Feb. 14, 2023 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
24:47
EPISODE 394: THE COLLAPSE OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS
On today's episode of Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec, we delve into the recent train derailment in Ohio and its potential impact on transportation and what that says about the state of American infrastructure. Poso also discusses the South African affirmative action failure, which has only now begun to show its full consequences via the Eskom collapse and the country experiencing power outages for 12 hours a day. PLUS Jack sounds the alarm bells on the impending societal collapse given...
Ladies and gentlemen, today we've got a theme for you.
Today we've got a thesis.
Today we're going to solve a mystery.
The collapse of complex systems.
We are going to be detectives and we are going to examine the clues as to why these complex systems seem to be collapsing all around us.
From the railroads in East Palestine, Ohio to the South African power grid.
Stick with us.
You need to hear this information because you're not going to hear it anywhere else.
And Chad GPT isn't allowed to tell you about these facts.
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Let's get into it.
Right now in East Palestine, students and teachers are back in the classroom for the first time in over a week since a train derailed while carrying a dangerous chemical.
While schedules, busing and even extracurricular activities will resume like normal, the school system says many students are not back in school because these families were displaced and are waiting on air testing in their homes.
Now, a new letter from the EPA lists more chemicals found since the controlled explosion of vinyl chloride and says Norfolk Southern may be liable for damage and compensation in the area.
That's the railway that operated the train.
The EPA says after air monitoring and water sampling, it found four other chemicals in nearby creeks and streams, surface soils, and in storm drains.
Norfolk Southern has not responded to this news yet, but over the weekend, the railway confirmed they cut a check to the city for fire gear.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily.
Today is February 14th, St.
Valentine's Day 2023.
Anno Domini.
East Palestine, Ohio.
The train derailment.
The potential for an ecological disaster.
The only ecological disaster that, as far as we can tell, that doesn't seem to concern any of the environmental activists whatsoever, Greta's not there.
None of the greenies are there.
Al Gore's not around.
Leonardo DiCaprio is not flying his private jet.
Klaus Schwab hasn't mentioned it yet.
See, the problem with the train derailment like this is, you know, for a number of reasons.
Number one, that Warren Buffett is super invested in a lot of railroads in this country, as well as Blackstone and BlackRock and so many others.
That's the reason they're all against pipelines, by the way, because they're all heavily invested in railroads.
That's why they were against the Keystone XL pipeline.
In fact, there was somebody who told us that we should build pipelines because they are safer and will relieve stress on our railroad systems.
But I wanted to get into a deeper question because I think the East Palestine situation And the fact that most of the mainstream media is not covering it whatsoever.
They're just not interested.
It tells us something deeper about what's going on in our country and the problems that are happening in our country.
And so today's episode is going to have a theme.
And here's the theme of today's episode.
The collapse of complex systems.
And I know we talk about that a lot here on the program, but I wanted to take this as an example to kick off a wider Wider paradigm that's going on.
We have in this country for so long placed emphasis on equity, disparate incomes, disparate outcomes, disparate impact, representation, disparate representation in media and elite institutions.
We're so happy that Pete Buttigieg Is our transportation secretary.
Why?
Well because apparently we're supposed to pick our transportation secretary because of his sex life, not his actual qualifications at doing his job.
The infrastructure in the United States has been crumbling for a long time.
And there's a lot of reasons why this is.
One of them, by far, is because we in this country have done away with standards for a long time.
Hiring quotas have been in place since Gen Xers were entering the market.
They rule the place right now.
Affirmative action is currently up at the Supreme Court.
Hopefully they strike it down, but we'll see.
Remember Clarence Thomas once asked in those debates that were being held, the oral arguments for affirmative action.
And he said, explain to me the benefits of diversity.
And they went on and said, well, we, you know, we think that diverse outcomes and diverse classrooms, he's talking about schools, enrich the educational experience.
And he responded back, you haven't yet explained how diversity increases the educational level of the classroom.
Because here's the thing, we've decided that our new civil religion is going to be diversity.
Because we have also turned around and looked at our country, the wokies, the wokesters, the social reformers, the prison reformers, the criminal justice reformers.
And they say, well, you look at all of these things going on, the inequality, and it must be caused by racism.
The only thing that causes inequality is racism.
Of course, they'll never talk about inequality when it comes to, say, the NBA.
They never say, Oh, the NBA is racist against white people because there aren't enough white players.
No one's ever going to say that's because that's ridiculous.
We understand there's a thing called a skills gap, but no, no, no, they won't say it for anything else.
It's always about racism, the racism of the gaps argument.
We see inequalities in our system and they can only be explained by racism.
Nevermind what the empirical data shows us.
Nevermind what we can all see.
Where does that lead us?
That leads us to a place where standards are lowered for police officers.
And then you get a situation like in Memphis, where standards are lowered for construction and buildings get collapsed.
Bridges, standards are lowered across the board.
Hiring practices are lowered.
And so we turn into a country where merit, where achievement, excellence, Dare I say?
Greatness.
Let's put it on the back burner.
We're not interested in that.
We are interested on how can we make money through equity programs.
D-E-I-E-S-G.
And I've said before that Blackstone and BlackRock are the operations arm of so much of this.
And it's tempting for a lot of people to say, well, this is a cyber attack.
Unrestricted warfare by the Chinese Communist Party.
They're using it against us here in our homeland.
But here's the problem, folks.
It's not them.
I wish it was, in a sense.
Because at least then it would be easy to pinpoint the problem.
But that's not actually what's happening.
In this case, it's us.
We are doing this to ourselves.
And we're going to keep doing it as long as we place these false reality filters Over our eyes.
2 plus 2 equals 4.
It's only equaled 4 and it's only ever going to equal 4.
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Travelers on the road this festive season have been sending out images that attest to what experts have been saying, that South Africa's infrastructure is crumbling.
So you've got an example behind me.
Let's look at the state of infrastructure tonight then.
A report from the South African Institution of Civil Engineering published late last year suggests that the entire public infrastructural system in South Africa has collapsed or is in danger of collapsing.
And this report card, it gave infrastructure a D, which is the lowest rating since the report was first published in 2006.
An investigation by the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure also suggests that the country's road networks are in a mess.
South Africa.
Country is in a complete state of collapse.
Interestingly enough, our country is also beginning to see the collapse of complex systems.
How could this be?
Why could this be?
Well, let's go back and find out what happened with South Africa.
South Africa used to have what was referred to as an apartheid government.
That government came apart.
The African National Congress took power.
They did away with so-called apartheid and Nelson Mandela took power.
What did Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, his party, decide to do?
Well, he found a CNN article.
And I gotta say, I pushed, I pushed our staff today really hard.
I held them over.
I said, we need to find the article.
We found it.
CNN, 1998.
South Africa tries affirmative action.
Racial quota plan to become law.
South Africa's version of affirmative action.
A plan is controversial here as it is in the United States could soon become law in the black majority country.
The employment equity measure, boy, That phraseology sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Employment equity.
Well, it turns out that here in the United States, this phrase that we hear over and over and over, equity, equity, equity, is not domestic at all.
It's not indigenous to the to the shores of North America.
It actually comes to us by way of South Africa.
And here's, of course, CNN's CNN's reporting in 1998, South Africa's economy is still carved up between a few giant conglomerates, mainly controlled by whites.
But four years after historic all-race elections, black-owned firms are making gains.
Here we go.
To push that transition into the white-owned ranks and make up for the wrongs of the apartheid era, President Nelson Mandela's government backs a plan in which black South Africans, quote, would need to constitute 69% of the workforce at all levels from the top down.
Force.
Race quotas onto South Africa.
Force them onto a country.
This is what Nelson Mandela did.
And this is what his successors have done.
Now let's go to a reporting from CNN just four days ago.
This is a report from last Friday, February 10th.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has declared a national state of disaster in response to the country's drawn-out energy crisis, calling it, quote, an existential threat to Africa's most developed economy.
Setting out the government's key objectives for the year in the State of the Nation Address on Thursday, he said the crisis is an existential threat and the very social fabric of our country.
Our most immediate priority is to restore energy security.
They've endured power cuts for years, but in 2022 saw more than twice as many blackouts as any other year as aging coal-fired power plants broke down and the state-owned power utility ESCOM struggled to find the money to buy diesel for emergency generators.
Blackouts in South Africa, or load shedding as they're known locally, have been lasting for as long as 12 hours a day.
Last month, the South African Funeral Practitioners Association warned that people were advised to bury their dead within four days because mortuary bodies were decomposing because of the constant electricity outages.
They can't even keep bodies on the slab and they're decomposing too fast because of power outages and all thanks to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Now, here's what's going on.
And there are slums, by the way, on the outside of Johannesburg where you can find families You can find families in poverty, people starving, dirty, children that are just as poor as the people in poverty that you were trying to help in the 1990s.
What they've done is they've flipped the inequality.
They've decided to put people into poverty in South Africa because of the color of their skin, the Afrikaners.
And instead have the systems run with this racial quota system that's leading to massive collapse.
And it's not just there.
You can, you can go and find article after article, the railroads, public transportation, the ports, the airports, the police, the corruption.
South Africa is a country that literally has critical race theory printed in its constitution.
It is required for the government of South Africa now since the 1990s.
To impose critical race theory on their country.
How's it going?
How's it working out, folks?
How's it working out for the people of South Africa?
Not so good, is it?
Look, I'm all for having a country that is colorblind.
But the point is, you have to focus on results.
You have to focus on outcomes.
You have to focus on excellence.
If we're actually going to say we don't care what the color of a person's skin is, okay, fine, but Are you putting them there because of the color of their skin, or are you doing it because you want your institutions, your workforce, whatever, to look a certain way?
At the detriment of the actual outcome of that service.
You don't have power.
Your planes could be falling out of the sky.
What's that gonna come next?
What happens with surgeons when they're put in that situation?
I mean, you listen to this.
The government is committed to, you go back to the 1990s article, the government is committed to change.
The job equity measure is designed to prevent discrimination, provide for affirmative action, and bridge the wage gap between management and workers.
Oh my gosh, they're talking about how, yeah, they're talking about how the company's management must change over the railroads.
We're going to change the railroads over.
Folks, this is what happens.
This is what Ayn Rand got wrong.
This is what Ayn Rand got wrong.
I'm a fan of Ayn Rand, I liked Atlas Shrug, I liked the Fountainhead, but she got a lot wrong.
And this is something she got wrong too.
That the government's not just gonna come in and come after the companies, because in many of these cases, and we see it across the West, where the companies are all for it!
The companies are working hand in glove with the government, pushing this stuff.
That's why I talk about getting out of cities so much, because Cities are great.
Cities are amazing.
San Francisco used to be a literal shining city on the hill.
New York City was one of the shining examples of what Western civilization could build, one of the greatest cities of the modern age.
I want to take them back.
But first, but first, they're going to go into rock bottom.
And that's what South Africa is hitting right now.
Did I get the job?
Absolutely not.
Why not?
Because you're a baby boomer, and I'm a millennial.
Ah!
Well, Melanie, I am overqualified for this job.
I don't know where you got this.
We don't do paper applications.
I made it.
I don't do the internet.
Okay, that is the third time you have said that this interview, and it also says so on this homemade job application.
There you go, champ.
I don't know what this is for.
Don't you need a trophy anytime you... anything?
Oh, it's on.
How'd you get here?
Horse?
I drove.
My car.
I own it.
After eight more payments.
What?
How'd you get here?
I took an Uber.
Do not know what that is.
I bet you're a...
Yeah, because I'm not a monster.
Your generation is afraid of black people.
Your generation thinks you are black people.
Aw, word.
So, I do also want to point out something else.
Because I don't think it's necessarily just because of this commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
That so many complex systems are collapsing.
I think it's a big part to be sure.
It is a huge, huge part of what we're seeing right now.
But there's also something else going on.
And that is simple fact that the baby boomers are retiring.
Yes, the baby boomers are going into retirement age.
They're pulling out, putting up their boots.
And they've done a great job in many ways.
Of keeping our country running for so many years.
There is a quiet competence to most baby boomers at work.
They run the ranches, they build the roads, they keep things running, keep the trains running.
But you notice, as they retire, as they reach retirement age and step off, we're starting to see millennials and Gen X try to fill the gap and it isn't quite working.
Parody right there for as an example of that.
But but look at this from from Skitch, which is an industry, Industry Insight magazine.
As baby boomers retire, labor shortages in construction increase.
From LAist, it's actually kind of a woke article, but it points out as baby boomers retire, the water workforce faces its own drought, which if you remember the movie, the old Jack Nicholson movie, Chinatown is actually all about water in L.A.
But look at this.
The industry is struggling to keep up as workers are retiring, who had the baby boomers were the boom of a workforce in water treatment jobs throughout the 80s and 90s.
And now they can't keep up with workers.
They don't have a trained workforce because people just simply don't want to go into this anymore.
And even Forbes, even Forbes has the article up.
The nation's infrastructure has a bigger problem than its politics.
It's baby boomer.
and Zoomer retirement.
So we're seeing even if the money flows, will workers be available to rebuild US infrastructure?
I wanna read a little bit from the Forbes article just to give you a sense of what's going on.
They quote Yogi Berra who says, you can see a lot by looking.
Have you dared to look at some of our nation's highway overpasses and bridges?
You have to wonder how long rough cut lumber jerry-rigged into place can serve as a reinforcement to delay the decay of one of the nation's greatest achievements, but also oldest achievements, the interstate highway system.
We can talk about clean drinking water, like the people of Flint, the issues in Brenton Harbor.
The American Society of Civil Engineers attempted to bring attention to this in 1988 with a scorecard.
The nation's infrastructure grade has wobbled between a D and a D plus ever since the first scorecard was issued.
If the nation were a student, it would have been expelled long ago.
But here's the problem.
It's not just about.
Spending money, it's also I mean, you can go through the list of the things that we spend money on, by the way, in this country spent billions of dollars in Ukraine, billions of dollars in Afghanistan, billions of dollars on endless overseas forever wars.
But what about right here?
Well, even if we have the money at home, here's the problem.
Where's the workforce?
So listen to this.
Older Gen Xers and Baby Boomers are the backbone of the construction trades and operators of today's infrastructure, and they are heading for the door.
You can blame the pandemic that accelerated many to retire earlier than they might have, but demographic is destiny.
The workforce is simply aging out.
40% of workers in the construction industry, 40% are between 45 and 64.
There is not a long line of millennials and Gen Z waiting for these, quote, older workers to get out of the way.
The trades are not attracting younger workers.
Despite millennials being the nation's largest cohort in today's workforce, they are underrepresented in their trades.
And by the way, some of the Gen Z is already in their 20s and they've begun working.
But.
Man, this is this is this is rough, folks, listen to this.
I want to read this word from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Fifty one percent.
of civil engineers are over 40, 52% of pipefitters and plumbers, 52% of welders, 52% of electricity line workers, the linemen, 51% of masons, 56% of electricians, 65% of heavy equipment operators, 65% of pile drive operators, and 74% of dredge operators.
Where are you going to find those people?
Because with everybody running into millennials, Gen Z, they want to be in the digital economy.
They want to be in tech.
They want to be in the latest thing.
What are we doing as a country to promote the actual jobs that maintain the backbone?
I'd love to see, by the way, this is focusing on infrastructure, but I'd love to look at truckers and so many other jobs like that, that certainly require a human to be able to run this.
And by the way, here's the dirty little secret.
Guess which jobs are now threatened the most by AI?
It ain't these jobs.
It sure ain't these jobs.
No, it's the email jobs, the laptop class jobs, It's the jobs that everybody thought that they'd be doing for copywriter, journalists, all these different jobs that people thought that they would be doing in perpetuity.
Many people invested four to six years of their life and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get a degree for.
And then along comes chat GPT and stealth GPT and 11 labs and so many of these other programs out there.
And they do the job better than you and faster and cheaper.
So here's the question, what are you going to do about that?
Because you guys are going to be the ones out of work.
Here's the little secret.
Folks, go watch the movie Office Space.
That movie was not just a film, it was a prediction!
Remember, he goes from a software job to being construction worker at the end, and that is when he finds happiness.
Being outdoors, getting exercise, Making bucks.
And you don't have to worry about the petty BS of office politics.
