from an Intercept (Jeremy Scahill) interview with Alfred McCoy, author of “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.”
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We speak of crumbling U.S. infrastructure, one thing that nobody talks about very seriously in a sustained way is the intellectual infrastructure of the country. The OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the rich countries club, conducts these tests every couple years, the PISA tests, and they test 15-year-olds. In the latest rounds of tests, Shanghai students have come number one in math, science, and literacy.
U.S. students have been somewhere, in math and science, somewhere between 20 and 30. And so you might say, “Who cares about a bunch of 15-year-olds with braces, backpacks, and attitudes?” Well, by 2030, those 15-year-olds are going to be in their 20s and 30s. They’re going to be the super smart scientists and engineers that are coming up with the cutting edge technology. Technology, for example, like photon communications. China is evidently going to lead in this. That means that China can communicate with its satellites and its entire cyber and space and military apparatus without fear of being compromised. We have not developed the same level of photon communications as China. We’re much more subject to being hijacked and manipulated.
So, those kinds of trends in raw military power. The sort of erosion of U.S. educational standards within 10 or 15 years can have some very serious implications for our military technology. It means you just don’t have the scientists, the technology, the innovation that has been so central to U.S. global power for so many years. And so that waning, the geopolitical shifts, you know, those invisible movements of a power arrayed across the landscape. And then the technological and educational shifts coming together means that there are all kinds of ways for the U.S. to lose power. Either with a bang or a whimper. But by 2030, it’s pretty much over for our global dominion.
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“If the American people were to awaken to the realities of world politics and regain control over their government, they still would have the military and economic power to break away [from The New World Order]. Among the world planners, therefore, it has become the prime directive to weaken the United States both militarily and economically.” ~ The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin
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A quarter of Philadelphia’s electorate relies on candidates’ numbers because they cannot recognize their candidates’ names, https://billypenn.com/2019/04/29/nearly-a-quarter-of-philly-adults-cant-read-but-they-still-vote/
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“Run your email copy via a readability calculator. Make sure your average readability level is around the 6th grade.” ~ EasyShip, https://bit.ly/38d5iSV
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