Geoff's Blog

Stopped for a slice of pizza on the way home tonight, while on my way to check my post-office box near the University of Toronto.

Some new gangly half-black guy was behind the counter along with the slim-but-unattractive Asian girl who’s worked there forever. For his sake, I hope it was his very first day on the job (I really don’t think it was), ’cause he only left it in the oven to re-heat for half as long as he should have, so the cheese wasn’t properly melted; and when he cut the slice in half, he didn’t cut it all the way through. It ended up being the worst slice of pizza I’ve ever purchased.

How incompetent and “niggardly” do you have to be, to not be able to re-heat and cut a slice of pizza properly? It ain’t rocket science, Sambo!

Then had the pleasure of having to pick up a couple of mailed items from a palpably two-digit-IQ black monkey-woman in a drugstore … wearing a “SUPERVISOR” tag! I would have far rather dealt with the reasonably attractive Asian woman who’s worked there forever … and who needed to show the monkey how to scan the barcodes on the mail items, ’cause that “supervisor” didn’t know how to do it.

(Is “supervisor” really a title in the post-office hierarchy? And seriously: I had cards for two items, and the monkey-woman needed to be told to scan the first one in, and then fetch the second one from the back room, in that order. Don’t ask me….)

“Diversity is strength.” It’s also higher-primate post-office “supervisors,” and immigrants (please don’t tell me he was a U of Toronto student) who can’t re-heat pizza competently.

I want my country back.

P.S. Admit it, you’ve always wondered how poorly the buildings were constructed in Haiti:

The audience at last Tuesday’s UC Berkeley lecture given by Eduardo Fierro, one of the first U.S. earthquake engineers to visit post-quake Haiti, collectively cringed as Fierro showed slide after slide of haphazard columns, brittle frames, and slipshod rods and joints. “This was not an earthquake disaster,” Fierro said. “[This] was caused by people that didn’t know how to use codes, that built things in bad shape. These were the people that caused the tragedy.”

Fierro, a Peruvian native who has worked around the Pacific rim, arrived in Haiti within two days of the earthquake to investigate the destruction caused to the country’s built environment. From Port Au Prince to smaller cities like Leogane, from cathedrals to schools to power plants, Fierro found that the same architectural mistakes were made over and over again….

Fierro concluded the seminar with photographs of local reconstructive efforts currently taking place. Things don’t look much better—new construction is proceeding the same way as before the quake. “Same little columns, same blocks, same lack of rebars,” Fierro said.

So much for the Steveospheric idea that all the gobs of Western money flowing into Haiti will rebuild it to a state better than it was before the quake. Not when you leave it in their hands, it won’t, even in the absence of government corruption.

Prior to Archimedes, the basic method of construction in even the most-developed parts of the world was to build things as tall as you dared, and then hope that they didn’t fall down. Especially in an earthquake. Of course, that was more than two thousand years ago, back when Diogenes was masturbating in the agora. Some of our world’s cultures have learned a thing or two about civil engineering since then.

Thankfully, there is a solution to Haiti’s construction woes:

“Better code and better design isn’t the answer,” Fierro said. He stressed that the rebuilding process must be simple and supervised. [By whom? Whitey?] One idea: distributing a “cartoonish” booklet depicting the right construction processes—a guide so easy to understand you “don’t have to be an engineer” to read it.

No, but you still have to be able to read. At least a little. Even for a “cartoonish” booklet which the locals might be able to understand and follow. (Suggested title: Curious George Builds a House. They could relate to the monkey theme, right? if not to the “imperialistic, colonial” yellow hat.) And therein lies the rub.

Maybe if they did it as a hip-hop video instead.

Those collapsed structures were not built without plans—architects, professional engineers, blueprints, cranes, the whole nine yards. If those houses and buildings were incompetently “constructed with unwieldy slabs of concrete,” that’s not simply from grunt-working non-engineers not being able to understand geek-speak. Rather, it’s the product of wild incompetence even among the architects and engineers themselves—graduates of Haiti’s many esteemed (and black-self-esteem-producing) universities, no doubt. Civil engineering is another thing you can’t bullshit or affirmative-action your way through. You can figure that out beforehand, or you can find it out the hard way, when people die from low-IQ black incompetence.

The latter is precisely what has happened in Haiti. It happens in the West too, with affirmative-action admissions to medical degree programs, where the differential in competence is literally killing people in the name of political correctness; you just don’t hear about that, except that it’s implied in the high cost of malpractice insurance. Wouldn’t you love to see those insurance claims broken down by the race of the doctor? It wouldn’t be pretty, that’s for sure.

You can see why they should just stick to re-heating pizza, eh?