Conservatives typically ignore issues of genetic quality when rattling on about “we the people,” those who will arise and defeat the Dark Lords of Mordor, because the good guys always win, don’t they? But, an intriguing article at the ever heretical The Burning Platform.com by Donald Jeffries, hoses this idea down with the cold waters of reason. But before outlining this, I found the concept of “the burning platform” equally as insightful, pregnant with meaning:
  https://www.managementcentre.co.uk/create-a-burning-platform/

“Burning platforms are very powerful drivers of strategic change. They are what happens when:
•    There is a real and immediate crisis
•    There is a limited number of difficult and challenging choices
•    Each of the choices is irreversible
•    Each choice has a high risk of failure

The phrase comes from a real incident dating back to July 6th 1988. On that date the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea exploded – the result of a failure to check some simple systems that had worked faultlessly for the previous decade. The explosion in turn caused a massive fire. 167 men died – the largest number killed in an offshore accident. The scale of the blast was immense: the flames from the blaze shot 90 metres in the air and apparently could be seen 100 km away. At first the workers locked themselves in a room in part of the rig – hoping the fire would burn out or emergency systems would kick in. Eventually three men, realising this wouldn’t work, made it to the edge of the platform, and stood staring into one of the world’s coldest and roughest oceans. They had two choices – to stay where they were and hope for possible rescue from the flames, or to jump into the freezing ocean and risk almost certain death from hypothermia. Two men chose to jump – and they lived, despite being terribly injured, thanks to a rescue operation mounted by sea. The man who chose to stay put, sadly, perished, as helicopters failed to make it in time.

That story contains some powerful learnings about the need to respond positively and proactively to serious strategic challenges. It also offers a clue about how to communicate about such challenges. First there is the idea of the unacceptable option of staying the same. The man who stayed put on the rig in the case study died essentially because he waited for someone else to help him. Staying the same – not going through the change – and hoping things will get better is to risk probable failure. Second is the message that sometimes radical, risky change is essential, if painful. Against the odds the two who jumped survived, though they broke their legs in the process. It hurt, but the action they took gave them the very slight advantage they needed. Above all they took action. So, a burning platform is so serious that it requires action.”

     The metaphor involving massive fires on oil rigs in icy stormy seas is a good one for our age. Now, to the falling intelligence article:
  https://www.theburningplatform.com/2019/06/06/america-dumb-dumber-and-dumbest/

“I’m taking the gloves completely off here. I’ve inferred that Americans collectively are pretty gullible and naive. I’ve invoked comparisons to Mike Judge’s movie Idiocracy. But it’s time to simply tell it like it is: the majority of present-day Americans are stupid beyond belief. This doesn’t include all the increasing number of “awake” people out there, but it certainly does include the newly coined “woke” folk, who seem to be sleeping more soundly than the average American dupe. Ironically, a lot of these “woke” Americans are “mad as hell” but their anger is focused exclusively on Donald Trump. They figure if they can just get him to go away, things will be back to normal. “Normal” being the kind of nonstop corruption I wrote about in Hidden History.

My bleak assessment has some scientific evidence to back it up. Even mainstream sources report that IQ scores all over the world have been dropping for decades. Some estimates put the IQ drop at about 7 points for each subsequent generation born after 1975. These studies were centered in Norway, or other parts of the western world. My guess is that the average American IQ, if anything, has decreased more sharply than that. There are plenty of factors here. The increased consumption of processed foods, poisonous preservatives, GMO products, and the constant stress everyone is subjected to by the modern world have all contributed. Insipid and offensive films and television shows, dishonest state-run media, and wrong-headed public school systems were even more crucial in dumbing down the populace. Nonstop propaganda- really brainwashing- has turned many Americans into unthinking, unquestioning sheep who lack both empathy and a moral compass.

Consider all that Americans have permitted over just the last thirty years. They fell for the “invasion” of Kuwait nonsense, and were ready to send their children to die in a place they wouldn’t have been able to locate on a map the week before. They parroted the mainstream media line about Saddam Hussein being a “brutal” madman, when they previously wouldn’t have been able to identify him. They fell for the “babies in incubators” line from the crying young girl, and didn’t blink when she was exposed as the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador lobbying for war. Enough Americans bought Bill Clinton’s obsequious “I feel your pain” charade to elect him president twice. They ignored the growing body count and the outrageous corruption that began in Arkansas during his tenure as governor, as studiously as the fawning mainstream media did. We crossed one of those important moral lines in the sand when the majority of Americans stood by silently as armored tanks demolished a home (smeared continuously in the media as a “compound”) and poured deadly gas banned by the Geneva Convention inside, killing civilians that included a large number of children. What happened at Waco should have garnered impeachment charges against Bill Clinton, with criminal charges to follow. Instead, the inventor of identity politics was re-elected, and continued to garner almost 100 percent support from Hollywood.

Americans accepted the ridiculous magical fertilizer bomb theory at Oklahoma City, and cheered when patsy Timothy McVeigh was executed in record time. They swallowed the “JFK Jr. was reckless” accidental death theory in 1999, and no one exposed the truth about this latest Kennedy assassination until I investigated and wrote about it in Hidden History. On September 11, 2001, we crossed a line that will be very difficult to step back from. Up until that point, no steel frame high rise had ever collapsed from fire. On that day, three did- including Building 7, which was not struck by any aircraft. Since then, no building has. A magical day indeed, and one which exposed the new collective stupidity of Americans, as they stared transfixed at their television screens, as military “expert” after military “expert” told them that the “terrorists” had done this, and nothing would ever be the same. The majority of Americans accepted that nineteen crazed Arabs, who admittedly were not qualified to fly planes, executed this terrorist plot flawlessly, led by the new bogeyman, Osama Bin Laden, from his secretive cave lair. The odious, unconstitutional Patriot Act was quickly passed, with virtually no opposition from any public figure, and the unconstitutional Homeland Security Department was created. “Free speech zones” became all the rage, without a peep of protest outside the world of “conspiracy theorists.”

Before 9/11, the majority of Americans accepted the results of the dubious 2000 presidential election, which featured the first widespread mention of “hanging chads” and suggestions of voter fraud. I exposed the long history of American electoral corruption in Hidden History. The ballot box lost any significance it had long ago. Even if they counted the votes honestly, no honest candidates are ever permitted to run for president in either “opposing” party. As Huey Long said before they killed him, you have a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Dubya Bush, despite severe deficiencies as a politician, was elected twice by the American people. He continued to dismantle what some of us call America 1.0, a job Bill Clinton did yeoman work on. Unbridled illegal crossings from the southern border, expanded Visa worker programs, unprecedented corporate greed, and the further weakening of unions contributed to a glaring disparity of wealth, lowered wages and decreased benefits for the poor and working class.

The election of Barack Obama represented a politically correct coronation. Bill Clinton’s “feel your pain” mantra found full fruition in the election of a half-black man with little personal history and monumental secrecy surrounding his past. Obama’s election first exposed the now massive cultural gap in the country. Half of America was ecstatic to see someone who wasn’t white elected as president, for no other reason than the fact he wasn’t white. Any criticism of Obama, who continued the dastardly nonstop war, corporate welfare policies of his predecessors, was instantly branded as “racist.” Obama infuriated that segment of the population who bought into Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric. Many independents like myself were attracted to Trump’s often revolutionary comments as well. Obviously, over halfway through his first term, Trump has further divided the country, and become a lightning rod for all political discourse. The same people that loved Obama for being nonwhite and nothing else, despise Donald Trump because he seems so much like the old white guys who used to run this country.

This is merely a sampling of the tyranny Americans have permitted, just in recent times. I could have mentioned the ultimate corporate giveaway, when despite 95 percent of them opposing it in every poll, the biggest banks- those dubbed “too big to fail” by our state-run media, were bailed out by taxpayers after the 2008 economic crisis. If the banks want to be bailed out again, Americans will stand by politely. There will be no yellow jackets in the streets of America 2.0. A movement like Brexit would not be possible in America, because a majority of our citizens still buy into the collective narrative, that there are no conspiracies, and our leaders are basically decent people with good intentions. Iceland threw their bankers in jail. I have tried to get Americans to even understand the counterfeit nature of our criminal fractional banking system, but most just don’t care. I live in one of the richest counties in the country. Our roads are Third World quality, and our power grids are a joke. Power goes out here in a mild wind or simple rainfall. Many members of Congress drive the same roads I do, and yet they do nothing to upgrade them. Our infrastructure has not effectively been updated since the Eisenhower years. At least Trump talked about that, but again nothing has been done. Blame it on “partisan politics.” That’s what our state-run media does.

It’s not pleasant to call people stupid. After all, you wind up essentially calling yourself superior, and sounding elitist. But what else can you say about people who bought into the state-sanctioned, mainstream media driven “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory? The same Americans who can’t accept that 9/11 was an “inside job” believe that “the Russians” somehow “hacked” our election and denied us all the wonderful opportunity a Hillary Clinton presidency would have represented. We’ve known the facts about the lack of intellect in our country for quite a while. All those “person in the street” interviews, done by everyone from Jay Leno to “conspiracy theorist” Mark Dice, demonstrate all too clearly just how ignorant the average American is. Many Americans seem to revel in their stupidity. If Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy is now seen as an unfortunate prophecy, what does the huge popularity of the movie Dumb and Dumber demonstrate?”

     This ignores the possibility that the people are so dumbed down and lacking in critical self-reflection, that they can no longer understand their cognitive limits; so dumb that thinking no longer occurs. Of course, Australians are not dumb like this, and our “good men” are not doing nothing, no sir, and we are ever-striving to overcome our oppressors. Sure.
  https://internationalman.com/articles/stupidity-evil-and-the-decline-of-the-us/