Daily Grind

Les at the grinder

My god, the blog looks so frilly. That won't last long. Was reading the daily stupidity index, wait that is not p.c., I forgot, these people are merely ignorant, scuci.

Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.

In case you need me to do the math, that is approximately 16.4 million fellow Americans that you are currently sharing the oxygen and driving on the same roads with.

The article continues:

...in some populations, confusion about basic food facts can skew pretty high. When one team of researchers interviewed fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at an urban California school, they found that more than half of them didn’t know pickles were cucumbers, or that onions and lettuce were plants. Four in 10 didn’t know that hamburgers came from cows. And 3 in 10 didn’t know that cheese is made from milk.

Three in ten didn't know cheese came from milk? Wow.

I need to study the whole dumb quotient more carefully. I remember that a very high number of high schoolers couldn't find Mexico on a map. I found an old study and its even more terrible than that, 11% of American students couldn't find the United States on a map. Probably worse now.

Alan Caron wrote a nice article on this trend to idiocy last year that I will now cannibalize titled America is suffering from a dangerous knowledge deficit. 

Eighteen percent of Americans believe that the sun revolves around the Earth.
Forty-two percent of Americans believe God created human beings less than 10,000 years ago.
Three out of four Republicans in the U.S. Senate and half of those in the House deny the validity of climate change.
Only 40 percent know we have 100 senators in the U.S. Congress.
For the first time in America’s history, this generation will be less educated than the last. Where we once led the world in the number of young people with college degrees, we’re now in 12th place.

It is really disheartening but does add a little perspective when you start wondering why certain folks might have been elected.

This man says American stoopid is a matter of ignorance, not stupidity. Whatever.