Atrios asks, Does Anybody Remember MOOCs? For those who don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, MOOC is an acronym for “Massive Open Online Course.” It was one of the many “revolutionary” ideas that was going to save education in this country without, you know, the bother of actually spending any money or employing any teachers. Atrios noted that they had many problems. First, they didn’t scale the way people thought they would. Second, they were actually fairly expensive to provide after all. Third, just because Harvard was pushing them didn’t mean that anyone really thought that they were getting a Harvard education. And fourth, and most important, such courses might work better than teaching yourself with a book but they were never anything close to getting taught by a teacher.

Let’s just throw out one idea right away: a Harvard education isn’t as good as a Harvard education. Big name schools do such a great job “educating” students because of their names. They can demand the very best students with the very best preparation. The only way that getting educated at a big name school is helpful is that it provides for the “Chris Hughes Effect.” This is where you get to interact with a whole bunch of other smart and — more important — well connected people. So without doing anything of significance and without being of notable ability yourself — you too can have a half billion dollars, buy magazines, and run all over the world and be treated like you have half a clue about anything.

This is largely why learning from a book is not as good as going to college. It’s true that learning from books all by your lonesome is hard. As a result, people ought to be most impressed with the self-educated. Eric Hoffer ought to be a household name rather than William F Buckley Jr. But that isn’t the case because America is the most anti-meritocratic national that I can think of. The Harvard degree isn’t about what you know. It is more about who you know. The business community in the United States is interested in a Harvard degree the same way that a Hollywood casting director is interested in that episode of Break Bad an actor appeared in.

So the idea of the MOOC was always stupid. Let’s suppose you managed to give half the American people a Harvard level education. What then? All that would do would be to make a Harvard education useless. The society would have to find some other way to separate the impressive people from the unimpressive people. Because it isn’t about knowledge and it never has been. When the power elite talk about education, it is primarily for one reason: to claim that the poorer classes don’t have jobs and the ones who do are paid poorly because they lack education. It doesn’t matter that a dullard born rich like Bush the Younger is far better off than a genius born poor. Education is a good stick with which to beat the non-elite. And add to that an effort to destroy the one remaining middle class profession — teaching — and you have the whole thing. The power elite never need worry about anyone challenging its rule.

MOOCs are a thing of the past. But don’t worry! The power elite have an endless supply of ideas for how to “fix” education. There is always a new idea in the pipeline. As soon as they destroy all the teacher’s unions and reduce education to a $12 per hour job, they’ll have another idea that “This time!” will fix all the problems. And eventually they will come back to the MOOCs. There is no reason why a computer can’t teach our kids the only things that really matter: multiplication tables, circuit board assembly, and most of all, how to bow before their betters.

I almost didn’t notice that it was new year’s eve today. Part of it is that I just don’t like the day. I never do anything for it. Under most circumstances, I won’t even stay up for it. But now I normally do because that’s when I do my birthday posts. Really: the new year has absolutely no relevance to anything. It is an entirely arbitrary dividing line between years. But whatever. I do have a bit of good news on this new year’s eve.

Maryland had the death penalty all the back to when it was a colony — in 1638, they hanged two men for piracy. Since that time, they’ve killed 312 people. Now that may sound like a lot, but actually, in that almost four centuries, the state has managed to kill off many fewer than Texas has killed since people started dancing in the street in 1976 because the Supreme Court allowed them to start legally killing people again. (Texas has killed 508 people in the last four decades.)

But last year, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley signed a law abolishing the the death penalty. As Huffington Post reported, O’Malley argued that “it wasn’t a deterrent for criminals, could end up being applied to innocent people, and was far more costly to the state than other punishments.” You know: the holy trinity — the reasons that all people would be against the death penalty if they approached the subject with their higher brains. But instead, most people approach it with their lowest brain: they just want to “get” the bad guys.

Let’s go over that list. First, people don’t kill as rational acts. They don’t think, “Now that I only have to spend the rest of my life in prison, I’m going to kill my wife!” People murder for two reasons: they either think they won’t get caught or they aren’t thinking at all. There is no evidence whatsoever that the death penalty reduces the homicide rate.

Second, innocent people get put to death all the time. If the death penalty really was effective at stopping murders from happening, maybe one could argue that innocent people being put to death was an acceptable price to pay. But since we can’t, we are killing these innocent people for no reason whatsoever. But hey, I guess as long as it isn’t happening to you or one of your loved ones, it doesn’t matter. And after all, you do get something from the death penalty: the great feeling that you are “getting” the bad guys.

Third, it is a hell of a lot more expensive to kill a murderer than to just let him rot in jail the rest of his life. It is this argument that gets the most bizarre response from death penalty advocates. Their response is always the same, “But it shouldn’t cost more!” According to them, after a “guilty” verdict, the judge should just pull out a gun and shoot the defendant in the the head. The fact that dozens of people have been proven innocent decades after conviction is just ignored. Nothing can get in the way of the wonderful feeling people get from legally murdering the bad guys.

In getting rid of the death penalty, Maryland had a bit of a problem. They had four people still sitting on death row. The state could still kill them because they were grandfathered in, so to speak — or so some claimed. So as his final act of governor, O’Malley commute their sentences to life without the possibility of parole. That is about the best news that you are going to get from me this year. And it is pretty good news too. I wonder when my home “liberal” state of California will ever outlaw this barbaric practice.

Paul Waldman wrote in interesting if maddening article article yesterday over at The Washington Post, The Substance and Politics of Obamacare, in One Citizen. It tells the story of Kentucky resident Amanda Mayhew who is thrilled with all the needed medical care she is receiving because of Obamacare. But she would give it all away if it would put an end to all the old people who are being killed by the death panels. It’s kind of sweet actually. Ms Mayhew is clearly a very caring person. In fact, she’s the kind of person that Americans flatter themselves as being: willing to put the needs of the less fortunate above their own.

The bad aspect of this is that her very decency is being used against her. She’s been lied to. There are no death panels. No one is deciding if old people deserve cancer treatment. This is just a scare story designed to malign the new healthcare law. Teens are told the story of The Hook to scare them away from making out in their cars and the Death Panel is told to the working poor to make them turn against a healthcare bill that is designed to help them.

Waldman blames politicians and hate radio hosts and Fox News for the problem of all the misinformation about Obamacare. But I don’t. They are just doing their jobs. They are the foot soldiers for their fascist leaders. My problem is with the mainstream media. All the right wing propaganda about a government takeover of healthcare and death panels never would have gotten a foothold in the mainstream consciousness if it hadn’t been for the local news and the big newspapers and the network news reporting it as, “The administration says that the government is not taking over the healthcare system and that there are no such things as death panels; the Republicans claim this is the end of quality healthcare in America and all people over the age of 65 will be forced to kill themselves; as objective reporters we have no way of saying what the truth is.”

Let’s not forget where the whole idea of the death panel came from. Sarah Palin, of course, came up with the name. But the concept came from Betsy McCaughey — the disingenuous health policy “analyst” who pretty much single-handedly destroyed the Clinton healthcare reform plan. And like James O’Keefe, it doesn’t matter how many times she lies and is shown to be totally wrong, the press just can’t manage to apply even the smallest amount of skepticism towards her. Because, you know: that wouldn’t be “objective!”

The best example of this came when McCaughey went on The Daily Show when she brings out a big binder containing the Obamacare law. And Stewart gets her moving from section to section until it is clear that what she’s claiming is nonsense. Nothing in the law says anything about death panels. It’s clearly just about end of life planning — living wills — and Stewart is absolutely right when he calls what McCaughey is doing hyperbolic and dangerous. Also check out the second part of the interview.

But as usual, the mainstream media didn’t do anything near as good as what the comedy show The Daily Show did. So as usual, the problem is our media that has no real interest in informing readers and viewers. Instead, it is a kind of talking point aggregator. And that’s why we can’t have decent governance. Our government is only as good as the media that covers it. And we don’t even have a media that covers the government. We have a media that repeats the government.

So we have poor Amanda Mayhew who would vote to eliminate Obamacare because of the all the old people she thinks the law will kill. “Liberal” Californians vote against GMO food labeling because they think it is going to harm the one remaining small family farm in the state. And Americans consistently vote for politicians who take money from them and give it to the rich because of some weird sense of fairness. And it is all due to a media system that will only take a stand on an issue when it helps the power elite.