Here's one example. Just one. My father (1916-2002) had three years of college, in chemistry. The day after Pearl Harbor he and his brother were down at the recruiting station. They turned Dad down because as a chemist he was "too valuable at home". He would have none of it, and eventually browbeat his way into the Navy, becoming an officer.
He taught himself radio and radar, and at Iwo Jima radioed the lead unit assaulting Suribachi to "grab the biggest damned piece of sheet metal you can find, and carry it right up front." He then deployed the radar fire-control system to walk his destroyer's 5-inch shells up the mountain, only yards ahead of the Marines. Figured it on the go. There were thousand like him.
After the war, he became a self-taught engineer, eventually getting his P.Eng. licence in both electrical and mechanical engineering. He specialised in metals -- alloys, corrosion, plating, and so on. Back in 1963 he got a panicked phone call from a competing company. They had a process tank full of phosgene [one of the most poisonous things there is] at 3000 psi for which the corrosion monitors no longer were reporting.
He caught the overnight train to Cleveland, and by Xray determined that 2 inches of nickel steel had corroded to 5/8 inch. It was days away from a pressure-failure explosion, directly upwind of Cleveland.
When he got home, he pulled me out of school and we spent days at the nearby Yale library. I was doing the preliminary skimming, and handing him the potentially useful journals and texts. Within 30 days he had invented a totally new alloy which would not corrode under those conditions.
He refused to patent it, and instead telegrammed every chemical company using high-pressure phosgene in the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe ... warning them of the problem and giving them the needed new-alloy specs.
America was then full of men and women like him, and I, too, wonder why such people are so depressingly scarce in these current times. Dad certainly didn't have more formal eduction or credentials than folks today, but his generation always found ways to get shit done.
This will get me branded as an extremist ofc, but i've been in the workforce since the early 80s and these observations are built on copious experience. Workplaces where men are the majority tend to be crunchy. Workplaces where women are the majority don't. Workplaces with a critical mass of out-of-the closet deviants (5% or so) are the soggiest of all.
I was going to write in my own ruminations but I had to compliment you on speaking the unhappy truth. Every inch of our government is now soggy because it is totally feminized. Add to this DEI which had to be a female dream and our country is doomed to abject failure and will be subject to easy conquest by our enemies who are still plenty crunchy.
I think we should be quick to note that this isn't because men are inherently better at anything, it's because men are risk-takers and rule-breakers to a much greater extent than women. This leads to crunchiness, in the parlance in use here. Risky behavior fails fast, just like SpaceX, and delivers innovation more quickly (at the expense of money and safety, of course).
A good system needs a balance of both. If the system goes out of balance; if the women's viewpoint becomes dominant, sogginess prevails. If it goes too far the other way, it gets more expensive and unsafe (in a large sense), but these often go unnoticed in light of innovative success. Even Elon is not saying, "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."
Conversely, non-men tend to either drive or crave conformity. The latest exercise of calling political opponents "weird" is an example. Those people didn't grow up with "sticks & stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me". I might even think weird is a compliment! :D
It is better I think, in the software business as the results are instantaneous. And then the Crowdstrike thing happens. How often does that happen? THink of the millions of lines of code in the Office product!
I'm reminded of that famous quote from Thomas Sowell: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
Exactly. The one word that describes EVERYTHING that has gone wrong is accountability. There is none. None. Even in a formerly "crunchy" society like Israel who has paid a price for the myriad failures that led to the events of October 7. There isn't even accountability for malfeasance or negligence let alone simply for failure. And it will be our end.
I’ll tell you the underlying reason in three letters: DEI.
We now hire for extraneous reasons other than raw competence and merit. You can’t sustain a modern society while not permitting your best to be free to rise.
Every generation has to learn the top of the stove is hot...Heinlein, I think? When there are no consequences, critical learning and / or failure, is stunted. The "who cares, what evs dude" attitude becomes epidemic, the banks are too big to fail so get bailed out, and the institutions become inept. Such is the fate of empires, as they grow, decline, and eventually fall. History doesn't repeat because it can't, but patterns of human behavior (and empires) seem to. In the case of the UK, they seem to more or less fade away and they become unrecognizable from what they were. We remember what we were, but aren't self assessing our current state of competence well, if at all. Soggy as an old donut left outside overnight in the rain...
It's easy to say our K-12 public schools are failures (because they certainly are). However, given how they teach our children to hate their country, decry it as the nation that invented slavery, and that they are not accountable for their actions, one has to wonder if they are actually succeeding at an easily visible but unstated goal / objective: liquifying the foundation of any nation, its youth.
Glenn, there's an interesting intersection of ideas today between your essay -- specifically soggy systems and how they erode confidence in our institutions -- and Steven Hayward's "Justice Gorsuch and the Administrative State" (posted on Powerline 2 days ago). Besides highlighting Gorsuch's recent thoughts on the muck of our public bureaucracy, Hayward also reaches back, thru a post of his ten years earlier, to de Toucqueville. Specifically to this quote (from 1835)...
"Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends it arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."
I fear we're now further down the path of de Tocqueville's prediction than we realize. Enjoyed your essay. FWIW...
Many great comments here. I'll add that the "participation trophy" mindset is another cause of so much incompetence. Also bureaucrats in both big government and big corporations are virtually always shielded from the consequences of their actions. Bureaucracies primary goal is to preserve and enhance the bureaucracy. Innovation is discouraged or punished and "not rocking the boat" is rewarded. Meritocracy has become a bad word. Someone like Musk that pushes for excellence and frequently fires people is vilified. Our most innovative and successful people end up making lots of money and are hated for their wealth and success. Our culture vilifies the "nerds" when we should be praising them as our best and brightest.
There's a saying among government employees: "nobody ever got in trouble for saying no". Whenever anyone proposes to do anything daring or risky, the government's default answer is always going to be "no". New highway that could substantially improve the economy in a depressed region? No. New drug that could save millions of lives? No. Nuclear power plants to replace old coal-burning plants? No. And since you can't do anything without the government's permission these days, the default answer to everything becomes "no", and huge amounts of capital and labor have to be expended to overcome that.
One obvious institutional failure that was missed: Our educational system.
I’m tempted to insert ‘so-called’, because much of K-12 schooling is more like babysitting. Too many kids graduate (or not) unable to read close to grade level. Likewise with ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic performance.
And then there’s grade inflation, revised (dumbed-down) SAT tests, too much school time wasted on social/cultural/ideological indoctrination that’s irrelevant to education, etc.
I could go on, but there’s no need to repeat the obvious.
Speaking as an urban elementary school teacher, the teachers are not the core problem, at least not in the non-white world I live and work in.
Core problems nationwide:
1. No consequences allowed for students. We are NOT ALLOWED to hold a child back EVEN if the parents beg us to. This is all based on 20th c. studies involving having children who are multiple grade levels behind repeat the most recent grade - which is still way above their actual skill level. Plus, it is an article of faith that the harm to their self-esteem for failing is worse than the harm done to their self esteem from sitting in a class where they can’t do the work. My experience with post-Covid 5th graders tells me that’s completely untrue. The result is that kids pretty quickly figure out that there’s no actual (to a child) reason to put in effort. The result is that only a handful of the brightest students learn much.
2. This failure to learn is compounded by the fact that we are required to ONLY TEACH GRADE LEVEL MATERIAL, even if the entire class is 3 years behind. Reasoning: someone did research that found that remedial teaching hurts poor black children because it “prevents them from having access to grade level teaching”. Personal example: 5th grade, fall 2022, all-black public housing project students. Sent home in March of their 2nd grade year. “Online” (but mostly not) for all of 3rd, then in and out during 4th. 22 kids, only one knows how to subtract with borrowing (ex: 72-48). We’ve been ORDERED not to do any “gap filling”. Instead, I must teach “.037 x 10squared and .037 divided by 10 sq.” until they can fill their “exit tickets” (quiz) out right. Needless to say, keeping them engaged in spending days trying to remember how to do meaningless manipulations way above their skill level was impossible. Bad behavior ensued (they’d run off 4 teachers the previous year). So I broke the rules and ran off some two-digit subtraction worksheets - and they paid attention! But…I got caught. “Ms. Reality, that’s a 2nd grade skill! You have to teach 5th grade skills only.” I was the second fifth grade teacher to quit that year.
The surviving 5th grade teacher was reprimanded for giving too many C’s to her universally below grade level students, and for saying “You shut up!” to a student who told HER to shut up. She’s at a charter now.
I wrote all that to try to make outside observers in mostly white bubbles understand how these “failing schools” actually work. Most of the teachers I’ve worked with are really trying, and are at least as good as the ones I had in the ‘70’s.
Related problem: K is now the learn-to-read grade (since early 2000’s). 90% of 6yo are developmentally ready to read; many fewer 5yo are. Boys are about 6 months behind girls developmentally at 5. Every year I’ve taught K, the children who turn 6 in the fall are the superstars and my spring and summer boys almost struggle badly and most leave as non-readers. Yet, second chances are forbidden. As a first grade teacher I was reprimanded for trying to teach my lowest students to sound out “cat, rat, bat”. “Those are kindergarten standards, Ms. Reality!”
I believe this change is part of why boys are falling behind so badly.
I quit in 2009 because of that garbage of centers learning. All the classrooms with the same lesson plan, all the kids teaching each other. I showed the test results from Florida where 50% fail rate in standardized tests resulted from centers learning. I taught strategies to inner city math, English, and Science students so I hid the remedial work under strategy of doing easier work and then following it up next day with grade level attempt. Of course, it took months but we took a hs at 4th grade level in all grades and by May were at grade level in a school with 27 active gangs.
I agree but how do we get the geniuses to figure out that if a 12th grader can’t read we did something wrong in first grade. My granddaughter had trouble reading out of kindergarten and couldn’t even get all her letters correctly. She was in a school that insisted on everyone wearing a mask. Different school, no masks and now she reads above grade level in English and also reads Hebrew.
Once you add the failures all up. It's actually quite profound. Sometimes, a large amount of money "sloshing" around can also be a factor in the litany of failure. But it seems lately, incompetence is not only tolerated but sometimes even rewarded. The deep dive the SS is currently experiencing has proven to be long overdue. Which in no way diminishes the inexplicable lapses uncovered. Our institutions being greatly affected by political partisanship or otherwise strongly held uncommon beliefs is an ongoing, pernicious problem.
As for me I prefer not to swirl down the toilet of socialist excrement. My choice is to refuse to tolerate mediocrity or socialist dogma. Just walk away and vote and push for a way to make it stop. Might not work but perhaps it is the only hope.
This is a supply chain failure. The failure to ensure mechanical competency. The engineering may or many not be the problem. It could be the nozzles and the controllers for the helium. etc. etc.
"Americans used to be known for "know how," for a "can-do spirit," for "Yankee ingenuity" and the like. Now? Not so much."
I think it has as one cause the masses of rules from unelected Executive branch blobocrats, very well described by Neil Gorsuch in 'Over Ruled'. Whatever their intentions, the sum of their effects amounts to jealously counteracting, forbidding, crippling or at least hampering individuals who exercise Yankee ingenuity, and might have continued without the deliberate discouragement of said unelecteds.
**Educational Credentialism** is a huge part of this problem. Here's something that Peter Drucker, the great writer on management society, wrote back in 1969:
"One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the elite institution which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties 'matter.'This restricts and impoverishes the whole society. The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…"
We as a country are a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for Harvard Law School and similar institutions than we were when Drucker wrote the above.
In 1797, a Spanish naval official wrote an essay on the subject “why do we keep losing to the British, and what can we do about it?” His thoughts are very relative to our present crisis of organizational competence.
Originally, the whole point of having a professional government bureaucracy was to encourage high-competence individuals into the government to run the bureaucracies effectively and efficiently. Following WWII, with the influx of GI Bill educated veterans into the government workforce, that intent was mostly fulfilled.
Starting in the late-70's, and accelerating through the 80's and early 90's, those vets left the workforce.
Now government service is often a jobs program for many otherwise unemployable people, often selected based on various social justice goals rather than knowledge and competence, not so much.
Here's one example. Just one. My father (1916-2002) had three years of college, in chemistry. The day after Pearl Harbor he and his brother were down at the recruiting station. They turned Dad down because as a chemist he was "too valuable at home". He would have none of it, and eventually browbeat his way into the Navy, becoming an officer.
He taught himself radio and radar, and at Iwo Jima radioed the lead unit assaulting Suribachi to "grab the biggest damned piece of sheet metal you can find, and carry it right up front." He then deployed the radar fire-control system to walk his destroyer's 5-inch shells up the mountain, only yards ahead of the Marines. Figured it on the go. There were thousand like him.
After the war, he became a self-taught engineer, eventually getting his P.Eng. licence in both electrical and mechanical engineering. He specialised in metals -- alloys, corrosion, plating, and so on. Back in 1963 he got a panicked phone call from a competing company. They had a process tank full of phosgene [one of the most poisonous things there is] at 3000 psi for which the corrosion monitors no longer were reporting.
He caught the overnight train to Cleveland, and by Xray determined that 2 inches of nickel steel had corroded to 5/8 inch. It was days away from a pressure-failure explosion, directly upwind of Cleveland.
When he got home, he pulled me out of school and we spent days at the nearby Yale library. I was doing the preliminary skimming, and handing him the potentially useful journals and texts. Within 30 days he had invented a totally new alloy which would not corrode under those conditions.
He refused to patent it, and instead telegrammed every chemical company using high-pressure phosgene in the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe ... warning them of the problem and giving them the needed new-alloy specs.
America was then full of men and women like him, and I, too, wonder why such people are so depressingly scarce in these current times. Dad certainly didn't have more formal eduction or credentials than folks today, but his generation always found ways to get shit done.
Great story! Thank you.
There were men such as this! No more with few exceptions - - and they are certainly not in government,.
This will get me branded as an extremist ofc, but i've been in the workforce since the early 80s and these observations are built on copious experience. Workplaces where men are the majority tend to be crunchy. Workplaces where women are the majority don't. Workplaces with a critical mass of out-of-the closet deviants (5% or so) are the soggiest of all.
I was going to write in my own ruminations but I had to compliment you on speaking the unhappy truth. Every inch of our government is now soggy because it is totally feminized. Add to this DEI which had to be a female dream and our country is doomed to abject failure and will be subject to easy conquest by our enemies who are still plenty crunchy.
I think we should be quick to note that this isn't because men are inherently better at anything, it's because men are risk-takers and rule-breakers to a much greater extent than women. This leads to crunchiness, in the parlance in use here. Risky behavior fails fast, just like SpaceX, and delivers innovation more quickly (at the expense of money and safety, of course).
A good system needs a balance of both. If the system goes out of balance; if the women's viewpoint becomes dominant, sogginess prevails. If it goes too far the other way, it gets more expensive and unsafe (in a large sense), but these often go unnoticed in light of innovative success. Even Elon is not saying, "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."
Conversely, non-men tend to either drive or crave conformity. The latest exercise of calling political opponents "weird" is an example. Those people didn't grow up with "sticks & stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me". I might even think weird is a compliment! :D
I tend to agree with your observation.
It is better I think, in the software business as the results are instantaneous. And then the Crowdstrike thing happens. How often does that happen? THink of the millions of lines of code in the Office product!
I'm reminded of that famous quote from Thomas Sowell: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
Exactly. The one word that describes EVERYTHING that has gone wrong is accountability. There is none. None. Even in a formerly "crunchy" society like Israel who has paid a price for the myriad failures that led to the events of October 7. There isn't even accountability for malfeasance or negligence let alone simply for failure. And it will be our end.
I’ll tell you the underlying reason in three letters: DEI.
We now hire for extraneous reasons other than raw competence and merit. You can’t sustain a modern society while not permitting your best to be free to rise.
Every generation has to learn the top of the stove is hot...Heinlein, I think? When there are no consequences, critical learning and / or failure, is stunted. The "who cares, what evs dude" attitude becomes epidemic, the banks are too big to fail so get bailed out, and the institutions become inept. Such is the fate of empires, as they grow, decline, and eventually fall. History doesn't repeat because it can't, but patterns of human behavior (and empires) seem to. In the case of the UK, they seem to more or less fade away and they become unrecognizable from what they were. We remember what we were, but aren't self assessing our current state of competence well, if at all. Soggy as an old donut left outside overnight in the rain...
It all starts with, and ends with our "public education system". It is a joke and now
completely out of our control. Allowing public teachers unions to donate to politicians campaigns is one of the dumbest of all policies.
We reap the "benefits" of an incompetent, lazy and entitled student/new worker.
It's easy to say our K-12 public schools are failures (because they certainly are). However, given how they teach our children to hate their country, decry it as the nation that invented slavery, and that they are not accountable for their actions, one has to wonder if they are actually succeeding at an easily visible but unstated goal / objective: liquifying the foundation of any nation, its youth.
No question that is a big part of the plan.
"Stay crunchy, my friends."
Glenn, the effect of staying crunchy in a soggy society is summed up by the phrase "trying to stiffen a bucket of spit with a handful of buckshot."
Glenn, there's an interesting intersection of ideas today between your essay -- specifically soggy systems and how they erode confidence in our institutions -- and Steven Hayward's "Justice Gorsuch and the Administrative State" (posted on Powerline 2 days ago). Besides highlighting Gorsuch's recent thoughts on the muck of our public bureaucracy, Hayward also reaches back, thru a post of his ten years earlier, to de Toucqueville. Specifically to this quote (from 1835)...
"Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends it arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."
I fear we're now further down the path of de Tocqueville's prediction than we realize. Enjoyed your essay. FWIW...
Many great comments here. I'll add that the "participation trophy" mindset is another cause of so much incompetence. Also bureaucrats in both big government and big corporations are virtually always shielded from the consequences of their actions. Bureaucracies primary goal is to preserve and enhance the bureaucracy. Innovation is discouraged or punished and "not rocking the boat" is rewarded. Meritocracy has become a bad word. Someone like Musk that pushes for excellence and frequently fires people is vilified. Our most innovative and successful people end up making lots of money and are hated for their wealth and success. Our culture vilifies the "nerds" when we should be praising them as our best and brightest.
There's a saying among government employees: "nobody ever got in trouble for saying no". Whenever anyone proposes to do anything daring or risky, the government's default answer is always going to be "no". New highway that could substantially improve the economy in a depressed region? No. New drug that could save millions of lives? No. Nuclear power plants to replace old coal-burning plants? No. And since you can't do anything without the government's permission these days, the default answer to everything becomes "no", and huge amounts of capital and labor have to be expended to overcome that.
One obvious institutional failure that was missed: Our educational system.
I’m tempted to insert ‘so-called’, because much of K-12 schooling is more like babysitting. Too many kids graduate (or not) unable to read close to grade level. Likewise with ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic performance.
And then there’s grade inflation, revised (dumbed-down) SAT tests, too much school time wasted on social/cultural/ideological indoctrination that’s irrelevant to education, etc.
I could go on, but there’s no need to repeat the obvious.
Speaking as an urban elementary school teacher, the teachers are not the core problem, at least not in the non-white world I live and work in.
Core problems nationwide:
1. No consequences allowed for students. We are NOT ALLOWED to hold a child back EVEN if the parents beg us to. This is all based on 20th c. studies involving having children who are multiple grade levels behind repeat the most recent grade - which is still way above their actual skill level. Plus, it is an article of faith that the harm to their self-esteem for failing is worse than the harm done to their self esteem from sitting in a class where they can’t do the work. My experience with post-Covid 5th graders tells me that’s completely untrue. The result is that kids pretty quickly figure out that there’s no actual (to a child) reason to put in effort. The result is that only a handful of the brightest students learn much.
2. This failure to learn is compounded by the fact that we are required to ONLY TEACH GRADE LEVEL MATERIAL, even if the entire class is 3 years behind. Reasoning: someone did research that found that remedial teaching hurts poor black children because it “prevents them from having access to grade level teaching”. Personal example: 5th grade, fall 2022, all-black public housing project students. Sent home in March of their 2nd grade year. “Online” (but mostly not) for all of 3rd, then in and out during 4th. 22 kids, only one knows how to subtract with borrowing (ex: 72-48). We’ve been ORDERED not to do any “gap filling”. Instead, I must teach “.037 x 10squared and .037 divided by 10 sq.” until they can fill their “exit tickets” (quiz) out right. Needless to say, keeping them engaged in spending days trying to remember how to do meaningless manipulations way above their skill level was impossible. Bad behavior ensued (they’d run off 4 teachers the previous year). So I broke the rules and ran off some two-digit subtraction worksheets - and they paid attention! But…I got caught. “Ms. Reality, that’s a 2nd grade skill! You have to teach 5th grade skills only.” I was the second fifth grade teacher to quit that year.
The surviving 5th grade teacher was reprimanded for giving too many C’s to her universally below grade level students, and for saying “You shut up!” to a student who told HER to shut up. She’s at a charter now.
I wrote all that to try to make outside observers in mostly white bubbles understand how these “failing schools” actually work. Most of the teachers I’ve worked with are really trying, and are at least as good as the ones I had in the ‘70’s.
Related problem: K is now the learn-to-read grade (since early 2000’s). 90% of 6yo are developmentally ready to read; many fewer 5yo are. Boys are about 6 months behind girls developmentally at 5. Every year I’ve taught K, the children who turn 6 in the fall are the superstars and my spring and summer boys almost struggle badly and most leave as non-readers. Yet, second chances are forbidden. As a first grade teacher I was reprimanded for trying to teach my lowest students to sound out “cat, rat, bat”. “Those are kindergarten standards, Ms. Reality!”
I believe this change is part of why boys are falling behind so badly.
I quit in 2009 because of that garbage of centers learning. All the classrooms with the same lesson plan, all the kids teaching each other. I showed the test results from Florida where 50% fail rate in standardized tests resulted from centers learning. I taught strategies to inner city math, English, and Science students so I hid the remedial work under strategy of doing easier work and then following it up next day with grade level attempt. Of course, it took months but we took a hs at 4th grade level in all grades and by May were at grade level in a school with 27 active gangs.
I agree but how do we get the geniuses to figure out that if a 12th grader can’t read we did something wrong in first grade. My granddaughter had trouble reading out of kindergarten and couldn’t even get all her letters correctly. She was in a school that insisted on everyone wearing a mask. Different school, no masks and now she reads above grade level in English and also reads Hebrew.
https://www.amazon.com/Education-Apocalypse-How-Happened-Survive/dp/1594037914
Just another example, on this anniversary of Instapundit, of the professor’s important and thoughtful published writing!
Once you add the failures all up. It's actually quite profound. Sometimes, a large amount of money "sloshing" around can also be a factor in the litany of failure. But it seems lately, incompetence is not only tolerated but sometimes even rewarded. The deep dive the SS is currently experiencing has proven to be long overdue. Which in no way diminishes the inexplicable lapses uncovered. Our institutions being greatly affected by political partisanship or otherwise strongly held uncommon beliefs is an ongoing, pernicious problem.
As for me I prefer not to swirl down the toilet of socialist excrement. My choice is to refuse to tolerate mediocrity or socialist dogma. Just walk away and vote and push for a way to make it stop. Might not work but perhaps it is the only hope.
at what point do we gather as a group of 50% of America, and stop paying taxes?
Time to defrost Kranz out of Cryro:
NASA Director: This could be the worst disaster NASA's ever experienced.
Gene Kranz: With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.
Gene Kranz: We've never lost an American in space, we're sure as hell not gonna lose one on my watch! Failure is not an option.
Gene Kranz: I don't care about what anything was DESIGNED to do, I care about what it CAN do.
This is a supply chain failure. The failure to ensure mechanical competency. The engineering may or many not be the problem. It could be the nozzles and the controllers for the helium. etc. etc.
"Americans used to be known for "know how," for a "can-do spirit," for "Yankee ingenuity" and the like. Now? Not so much."
I think it has as one cause the masses of rules from unelected Executive branch blobocrats, very well described by Neil Gorsuch in 'Over Ruled'. Whatever their intentions, the sum of their effects amounts to jealously counteracting, forbidding, crippling or at least hampering individuals who exercise Yankee ingenuity, and might have continued without the deliberate discouragement of said unelecteds.
**Educational Credentialism** is a huge part of this problem. Here's something that Peter Drucker, the great writer on management society, wrote back in 1969:
"One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the elite institution which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties 'matter.'This restricts and impoverishes the whole society. The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…"
We as a country are a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for Harvard Law School and similar institutions than we were when Drucker wrote the above.
In 1797, a Spanish naval official wrote an essay on the subject “why do we keep losing to the British, and what can we do about it?” His thoughts are very relative to our present crisis of organizational competence.
https://ricochet.com/290284/organizational-culture-improvisation-success-and-failure/
Originally, the whole point of having a professional government bureaucracy was to encourage high-competence individuals into the government to run the bureaucracies effectively and efficiently. Following WWII, with the influx of GI Bill educated veterans into the government workforce, that intent was mostly fulfilled.
Starting in the late-70's, and accelerating through the 80's and early 90's, those vets left the workforce.
Now government service is often a jobs program for many otherwise unemployable people, often selected based on various social justice goals rather than knowledge and competence, not so much.