“Male blood donor, 66, turned away from clinic after he refused to answer a question on whether he was pregnant as part of a pre-donation questionnaire.” That appears to have happened in the UK—actually, no really, I mean, truly, I’m not joking.
We’re done. No longer can we humans consider ourselves to be the apex of evolution, no longer to mark ourselves as “a little less than the angels” on the hierarchy of beings, that Great Chain of Being that runs from God to rocks.
The questionnaire designed for “inclusiveness” reveals how far we humans have fallen off the pinnacle of intelligence we spent 200,000 or more years climbing. If we include our sister (brother, related, person) species, it’s been a climb for as many as five million years, starting with ancestors of Australopithecus.
If I were a sculptor, I might carve a statue of Leslie Sinclair, the rejected blood donor. On the pedestal I would inscribe: “Leslie Sinclair: The Last Victim of Stupidity.” And I would place the statue outside the Albert Halls Clinic in Stirling, Scotland, where the clinicians rejected his donation because he refused to answer a question irrelevant to his ability to donate blood.
This is how far we’ve fallen: The “inclusive” health care administrators of England would rather see the blood bank depleted rather than accept a donor because they will not acknowledge that an elderly man cannot become pregnant, that the chance of such a pregnancy is one in infinity. Maybe Sarah conceived in her old age, but the God of Abraham didn’t grant a pregnancy to old Abe.
That we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by the terminally stupid is our own fault—my fault, your fault, everyone’s fault. But I can understand how the tumble off the pinnacle happened. We were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the bureaucrats with little to do and an agenda to fill. No one can keep up with the madness. The only refuge for the sane seems to be a cemetery as Thomas Gray noted in his eighteenth-century elegy and Thomas Hardy wrote in the title of his novel: “Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife.” The madding, or maddening, crowd is the chief bane of the commonsensical. And as the human population grows, so does its perversion of commonsense. There are just too many agenda-driven stupid people to handle. We’re done as a dominant species, and the rejection of Leslie Sinclair marks the moment.
I can think of a number of incidents that prove my contention. Take an education movement of a few decades ago called Outcome Based Education. Proponents of the methodology included this dictum: If seventy per cent of a class failed to make seventy per cent on a test, then everyone in the room had to retake the test. The result: Bullies would announce to their classmates that they had to do poorly on a test to give the bullies a chance to study, and the studious and bright classmates had to suffer retaking a test that they passed in a waste of their time. This educational program was foisted by university professors on public schools until parents finally realized what was happening and returned to commonsense.
Or, take the current administration’s wholesale acceptance of global warming as an “existential threat.” Blocking the domestic exploration for gas and oil through regulations imposed by bureaucrats, the administration has turned to foreign sources as though their oil and gas does not add carbon to the atmosphere. During the decline in commonsense centered on “warming,” the world fawned over a Swedish child named Greta who claimed that adults had robbed her of her childhood because of global warming—even though no data suggest that she couldn’t have played hopscotch, or hide-and-seek, or any other game or participated in any playful activity (if that’s how one defines childhood) because the world temperatures prohibited her from doing so. And in the process of fawning over Greta, the adult world gave her experiences I never had in my childhood, flying and sailing her around the world as a celebrity. Greta even has a bronze statue. The $33,000 likeness sits on the the University of Winchester’s campus. I don’t know whether it has any inscription, but I’m willing to offer one if the university asks.
We’re done. Truly done. Stupidity reigns. I have looked, but I can no longer see the top of the pinnacle. Dark clouds cover the top. The madding crowd envelopes me.
We’re done. No longer can we humans consider ourselves to be the apex of evolution, no longer to mark ourselves as “a little less than the angels” on the hierarchy of beings, that Great Chain of Being that runs from God to rocks.
The questionnaire designed for “inclusiveness” reveals how far we humans have fallen off the pinnacle of intelligence we spent 200,000 or more years climbing. If we include our sister (brother, related, person) species, it’s been a climb for as many as five million years, starting with ancestors of Australopithecus.
If I were a sculptor, I might carve a statue of Leslie Sinclair, the rejected blood donor. On the pedestal I would inscribe: “Leslie Sinclair: The Last Victim of Stupidity.” And I would place the statue outside the Albert Halls Clinic in Stirling, Scotland, where the clinicians rejected his donation because he refused to answer a question irrelevant to his ability to donate blood.
This is how far we’ve fallen: The “inclusive” health care administrators of England would rather see the blood bank depleted rather than accept a donor because they will not acknowledge that an elderly man cannot become pregnant, that the chance of such a pregnancy is one in infinity. Maybe Sarah conceived in her old age, but the God of Abraham didn’t grant a pregnancy to old Abe.
That we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by the terminally stupid is our own fault—my fault, your fault, everyone’s fault. But I can understand how the tumble off the pinnacle happened. We were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the bureaucrats with little to do and an agenda to fill. No one can keep up with the madness. The only refuge for the sane seems to be a cemetery as Thomas Gray noted in his eighteenth-century elegy and Thomas Hardy wrote in the title of his novel: “Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife.” The madding, or maddening, crowd is the chief bane of the commonsensical. And as the human population grows, so does its perversion of commonsense. There are just too many agenda-driven stupid people to handle. We’re done as a dominant species, and the rejection of Leslie Sinclair marks the moment.
I can think of a number of incidents that prove my contention. Take an education movement of a few decades ago called Outcome Based Education. Proponents of the methodology included this dictum: If seventy per cent of a class failed to make seventy per cent on a test, then everyone in the room had to retake the test. The result: Bullies would announce to their classmates that they had to do poorly on a test to give the bullies a chance to study, and the studious and bright classmates had to suffer retaking a test that they passed in a waste of their time. This educational program was foisted by university professors on public schools until parents finally realized what was happening and returned to commonsense.
Or, take the current administration’s wholesale acceptance of global warming as an “existential threat.” Blocking the domestic exploration for gas and oil through regulations imposed by bureaucrats, the administration has turned to foreign sources as though their oil and gas does not add carbon to the atmosphere. During the decline in commonsense centered on “warming,” the world fawned over a Swedish child named Greta who claimed that adults had robbed her of her childhood because of global warming—even though no data suggest that she couldn’t have played hopscotch, or hide-and-seek, or any other game or participated in any playful activity (if that’s how one defines childhood) because the world temperatures prohibited her from doing so. And in the process of fawning over Greta, the adult world gave her experiences I never had in my childhood, flying and sailing her around the world as a celebrity. Greta even has a bronze statue. The $33,000 likeness sits on the the University of Winchester’s campus. I don’t know whether it has any inscription, but I’m willing to offer one if the university asks.
We’re done. Truly done. Stupidity reigns. I have looked, but I can no longer see the top of the pinnacle. Dark clouds cover the top. The madding crowd envelopes me.
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