Systemic, Institutional Rot. By Ilana Mercer.
Some blame a quasi-free-market in electricity for the collapse of the electrical grid in Texas … Opposing opinion has it that an excessive reliance on renewable energy sources, like wind turbines, was the culprit …
All agree that the oil-and-gas state [of Texas] enjoys both cheap natural gas and abundant wind power and that its natural resources could have stood Texas in good stead.
The Lone Star State’s human resources are another matter entirely.
Be they wind turbines or gas pipelines; the electrical grid has to be properly maintained. Texas, however, lacked “leadership.” It transpires that the grid had not been weatherized or winterized in anticipation of a harsh winter — pipelines had not been insulated and wind turbines never deiced.
Leadership is a euphemism for intelligence. Texas in the winter of 2021 will likely be looked upon as a case of systemic stupidity; systemic rot.
Things start to fall apart when the best-person-for-the-job ethos gives way to racial and gender window-dressing and to the enforcement of politically pleasing perspectives.
Likewise has the emergency personnel managing the blackouts for the nation’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, joined California’s political leadership to deliver third-world quality service to Californians.
When it is reported that, “Among the hundreds of people who handled the blackouts from Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s emergency operations center, only a handful had any training in the disaster response playbook that California has used for a generation” — that is a fancy way of saying:
Affirmative action.
It doesn’t help that the American Idiocracy is moving at breakneck speed to equate merit-based institutions with institutionalized racism.
Or, think about it like this: When merit-based hiring is deemed racist, bridges fall down. …
It started with NASA around the time they got to the moon. NASA stopped being impressive then.
When spanking new bridges collapse, trains on maiden trips derail (Washington-State Amtrak trains, in 2018 and 2015), Navy ships keep colliding (USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald in 2017) and police and FBI failure and bad faith become endemic — a picture emerges of a sprawling country, the USA, in which indeed the best-person-for-the-job ethos has given way to racial and gender window-dressing. …
South Africa shows the way:
The reality into which America’s deformed social reformers have thrust us is better understood with reference to the cautionary tale of South Africa …
South Africa’s gutted institutions were meant to serve as a harbinger of things to come in the U.S. Ten years since Into the Cannibal’s Pot’s publication, evidence abounds that societal institutions — state and civil — have been similarly hollowed out like husks. …
“[South Africa’s] electrical grid has been degraded at every level … Since distribution is now entrusted to the local, increasingly inept, authorities, candles and paraffin lamps have made a come-back in my home town of Cape Town as well as in other cities. Daily power outages affect industries and services across the country. Rolling blackouts — ‘load shedding’ is the local euphemism — are now as typical of Cape Town’s landscape as the tablecloth of clouds that cascades over the majestic Table Mountain. …
Eskom, the utility that supplied most of the electricity consumed on the African continent, did not run out of juice. It just ran out of experienced, skilled engineers, expunged pursuant to BEE [Black Economic Empowerment, aka affirmative action]. ‘No white male appointments for the rest of the financial year,’ reads an Eskom Human Resources memo, circulated in January of 2008 …
The same supple thinking went into destroying the steady supply of coal to the electricity companies. Bound by BEE policies, whereby supplies must be purchased from black firms first, Eskom began buying coal from the spot market. Buyers were to descend down the BEE procurement pyramid as follows: buy spot coal first from black women-owned suppliers, then from small black suppliers, next were large black suppliers, and only after all these options had been exhausted (or darkness descended; whatever came first), from “other” suppliers. The result was an expensive and unreliable coal supply, which contributed to the pervasive power failures.
That’s how to do it. Bowing to the wishes of the gimme-dats and parasites, instead of sticking strictly to a meritocracy, is just another form of corruption.
Demography is destiny. Not all human groups have identical statistical characteristics, even though it’s nice and PC to pretend otherwise.
