How Little We Know

 In a hopeless quest to get some exercise Kadizzle rides the ebike down to the park below sometimes three times a day. Without the help of the battery the lard would never make it back up the steep hill. 

At the park they have a wonderful concert every Saturday evening. Stopping in the park to listen to the music Kadizzle sat down on a park bench beside a man with two dogs. The conversation rambled along and then of course Kadizzle steered it a little toward politics. Kadizzle asked the man what he thought about the January 6th hearings. The man was clueless and hardly even knew what the hearings were about. The man himself said most people are oblivious to what goes on. He did not seem left right or otherwise. Somewhere in the conversation he said " Well Trump had gas at two dollars".  The ill informed seem to think the president can set the price of gas. 

Do you talk to the general public? Kadizzle does every day. The strange things people believe are amazing. One common thread is the role of the poor, and always immigrants. Having enemies works so well for the Republican narrative. Who is your enemy? Your enemy is socialist, poor welfare cheats, immigrants, and of course liberals. In your heart you know you are a good hard working person, but success has been denied you because your enemies have take your tax dollars, the good jobs, and made regulations that keep you from succeeding. What is better than having someone tell you your failure is not your fault.  It is my wife's cooking that made me so fat. I had nothing to do with it. 

Now for a little different spin. Ignorance eats into society at a far higher level than you might suspect. A father and son team in Switzerland put together a database called gapminder. The database enabled them to query many social questions like " In the world what percentage of people are able to read".  The correct answer is 80%. Ask anyone you know even those with a very good education and they will get the answer wrong. Most people will guess from 20 to 40%. 

What the two researchers found out was even the best educated people are terribly misinformed about the world. It turned out monkeys picking answers at random did better than most college educated people. Now think about the dingers. The dingers never attended college, generally read nothing, and what little the do investigate comes from Fox News. You can prove this to yourself. Just walk somewhere and have a conversation with a dinger. 

The Hoopleheads who are a subset of the dingers are so easily sold any story. Hillary Clinton was running a sex ring out of a pizza parlor. Hunter Biden's laptop has all this strange evidence about his underhanded tricks. Jewish space lasers. A Hooplehead likes nothing better than a simple explanation to a complex problem. There is no global warming, it snowed last night.