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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, April 10, 2008

So You Thought You Were Going To Fly Somewhere? 

...some days you just have to wonder just exactly who is actually being messed with. On the surface, it would appear that the FAA, having been caught with its pants around its ankles over Southwest Airlines' problem with missed aircraft inspections, has begun a righteous round of getting its house in order by going over inspection records of airlines. This week's sudden spasm of regulatory zeal resulted in the odds of getting to some intended destination by jumping off of a freeway overpass onto the trailer of some random passing semi-truck just about as good as getting there by purchasing a ticket for an American Airlines flight. The now stern-faced defenders of the flying public's safety promises that there will be more review of safety compliance records to come, and the blizzard of flight cancellations most likely isn't over yet...

And, yeah, I've got a dog in this fight, because at the end of next month I have a 19-year-old who has flown exactly once (with her mother) who needs to get on a couple of different air carriers to fly back home for the summer from the college on the other side of the nation (which is the place she flew on her first ever flight). Yes, I know she's a big girl now and its time to let her spread her wings to fly and all that crap, but I'm still a dad and this isn't the sort of circumstance that helps me drop right off to sleep at night. Chalk it up to my hard-earned lack of faith in the willingness of the air travel industry to actually take care of its customers when the deal goes wrong...

The curious thing is that all this sudden muscular concern over airline safety is something of a departure from the sort of behavior with which we have grown accustom by the Bush Administration. The natural question to ask is "What are the Bushies up to?", and it's a fair one because these shysters don't have anything that even looks like a track record of being concerned about consumers when it comes to regulation, even on issues of health and safety. All we do know is that while the business world clutches its pearls over the financial beating that the airline industry will suffer if there is a rolling series of massive aircraft groundings for safety inspections, the actual victims are going to be the people who are trusting there will actually be an airplane sitting at the gate when they show up to catch their flights. It almost seems that the Bushco version of the FAA, having been caught out actively interferring with the efforts of career employees to make the airlines do what they are supposed to do, has decided to create a crisis that create blow-back on the Democratic Congress for being so pushy for insisting on oversight on the inspection process with its whistleblower hearings...

You will hear all the staunchly pro-safety 'right' words coming out of Gee Dub's FAA minions, but the very best that can be said for all of this wild crazyness that they have finally got around to flinging at the traveling public is that they are trying to brush out their tracks just in case a plane goes down for reasons that turns out to be the result of inspection failures. Lord knows you just have to hope they aren't looking for some 'atta-boy' for their efforts; it was their lack of effort that led to this problem to begin with...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:30 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Why Bother? 

...I’ve been trapped in the peculiar hell of a Team-Building exercise all day, so I was unavoidably denied even the most cursory news fix that might feed my info-jones about how the Petraeus/Crocker show played on the Peoples’ Side of the Congress of The United States Of America. Didn’t hear much of anything else about anything else, for that matter, but on the way home tonight I did learn about the efforts to transport the Olympic Flame through the Streets of San Francisco...

The obvious first thought choice was “What On Earth were they Thinking”, but a bit of reflection and research and listening suggests that - from a purely ‘We Are The World’ bring-us-all-together point of reference, San Francisco - with its famous Chinatown and Sino-centric populations - must have seemed to someone like the best of all possible places to feature the United States’ support for the upcoming Summer Olympics in Bejing.. Sad how the concatenation of circumstances can lead to a sad, strange outcome...

What we are finally faced with (aside from the final official reduction of the Olympics to the open, up front expression of political statements) is an absurd bit of theater surrounding the most innocuous of Olympic symbols. The recent brutal treatment of Tibet by the Chinese government has created such a firestorm of controversy and protest focused on the movement of the Olympic Flame that its one US appearance became a weird sort of cat-and-mouse game between the city officials who so desperately wanted to avoid being part of some international incident and protesters who wanted no less than that particular outcome. For the first time in my (more than...ahem) half-century of life, the celebration of the Olympic Ideal expressed by the advent of the flame originally ignited with great ceremony by primitive means many months ago in Athens took on a strange specter looking nothing like a celebration of athletic excellence and far too much like the extraordinary rendition of a lost, uncomfortable concept to some dank, fetid foreign dungeon where the moldering bones of far too many long-lost lofty ideals speak volumns to their grim and untimely end....

That the politization of the fact of the Olympics - beyond the self-serving national medal count - has become a fact of life isn’t some sort of ‘Breaking News’ for me; I was in my mid-twenties when my man Jimmuh Carter introduced the nuclear option in 1980. Today’s action in ‘Frisco is, however, at least the end of the beginning, as Winston Churchill said about some other entirely different thing. My first, fundamental reaction to the news of today’s efforts to avoid the sorts of conflict that have been seen in Western Europe over the last several days was to think “Why Bother”. The torch run has always been an experience of celebration; having to sneak the torch down side streets and alleys to avoid moments of riotous conflict suggests that the effort has become an empty gesture lacking any particular contextual meaning. For all the impact that the event engendered, its managers might have well just had the torch runners charge around for a given number of laps inside a vacant hanger at the airport. Who cares anymore; why bother...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:13 PM 0 comments

Monday, April 07, 2008

Do Not Forsake My Blogging, Oh My Darling 

...this probably isn't good news for a number of folks; it certainly isn't good news for the progressive segment of the blogtopian world who have been making good and continual sport of those huddled basement-dwelling winger bloggers known as the "Keyboard Commando's" who have more conviction in their words than in their actual actions. Now those Cheeto-dusted conservative worthies may have some perverse room to insist that they are risking their very lives, in some surreal facsimile of real live American military personnel, by bringing their own twisted, blood-colored version of some 'truth' to the American people...

On the other hand, it does provide an out - however weak - for us Z-list bloggers who can't seem to reliably get it all together in order to post one entry on a daily basis, especially in the face of observations by our significant others and children who marvel - seldom in a positive way - at our particular obsession with this avocation. This whole blogging thing is actually a healthy release, dear, and is a far more sensible way to address the tensions that an informed understanding of the surrounding world can create than something like being a major-league blogger or a professional rodeo bull-rider or such. Don't worry; it's all good...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:40 PM 0 comments

One-Note Georgie 

...at some point, you would just have to assume that Republicans would grow so tired of having to deal with the single off-key note that has become the theme song of Gee Dub's administration that something like this would make them say "oh, the hell with it; go ahead and impeach him":
Bush said the agreement would "advance America's national security interests in a critical region" and "strengthen a courageous ally in our hemisphere," as well as help the U.S. economy.

[snip]

Bush said he decided to force Congress to take up the measure because the "need for this agreement is too urgent; the stakes for our national security are too high to allow this year to end without a vote."

...there may be a lot of things that can be said about the supposed value of a free-trade agreement with Columbia, but 'national security' can't possibly be one of them. If 'national security' was a true value to accrue from a free-trade agreement, the casual observer would be left with little choice but to arrive at the conclusion that NAFTA would obviate the need to spend a gazillion dollars building hundreds of miles of otherwise-useless 'feel good' barriers along our southern border with Mexico, given that particular long-standing free-trade agreement...

These 'free-trade' agreements are of benefit to corporations seeking to pursue increased profits by moving operations beyond the border in search of lower labor costs. The ability of some bad guy to sneak terrorists and their weapons from Columbia to the U.S. as easily as Columbian drug cartels have been moving cocaine north is not a function of a free-trade agreement. If we have learned no other lesson from the depressing saga of the Gee Dub years, the one fundamental teaching moment that we should have been able to search for is the answer to the question "which partner of George W. Bush or one of his handlers or supporters will benefit from this agreement". While it might be remotely possible to make at least some lame argument that Gee Dub is desperately clawing at one last chance to make some claim to a legacy that isn't draped in the grim black banners of abject failure, the ugly reality is that this is only going on because there's something in it for somebody who has a hook well set in his soft mouth and we've moved to the "Fish On!" endgame...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:03 PM 0 comments

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