Apes Flying Planes

Imagine that archaeologists, digging around in the jungles somewhere, stumbled upon what they think are the remains of ancient buildings. Upon closer examination they learn that it is very old, but has technology that is advanced, more advanced than the most advanced technology of today. This is the sort of premise that makes for a good science fiction story or even a mediocre sci-fi series. The next step in the plot is a drama between the characters over what to do with the newly discovered alien technology.

In real life, there would be an endless rounds of committee meetings and memorandum as the bureaucracy tried hard to not do anything with the new technology. The original discoverers would die of old age long before a decision was made. Even without the byzantine processes, nothing would be done, as no one would know what to do with the alien technology. Anything that far advanced would be the product of a race with an entirely different evolutionary arc. No one would know why they created the technology.

That’s the part that gets left out of the science fiction version of the story. Technological advance often seems like leaps and bounds, but in the long run it is glacial. For example, plow design remained fairly crude into the 19th century, then all of sudden it advanced rapidly to what we know as the modern design. That great leap in technology was the result of the glacial advance in material science, economics and social organization that started in the Middle Ages. The plow was the result of that.

That alien discovered in the jungle would have been the result of a similarly long evolution of an unknown race of beings. Without that long arc, their technology would be like the final pages of a mystery novel, without the rest of the book or even the knowledge surrounding the book. At best, we would be able to guess at parts of the arc, but we would have no idea why the thing was created, so we would have no idea what to do with it. An example of this is the Antikythera mechanism.

Now, this is not advanced alien technology, but it is alien technology. The ancient Greeks are alien to us, not quite as alien as people from space, but we really can’t know that for sure. The Antikythera mechanism was discovered in the spring of 1901 and it took 70 years to begin to understand it. In 2008, researchers announced that it was an instrument for predicting astronomical positions, eclipses and for maintaining a calendar. They still don’t know all of it.

Now, if it took a century to puzzle through a piece of alien technology from 2500 years in our past, from a people about whom we know a lot, how long would it take to unravel advanced technology from a mysterious alien people? It is a pretty safe bet that the CIA has learned nothing from that crashed alien spaceship they keep at Area 51 in Nevada. Unless the aliens sent scientists trained in working with retarded people, we would have no way of figuring out where to start with the technology.

Now, what does this have to do with anything? Technological advance is a feedback loop within a society. It’s why technological advances can move from one people to a similar people, but they take a long time to work into alien cultures. Europe went through a rapid technological advance starting around 1500, racing ahead of the rest of the world. Much of what the West created did not make it into Asia and Africa until the 20th century. Advances in social organization remain alien to much of the world.

Now, imagine what happens when a people become too stupid to maintain the technology created by their ancestors. This is something that would be predicted by social cycle theory. As the ruling elites, the smart fraction, sees its fertility rate decline, the overall IQ of the people declines. There could reach a point where the society no longer has the social capital to maintain the social and material complexity created by their ancestors. At some point, their world becomes chimps flying airplanes.

Think of it this way. Imagine if tomorrow, everyone with a working knowledge of turbines died from some awful disease. We would still have smart people capable of learning about turbines, but they would have to learn it. They would also have to acquire the experience of working with turbines. It would take years before we had enough people able to work on and maintain existing turbines. By that point, the work needed to repair existing turbines would be massive. It may never get done at all.

Now, the evidence is strong that Europeans are getting dumber, and that is putting aside the issues related to immigration. In fact, the decline into stupidity may be accelerating. When you add in immigration by people with significantly lower intelligence than existing European people, the effect is an acceleration toward a much lower average IQ for Western nations. Again, this is predicted by social cycle theory to a degree, but also backed up by research into the subject by people like Ed Dutton.

The social instability of the West, things like the inability to control borders and the revival of primitive beliefs, promoted by female shamans, could very well be due to the decline of general intelligence. The people populating the machinery for running a modern Western society no longer possess the intelligence to properly operate the machinery. They are like those researchers who discovered alien technology, except our rulers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals are convinced they know how all of it works.

There is another angle to this. Take the financial system, which is probably the most automated system today. It has reached a level of complexity where no one person knows how all of it works. This is not just the narrow technological stuff. Transactions have reached a level of complexity where specialists focus on just one part. About 70 percent of overall trading volume is now generated through algorithmic trading. The markets are literally run by robots that no one fully understands.

As a result of this realty, like the science fiction movies, the world markets now have what amount to dead man switches. If the robots get out of control, the breakers put a halt to trading in order to give humans a chance to figure out what’s happening. This is a preview of what lies ahead for Western society as a best case scenario. The apparatus of the state will be kitted out with circuit breakers and dead man switches, not to control the algos, but the stupid people operating the machinery. It is apes flying planes.

A more likely scenario is something beyond anarcho-tyranny. Instead of the authoritarian institutions harassing citizens over petty matters and ignoring the serious issues they were designed to address, the machinery of society will slowly grind to a halt, as happened in post-colonial Africa. The organizational systems, not just the physical machinery, will become too complex for the people to master. As a result, we will enter a period of technological and social regression toward the new mean IQ.

Put another way, the society created by our ancestors of just a few generations ago is beyond the event horizon of our modern ruling and intellectual elites. The physical manifestations are all around us, but the cultural aptitude to create and maintain such a world is now beyond the reach of our elites. While they remain smarter and more sophisticated than the main body of citizens, they are relatively primitive compared to their ancestors and as a result we are ruled by people puzzled by their own inheritance.

To contribute to my work

Or, You can send money to me at:

P.O. Box 432
Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432

183 thoughts on “Apes Flying Planes

  1. Apes Flying Planes

    Btw, would be hard to find a better description of modern Western Europe than that. God I hate leftist traitors.

  2. Reading this I was just going ‘yeah, yup, makes sense, squares w own impressions’. Western society, on both sides of the North Atlantic, is increasingly retarded. And I believe in social cycle theory and also that, for some reason, we managed to make smart people, especially smart women, have far fewer children than dumb people. Where would that logically lead?? We also have a society that I honestly think is increasingly despiriting and uninspiriing to high-IQ, non-brainwashed individuals.

    This post was really solid work, even by Z’s really good standards.

  3. Great essay . It’s hard to ignore the laziness and stupidity in young people today. It’s not entirely their fault. Perhaps when the last of us boomers die off the country can get back to business and forget this horrible PC culture we have burden ourselves with.

    Public schools used to be a great way to expose children to math, science, art, etc.

    Even kids with mediocre grades could learn learn a trade and support a family. Now schools are just indoctrination centers for degenerates trying to poison young minds.

    The white man has lost his will to fight. We’ve handed off the controls to the women, bushmen and fairies . We still play the rules our elites and enemies have long abandon .

    Just like my beloved Boston Bruins. The other team breaks the rules, we look for justice and the “powers that be” look on with disinterest .

    Until we “man-up” our children,their education and future will continue to suffer.

  4. The story of the most recent Legend of Zelda game is built on this premise. Princess Zelda and her colleagues spent a lot of time researching ancient technology (including killer robots and drones with powerful laser weapons) to give them an edge against Ganon, but failed to completely control it, so Ganon took the machines over and turned them against the good guys, turning most of the kingdom into ruins, killing most of those who had acquired power over the ancient technologies, leaving Link near-dead and placed in a recovery chamber for a hundred years, and leading to the creation of a cult dedicated to exacting revenge on those who resurrected dangerous ancient technologies. Zelda’s obsession with the research took time and energy away from mastering her own traditional magical powers that should have more reliably and directly stopped Ganon. In the end, despite Link mastering both ancient scientific technologies and traditional magical weapons, it’s only the magical weapons and powers with a strong continuous tradition that are able to destroy Ganon.

    This suggests an even worse scenario than that outlined in this post: what if, by focusing so hard on pretending to still have the social capital to maintain old technologies, we neglect to maintain the parts of our civilization we still have a chance of controlling?

    • I messed with Breath of the Wild a bit, the control are strange and its only on Switch so I won’t be buying it which is too bad, It’s a neat game and coming from Skyrim to being able to actually climb trees to get apples is amazing
      Politically that refreshingly Conservative view of things for a modern game but again it is Japanese.

      I’ve seen public intellectuals in Japan say more or less “if our population drops too low, we will just have to get rid the tech we can’t maintain and gradually become more agrarian.” without being laughed at.

      Japan understands that Societies must maintain traditions or they will die

      This mindset is far easier in Europe or Asia than the USA . Heck European households have family heirlooms older than the entire USA and pubs hundreds of years older.

  5. By the way, this is a nice tie-in to yesterday’s Z-post.

    I am eternally dismayed at how little I know, especially about the equipment and things I use.
    (and that includes the light switch, phone, computer, etc)

    • You can learn the basics of this stuff pretty easily on line or with kids books but be warned once you enter the modern computer age it’s quite complex.

      This complexity is not sustainable though which is a good thing as, posted ironically here with a computer the computer and its offshoots is an existential risk to humanity having a future

  6. Blew my schedule discussing this with Pajeet from London.

    I asked him, “can the nonwhites sustain what we whites gave them freely?”

    He is absolutely convinced Mayor Khan and the new London are destined to take us to space.

    His computer models probably predict it! All that diversity of creative thought and different ways of thinking.

    That, and because Brexiters are stupid, stubborn racists. New London is so great Pajeet bought a $500,000 house in gated redneck Texas.

  7. It is both intelligence and culture. China and Japan were very smart but blockd progress. Even now, someone in the west can admit they goofed (early), but the shame culture makes it hard in the east. Lu Bans” axe.

    https://hackaday.com/2017/08/30/lu-bans-axe-and-working-with-your-chinese-suppliers/

    This is the greater problem with Africa. The bell curve insures there are a sufficient supply of intelligent Africans, e.g. in Zimbabwe. Or Detroit. But when “empowered” by Democracy, they give the positions to supporters incapable of running them, and those don’t hire experts to keep things going, so it fails.

    Not just Africans, but Venzulans (and earlier Argentina with Peron). They didn’t have an influx of stupid people, but lost their morality. The goose that laid the golden egg. You have a society involving Makers which only exists in a free market (competition, property rights, not anarchy) that creates wealth, but a generation arises that just sees the prosperity and thinks it spontaneous (without some “indoctrination” into the truth). So they become takers, and the makers stop making.

    Even if it is not a deep proof, someone with an 85 IQ can be taught, even if only as a line in a creed, that you cannot take what someone does not make. Or ‘Thou shall not kill, steal, commit Adultery, or bear false witness”.

  8. The decline in intelligence has been particularly noticeable in Blacks. Steve S. posted the results of a study dating from the early 1970s that found that “unskilled” (however that was defined) Whites had an average of 3 point something children vs. “skilled” Whites with 2.3. With Blacks, it was 1.9 skilled vs. 5 point something unskilled. The unskilled ones now make up the majority of Black births and set the tone of Black culture.

  9. The “apes running airplanes” image certainly seems true when I look at the state of Hollywood movie making today. They can’t make Star Wars the way they used to, and even their specialty – blockbuster comic book movies – seem to come packaged with some fatal flaw in the wiring that causes them to crash short of the runway.

    Now, we greet a new movie with dread, wondering in which bite the poisoned pill will be concealed, because we know it’s going to be there, no matter what.

    It’s interesting to watch old films – not masterpieces, but just workmanlike B-movies, the staple of movie studios for decades. They’ve got something that’s missing from all the brittle multi-million extravaganzas thrown up on the screen today: a sober confidence in their own ability to do a good job. The feeling of understated professionalism is evident throughout, even in movies that were made to be watched once and then moved back in the queue. I get the feeling that these people learned their craft and then took it as a matter of course that they would apply it to whatever project came along next. There was no fussy messianism, as there is today, with directors and actors strutting into public to claim a “platform” to rain down abuse or exhortations on the populace.

  10. One generation after the fall of Rome, peasants looked up at the aqueducts, and wondered what they were for…

  11. Kinda meshes with my prediction that in the year 2500, the C and D climate zones will be populated by Amish-style farmers, the B zones by Muslim goat-herders, and the A zones by naked savages chasing each other through the jungle with pointy sticks. The Industrial Revolution dies not for lack of raw materials but for lack of people smart enough to operate it.

    Technology is dysgenic because when e.g. Norman Borlaug invents a cure for hunger, the reproductive benefits accrue to the people least related to Norman Borlaug. Another problem is that industry requires cities, and cities lure intelligent, nubile young women into a vast buffet of mating opportunities, making them loathe to settle down with one man and start knocking out babies. Tove Lo’s gotta stay high all the time.

  12. The WSJ published an extensive article on the 737 Max fix today. Speaking of forgetting what was once common knowledge, at a cost of more than 300 lives:

    “Under the original version, Boeing assumed that pilots would diagnose the repeated downward pitch movements as “runaway trim,” something they used to train for more frequently. Runaway trim in modern planes is rare—American had one incident in its last 750,000 737 flights. Even Capt. Guthrie and Capt. Johnson say they had to brush up on speed-trim system functions after the Lion Air crash into the Java Sea in October.

    The longstanding prescribed procedure for runaway trim is fairly simple: stabilize the aircraft, then disconnect the system by flipping two toggle switches called the Stab Trim cutout, short for stabilizer trim, that are on the pedestal between pilots just below the throttles. Then you use a wheel beside each pilot’s knees to crank in necessary trim—to move the stabilizer manually as needed.

    The Ethiopian pilots did cut the stabilizer trim off, investigators have said. But with multiple warning alarms sounding and multiple emergencies at hand, they didn’t control the speed of the airplane. The plane can get going so fast that a pilot can’t move the wheel.”

    And that is why no U.S. domestic Max aircraft have crashed.

  13. I’ve thought about this concept often, especially within the context of the regulatory state. Career bureaucrats and politicians LOVE piling regulations and mandates on top of the existing economy without ever thinking about the mechanisms behind their target. In their mind, “corporations” will always be profitable no matter the circumstances, so why not tell them they have to pay for mandatory time off of work when someone in the house has baby? Why not tell these evil rich guys that they have to pay for their employees to go to the doctor any time they want? Why not mandate that these companies have to quit buying fossil fuels and instead buy electric cars that are left efficient and literally can’t be recharged because there is sufficient infrastructure in the entire country to produce or deliver enough electricity to power them? To a lot of modern voters – Democrat and Republican alike – society is a bit of a cargo cult where all you have to do is profess a love of “democracy” and “markets” and the machine will always keep humming.

    • Point taken, but laissez faire is not the solution. Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook all started off as small companies. Now they are using their power and market share to implement their agenda, control speech, and tweak regulations to their benefit.

      Corporations would be less problematic if they were run by genuine nationalists and not amoral globalist elites.

  14. I don’t know about getting more stupid. But I do think white males are becoming increasingly gutless and showing low Testosterone which allows women and lunatic pols to push them around. Low T levels guarantee that males become passive, lose confidence, drop muscle mass and ambition and the end result is a Soyboy physique which doesn’t even look male.

    We see lots of passiveness with MAGA hat types who just stand there as they are being attacked. They have no self-preservation instinct left.

    I don’t think whites today are capable off The Battle of Athens Georgia(1946). The martial spirit and unity among whites is no longer there and is why the elites as deracinated as they are can push us around at will.

    It is also why I’m not very optimistic about our side coming out on top in a revolution. We are not the same males we were after WWII or who dealt with Pinkerton men and Nation Guardsmen trying to murder us.

    As for our ruling class. My bet is that most of them have some sort of useless sociology type degree or a MBA. Case in point Theranos, whose female founder outwitted a bunch of highly connected and wealthy investors with the greatest of ease. How? Because they had no knowledge of how blood drawing is done and did not bother to hire someone to teach them the basics.

    • Most of the people up at the Bundy’s place a couple of years back . all of them armed and ready for The Day were White guys. Plenty of T up there.

      That said almost all work is White collar, most people drive to work and people simply live too physically easy lives to develop much testosterone.

      This not not a new problem, hell a movement called Physical Culture developed in Germany the US and the UK in the 19th century to build a stronger population.

      These days though weak leaders fear strong men and you get what we have now

      The reason we can’t seem to ix it, is there isn’t yet another better offer out there. You are asking men to fight for something without telling them what the intended outcome is or what they’ll get out it , materially, spiritually otr otherwise

      There are a few creeds that “Christendom” as exemplified by Vox Day and his crew and White Nationalism , basically a USA free of Jews and Non Whites but thus far neither have the legs

      Oh, yeah well Antifa is offering something which at least gets the young dolts motivated

      I suspect truthfully that there really isn’t anything to offer than anyone wants enough to fight or die for it and to paraphrase Voltaire

      “we must cultivate our garden as all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. till it all falls apart

    • The warrior ethos and broadly speaking masculinity are not innate, they are learned skills.

      The American Left is also aware of the fact that masculinity is a product of the environment. Why else do you think they spend so much effort on hawking feminism to white men via academia, entertainment, and the news? Likewise why do you think they want import more blacks, Latinos, and Muslims? They tend to be more overtly masculine in a thuggish sense and will serve as shock troops.

      The solution is simple. Do manly stuff to raise your testosterone levels. Lift weights, eat red meat, eggs, and cruciferous vegetables. Get the estrogen out of your water. Train in hand to hand combat and firearms. Above all else, be in the company not like-minded men and train with them. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

      • The culture is designed explicitly to sap the confidence of white men and thus make them unwilling to defend themselves. People who refuse to fight back are vulnerable to whatever ministrations the government wishes to visit upon them, and that’s precisely what the Left wants. Kill off white survival instinct and group identity, and take away their guns, and they’re toast.

    • Agreed, fully. However, one reason whites allow themselves to be pushed around is because they don’t want to fight back and risk going to jail in a system that is rigged against them. Blacks, OTOH, are often more than happy to go to the hoosegow. Gives ’em street cred, and they get to hang out with old homies and fambly members.

  15. Yes, one of the key weaknesses in our modern society is the persisting belief that there are still adults in the room, i.e. that the people running our national government are smart, capable, and will prevent disasters from befalling us all. The Soviet Union collapsed practically overnight and something similar could very well happen here in the West. Most likely, it will be in Europe first, but then cascade elsewhere. And when people start starving and get desperate, then violent things tend to follow.

  16. Edd Dutton and I were co-authors of The Genius Famine – which is now readable free online:

    http://geniusfamine.blogspot.com/

    and was based on my Intelligence, Personality and Genius blog:

    https://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com/

    We talk a lot about this stuff, but in particular the absolute necessity for creative geniuses in making breakthrough inventions and discoveries.

    We suggest that pretty much all major advances rely upon a single man (at most a collaborative duo) who had a Qualitative insight – but as soon as the creative genius had made the breakthrough it was usually quite simply explainable to people of much less intelligence (and near zero creativity).

    The specific breakthrough leading to the modern kind of plough is probably lost; but (fro msimialr known cases) it was probably down to a single creative genius who ‘saw’ what was needed. It is the ‘supply’ of people such as this which is the rate-limiting factor. i.e. to discover a modern plough is very difficult indeed; to explain and make it once dicovered is a cognitive task that can be accomplished by most people. Hence the great (truly massive) added value of geniuses. One relevant genius may be ‘worth’ thousands, or millions, of non-geniuses in terms of societal efficiency and capability.

    The industrial revolution seems to have been made possible by an historically rare/ unique concentration and quantity of highly intelligent And highly creative people in Europe. In most other places the average (hence peak) intelligence was insufficient; and in East Asia the creativity was insufficient.

    I absolutely agree that we are seeing the results (primarily) of declining intelligence, which began some 200 years ago, and was caused partly by dysgenic mating – but also by accumulation of deleterious mutations mainly due to the almost abolition of child mortality rates (from about 60% of babies and kids dying before reproductive age, to about 1%)

    http://mouseutopia.blogspot.com/

    Since major geniuses are almost extinct, we have already stopped making major breakthroughs in science and technology (now only incremental improvements, and these concentrated in relatively few areas relating to computers). Invention rates have been in decline for at least 50 years.

    As intelligence continues to decline we will lose the ability first to improve, then repair, then to maintain, then even to operate complex technology and systems.

    And, due to mutation accumulation (if nothing else) will probably drop to a level below that we began – ie a social complexity, productivity and effectiveness below that pf Medieval Europe. Such a system cannot support 7 million, may not be able to support 1 million.

    Interesting times ahead.

    • Yeah, but childhood mortality is essentially random, assuming you’re not referring to it happening in poor, “stupider” families. The genes it takes with it are as likely good as bad.

      • “childhood mortality is essentially random” – Not at all!

        In humans and many other species, it differentially operates to filter-out a wide range of (health and fitness damaging) deleterious mutations. For example, in medieval times the mortality rate was much higher in the lower classes (average number of surviving children was probably less than one) – and the lower classes would have mugh higher rates of deleterious mutations.

        There are estimated about 100 mutations per generation on average (in humans), average 2 or 3 (some people have none) are significantly harmful. These need to be filtered-out from the gene pool or else they will accumulate generation on generation.

        This is especially important in humans where the brain is such a large mutational target such that (probably) half of mutations would probably harm adaptive behaviour to some extent. That is a price we pay for our high intelligence.

  17. Conservative Christians often rant against Margaret Sanger because she favored eugenics and supposedly wanted to exterminate Blacks (she didn’t want to exterminate Blacks). It’s an opportunity for them to virtue signal about how much they love Blacks (you think that libs are the only ones who virtue signal?). They should be happy to learn that the population is growing dumber not smarter. Take that, Margaret Sanger! Idiocracy awaiteth. Praise be to Jesus.

  18. There’s also the question of motivation. I’d be proud to repair turbines, even if dirty or dangerous, if I could come home to a nice family in a nice country. But now I might be more like what’s the point?

    I do business in East Asia, and one of the things I’ve noticed is a lack of malice in their general culture. In America, a lot of popular culture is actively malicious, intentionally trying to shove in your face disgusting and degenerate things, in order to humiliate and exhaust you.

    In East Asia (I speak particularly of Taiwan and Japan, the countries I know best), their culture is on their side, mostly just trying to please or comfort people.

    There is a fundamental calmness, a settledness, in those countries. You don’t feel agitated all the time. People just get on with things, even difficult jobs, and still live happily.

    It makes me very sad that Americans, indeed white Westerners everywhere, have been deprived of that feeling of being calm and settled in their place.

    • It is one heck of a lot easier for closed cultures to align the public interest with that of its constituents. There is too much in it, for certain people, in stirring up all the antipathies amongst the rest of us.

  19. “Now, the evidence is strong that Europeans are getting dumber, and that is putting aside the issues related to immigration. In fact, the decline into stupidity may be accelerating.”

    And yet, almost everyone — including many people who think they’re dissident right — has an attack of the vapors over the concept of eugenics. It brings out the Slippery Slope Brigade in force.

    Sure selective breeding has potential dangers, just like every social policy including ones that people will lay down their lives for (like democracy). Dysgenic breeding has actual dangers here and now.

    • The problem with eugenics is who gets to decide who lives and dies. Chances are it will be a monied freak like Zuckerberg or Brin giving you and the alt-right types a thumbs down and a ride to the quarry.

      IOW before we even ought to talk about this, we need to throw the current set of MOFOs out of power. And right now that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. I mean when was the last time a bunch of nerds ever led a violent overthrow of any government? None. That’s how many times.

      • It doesn’t have to be done that way. Much of the work can be done by simple incentives and disincentives.

        Stop immigration

        Encourage motherhood among the native population as Hungary is doing

        Campaign against the feminist message that smart girls get degrees and careers before they start families.

      • Rod, your statement is a good example of why the concept of eugenics is impossible to discuss. You do the Left’s work for them when you immediately jump to “who lives and who dies” type alternatives. Eugenics is not about killing the living, it’s about who reproduces and who does not. Or alternatively, what sort of offspring and how many are created and contribute to a society’s future genetic gene pool. As Vizzini has pointed out, incentives may increase or decrease such.

        Another aspect may be the selection of fertilized embryos (of high genetic quality) for implantation. I’m betting this comes first from China.

  20. But then there’s Switzerland. Despite the negatives of climate, few resources, diverse languages and having multiple ethnicities they have prospered. Was it their diversity?
    Hardly, they were all Europeans. The fact is the will to survive has a quality all it’s own. Mix that with culture and genes and distrust of outsiders and now you have something.
    You could compare the Swiss to our early American forebears. Call it what you will, Yankee Or Protestant work ethic we had it for a reason. Like the farm boy that went to the city and succeeded, how could he not? Working day in and day out, it is habit. Eskimo’s don’t call it survival, they call it everyday life.
    We may not be those people, but the genes are their waiting, and we may need to be those people again.

      • Be careful what you envy – many poor Swiss were rounded up and shipped to America and other countries with one-way tickets because the Swiss didn’t want to be burdened with the social cost of supporting them.

        Of course the country looks good. Most countries would when the poor and destitute are shipped away or locked up in prisons. Imagine how nice San Francisco would be if they could deport all their homeless somewhere else.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hEvSD0pjts

        Look at the Swiss population demographics today; 30% are foreigners. Of those, 90% or more are European ex-pats (doctors engineers and other professionals) who carry a Swiss visa.

        Switzerland owes it’s success to foreigners, not native Swiss.

        • Switzerland was a tiny country eking out a hardscrabble existence in narrow valleys and steep mountain pastures. It never had a wide-open frontier or overseas empire to absorb its surplus population. What was it supposed to do with all those people?

          • They have been doing that in the US for decades. They ship them all to Washington D.C. and give them Government jobs with fancy titles like Senator, Congressman, etc. 😉

    • Eskimo’s don’t call it survival, they call it everyday life.

      Ugh. Unfortunately the Alaskan natives up there now are the biggest collection of slovenly, drunken degenerates you’ll find anywhere.

        • Right on, they and Native Americans, that’s what TOTAL cultural collapse looks like. This is what leftie wants for us.

    • What saved Switzerland is that they didn’t blow their genetic inheritance on insane and useless wars during the last 200 years like the Brits, French and Germans did.

      We didn’t either, but with opioids wiping out the white segment that provides soldiers and workers we’re well on our way to ending up a dying race. High IQ officers workers aren’t a substitute for those men.

  21. I suspect that the elites are getting dumber faster than the dirt people. With affirmative action, tribalism, and nepotism in play, meritocracy is a thing of the past. It seems that they may already be dumber than the masses based on the magical thinking they are transfixed by.

    • I think that it was Andrew Carnegie who observed: “From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” The first generation makes the money, the second blows it and the third must go back to work. I know or know of a number of the offspring of the wealthy who are not doing well on their own.

      The Cloud People shouldn’t be so quick to scorn the Dirt People. Their children might end up as a Dirt People if it wasn’t for the parents’ support.

  22. We know that the decline is happening, and we know some things will be inevitably lost based on past history.

    Using history as our guide, how did the Europeans recover from the collapse of the Roman Empire?

    Can we take the Hari Seldon solution? Whites on the Dissident Right are probably the only group capable of doing that.

  23. This hit home with me . I am an engineer in manufacturing, have been for 40 years. grew up on a farm , fixing odd farm equip, moved to TV and electronic repair when some of them had vacuum tubes. deg BSEE, and on to manufacturing . I have seen first hand this process . the offshoring of manufacturing caused serious damage to the skill base those of us still here depend on . the response has been to go back to a hybrid type of system with people stepping in, like the stock market. the problem now is we are running out of people who have any idea what to do once the system stops.
    I tell people all the time “that’s why we can’t go to the moon anymore, like we did in the 1960’s” . I have run into millenials with engineering degrees who tell me ” Oh that was all fake. they never really did that” . They have seen a photo shopped photo of a NASA boot with a tread that doesn’t match all the photos from the moon and now just accept that it never happened. So the reaction to the problem of skill decay is not “crap! we have to redevelop those skills pronto!” it’s ” We never really had those skills ” .

    I chalk it up to a combination of skepticism of the fake media , which is justified , combined with a who lifetime marinating in an education system that denigrates any accomplishment our country had in the past.

    the old saying ” when a man dies, a library burn down” seems more prescient every day.
    Derb was right https://www.amazon.com/Are-Doomed-Reclaiming-Conservative-Pessimism/dp/0307409597

    • Well, if they really said the Moon Landing was simply Photoshopped video/pictures, then they fall under my definition of low intellect folk. I respect skepticism and that’s an important aspect of critical thinking in my opinion, but I also respect factual knowledge of the salient points in the implied argument, which would be the date of the Moon Landing event and the ubiquitousness of digital photographs and editing software. Photoshop was introduced about two decades, maybe a bit less, after the Moon Landing. Yes, photos could be doctored, but I’ve never seen very good one from that time period.

  24. Think more simply, forget turbines. Think water distribution and sewage handling. Probably one of the basic functions of a local government, along with trash removal. The AOC generation knows nothing of this. This is why they are infatuated with Solar. Yet, with a simple calculator, you can see where this fails. No economy of scale, a basic rule.

    I have friends in the trades. They tell me it’s tough to find people willing to work and learn. The plumbers tell me the average age of a plumber is 53. The AC dudes tell me the average there is 56.

    Generation zero will have to learn, painfully, what everyone once knew.

    • My wife recently took on facility management for a frat house populated primarily with EE grad students. Not one of them can wire an outlet or unplug a toilet.

    • The Fertile Crescent was not so fertile after the locals left, died, or were replaced by folk who could no longer maintain the irrigation system. Now it is an “Empire of Dust.”

  25. “Now, imagine what happens when a people become too stupid to maintain the technology created by their ancestors.”

    You don’t have to imagine it. It’s already happened on this planet; the Romans were alien to all Northern European peoples. That’s why when Rome fell, aqueducts went dry, public sanitation vanished, and today’s concrete is still inferior to what the Romans came up with.

    Americans only need to look back 150-years in their own country at Native Americans, who still hadn’t figured out the wheel, metal working or an alphabet.

  26. You want to see this in action, go on youtube and watch “empire of dust”. The best scene is here https://youtu.be/UPt9pGfpmS0 . “You neglected what others had left you. and not only that, you made them worse”
    This explains the dearth of new movies, that aren’t remakes, or cloned off of older comics.

    Mark Steyn noticed in his book ‘America Alone’ that we haven’t made a whole ton of technological progress since the 50s. Sure, jets are nicer, cars are nicer. But a person brought here from back in time would’t be the least bit surprised. Sure, we have mobile phones and computers. But the functions are still roughly the same.

    We’ve actually regressed with space travel.

    • Himself: “Sure, we have mobile phones and computers…” LOL. You do NOT get to offhandedly dismiss computers and cell phone pocket computers. “Oh sure we have prosthetic limbs, the genetic code, organ transplants, cancer cures, small boob cures, cloning, MRI, drones, dick pills, in vitro, wireless communication, and all that. But come on science guys, stop sitting around and DO something.”

      I don’t know what some of you “more more MORE!” people want. Creators still have to work within the bounds of physics.

      • Medical science is the one area in which we can say that change has fairly clearly been synonymous with improvement. That said, even in this area, the good has real side-effects such as overpopulation, healthcare-related drains on the economy, and the misery that often accompanies very old age.

    • Now see here! Today’s cars are more reliable than those from the 50s, but they’re dam’ sure not nicer. Aesthetics matters, and in that regard, we’ve regressed terribly from the 50s and even the late 60s.

      • Newer cars are more reliable, more efficient, more capable, considerably more safe, and more environmentally friendly. What they are not, are easily repairable, fundamentally strong (thick steel and heavy castings), and simple to understand and maintain. These last three qualities may be much more important in the near future, than they have been in the recent past.

        • Dutch, wise insight. As supporting evidence I offer you, Cuba! They still repair, maintain, and drive 50’s cars in abundance. Could you imagine what Cubans would have done with those computers on wheels we drive today? I don’t believe I ever had one repaired that did not involve swapping an unrepairable part out—like a computer control module.

    • We regressed on space travel because our aerospace companies were bought out in the 90’s and they lost all their talent, After the mergers and acquisitions were complete, we were left with two useless companies. Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Neither one known for building launch vehicles. When NASA asked them to build a Shuttle replacement they totally failed. Both companies became parasites sucking off the government.

      Take Boeing’s 737 MAX. It’s a bad design. It’s CG is totally messed up thanks to those oversized engines that are placed way forward and which caused the two crashes and reports from other pilots. This wouldn’t have happened with the old Boeing who took aircraft design and building seriously. Today the company is run by MBA’s.

      The bottom line with the 737 Max, it needs a new airframe to handle those monster engines. Boeing thought they could save a lot of money by grafting those beasts onto a 737 frame and avoid FAA testing as well. Instead it bit them on their collective asses. You cannot white wash this simply as the fault of 3rd world pilots. There is a reason why the airlines grounded the plane.

  27. This was all covered by Thomas Malthus over 200 years ago. As a population expands, it outstrips its sustenance, and you will get a mass die-off through war, starvation and disease. He attributed poverty to bad morals, and knew that the gene pool was a self cleansing system.

    Despite the electricity grid, mass communications, mass produced necessities, we’re still a hostage to a self cleaning environment. We had great advances in agriculture through mechanization and fertilization. These advances have stalled out. We had great advances in learning about disease transmission, but that knowledge is for people smart enough to wash their hands. But most of all, we’ve had spectacular advances in war machinery. To a point where our most lethal weapons, bio, chemical, neutron bombs, hydrogen bombs, etc., haven’t even been unleashed on the world. And they will. We have no frame of reference to understand how bad it will be. Mustard gas in WW1. Hiroshima in WW2. Not even practice sessions. The smart will see WW3 coming. Wars kill smart and stupid alike, but way more stupid people.

  28. That’s the funny thing about smart machines: they make most of their users dumber.

    Designed by very clever people, the machines are smart in how they let people who could not possibly build the device use it to complete complex tasks. As the tech continues to increase in complexity the gap in understanding how the device works increases to the point where to the typical user it’s no different than magic: ‘apes using cell phones’.

    Those tasks which once required some planning and basic knowledge to complete now only require the push of a button. A lot less gray matter needed.

    Continually reduce the need to think and puzzle things out and you get fewer and fewer people who can think effectively.

    • This doesn’t only happen with average users of tech it is beginning to happen even at the research level of STEM.

      Z pointed out financial trading algos. It’s also common in lots of STEM apps. Plug the numbers into some application and it will derive an answer and its applications. When the power goes out lots of engineers and scientists can’t do the pencil and paper math that was common 1 generation ago. Computers churn out answers to complex problems that research mathematicians and physicists can’t emulate without the computer, etc.

      The people of the Fertile Crescent are incapable of building a Ziggurat today. If they have an elevator or a generator break down they need someone from the West or East to fix it for them.

      What happens to the world when the West and East have an average IQ of 95?

      Unlike in the Challahwood movies, the apes aren’t going to save the day.

      • And the same thing happens in elementary classrooms, where I teach 1x per week (because I genuinely enjoy the kids, not because the system works…).
        My rule (and they know it) is: when you read, NO iPads. You read from a real book with pages.
        And when I was babysitting a class the other week, they had a “writing” project to do… using the iPad. Heh.
        I told the kid to turn off the iPad, get paper and pencil, and write it all out first.
        To which he replied: “ that’s hard.”
        And I said: “yes. And?”

        Kids are being enabled at every level, starting from the beginning. I do what I can , but it’s horrifyihg.

    • Go for simple and robust over complex and efficient. Your personal future may depend on it.

    • Much as labor-saving devices make people more sedentary, if not out and out lazier. Likewise, from a social standpoint, we might argue that the self esteem movement reduces people’s merit by giving them unearned plaudits on the cheap rather than requiring them to actually accomplish things for them. And it is unintended consequences such as these that make me highly skeptical about the idea of progress.

  29. Due to the forces Z cites here, the Empire will ultimately stratify into a high tech elite and a feral mass, with a very thin largely managerial middle class. Its egalitarian delusions are becoming more delusional as that increasingly unequal reality leaves them in its rear-view mirror. The untermensch of Imperial Idiocracy would be better served by an elite who looked on them with a sense of noblelesse oblige, like past Progs did before WWII, rather than throwing trillions more dollars and vast social capital into “closing the gaps.”

    I hope we will have already disengaged from the Empire within a few generations and can offer this kind of advice in the same way that Europe and America criticize each other now -across a wide divide in the hopes of having better neighbors.

      • @Ris-Border Patrol captured 116 African “migrants” crossing the Rio Grande into Texas,3 days ago. They were from Angola,Cameroon, and,most ominous,the Congo. That country is currently experiencing a raging Ebola epedimic,and has been for months.
        This country has already seen a significant uptick in medieval diseases,thanks to our new here-to-suckup-the-bennies & vote Democrat friends. Yet they say there’s no crisis at the border.

        Ebola is a nightmare virus. Incubation is roughly 21 days before the full-blown bleed-out watch your fevered body dissolve,in great pain happens. In those 20-odd days,you can infect a LOT of people.
        Bad news is,our healthcare system cannot,will not be able to handle an outbreak of Ebola.
        More bad news is that it won’t be just the deadweights who contract it.

        I propose that when (not if) the outbreak starts,have a large Carnival Cruise ship,preferably the one with unworkable toilets,on standby. Have SEAL teams & Delta Force round up every worthless congressbint & bastard,load them aboard and set sail for the Democratic Republic of Congo. Get the 2 Sailorettes who rammed their Navy cruiser into a merchant ship awhile back share Captain’s duties,as a nod to diversity.

        Bon Voyage,F**kers
        Oh,and take Obama with you. He allowed Ebola into Texas in 2014,remember?
        We dodged a big,fat bullet that time. We won’t next time.

        Aesop at Raconteur Report keeps a running update on all things Ebola,along with choice commentary on our pozzed military.
        In case anyone is looking for fresh nightmare material.

  30. The problem with the Antikythera Mechanism was that it was little more than a lump of rust – figuring out its use was more a question of x-ray technology than a problem of understanding its construction. It is – by modern standards – a fairly simple clockwork, but whether a gear wheel has 233 or 235 teeth is a pretty big deal in the clockmaking business, and that’s sometimes impossible to determine from the remains.

    A very beautiful channel with a self-taught guy reconstructing the mechanism, in part with reconstructed Classical Greek tools. ASMR for the eyes:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&t=9s

  31. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that none of you people have ever kissed a girl

    That would explain your collective hatred for women

  32. Once we figure out how to create smarter babies using gene technology chimps may well be flying the planes.My grandfather was born in 1900. The modern world lay undiscovered a few short decades before him. What lies before us? People getting dumber is a real problem. I realize we are in a race and we may not finish, but If the past is any guide we are going to miss those dumb people in the future.

  33. And it need not be as dramatic as losing knowledge of turbines, the black magic of the financial system, or even apes flying planes. I visited family and learned that the county is letting a bunch of paved roads go to gravel; not enough money/people/resources/will to maintain them. One of the high schools in the area might close and its students scattered to neighboring districts, because the school is $16,000,000+ in debt and their records are so screwed up, half the seniors might not actually be eligible for graduation. One of the biggest employers in the area had a bunch of people quit because the city (which is so dysfunctional it has been taken over several times by the state) their HQ is in, has implemented a tax on all non-resident workers: if you work in the city, but don’t live there, you have to pay the city for the privilege.
    Look around your own area, and I suspect you’ll see similar themes. Don’t expect a Hollywood-style disaster or collapse; we’re already in a slow-motion one. It’s just less of a zombie apocalypse, and more of “some idjit can’t time traffic lights to save their life and now the city is in perpetual deadlock” and “they ripped up and repaved the road, jamming traffic for two months, only to have a sewer main break two weeks later and have to rip up the road…again.”

    “There will be no Doomsday. Nor will there be a Utopia. Things will go along as they always have — that is to say, rather badly.”

    • I can think of no greater representation of the diminishing returns on investment than infrastructure. Paved roads are great. But paving every road in the county when you have no increase in your tax base is insane, but they tried to do the same here.
      Building the schools outside of town here was also a brilliant idea. Why bus half the kids to school when you can bus them all?
      Sometimes having more money (or credit, or tax revenue) than sense can be hard on people.

    • Sounds like you’re talkin’ Detoilet. Incidentally, I wonder if the failure of Flint’s water system could be chalked up to Zman’s topic? Not apes flying planes, exactly, but certainly Africans attempting to manage and maintain technologies and systems far beyond their ken.

      • Knowledge of tannins, pH, alkalinity, leeching, and chemistry would have been required to avoid the water problem in Flint, Michigan.

        If you’ve been paying attention, the phenomenon has been simplified into “water bills be two hi n sheet cuzz raycizm”.

        I wonder why they don’t mention Sewer service, which is twice as expensive as water in my city and calculated based on water usage.

        Additionally, most of government water monitoring is concerned with nutrients, bacteria, and dissolved oxygen. Metals, industrial synthetics, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides/herbicides are not monitored nearly as much. It’s because the former are the most unsightly. What we actually have is “Aesthetic Environmentalism.” It’s why we spend money dumping herbicides in clean water to kill “invasive species”.

      • iirc, lead was leaching from the pipes because the pH in the water wasn’t kept neutral. I’m not sure the city knew they should, but didn’t to cut costs (to fund graft?), the engineers couldn’t convince the diverse leadership to approve the extra expense, or they simply didn’t know.

    • You are going to find that, over time, rich people moving into an area and being willing to throw around a lot of money, to do a lot of things, is the death knell for a community. Locals know the local idiosyncrasies and the local capabilities. Wealthy “smart” people think they know better, and their wealth and personal prejudices convince them to “set the locals straight”.

    • There’s a gravel section of road over the hill from me that started to slip last winter. It was a tiny gully when it started, and the township kept tossing gravel into it, but it has gotten bigger and bigger, and they had to close the road a while back. It’s nearly man high and the disturbance has destroyed a good 40 yards of road. The whole hillside is slipping and they simply don’t have the money and massive earth moving machinery available to rebuild it, and the road is so low-priority, nothing is likely to be done — it’s so far down the state’s priorities it will never rise to the top. I suspect in 20 years I’ll be reminiscing about when a road used to run back there. The road doesn’t go anyplace important. There are only three or four houses on the whole section of road and all of them can be accesses almost as easily by bypassing around the cut on other roads.

      That road has been there for decades. I can see it on plat maps going back to the 1800s. But we’ve had wetter weather the past three years than I’ve ever seen before around here.

    • Re: “tax on all non-resident workers”

      Martin Armstrong talks about this quite frequently and calls it the Endless Hunt for taxes:

      https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/category/world-news/taxes/

      All over the West – governments are in a never ending quest for more things they can apply taxes to. Because socialism never has enough of other people’s money to spend:

      ” governments are taking directly out of our paychecks, while at the same time, printing money like deranged lunatics. Why tax my labor income if you (the government / CB’s) can just print as much fiat as they need? What do they need to dip into my paycheck for 30% before the money even hits my bank account, when they can just print what they need. Maybe it is because of their greed and lack of morality know no bounds. We are being ruled by tyrannical, Marxist inspired lunatics.”

      This is probably a good part of what is driving the infestation of third worlders into Western nations. Everybody is looking for cheaper cheaper cheaper – because so much is already taken in taxation (and given away to those who shouldn’t be getting it in the first place).

  34. For example, plow design remained fairly crude into the 19th century, then all of sudden it advanced rapidly to what we know as the modern design.

    And that was so ground-breaking the name of the chap responsible graces the side of big, fuck-off green tractors I see working on the road-widening scheme I pass on my daily commute. A lot of technological advances in agriculture came from the US, because their fields are so much bigger than those in Europe: it simply wasn’t possible to work them by hand.

    (Yes, I grew up on a farm and am slightly obsessed with farm machinery.)

    • The plow is a great starting place for thinking about human social evolution. Why did it take so long to figure out what seems pretty simple?

      • Some of it had to do with the materials available. Wood vs bronze vs iron vs steel. Some of it had to do with the speed of the animal pulling it. Not all societies had oxen. The beast of burden for the American Indian was the dog. The ability to plow large areas quickly didn’t come about until after the invention of the horse collar. When the ability to harness many horses to implements came about, the necessity of sturdier self-cleaning plows came after.

        The use of horses in agriculture was also inhibited in certain cultures by laws tending to restrict the use of horses to military or transportation uses. In Ancien Regime France teams of plow horses on farms were taxed, while teams of oxen were not. This contributed as much to the backwardness of French agriculture as many other of their stupid laws and lack of innovation did.

        • Well into the Middle Ages Europeans were also dependent on bog iron, until ore extraction became a thing. Iron was expensive and not plentiful, also until coal production came into play charcoal was primarily used in the smelting and smithing of iron, amazing all the variables involved.
          I wonder if Celts throwing men in the Bog was a way of persuading the gods to give them more iron?

      • Why did it take so long? Perhaps the general population just became smarter and one of those newly smart bastards decided to experiment with design.

    • Don’t forget, necessity also drives innovation.
      To bust the sod on the Great Plains it took a better plow, without it you were working to death trying to clear a field. Those sod houses in the old photos were testament to how deep and tough the native sod was.
      First thing a pioneer would do if he was smart was stop off John Deere’s shop and pick up a self-scouring plow on his way to Iowa or Minnesota or points further west.

      • Look up Ferguson’s three-element plow mount on the tractors. You can’t plow efficiently without using physics to force that plow down into the soil, or otherwise going back to tons of weight and sheer pulling power. WT cooperates and builds on each other’s work. That’s the secret sauce.

        • Ah, yes. The three-point hitch. An amazing invention. Simple, elegant, highly effective.

    • Why did it take so long to figure out what seems pretty simple?

      The modern plow has dozens of improvements, each having been a small revolution at its time. It may be one of the most tweaked object in the history due to its importance, on a par with the weapon of choice.

      What the plow and the weapon have in common is their importance and thus the high demand for any improvement. But improvement development is very resource demanding, because many bad ideas have to be tried before finally a good one is discovered. In this regard the plow differs from the weapon in two important aspects.

      The improvement of weapons had the backing and resources of the warlord, while the improvement of the plow would firstly benefit the peasant who had zero time and money to spend on R&D. If he had enough food for his kids he would call it a very good day, so any R&D would have been resources detoured from his starving kids and a tough decision.

      Second, any improvement of weapons is always needed now, with a life or death emergency level, while the existing plow model can also be used the next year just as well. Even if the warlord also had many incentives to provide his peasants with a better plow, this was not his first priority.

      Even so, there are many weapons that remained unchanged for millennia because they were good at the time, even though today the spear is no longer a match to the missile.

      Also, I think there were many more plow improvements that were lost than weapon improvements. The village with a better plow would soon be better off than the rest, and a thus a better target for raiding. When the village was burnt and the peasants enslaved, chances are that the plow improvement was lost. On the other hand, a party with improved weapons had the upper hand in combat, and even if they lost, the other party would surely have noticed the new weapons and would have preserved them.

  35. Not the first time something like this has happened.

    The closest analog I can recall is Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall and east of Wales after the ruling class Romans left. This example is even more ominous in that the society that remained after the Romans departed regressed _below_ the level (materially, socially, intellectually) Britons had attained at the time of the Roman conquest of Brition.

    Britons had benefited from and learned to rely on more centralized and complex Roman manufactures and systems, while forgetting the pre-Roman means to do for themselves. They were left systems they could not operate, infrastructure they could not maintain, and social organizations they could not keep together. Within a few generations, the ruins of Roman infrastructure might as well have been built by giants, aliens, or magical creatures.

    When the Saxons, Jutes, and Angles hit the shores of Briton, they had advantages in all those realms relative to the Britons. Barbarians the Germans were, but still better situated than a formerly Romanized/civilized people fallen into ruin.

    • The same thing happened in Gaul. They not only could not defend themselves, they didn’t even try.

  36. Just kinda coincides with more women being in universities.
    Did they account for gender I wonder?
    Kinda like when they count suicides as victims of gun violence.

    • Thinking back, the social sciences started boiling off white males in the 60’s and 70’s. Today, there are few smart white boys in those fields. Corporate America has undergone a similar transformation starting in the 80’s. The military started down this path in the 90’s, I’m thinking. As the white males are chased off, the spots are filled by girls.

      • Yes, the military had both feet in the fire by the nineties. Having a single black female unwed mother as a commander bred some resentment.

        • Our military is going to get its ass handed to it in the next real conflict against a legitimate power, isn’t it?

          • Maybe someone can do a movie reimagining D-Day with women in charge of women soldiers. There are a myriad of treatments that present themselves, from comedy to tragedy.

          • Maybe not. The next serious war will be fought by game players in a secure location. Women play as well as men in many cases. The players will not know that the war is real because that would cause too many feelings. Those will knowledge of what is happening will all be male.

      • Somebody said women entering an institution is a sign that the institution had lost its influence. Or something like that. It was in regard to Congress, but may apply just as well to academia or business : women entering equals loss of seriousness.

      • White wahmen were the best, and most numerous, replacements available due to thin ranks among the “talented tenth” of PoC’s, but giving Chads the Shoah and putting Beckys into the workforce caused White fertility and family collapse in a remarkably short time. Woke Capitalism & Suffragette Democracy are rapidly consuming their own future.

      • USAFA just brought in their second female commandant in a row. Their third since the first female commandant in 2005. Graduates who visit are often appalled at how far the standards have fallen, and is often described as “UCLA in uniforms”.

        This stuff has been a problem since Clinton. I left the Air Force in 2002, disgusted with its slide into mediocrity. I had decided to give it one last assignment after being stationed at a unit with a large number of USAFA grads. These young people were sloppy, routinely lied, and maintained this sort of “brotherhood” to look out for each other in the face of disaster. Several years later, this was a nuclear weapons unit, the shit hit the fan.

        http://time.com/8530/are-you-smarter-than-a-nuclear-launch-officer/

        • The number of ships running into one another is one of the things people will point to in the future. Social promotion in the officer ranks is the cause, but no one is allowed to say it. When a carrier is sunk in the Persian Gulf, maybe then, but not until then.

          • If a carrier sunk in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. would probably use the event as a false flag and attack Iran. And then our women, trannies, POC troops get their asses handed to them. But not a word against our PC military!

      • Z Man;
        Was one of those boiled off in the late ’60’s (to my eternal gratitude). My recollection is that it was Cultural Marxism that initiated the process and Feminism (BIRM) that really got it going. Due to buying into Multi-Culti’s obvious nonsense about equalism, the old guard had lost confidence in standards and so lost the ability to resist the demands of elite females for accommodation (relaxing the rules so said elite women could succeed without so much work and hurt feewillings). After that, one accommodation lead to another.

        And then there’s the money. When there’s little money to be made in your field, those that remain tend to be more fanatical about the quality of their work. Due to the Baby Boom, post WWII prosparity and The Great Society all of a sudden there was money sluicing in. When any sociopath can con their way along by being able to cater to elite females feeellwings and make a nice living with not too much effort, there’s dilution of standards.

        • Dilution of standards in the US Army began in late 1978, under the rule of James Carter. I saw it myself. I was one of the last BCT trainees at Fort Dix to undergo the ‘Viet Nam Era’ rigors of live fire, gas attacks, 20-mile marches along sandy roads, 4 a.m. wake-up, 14-hour KP duty, etc. The powers that be switched my MOS – without my consent, needless to say – which left me stranded for a few weeks, one of the guys whose job was to pass out weapons to the new trainees. The very next cycle after mine introduced females into the system. It was quite an experience to watch the awkwardness of the drill sergeants, to marvel at – and envy – the hilarious reduction of physical discipline and verbal abuse. And the goings-on in the barracks, well… If I had just waited six months to join the Army, said I to myself at the time.

    • Women’s liberation may well be dysgenic in that women choose to have fewer children and the most intelligent have far fewer. As well, hypergamy predilects women against smart men in favor of raw physicality and disincentivizes men to attain when sex is cheap(ish) and the rewards for working hard (obedient pair bonded wife chief among them) unlikely.

      I think women’s liberation over the past seventy years can account for much of the IQ decline especially in Baltic nations that haven’t experienced much third world invasion.

  37. I saw the headline and thought for sure that this article would be about the Ethiopian Airlines crash.

    • @Meme-ya,that was my thought,too. “Apes flying planes” is funny at first,til you think about it.
      Like the movie “Idiocracy”. When I first saw it years ago,it was just a really funny movie. Watch it today and it’s uncomfortably disturbing how accurate it is.

    • Not a small number of people have pointed out that the 737 crashes were preventable in countries with more advanced fliers and better training. And, that either due to cost or lack of understanding, some of Boeing’s “optional upgrades” were never purchased.

      There’s also indication that Boeing is letting its engineers QC their own work. I doubt this is just a cost-saving measure…their engineers are probably the only people smart and qualified enough to inspect it.

      • Mrs. Dutch tried to call my bluff by asking if I was willing to fly on a 737 Max. Absolutely! But not on Ethiopian Airlines. People don’t understand probability sets.

      • Also note that such accidents are recorded to have been prevented in the US. But it took speed and high knowledge/experience to correct. There was no time to pull out the user manual (which I understand happened on one of those flights that crashed). Speed of thinking/reaction is correlated with IQ. Food for thought.

    • MemeWarVet, I was going there but you beat me to it. 😉 There are a few YT videos on the incidents in question and the technology used to control the plane. I immediately saw the problem, in short an “ape” *can* fly such a computerized plane literally by pressing “buttons”—such as automated takeoff and landing routines. The pilots are supposed to take over when they sense the program is failing. And of course they were not up to the task. So the program failed and then the backup (human pilots) failed, then the body bags were ordered.

      Now why they were not up to the task is the major question of interest—but of course will never be examined appropriately in today’s PC atmosphere, so no “cure” will be found. A software “fix“ will be implemented, the planes allowed once again to fly, and third world countries made to feel adequate.

    • M.W.V.
      Turns out the story is highly topical. Little to do with pilot error by simians, though. Much more about arrogant engineers and unprincipled globalist corporatists.

      I know several retired airline captains. They tell me that Boeing is in deep dodo. They made a number of design shortcuts to get their new jet into the market to beat out Airbus by pretending it was just a tweak of their old 737. This (temporarily, it turns out) saved Boeing lots of time and money from not having to qualify for a new aircraft FAA airworthiness certificate (takes 2+ years).

      So they had to retrofit the old 737 design instead of starting from a clean sheet of paper. Raised wings on the fuselage to let bigger diameter engines (more fuel efficient) clear the ground. This made the aircraft less stable. They covered for this by going to computerized trim control,^ *that overrode pilots’ manual settings*. *And they didn’t highlight this ‘improvement’ in pilot training materials*.

      Then, as a cost-saving move, they simultaneously compromised the computer pitch^^ control system by going from two redundant input sensors to a single one: Used to be that there were two angel-of-attack (pitch) sensors and if they disagreed, a warning light came on in a cockpit display, warning pilots to implement backup procedures. For the new jet they took away the warning light: The great infallible computer AI made this unnecessary. Plus they used what used to be a fixed rear stabilizer as the pitch trim control device to reduce drag (saving fuel) by eliminating the trim tabs on the elevators, accentuating the effect of small changes. All planes used to have fixed stabilizers and elevators with trim tabs: All general aviation aircraft still do.

      All real-time computer control depends on correct sensor input: Bad non-redundant sensor = big trouble. Doesn’t matter how good the AI is. Runaway AI pitched aircraft into the ground. Pilots didn’t know how to override the runaway AI: Never been trained to do so.

      One likely theory is that the aircraft is still grounded in order to find out what other corners Boeing might have cut.
      ________________________________
      ^Trim is critical to compensate for changes in weight and balance, variations in engine power, etc. It works by slightly altering the flight control settings by a fixed amount(s), matched to the characteristics of any specific flight. A properly trimmed aircraft will maintain straight and level flight without using the normal flight controls.
      ^^ Pitch = pointing the nose up/down; Yaw = pointing the nose left/right; Roll = spin around the line-of-flight axis.

      • It would be hard to fathom how enthusiastic all the dead passengers would be about all the ‘fuel savings’ that resulted from the new design.

  38. You could have wrote a piece on the current Democratic presidential aspirants and made your point just as well.

  39. We are not going to allow hate speech anymore.

    You implying women running things is bad is hate speech

    I have alerted the authorities and we will shut you down

    • It has become clear to me that the majority of women cannot follow rules. Any institution you have that is governed by a set of laws you have to keep women out because first thing they do is follow their feelings, the rules come second. I see it in the micro situation in my neighborhood constantly with all these upper-middle-class white women who can’t follow basic traffic laws. I think it explains why women’s rights are actually symptomatic of late-stage Empire. Women have gotten rights before many times in history but the problem is it’s right before the civilization collapses and once that happens it becomes dangerous for women to be on their own so 100% of the gains are lost. Feminists seem to be unaware of this fact and think they are charting new territory when in fact they are just walking on old faded Maps

        • Women are the best rule followers ever. The question is who is making the rules.

          • Exactly. Women follow rules like little Nazis. And they love to crack the whip, as most little people do.

            As Quasitrolibunny implies, they’re now making the rules, too, and that’s what’s led us all down the road to totalitarianism.

            Most men, at least proper men, don’t see the need to dictate how much salt KFC puts in their batter, whether a working man can legally smoke a cigar in a cigar shop, whether bleach bottles require copious warning labels about the dangers of drinking bleach, or whether free speech should be allowed based upon whether feelings get hurt.

            There’s a term for “church ladies” but not for “church gentlemen”.

            Matriarchy = Totalitarianism

            Guess what we’ve had since the 1960s.

          • Women follow the rules like little Nazis, but when they don’t, there is always an excuse and it is always someone else’s fault that they had to break the rules. Quite a few men are going the same way.

            Almost no one is willing to own up to their own behavior any more.

          • That is what woke me up to the realization that democracy is a sham. Very few people have the necessary virtue, self-drive, and the self-awareness necessary to make it work.

          • Last Stand, agreed—but don’t exclude intellect, which leads to knowledge, wisdom, and critical thinking. Everyday I listen to the “news” and am simply dumbfounded at what is stated and then believed by the public (I assume so, as they keep saying such). It’s not simply telling lies, it’s stating things that are self contradictory, or physically impossible, or absurd in the light of observable reality. To believe such is to reveal oneself as an unthinking Cretan. Yet such people exist and vote.

          • The hardest parts of my job are a) dealing with wahmen in my own office b) wahmen in my client’s offices c) wahmen opposing counsel and d) wahmen judges. They cannot put the job before office politics, obsess on trivial details, have a chip on each shoulder and suffer crippling levels of Dunning-Kruger. NAWALT, ofc, but applies to vast majority.

          • No, men still make the rules.
            http://time.com/4556917/presidential-election-2016-women-government/
            https://www.information-age.com/men-women-ceos-fortune-1000-123465514/
            http://www.womensmediacenter.com/reports/the-status-of-women-in-u.s.-media-2017
            https://feminem.org/2017/06/22/double-bind-women-leaders-military/
            https://www.newsweek.com/women-college-presidents-gender-gap-581532
            Women make out okay in the Big 5 publishing houses, but the leadership is still predominantly male. Women are are definitely punching below their weight according to their numbers in government, corporations, media, military, education, and publishing. If men in power wanted to put an end to things as they are progressing tomorrow, they still have the clout to do it. Just a fact. Of course, there would be a lot of squawking.

          • Yep. Women evolved to stay on the good side of the tribe. A strong male hunter could hunt on his own and maybe form his own tribe, but a woman was always reliant on her mate AND her tribe (in case her mate got killed).

            Women are constantly looking for signs of what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior and thinking in the tribe. That’s why they can’t get enough media. It’s telling them the tribal rules.

            It’s why the Left hates religions and will do anything to stop whites from forming their own communities. Both of those would provide an alternative tribe and alternative set of rules.

          • @Citizen

            That also explains how French women slept with the Nazis and then enthusiastically “thanked” the GI’s.

          • You need to read a little WW2 history.

            The answer is yes: in many cases it was the same women. The hamster told them to sleep with whomever was in charge. When the Germans came in – they were in charge. When the Americans killed all the Germans – it was pretty obvious they were in charge.

            Plus when their fellow Frenchmen were looking to lynch them for cooperating with the Germans – they often used the vagina to get protection from the Americans.

          • Another history lesson.
            https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_French_Resistance
            There were plenty of male collaborators, as well. They were just shot, not as photogenic.
            “One further aspect of this should be noted: there was an awful lot of collaboration in France. That’s just a fact, it extended throughout the government and extensively among ordinary people. Many partisans themselves had, shall we say, less-than-impeccable bona fides and perhaps even a bit of guilt about things that nobody else knew about. The partisans did not really become very populous until liberation was assured – but then, everyone who could (i.e., was not a known collaborator) jumped on the bandwagon. There is an awful lot of posturing in the photos by partisans crowded around shamed collaborators, perhaps just a tad too much here and there; everyone was anxious to prove that they were on the right (i.e., the winning) side.”
            https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/78558.html
            And let’s not forget the entire Vichy government.

          • Right now I’m super pissed off about the four-way intersections near my house. They’re major thoroughfares with stop signs and the women have turned them into absolute chaos. Sometimes it’s a bunch of men in the cars and everything works smoothly the way it’s supposed to, the person on the right goes and it becomes a de facto roundabout. But when these bitches are in their cars, seriously it’s chaos. I have a deep love of order and I see this and just know that this is what spilling out into the wider world. And I hate it and I don’t think it will be stopped until they destroy everything

          • We have an intersection like that in the center of my town. The town was incorporated in 1655 – and I’m pretty sure those two roads and thus that intersection have been in existence since some time in the 1700’s.

            I grew up in a neighboring town – and still remember driving thru that intersection for the first time something like 38 years ago. It was pretty simple: you pay attention to who came up to the intersection first – and everybody takes their turn. Even as a kid I figured this out pretty quickly.

            But 10 years ago – they “modernized” the entire center of town and put in traffic lights. Apparently there was too much bitching about “chicken corner” – and how hard it was to drive thru.

            Like I said: I never had a problem for 38 years – and for probably 250 years since the intersection first appeared – everybody else managed to make it thru without too many issues.

            You know who led the charge for lights? Women.

          • In my city they’re going to start putting roundabouts in. And after the fiscal irresponsibility, graft and general chicanery it’s going to cost about a gazillion dollars. And here’s the funny thing to do it they’re going to have to tear down a semi historic building and all the women in the neighborhood are out of their minds and up in arms about this building being torn down. They are starting campaigns and movements to ‘save the building!’ If they just started following the law they could save the building and save a gazillion dollars

          • Four way stops are common in the all White areas where I live. But judging from their total absence in nearby more “vibrant” areas I guess it is unthinkable for the state’s traffic engineers to place four way stops in intersections there. Four way stops are an artifact of a high trust society that only work if everyone follows the rules.

          • I live in a town that is something like 93.5% white according to all the data I can find. So there’s pretty low levels of “diversity” – and most of that remaining 6.5% diverseness – is Asian.

            For the most part people obey the traffic laws here.

            The next city over however – is very “diverse” – and going back about 15 years – I had to commute thru that city for the job I had at the time. Just crossing the border it was plainly obvious there was a distinct difference in the behavior of drivers. Running traffic lights was common. But even worse was going down a main road with a bunch of intersecting side roads. People simply would not stop at the intersections and would just drive full speed across a main road.

            And most of the diverseness in that city – was Southeast Asian. We’re not even talking about African descended diverseness (although that is increasing)

      • I think that’s actually more of a progressive thing than a wamen thing, but, yes, the end of the empire is getting real close.

Comments are closed.