So, I saw this woman. She looked good, so I said hi. ;-)
She’s from DC. (That’s bad)
She’s an attorney. (That’s worse)
She works at the DOJ. (Oh, hell no)
I figured she was a lost cause, but I decided to see if I could get some inside scoop from her. She laughed that everybody in the city of DC is an attorney. (I don’t find that funny)
I asked her what she thought about the Sussmann indictment. (Who?)
She has no idea who Michael Sussmann is, much less that he was indicted. She has no idea who John Durham is.
She works on the civil side of things, not criminal. But still. She is a fucking attorney in fucking DC, and she works at the D.O. fucking J. Hello! Anybody home?
She told me that when a federal government employee gets fired, they have due process rights. I thought, yeah no shit, everybody has due process rights. I told her everybody has due process rights, and she really could not comprehend the concept that everybody has rights. She seemed to think that federal government employees “are in a privileged position” (her words) and that’s why they have due process rights. For a seemingly intelligent woman, this chick is clueless.
I left the conversation thinking that this is exactly what we see with so many doctors. Both doctors and attorneys are taught a very narrow slice of the truth of their professions, and then they have blinders on to anything that is not within the scope of what their professors, bosses, and co-workers spoon-feed to them. They have no knowledge beyond their tunnel vision. Much of what they think they know is not true. And there is a lot of truth that they are completely unaware of.
And these attorneys in DC have an obvious arrogance about them. They think they are on the top of the food chain. They think they have somehow “made it.” The reality is the federal government is at the bottom of the food chain. They are servants. Nothing more.
I also listened to an interview on the radio where a lawyer was talking about how so many judges have been “fooled” (that was the word used) by claims of the 1905 Supreme Court case related to mandating vaccines. He said it was a very narrow ruling (only applied to a specific situation, not related to what we are seeing now), and even that was overturned later by the Supreme Court. It seems that lawyers are bamboozeling judges into believing that the court case is relevant when it is not. But apparently, judges are too lazy or too stupid to read.
Clown World.
Current schooling is about short-term memory, not intellect, wisdom, or critical thinking.
Can you remember what the text book said, and name the 3 causes of 'X'?
If yes, you will do well on the test, get an A grade, and be considered "smart."
If you have a hard time remembering, you won't.
Simply studying long hours (the secret of the Asians) by repetitive reading will make it sink in long enough to do well on the test. But that does not necessarily translate to the real world, where the tests are harder to identify and solve.
The Chinese are good copy cats and thieves of technology, but they create nothing.
None of that has to do with critical thinking. The farmer's kid who only finished a 6th grade education, but learned how nature works and the process of trial and error will probably have better critical thinking skills than the kid who went to Harvard because he spent all non-school hours studying and memorizing for the next test.
Home School.
Well said
Yes - a close family member was an administrative assistant for an engineering dept of a college in the Midwest that has started accepting a very high number of Chinese students. ($$$) she said cheating and plagiarizing was a HUGE issue with these kids. They would have to be talked to repeatedly about it. I also watched a documentary once about how few university spots there are in China and competition is fierce. The amount of ways they cheat on entrance exams was pretty impressive. Many devices, crib notes, etc are confiscated ....
I hated math. I have a decently high IQ but math is not my forté. I remember in Algebra class, I used to work out my own way to come up with the answers even though it wasn’t the “proper” way to do it. That came in handy when I took my ASVAB test for the military years later. I scored high enough overall that they told me to pick whatever career I wanted.
This.