The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Corporate Profit’ and the Political Ideas That Are Driving America’s Crime Wave

Posted on | December 28, 2023 | Comments Off on ‘Corporate Profit’ and the Political Ideas That Are Driving America’s Crime Wave

The image above is from a police dashcam showing the end of a pursuit in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. The SUV was driven by 18-year-old Demetrius Walker of Milwaukee, and the front-seat passenger, 18-year-old Nevaeh Beck of Milwaukee, had stolen about $300 worth of merchandise from Home Depot, where Walker had helped himself to some snacks and soft drinks. After a pursuit of about five miles that reached speeds over 90 mph, heading back into Milwaukee, the SUV crashed into a light pole, at which point five people — Walker, Beck, two other teenagers and a 5-year-old child — fled on foot before being apprehended:

According to the criminal complaint, Wauwatosa police responded to a retail theft at Home Depot on N. 124th Street on Friday, Sept. 22. Officers were told two females walked out of the store with cleaning supplies and loaded them into a black SUV with no license plate. The criminal complaint says the pair left the store with $308.93 worth of cleaning supplies without paying for them. The complaint also says the driver of the SUV, identified as defendant Demetrius Walker, also entered the store, “took two bottles of soda and a bag of chips and left the store without paying for the property. As soon as the females loaded up the (SUV) with the rest of the stolen merchandise, Walker drove away.” . . .
In an interview with police, Walker “admitted to shoplifting from Home Depot and that he took drinks and a snack without paying. Walker admitted to being the driver of the vehicle. Walker admitted that he knew the merchandise being loaded into the (SUV) was stolen because he was told by Beck that it was stolen as she was loading the (SUV) up. Walker admitted to fleeing from officers because he had been informed that the (SUV) was stolen,” the complaint says.

Stolen SUV. Stolen cleaning supplies. Stolen soda. Stolen chips.

Watch the YouTube video of the police pursuit:

 

After watching this YouTube video in the wee hours, I read the comments, many of which were about the “usual suspects” nature of these criminals. Being a habitual viewer of police videos on YouTube, I am inured to this unpleasant reality. Why do some people feel the need to resist the law so strenously? You see the blue lights in the rear-view mirror, you pull over. You know you’re guilty. What are the chances you’re going to outrun the cops in your stolen SUV? And once you wreck out, with multiple cop cars in pursuit, why even try fleeing on foot?

Perhaps these young scholars from Milwaukee were so busy studying for their AP Physics exams that they didn’t have the leisure to watch YouTube videos and figure out they had no chance of escaping the law. Perhaps, but what I perceive — not just in this video, but in so many dozens of others I’ve watched — is that some people have an attitude of disrespect for the law and contempt for authority.

Gosh, I wonder how they got that attitude?

The anti-police rhetoric that flooded the TV airwaves during the summer of 2020, and the media coverage that excused the “fiery but most peaceful protests,” have helped foster a belief that resistance to law enforcement is some kind of heroic duty. So you drive the stolen car until it crashes, then you flee on foot and, if you happen to have a pistol handy, you get into a shootout with the cops, dying in the proverbial “hail of gunfire,” thus becoming a courageous martyr for social justice.

It would be easy to write a 5,000-word essay about this irrational and destructive mentality, but that’s not what got me going on this particular video. No, it was this comment that set me off:

“I’m so happy we’re protecting corporations profits”

This infuriated me, and I replied:

“Your attitude — ignorantly deriding ‘corporate profit’ — is indistinguishable from that of the criminals. Why do you think businesses (large or small) exist, huh? Where do you suppose the profit goes? And what would happen if the business could not make a profit? You should be ashamed of yourself, but if you had any sense of shame, I suppose, you never would have said such a thing.”

Has this person never read Atlas Shrugged? Or do they just not understand how business operates? Here’s a simple formula:

Profit = Jobs

It’s really not much more complicated than that. The only reason any business exists is because the owners — whether sole proprietor, partnership, or corporation — hope to make a profit on their investment. If they fail to make a profit, they go out of business, and then they can’t employ anybody. No profit, no jobs. This is true both on the global and local level. Where any government creates conditions that are incompatible with profitable business activity, they will thereby drive jobs out of the community. (Hint: There are no CVS stores in Gaza.) You may say, “Well, Home Depot is a gigantic nationwide business that’s in no danger of going out of business anytime soon.” True, but any particular Home Depot location that doesn’t make a profit will be closed, costing jobs at the local level. And if a community tolerates lawlessness, there won’t be any Home Depot locations there. Like, there’s no Home Depot in downtown Baltimore; you have to go out on the east side, near I-95.

There are today many places in America where the local Democratic governments, by tolerating crime, have ruined the economies of their communities. The entire state of California is circling the toilet bowl:

California’s budget deficit swells
to record $68B as tax revenue falls
— Politico, Dec. 7

Report: Wealthy Taxpayers Are
Fleeing California
— Breitbart, Dec. 20

The California exodus continues.
Chart shows how unusual
the population drop was
— San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 21

There are many causes of California’s problems — Gov. Gavin Newsom enforced one of the most draconian and longest-lasting COVID-19 lockdowns in the country — but a lot of it has to do with the crime wave unleashed when the state’s voters approved Proposition 47, which reduced “most drug possession offenses and thefts of property valued under $950.00 from felonies to misdemeanors.” Well, guess what? The level of retail theft in California is now “beyond crisis level,” as the Sacramento County sheriff has said. Anyone who sneers at “corporate profit” ought to have second thoughts, if they’ll just watch a few videos about what’s happened in San Francisco — one empty storefront after another in what were once bustling commercial districts:


 

My friend Dianna Deeley, who used to live in the San Francisco area, was saddened when I sent her those videos. This economic destruction was entirely avoidable, and the voters of California who inflicted this destruction — electing people like Newsom, and voting for ill-considered “reforms” like Prop 47 — should be ashamed of themselves. But then again, if they had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t vote for Democrats.



 

Category: Crime, Wisconsin

Rule 5 Sunday: Santa, Baby!

Posted on | December 25, 2023 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: Santa, Baby!

— compiled by Wombat-socho

This is the time of year when we’re blessed with a surfeit of attractive young ladies clad in festive Christmassy raiment. One such is this lass, whose pic I filched from kbdabear’s feed on X.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Climate Cult Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, Candy Cane Lane, Julie Christie, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”, Nordic Solstice, Last & First Men, Buffalo Gals, MAGA Rocky Mountain Ballot Ban, The Ventures Christmas Album, Mistletoe Ranch, and The Family Plan

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Lucy Kilcommons, Forget It Jake, It’s Baltimore, The Grinches Want to Steal Christmas, Fish Pic Friday – Madison Shaudys, Tattoo Thursday, The Wednesday Wetness, Still Fighting About Little Fish, Tuesday Tanlines, The Monday Morning Stimulus, and  Palm Sunday

FLAPPR: T.I.T.S. For December 22

AVERAGE BUBBA: Rule Five Friday (Pre-Christmas Edition)

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Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts




Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Our Annual Rogers Hornsby Moment

Posted on | December 25, 2023 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Our Annual Rogers Hornsby Moment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.
– Rogers Hornsby, Hall of Fame second baseman

So we got stomped in the playoffs by the Angels. So what. After two years as the co-doormat of Pete’s Draft League*, it was good to rise up and deal out the beatings for a change; finishing second in the AL West with a 91-71 record felt very, very good indeed. Now comes the time to look over the roster and see which players we want to keep and which players we’ll set free because they’re turning into pumpkins in 1972. We also ought to take a few minutes and talk to this Herzog kid; Ted’s making noises about wanting to spend more time with the fish next summer, and it would be kinda cool to let the Kid leave while he’s on top.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

Time to lock the doors and go home until spring.

Why Are Democrats Such Bad People?
First Street Journal
The Daley Gator
Flappr
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL




Rule 5 Sunday: Outstanding In Her Field
Animal Magnetism
Average Bubba
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL

John Hoge, R.I.P.
The Pirate’s Cove
357 Magnum
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Falcons & Eagles
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

Which One of You ‘Christofascists’ Urinated in A.R. Moxon’s Cornflakes?
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.18.23
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.20.23 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

Do Bananas Grow in Colorado?
Flappr
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.21.23 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.21.23 (Evening Edition)
Average Bubba
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

‘TNFlyGirl’ as a Metaphor
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.22.23
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending December 22:

  1.  EBL (12)
  2.  357 Magnum (11)
  3.  A View From The Beach (9)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

*Montreal is still the worst team in the National League, and it’s not even close.

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Category: FMJRA Award

Ex-NFL Player: ‘Average White Guys’ Shouldn’t Be Talking About Football

Posted on | December 24, 2023 | Comments Off on Ex-NFL Player: ‘Average White Guys’ Shouldn’t Be Talking About Football

Rashard Mendenhall kicked a hornet’s nest this week, and even after getting ratio’d into oblivion, refused to apologize:

Let us stipulate that we don’t know what set him off. Something must have provoked him to say these offensive things, and his willingness to maintain his defense suggests that either (a) the provocation was great, or (b) Mendenhall has been getting tired of hearing “average white guys” for a long time. Because I don’t know what the background might be, I would not participate in a rush to jump on this particular dogpile. What is to be gained by joining an online lynch mob? Besides which, I dislike the tendency of some of my fellow conservatives to point the finger and say, “See? Black people are racist, too!” The far better approach to such issues, I contend, is to attack the fundamental premise of the syllogism, i.e., the liberal assumption that “racism” is the universal explanation of every problem afflicting black people. Call me a “racist,” and my response is likely to be, “So?” What does that have to do with anything? Even if it were true that I harbored some opinion which you might describe as “racist,” how is anyone — black, brown, whatever — actually harmed by my mere opinion? Spurious accusations of racism — “RAAAAACISM!” — are generally motivated by politics, representing an attempt to gain some advantage by discrediting one’s opponents, a character assassination that is logically invalid as argument and irrelevant in terms of explaining the problems of black America. But I have digressed far enough . . .

Rashard Mendenhall asserts that he is better than “ur goat,” G.O.A.T. being an acronym for Greatest of All Time, but this is self-evidently false. I’m guessing Mendenhall, as a former Pittsburgh Steeler, might be thinking of Rocky Bleier and I’m sorry, no, sir, you’re not better than him, at least in terms of pure courage. Whether or not Bleier was ever the “greatest” in terms of speed, the simple fact that he made it to the NFL — and won four Super Bowls with the Steelers — after being blasted by a hand grenade in Vietnam is ample testimony to his character.

So if Mendenhall was provoked by some old Pittsburgh fan’s nostalgic remembrance of Rocky Bleier as the G.O.A.T., maybe the best response would have been to bite his tongue. But I actually don’t think that’s what set him off. No, I think it more likely that Mendenhall’s resentment was provoked by the praise being heaped on San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey, a white guy who’s a lot better than “average.”

Since being acquired from the Carolina Panthers in a mid-season trade last year, McCaffrey has become the driving force of San Francisco’s offense, and is arguably the reason the 49ers are now 11-3, with the best record in the NFC and the odds-on favorite for the Super Bowl.

McCaffrey has rushed for nearly 1,300 yards and added more than 500 yards catching passes, with a total of 20 touchdowns, and these statistics don’t really do justice to the decisive nature of McCaffrey’s contributions. Whether it’s making crucial third-down conversions, or just enabling the Niners to play the kind of ball-control offense that helps keep their defense rested, it’s hard to imagine San Francisco being the conference leader without him. And yes, he’s white, in an era where it’s rather rare to see white players as running backs, let alone the kind of franchise star McCaffrey has become in San Francisco.

If there’s any secret to McCaffrey’s success, it’s good breeding. His father, Ed McCaffrey, spent 13 NFL seasons as a wide receiver, including three consecutive 1,000-yard-plus seasons (1998-2000) with the Denver Broncos. Athleticism comes from both sides of the family, however, as Christian McCaffrey’s mother was a soccer star at Stanford, and her father was an Olympic sprinter. Coming from a family with a tradition of athletic success, Christian McCaffrey’s NFL career is less surprising than it might otherwise appear in an era where it is not controversial to assume that only black players can be star running backs.

And, hate to break it to you, Rashard Mendenhall, but Christian McCaffrey is better than you ever were. In your best NFL season, you rushed for 1,273 yards and 13 TDs, which is less than McCaffrey’s got this year. So if you’re ranting about “average white guys” because you’re tired of hearing TV commentators praise McCaffrey’s ability, that’s too bad — he deserves the praise, and your complaints are unseemly.

By the way, permit me to suggest reading Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We’re Afraid To Talk About It by Jon Entine, a careful examination of the subject. The crucial point is that we’re talking about tail-end-of-the-bell-curve phenomena, which is less about average group differences than about what happens in competition between a comparative handful of elite athletes. It is unfortunate that a dogmatic commitment to intellectual abstractions about equality tends to make many people reluctant to acknowledge actual differences between racial or ethnic groups, as if such an acknowledgement would automatically lead to resurrecting Jim Crow or Nazi Germany.

There is no reason why all of us — including “average white guys” — can’t get along peacefully, without resorting to censorship and quotas and endless protests about “injustice.” Just get used to the idea that (a) everybody’s racist and (b) so what? The rest of it is then a lot easier.



 

Category: Football, Racism

Meth-Crazed Lesbian Dies in Proverbial Hail of Gunfire; No Charges for Cops

Posted on | December 23, 2023 | Comments Off on Meth-Crazed Lesbian Dies in Proverbial Hail of Gunfire; No Charges for Cops

Methamphetamine is a bad drug, and when the final report about the death of Whitney Leanne Fox, 36, was issued last month, probably the most important finding was the autopsy that showed “the amount of meth found in her blood was double the amount normally associated with irrational and violent behavior in meth abusers.” This is sufficient to explain why she led cops in Cocke County, Tennessee, on a high-speed pursuit that ended with her getting shot to death while apparently trying to run over officers who were attempting to get her out of the vehicle.

That happened in May this year, but authorities didn’t release body-camera footage of the incident until after a special investigation cleared the two county deputies of wrongdoing in the case: “Both deputies were placed in the position of being on foot in an open field with a driver who had no intention of surrendering and who was in command of a fully operational vehicle, which could reasonably be considered a deadly weapon.” And so last night I watched the YouTube video of the incident:

 

One of my pet peeves with local journalism these days is that there’s so little follow-up reporting on criminal activity. Surely, there must be a fascinating story of how Whitney Fox’s life ended this way, but apparently no reporter in East Tennessee considers the story worth pursuing.

Who was Whitney Fox? That question rooted itself in my mind, and when I started Googling for answers, among the things I noticed was that her obituary listed her as the mother of a daughter named Ryleigh, but made no mention of her being survived by a husband (or any other partner).

Then I found a Facebook page (which I won’t link) showing that, circa 2015-16, Whitney was in a relationship with a woman whose initials are T.A. Some time during the past decade, however, Whitney’s life seemed to descend in a downward spiral. About a year before her fatal confrontation with Cocke County sheriff’s deputies, there was this report from April 2022 in Newport, Tennessee:

On April 29, Patrolman Paul Weber initiated a traffic stop for a Buick with an expired temporary tag. The driver was identified as Whitney Fox, age 35. Fox was known to have an active arrest warrant out of Sevier County for Aggravated Kidnapping. Weber placed Fox under arrest and transported her to Sevier County, where she was released to the Sevier County Sheriff’s Department.

Whoa! Aggravated kidnapping? That is a serious felony, so why was Whitney Fox back out on the street barely a year later? What was involved in this Sevier County kidnapping case? Did the case go to trial? Was there a plea bargain? Or was Whitney Fox out on bail awaiting trial?

You see what I mean about the lack of follow-up by the local media? Other than the report that she was picked up on this warrant in April 2022, I could find no reporting about her Sevier County charges. My hunch — and it is only a hunch — is that she must have gotten out on bail and then failed to show up for a court hearing, because the reason cops tried to pull Fox over in what turned out to be the fatal May 2023 encounter was that she “reportedly had several outstanding warrants.”

It’s not just urban “blue” districts where the judicial system fails society by a turn-’em-loose approach to criminals. Even in rural East Tennessee (Cocke County voted 82% for Trump), somehow a meth addict with a criminal record was on the street. And this was not good for Whitney Leanne Fox. The cops fired 22 shots, hitting her 13 times.



 

Category: Crime

‘Oh, We’re Halfway There’

Posted on | December 23, 2023 | Comments Off on ‘Oh, We’re Halfway There’

Because I don’t watch much TV except news and sports, I know almost nothing about Millie Bobby Brown, one of the stars of a popular Netflix science-fiction series, Stranger Things. As for her fiancé, well, his dad used to be kinda popular in the 1980s, and maybe still is, if you count karaoke singalongs. When their engagement made headlines in April, there was a good deal of journalistic chatter: “Oh, they’re so young!”

Really? During the 1950s, the median age at first marriage for women in the United States was 20.3 years, which is to say that nearly half of weddings involved teenage brides. Such was life in the Golden Age of middle-class America, when Dwight Eisenhower was president. You would probably risk a United Nations human rights investigation if you advocated a return to the 1950s status quo ante, what with all the propaganda directed toward denouncing “child brides” (by which they mean any girl marrying before age 18). This is why Millie Bobby Brown’s engagement at 19 was “controversial,” as if she were a helpless child in a Third World village being bartered off by a tribal leader in some kind of primitive exchange where the father of the bride gets a herd of goats.

Question: Do any of these people who get themselves in a huff over youthful marriage actually remember what it was like being a teenager?

Boredom and restlessness, an impatient yearning to break free from the stifling prison of high school — that’s what I remember, mainly. Also, smoking weed and listening to Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. But there were also years of unrequited love, hopeless crushes that never got anywhere, and, yes, the hormone-induced Bible Belt affliction of sinful lust.

People seemed to grow up faster back in the Seventies. A ninth-grader could walk into the store and buy a pack of Marlboros, no questions asked. The legal drinking age was 18, although many of us started much earlier than that, and high-school girls were partying in downtown discos where nobody much cared whether their IDs were fake.

The main obstacle to adolescent hedonism back then, at least in the Deep South, was the prevalence of what we would now call fundamentalist Christianity, which defined the moral code that adults sought to inculcate in youth. We were all wretched sinners in need of salvation — this was the theme of every Sunday sermon at Lithia Springs First Baptist Church, and every sermon ended in an altar call, usually with the choir leading the congregation in “Softly and Tenderly.” Growing up with the consciousness of one’s inherently sinful nature — being lost, with only one hope of redemption — did not necessarily lead to good behavior, and I was rebellious by nature. Bad boys were (and probably still are) more numerous than bad girls, so there was a supply-and-demand imbalance in the sins-of-the-flesh market once adolescence arrived.

All this I recall by way of rebuking those soi-disant “reformers” who think that adolescence should be extended by effectively prohibiting teenagers from becoming adults. They don’t want kids to grow up and get jobs; instead, they want to send them off to college to accumulate a mountain of debt and get a worthless diploma, thus to make them even less capable of independent living than they would have been if they’d dropped out of school in 10th grade. Most of all, they don’t want young people to fall in love, marry their high-school sweethearts and have babies. Our 21st-century “reformers” are anti-marriage, anti-motherhood and, in the final analysis, anti-love. So when a Hollywood starlet like Millie Bobby Brown announces her engagement at age 19 — oh, how dare she do such a thing?

If Millie Bobby Brown had declared herself to be transgender, gotten injected with testosterone and underwent a double mastectomy, she would have been applauded for her (or “his”) courageous choices. But getting engaged? To marry a man? Well, this is not just unfashionable, it’s practically unthinkable, at least in the minds of the “reformers.”

What was once considered the right thing to do — “better to marry than to burn” (I Corinthians 7:9) — is now considered quite wrong in a culture that has abandoned biblical morality in favor of “progressive” beliefs.

In choosing the old-fashioned way, Millie and Jake are rebels against the prevailing cultural norms, and it’s weird that, even though Jake’s dad seems to be a Democrat in politics, he’s an old-fashioned conservative in his personal life, having spent more than 30 years married to his high-school sweetheart. Now, everybody sing along:

We got to hold on to what we got.
It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not.
We got each other, and that’s a lot.

Just make sure Millie’s dad gets that herd of goats, OK?



 

Category: Celebrities

In The Mailbox: 12.22.23

Posted on | December 23, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.22.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

Mash Kyrielight wishes you a Merry Christmas!

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: How’s That Bail Reform Working Out?
EBL:  Dostoyevsky Survives Firing Squad, also, Julie Christie
Twitchy: Author Claims Argentina Turning Fascist – Gets Slapped By People Who Know The Definition, Randi Weingarten Tries To Dunk On Prager U – Gets Buried Under Receipts, and Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud At U. Minnesota
Louder With Crowder: Below average high school male sprinter turns female, now SHE’S crushing records in college
Vox Popoli: The Shadow Mocks
According To Hoyt: Better Late Than Never Post, Sorry, Sorry, Sorry, and Blessed When The Masks Fell
Monster Hunter Nation:
Stoic Observations: Merry Christmas

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Avoiding a Junk-Filled Christmas
American Greatness: A Glaring Sign of Rot Within the CIA
American Thinker: 2020 Election Fraud and the Courts, also, One Doctor’s Fight for COVID Justice
Animal Magnetism: First Day of Winter, also, Rule Five Climate Cult Friday
Babalu Blog: A black Christmas in Cuba for the family members of political prisoners, Cuba’s fake president says drastic economic reforms ‘will make more Revolution and more Socialism’, and Nicaraguan dictatorship arrests bishop for saying he prays for imprisoned bishop
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For December 22
Behind The Black: Red Chinese astronauts do spacewalk to repair Tiangong-3 solar panel, Firefly successfully launches for the second time in 2023, and Curiosity takes a close-up of distant cliffs
Cafe Hayek: By Itself?
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: Worth Pondering
Da Tech Guy: My Suggestion to St. Mary’s Fire the Board, Fire the President
Don Surber: Merry Christmas, Matt Drudge
First Street Journal: St Greta of Thunberg must be appalled!
Gates Of Vienna: Striking Their Necks, also, We Have Ways of Making You Give Up Your Christmas Goodies!
The Geller Report: “Irishman” Who Stabbed Three Young Children With 14 Inch Knife Finally Identified as Muslim Migrant (Algerian National)
Hollywood In Toto: Why Godzilla Minus One Is Best Film in Decades-Old Franchise, Thanksgiving Slices Up a New Holiday Classic, and Toto’s Worst Movies of 2023
The Lid: Senator Rand Paul’s 2022 Report’ Uncovers a Startling $9 BILLION in Government Waste
Legal Insurrection: People Have Noticed the COVID Boosters Aren’t Very Effective, “If you had a 17-year-old son or daughter, would you send your kids to an Ivy League school today?”, Temple University Police Reportedly Threatened With Sanctions for Pushing Clothing Drive for the Needy, NYC Mayor Eric Adams Slams City Council for Pushing ‘Far-Left’ Agenda Over Progressive Policing and Crime Bills, and U California Tables Anti-Israel Proposed Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement After Pushback
Nebraska Energy Observer: Scattershot Friday
Outkick: Nick Saban Shares Ominous Warning For Future Of College Football, Florida State Files Lawsuit Against ACC In Fight To Leave Conference, Dodgers Have Built A Superteam, But Does It Matter In October? Patrick Mahomes Makes Taylor Swift Official Member Of Kansas City Chiefs: ‘She’s Part Of The Team’, Former Red Sox Pitcher Jonathan Papelbon Roasts Alex Verdugo After Manager Criticism, and Jets FB Nick Bawden’s Wife, Alexis, Gets The Internet’s Attention Via Yoga Pants Photo
Power Line: Interfering In Another Country’s Politics, also, Thoughts from the ammo line
Shark Tank: U.S. Sugar Makes Historic Donations This Holiday Season
Shot In The Dark: A Christmas Time Visit To The Ghost Of DFL Victory-Dancing Past, also, The Hallmark Movie I’d Like To See Over The Holidays
The Political Hat: 12 Post of Christmas, 2023 (Day 10)
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, Retired Airman attempts to gain base entry by claiming to be Captain America, and Army veteran struck by eight different vehicles
Victory Girls: Adulting Is Hard, And You Know What They Say About Karma
Volokh Conspiracy: Clarence Thomas: The Best and Most Incorruptible Supreme Court Justice in U.S. History
Watts Up With That: Authorities Raid Berlin-Based Radical Leftist Group “Zora”… Leader Tied To “Fridays For Future”, VOX: Winter Has Disappeared Thanks to Climate Change, and SCOTUS Will Hear Challenge to One of EPA’s Most Stringent Proposed Climate Regs
The Federalist: The Pregnancy Center That Saved My Life Years Ago Still Supports Me And My Sons, Washington Post Shedding Hundreds Of Staff From Payroll After Trump Presidency And Covid Is The Reason For The Season, Defunding Child Sexualizers Like The Kinsey Institute Should Be A No-Brainer For Republicans, With Help From DOJ, Lesley Wolf Dodged GOP Questions About Her Obstruction Of Biden Probe, By Trying To Keep Trump Off The Ballot, Democrats Are Staging A Coup In Broad Daylight, and Kate Cox’s Baby Deserved A Name
Mark Steyn: You Make Me Feel So Jung

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Category: Linkagery

‘TNFlyGirl’ as a Metaphor

Posted on | December 22, 2023 | Comments Off on ‘TNFlyGirl’ as a Metaphor

Tragedies can be instructive, if you pay attention, and the death of Jenny Blalock, a/k/a “TNFlyGirl,” could be a useful lesson in many ways. Blalock was a 44-year-old University of Tennessee graduate and successful businesswoman, founder of Luxe Homes and Design.

A couple of years ago, Blalock bought a Beechcraft Debonair airplane, which costs about $100,000 and carries four people, including the pilot, and took lessons to become a pilot. She had about 15,000 followers on her YouTube channel, which featured videos about her flying excursions. She wanted to have the plane fly on autopilot, so she had a Century 2000 autopilot system installed and, apparently, this was her fatal mistake, ultimately resulting in a crash that killed both her and her father, Buck.

After the December 7 crash, but before the National Transportation Board (NTSB) had issued its report on the incident, veteran pilot Juan Browne examined the available evidence on his YouTube channel.

 

Browne zeroed in on Blalock’s misunderstanding of how to use the autopilot as the likely cause of the crash. She simply did not know how it worked, but kept trying to figure it out, without the instruction of anyone competent to explain it to her. On her fatal flight, she was on a planned 500-mile flight to Bryant, Arkansas, where she planned to have work done on the plane. About 30 minutes into the flight, the plane began a series of “oscillating” climbs and descents, going up and down, its airspeed varying rather drastically. What was going on? The autopilot has “up” and “down” buttons, but it doesn’t have control of the throttle or trim, requiring the pilot to adjust those accordingly. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” Browne says at one point in his analysis of Blalock’s crash — which includes clips from her YouTube videos — and it’s clear that her misunderstanding of the autopilot function was related to the “oscillating” trajectory of her fatal flight. Blalock was still trying to figure out how to make the autopilot work, going up and down as a result, and ultimately ending in an uncontrolled dive straight into the ground.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and one doesn’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but the element of hubris involved here cannot be ignored. People who are intelligent, competent and successful — which is certainly an apt description of Jenny Blalock — are not immune to the temptation of thinking that, because they know what they’re doing in their regular daily life, they will automatically be competent in whatever new endeavor they may undertake. A successful businesswoman becoming a flight student in her 40s may have had difficulty accepting the fact that she didn’t know what she was doing. Her business expertise did not translate to automatic competence in the cockpit. She expects to succeed, and is frustrated by any failure, e.g., “Why isn’t this autopilot working?”

What Jenny Blalock needed — what she didn’t get from her instructors — was a “tough love” approach that would include warnings like, “Hey, you need to stop f–king around with that or you’ll get yourself killed.”

My brother Kirby was for many years a long-haul trucker whose job sometimes required him to act as a trainer for new drivers. He used to tell them to forgot about everything they “knew” about driving because most people’s driving “skills” are just a collection of bad habits that will get you killed if you drive like that in a semi rig. When I told him about “TNFlyGirl” and some of the videos she’d posted with her flight instructors, Kirby said, “They took her money, though, didn’t they?”

Ouch. Hit the nail on the head there. It probably wouldn’t have taken more than a few hours for a competent instructor to fully explain the autopilot to Jenny Blalock, and to take her up on a couple of training flights to make sure she was able to operate the autopilot system properly. But that instruction obviously didn’t happen, and at no point did anyone give her the advice that would have saved her life: “If you can’t figure it out, turn the damn thing off and just fly the plane!”

The NTSB has issued its preliminary report on the crash which did not find “any obvious cause,” which is to say, there was nothing wrong with the airplane. It wasn’t a mechanical malfunction, the weather wasn’t a problem. This was pilot error, pure and simple. And it strikes me that this is a metaphor for a lot of what’s wrong in America.

Consider my own profession of journalism. One of the basic problems in the news media is that reporters begin to think of themselves as possessing expertise about the topics they cover, so that you have the TV meteorologist presuming to lecture us about “climate change,” or the Pentagon reporter who imagines himself to be a military strategist. And don’t even get me started on sports writers — looking at you, Albert Breer — with their know-it-all attitudes about football. Two necessary traits for a journalist are curiosity and skepticism. A good reporter is driven by a need to know, a curiosity that keeps him asking questions until he’s satisfied that he’s gotten the right answers, and he is skeptical about everything: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

Curiosity and skepticism go hand-in-hand. A reporter must be able to question his own beliefs and opinions, to avoid jumping to conclusions based on whatever unexamined bias he may bring to the story. Yes, of course, you’ve got to be able to follow your gut hunches sometimes, but you’ve also got to be willing to realize when the facts contradict your gut-hunch first impressions. Be prepared to be proven wrong.

Now, think about politics, and think about Donald Trump. His basic problem, as I see it, was that he was used to being the boss, surrounded by people who got paid to do whatever he told them to do. His business success (or, at least, his reputation for success) was a validation of his methods, and he approached his presidential campaign with a similar attitude. But this caused problems. One of the criticisms heard from “sources” in the White House was simply that they couldn’t get Trump to read anything. His staff would supply him with written reports on various subjects, and this proved to be a complete waste of time. His basic attitude toward politics (and toward governance) was that of the guy sitting on his sofa watching TV news and yelling back at the TV.

Trump was (and still is) very popular with a lot of people because the things he yells at his TV are the same things we’d yell. But in terms of operating a presidential administration, this yelling-at-the-TV attitude is less than ideal, to put it mildly. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, though, and it appears that Trump won’t listen to any constructive criticism. People who would very much like to help Trump get elected, and then succeed as president, find themselves frozen out and accused of disloyalty for telling the boss what he doesn’t want to hear.

I voted for Trump and would vote for him again, but it’s frustrating to know that so many of his problems are self-inflicted wounds that could have been avoided, if he would have been amenable to good advice.

When your habit is to get rid of any advisor who’s not a sycophant — “You’re fired!” — your operations will falter due to the lack of dissenting opinions in your inner circle. Ronald Reagan’s advisors were not ideologically homogeneous; he had a bunch of neocons on his staff, but he also had Pat Buchanan as a counterweight to that neocon tendency. And it would help Trump if he had someone other than True Believers and yes-men in his circle of advisers. Even to point this out, however, is to incur the accusation of disloyalty, to be suspected as a faintheart or a sellout, so that no system-wide internal examination with the objective of reforming the Trump operation is possible. If the plane finally crashes (returning to the “TNFlyGirl” metaphor), the after-action report will identify these flaws, because hindsight is 20/20, but that will be of no consolation to those of us who wanted to see the flight land safely.

“You don’t know what you don’t know” — it would be tragic if this were to become the epitaph of the American republic.



 

Category: Politics
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