Leading climate scientist Michael Mann and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman are really smart guys? The guys who write the New York Times are really smart?

A university selects for diligence, intelligence, ability to follow orders, and willingness to follow orders, thus a degree signals these things to employers, and a high degree from an elite university signals more of these things to employers. It also, however, selects for political correctness, or the well simulated appearance of political correctness, and as the left has become ever lefter, political correctness has increasingly become a signal of stupidity, real or pretended.

Who is the most influential scientist?

Michael Mann, a Yale PhD, who does not have enough brains to know when he is telling lies with statistics, and who has his students and employees perform any task that is intellectually demanding.

Once upon a time, the left position was arguably clever and sophisticated. By and by, it became more a collection of elaborate and extremely clever rationalizations for propositions that were quite stupid. Galbraith, Gould,and Chomsky were great rationalizers for obviously stupid propositions. Quote any of Chomsky’s conclusions without the very clever lead up, he sounds like a monkey flinging $#!%. But there was a very clever lead up.

However, as leftism has become increasingly stupid, barefaced assertion has replaced clever rationalization. This transition is visible in the career of Paul Krugman, his Nobel prize winning work being clever rationalizations for politically desired stupid conclusions, his recent work being mere proclamations of holy dogma.

Observe the response by the KOS tribe to some guy making the point that Muslims have all the characteristics that the left attribute to Christians:   It is a troop of monkeys flinging their $#!% from the trees.

OK, that troop of monkeys is merely the rank and file leftists, not necessarily Harvard PhDs, (though chances are that quite a lot of them are Harvard PhDs, with advanced degrees in education and victim studies). Surely the leadership is, however, a lot smarter?

Well yes, the leadership is smarter, but that does not actually make them smart. Here is one of the top monkeys flinging his $#!% from his tree.

This is the cognitive elite?

This destruction allows a new past to be written, a demonized and hate filled past.

Now one might suppose that this destruction is unintentional, a mere result of perverse incentives, though what is the incentive that compels people to destroy books that would bring high prices on Amazon? But that Google gives limited access to our past, and that books are becoming lefter and lefter makes this destruction suspicious.  For example the disturbingly politically incorrect Hakayit Abdullah by Munshi Abdullah is available on google only in snippet view.  Why only snippet view?  The translation was published in 1874, which makes it well and truly out of copyright everywhere in the world.   Google only gives full access to a tiny handful of past texts.  One can get around this by looking up texts on google book search, then downloading them from the internet archive.  Accessing our past is not criminalized, nor even particularly difficult, but it is systematically discouraged.

This restriction is not obviously politically selective.  It is more of a wholesale restriction on the past.  Both “Froudacity”, the left wing, politically correct view on decolonization by a black man affirmative actioned to prominence, and “The Bow of Ulysses”, a eulogy and funeral speech for colonialism that looked back to the good old days when colonialists were free to be pirates and brigands, are available only in preview, though of course, one can get them from the Internet Archive.

The author of “Froudacity” is also the originator of what we now call Ebonics – the idea that black speech is not inferior, not less capable of communicating ideas and instructions, but merely different – a proposal that merely has to be stated for its absurdity to be apparent, and merely has to be contradicted to create the most astonishing outrage, for to contradict it implies that blacks are, on average, not merely less literate but less verbal, less capable of human speech, and therefore, on average, significantly less human, speech being the defining human characteristic.

“The Bow of Ulysses”, on the other hand, endorses the old colonialism, nostalgically recalling the days when Britain was not an empire, but rather British colonialists were pirates and brigands, who robbed, conquered and eventually ruled, gradually making the transition from mobile banditry to stationary banditry without the British government paying much attention.  In “The Bow of Ulysses” Froude condemns nineteenth century imperialism as unworkably left wing, and inevitably leading the destruction of the British empire, and thus the ruin of the subjects of the British empire, all of which ensued as he envisaged, while the author of “Froudacity” endorsed imperialism.

(Since I posted this, people have reported to me that they can access “The Bow of Ulysses” through Google, but I cannot, even when using Tor, or using a Singaporean proxy)

If we read “Froudacity” and “the Bow of Ulysses”, we discover the remarkable and surprising fact that the imperialists, the ones that upgraded Queen Victoria from Queen to empress, were the same bunch as those then and now preaching ebonics.  The imperialists, those advocating British Empire, were the left, and the colonialists were the right.  And the colonialists correctly predicted that  if this were to go on, we would get the left that we now have – one of the many strange facts one encounters if one reads old books.  Reading the works of and about Garnet Wolsely we find that when the British subjugated the Boers, this was the left conquering the right, with a view to eventually producing today’s black ruled South Africa, which the right predicted would be the way that it is in fact turning out to be.

The Google suppression of the past is not in itself directly politically biased, old left texts are not obviously privileged above old right texts, but it is politically biased in that the texts of the past are all non left by modern standards, and tend to discredit the politically correct version of history, so if you suppress old books on the basis of age without regard to their political content, you are suppressing the non left, since old books are mostly non left, and new books are mostly left.

Kim Standley Robinson, moves from far left in 1992 to frothing at the mouth insane left in 1997:

In his 1992 fiction book “Red Mars”, regrettably over-idealistic environmentalists harm people who are trying to develop and settle Mars, harm people who are trying to make it habitable to humans.

In his 1997 fiction book, “Antarctica”, evil developers seeking to develop and settle Antarctica harm idealistic environmentalists

In “Lucifer’s Hammer”, written in 1978  by Niven and Pournelle, civilization collapses, there is famine, and people start eating people  The cannibals are not especially black, even though realistically, it is likely that the cannibals would be disproportionately black.  The only guy who suggest that there might be a correlation between cannibalism and blackness is the horribly prejudiced ignorant hick.

In Lucifer’s hammer the authors are careful to make the proportion of blacks among the cannibal army exactly and precisely the same proportion as blacks are a percentage of the US population, nonetheless today the book is deemed utterly outrageous and horribly reactionary for having any black cannibals whatsoever.  Observe that in today’s collapse of civilization books, all cannibals are white.

“Clone High” 2002-2003 is a cartoon series.  It ridicules political correctness.  In episode 11, “Snowflake Day; A very special holiday” Christmas has been banned, replaced by a silly made up festival “Snowflake day”.  Snowflake Day is celebrated in large part by telling everyone how hate filled and exclusionary Christmas was – which of course reveals that Snowflake day, not Christmas, is hate filled and exclusionary, reveals the intolerance of “tolerance”.   Again, I don’t see any recent mainstream works making such criticism.

All the clones in Clone High have foster parents instead of real parents.  Clone JFK has two daddies, which family, consisting of a teenage heterosexual boy, and two male homosexuals, is presented as vile, disgusting, ugly, perverse, unnatural, and disturbing, ridiculing the political correctness of “Heather has two mommies”.  His two daddies  display stereotypical gay behavior, which stereotypes these days would be deemed hateful and hurtful.

Kage Baker’s company series, for example “The Life of the World To Come”, supposes that over the next three hundred years, political correctness will become ever more severe and oppressive – the background is “If this goes on”.  In 2004 it was possible for novelists to condemn political correctness as oppressive and still get published by mainstream publishers.  No longer.

The science fiction writer John Ringo is pretty far right, as is obvious in his earlier books.  In “The Last Centurion” published in 2008 by a mainstream publisher, a military coup saves the US from the excesses of democracy.  Like Sulla, though with considerably less bloodshed, the military officers then restore the old republic and resign.  The book optimistically promises that this restoration, unlike Sulla’s, will last.  Could he publish that today?  Let us look at what he is publishing today:

In “Live Free or Die”, published 2010, he tries very hard to contain his right wing slant, and play straight down the middle with obligatory bows to political correctness, piously endorsing the official line with amusingly transparent insincerity.  Unfortunately, he committed the unpardonable sin of a few lines about stereotypical blondes.

So, alas, the sequel (“Citadel”, published 2011) has to have as its main character a counter stereotypical blonde female.   In the sequel, the rhetoric about freedom mysteriously mutates into anticolonialist, or decolonist, rhetoric, perhaps because merely having a counter stereotypical blonde as main character is insufficient penance  for making a joke about blondes.

Writers are steadily moving left – each writer as time passes by produces works that are far the left of his previous works, reflecting what is politically acceptable at that time.  The early Keith Laumer ridiculed democracy.  The later Keith Laumer did not.  In “The Governor of Glave”, published 1963, he seems to take it for granted that everyone knows that democracy is a corrupt system run by people who are foolish, ignorant and evil.  The planet Glave is what we would now call a terraformed planet. Earthlike conditions are maintained by some big high technology superscience machinery.  The elite rules over their inferiors, but are  getting tired of providing their inferiors with bread, circuses, and earthlike conditions.  Most of the elite has left for a frontier world  less infested with inferior welfare parasites.  There is a democratic coup against the remaining elite.  Finding  democracy even less attractive, most of the remaining elite attempt to leave and/or go on Galt strike.  The evil democrats refuse to let them  leave, and force them to work under armed guard.

The heroic Retief arranges for their escape.  As they escape, we see terraforming collapsing and the planet starting to revert to its natural inhospitable condition.

Similarly, in Keith Laumer’s “The prince and pirate” 1964, the Prime minister and his party are vile treacherous cowardly scum.  The prince is kingly and the pirate is bold and martial.  Retief makes a deal between the prince and the pirate, which results in the prime minister being killed, something unpleasant happening to his party, and the prince becoming an absolute monarch.

The nearest thing to an anti democratic novel in recent times is “The Last Centurion”, where the military restrain the excesses of democracy – but they then, like Sulla, leave politics so that democracy can continue, whereas the prince in “The prince and pirate” permanently ends democratic politics by killing quite a lot of politicians.  We just don’t see novels that unashamedly support technocracy, monarchy, or aristocracy any more.

“The Last Centurion” is far to the left of “The prince and the Pirate”,  “Live Free or Die” far to the left of “The Last Centurion”, and “Citadel” far to the left of “Live Free or Die”.   I am pretty sure that anything written by John Ringo is as right wing as anything a major author dare publish, and what he publishes indicates that the rightmost thing that a major author can publish gets further left every year.

Just as affirmative action makes the differences between blacks and whites starkly visible to everyone at the same time as it makes it a criminal offense to notice, or even think about, those differences, law enforcement that primarily targets the honest and productive similarly makes the differences between the honest and productive, and those born to welfare to live on their votes, starkly visible to everyone.

The propensity to commit crime is extremely sensitive to the level of enforcement. A modest tightening of enforcement, such as Singapore with its floggings and swift justice, reduces crime by a factor of a hundred or a thousand. The punishments in Singapore are not hundred times more severe, nor is justice a hundred times swifter, but crime is reduced by more than a hundred fold.

The fact that some societies have no difficult in reducing crime to zero for all practical purposes, reducing it to levels so insignificant as to have eliminated it for all practical purposes, shows that the supply of crime is extremely elastic to the price of crime.

In such an environment, only the most exceptionally criminally inclined are likely to misbehave. La Griffe Du Lion’s analysis shows that though the typical black is criminally inclined, and the typical white is not, the exceptionally and extraordinarily criminally inclined individual is typically white, not black. Just as very smart people are overwhelmingly male, due to the greater male variance in IQ, very criminal people are overwhelmingly white. When we see niggers chimping out en masse, they are doing stupid stuff – minor assaults. Black flash mobs are seldom deadly. Nothing anyone did in this video would be surprising or disturbing if a single white individual did it. What is surprising and disturbing is a mob doing it. What is disturbing is not the edge of the black bell curve, but the center.

Singapore does not allow us to test this theoretical prediction, because by and large, they just don’t let black people in, however the America of the past does allow us to test this prediction, since back then, most crimes would get you immediately hung from a tree. Consistent with this prediction, we read Nehemiah Adams in “A Southside View of Slavery” telling us how peaceable and well behaved negroes are. Similarly, Froude in “The Bow of Ulysses” never pays the slightest attention to whether or not he is in an all black area. Carlyle in “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” remarks on how negroes thrive under white rule and are made into good people, and argues that God and/or Nature makes it the duty of whites to so rule backs for the good of their souls, and if not so ruled, blacks will prey upon each other.

But obviously rule by today’s whites does not benefit today’s blacks – indeed state policy is to turn everyone, regardless of race, into underclass, in order to move the electorate left. If everyone, regardless of race, are pimps, whores, and thieves, they will reliably vote for the sort of politics that the good and the great know they should vote for.

The solution, therefore, is not separation of whites and blacks, but just, efficient, and swift law enforcement, preferably with offenders hanging by their necks from trees, something that democracy is unlikely to provide us because we have wound up with rule by those who steal the money of the productive to buy themselves the electorate they want. And the electorate that they want is on display in the above video.

Hwan Lewi:

How about ‘atheocracy’? It should be instantly recognizable as derivative of ‘theocracy’ and thus retain most of the descriptive and shock value, and it gets around the deism/non-deism issue.

From now on, atheocracy it is. In addition to being clear, it avoids pissing off those reactionaries who favor a genuinely Christian theocracy.

Digressing, I fully agree that that a genuinely Christian theocracy would be a good system. I also think that a theocracy genuinely based on the pagan religion of the early Roman monarchical period would be a good system.

The Roman monarchy worked fine when the King was elected for life by the Senate and the people of Rome, and endorsed by the Gods. When the Gods started to bend to whatever the prevailing wind was, the monarchy started to become corrupt and decadent. So Kings were removed. Thus began the Roman Republic. Elections were now more much more frequent. This worked fine for a while, but almost immediately the Republic started an ever leftwards drift, which soon became intolerable – so intolerable that the army stopped tolerating it.

The leftward drift was abruptly reversed by Sulla, who implemented a hard reset similar to that advocated by Mencius Moldbug and restored the old Republic. The restored old republic worked fine for a generation, but this failed to fix things permanently, since the reset led to a drift to military dictatorship. One generation later, civil war resumed and dictatorship followed.

So I am trying to crowdsource some less confusing terminology.

Without the word “theocracy”, how does one concisely explain why society moves ever leftwards?

One way around this problem is to use the concept of a ruling clerisy, since the word “clerisy” has in the past been used to refer to what is in common in the exercise of political power by priests and bishops, and the exercise of political power by journalists, academics, and intellectuals.

Trouble is that “clerisy”, when used unironically, merely means the class of learned persons, when what we want to refer to is the class of persons learned in the state supported and state supporting belief system. Obviously we want the ironic meaning of clerisy – the class of ignorant brainwashed but officially credentialed holders of officially true opinions, the class of people learned only in political reliability.

So “clerisy” like “theocracy” brings in unwanted meanings.

So could anyone who does not like my use of the word “theocracy” try to come up with an explanation of why the left always wins and the right always loses is, using different words?

“Coordination Problem” is treating this as a deep and puzzling mystery.  Obviously they have not been reading Moldbug.

Leftism is a form of theocracy. The state endorses the belief system, and the belief system endorses the state. The priests (the Ivy league professoriat) get power and the state gets power. Indeed, since there is no fixed doctrine or direction of leftism, it is merely theocracy. Any theocracy is in a sense leftism, which is why leftists are so fond of Islamists – but since Islamists, unlike leftists, do have a fixed and definite doctrine, an unchanging holy book, they do not return the affection.

Leftism is the state, and the state is the left. Leftism is the state at prayer.

Naturally, those who intend to remake society in their interests, adhere to the faction that has been successful in remaking society in their interests. The left is simply the gang that has been winning, and so keeps on winning, while the right is whoever is getting run over by the bandwagon. The process is inexorably self accelerating.

Leftists are confident that Islamism has no fixed essence, that Islam can be whatever leftists would like it to be, because leftists have no fixed essence.

Most theocracies do have a fixed essence – because those without a fixed essence destroy themselves quite rapidly. In a theocracy the way to power is always to be holier than the next guy, to be lefter than thou, and if the religion does not have a book and immutable doctrine to anchor it, this results in doctrine becoming ever more extreme and ever more crazy.

Leftists project onto Christianity their own theocracy, and onto Islam their own fluidity. When they see Muslims taking “moderate” positions, for example the Muslim brotherhood’s gradualism, they conclude that Muslim brotherhood is well on the way to being progressive, but in reality the Muslim brotherhood’s gradualism is Mohammed’s gradualism. Mohammed favored the salami slicer procedure for eradicating opponents, so favoring more abrupt repression of heretics does not make a Muslim more Muslim than a gradualist, whereas favoring more abrupt repression of heretics does make a leftist lefter than a gradualist.

Leftists tend to be staggeringly ignorant of cultures and societies different from their own, since any actual knowledge of such societies is likely to be politically incorrect, or have politically incorrect implications. Since the way to power is to sincerely and loyally believe every single one of ten thousand points of ever shifting leftist doctrine, and reality is apt to contradict leftist doctrine, the way to power is to avoid knowing the difference between shit and beans. Even if reality fails to contradict today’s leftist doctrine, it might contradict tomorrow’s, so knowing reality can get you into trouble. Perhaps tomorrow it will be necessary to believe that beans remain unchanged after passage through a mule, in which case should you have ever believed otherwise, you will be a global warming denier or something equally heinous.

It is always safe, and apt to be profitable, to be lefter than thou, whereas right wing deviation is apt to be punished. This has been the case for a couple of hundred years. Even when slavery was in effect, it was apt to be hazardous to argue in favor of slavery, while very safe, and wonderfully respectable, to argue against it, and to argue for the dignity of the negro race, the inherent equality of women, that labor and the poor are oppressed. Dickens was wonderfully respectable, taking the safe, respectable, and popular position. Carlyle was not. In a conspicuous display of affirmative action the reasonably literate black schoolteacher John Jacob Thomas was in 1869 paraded around London as a brilliant intellectual, like a monkey dressed in a business suit – not primarily because he was a reasonably intelligent counter stereotypical black man, but because he was a reasonably intelligent counter stereotypical black leftist. And if anyone doubted the supposed brilliance of John Jacob Thomas, it cannot be because Thomas really was not all that bright, it must be because the doubter hates blacks and favors slavery. The doctrine first enunciated by Thomas is still around as Ebonics, and to doubt what we now call Ebonics was as hazardous back then as it is now.

And indeed, by and large the doubters did favor slavery, in the sense that they believed that blacks needed white rule for their own good or they would revert to savagery. And by and large, the doubters were right. For example, when the whites fled the Congo, cannibalism and genocide returned. Since the progressive finds it perfectly obvious that blacks are on average precisely equal to whites, and woman on average precisely equal to men in every respect, there can be no reason for doubting this other than hatred of blacks and desire to harm them. And thus, if one makes unkind remarks about women’s driving and parking skills, one will on most blogs be promptly banned, lest your horrid hatred of womankind causes trouble for the blog owner.

The good leftist will not only perfectly confident that women are just as good at driving as men, he will also be agnostic as to the difference between beans and shit, just it case that too becomes a point of leftist doctrine.

Does this mean we are doomed to always and forever move ever leftwards? Of course not. Trees do not grow to the sky. They grow to a certain height, then fall over. But we will move ever leftwards until we run into crisis and collapse. Chances are that democracy and the United States will end before the ever leftwards movement ends. Predicting when a tree will fall is chancy, but predicting that a tree will fall is certain. If you are in bus moving at high speed, and the driver is blind and insane, the bus will stop eventually.

Absent patriarchy, humans predominantly mate on the lek system.

In monogamy and polygyny children have natural fathers. In lekking, the don’t. Today, most children do not live with their father. Therefore, lekking is the today predominant system, not monogamy, not serial monogamy, not polygyny.

Lekking.

In general, a species that leks will obviously produce fewer offpring than a monogamous species, about half as many. Hence the fall in fertility.

In the general span of history surveyed by Udwin in “Sex and Culture”, societies that reproduce by lekking disappear, while monogamous societies expand and overwhelm their neighbors.

Strangely, the summary neglects to inform us about what happens to the passengers and cars of women drivers.

Supposedly the crashes are “comparable” – but if female crashes are comparable to male crashes, should not women passengers also have a higher injury rate than male passengers?  To ascertain whether the crashes are comparable, what we really need is data on passengers of women drivers, as compared to passengers of male drivers.

If the cause of the problem is that women are fragile, that should be easy to detect.  In an accident, males in the car would be at lower risk than females in the same car – the sex of the driver should be irrelevant.  That the problem is driver related suggests that the cause of the problem is that women tend to be terrible drivers.

Most of Occupy Wall Street have no demands at all – they are just astroturf, like the grotesquely well paid “striking” employees of the City of Oakland, sent by the the Mayor to join the protest on full pay.  The protestors did not block the Port, rather the Mayor told her port employees not to show up for work.  They were “blockading” an operation that had been shut down by the Mayor.  It was confrontation theater, the appearance, but not the substance, of confrontation.

Yet there is real rage:  Of course, at the protests, hard to tell the real rage from the choreographed rage, though when they smash up a Whole Foods shop or a Men’s warehouse, obviously there is some real rage. Rage is perhaps more evident in the art world, where official artists blessed by the government as real artists (unlike mere kitsch peddlers who have to humbly rely on people voluntarily choosing to buy their stuff) tend to produce utter garbage, to show their contempt for the bourgeoisie that are forced to pay them, the San Jose dog turd being an infamous example.  The message of the San Jose dog turd is “I can shit on you, proving I am more powerful and important than you are.”  The dog turd statue is spittle directed at la bourgeoisie.

The TSA conveys a similar message:  “We can capriciously humiliate you and degrade you, and you dare not resist, or even complain, so we are powerful and you are powerless.”  Obviously security should be given back to the control and discretion of the airlines, and in particular, the captain should carry a gun, and have final decision making authority over security.  No one dares propose abolishing the TSA, even though it is obvious that such abolition would be hugely popular.

Most real Americans think that money is status, think a wealthy guy is high status, though unless he is rich enough to fly by private jet, he gets the TSA treatment like everyone else, and probably with knobs on, since the TSA does not like wealthy Americans.  A lot of George Washington’s resentment of the British may have been that though he had land, money, education, and military experience demonstrating courage, leadership, and competence, the British did not consider him a gentleman, and since he was not a gentleman, felt his money and land to be rather illegitimate and improper.  The “Occupy Wall Street” mob view the wealth of the productive with disdain similar to that with which the British viewed Sam Adams.

One striking difference between the “Occupy Wall Street” mob and real Americans is that the the “Occupy Wall Street” mob thinks that only the virtue industry is high status:  They think that only their inferiors should degrade themselves by producing goods or services that la bourgeoisie actually want and are willing to pay for.  They think a low paid job in the virtue industry is higher status than a rich man who produces what la bourgeoisie actually want.  Their vision of their personal bailout is not that the government bails them out by giving them a well paid job, but that the government bails them out by giving them a virtue industry job, a job where they get to morally or culturally improve their inferiors whether their inferiors like it or not.

The politicians do not rule, merely compete for the job of public relations officer for the permanent and fireproof government employees.   Government employees were made fireproof to supposedly depoliticize the public service, yet somehow recruitment has become more political than ever it was, as illustrated by the infamous Department of Justice, the EPA, and the SEC.  The “Occupy Wall Street” mob reveals these people who rule us are inferior to us, dislike us, and like to harm us.

A real change of government would require a mass political purge of government employees.

… we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse  of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of  political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds  of reality television and popular entertainment

… how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change,  evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?

When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s  and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration:   We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads  in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde  in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. …

… One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career.…

… In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and  a half.
…

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, …

Incomes, stalled since 1973, are now falling, across the board, afflicting all income quintiles, with no end in sight. Japan has been in decline for over a decade. There is no reason to think that this decline will end until its causes are remedied – and if never remedied, we may well wind up like so many vanished civilizations before us.

Since the decline effects all of society, every aspect of society, we have the luxury of looking of looking for causes where the light is best.

Let us look at three well studied instances of decline:   the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, Wikipedia, and Washington Mutual.  I did not select these cases because they all support my thesis, but because they are conspicuous and good information is available for what went wrong.

1. The space Shuttle Explosion

   Low ranking engineers explained to their superiors in detail that the Challenger would explode if launched in cold weather and explained in detail how and why it would explode, but the high ranking “engineers” neither understood nor believed.

   Chairman Rogers: Well, let’s read it. “Loss of mission” – this is actual loss.

   “Failure effects summary: Actual loss. Loss of mission, vehicle and crew due to metal erosion, burn-through, and probable case burst, resulting in fire and deflagration.”

   …
   Mr. Mulloy: But about halfway through, after we had looked at all of the data, the conclusion and recommendation charts that Mr. Lundhad prepared came in and the logic for his recommendation, which did not specifically address don’t launch 51-L, what itsaid was that, within our experience base we should not operate any solid rocket motor at any temperature colder than we have previously operated one, which was 51-C.

   Chairman Rogers: Didn’t you take that to be a negative recommendation?

   Mr. Mulloy: Yes, sir. That was an engineering conclusion, which I found this conclusion without basis and I challenged its logic.

   Mulloy then repeats over and over again that he was not able to understand the explanation of why the shuttle was going to blow up, from which he concluded not that he was an idiot, but the engineers telling him it was going to blow up were idiots.

   “And this was a rather surprising conclusion, based upon data that didn’t seem to hang together, and so I challenged that.”

   Further, in describing how it did blow, he reveals he still does not understand the explanation of how it did blow up. In other words, he is an idiot, and, being too stupid to understand why the space shuttle was going to explode, and not wanting to believe it was going to explode, insisted on it being launched. Mulloy not only did not understand why the space shuttle was going to explode, but after it exploded, and the cause of the explosion had been found, studied, and explained again step by step, still did not understand how it exploded.

   So how is it that Mr Mulloy, and people like him, who do not know $#!% shit from beans, are in charge of people who knew and understood stuff?

2. Wikipedia

   Wikipedia has less information, and less useful information, than it used to.  This reflects its policy of presenting the official view on everything.  Where there is no official view, facts tend to get deleted as unsupported, or not encyclopedic, or some such.  Truth and knowledge is supposedly what comes from universities and the mainstream media.  If not in the universities or the mainstream media, is supposedly not truth. This leads to particularly bitter contention in political fields like climate science, evolutionary psychology, race, and Darwinism, but causes widespread damage in many non political fields, for example on computer science, since the vast majority of computer science knowledge is not academic.

   Contributors are instructed:  “Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, not an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook. Wikipedia articles should not read like … instruction manuals. ”

   When I look something up related to computer science, it is normally because I am working on a project, and need to know how to do something, so I need something that reads like an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook.  Further, anyone who knows computer science stuff is usually an engineer, so is apt to write like a textbook or instruction manual.  The effect and application of the not-a-manual rule is to prohibit contributions from people who actually do stuff, which contributions they intend to share with other people who actually do stuff, in favor of contributions by people who do not do stuff, and are incapable of doing stuff – which is to say, in favor of academic knowledge.

3. Washington Mutual

   Washington Mutual was able to take over many other better run banks, not because shareholders had confidence in Washington Mutual, but because regulators had confidence in Washington Mutual willingness to enthusiastically hurl vast amounts of money in the general direction of desired voting blocks. Kerry Killinger, CEO of Washington Mutual, became rich and powerful in substantial part through his cozy relationship with left wing activist organizations such as Acorn, which enabled him to control regulators as much as it reflected the fact that regulators controlled him.

   Washington Mutual took out ads condemning themselves for racism, and was given a bunch of other, more soberly run banks, to loot and destroy.

   Banks were told by regulators: “Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor … In reviewing past credit problems,  lenders should be willing to consider extenuating circumstance”

   If a bank prevented people with no credit history from borrowing, this was a practice with “disparate impact” – which is “Raaaacism”. “Disparate impact” means you cannot apply standards at which non Asian minorities fail disproportionately – such as having documented income, a past history of paying their bills, and so on and so forth.

   When your regulator tells you that you “should” make easy money loans, you will make easy money loans, or suffer dire punishment.  And indeed, banks that did not make easy money loans did suffer dire punishment – they got taken over by Washington Mutual and its merry band of idiots.

   It is clear that Kerry Killinger and Angelo Mozilo sincerely believed that lending unemployed no-hablo-english wetbacks money to buy million dollar houses no money down was a good idea. They conned everyone of gigantic amounts of money, but their biggest victims were themselves and their banks.

   They did not pretend to believe in order to become rich and powerful, rather the regulatory apparatus efficiently selected stupid people who sincerely believed stupid things to become rich and powerful. If their beliefs had been feigned and cynical, a lot more of the disappeared money would have stuck to them.

   That Kerry Killinger was quite genuinely stupid was also demonstrated by the inability of Countrywide and Washington Mutual to manage their paperwork. Many of the titles that passed through their hands now have no paper trail showing who is the rightful owner, which suggests that bank was for the most part staffed by people whose IQ was below 105.

   Because political correctness requires stupid beliefs, selection for people who are sincerely politically correct, such as Kerry Killinger, selects stupid people, who in turn hire and promote other stupid people, so that no one in his bank could do a banker’s paperwork.

This is consistent with Codevilla’s analysis:  That that we are ruled by a ruling elite, credentialed but not educated by the very best universities, that is increasing narrow, ignorant, out of touch, and stupid!

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language – serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. …

…regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government.…

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity – being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.…

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. … But didn’t our [ruling elite] go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades?  … getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

We have statistical evidence that our ruling elite selects people who fit in at the expense of ability – that people who are excessively able in unappreciated ways do not fit in.

Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”

all other things being equal, being an officer in the ROTC is likely to get you excluded from a prestigious university – any fool can see that political correctness counts more than ability or experience – whether in college admissions, or Obama’s picks for the federal reserve, or the post of CEO of HP, people are chosen primarily for their theology not their ability.

Codevilla continues:

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what amounts to indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting unequivocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

This means that there really is no private enterprise any more. Everything is to a greater or lesser extent run by the ruling elite – and the ruling elite is not very bright, and is steadily getting dumber.

If someone is important and under pressure to perform (perhaps the board, being composed of major shareholders, wants the CEO to make a profit and will fire him if he does not) he will surround himself with the smartest people he can get – the Google policy. But if he is under no pressure to perform, he will prefer that those lower in status than him are not quite as bright as he is, other wise he is apt to find himself in the uncomfortable position of Mr Mulloy, wherein a low status person explains why he is wrong about something, and he fails to understand the explanation. Since our ruling elite exclusively works in fields where there is no pressure to perform it naturally finds itself more comfortable inducting new members of the ruling elite that are dumber than the existing members, so that with each generation, our ruling elite gets stupider and stupider. Once upon a time, the ruling elite was kept smart by the continual infusion of smart people from business, and was prevented from declining by an hereditary elite, but now, completely self enclosed, and under no pressure to perform, a purported meritocracy by slow degrees becomes an idiocracy.

I predict that wherever membership of the government bureaucracy is controlled by some meritocratic test, the test will be subverted to that it no longer has much to do with intelligence, because bureaucrats do not much like smart people.

Observe that even at Google, though they get the smartest engineers that they can, they have a very different policy for other parts of the company. Those that might have to deal with the state, are selected to fit in, and if you are dangerously smart, you are unlikely to fit in.

We are in decay because the our ruling elite, including our top scientists (who are not really scientists, but rather a priesthood who preach pseudo scientific rationales for whatever our rulers desire to do), are steadily getting dumber and dumber.