Health care, education and YOU!

I'm sorry, this message is really about learning, not about politics. BUT... Today the Congressional Budget Office listed their "scoring" of the Senate healthcare bill, the Better Healthcare  Act (BHCA I think). CBO states that 22 million people will lose healthcare insurance over the next 10 years. Most of the news that I read is going nuts about this, hoping that voters will realize that the congress is enacting a massive transfer of wealth in the form of tax cuts to the top 0.1%. 

On the Fox News website, however, you would have all of this discussed in only 457 words. What could be more economical?

Other news includes: North Korea "amazed" by Spanish beach resort known for drinking binges, Supreme Court decision shifts momentum in Trump travel ban, Supreme Court to decide if gay rights trump everyone else's rights, Prison officials under fire for treating inmates to stripper show. 

All this. And more. http://www.foxnews.com

(Ok, there's your photo. Headline is: "Seattle's $$ Struggle: Minimum wage hurting low-level workers, costing jobs.") 

So. Why is this about education and learning? Because the site cited is covering the biggest news by not covering it much at all (while the negative impacts of the rise in the minimum wage, with that photo and front-page treatment, gets 511 words). 

We need our children (and our adults) to be able to discern when they are being gamed. That might require understanding that an n=1 experiment is valueless. That might require checking another news source to see what's what. That might require empathy, understanding that the closure of Planned Parenthood clinics in distant states _terminally_ "inconveniences" women.

(Sorry to go all political on your a**. This is about learning, not politics, but the conclusion that we must reach is that in fact "learning is political." i hesitate to say, "learning in a dictatorship is political." We are not there yet. Learning is the antidote to authoritarianism. Perhaps we can agree on that.)