The Lack of a Peritum Standard

 For those not into Latin....peritum means 'expert'.  

Around ten years ago....I sat one night watching CNN, and they wanted to drill down into some topic and had some 'expert' show up for a 'Q and A' session.  About half-way through the ten minutes, I came to realize that the expert was NOT an expert, and that I probably knew twice as much on the topic as the CNN expert.  

Ever since that point, I'm skeptical of 'experts'.

Between the various news networks, and print-media/social media experts.....I probably see or read a presentation by at least 20,000 experts per year.  To be kinda honest....about 80-percent of them are what I'd call marginal or non-existent experts.

In the days of old Greece or old Rome....maybe in your entire lifetime, you probably only came face-to-face with twenty-odd experts (one of them probably was the village blacksmith).  So you weren't so confronted with so many non-existent experts pretending to know nothing about something. Life was simple.

Today?  You have even social media giants like Facebook and Twitter which have granted themselves 'expert-status', and have the power to collapse or cancel anyone who doesn't rank with their level of expert-status.  In some sense, the world is revolving around a civil war of the 'experts'.....group X against group Y.

In some cases, you even have experts who deem their status because they are experts about the experts in the world.  And in some cases, you have experts who are experts over experts over experts.  

Where this is leading onto?  It's anyone's guess.....but it would seem like....eventually, that some folks would just wake up and just start laughing about this level of experts existing.  

Atlanta

 So when this BLM riot episode started up in the fall of 2020 in Atlanta.....at some point, a 8-year old kid was killed.

The family of the kid this week....started up a court episode.  They want sixteen million dollars, or they go to court.  

Responsible parties?  The mayor and chief of police.  

What'll happen?  I'm guessing Atlanta has an insurance policy over events like this and it's probably in the range of five to eight million for a pay-out.  Course, once this occurs....the insurance company will come back within twelve months and probably double the insurance rate.

The city will spend at least a million (probably more) on legal costs, and eventually get this down to what the insurance would pay.  

But here is the icing on this cake.  The folks in Buckhead (that upper-scale suburb to the far north of Atlanta) have been reviewing this idea of breaking away from Atlanta and becoming a city on their own.

I'm guessing this will help funnel the move in a certain direction, and within two years.....Buckhead, the city...will occur.

How the city covers increased insurance costs.....with fewer 80,000 fewer residents, and less property tax revenue?  That's a curious question.  

Bold New World

 I sat and read through this story.....the University of Washington Law School has drafted up this idea which basically says....as a 'guest' of their school....there would be regulations to limit what you say on social media.  

I pondered over this for a while.

Who exactly would determine the list of forbidden topics?  That's not clear.  It sounds like the University law school folks would have the final say.  Who made them special?  Well....that's not clear either. 

For example....you might wake up one day, and find that discussing whores or hookers was a bad thing (thus forbidden to talk about) but slutty women was approved (thus a good thing).

Another example, you could wake up and chatting about blacks and high cholesterol was a forbidden topic, but it was ok to chat about whites and high cholesterol.  

Personally, I'd look at the situation (if I were a student) and build a secret identity with a fake moustache, $19 used wig, and a VPN that led back to Gila Bend, Arizona.   

Six months into this deal....if they finalize it....you'd probably see a thousand fake ID folks....chatting over forbidden university topics, and the university elites just grumbling that people weren't supposed to do fake identities.