All engineers are TERRORISTS

Wassup NSA how's it goin'? That's right you saw the title. The word TERRORISTS in all CAPS. Terrorists of that radical knowledge. Yeah, you heard me, WE ARE smart, the un-civil ones. I'm kidding, civil engineers are smart too.

What I mean to say is not that all terrorists are engineers, engineers of mayhem and destruction, but most home-grown radical islamic terrorists are engineers. According to Homeland Security, 62% of home-grown terrorists are engineers. I didn't know my peers had a dangerous side. Oooh spicy, the plot thickens.

What do Betsy Devos and terrorism have in common? You'll find out.

They are both linked to an interesting conversation I had with an aide of mine. (This "aide" helps me out of my wheelchair during the day.)

When she arrived I was watching this video:

So our conversation began about Betsy Devos, the Trump appointed secretary of education. When the media talks about Devos, it is usually prefaced by billionaire. We talked about how billionaires are vilified, while wealth has almost nothing to do with her advocacy of school choice. We also agreed that wealth does make it easier to be a politician. She has no advanced ivy league-degrees compared to her Obama-appointed predecessor, leaving her qualifications questioned. School choice allows parents of students to choose which school their children attend, outside of district lines.These choices are between public and charter.

I do like her stance on school choice which, according to the CATO Institute has been shown to improve student test scores. However, some argue that the competition would put schools out of business, which it would. But the CATO Institute also cites cases in overburdened schools that cause the competition to improve "failing" schools.

Our conversation then moved on from Betsy Devos to how she feels like the media is not covering important stories fairly or at all. A case of this is the Berkeley Riots. None of the violence caused by the riots were shown, except for a cart burning. There were people being beaten with flag-poles, a woman was pepper-sprayed, by "protestors" a man was almost trampled. Yet many news outlets were calling this a protest. The media she feels has become more unaccountable, feeding off of the Trump hysteria, and pandering more toward extreme viewpoints for better ratings. I believe that news has become more about entertainment than facts. In the 50's news broadcasts were short and sweet, you learned everything you needed to know in 10 minutes with very limited spin. I think the 24 hours news cycle can be blamed for this move to an entertainment-focus in news. In order to keep people interested in the news it has be radical, and this leads the left-leaning media to make many stories about how Trump is Hitler. And this led to us talking about the "muslim ban," which she felt wasn't being covered fairly.

We talked about the temporary travel ban to several muslim majority countries. The countries that have been banned were mentioned as dangerous in several of Obama's executive orders (read the whole page). I bet no one told you that! We also discussed on how it misses the countries where most terrorists and muslims are from. I am not equating all muslims to terrorists, but I am making a point. This is not a muslim ban because it does not ban immigrants from countries with the largest populations of muslims, like Saudi Arabia. Speaking of Saudi Arabia, she lived there for 20+ years, but we will get to her experience of how muslims are radicalized in the next blog. Ha! Bait and switch. After saying radical and radicalized and terrorist so many times, Hitler, mayhem and destruction, and Homeland Security, I know at least one person is reading my blogs. The NSA.