Diversity vs competency

Harold Robertson at Palladium Magazine has an essay “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis” (h/t Andrea Widburg).  He starts off:

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen. 

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

And here’s his conclusion:

Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today. 

The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.

Read the rest here. It’s a long read, and Mr. Robertson is not optimistic, but as Ms. Widburg concluded: “If we recognize and address it, maybe it’s still possible to pull the airplane of state out of its deep dive toward the earth.”

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Your Sunday meme with Bert & Ernie

 

Posted in observance of the suspension of any Debt Ceiling

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It’s Up to the States

 

Luis Miguel at The New American is looking beyond the DC swamp – in order to drain the swamp:

Congress Won’t Drain the Swamp — It’s Up to the States

No politician at the federal level is going to drain the swamp, because the federal government is the swamp.

It’s human nature. No one with great power is going to strip himself of that power. That’s like expecting Genghis Khan to step down from the throne. It’s not going to happen.

. . .

The United States began as a federation of sovereign states unified for mutual defense. But eventually, the capital they created — Washington, D.C. — became its own political entity and usurped control over the states that had created it. The state-created federal government, seated in Washington, D.C., now operates on its own independent of the states and opposed to their interests.

. . .

Furthermore, Washington is a city-state in which the ruling dynasty is the globalist cabal. Everything else is a facade. All the congressmen, senators, bureaucrats, intelligence officers, and generals who live and work there are servants of the globalist oligarchy, not representatives of the people. The entire system in D.C. is designed to protect the interests of the cabal — Congress can’t completely reform it from within.

“Everything else is a façade”.  Again, that fits right in with Sundance’s scenario that all of the DC political construct is a “Potemkin Village”, maintained to provide us plebes with the “Illusion of Choice.”  Mr. Miguel concludes:

This is why it is up to the states, through nullification and an aggressive reasserting of their states’ rights, to rein in the federal government. For if D.C. is the swamp, then the city must be drained — and only the states have the power to do it.

Read the full column here.

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The Biden pResidency takes a fall

 

Yesterday, pResident Joe Biden took a nasty prat fall at the US Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.  The short video is at Treehouse here.  But the clip is also up on the Telegram channel Slavyangrad, a Russian channel (no link; it’s subscribers only). 

So the world watches.  Many call Biden’s presidency a case of elder abuse.  True, but it’s also tragic and embarrassing to witness America now as a global laughingstock.  Matthew G. Andersson at American Thinker just published a column, “Why the White House Wants War,” and he thinks Biden’s pResidency is even worse than embarrassing.  Mr. Andersson’s frightening conclusion:

An unsettling aspect of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is that, while it seeks war, it isn’t prepared to fight one (especially with a putative civilian commander qualified for 25th Amendment removal): it invites a confrontation with Russia (and to some extent with China) not to win, but in an unprecedented perversion of U.S. national security interests, to lose: it has declared America, Americanism, and a majority of Americans, as its enemy.  It will use Russia as a tool for its own domestic “transformation” which means the attempted dismantling of U.S. constitutional law. The White House wants war, but an effective internal civil war that results in a reconstructed government, legal system, and political order.  Biden was installed not just as an Obama proxy, but as a signal of weakness. . . .

The full article is here. 

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Now we know where Jim Jordan stands

 

The Freedom Caucus can now re-brand as the RINO Caucus.  Politico reports:

Jim Jordan and other key conservative firebrands have caused a fair share of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy‘s biggest headaches. But instead of leading the rebellion this time, they helped him quash it.

As the House Freedom Caucus was preparing to discuss whether to officially oppose the speaker’s bipartisan debt deal — a move that would potentially galvanize conservative opposition — Jordan (R-Ohio) phoned several fellow members with a request, according to a person familiar with the calls. The former chair of the group urged them to hold back, effectively giving conservatives who wanted to vote with McCarthy license to do so.

Jordan, a longtime McCarthy antagonist turned ally, almost got his wish. The group took no official position until hours before the vote, when most members had already made up their minds.

The beloved House Freedom Caucus co-founder — who gravitated toward McCarthy after the now-speaker tapped him for a senior spot on the Oversight Committee — helped out in other ways. The Ohio lawmaker spoke up in favor of the deal in private calls and meetings, including taking the mic at a closed-door huddle on Tuesday night, just hours after many of his fellow conservatives had spent the day trashing the deal.

This report concludes with this:

If most Republicans get on board, it means threats against his speakership won’t gain real traction. And with two-thirds of the GOP conference backing the deal Wednesday, it seemed to be working.

“We didn’t do it by taking the easy route,” McCarthy said in a celebratory post-vote press conference. “It wasn’t an easy fight, I had people on both sides upset.”

But he added: “I think we did pretty damn good for the American people.”

No debt ceiling.  No serious budget process.  J D Rucker considers this bill an existential threat.  His take is here.

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COVID studies: The Retractions

 

Retraction Watch monitors retractions of peer-reviewed articles/research that don’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s utterly damning to see the sheer number of peer-reviewed reports -- on COVID -- retracted – always after the damage is done: 

We’ve been tracking retractions of papers about COVID-19 as part of our database. Here’s a running list:

Retracted

“5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells,” published in Biological Regulators & Homeostatic Agents on July 16, 2020, withdrawn on July 24, 2020. Our coverage here.

“A Case Series of Stent Thrombosis During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” published on May 27, 2020 in JACC: Case Reports; retraction date is unknown.  Retracted as a duplicate publication by journal error.

“A Comparison of Early Rehabilitation in the Intensive Care Units of Patients With Severe COVID-19: A Propensity Score Matching Analysis,” published November 10, 2022 in Cureus; retracted on April 4, 2023.

“A data-mining based analysis of traditional Chinese medicine in diagnosing and treating COVID-19,” published on June 24, 2021 in The Anatomical Record; unknown when retracted.

“A deep learning model and machine learning methods for the classification of potential coronavirus treatments on a single human cell,” published on October 17, 2020 in the Journal of Nanoparticle Research; retracted on August 16, 2021.

“A Discourse Analysis of Quotidian Expressions of Nationalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chinese Cyberspace,” published on September 8, 2020; retracted on April 12, 2022.

“A mechanistic analysis placental intravascular thrombus formation in COVID-19 patients,” published on April 25, 2020 in Annals of Diagnostic Pathology.  Retracted on June 22, 2020 as a duplicate publication by journal error.

“A meta-analysis of granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) antibody treatment for COVID-19 patients,” published on August 20, 2021 in Therapeutic Advances in Chronic Disease; retracted on November 21, 2021. See our coverage here.

“A Model Based Analysis for COVID-19 Pandemic in India: Implications for Health Systems and Policy for Low- and Middle-Income Countries,” preprint possted on June 12, 2020 in medRxiv; retracted on August 18, 2020.

“A psychosocial exploration of body dissatisfaction: A narrative review With a focus on India during COVID-19,” published on July 29, 2021 in Frontiers in Global Women’s Health; retracted on January 19, 2023. 

 . . .

The rest of the list is here.  (Links via the original article)

RELATED:   Ben Bartee at PJ Media: “Peer-Reviewed Study: 'The Higher the Number of Vaccines Previously Received, the Higher the Risk of Contracting COVID-19' “

And American Greatness has more: click here. 

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America’s Fundamental Transformation

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Sundance at Conservative Treehouse posted a piece on how America suddenly went off the rails, and it’s persuasive.  Here’s a big chunk of it:

. . . As some continue to say with jaw agape, WTF happened?

The answer “why” is not complicated…. not complicated at all.

In 2008, the ‘activists’ took control of government.

In January of 2009, the leftists, community organizers and activists took control of the systems they had opposed for the preceding 50+ years.

In January of 2009, and inflection point took place; an inflection point that no one realized in forethought, scale or consequence.

Starting in 2009, all of the systems of federal government were now under the control of the people who previously fought against the systems of federal government.  Everything since is an outcome of that inflection point; that’s why everything flipped.

All of it, and I do mean every scintilla of the thing; every single granular detail and example you can put in front of me can be traced back to that moment when the activists were no longer outside government railing against the corrupt system they hated.

Starting in January of 2009, the activists took power over the United States government, and every outside institution, including media, necessarily and ideologically followed that inversion.

Starting in 2009, the systems and institutions of the U.S government now came under the control of the radical activists.

In the eight years that followed, the mission of every institution was changed.  Government was weaponized on behalf of the leftist activists who now took control of it.  Everything thereafter is a consequence of this change.

When I use the word “suddenly”, it is only for understanding the inflections point that came as a consequence.  In actuality, the severity of change inside each institution took place over several years.  That’s why the intensity of the weaponized and corrupt systems became worse over time.

As each institution was infiltrated to become more aligned with the mindset of the activists, the institutions became more radical in their targeting and weaponization.

The activists went from being outside government to being inside government.

Suddenly, the left-wing supportive media changed mission priority from railing against corrupt government, to defending the corrupt weaponization of govt.

Suddenly, the FBI went from targeting domestic threats, to targeting only the domestic threats defined as against the interests of the left-wing activists.

Suddenly, the outside activists went from being defined as social elements creating turmoil, to social elements now being defended and even promoted.

This is why we see outside activist groups like the Dream Defenders, New Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street and more recently ANTIFA, as protected and supported by the activists inside government now in control of the systems and institutions.

All of the social, cultural and political dynamics that changed traditional “liberalism” are easily understood once you realize and accept that activists took control of the power centers of the U.S. government.

Everything that followed, including our current state of social and political turmoil, is simply a natural conclusion of that fundamental change.

The radical activists are now in control of the institutions of power.  This core shift is what created the dynamic of a very visible two-tiered justice system.  Each institution was weaponized and continues to be weaponized against those who are not aligned with the activist ideology. . . .

Read the entire piece here.

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