I had high hopes for this article, but it failed to live up to it's lofty (linkbait) title. This to me is the crucial part of the article: "But since the 1970

I had high hopes for this article, but it failed to live up to it's lofty (linkbait) title. This to me is the crucial part of the article: "But since the 1970s there has been a decline in the quality of people in the key jobs in NASA, and elsewhere – because organizations no longer seek to find and use the best people as their ideal but instead try to be ‘diverse’ in various ways (age, sex, race, nationality etc)." "And also the people in the key jobs are no longer able to decide and command, due to the expansion of committees and the erosion of individual responsibility and autonomy." Neither of these means individuals' peak capability has declined, but the environment has changed. Bureaucracy, positive-discrimination (versus meritorcracy) may be stifling it, but that is a different argument. The author then completely discredited himself with the following: " ...swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders......" Since when is swiftly subduing and controlling weaker opposition regarded as the high water mark of human achievement? Renaissance Italy produced some of the finest artists that ever lived, yet Northern and Central Italy at the time could hardly be described as military superpowers with secure borders. City states would use mercenary armies to frequently wage war against one another. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Renaissance#International_relations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Renaissance#Internation... EDIT: grammar