Posted on 12/29/2024 9:44:35 AM PST by Rummyfan
It is the twentieth anniversary of the famous Boxing Day tsunami, which swept a quarter-of-a-million people to their death. So for our new and invariably somewhat obnoxious feature - "As I said twenty years ago" - I thought I'd run a twenty-year-old column which, just for once, is not about everything I got right but about one big thing I got wrong.
Back then, I wrote about what seemed a fairly non-partisan assertion: the ability of America and its closest allies to get a grip on disaster and make things better very quickly. A decade or so later, I began advancing an alternative - my planes-dropping-from-the-sky nothing-works-anymore scenario. The United States takes its best and brightest and sends them to the planet's most elite institutions - not just Berkeley, but West Point - and comprehensively wrecks them. Then it takes all the plum jobs and parcels them out on the basis of non-competence, because of various favoured identity-group characteristics - for example, the non-binary kleptomaniac with the stolen cocktail dresses that showed off his fetching nuclear wasteline. But also, one should note, the woman who can't define a woman but who wound up on the Supreme Court because she is one - and a black woman at that, because Biden so promised. Black females make up two per cent of the American bar, meaning ninety-eight of the available talent pool were excluded from consideration. Sixty-six per cent of Biden's judicial picks have been non-white. In his second term, sixty-six per cent would have been non-binary. I don't like to think who'll be on the Supreme Court by the time my own lousy case makes it there.
When you start filling jobs on every criterion except whether the candidate can do it, it doesn't take long to reach the planes-dropping-from-the-sky scenario...
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
20 years. Seems like Yesterday. Awful event, it actually changed the length of a day . The undersea earthquake that caused this tsunami shortened the length of a day by about 6.8 microseconds and shifted the Earth’s axis by about 3 inches.
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Time goes by fast enough, thank you.
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