As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance. In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving. Our art is crap, we …
Tag: not the cognitive elite
Technological decay
I have long argued, and commenters on this blog have long been disputed, that science died shortly after World War II, replaced by official state religion wearing lab coats as priestly robes, and using test tubes as aspersoria for holy water. The age of science began with the Restoration and the Royal Society. The Royal Society’s motto was “Take no one’s word for it”.  Feynman, in his address “What is …
Hillary and the decline of the elite.
Bill Clinton was a truly great politician. He could embrace you and steal your wallet, embrace your wife and fuck your wife, and you would still somehow like him. Hillary Clinton is the drunken dumb heiress bitch Bill Clinton married to fund his initial entry into politics. She is now big fat drunken carpet munching dumb bitch. Bill Clinton is a very good liar, an extraordinarily good liar. Hillary Clinton …
Firing Kathleen Sebelius
Everyone involved in the disastrous rollout of the disastrous Obamacare website has been fired or has had something horribly bad happen to their careers, from Human Health and Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius downwards. It turns out that people working for the government, like people with tenure, can be punished by the left, though not by the right. If ever the right should try to fire people, see my post on …
mens rea
I have been arguing that social decay is ending technological and scientific progress. In most areas it has strikingly slowed, in some areas, going backwards in the west, as we forget how to do what once we could do. Others, however, argue that technological and scientific progress is still running hot, or that if it has slowed, it is that we ran out of low hanging fruit. But a big …
Not the cognitive elite
Government has accomplished some mighty impressive things, the most impressive being the Manhattan project (nuclear bombs and nuclear energy), and the second most impressive being the landing on the moon. After Hiroshima, and before the moon landing, people said “Why don’t we (meaning government) have a Manhattan project to do X†After the landing on the moon, people said “If we (meaning government) can put a man on the moon, …
Not the cognitive elite
The immensely well paid staff of the World Bank issued a pile of nonsense about European financial problems in which they kept calling a positive feedback loop a negative feedback loop. Obama’s speechwriters issued an equally stupid speech to their black mascot in which they called the Falkland Islands the Maldives.
Why the elite is dumb and getting dumber
When recruiting people for administration, administrators very reasonably look for past experience on the administration track. To him that has shall be given, to him that has not, even what little he has shall be taken away. However success at the lowest levels of the administration track is at best a poor indicator of intelligence, and in government, and in large schlerotic organizations choked on red tape, is a strong …
What the DenialGate fake reveals about warmists
Peter Gleik phished some genuine files from the Heartland Institute. The files revealed what everyone knows, what no one has ever denied, and what the Heartland Institute has frequently announced: That the Heartland Institute is funding science that is skeptical of global warming, though its funding is ludicrously tiny, while Peter Gleik received half a million dollars to attack skeptics and help the warming cause. He then created what he …
Murray refuted
I found Murray’s major theses in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, hard to believe, in particular, that the elite is sexually well behaved.