In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond studied a dozen societies across thousands of years, from the Maya to the Vikings, to answer one question: why do great civilizations fall? What he found wasn't drought, war or bad luck. None of those were ever enough on their own. The one thing present in every collapse was how the people at the top responded to what was happening below them.
The warning sign he found again and again was leaders who were completely insulated from the pain of ordinary people. When the powerful never feel the consequences, they stop seeing the problem, and when they stop seeing it, they stop fixing it. The Maya kings kept enriching themselves and building monuments while the farmers who fed them went hungry. Their civilization didn't fall because of one bad year. It fell because the people in charge had stopped living in the same world as everyone else.
Diamond called them "distant managers." They are the people in power who live so far from the damage that they are the last to understand how bad it has gotten. By the time they notice, the fields are already empty.
His most important finding was that collapse is a choice. Every society that fell had leaders who could have changed course and chose not to. The question for us is whether we will keep letting people who can't see us make that choice for us. Because we are there folks.
Kennedy: "I don't think any public official, including President Trump or Kristi Noem or John Kennedy, should spend public money on private ads for themselves ... I may end up with a sombrero on my head, but I also think we ought to have a rule that no politician can have a building named after him when he's alive"
Hope Kyle Juszcykyzck is happy with himself. My 4 year old son Chris saw this demanded that I only fill his sippy dinosaur cup with Bud Light, the official beer sponsor of the NFL
Arizona Sheriff who ended the Flock camera contract in his county:
If we rely on private camera networks to continuously log the habits of innocent Americans without a warrant, we are paving the way to an AI-driven surveillance state. We must establish clear boundaries for automatic license plate readers. We cannot wait for a future Supreme Court ruling to correct AI overreach. We must protect the Fourth Amendment today.
A new study reaffirms that taking Tylenol during pregnancy as directed is not linked to neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD or autism.
ABC News' Hanna Battah reports. https://t.co/PT1t3fCPka