Have we hit bottom yet?

The new Woodpile Report has been published. As always, it is worth reading. His writing is delightfully understated. His readers are assumed to be literate, clever and alert.

In a world full of noise where nuance is unappreciated, and being told what to think is the norm, his respect for the reader is pleasurable.

I do you a disservice posting this debate here, as his context building is worth the read. I therefore recommend you click the link to Woodpile Report only viewing the video below as part of a solidly developed bigger picture.

On the other hand, he reports that the video has been taken down several times. I contribute my fair share to honest reporting by keeping it alive with this re-publication of it.

I could not, can not unsee it. This, as the bright smiling faced newscaster breathlessly reports, is a national debate championship team in action. (In a world where everybody is a winner, participation trophies for all, and equality of outcome is more important than equality of opportunity).

You can recognize his link to this video in the last sentence of the following:

…”
Washington Post – ‘We didn’t know it was this bad’: New ACT scores show huge achievement gaps … despite efforts to improve schools under the banners of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and other national initiatives.

Somewhat off topic, here’s an amusing example of affirmative action on campus . It’s a five minute video that’s been taken down at least once.
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I do, by the way, disagree with the widely popular assumption that, as stated in The Woodpile Report, there have been “efforts to improve schools under the banners of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and other national initiatives”. As John Taylor Gatto pointed out several decades ago, the dumbing down of education and the populace is very deliberate… and sadly successful.

Later in his post, he publishes the following paragraph out of a thorough essay on the decline in education and value of college degrees. I Highly recommend chasing this link:

College Graduate IQ In Freefall

By Professor Doom

College Graduate IQ In Freefall, Professor Confess – One of the weird things about higher education is how the smart people are fleeing it. Consider the most recent decade, where the drop in IQ is 2.9. This is a relatively huge drop compared to the previous decade, about 4 times as much in terms of proportion. We’re losing our best and brightest because they’re smart enough to see quickly that higher education is a dying system that would merely exploit them. Smart people aren’t just leaving graduate school, they’re fleeing college in general. Having a college degree will soon mean that you’re of below average intelligence.

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Thanks also to Remus for delivering me to this excellent insight into some of the seeming schizophrenia of the USofA governmental actions.

Not agreement capable

from Jim’s Blog

When the Russians were dealing with President Gay Caffè Latte, they complained the US was “not agreement capable”. They would make an agreement with one branch of the US government, and few hours later another branch of the US government would sabotage the agreement by blowing stuff up.