Anyone following the 2022 elections knows that something hinky went on. As with two years before, ballots that slanted mostly Democrat started pouring in overnight. Not surprisingly, those ballots gave the Democrats victories in several key races.
What caused this strange, statistically impossible, surge in Democrat votes? Was it election fraud or simply because too many idiot voters voted Democrat?
I suspect it’s a little from column A and a little from column B.
There’s a movie from 2006 called “Idiocracy”. The plot is that a moron signs up for a government project to test a human hibernation pod. For some reason, the first test subject gets stuck in the pod for 500 years.
During the time he was in hibernation, the world’s general intelligence level sinks to a point where it’s so low, that this moron, coincidentally named “Joe”, seems like a genius by comparison.
It’s a good movie. Not great but pretty good. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. Because the similarities between the movie and real life today are quite striking. Because the intelligence level in the United States is plummeting.
This year, after skipping a couple of years, the test called “National Assessment of Educational Progress”, also known as “the nations report card”, was given to hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders across the country. The result was that eighth-grade math scores dropped about 10%, meaning that now nearly 40% of eighth graders earned a score deemed “below basic”. An example of “below basic” is not being able to find the third angle of a triangle when you’re given the other two.
Someone claimed that the test scores were the result of distance teaching during the dumb-ass COVID lockdowns. Then, the fact checkers jumped on board and started “fact-checking” the distance teaching claim.
Note I said, “distance teaching” instead of “distance learning”. I think “distance teaching” is a better term because there’s a huge difference between teaching online and learning online.
Teaching kids online wasn’t about learning. It was about school districts doing the absolute minimum required to continue to get their state funding. Nobody cared if the kids were learning, what mattered was that the teachers were teaching. And those two things aren’t mutually inclusive.
While the fact checkers were all over the COVID claim, nobody paid any attention to the real issue. The real issue isn’t that the scores dropped, it’s that the scores were so low in the first place.
For eight grade math, the national average dropped from 281 out of 500 in 2019 to 273 out of 500 in 2022. The high point for this century happened in 2013 when the average score was a whopping 282.
Let’s take a second to remove the obfuscation. 282 points out of a possible 500 is only 56%. I don’t know how it works now, but back when I was in school, anything better than 90% was an A, 80%-89% was a B, 70%-79% was a C, 60% to 69% would get you a D and anything below 60% was an F.
I’m guessing that “below basic” is the same thing as an F. Which still means that the kids are failing, but at least it’s not such a big hit to their self-esteem.
This isn’t a recent thing. The overall intelligence in the United States has been trending downward since they started measuring it. In fact, the results of the SAT’s got so bad, they had to change the scale to make them seem better. The scales were changed in 1995 and then again in 2015 and make SAT scores appear artificially higher than they actually are.
It’s not just math either. Verbal skills have also dropped precipitously. And yes, the scale was changed for that too.
Now, I’m not suggesting that lower test scores can be used to determine who would vote for Liberal candidates. But it’s a start. As with the SATs, we continuously reduce our expectations about what people should be able to deliver. And, when they don’t meet even those expectations, we lower them some more.
If you’re writing something for the general public to read, the recommendation from Readable.com is to write at the grade level of 8-10.
I did some research this week on a nasty bacteria called Clostridiodes dificile, also known as C. diff. I went to the CDC web site looking for information. According to the CDC, “C. diff germs are carried from person to person in poop”. They didn’t say “feces” or “fecal matter”. They said poop.
The CDC isn’t writing at an 8th grade level, they’re writing at the 8-year-old level. Which probably shouldn’t be surprising. Based on all the other nonsense we’ve seen come from them in the past couple of years, it’s entirely possible that’s the best they can do.
And those are the people supposedly in charge.
Not all people who don’t understand math are Liberal. But you need at least a basic knowledge of math to understand that 60% and 150% can be the same thing, depending on your reference point.
I know some people are going to be scratching their heads on that one, so allow me to explain. Let’s say that I have $100, and you have $40. You have 60% less money I have. But I have 150% more money than you do. By simply changing the reference point, Democrats are using people’s lack of math skills to make people think that things are better than they really are.
This all means that high schools are cranking out young, uneducated people faster than ever before. Instead of teaching kids the three-r’s, they’re being taught that men can become women, the color of your skin is the only thing that matters, and that all white people suck.
Then they go to college and their pliable, clay-like brains are molded into obedient, don’t-question-anything Liberals. Colleges are pooping out graduates with no marketable skills and no practical skills either. So, they’re unable to get a job because they can’t do anything that needs to be done. They have no choice but to rely on the government to give them free stuff. So, they vote for the candidate who promises to give them the most free stuff.
It is any wonder that we got to where we are?
We are living in an Idiocracy.
Joe Biden is President of the United States because a lot of people are so stupid, he looks smart by comparison. The idiots that voted for Joe Biden can’t see that he’s dumber than a stump because they’re even dumber than he is. In fact, the bar has been set so low that a brain damaged ne’er-do-well from Pennsylvania can get elected to the U.S. Senate.
So, that’s column A. Dumb down the population enough so enough people vote for you. You don’t need enough to win, but you do need just enough to allow you to cheat.
That’s where column B comes in. You make up the difference between the votes you need and the votes you got by dumping a bunch of ballots that nobody can verify are legitimate, because you spent the last two years removing all the checks and balances from the process.
But, if fewer people had voted for the Democratic candidates, it would have been harder for them to explain the magical appearance of mostly-Democrat votes after the polls had closed. Democrats only had to bamboozle enough people to vote for them, and then hope that those same people don’t realize their boozles had been bammed.
But they needn’t worry. Because their voters don’t possess basic math skills. Which means they’ll never realize that the mid-term election results are so improbable that it makes the existence of unicorns seem more likely.
Yes, we are living in an Idiocracy. Because enough people were fooled into believing that it was necessary to make America less great than it was, so that it could be built back better.
