I often wonder what they believe. I've been watching it for years and it's hard to understand how they could possibly believe the shit they claim to. But if no one believes it and it's all a political ploy then it wouldn't work as a political ploy. Some people must have bought into it for it to work.

I suppose having been convinced that Obamacare was so bad they could be convinced that anything, even just repeal, would be better. After decades of propaganda that blamed all the decline in coal jobs on environmental regulation and desperate for jobs in their failing communities they could be convinced that simply revoking the regulations would bring all the jobs back. So under educated in their high school years with most never reading after graduation I suppose they never considered the effect of rising tech increasing production while reducing jobs or competition with lower cost natural gas from fracking or efficiency improvements in solar and other renewables.

But that's all simple, how many bought into the birtherism conspiracy theories? Just a short look and one had to go deep into the weeds to buy into it. Or years earlier when these lists of 40 or 50 people supposedly murdered by the Clintons went viral for it's time. Most were killed to set up, maintain, or hide the supposed drug smuggling ring run out of an Arkansas airport during Bill time as governor.

Who believed what when? I really haven't got a clue. It's all so much nonsense I can't fathom how any of it got any traction at all. But it did, these conspiracy theories went viral.

CNN has done several different interviews with groups of trump voters. In fact most have been with people who really believed his promises and many are so disappointed that he isn’t delivering. 

I still believe that they bought what he was selling, but I certainly don’t know for sure, and neither does anyone else, really. Including them. 

The ones I don’t even want to understand are those who voted (or stayed home) thinking that Hillary was equally as bad. That is the person I have no respect for.  

I said 30 minutes. Okay, a few classes would be fine for "place in the universe". But then they'll still spend 2 fucking months on volcanoes in high school geography, when few will ever see an active or inactive volcano and aside from an earth-changing eruption every 75 million years, they're far down on the "pressing needs" list.

Same with planets and such - great for inspiration when we had a man-made space program; now that we're sending probes to space, it's much more about the physics of motion and telecommunications, and not memorizing the names of constellations and planets even but knowing how they pull on each other and how solar flares work - hey, it's kind of cool that our solar system now has 8 or 12 planets, depending on how you count, but it's really for a tiny subset of human occupation, and it could be done as free time like football and chorus and.... 

Psychology? we don't teach how the mind works anywhere in grades K-12. Interpreting human mannerisms? Nowhere. Teams? well,no - we make groups and hope they work out (which they usually don't), but we don't teach about successful and unsuccessful teams anywhere, whether in regular curriculum or as part of external activities. Coaches may scream about it,but even then it's about running patterns, taking out the linebacker, not hogging the ball and cheering/spiking the ball occasionally.  If anything our teamwork and bullying is getting worse.

What else useful in everyday life do we ignore?

well, we touch on sanitation in kindergarten, maybe more and more in health, but still pretty paltry. Lots of math - years and years - largely disconnected from any practical use. Why are you balancing those equations? what's a derivative or integral good for? what practical problems should you be using statistics & analytics for?

Money - it will occupy our lives perhaps the most over our lives, and now it's all being virtualized, yet we haven't come up with a new treatment in 200 years (yes, I'm pretty sure they had piggy banks of some sort back in Napoleon's age, at least for the uber-riche)

Physical Education - there's been a revolution in running techniques, knowledge of body & exercise, healthy ways of promoting life-long activity. How much of that makes it into K-12 PE classes, vs. "hey, here's a ball, go hit it around the gym and I'll go flirt with the other coach."

Did you know the brontosaurus is actually an apatosaurus mislabeled, and that ostriches stick their head in sand to turn eggs, not escape their predators (they can run 45 mph) , and no self-respected frog will sit meekly by to be boiled to death without hopping out of the pan - even the stuff we were supposedly learning was half nonsense. And we're years past into complex genetics and earth science and nanotech and.....

While it's admirable to learn cosmology and our place in it, it should be obvious that our country is rather scornful of facts. How is it that we're so deficient in science and other fields, so susceptible to chicanery?

Sexism - while we at least have some idea how to address racial equality, we have boys and girls in classes together for years and years, and I don't see any instructional or group approaches that address the development of these sexist values and work on replacing stalking & other creepy behavior as the basic way of interacting with the other sex. The Camille Paglia article was a nice antidote to too much boggled PC fancy thinking, but at the same time it's entirely Italian-based (we know those stereotypes), and yet we have a Trump & Harvey Weinstein thing going, and we can't trace back any responsibility to our educational or lack-of-educational system? I simply mean, we're monkeys that crawled down from the trees - I don't expect us to have a GPS map to Starbucks yet, but we can look around and say, "hey, this is basic shit we used to do up in the branches - and it doesn't really fit here in this Brave New World!!!" Instead, 1820's education keeps churning ahead.