Rushing to keep their date with Davy Jones
Our leaders like us to believe they’re wise, clever, intelligent, well-informed, and always equal to the occasion.
Anything farther from the truth would be quite difficult to imagine.
Really, it’s more like nincompoops playing with matches and M-80s in someone’s living room. I knew a kid in high school who blew half his hand off, that way. He was looked upon as an authority.
Is that how you get to be an authority?
They worked better when they had ammunition.
One of my Political Science professors had a thing about this “Dogger Bank Incident” of 1904, in which the Russian Navy, sailing off to go to war with Japan on the other side of the world, mistook the British North Sea fishing fleet for the Japanese Navy in disguise and shot it up.
(https://leeduigon.com/2014/04/26/a-lesson-in-folly/)
The men responsible for this insane decision, Prof. Mansbach pointed out, were experts and professionals–not escaped mental patients. The lesson: Be afraid, be very afraid, when the experts insist they know what they’re doing.