[Bob Lincoln]

Rather than telling people what to believe, education should be telling people how to analyze what is presented to them. It’s obvious analytical skills are missing for much of the population.

We were taught to prove what was presented to us, as part of the assignment, from middle school right up to grad school. Even in grad school, we were given copies of Excel, MathCad and another spreadsheet, and all three gave slightly different results. We were made to delve into how they did the calculation, so as to understand how we might not get the precise answer, or a consistent one, with different tools. Most people just accept that the tool is correct, and they go with the answer. Even the simpler assignments made us question, is this the right order of magnitude? Does the answer fall within an expected range? If not, why not?
But that is lacking in many educational systems.

 

[Bob Lincoln]

Ideology not analytic skills are taught in school. Some young folks I have interacted with don't even know which political party was involved in the starting of and escalation of the Vietnam war. I told them watch the Ken Burns series on this, and read McNamara's book on it, and learn.

Most people don't know that the Vietnam war was a resource war, plain and simple, in disguise. Oil and natural gas access.

 

[Bob Lincoln]

And the whole year I was there (1967) I thought I was fighting the communist menace. Go figure!!

That was the narrative. It was a lie. I'm sorry if this upsets veterans who honestly gave their all for the country. You don't get to pick and choose your battles, literally, when you make such a commitment. But the use of our armed forces was subverted.

My dad was a WWII veteran, and a banker. In the late 1960s, he was promoted to Foreign Loan Manager of the largest bank in New England. One of the loan applications that crossed his desk was a large international oil company, and to justify the many tens of millions of dollars to be borrowed, they included a geologist's report. It showed massive deposits of oil and natural gas off the coast of Vietnam, that they wanted to go after.
It was then that he realized that the war was all driven by Big Oil. He could not go public, of course, for obvious reasons of confidentiality, career suicide and probably death threats. But what he did was start wearing a peace medallion into work along with his suit, and he attended anti-war protests on Boston Common during his lunch hour. There was nothing the bank could do about this, except perhaps not advance his career.
For the last 30 years, that oil company and others have been exploiting those very resources.