A train carrying a dangerous chemical derailed and exploded in East Palestine, Ohio, on Valentine's Day, February 14th, 2023. What s going on? And why is the mainstream media ignoring it? What s the connection between the derailment and the lack of outrage from environmental activists?
00:00:00.000Ladies and gentlemen, today we've got a theme for you. Today we've got a thesis. Today we're going to solve a mystery. The collapse of complex systems. We are going to be detectives and we are going to examine the clues as to why these complex systems seem to be collapsing all around us from the railroads in East Palestine, Ohio, to the South African power grid. Stick with us. You need to hear this information because you're not going to hear it anywhere else.
00:00:27.160And chat GPT isn't allowed to tell you about these facts. But first, I want to remind you to sign up for the Poso Daily Brief. Humanevents.com slash Poso. It is completely free. Read what I read and show prep. You'll be able to skip the endless scrolling. You will be able to simply get one free email every single day from the Poso Daily Brief and the news you need to know. Humanevents.com slash Poso. Let's get into it.
00:00:57.160Right now in East Palestine, students and teachers are back in the classroom for the first time in over a week since a train derailed while carrying a dangerous chemical. While schedules, busing and even extracurricular activities will resume like normal, the school system says many students are not back in school because these families were displaced and are waiting on air testing in their homes.
00:01:18.960Now, a new letter from the EPA lists more chemicals found since the controlled explosion of vinyl chloride and says Norfolk Southern may be liable for damage and compensation in the area. That's the railway that operated the train.
00:01:32.420The EPA says after air monitoring and water sampling, it found four other chemicals in nearby creeks and streams, surface soils and in storm drains.
00:01:42.540Norfolk Southern has not responded to this news yet, but over the weekend, the railway confirmed they cut a check to the city for fire gear.
00:01:50.020Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily.
00:01:53.220Today is February 14th, St. Valentine's Day, 2023. Anno Domine, East Palestine, Ohio.
00:02:01.220The train derailment. The potential for an ecological disaster.
00:02:08.380The only ecological disaster that, as far as we can tell, that doesn't seem to concern any of the environmental activists whatsoever.
00:02:15.420Greta's not there. None of the greenies are there. Al Gore's not around.
00:02:20.420Leonardo DiCaprio's not flying his private jet. Klaus Schwab hasn't mentioned it yet.
00:02:24.780See, the problem with the train derailment like this is, you know, for a number of reasons.
00:02:28.800Number one, that Warren Buffett is super invested in a lot of railroads in this country, as well as Blackstone and Blackrock and so many others.
00:02:39.420That's the reason they're all against pipelines, by the way, because they're all heavily invested in railroads.
00:02:43.360That's why they were against the Keystone XL pipeline.
00:02:45.100In fact, there was somebody who told us that we should build pipelines because they are safer and will relieve stress on our railroad systems.
00:02:52.540But I wanted to get into a deeper question because I think the East Palestine situation and the fact that most of the mainstream media is not covering it whatsoever.
00:03:56.020Well, because apparently we're supposed to pick our transportation secretary because of his sex life, not his actual qualifications at doing his job.
00:04:08.000The infrastructure in the United States has been crumbling for a long time.
00:04:12.200And there's a lot of reasons why this is.
00:04:15.220One of them, by far, is because we in this country have done away with standards for a long time.
00:04:24.420Hiring quotas have been in place since Gen Xers were entering the market.
00:04:39.560In those debates that were being held, the oral arguments for affirmative action, and he said.
00:04:46.620Explain to me the benefits of diversity.
00:04:49.180And they went on and said, well, we, you know, we think that diverse outcomes and diverse classrooms, he's talking about schools, enrich the educational experience.
00:08:46.180You can contact them immediately today.
00:08:47.800The travelers on the road this festive season have been sending out images that attest to what experts have been saying, that South Africa's infrastructure is crumbling.
00:09:01.940Let's look at the state of infrastructure tonight then.
00:09:04.900A report from the South African Institution of Civil Engineering published late last year suggests that the entire public infrastructural system in South Africa has collapsed or is in danger of collapsing.
00:09:18.000In its report card, it gave infrastructure a D, which is the lowest rating since the report was first published in 2006.
00:09:25.580An investigation by the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure also suggests that the country's road networks are in a mess.
00:10:49.160Well, it turns out that here in the United States, this phrase that we hear over and over and over, equity, equity, equity, is not domestic at all.
00:10:58.280It's not indigenous to the to the shores of North America.
00:11:01.840It actually comes to us by way of South Africa.
00:11:04.400And here's, of course, CNN's CNN's reporting in 1998.
00:11:09.880South Africa's economy is still carved up between a few giant conglomerates, mainly controlled by whites.
00:11:15.440But four years after historic all race elections, black owned firms are making gains.
00:11:22.900To push that transition into the white owned ranks and make up for the wrongs of the apartheid era.
00:11:29.160President Nelson Mandela's government backs a plan in which black South Africans, quote, would need to constitute 69 percent of the workforce at all levels from the top down.
00:11:43.600Force race quotas onto South Africa, force them onto a country.
00:11:50.160This is what Nelson Mandela did, and this is what his successors have done.
00:11:54.860Now let's go to reporting from CNN just four days ago.
00:11:59.160This is a report from last Friday, February 10th.
00:12:03.540South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has declared a national state of disaster in response to the country's drawn out energy crisis, calling it, quote, an existential threat to Africa's most developed economy.
00:12:15.440Setting out the government's key objectives for the year in the State of the Nation address on Thursday, he said the crisis is an existential threat and the very social fabric of our country.
00:12:24.560Our most immediate priority is to restore energy security.
00:12:27.900They've endured power cuts for years, but in 2022 saw more than twice as many blackouts as any other year as aging cold fire power plants broke down and the state-owned power utility, ESCOM, struggled to find the money to buy diesel for emergency generators.
00:12:44.180Blackouts in South Africa, or load shedding, as they're known locally, have been lasting for as long as 12 hours a day.
00:12:54.060Last month, the South African Funeral Practitioners Association warned that people were advised to bury their dead within four days because mortuary bodies were decomposing because of the constant electricity outages.
00:13:10.960They can't even keep bodies on the slab, they can't even keep bodies on the slab, and they're decomposing too fast because of power outages, and all thanks to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:13:27.300Now, here's what's going on, and there are slums, by the way, on the outside of Johannesburg, where you can find families.
00:13:41.080You can find families in poverty, people starving, dirty, children that are just as poor as the people in poverty that you were trying to help in the 1990s.
00:14:00.200What they've done is, what they've done is they've flipped the inequality.
00:14:07.320They've decided to put people into poverty in South Africa because of the color of their skin, the Afrikaners, and instead have the systems run with this racial quota system that's leading to massive collapse.
00:14:24.340And it's not just there. You can go and find article after article, the railroads, public transportation, the ports, the airports, the police, the corruption.
00:14:33.860South Africa is a country that literally has critical race theory printed in its constitution.
00:14:40.280It is required for the government of South Africa now, since the 1990s, to impose critical race theory on their country.
00:14:49.720How's it going? How's it working out, folks? How's it working out for the people of South Africa?
00:14:55.180Not so good, is it? Look, I'm all for having a country that is colorblind.
00:15:01.480But the point is, you have to focus on results. You have to focus on outcomes. You have to focus on excellence.
00:15:10.320If we're actually going to say we don't care what the color of your person's skin is, okay, fine.
00:15:13.640But are you putting them there because of the color of their skin or are you doing it because you want your institutions, your workforce, whatever, to look a certain way at the detriment of the actual outcome of that service?
00:15:35.240You don't have power. Your planes could be falling out of the sky.
00:15:47.280The government is committed to go back to the 1990s article.
00:15:50.440The government is committed to change.
00:15:52.080The job equity measure is designed to prevent discrimination, provide for affirmative action and bridge the wage gap between management and workers.
00:16:00.400Oh, my gosh. They're talking about how the other they're talking about how the company's management is must change over the railroads.
00:16:07.360We're going to change the railroads over. Folks, this is what happens.
00:18:21.060So, I do also want to point out something else.
00:18:26.240Because I don't think it's necessarily just because of this commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion that so many complex systems are collapsing.
00:19:16.480They keep things running, keep the trains running.
00:19:19.120But you notice, as they retire, as they reach retirement age and step off, we're starting to see millennials and Gen X try to fill the gap, and it isn't quite working.
00:19:30.560And we played that parody right there as an example of that.
00:19:33.540But look at this from Skitch, which is an industry insight magazine.
00:19:40.940As baby boomers retire, labor shortages in construction increase.
00:19:44.380From LAist, it's actually kind of a woke article, but it points out, as baby boomers retire, the water workforce faces its own drought, which, if you remember the movie, the old Jack Nicholson movie, Chinatown, is actually all about water in LA.
00:20:00.340The industry is struggling to keep up as workers are retiring, who had the baby boomers with the boom of a workforce in water treatment jobs throughout the 80s and 90s.
00:20:11.580And now they can't keep up with workers.
00:20:14.000They don't have a trained workforce because people just simply don't want to go into this anymore.
00:20:18.340And even Forbes, even Forbes has the article up.
00:20:21.120The nation's infrastructure has a bigger problem than its politics.
00:20:24.540It's baby boomer and zoomer retirement.
00:20:27.500So we're seeing even if the money flows, will workers be available to rebuild U.S. infrastructure?
00:20:33.880I want to read a little bit from the Forbes article just to give you a sense of what's going on.
00:20:38.660And they quote Yogi Berra, who says, you can see a lot by looking.
00:20:43.680Have you dared to look at some of our nation's highway overpasses and bridges?
00:20:46.520You have to wonder how long rough cut lumber jerry-rigged into place can serve as a reinforcement to delay the decay of one of the nation's greatest achievements, but also oldest achievements, the interstate highway system.
00:20:57.120We can talk about clean drinking water like the people of Flint, the issues in Brenton Harbor.
00:21:02.720The American Society of Civil Engineers attempted to bring attention to this in 1988 with a scorecard.
00:21:08.700The nation's infrastructure grade has wobbled between a D and a D plus ever since the first scorecard was issued.
00:21:16.120If the nation were a student, it would have been expelled long ago.
00:21:47.580Older Gen Xers and baby boomers are the backbone of the construction trades and operators of today's infrastructure, and they are heading for the door.
00:21:55.200You can blame the pandemic that accelerated many to retire earlier than they might have, but demographic is destiny.
00:23:10.220What are we doing as a country to promote the actual jobs that maintain the backbone?
00:23:18.720I'd love to see, by the way, this is focusing on infrastructure, but I'd love to look to look at truckers and so many other jobs like that.
00:23:26.700That certainly require a human to be able to run this.
00:23:29.780And by the way, here's a little here's the dirty little secret.
00:23:32.480Guess which jobs are now threatened the most by A.I.
00:23:37.840No, it's the email jobs, the laptop class jobs.
00:23:41.700It's the jobs that everybody thought that they'd be doing for copywriter, journalists, all these different jobs that people thought that they would be doing in perpetuity.
00:23:51.280Many people invested four to six years of their life and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get a degree for.
00:24:00.620And then along comes chat GPT and stealth GPT and 11 labs and so many of these other programs out there.
00:24:06.180And they do the job better than you and faster and cheaper.