too Wrongs

There have been quite a few pandemic revelations not the least of which are all the self-professed "smartest folks in the room" asking the wrong questions and demanding the wrong answers. Unsurprisingly that is what they get, but perhaps these are just rhetorical questions because the real answer is, with teachers, "we're not going back to the classroom."

But let's suppose these folk really are smart and really want to make informed decisions. 

Then we must start with the most popular CoVid stats: positivity rates and new cases. What do these really mean? THAT is the question these smart folk should be asking and then they should pull on that thread. Very hard. Let's pick one, the positivity rate most often stated in number per 100K population. The alarmists get livid when the rate is over 100 per 100K or approximately 0.1 percent with recent reports north of 500 per 100K. Even moderate curiosity  begs certain questions most particularly how, over time does this splitting up of the population look? Well, over 12 cycles (cycles are usually 14 days) approximately 6% of the population has been diagnosed with CoVid. This leaves out those who have or have had previously diagnosed or undiagnosed CoVid. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that by 1 Mar 21 (taking into account rates late last year) at least 10% of the total population has or has had CoVid. That we know of. But that begs another question regarding how CoVid is diagnosed and whether someone is diagnosed upon a positive test result and if that same person is re-tested with the same result is that listed as one or two cases? 

Ah, the tests...lots of questions there. It seems public school educations have equipped us with an eighth grade reading level and the amazing ability to comprehend yes/no results and little else. But the real questions are around the cycle threshold for PCR testing. What threshold defines "not infected?" Does this vary based on test manufacturer, equipment or reagents? And what is being reported, test results or patient results? In other words, what happens when an individual is routinely tested every two weeks? Do you stop testing them when they test negative after having tested positive? How is that reported and how does it change the overall statistics? What about the folks who aren't tested, are there any statistical models on that? If not why not? We do that for the census don't we?

But there is another test. The one that tests for antibodies generated when one's immune system is exposed to the virus or the mRNA vaccines. Why are those tests not part of the conversation? Why are these not a pre-requisite to getting a vaccine? After all, if you've had CoVid, even mild and undiagnosed, a vaccination would waste a precious resource. 

Why aren't the folks running around screaming "blood on their hands" asking these and other penetrating questions? Why does anyone still think these folks are really all that smart?

The Voice

The reaction of certain cloistered demographics, particularly college professors and students, to the recent election is pretty baffling to anyone who lives outside of their bubble and might have lived thru more than one change of party in the Whitehouse. It is easy enough to dismiss the behaviour as infantile tantrums because that is what they are but that doesn't explain how so many became so infantile, entitled and willing to show their asses in public. Yes, they are the third or fourth generation raised on an exclusive diet of self esteem and participation awards and sheltered in safe places with trigger word warnings protecting their fragile bloated egos. But that is just a platform and like the agar it is the medium for growing the pathogen, not the pathogen itself.

The pathogen is ignorance and it has become virulent. Generations ago our public schools abandoned any topic that might open a mind to this country's (little c) constitution and how our electoral system (not just the electoral college) actually works. This void has been filled by ridiculous examples of "votes", popularity contests delivered by five intense minutes of thumb-numbing twittering such as last week's end of show vote on The Voice. It's highly likely that the similarity of "popularity" and "popular" confuses these feral minds and the TV format has led them to believe that a winner is "whoever gets the most votes" rather than the fifty percent plus one required in the real world. Seeing a three-way vote split 41% to 39% to 20% means that 41% is a "winner" because the producers of The Voice say so. Suggesting that an "election" where 59% vote for someone else is anything but a "win" is met with a confused look.

It's easy but dangerous to dismiss this silliness as the product of a vacuous mind. That this virulent ignorance has such a powerful grip on academia which should be all but immune does not bode well for our collective future.