So many of the news headlines today reflect both — another aid worker beheaded; hundreds of villagers of a different faith beheaded; kidnapped schoolgirls forced into marriage because women shouldn’t be educated; Republicans decry President’s amnesty executive orders, but refuse to pass legislation that isn’t 100% of what they want; and pretty much the vast majority of elected officials ignore anything they don’t want to believe, regardless of the amount of evidence to the contrary.

The sad part of this is that so little of it is new. Five hundred years ago, in England and across Europe Catholics were burning Protestants as heretics, and Protestants were killing Catholics in various ways because each was absolutely certain of the supremacy of its faith, and the evil of the other guy’s faith, and it was guys, because women didn’t count for much back then.

Not only that, but all of the various religious beliefs, past and present, are based on the teachings of men, and one woman, who have attempted to assure their followers that they knew, absolutely, the will of the Deity… and that in all too many cases, the will of that Deity was to slaughter and/or enslave all who did not share their beliefs. Despite the fact that there is no empirical evidence of such a Deity, and the fact that a great number of beliefs based on such teachings have been found to be totally inaccurate, if not completely baseless, tens of millions of people are ruled by such absolutist believers, and U.S. history has its share of such.

Four hundred years ago, European colonists began a two-century campaign to conquer North America, and in the process to displace the native American peoples because they were “inferior.” Slightly more than a hundred and fifty years ago, the leaders of the Confederacy began a civil war because they believed their way of life, based on slavery and “states’ rights,” was superior to a federal government had the temerity to suggest that perhaps enslaving other people might not be such a good idea – and at that time the federal government had only restricted the extension of slavery to new states. We still have those people who believe in the unlimited right to have and bear arms, despite the fact that the United States has one of the highest rates of civilian deaths by firearms – and certainly the greatest absolute number of such deaths.

The consequences of such absolutist beliefs have always been deadly, and usually terrifying, and that hasn’t changed, either. That was a lesson the Founding Fathers understood, and understood well. Because they didn’t want an absolutist government, they did their best to come up with a system that required a certain amount of compromise to work.

Well… now no one wants to compromise, and guess what… the system doesn’t work. What about that, exactly, is so hard to understand?

Recent archaeological discoveries in Central America have revealed a great deal about the fall of the great Mayan culture. That culture flourished in an area where the rains only fell from May to October. To keep the gods happy and the rains coming, the Mayans offered human sacrifices to the gods. Then in the late ninth century, the weather changed, and there was almost no rain – anytime. The Mayans began to increase their sacrifices, but the rains still didn’t return. Then came the wars… and more sacrifices… and finally the collapse. Sad to say, all that true belief didn’t matter at all, but the mindset of true believers is to claim that that is because the other guy believed in the wrong god and faith. That’s the all-too-human reaction – the other guy is wrong. Add to that the problem that very seldom do most people understand that following a belief that doesn’t have a grounding in facts is likely to cause problems, if not lead to disaster.

Americans have progressed… slightly. We now follow politicians whose views comfort us the most and give us the reassurance that the other guys and gals are wrong… and we can’t really understand how people can kill for religion… even as close to seventy thousand Americans die every year because of our belief in the freedom to drive automobiles at high speeds even while drinking, distracted, and texting and for virtually everyone to bear firearms, regardless of their capacity to use them wisely.

Apparently, Missouri governor Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency and alerted the National Guard in preparation for possible violence in Ferguson, Missouri, because the grand jury is close to a decision on whether to indict policeman Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown.

Heaven knows that the Ferguson Police Department is not up there with the best of police departments. Reports from everywhere seem to suggest that, while the department is better than it was years ago, it has a long ways to go. And some analyses of the way Darren Wilson handled the beginning of the confrontation with Michael Brown suggest that there might have been better ways to approach Brown.

That said, let’s be honest. No matter what Brown’s friends, family, and supporters say, Brown was not the innocent near-angel portrayed by his supporters. Minutes before the fatal confrontation Brown stole cigars from a local convenience story and brutally shoved the clerk and owner out of the way. This was caught on the store surveillance camera. The owner reported the theft immediately and described Brown. Police were looking for him. No one knows for certain what happened in detail after Wilson stopped Brown, except that Wilson did suffer injuries, that a quantity of his own blood was found in his squad car, and that Brown was fatally shot.

Some sort of confrontation occurred; Wilson was injured enough to bleed and have minor injuries; Wilson shot Brown. An autopsy performed by the former chief medical examiner for the city of New York, at the request of Brown’s family, found that the shots had all been fired at a distance of from one to four feet; this finding was consistent with the other medical examinations.

Now…for a moment, forget about the race card. A six foot four inch young man weighing 292 pounds who has been identified as a robbery suspect strikes a policeman… for whatever reason. The policeman shoots him at short range. This is not a violation of civil rights. It may have been an unwise split-second decision by a panicked policeman facing a giant of a young man who had just committed a crime, and that decision resulted in a fatal shooting. Or it may have been self-defense on Wilson’s part. In any case, Michael Brown was no innocent. Most likely, Darren Wilson wasn’t either.

But, however the grand jury rules, this shouldn’t be a case for rioting and great clamor over civil rights. And by the way, what about the civil rights of the shopkeeper who was robbed and assaulted by Michael Brown? I haven’t heard a word about his rights… anywhere.

No… I’m not talking about discrimination, at least not racial or gender discrimination, but about the growing inability of younger Americans, say a huge percentage of those under fifty, to integrate information and knowledge into their studies, lives, and social and economic behavior.

This is scarcely just my personal evaluation. Since my wife is a university professor, and one daughter a secondary school teacher, and two others graduate school professors [one in law and the other in medicine], and all of them interact with others in their fields, the data-base from which I’m drawing is both broad geographically and in terms of fields. And all of them, and the vast majority of their colleagues, all agree on one point – the majority of U.S. students cannot integrate information. They cannot offer a coherent, fact-based oral or written presentation that is both organized and logically supported.

This deficiency goes well beyond education. We have far too high an unemployment rate, and an especially high underemployment rate, in this country, yet we have business after business claiming that they cannot find skilled employees and, often, not even potential employees who can be trained. Why not? Because pretty much every job above the basest form of manual labor requires a degree of information integration.

In the case of students, the majority of them are not stupid, nor are they inherently slow. They couldn’t be with the speed at which they text. But they’ve never been taught how to take discrete bits of information, to evaluate them, and then to integrate that information into their world-view, or even just into their work-view or school-view.

Not only is this lack of information integration prevalent in schools and universities, but it’s now pervading everything, from politics to business to entertainment.

What is overlooked so often today are some very simple points. Without facts to back it up, any viewpoint is just prejudiced opinion. Without knowledge of how a tool works and what its limitations are, the worker who uses it is an accident waiting to occur.

According to poll after poll, around 90% of all Americans are displeased, if not furious, with the American Congress. Yet in the last election, over 96% of all incumbents were re-elected. A little bit of cognitive dissonance there? If you’re that displeased with Congress, why did you reelect the same folks you’re so displeased with? Take your choice – (a) people are incredibly stupid, (b) they can’t put the facts together, i.e., they can’t integrate information, (c) party loyalty supersedes factual information, i.e., most people are illogical, or (D) some combination of the above.

Now, polls show that the majority of voters in any given district/state have a favorable view of their own representative or senator, even when that elected official continually votes against the voter’s declared interests.

As I’ve noted more than a few times, all too many businesses seem unable or unwilling to integrate data and events that indicate that the insistence on higher short-term profits puts them on a long-term course for disaster and lower profits. GM’s faulty starter switch was a perfect example. Saving less than a dollar a car by installing substandard switches in roughly 30 million cars for more than ten years “saved” GM something like $30 million. GM has already paid the National Highway Transportation Board more than $35 million in fines and faces more than one billion dollars in costs, not including additional lawsuits by almost a thousand claimants.

The last thing the United States needs is another generation that is even less adept at integrating and analyzing information, but with schools clearly not being able to teach such skills and the instant-media-communication thirty-second news bite and the growing popularity of Twitter and texting, I’m getting the distinct feeling that information integration and analysis is falling even further behind in the list of skills valued by Americans.

Last week the New York Times book section led off with a review of a book whose title I’m not about to name, for reasons that will become obvious. The book in question was a “science fiction” novel by a “mainstream” author and was highly praised. The reviewer opens by stating that just as the Apollo missions showed the beauty of our planet, in the same fashion a “comparable journey takes place in the best works of science fiction – an imaginative visit to speculative realms that returns the reader more forcibly to the sad and beautiful facts of human existence.” So far, so good.

But then, even as the reviewer admits, the author breaks no new ground with his tale of a missionary’s trip and experiences on an alien world [with no reference to The Sparrow or A Case of Conscience, I might add], but praises him as “a master of the weird” and, after summarizing the plot of the novel, concludes by comparing the author to Hilary Mantel [whom he declares has made the historical novel “newly respectable”] and saying he hopes the author “can do something similar for speculative writing.” The author is, of course, an international seller with several movies based on his books.

All of this gave me the almost insane desire to borrow weapons – as many as I could – from Larry Correia and go on my own monster hunt against the so-called mainstream literati, such as the reviewer, who clearly feels that no existing F&SF writer, no matter how good, can possibly do what this author, as an outsider, may be able to do. The sad part is that the reviewer just might be right, not because there is not a great deal of highly literate and well-written F&SF, but because there seems to be a view among literary reviewers that such literature does not exist.

In the case of such “mainstream” reviewers, I just can’t forgive ignorance and/or total disregard of an entire long-standing genre, particularly when that ignorance has existed so long and so willfully. Praising a novel that clearly examines issues and tropes that have been examined in detail in F&SF for years, if not longer, often brilliantly, as if no one has ever done it before, in the hopes that a talented outsider can bring more readers and “enlighten” them to the fact that within &SF exist a great many brilliant works of literature, seems to me to reveal that the so-called mainstream literati continue to exhibit either ignorance beyond ignorance, or ignorance compounded by arrogance.

And for those reasons, I’m not about to give ink or mention to either the reviewer or the author,

… and the test results are in. Utah high school students just received the results of a new test that measures achievement in language, mathematics, and science… and on average, less than half the students met the standards in any of the test areas. Two things about the new test were especially interesting, first that the standards and what was being measured didn’t change and, second, that half of the new test required answers from the student – no guessing from choices provided. While there were schools whose overall student mastery levels reached or exceeded 90% mastery, there were also schools where the mastery levels averaged in the 10%-20% range.

What to me is so obvious, but what has been overlooked for years by both parents and educational bureaucrats, is that multiple choice tests don’t accurately show student subject mastery – they’re far more likely to reward speed readers with moderate subject mastery and great test-taking ability. And multiple choice testing certainly doesn’t measure the ability to reason out a mathematical concept or to write an accurate and grammatically correct paragraph.Those students who excel at multiple-choice testing are generally those who (1) have learned the material and can regurgitate or recall it quickly; (2) those able to read and process the questions quickly, (3) those with a comprehensive understanding of common and standard language and society, and (4) those with higher levels of self-discipline. Not surprisingly, those abilities tend to be associated with families with higher incomes and with students from more demanding schools [most of which are either schools in high income areas or charter schools with extraordinarily dedicated and highly professional staff, as well as generally better resources. There are exceptions, of course, but exceptions, as the saying goes, often prove the rule.

The other long-standing problem with multiple choice tests is that they provide an unrealistic view of the choices in life outside and after schooling. Sometimes, usually very infrequently, life presents you with clear and multiple choices. Most of the time, your choices either aren’t obvious, tend to be between less obnoxious alternatives, or you don’t have a real choice at all. Even when choices seem obvious, they often aren’t, because the most appealing one in the short run may turn into a long-range disaster.

The “advantages” to multiple-choice tests are that (1) they’re theoretically more objective, since whether one adequately written paragraph is better than another can result in subjective grading; (2) theytake far fewer resources and are far easier to grade; (3) they allow theoretically more objective comparisons of teachers, schools, and school systems [except most really don’t measure how much a given teacher has improved the skills of a particular student or set of students].

The fact that Utah test scores dropped drastically across the board when open-ended questions were added underscores dramatically just how limited multiple choice tests are – as almost any veteran classroom teacher can explain.

But then, since multiple choice tests are graded on the immediate answer, and we have two generations in a row raised on multiple choice tests, is it any wonder that we’ve become a society dominated by instant gratification and superficial knowledge, with a continuing decline in true critical thinking?