Don’t know much about history

Supposedly we are ruled by the cognitive elite, but, strikingly, when compared to the elite of a  century ago, they don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology, don’t know much about a science book, don’t know much about the french they took.

The members of the old elite would casually make interlingual puns, erudite references to ancient history and to the latest science of their day.   I am not seeing this from our current elite.

I saw on television a US spokesman piously calling for a cease fire in Gaza  “Israel requires an end to rocket attacks, Hamas requires an end to the state of siege and and end to attacks on Hamas personnel”

“What,” I thought, “does the state department hire the mentally retarded?”

The Israelis gave him a flea in his ear.  I would hope that that might be because, unlike the Americans, they know some history, but fear it more likely they only know the history they themselves have personally lived through.  They used to use the phrase “cease fire” often enough.

The Obama regime abruptly dropped the phrase “cease fire” and started talking about “durable de-escalation” – which unfortunately means much the same thing, if it means anything at all, which I doubt.  It is obvious that everyone in the regime has been told not to use the phrase “cease fire”.  Unfortunately it is equally obvious that they don’t know why they should not use that phrase.

John Hubner argues that the rate of innovation has been declining since the 1880s, which is roughly the time when I judge the elite to have been smartest – when it was benefiting by recruiting smart people from the lower classes,  but had yet not abandoned consideration of parental achievement.

Leftism, based on equalism, leads to systematic discrimination against the dangerously bright, which was a problem in the late nineteenth century, and has been getting steadily worse.

Kurzweil and the other futurists of the technological singularity correctly complain that Hubner is focusing only on the initial innovation, neglecting the quite large period of development that eventually leads to the innovation becoming an effective improvement in our standard of living or our capability to slay our enemies, but it is reasonable to suppose that the original innovation requires more smarts than perfecting and mass producing it.

Now this sort of fermented mashed bananas, “cease fire”, was reasonable enough in the nineteen seventies, when people in the middle east were piously pretending to progressivism, and called themselves anti colonialists and such, but now that they are calling themselves Muslims, there is really no excuse for not cracking open an old, yellowing, dusty history book before calling for a “cease fire”.

Like the Obama regime, I am full of good advice for Israelis and for those Muslims who would prefer to postpone receiving their six pack of virgins for as long as possible, but wrestling with a pig only gets one dirty and annoys the pig, so I stick to discussing our “cognitive elite”.