The Numbers Game, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #370 | @MDWorld
July 7, 2014 Mike Gold 1 Comment
You know those lists of amusing-and-almost-but-not-quite interesting stuff you see in magazines and on various websites?
Well, here’s mine.
7% think Congress is doing a good job. I cannot for the life of me understand why that number is so high. However, it does undermine Bill Maher’s well-explained theory that most Americans are dumb.
10% say they’ve seen a UFO. These folks live mostly west of the Mississippi, but there’s a concentration of ‘em in uppermost New England. I think it has something to do with being real lonely.
25% believe the sun revolves around the Earth. Well, the bible says so, so there. Ecclesiastes 1:5. Yup, I can Google with the best of them. I’ll bet each and every one of those people believe evolution is the Communist conspiracy that led to Obamacare.
29% of Millennial adults are “religiously unaffiliated.” This is part of the reason why I like Millennials and try to have a few on speed-dial.
33% of Americans believe Reagan was our best post-WWII President. Now, if we only knew who was really running the country back then. I’ll admit Reagan was better than GWB… or at least more interesting. Keep in mind that, roughly speaking, folks with Alzheimer’s disease can live from eight to 20 years. For the record, I’d pick Eisenhower because I do a lot of long-distance driving.
36% of Americans believe the severity of storms is evidence we are in the biblical end times. And, I’ll bet, 36% of those folks refuse to take a shower.
49% of Americans believe our best years are behind us. The poll (from Pew Research) does not tell us approximately when those best years were. Before the repeal of Jim Crow? Before fluoridated water? Before passage of the 19th Amendment? Whatever, as long as it’s after the adoption of deodorant and mouthwash.
49% of Millennials believe Obama is doing a good job as president; 10% don’t know and/or don’t care. And I believe 23% of Americans just shit the bed.
50% of our nation’s high school students claim they can score weed within 24 hours. OK, fine. Is there a list? Maybe I should join Twitter.
58% of Americansbelieve the United States is among the world’s greatest countries, but does not stand above all others. This one surprises me, and must come as a major disappointment to our nation’s right wing assholes. Why is it nobody ever defines “great?”
81% of Millennials believe most people cannot be trusted. Screw this “over-30” stuff.
90% of our nation’s doctors discourage others from becoming doctors. 300 doctors, give or take, commit suicide every year. Here’s a fun fact: if you ask your doctor (and I’ve done a lot of that recently) how he/she is feeling, your doctor will look truly bewildered and confused. They don’t know how to respond without violating the Hippocratic Oath.
90% of Americans approve of the name “Washington Redskins.” The source for this is what NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell pulled out of his ass. Then he approved the team name “The Long Island Kikes.” Yes, it’s a women’s football team. Love their nails. They’re like buttah.
100% of all right-thinking people believe that figures do not lie, but liars figure.
OK. I made that last one up.
Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.
R. Maheras
July 7, 2014 - 12:50 pm
Poor Millennials — They are the first generation in recent memory to be screwed-over en masse by empty promises, no jobs and the free-spending of earlier generations.
They were all conned into going in horrendous debt to go to college, because “everyone knows college-educated people make more money.” And while that may have been true in the old days, it certainly isn’t true now — regardless of what the usual statistics say. SOME do make good money, of course, but many degrees are absolutely worthless the day the Millennial walks off the campus.
A recent survey notes that only 25 percent of Millennials are married — the lowest rate of all recent generations. Yet the same survey found that nearly 70 percent want to get married someday. They simply cannot afford to.
Face it, when you rack up a debt $75,000 to $125,000 on a degree that MIGHT pay — if you can even find a job in your given field — a starting salary of $35,000 a year, you can’t afford a home, a spouse, kids and a car (unless you’re lucky and live in rural Oklahoma). In many cases, you move back in with your parents and drive one of their old cars — all in the hopes that you’ll eventually get that elusive degree-related job.
By contrast, when I eventually graduated from high school after five years in 1973, I never had trouble finding a decent-paying job. I also owed exactly zero dollars. And after bouncing around at a few labor-intensive jobs, I ended up at a union warehouse job where I could easily afford my own apartment, a new car, and had money to burn.
Millennials never knew they had an option of foregoing college and, perhaps, pursuing a vocation. If you didn’t go to college, you were seen as a failure. In hindsight, skipping college — particularly if you didn’t have a clue what you wanted to do and were planning on settling for a general (or soft) degree — might have been the smart thing to do.
But the governmental and educational institutions you trusted lied to many Millennials (and their parents), which is probably why Millennials are less trusting than any other age group, and why about half say they are independent voters.
This means that they old strategy of empty promised from politicians may no longer work for this youngest generation, and they’ll switch candidates faster than a speeding bullet train if crossed.
It also me