We hear some overzealous jackholes may be requiring proof of one getting vaxxed with an experimental set of vaccines with some pretty firm negatives running against them, for a non-zero number of people, just to be treated like first-class citizens in public again.
No sale, bucko. To quote no less an authority than Toni Basil,
"you think you've got the right, but I think you've got it wrong...".
We're not anti-vaxxers hereabouts, in any way whatsoever, as any number of left-handed backhands over the years to "Dr." Jenny McCarthy's egregious insanity would attest.
That doesn't apply for something wherein you are a lab rat beta-tester for Big Pharma, which has been immunized from lawsuits, with no recourse left you in case of adverse reactions, up to and including death.
F**k that, up the @$$, sideways, with a rusty running chainsaw.
On the other hand...
It's a big internet. If someone(s) were to take the above example of a mostly accurate but thoroughly spurious vaxx card (which we may or may not possess, to flash at any officious @$$hole who prods us for it, and which card, nota bene, is every bit as legitimate as voter registrations and ballot counting in Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Atlanta, Madison, and Las Vegas), and they put their own "information" in the blocks above, well, we wouldn't encourage that, and it might get you into trouble. But we'd have no way to stop them, would we...?
So please, don't do anything bad. 'kay?
Bitte schön.
Just saying.
(BTW, I think I've just hit upon my next telephone listing, if I ever get a published number again.)
Those alone are sheer genius. Wile E. Coyote this guy is not.
But then he decided, between Christmas anti-porch piracy patrols, to entertain himself the rest of the year by thwarting his neighborhood tree rats, and their predations on his backyard bird feeder. With his Backyard Squirrel Maze.
Absolute glorious silliness, coupled with world-class engineering. And in its first day up, 6M views on YouTube. These five videos, combined, are at over 250M views, so I think he's onto something.
The time for reasonable people, seeking peaceful solutions, is past. Anyone still preaching that line of nonsense now is either captured and propagandizing for Enemedia, or in delusional denial. Either way, abandon them. You can't save people who won't realize they're in a burning building, and don't want to get out of it.
Nota bene: The people waiting for a Fort Sumter moment forget, to their peril, that history echoes and rhymes, but it does not repeat.
Your first real notice may not be Fort Sumter; it may be Antietam or Gettysburg.
The current era is more akin to the Phony War from fall and winter of 1939, through early spring of 1940.
When weather conditions are right, it will be springtime for Hitler again, and you'll be facing blitzkrieg conditions.
There are any number of other songs of his I like better than this one, though it's definitely a rock classic, and yes, JB is a 70s hippie anti-nuke Leftard weenie, but he's cut some damn fine songs over the years. This one is for all you folks on the Hurricane Coast feeling the pinch right now every time you try to fill up the tank.
In response to yesterday's meme, and one of our comments, we received this little gem:
The Peace and Quiet of the smoking graveyard.
It's EASY to destroy stuff. Low IQ Antifa and Burn Loot murder has PROVEN that point well enough.
It's easy to destroy a country when you are Overseas and your family's is safe at home. I've done enough of that during my time in Uncle Sam's Army.
It's different when it's YOUR Smoking ruin of a home with your family strewed about beaten raped and dying while YOU were away going to work, going to church, going shopping for supplies.
A single crazy with a bottle of gasoline and your home with all your preps are smoking ruin eh?
THAT'S Rwanda X Bosnia in Real Life(tm).
And some dumbasses seem to be cheering for it? No offence but if the shoe fit's its on you.
First earthy duty is defending your family. Second in my heart is how to protect those folks I think deserve protecting.
Don't think that Clown World Morale Patch will stop me from popping a cap on you if your a danger to those I choose to protect.
As Ole Ben Franklin said "A Republic IF you can keep it", we failed.
As that Beatle Song Revolution goes, "We all want to SEE the plan".
If there is anything to do besides beat our chests about how bad ass we are blah, blah, blah let me know.
We can destroy infrastructure and kill 90% PLUS of our population, or we can fight a civil war and *Still* destroy our Infrastructure and lose 90% of our population.
The Marxist Monster is an Electronic Control Freak and KNOWS we will not pull the plug on our families survival. OR if we DO they have taxpayer paid for bolt holes to arise after the screaming and flames die down. THEY are Sociopaths'.
I see a series of EMP strikes a KINDNESS of 21+ days of struggling to survive VS years of seeing people wearing gasoline soaked flaming tires like Rwanda.
Praying for wisdom
I see your point, because I'd never once considered any of that in literal decades of thinking, until you made it clear.
You mean there could be, y'know, like...actual CONSEQUENCES?!?!?
Leviathan might not like being opposed?!?!? We might get in trouble???
Well, holy shitballs!!!
" ' Oh! We're afraid to go with you Blutto! We might get in trouble!'
But...wait. Now I can understand the wisdom of sitting on our hands and losing everything we have and everything we hold dear, because the most important thing on the planet is you, your family, your spouse, your kids, your home, your property.
FUCK those other 330,000,000 people, amirite?
(I cannot imagine how "we" ever lost a republic with that attitude prevalent.)
So, by all accounts, let's not make any fuss, because there might be a cost involved.
And, of course, we've never made any of those points far more fervently and eloquently, not any hundred times, but thank a merciful heaven someone else has dropped in to enlighten all of us.
We should all just quietly self-load onto the boxcars in an orderly manner, and pray to impotent deities to save us, because we're too afraid to use the backbones and our own biceps to save ourselves, because those weren't given to us for exactly that purpose.
That strongly worded protest? I was just kidding. Can I go home now?
Bravo, sir. Well played.
Let us know how that one works out for you.
And do have mercy on us poor dumb bastards, by letting us know just how far up our legs and ass we should cheerfully and blissfully let the crocodile snack, before we might have your gracious permission to maybe, possibly, perhaps, begin to commence to cogitate about thinking whether or not maybe firmer measures than a strongly worded letter to the editor (never to see the light of day) might be in order.
No offence [sic] but if the shoe fit's [sic] its [sic] on you.
Look, I'm sorry. Maybe you've been asleep for 100 years or something. Maybe you fell in a cave, and hit your head, and just got out after a year lost in the labyrinth. Maybe you've been in a medical coma for a decade. I don't know.
But just to catch you up on current events: The Germans bombed Pearl Harbor last November.
An entire presidential election was stolen in plain sight, with everyone watching, and it's so obvious even Stevie Wonder could see it from orbit in space. And then they doubled down, and tried to turn a panty raid into a revolution. And then doubled down again.
The Fourth Amendment's been in tatters for all of this century, and before. They've set the First Amendment on fire for the last six months and counting. Now they're coming after the Second Amendment, and the Third Amendment is the step after that. Let me know when the penny drops for you.
That's besides generational enemies worldwide sharpening their carving knives looking at the carcass of a once-great nation, the wholesale deliberate hamstringing and then gutting of the greatest military on the planet, and the imminent collapse of the entire world economy, starting, Gentle Reader, with your own little ricebowl, and your little patch of paradise on earth.
People have been yakking lately about the totally symbolic fart-in-a-hurricane letter from a bunch of impotent pensioned-off old-fart petty generals and admirals. You might have heard something.
It's all nothing but ass gas from people eating soft food and wearing Depends.
The letter they should have read was from Zombie Admiral Stark, piped in from 1941 via the Twilight Zone:
So maybe, stop acting like a Baby Duck, and realize that the time for pusillanimous appeasement and pants-wetting caution went up in flames waaaaaaaaaay back, and either pitch in or fall in to commence training to reverse that, or else just resolve to taste bad when they feed you to the lions.
Because for those willing to put it on the line, despite all the bad things that will precede it, the day pictured below always comes for Communism, as surely as sunrise after a long night:
No one's asking for your permission to get there.
Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.
Grownups are talking here, and you're not contributing anything but gravel in the transmission.
Guns are fun. But they're just tools. Sometimes lifesaving ones, but not really different from hammers or hacksaws. (The former are just effective farther away than the latter.)
Ammunition. Water. Food. Medicine. Any other consumable supplies? Those are commodities.
But something that's both a tool, and a consumable, and will get you all of the other things you could ever need, or want, is the indispensible item.
Money.
Nota bene we did not say "cash". Cash is nice, but it's not money. In fact, it's explicitly something commonly accepted by people AS IF IT WERE money, thus not money, per se.
Gold is money. Silver is money. Other precious metals (nickel, copper, platinum, etc.) can be money. US dollars (nor Euros, British pounds, Swiss francs, Japanese yen, etc.) are NOT money, and haven't been since they stopped being readily exchangeable for actual specie.
Other things (jewels, bonds, stocks) are worth money, but they aren't money either. Nobody prices gas or milk in gallons per carat, for instance.
So as you're stocking up on canned goods (both in #10 cans, and in olive drab ones), and storing water, fuel, and all sorts of consumables from pins to nails to bolts to lumber products - you are working on that, right? - make sure you're storing money. And cash. In a cache. Or ten.
[BTW? Cache? It's also pronounced cash. Not cashay. Don't sound like the prepper version of Dubbya when he talks about "nukular weapons". Cachet is a perfume. A cache is where you store stuff. They don't sound the same. Ever. Just saying.]
So part of your efforts should include adding "junk" silver (i.e. U.S. coinage prior to 1965, which is 90% silver by content), and gold (ideally in fractional ounce denominations - 1/10th oz., 1/4 oz., etc. - as coins worth $1800 and up for full ounces are a bit too concentrated for everyday items) to your stockpile(s). I made that plural, because you shouldn't keep all your nest eggs in one basket. In any sense.
And, as every devotee of Dave Ramsay knows, have a cash reserve.
Six months' gross income is a worthy goal. It gives you options, not least of which is "F**k You" money, to cope with a bad boss, a bad situation, or a bad location. Anything you can't solve with six months' cash is pretty much catastrophic levels of problem. Probably 90% of life's problems are readily solved by a six month float.
Any or all of this should be stored, safely and securely, and not in places or institutions that do not have your best interests in mind. IOW, safety deposit boxes suck. Try getting into yours after a disaster, or a bank run. Or after a tax lien. [Hint: It ain't happening. And you're therefore screwed. Possibly terminally. Think about that.]
A safety deposit box is for Grandmother's pearls, or items of personal and sentimental value, not necessarily of financial value. Anything in them can be seized, stolen, confiscated, etc., at times and means out of your knowledge or control. Thus it isn't safe in any sense. Except from you, not for you.
So your emergency cash stash should be ready to hand. It's your bugout bankroll, or most of it. Cash will likely solve most of your small problems, and still be accepted (howsoever briefly) in major disturbances to society. IOW, long enough for you to get from current home to safety, if they suddenly cease being one and the same place.
The melt value on a roll of silver dimes is currently about $100, btw. A shade under $2/@, at the moment. In 50 years, it will still be 50 pieces of 90% silver. The $100 in a crisp Benjamin will not be nearly as valuable in 50 years' time, or even in 20 years. Bet on that reality. Ignore that truth to your own financial peril.
FTR, US$100 in gold from 20 years ago is now over US$677 in gold. Put the other way, $100 in cash now, used to be $14.75 in cash the summer before 9/11. (An ounce of gold then was about $271, and it's $1,836 right this minute, for that same ounce.) That's how much inflation has destroyed your cash, even since 2001. Now see if you can guess why the price of everything goes up faster than your salary, and faster than Fedgov can print fiatbux, 3 shifts/day since ever. Gas at $4/gallon is frightful? It could just as easily be $27/gallon. Let that news settle in for a minute, and bathe your financial consciousness. Your savings and income is being inflated away towards Weimar/Zimbabwean rates of loss while you sit reading this. And it's only going to get worse from here on out.
Find some places you can stash small hoards of money. (Actual physical money, in your sole control. Some B.S. account where they show you a piece of paper, for gold not in your hand, is worth less than the paper and ink to make it.) And begin acquiring them, and stocking them appropriately.
Just, please, not in the same job. (I want the guy flying my plane, for instance, to be Jimmy Stewart, not Hardy Kruger nor Richard Attenborough. Especially in Flight Of The Phoenix.)
But my point remains that Heinlein was talking out his fourth point of contact, even as he wrote that bit about "Every human being should...". And he knew it when he wrote it. It was sociologically and entomologically a load of codswallop, from start to finish.
But JW's idea about everyone rewriting it for themselves? Genius.
My riff off of this one will probably be my own Notebooks Of Lazarus long - Aesop version.
Every human being should be able to swim a river, cross a river, make a target, shell a target, storm a beach, surf a beach, comb a beach, cause bleeding, stop bleeding, make a baby, deliver a baby, feed a baby, build a boat, sink a boat, salvage a boat, build a building, tear a building down, teach a lesson, learn a lesson, make money, save money, spend money, use language, speak another language, play an instrument, shovel bullsh*t, detect bullsh*t, win an election, subvert an election, lead people, follow people, ignore people, do the math, ignore the math, start a heart, stop a heart, know what matters, when it matters, why it matters, and when nothing matters.
Specialization is for everyone.*
But if I'm stocking a society, I'd rather have an army of people who specialize in generalization, than one of people who generalize in specialization. One looks like Renaissance men, the other looks like an army of eclectic autistic mediocrity.
And if I'm making a list of things that "Every human being should...", in order to bank the fires of civilization in darker times (which always curiously takes the form of setting fire to banks and living in the dark - weird, huh?) it wouldn't look anything like Heinlein's list. And he knew that too.
Every human being should be able to find water, store water, purify water, make fire, put out a fire, build shelter, hunt food, gather food, grow food, store food, preserve food, cook food, harm people, heal people, gather knowledge, disseminate knowledge, store knowledge, synthesize knowledge, build a city, take a city, run a farm, run a business, run a race, build a base, and propagate a race.
Or you're going to be a historical footnote.
And as I think of it, even his list wasn't that of a generalist; it was a list of things he could specialize in.
It was nothing like a list of things "every human being should" be able to do.
I have to wonder if Heinlein knew that too, and that knowledge was his Easter Egg Of Insight towards which he was leading the reader; or if he was actually that self-unaware.
Your contributions in Comments, sil vous plait.
*(For anybody interested, yes, I've done every one of those, and more, successfully, and far more, and as an adult. As have you too, in all likelihood.)
Dylan's return from seclusion and conversion to Christianity sparked this album, and this was the first single cut loose from it. Liked it then, love it now, and yet again, Bob's proven to have been prophetic once again, this time 40 years early: There is a Slow Train Coming, but it's going to get here, and you're gonna hafta serve somebody. You might as well put this one on endless repeat for the next few years.
The average time for a minor wound to heal is a week to 10 days. If you're also burdened with poor circulation or other health problems, or it's a more severe wound, your healing time goes up to two to six weeks.
With, at minimum, daily dressing changes.
That means your needs just went to from 10-40+ dressings, per wound.
So for an uncomplicated in-and-out penetrating flesh wound (gunshot, etc.), you're looking at perhaps 80 dressings for those changes until it's healed. Maybe more.
This isn't going to cut it.
Nor will even this.
So if you're any kind of serious about long-term care, for one or more people, you're talking buying case quantities of supplies: Gauze dressings in all sizes, bandage rolls, etc., plus skin cleansers, antiseptics, ointments, and antibiotics, in order to properly treat any and all emergencies that are likely to arise.
That's not an aid kit, nor an aid bag. It's more like a medical aid closet.
Let's be honest: you don't have to do that. Or at least, not that much.
Maybe everything will be fine, the ERs will always be open and empty, civilization will continue unhindered, and you can always get everything you need, in quantity, at affordable prices, forever (or at least until you die).
It's not like a looming global economic crisis, a pandemic, riots in the streets, or hurricanes, tornados, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, etc., are ever going to happen either, right?
And maybe they never will. I mean, just look at how wonderful everything is right now!
Then again, they just might be cause for some concern to some folks.
So along with the hardware, and the canned goods - both #10, plus olive drab - that you've loaded up on, you should probably start adding to your collection of medical items, and start thinking in terms of big 100s/500s bottles of tylenol, etc., and box and case quantities of various important items.
And in quantities sufficient to ensure repeat customers can be handled, for some goodly amount of time, if things get annoyingly but predictably bad.
Stored properly, their lifespan is measured in years to decades.
If you're not willing or able to do that, stock up on how-to manuals for Civil War era medicine and nursing. Oh, and one other thing.
Suture self.
Bonus Pro Tip:
While you're up, you might need to know the best way to do proper wound care and dressing changes.
So you might want to add a recent edition of something like this to your survival bookshelf.
About $40. Buy once, cry once. Or get an older but still recent edition, or a used one, and save a few bucks. But get one.
Good on this guy from Oz for calling it like it is.
Our so-called "news reporting" on ABCNNBCBS looks like 24/7 press release tongue baths and pasteurized horsepiss by comparison (because that's what it is) with actual journalism once you see 5 minutes' worth of the genuine 86-proof article.
If Biden is alive and semi-coherent at Christmas this year, I'll be astounded.
I'm still betting on Kneepads, in the Lincoln Bedroom, with Scalia's Pillow.
[BTW, for those of you into Deep Inside Baseball:
The DemoCommunist Party (both wings: Liberal Moonbat and Anarcho-Communist Moonbat) hates Kneepads almost as much as they despise Shrillary. So before anyone makes a move on Gropey Dopey, they'll have to ease her out first. When you see a conspicuous impeachable scandal crop up out of nowhere for Kneepads, resulting in her removal and replacement with someone more palatable by TPTB, you can safely add Gropey Dopey to your next Ghoul Pool. Mirabile dictu!]
Yes, the John Wilder. (I love that meme-joke. It still cracks me up. And God bless his parents for the set-up.)
As in, gone and written another good piece. Homework prep: RTWT. It's not that long today. (Bonus: in fairness, what it lacks in length, it makes up for with bikinis, as usual.) But there's another side to that coin - perhaps even a whole sackful of other coins - and a few other codocils, addendums, caveats, etc. etc.
---
Did you read the OP referenced?
Good.
Now we reference a quote therein, one with which many of you are familiar:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects. - Robert Heinlein
Classic Heinlein, from a writer who is, for any rational person, canonical, whether we're talking about Starship Troopers, Tunnel In The Sky, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or any dozen other cherished sci-fi classics.
But let's talk turkey here:
Heinlein, in that quote, was full of sh*t. And he knew it.
The quote sounds great, sure. And we can agree with the sentiment, to any degree. Hell, we've referenced the same quote on this very blog. But it's still a load of codswallop and bullsh..., er, rose fertilizer. As we will demonstrate.
Any human being should be able to change a diaper
Okay, granted. Last I looked, no degree needed, to this day.
Plan an invasion
So, how'd that work out for the amphibious "genius" anyones from Sandhurst who planned Gallipoli? And followed it up with the Dieppe soiree? And monkey-f**ked the American plan at Sicily in WWII, very nearly snatching defeat from what could have been a decisive victory? And would have rogered Normandy, given half a chance? Turns out, anybody can not plan an invasion. The Marines had been perfecting such things for twenty years before WWII. Actually, more like 160 years, but still. And clueless Navy newbs would have made the same hash of Guadalcanal as the Brits did at Gallipoli, had it not been for some old-breed tough bastards. It was a near thing. Did the Army learn anything? Not until they'd mucked it up a time or three themselves. Read up on how Operation Torch went in North Africa. And then Anzio. So maybe expecting people to have a wee familiarity with the concept, over years and decades, isn't something every human being is going to have time to bone up on. Majors and colonels plan invasions. Guys with from 12-30 years moving through an up-or-out promotion system, besides being weeded out rather ruthlessly by bullets, bombs, shrapnel, and various other nastiness.
Butcher a hog
Look up the life expectancy and disease rate from improperly handled and prepared pork prior to 1930 or so. We'll wait for you.
Conn a ship
Not "sail a sailboat", nor steer a stinkpot runabout on the Inland Waterway, but "conn a ship". Every human being, Lt. Heinlein (U.S. Naval Academy, class of 1918)?? Says the man with a bachelor of science from the U.S. - and the world's - premier institution of seamanship, for the greatest navy in world history, after 4 hard years graduating 20th out of 243 midshipmen. Renaissance man speak with forked tongue.
How many ships routinely go down now that there are regs governing who can conn one, compared to past times? And ask the sailors on the McCain and Fitzgerald what happens when "diversity is our strength" retardation and shoddy watchstanding practice lets "anybody" conn a ship. And shout it loud, because Arlington cemetery is a long way off.
Design a building
Been to Pisa, Italy? Too far back in time? Okay; anybody seen what happened to the "Future Is Female" walkway at Florida International U.?
How much is your home state in the hole financially, both now and in the near future? What's the national deficit, just this year? How about the national debt? What's the average debt load of the average American, this minute? The amount of savings held in the bank by the average person? Yet again, case closed.
IIRC, practicing medicine without a license has been illegal in 50 states since at least 1900, even before Heinlein was born. Just saying.
Comfort the dying
Like diapering babies, no licensure or cert required, since ever.
Take orders
Ditto.
Give orders
And if you've watched and waited behind people at the drive-thru, you already know they're not Mensa members, college graduates, or certified by anyone, not even the Florida Clown College.
Co-operate
No certification required. Common sense is another thing entirely.
Act alone
Anyone who has ever herded cats or kindergarteners knows this is no great human accomplishment. And no certification required, nor necessary.
Solve equations
No certification nor degree required to operate at this level (nor will any be attained either), but we note with some humor that it takes Ph.D.s from MIT, CalTech, etc. to achieve the first landing of an interplanetary probe not on the surface of Mars, but actually 58 feet into it, because they couldn't remember meters per second is not the same velocity as feet per second. "Secant! Tangent! Cosine! Sine! 3.14159! Q! E! D! Gooooooo Tech!"
Analyze a problem
Most people can do that. The brighter ones actually do it well. The rest get stuck on the first four letters of that, and can't get their heads out. In any case, yet again, no certification required.
Uh huh. I bailed out of computer science my freshman year and never looked back, and haven't programmed anything since Hammurabi and Lunar Lander, in BASIC, with punch tape. Say, how's that whole "learn to code, bro" plan been working out for the Geek Squad since the 1980s? I wouldn't know, I've been working 8 days a week, and all I know how to do is turn the damned thing on and click on the screen icons.
Cook A Tasty Meal
No degree, been doing that since I was 14, ever since Mom's "so you won't starve to death as a bachelor" lessons as a barely teen. Only need a cert to do it for money, and given the number of times I've gotten the Food Court Two-Step at the food court, the standards for that are still too lax.
Fight efficiently
Rifle expert, first six times I tried it. AFAIK, "One shot, one kill" is about as efficient as one can get (unless folks fortuitously stand three deep in a straight line). Cert? Not required, but I did get a sheepskin from MCRD, Class of '84. And it's nothing anyone can't master any weekend with a 10/22 at an Appleseed Shoot. Given who taught plebes weapons handling at Annapolis, this is not news to Heinlein either, since NLT than 1925 A.D. or so.
Die gallantly
I live in hope.
And BTW, the average honeybee is by turns an environmental engineer, building subcontractor, security guard, obstetrician, childcare worker, reconnaissance pilot, news reporter, and agriculture worker, all in one lifespan, and all while serving as a Minuteman kamikaze pilot in the Bee National Guard for life. So even insects don't specialize, and all this was known to Heinlein then, as it is to us now.
So it's pretty clear, Heinlein knew he was talking out his own ass, fluently, even when that little ditty was still wet ink. And, to be fair, his point was that everyone should be good at all those things, not just do them. Which, looking at them all, is more a life-long bucket list than anything, because it'll take that long to check all those boxes, and some will never happen.
Gifted amateurs like Isambard K. Brunel are all well and good, for 200 years ago. We had That Guy locally, where I grew up. His name was William Mulholland. He emigrated to America from Ireland, and started out as a literal ditch-digger for the city of Los Angeles, scraping mud out of the irrigation canals that supplied the bustling metropolis of 10,000 with all the water that could be gotten from the muddy semi-annual creek known as the Los Angeles River. He was an uneducated, unlettered, self-taught civil engineer who worked his way up to chief engineer of the city from scratch, just because he could figure things out. He had worked his way up to chief engineer when he and a former L.A. mayor took a horse-and-buggy trip up the backside of the Sierra Range near the turn of the last century, and bought up land, in order to legally secure rights to water for what the city planners hoped would someday grow to 100,000 residents. Mulholland thought they were fools, and expected several millions. No points for guessing which side got that correct. He then devised a plan that no one had done, to move water uphill over several mountain ranges, hundreds of miles, in giant iron pipes and through-mountain tunnels, which, by the way, no one in the history of Ever had done before. It succeeded spectacularly, because although the water had to go uphill at times, Mulholland, despite lack of any formal surveying training or engineering pedigree, sussed out that it then went downhill even further, creating a giant siphon, and actually generated power rather than needing it, by the time the water got to L.A. It's literally half the reason L.A. ever came into existence as anything but a sleepy cow town backwater in the first place, and he figured it out, with nothing but common sense and a high school diploma, and it opened in 1913.
What undid him? That same lack of a college diploma or engineering pedigree or certifications.
He was working on another project, still large and in charge, and he placed an earthen dam in one of the canyons north of Los Angeles. What he didn't know was that the rock there was a terrible location for a dam. Which hydraulics, geology, and physics all demonstrated rather rudely one night in 1928, when the whole thing collapsed, killing at least 431 people (they've found bodies up to as recently as 1994) in the ensuing flood, ending Mulholland's career, and he died a broken man.
---
Specialization is what happens in stable societies, because that's what works. It's not bad, nor lazy. Nor inherently good. It just is.
Want to see a society where everyone can do everything? Go to any country from Trashcanistan to Shitholia, and observe their mud hut architecture, and their shit-flavored combination village well/swimming hole/washing machine/sewer. Let us know the average infant mortality and life expectancy thereabouts, and ponder the perennial question of why tsunamis and earthquakes lead to a great post-event mud hut housing boom. And why is it, do you think, that most modern cities seem to be located on a mound 50-300' deep thick, made up of the debris, garbage, and sh*t from the previous inhabitants?
Countries and societies where anyone can do anything are called primitive for a reason. This is why advanced societies brought the wheel to sub-Saharan Africa, and metal, horses, and the concept of livestock to the Americas.
Specialization and certification have been a thing since medieval guilds, a thousand years hence, exactly as fascinatingly and engrossingly laid out even in modern novels. The castles and cathedrals that awe-inspiringly stand to this day were built by master masons. The ones you don't see, because they were tried by amateurs and jackholes, aren't there.
Done right [pro-level caveat, right there] certifications and pedigrees keep the riff-raff out. Ask a generation of altar boys and scouts (referenced in JW's last post before this one) what happened when anyone could become a priest or scoutmaster. Before people like Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton turned nursing into an actual profession, it was about as reputable as acting, being composed almost entirely of good-for-nothing unmarriageable spinsters too dumb to cook and too lazy to do laundry, and washed up old syphilitic whores. (Really; you could look it up). Nowadays, with college degrees and background checks, we've almost gotten rid of all the spinsters!
I have no illusions about certifications and credentials. They have and will always be misused and abused. In 1910, anyone could buy and fly a plane. In the 1950s and '60s, passenger airplanes going down in flames was a regular occurrence. At times, multiple ones in the same week. Nowadays, with everything about the airline business from mechanics to builders to pilots to controllers vetted and regulated up the wazoo, major commercial aviation has killed nearly no one on an American carrier since 9/11. We've gone years (2009-2018) with zero deaths on major commercial carriers, while passengers and flights have expanded a thousand-fold and more over early years.
Yet, exactly as I've told hundreds to thousands of nursing students, my license or anyone else's only guarantees that on any given day, there's an 80% chance the holder won't kill someone outright through egregious stupidity or ignorance. That's all it demonstrates, and all it's meant to. The guy who graduated last in his medical school class is still called "doctor".
But the obvious psychopaths, sociopaths, idiots, and absolute morons are almost entirely weeded out. That's what specialization gets you.
That leaves only entertainment, journalism, the practice of law, and work in government to absorb those folks, and of those, only lawyers have to jump through any hoops. For the rest, most interviews are done on kneepads or couches, which explains most of what rises to the top in those fields.
In short, we're not forcing the right occupations to jump through the right hoops.
If every entertainer, journalist, and government worker (including politicians) was required to do, say, 4 years' honorable service in an armed branch of the military (thus excluding most of the Air Farce and Notional Guard - sorry guys) and get at least a 75% Fresh rating from their peers in every unit they ever served in to be qualified, think back and see how many of the current crop of douchenozzles in those trades would instead be frothing lattes at Starbuck's, or shovelling sh*t for the local septic company, instead of picking your pockets and shilling for open communism 24/7/365.
Everyone should, indeed, not just do many things, but do them as well as the professionals, to the extent such is possible, but everyone should be a specialist at something far exceeding their general abilities. That's where the money is, that's where society advances by leaps and bounds, and that's where we are most fully ourselves. You don't have to be as good as the experts in everything, but there damned sure ought to be something you can point to, that puts you in the upper ranks, even among peers.
To not be that, is to be a mediocrity among humans, which not only ought to be criminal, it's exactly what most criminals are, and where they rank.
I'm not a Fatboy Slim fan. Christopher Walken? Another story entirely. In one of the music viedos acclaimed "Best Of All Time", the right music can give you wings. Especially at 3AM in the lobby of the Marriot. If you're Christopher Walken. Pretty good moves for a guy (at the time) of 57.
Not counting the news outlets or websites along the full range of accuracy and veracity, I follow multiple actual individuals' handwritten blogs. (Bot news aggregators don't thrill me.) Looking them over, many are current serving or former military and a couple are some variation of high-speed low-drag elite forces ninjas. Or just funny as all. Because life without humor is just despair. So in other words, the same folks I trusted in the military not to wet the bed, sh*t themselves, or otherwise run around like headless Nancys, are the same folks I trust on the interwebz, for demonstrating pretty much the same trustworthiness and circumspectly responsible behavior. Color me shocked.
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