a crisis of competence

many bridges much too far

one might be forgiven for wondering how a once so high functioning civilization ever got to here.

how did we lose so many things that once we knew?

how did we lose critical thinking and critical assessment?

how did we trade quiet competence for cartoon-grade clownworld and place into positions of power plentitudes of post-peter principle poltroons?

and how, after having done so, did we watch everything wobble, fail, fall over, and ultimately catch fire and not lift a finger to stop it?

the signs were all there. it was obvious to anyone who was looking that danger was mounting in any one of a hundred spheres. the storm into which we are sailing (a storm of our own making no less) has been becoming clearly and obliviously darker and more dangerous. how on earth did the modal modern american response become “so fire anyone who knows how to drive a boat and replace them with someone who not only lacks such skill but who thinks that the most important aspect of seamanship is mermaid cosplay”?

how did we get this oblivious, this credulous, this insanely situationally unaware of the dangers from elevating actual anti-merit?

this seems like an important question and a question we should be asking because “get there” we have and the levels of interlocking and all encompassing incompetence around us are starting to build into failure cascades unlike anything the modern west has seen.

there are no systems to fall back on.

it’s all rot, rust, and ridiculousness.

and we need to get on top of this before it gets any worse.

“american selfie” circa 2024

because it’s such near perfect exemplar of staring right at problems and somehow not seeing just how bad they really are, let’s have a look at california because from homelessness to legalizing stealing to spectacularly failed rail plans to bad idea jeans immigration policy, they are as relentlessly wrong as they are utterly oblivious.

it’s reality denial as lifestyle.

and then one day it goes really, well and truly bad. and it’s too late and no one knows what to do.

this is just a taste of what’s to come.

for years, perhaps decades, it’s been blazingly obvious (sorry) that califiornia’s fire woes are of their own making.

i wrote about this a year and a half ago. all the issues were there.

everyone who knew anything about anything knew this. california is a burn ecology that has serious water limitations. always will be. you can thin the trees and clear the brush and leave enough water for those that remain to stay healthy and allow for small, safe burns or you can cave to eco-wackjobs with no calibration and less sense and ban 100 years of effective forest management to “save the fluffy butted warbler” and wind up with forest sized warbler flambé. (this is exactly what happened to the spotted owl)

then, you build like mad in chaparral canyons around LA where the santa ana winds roar into near perfect fire flues and let the brush grow out between houses built one atop the other in perfect fire chains of highly flammable materials.

and no one sees the danger. surely someone in charge decided this was safe!

it starts to seem like small children playing amidst hyaenas and lions and assuming all is well because they were told there’s no such thing as monsters.

meanwhile, you’ve elected a governor and a mayor of gross incompetence and a fire chief whose primary qualifications are being a gay woman obsessed with DEI.

in case that’s not enough, you fire hundreds of firefighters from LA for refusing to get the covid jab then complain about being shorthanded all while butchering all the new water and reservoir projects so badly that a $7.5 billion bond from 2014 still has not constructed the reservoir it was intended to because the bureaucracy is so absurd that they cannot even start.

and everyone sits by and watches like nothing is wrong.

then, on fire day, the hydrants don’t work. people seem to be arguing about whether additional water sources would have helped, if reservoirs were unfilled, or if it was just too many hydrants on at once killing pressure in a system that was never designed for a load like this (and i have no real expertise on that and so have no strong view) but that fact is that a whole bunch of firefighters had hoses full of nothing when trying to fight this wind whipped conflagration and have managed to maintain near zero containment on a fire many multiples of the one mrs o’leary’s cow is once claimed to have set off in chicago.

well, at least the firefighters not fired for covid or downsized due to funding cuts to “help migrants” did.

i mean, sure, this is a really difficult fire. it’s urban and you’re losing houses in every direction and spraying embers everywhere in 50 mph wind gusts pointed right at the rest of the neighborhood, but it was also totally predictable. if the “system was not designed for this” then it was not fit for purpose, kind of like a lot of the firefighters that LAFD has been focusing on.

let’s hear from LAFD assistant chief kristine larson:

when challenged with “you couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire!”

she responds: “he got himself in the wrong place if i have to carry him out of a fire”

indeed he did. that place is 2024 los angeles..

how is this even a possible response from a top firefighter? how did anyone watch this and not flee the state?

well, of course, many did, but they were mostly fire insurance companies.

the predictable people made the predictable arguments:

but the reality, again, was utterly obvious: risk was up, rates were capped, it was a guaranteed actuarial loser, so the folks who hire lots of actuaries all walked.

what’s amazing is that the article below came out via bloomberg 3 days before the editorial above.

and now we have the stunning outcome that many of the very expensive LA and malibu homes that look to be racking up the biggest fire bill in amercican history ($57 bn by recent estimates) are uninsured against fire because they were uninsurable against fire because, wait for it, they were in such a high risk zone for fire and california thought it would be “consumer protection” to cap prices.

and now everyone is screwed and the people in charge are a motley of muppetry.

every step of this was predictable. LOTS of people predicted it. i did. trump did. joe rogan did. he called this to a nicety 6 months ago.

is this correct in that it was always when and never if and that “doing anything about it” was always going to be impossible? i don’t know. what i do know, is that if you want a fighting chance, you need the best systems and people you can get and instead they hired for gender identity and race and built like clowns. they diverted huge amounts of water that could have helped forests, brush, etc stay healthy into the pacific under a program called “fall X2” that literally diverts the water socal needs to save a tiny fish called a delta smelt. and somehow this all seems OK. we just say “oh, those eco kids, what won’t they dream up next!” and go back to living in terrible danger as though nothing is wrong.

you also need to plan ahead, build for it, see if you can mitigate it. clear brush. build with less flammable materials. but no one did.

this has become an entire way of life. doctors, cops, firefighters, pilots, yeah, let’s pick them all for reasons other than merit then wonder why nothing works anymore.

let’s build in hurricane flood zones then wonder why there is more hurricane damage. (at least there, people are mostly using appropriate construction. my building took a direct hit from cat 5 maria. did not even get a window leak.)

but how are we missing this as an overall trend? from debt levels to entitlements to the wreckage of schools and disintegration of cultural mores, how are we staring at entirely fake problems instead of burgeoning new ones?

this seems like some sort of of offshoot of the relentless “progressive” programming of woke. it’s all semantic games, reality denial, and pretense that simply saying that X is so makes X so.

if there is no reality, we can just make it up, right?

what could possibly go wrong?

if gender is just a social construct then so is fireman and solider and cardio-thoracic surgeon and somehow we have acculturated a population to staring right into the eyes of such madness and saying, “well, ok, if you say so.”

we watch $100 trillion accrue in unfunded federal liability and say “yes, well, someone will figure it out…”

no one moves to fix anything. it seems impossible. we’re just along for the ride as entirely predictable things cascade into entirely predictable damage.

that’s extreme demoralization.

it’s actual hopelessness.

it’s blind trust placed in the obviously untrustworthy.

and there is no way that that works out well.

how we got to here is the venn intersect of bezmenov and orwell

“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom.

meets

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

―George Orwell,1984

and everything goes off the rails.

you wind up with a populace unable to tell up from down or the edge of a precipice from a meadow.

there is really no other explanation for this.

it seems enforced by group diktat.

most individuals can see how crazy this is, but groups cannot. they impose uniformity through relentless attack and censorship and accusation. they repeat and flood every channel and topic with the same propaganda and produce the abilene paradox of a room full of people who all know something is crazy all pretending it’s sane because they think that’s what everyone else thinks.

it’s all

“yes, the emperor has no clothes, but clotheslessness is a lifestyle choice and we should be welcoming and accommodating and tell him how stunning and brave he is and if you don’t you’re a sartorialist oppressor and need struggle sessions to show you the light now move over the emperor has some kindergarteners to read to”

until people really think others think this and start to self-censor and world views blur out of focus and into hallucination.

the worse it gets, the harder it gets to see because seeing it requires too much of the viewer, the price of admitting it grows too dear, the implications too vast.

pretty soon, a whole city is looking right at an actual wrecker and missing it. past a point, your brain almost needs to. you simply cannot comprehend and parse the meaning of a calamity that size, a risk that stupid.

it slides out of your sensorium.

this is what has made these magic words like racist and sexist and anti-nature such powerful as spells of suppression: the censorship, self and overt, that arises from it silences dissent and lets small angry minorities seem like majorities. it makes it seem like everyone else is OK with the bad idea and so there’s no point in you making a fuss.

it makes it easy to ignore.

it makes it easy to become demoralized and hopeless until 330 million people are all saying “i am just one person, what can i do?”

this is wrong.

my friends, it’s fuss time. everywhere. all the time.

this is way past too much and it’s getting really, really dangerous to live any longer with this illusion that there are experts in charge and that we should trust them. keep that up and pretty soon your pronouns are going to be “was/were.”

we need to give up on all this supposed decorum and tolerance and stop tolerating the intolerable descent into incompetence and ruin driven by the fact that any systems that are not explicitly and proactively meritocratic actively and of necessity function as anti-meritocracies as B’s hire C’s and C’s hire D’s all to avoid being challenged over roles for which none are adequate.

this is the mediocrity downspiral and once it starts, it can only be stopped by a top to bottom cleaning of house and the only way to do that is to get un-demoralized enough to do it.

and that means getting loud, finding commonality, and hitting back hard when people try to pull this crap on you. it is not “anti-empathy” to call an idiot an idiot when they seek to place you in danger.

the overton window is ours to move and all this politics lives downstream from us which is why manipulating our perceptions is their tactic of choice.

this is why they are so desperate to control and stifle the new coalitions of social media.

and they have failed. we broke containment.

now it’s time to break what they have imposed upon us.

it’s just common sense.

let’s make it common again.

america is not divided by race, color, gender, or sexual orientation.

america is divided into wise people and fools, into people of agency and the demoralized.

and only fools and the demoralized divide themselves by race, color, gender, or sexual orientation.

remember that and we’re well on our way.