Saturday, February 29, 2020

Entertainment Media The Origin Of The Stupid - Including Infotanement

This was published five days ago on New Scientist

Iran has reported 28 cases, but this appears to be a large underestimate because two people who have just flown from Iran to Canada and Lebanon have been found to be infected. Unless people who exit Iran by air are massively more likely to be infected than those who don’t, Gergely Röst of the University of Szeged, Hungary, says it would take 1600 to 2400 cases in Iran to produce two infected travellers – more than any official count so far in a country other than China.

This is especially worrying, says Andy Tatem of Southampton University, UK, as broader travel records show Iran has “strong connections to countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, which have weaker health systems”, meaning they might not detect or contain the virus.

Some countries, such as Singapore, have detected most of the infected travellers epidemiologists calculate they should have got from China. Christl Donnelly and colleagues at Imperial College London have worked out how many infections those countries detected per passenger flight, then compared that to other countries. On average the others detected only a third as many per flight.

“We have decided not to comment on other countries individually,” says Donelly, although the WHO has been informed.

And that was five days ago.   The level of knowledge, as the article implied would happen, fast, has moved on to even more alarming effect. 

And yet last night I was reading online people whining about how unacceptably disappointed their high-school and college age kids were going to be if the people in charge of their school trips were nervous nellies and canceled them.  College-credentialed people of an age old enough to have children that age were going on like that.  And that's among people who, no doubt, all had what are now called STEM prerequisites as part of their college credentialing, even if they didn't major in a relevant subject.  

Modern education produces credentialed idiots.  TV and entertainment don't help.  They are where the problems start.  A lot of those credentialed idiots are running the government, Kudlow, for example, has a Princeton degree, I recall reading when I looked up who to blame for him.  He was a preppy, too. 

Update:  Someone has sent me a link to Wikipedia that says  Larry Kudlow left Princeton before he got his masters there.  Which doesn't signify much.  I note in reading the article that the young "Kuddles" as it charmingly notes he was nicknamed, was involved with the play-lefty group SDS while in college, I'm guessing his radicalism was entirely tied to his draft-eligibility during the Vietnam War and probably ended when he was no longer in danger of getting his ass sent to Vietnam, like so many others of the "new left" he then found a profitable position on the Republican-fascist right.   I have come to entirely distrust secular leftists, they have such a habit of doing that.  

I've seldom known of a religious leftist who took that path, other than a few Catholics like Michael Novak who discovered his "white-ethnic" identity and proved what a double-edged dagger that kind of thing can be.  I've come to more and more think it was stupid to develop such romantic nonsense about that, even as we certainly are, none of us, genetically that different from others.  The problem was the reaction against WASP domination was as bad as that domination was.

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