“51% of Americans haven’t read a book” in the past year. That’s not as bad as it sounds. Thanks to the internet and everyone being continuously online, Americans today are likely reading vastly more in a given year, fiction and non-fiction and news, than they ever did back in the old days of books and newspapers and magazines.
“…but very true”. Um, no, that rant has many factual errors and inaccuracies… It claims, “[first in] defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined”. Nope, the US spends about as much as the next nine countries, which is vastly fewer than “26”. And while the US spends more in absolute dollars, it’s hardly first as percentage of the national economy. US spends 3.4% of its GDP on defense, while Russia spends 5.9%, Saudi Arabia spends 7.1%, Oman spends 5.4%, etc. The same rant says that of the “next 26 countries”, 25 of them “are our allies”. Um, really? The #2 military spender is China, the #3 spender is Russia, neither of which can seriously be called “our allies”.
It’s also wildly wrong when it sneeringly says that the US is “178th in infant mortality rate”, because Aaron Sorkin (the scriptwriter) misread the chart. The US isn’t 178th from the , it’s 178th , because that ranking put the HIGHEST infant mortality rate at #1.
It claims that “we lead the world in only three categories”, then cherry-picks three things Sorkin could get snotty about, while dishonestly pretending there was nothing else whatsoever the US leads in. I’m not impressed. The US is #1 in many categories, including Nobel Prizes, Olympic gold medals, beef production, cheese production, billionaires, GDP, medical research, movies, charitable donations, roads, dog ownership, higher education, aerospace (including the only Moon landings), energy production, and more.
Sorkin reminds me of the line from a song in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Mikado” that goes, “The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this and every country but his own.”
You need to find better parts of the internet. There are vast libraries online, entire research archives, complete college curricula, and much more.