Stephan: At one level this movement away from the traditional four-year college, masters, doctorate structure of higher education, would seem like progressive trend. But I am not so sure because what I see increasingly is people trained in some technical skill who have never been trained to think, and who have no real comprehension of American history, or even how the government is set up to run. One of the things that so turned me off about Trump and his MAGAts is their deep willful ignorance. A Washington Post survey discovered:
Among the findings:
"Nearly 4 in 10 (39 percent) incorrectly said that the Constitution gives the president the power to declare war. Just more than half (54 percent) knew that the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war.
"A vast majority (83 percent) correctly said that the Constitution gives Congress the power to raise taxes.
"A majority (77 percent) know that the Constitution says that Congress cannot establish an official religion — though almost 1 in 10 agreed with the statement that the Constitution says, “Congress can outlaw atheism because the United States is one country under God.”
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center said in a statement, “Lack of basic civics knowledge is worrisome and an argument for an increased focus on civics education in the schools.”
If colleges are changing the need for well-grounded primary and secondary public education has never been greater. But that is not what is happening. As a result we will have an easily manipulated ignorant population. That is not a way to get democracy to thrive.
Georgia College and State University freshmen Ashlynn Anglin, right, and Meghan Murphy, second from right, wear face masks as they talk while walking through the campus in Milledgeville, Georgia on August 21, 2020. Credit: Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP
The four-year, full-time college experience remains a rite of passage. In 2019, some 11 million students were enrolled in the nation’s four-year colleges, roughly three-quarters of them attending full-time.
But an eye-opening new survey finds that many Americans would like to see college become something very different: flexibly scheduled, available online, career oriented, and even linked to specific jobs or companies. As higher education struggles to redefine itself in an era of rising costs, explosive student debt, and a COVID-19 epidemic to boot, schools would do well to heed these findings.
The poll, which sampled 1,000 American adults in August, comes from the London-based global public opinion firm YouGov and was commissioned by the conservative-leaning Charles Koch Foundation. (The survey’s margin of error is +/– 3.3 percent.) It found that Americans are taking an increasingly transactional view of higher education, […]
Stephan: The correlation between religion and sexuality is universal. The Roman Catholic Church, probably because of its celibacy policy, became an organization defined by pedophilia. The evangelicals are defined by their commitment to male dominance, a conviction they share with Orthodox Jews. The Mormons are also defined by this and, for most of their history, polygamy. The founder Joseph Smith had a harem of 40 wives, the youngest of whom, Helen Mar Kimball, wed him “several months before her 15th birthday.” Heber J. Grant who succeeded Smith had 55 wives. Religions are obsessed with what their followers do with their genitals. And nothing gets them as agitated as non-heterosexuality. The LGBTQ variants just make them crazy. Here is the latest with the Mormons.
The interesting trend, however, is that religious affiliation is shrinking, and acceptance of an individual's form of expressing their sexuality is growing.
Temple Square, Salt Lake City, 1899. Credit: William Henry Jackson/Library of Congress
On Aug. 23, Jeffrey R. Holland, Brigham Young University’s former president and a senior apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, gave an inflammatory speech to BYU faculty and staff. In it, he urged faculty to take up metaphorical muskets to defend the faith. He called on them to be both builders of knowledge and defenders of the institution—the church—that determines whether the university exists and the faculty get funding to do their jobs, a fact he reminded them of multiple times in the speech. His words were unmistakably a call to arms: Holland used the word “fire” 10 times, “musket” eight times, and made multiple references to “friendly fire,” “wounds,” and “scarring.” In particular, he called for “more musket fire” from BYU’s faculty to defend Mormonism’s official position on the inferiority and social dangers of same-sex relationships and marriages.
Though the speech was directed at the faculty of BYU, it has shocked Mormons and ex-Mormonsfar beyond the university in its aggressive tone toward the LGBT community. Just […]
Stephan: We now have well-researched data on the mask issue, and it is very clear that the anti-masker position is crap, utterly without factual merit, completely ideological.
A woman wears a mask at the Sadarghat launch terminal in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on March 21, 2020. Credit: Syed Mahamudur Rahman / NurPhoto/Getty
Scientists conducted a randomized trial across 600 villages and more than 340,000 people in Bangladesh and found that even some adoption of surgical masks made a difference.
A study involving more than 340,000 people in Bangladesh offers some of the strongest real-world evidence yet that mask use can help communities slow the spread of Covid-19.
The research, conducted across 600 villages in rural Bangladesh, is the largest randomized trial to demonstrate the effectiveness of surgical masks, in particular, to curb transmission of the coronavirus. Though previous, smaller studies in laboratories and hospitals have shown that masks can help prevent the spread of Covid, the new findings demonstrate that efficacy in the real world — and on an enormous scale.
“This is really solid data that combines the control of a lab study with real-life actions of people in the world to see if we can get people to wear masks, and if the masks work,” said Laura […]
Stephan: And here is some more data on the social dynamics of this pandemic. These social choices must be learnt. It is not the disease, it is the human choices about reacting to it that matter.
Composite image of Donald Trump and Joe Biden Credit: screengrabs
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Wednesday reported on the higher death toll in the most Republican counties vs the most Democratic ones.
Hayes pointed to a new report that was published by data journalist Christopher Ingraham under the headline, “GOP COVID policy is killing GOP voters.
Ingraham’s data showed that in counties where Trump received less than 20% of the vote, the death toll in August was 4.89 per 100,000 residents. However, in counties where Trump received more than 80% of the vote, the death toll was 14.89 per 100,000.
“That is more than three times as many people dying from COVID as in those most, pro-Biden counties,” Hayes said.
Hayes says the data gives “some real empirical weight to the evidence we’ve seen, for months and months and months, that the delta wave is wreaking havoc disproportionately in red America.”
Hayes noted that with vaccines, the deaths were “largely preventable.”
“It is happening because the agenda of the Trump, MAGA, Republican Party has been, by-and-large, to ignore the risks […]
Stephan: It tells you a lot about a person who opposes seeing that every child in school gets a nutritious well-prepared meal. What you eat, and how you eat it shapes a child's entire life. It is one of the reasons why childhood obesity is such a problem in the U.S.
A worker cleans a middle school cafeteria. Credit: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post
With two girls in elementary school and a mother who is a teacher, the Dringenburg household in a Milwaukee suburb had been joyous and excited about back-to-school season — until this year, when the Waukesha School District board decided to opt out of a federally funded program that would give free meals to all students regardless of family income.
The board voted June 9 to return to the pre-pandemic National School Lunch Program, which offers free and reduced-price lunches to students who apply and receive federal money for them. Waukesha is the only eligible school districtin the state to eschew the funding.
Although Dave Dringenburg’s children had never qualified for the National School Lunch Program, he said the decision angered and disappointed him because officials “seem to be out of touch with the community’s needs.” It also led to an opportunity, he said, to advocate for change in a city where demographics and attitudes are changing rapidly.
“We’re determined to make Waukesha as good as it can be, starting with […]
