Sunday 3 August 2014

Our Vulcan-Mind-Society

Back in late May....there was a stabbing attempt up in Waukesea, WI....with two twelve-year old girls who attempt to kill a friend of theirs.  The stabbing?  Nineteen wounds, and this one girl was lucky to make it away and survive.

The judge questioned the sanity of the two twelve-year-old girls.  Reasoning?  An imaginary fantasy game was at the heart of this episode.

This past week....two mental health doctors came back from examining both young ladies.  For gal number one.....she was deemed mentally competent enough to be pushed into court and tried as an adult.  There's some questions about this, and I doubt if she does more than three to five years in some youth center.

The second kid (twelve years old)?  Well...this one doctor comes back and basically says that the kid thinks she's got Vulcan-mind-control.  She also talks to characters out of Harry Potter books.  And the kid thinks she has an ongoing relationship or friendship with some Ninja Turtles character.  Nutcase?  Yeah.  The Doc basically said that she needed to really grow up, and needed some really heavily medication.

The parents?  Teachers?  Associates?  They all put this kid in the normal intelligent group, and it kinda has shaken some people to consider her nuts at age twelve.

I worked with a guy years ago.....who the Air Force yanked to be an instructor at Goodfellow training school in west Texas.  My associate didn't really care for the job, but they wanted NCO's with bachelor degrees....which there were very few....and he was qualified for the instructor job.

As he said.....about a year into the job, he realized that there were a fairly large crowd of immature kids coming into the Air Force and not really prepared for the real world.

One day.....he had some 19-year-old female who'd failed a module....eight weeks into the class.  He had to quiz her and attempt to find a way to prepare her for the second test.  So he asked her for the notes she'd taken.  They were unreadable.

So he asked her if anyone else could read the notes, and she noted her other friend in the class...."Amber"....who could easily read the notes.  My associate accepted this and let her return to her desk.  Then he went to the roster of the class participants....no girl named "Amber".  He looked at the other classes.  No "Amber".

So he walked to the back of the room....where this gal sat, and asked about "Amber".  She points to an empty table next to him and an empty chair.  "Amber" was sitting there.  My associate asked...."Right now?" Yes of course was the response.

My associate walked quickly to the commander's office.....laid out this unique situation, and the commander doubted the story.  So the young gal is brought to the commander's office, and answers various questions, and then points to an empty chair in the room....where "Amber" was now sitting and indicating her friend was part of the class.

This gal had been through basic training, and had survived a security background check.  No one had ever noted her issues.

The commander dragged a female NCO along with him and drove this young gal over to the base clinic.  They kept her for several days....getting the same responses, and basically came to note that she was mentally perfectly ok....except for this imaginary friend. They processed the paperwork and around a month later......she was sent home.

In this case....this twelve-year-old kid in the attempted murder....is a nutcase and cannot be trusted.  How many such nutcases exist in America?  It's hard to say.  There could be forty thousand....there could be four-hundred-thousand.  Someone could walk up to you on the street....place their hand on your head, and then hint they are are doing Vulcan-mind-control over you....and then you kinda wonder if it's a joke or a nut.

Prior to the 1950s....we didn't really have science fiction or vampire-like stories.  We didn't have monsters, zombies, or alien predators.  Something happen over the past forty years, where society is continually being bombarded with these fake cultural derivatives.  Now?  There might be one percent of society that is unable to distinguish from Vulcan-mind-control and evil Republican politics.  The same group has trouble telling a difference between zombies and meth-head Democrats.

I even kinda wonder if this one gal in the intelligence school had just passed the test.....she would have gone on to more modules....passed them, and graduated out.  For all I know.....I might have been her first supervisor in the intelligence world, and found myself one day quizzing her over some failed project, and then she would have pointed to an empty chair and her friend "Amber".  Maybe I would have acknowledge "Amber"....but then hinted that "Amber" was a Karl Rove-agent and falsely pulling her toward a fake Republican agenda.  Would "Amber" had survived?  It's hard to say.  At some point, you wonder if reality would just set in one day, and cast the fake illusion folks adrift.

Sadly, all of the problems in the world.....and now I have to worry about fake Vulcan-mind-control idiots.....who might want to stab me while I stand in line at Piggly Wiggly and admiring the busty clerk handling merchandise.

The Three-Year Degree

There is an effort underway by Ohio....to develop and offer....three-year college degrees.  Basically, it'd be a bachelor's degree.

The general concept?  What they'd like to do is develop some relationship within the high school sector, and in that last year or two of high school....you'd do a couple of classes which lead to some method of testing and thus granted college credit.  The added reasoning to the project?  You'd cut out the costs of one entire year of college.  Figure that to be $15,000 that you won't have to borrow or pay-back.

Natural boundaries to this?  Yes.  Some folks don't want to consider it the equal of the current four-year program.  Added to the anti-pitch....there are the professors in various colleges who would be in lesser demand....so the pay deal and seniority would all be called into question once kids got firmly into the three-year program.  You'd threaten the general business plan of most American colleges.

At some point around the fifth year of my Air Force period....someone convinced me to sign up for Dantes testing at the base education center.  For each test you pass....you get three semester hours (one core class) of credit.  So over the course of one year.....I took around twenty tests.  I admit...other than the general math test (three hours of study over a weekend).....I never put any study efforts into the twenty tests.

I passed roughly ten Dantes and CLEP tests....figuring roughly thirty-six hours of total credit....equaling one entire year of college.  Just by watching Lawrence of Arabia and having read sixty pages of some text over a month....I passed the Middle Eastern history test.  The Vietnam War Dantes test was a breeze.

After finishing these....all free via the Air Force.....I started to wonder why Alabama hadn't offered these type tests to me back when I was sixteen and seventeen.

It's the same way with these various class modules you have today....via distance learning.  I could have probably taken two or three classes over the last two years of high school, and gotten college credit for that.

The college business cycle?  It's corrupted.

Let's be totally honest....if you are going after a four-year degree in business management....you have zero need to take any science-related classes or history-related classes.  If you were going after an electrical-engineering degree, you have zero need for biology classes or foreign-language classes.  If you wanted a four-year degree in French art.....why the heck would you take any science classes?

At some point in the 1800s.....most American universities went to a standard of four years equaling a bachelor's degree.  We can kinda admit today....that you basically ended up getting a plain-vanilla bachelor's degree up until the Civil War era.  By 1900, there were probably a dozen related degrees that you could get with big-name colleges on the east coast.

As much as they say they are a public-learning institution....non-profit in some sort of way.....it's basically a Wal-Mart style atmosphere where you say you want such-and-such degree, they hire up professors to teach it.....and then figure in some NCAA football action, heavy drinking and partying, and then "gift" you a degree by the end of four years (unless you really screw up).

I worked with a guy once who spent five years at some college in Florida.  The entire second year was a wash-out and he kinda admitted that he remembers almost nothing of the nine-month period, having been drunk or doped up for the whole time.  He left at some point, went into a six-week rehab program....got waivered to come back to the college (naturally, they wanted his dad's money), and finished up his degree.

I asked how he slide so far, and he admitted that everything in that first eighteen months was fairly boring, stale, and a repeat of the last year or two of high school.  He took to partying and rarely put any effort into any classes.  After rehab, he refocused himself....took higher advanced classes, got challenged, and easily graduated.

While colleges will tell you that kids are arriving unprepared for the first year of study, and marginally show any skills from the 12th grade of high school.....I'd suggest that most colleges have lowered their expectations enough now....that the first year of college is really a standard high-school year.  The sad thing is that you are paying $12,000 to $20,000 to repeat high school for that year and get yourself into shape to attend real college....in the second year.

So, I'm kinda for the three-year degree.  In fact, I'm all for wrapping up high school by the end of the tenth grade and offering you a simple test to conclude that part of your education in life.  It'll probably never happen, but we said that three-year degrees would never happen, and something came to change that logic.