The Dissolution of the Modern World.

bernieTrump

Richard Fernandez, as usual, has an excellent post on how the modern society we inhabit is wearing out.

One of the arguments for the impossibility of an event is lack of previous failure. “It never failed before and thus can never fail ever”. The Washington Post’s editorial board invokes a variant of this logic to refute Donald Trump’s border policy, arguing there are so many illegal immigrants it is too expensive to deport them all, leaving no alternative but to accept more.

Naturally, the WaPo is certain they know what could happen.

A useful case study is California, whose economy accounts for about 13 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and whose 2.6 million undocumented workers include almost a tenth of the state’s workforce.

For starters, the state’s farms and orchards, where a third to a half of agricultural workers are undocumented, would be crippled.

The state of California has already devastated the state’s farms and orchards by shutting off irrigation water to save a bait fish in the Sacramento Delta.

The Golden State’s agricultural industry has suffered dramatically under the drought, which cost the industry $1.5 billion in 2014, according to a University of California Davis study. Last year alone, farmers idled more than 400,000 acres of farmland amid abnormally dry conditions, the study added. Farmers primarily rely on the state’s snowpack to irrigate their crops, and it has been reduced to just 8 percent of its historic average.

The drought is one that California sees every decade or so but the state has not added any water conservation systems as its population doubled the past 30 years. Instead the governor is pushing a high speed rail system that goes nowhere important and will cost, in an early and inadequate estimate, $65 billion. How many desalination plants could that build ?

California is in the midst of a crippling four-year-old drought. Yet the state has built almost no major northern or central mountain reservoirs since the New Melones Dam of 1979. That added nearly 3 million acre-feet to the state’s storage reserves – a critical project that was almost canceled by endless environmental lawsuits and protests.

Although California has almost doubled in population since the dam’s construction, the state’s politicians apparently decided that completing more northern and Sierra Nevada water projects was passé. So the parched state now prays for rain and snow rather than building reservoirs to ensure that the next drought won’t shut us down.

The open borders lobby can see no problem in importing 10% of Mexico and the least educated 10% at that. I spent ten years reviewing workers’ compensation claims. About half of those claims were for Hispanics and about half of them were Mexican born and almost certainly illegal. They generally claimed to have completed second grade in Mexico and most were illiterate in Spanish, let alone English.

Social engineers are running this country these days and Fernandez is not impressed.

Social engineers are members of the first school of thought and are typically surprised by unprecedented events viewing them as perverse. For example the Washington Post notes the shock of rising and virulent xenophobia in Germany, something heretofore thought to be extinct since the end of the Second World War. ”Germany unnerved by scores of xenophobic attacks against refugees.” The past should continue indefinitely. Failure can be due only to wreckers.

By contrast, physical engineers — unlike their social counterparts — are not the slightest bit surprised when structures which have stood for a long time suddenly collapse.

He provides the example of the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed a few years ago, “unexpectedly” in spite of years of inspections that ranked it as dangerous.

However, social engineers have no concept of fatigue. They do not understand that “damage is cumulative. Materials do not recover when rested.” Instead they believe in the principle of “acceptance” or legitimization where not only does material recover when rested, it recovers even when it is not rested. For example, president Obama, fresh from his campaign to legitimize gay marriage announced the appointment of the first openly transgender White House staff member.

The assault on the culture is one factor that has created the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

One of the first exponents of social engineering were the 20th century Socialist totalitarianisms. The USSR attempted to entirely remake the Jews of Central Asia. “We’ll change henceforth the old tradition,” they declared. They also tried the forced collectivization program from 1928 to 1940. China in turn tried the Great Leap Forward, to name a few such experiments.

The results were rather disappointing. Instead of behaving as social engineers predicted, these experiments behaved like the I-35W, collapsing in a ruin which consumed the lives of untold millions. Nothing daunted, the intellectual heirs of the USSR have moved to the West, convinced that its greater resources will guarantee success this time.

We are currently watching the destruction of an entire civilization by those who do not realize that humans are not experimental animals. The result of poorly planned interventions in north Africa and the middle east, a surge of immigrants is flooding Europe and leading to violent scenes. Thousands are drowning as over-loaded ships capsize.

In announcing that Spain would install concertina wire on top of the border fences last fall, the Spanish government said that the number of immigrants trying to scale the fences had increased by about 50 percent in early 2013. Recent figures confirm that. Last year 4,235 immigrants arrived by land, compared with 2,841 the year before, government officials said. In the past few weeks, the assaults have continued on a regular basis, the men sometimes wearing homemade gloves to protect their hands.

The assault on the culture continues.

social engineers have no concept of fatigue. They do not understand that “damage is cumulative. Materials do not recover when rested.” Instead they believe in the principle of “acceptance” or legitimization where not only does material recover when rested, it recovers even when it is not rested. For example, president Obama, fresh from his campaign to legitimize gay marriage announced the appointment of the first openly transgender White House staff member.

Social engineers generally do not study physics or math and have little understanding of biology. Many are devotees of Stephen Jay Gould and his concept of The “Blank Slate” in humans who are infinitely malleable. It didn’t work in the USSR, but they are undeterred.

Stephen Pinker tries to explain.

The book is called “The Blank Slate,” based on the popular idea that the human mind is a blank slate, and that all of its structure comes from socialization, culture, parenting, experience. The “blank slate” was an influential idea in the 20th century. Here are a few quotes indicating that: “Man has no nature,” from the historian Jose Ortega y Gasset; “Man has no instincts,” from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu; “The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none,” from the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould.

There are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate, and some of them just come from common sense.

Common sense is in short supply among the political left and the Social Justice Warriors. What we are seeing is the fatigue of social cohesion that is being stressed to the point of failure.

A few examples.

1. Virtue Signaling and Black Lives Matter.

2. Gay Marriage and the accompanying harassment of the religious.

3. The Global Warming Hoax.

4. Rape Culture and the hysteria about sexual harassment on college campuses.

The list can go on and I am not trying to be Cassandra here.

We are reaching a cultural failure point and Trump maybe the leading indicator.

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