The National Transportation Safety Board has produced the greatest achievement of our age — 20 years without a major U.S. airliner crash. Is it possible that a Federal government agency has accomplished this near-miraculous feat? There’s a single reason behind it.
Moving Back to America with Bill Whittle is a production of our Members.
Video below hosted at Rumble.
18 replies on “The Greatest Achievement of the Age Thanks to a Federal Government Agency”
What Bill is describing, as the result of rigor, is the return to a meritorious system where both success and failure are valued. Success because it validates our decisions. Failure because it affirms a given decision that should not be relied upon in future endeavors. Merit based promotion is now dead. Dead as a door nail. The fact that we, as a society, have not yet fully regressed to a state of nearly universal failure is only due to the few individuals who simply refuse to let the culture crash under their watch. Most of those individuals are now on their last few orbits of the Sun and there are no replacements for them coming down the pipe from an education system that values only equity.
Many, but not all. Don’t loose faith that superior ideas will ultimately prevail. A recent newcomer to my neighborhood gives me hope – young, intact family with pride of ownership in their new (older) home, coupled with the patience to gradually fill it with furniture as their budget affords. Also thrilled to see another young guy show up with a brand-new trailer this spring to serve the multiple customers he has managed to snag right here on my block for his evidently growing landscaping business. Now, it is of no importance to me, but both of these young guys happen to be of Mexican descent. I only mention it because the conventional wisdom our elites have parroted to us for decades now was that this wave of relatively recent arrivals was going to be the UniParty’s permanent voting base. Well, maybe so, but when I see how these guys are voting with both their effort and their cash, the more blatantly Marxist the un-American ruling cartel becomes, the more confidence I have in the genius of private property rights.
Rigor is supremacy. Literally. In “Basic Economics,” the great Thomas Sowell teaches that our choices are driven by incentives. The reason rigor isn’t applied to preventing problems in Detroit is because people benefit from the problems in Detroit. Saviors need victims; victims need saviors. The self-reliant, not so much. Taking that first bite out of the government-dependency apple inevitably leads us here. Repent means turn away from, so let’s turn away from that “. . . so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” excerpt, Ephesians 4, ESV
We don’t raise the bar because too many people wouldn’t progress as quickly as others. Instead of encouraging and realizing their time will come as they continue to work to achieve the higher scores.
”Liberals” and “progressives” are more concerned with brining everybody to “equity” at the lowest common denominator, as opposed to improving lives, abilities and test scores.
If you were to try and apply the rigor of the NTSB to the problems of interurban America (Detroit is a fine example), the response would be for the politicians to immediately defund the NTSB!
How is it that common sense isn’t common?
Inquiring minds want to know.
It was common. When majority of people worked with actual nature, real materials and so on. That provides direct and unquestionable feedback on mistakes.
When you switch that to living in artificial world and most interaction happening with a screen, be it big or small, it allows BS to thrive and feelings allowed to trump reason 99.9% of the time.
Common sense, as I understand it, is euphemism for the practical application of knowledge — otherwise, known as wisdom. Wisdom is increasingly-devalued by an ever-increasing number of people — especially by those in positions of power. Wisdom of any sort is attained through a combination of book learning and experience. The latter is too often avoided and the former is subject to change based upon the whims of those who create the curricula. A society that does not value wisdom is doomed to collapse.
Excellent presentation Bill. Today the fad is to reward failure and punish achievement in our school systems. Apparently this is to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. May God help us all!
Well, when Bill gets a hold of one, he well and truly mashes. Fabulous piece and excellent work bringing it back to cities like Detroit.
Rigor is a fabulous word that people think is just a synonym for difficult, or having to do with effort. You have pointed out nicely that it is so much more.
Amen Ron!
Lack of high standards in many areas of life, have left us sinking further and further into a sink hole of mediocrity, be it morals, work ethic or lack of striving towards personal goals of excellence. More and more, we have become a nation of slothful, entitled human beings living off the labor of others. Sad.
This video describes in a nutshell the impossible problem we face as a nation. As long as one side refuses to apply rigor to our social ills, because it’s easier and more popular and gets them more votes even though the outcome is a plane crash, then we will not be able to keep the plane from crashing. We are flying that inverted Alaska Airlines aircraft right this moment, doing everything we can to keep from crashing into the ocean. We talk, we act, we vote, we communicate, we do everything a citizen can do but we can still see the crash looming out the cockpit window.
At this point I’m wondering if there is even any real hope to avoid the crash. People in general don’t seem willing to learn until their own actions result in burned fingers and painful blisters.
Whether this impending crash can be avoided or not, we still need to keep working to be ready to pick up the pieces, examine them, and be ready with a solution once the need for a solution becomes undeniable.
Your comment about lowering test scores underscores my oft-stated point that Affirmative Action was the death knell of NASA’s space program. When only the best and brightest were chosen for the space program, NASA was able to send astronauts to the moon using slide rules. Once Affirmative Action was injected into the hiring of engineers and scientists, NASA couldn’t keep the Space Shuttle in orbit using Cray Supercomputers.
Having used slide rules briefly before hand held calculators, I can say that using slide rules require rigor. And lots of it. Programming computers require rigor. (Done that over 20 years) . Using a computer; not so much.
I have the slide rule my dad gave me as a kid on the bookshelf in my office.
The slide rule is used most was my father’s too. Still have it. And oddly enough, it’s circular!
I always thought those circular ones were very cool. I have my dad’s old one as well. Have had it since I went to college, low those many years ago. Mine was the first class in my engineering school to require having a PC.