It Hurts When I Do This

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Cognitive Dissonance

“Well, then don’t do that” is the proper response any competently trained physician would answer to a statement like that. Or at least that’s the well known joke passed around my household when I was a kid. Don’t do ‘that’ and you won’t have pain there.

It was actually a double entendre for us because we were too poor to simply run down to the local doctor for a proper diagnoses any time something hurt or went wrong. And this was during a time when medical care in general, while still expensive on a relative basis, cost much less as a percentage of our total income than it is today. Continue reading It Hurts When I Do This →

Standard Issue Incompetence - More Evidence of Imperial Decay

(Time for Fight or Flight?)

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Cognitive Dissonance

I am certainly not the first to complain about the epidemic of incompetence running throughout our socioeconomic systems. Nor, I suspect, will I be the last. In my opinion it is simply additional irrefutable evidence that societies, cultures and empires degrade over time at all levels and in all aspects. It’s systemic, and not attributable to a single point of failure or ‘collapse’.

While history may note a ‘collapse’ at the end and point to it as ‘the’ fall of society and empire, in fact what had been occurring was a slow crumble, a spreading rot and decay until the supporting infrastructure (meaning its people, places and things) became so weak a stiff breeze, or a few barbarians at the gate, took it down in one fell swoop. Look below the surface and one finds the Empire had already been raped and thoroughly looted from within. Continue reading Standard Issue Incompetence – More Evidence of Imperial Decay (Time for Fight or Flight?) →