Pilot shortages are a government creation
Remember the mandate to fire anyone who wouldn’t be coerced into getting vaccinated craze that consumed much of the first year of the Biden presidency?
Joe Biden is really hoping that you won’t.
Airline disruptions and cancellations are part of the ongoing “supply chain” crisis which is playing havoc with the U.S. and world economy. Sure would be nice to have some of those pilots, flight attendants and ground crew back at the airports now, wouldn’t it? United Airlines alone claimed that 2,200 workers who received religious or medical exemptions from the vaccine would be placed on administrative leave or put into roles which did not touch customers.
What isn’t known is how many pilots and others retired prior to the mandatory age of 65 due to the threat of vaccination-based firing? After all, hanging onto your job with the hope that sanity would be restored makes little sense when your retirement pension could be lost if you were fired for cause.
How many pilots left the not-so-friendly skies is unclear. What is apparent is that currently, pilot shortages are being cited as a reason why thousands of flights are being cancelled.
How much of this labor shortage is a direct result of Biden’s vaccine mandates and the airline industry’s reliance on the federal government to stay in business during the pandemic is not certain. What is certain is that government mandated firing of pilots, crew and ground personnel over their vaccination status contributed to the chaos we are witnessing.
What we do know is that according to a report by Cowen and Company, airline pilot retirements are projected to accelerate through the mid-2020’s with 24.7 percent of pilots subjected to mandatory retirements between 2022 and 2026. These 13,000 forced retirements is up about 70 percent from the previous five years as baby boomers age out of the cockpit.
Looking forward, one obvious way to stave off this retirement age mandated shortage would be for Congress to raise the retirement mandate by two years to age 67, allowing those pilots who retain their competency to continue to work.
The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) claimed in a June 23, 2022 letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Majorkas objecting to Spirit Airlines request for special visas to recruit airline pilots from Australia that there are “1.5 pilots available for every airline pilot job” in the U.S., calling the pilot shortage “fiction.”
One thing is abundantly clear. Planes are flying full, flights have been cancelled or delayed, and routes eliminated due to crew shortages that are prevalent. On June 16th, ALPA member pilots of Delta Air Lines wrote in an open letter to passengers that they are currently working a record amount of overtime claiming that by the fall they will, “have flown more overtime in 2022 than in the entirety of 2018 and 2019 combined, our busiest years to date.”
It seems obvious that the quickest short-term solution to the dearth of pilots is to incentivize those who retired early to return and extend the mandatory retirement age. While various labor/management issues can be worked out to deal with questions about bringing in qualified pilots from around the world, ending the mandatory retirement for more than 2,000 pilots in 2022 would seem the most honest and reasonable immediate fix.
Heck, the airlines might even get on bended knee and beg those who were fired or put on the back bench due to vaccine mandates to come back to the front lines to work – vaccinations optional.
https://dailytorch.com/2022/07/pilot-shortages-let-baby-boomers-fly/
**********************************************New Orleans is experiencing the results of "progressive" justice
Fatima Muse still reaches for the phone to call her godmother, before remembering she’s not there to pick up.Portia Pollock was stabbed to death in front of her home in June 2021. The killer, who had a long criminal record and was out on bail awaiting trial in an armed robbery, drove off in her car.
The loss threw Muse’s life into chaos, and it has put her personal politics into tension: On the one hand, she holds deep convictions about the brutality and unfairness she sees in the criminal legal system — she was once tear-gassed protesting police abuses in Ferguson, Missouri. But she now also blames the system for letting a man accused of repeated violence out of jail, at a soul-shaking toll.
“This conversation we're having right now would probably be a lot different if it wasn’t the person that I love who got killed,” Muse said. “I would probably be a lot more lenient and liberal, talking to you about reform, people deserving another shot, and how screwed up the system is, especially for Black and brown people.”
Her dilemma illustrates a political debate consuming this city, as recently elected progressive officials in the criminal legal system face criticism tied to a rise in shootings, murders and carjackings during the pandemic.
The violence includes several high-profile incidents, like the killing of a 73-year-old woman in March who was dragged alongside her car during a carjacking; four teenagers have been charged as adults with second-degree murder.
The political backlash resembles the pressure on progressive officials in cities like New York and Chicago. In San Francisco, voters recently recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
But New Orleans’ relationship to these questions is unique. The city has long been an epicenter of mass incarceration, as the most populous city in a state “that locks up a higher percentage of its people than any democracy on earth,” according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan criminal justice think tank.
A 2015 report by the National Registry of Exonerations found that New Orleans had the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the country. Derwyn Bunton, the city’s chief public defender, said that this legacy was a major reason voters here were willing to try something new in 2020 and 2021 — electing two judges, a district attorney and a new sheriff who all promised to rein in the harshest aspects of the status quo.
But Bunton also cautioned that voters “can be scared back into making different decisions if we don’t take this moment seriously, and really defend the ground we’ve won.”
Fatima Muse was left with grief and political uncertainty after Pollock’s death. “Is there a way to make the system better and not treat people as harsh, but also hold people accountable?” Pollock’s goddaughter says.
Many residents are scared. In a June poll commissioned by a coalition of crime prevention, civil rights and business groups, three-quarters of respondents described the city as unsafe and 84% said crime had gotten worse over the previous year.
Calls for service to the New Orleans Police Department tell a similar story. In the year ending in May 2022, there were 235 homicide reports, roughly twice the 116 reported in the year ending in May 2019. Over that same period, reported shooting incidents also doubled, and reported carjackings tripled.
It’s too early to say if policy changes by newly elected officials are having an effect on crime. Many of the changes have been philosophical and are difficult to measure. But in a series of hearings this year, multiple city council-members, all Democrats, referred to what they called a “revolving door” legal system, citing low bonds that allowed people accused of violent crimes to go free before trial.
Some residents, and even a councilman, have floated the idea of sending in the National Guard to help police the streets — a move the state’s governor has rejected.
Violent crime began rising before any of the candidates elected on progressive platforms took office — a fact they argue shows the “old way” hasn’t worked. The increase in violence here also mirrors many other U.S. cities, regardless of whether they pursued criminal justice reforms.
Still, with New Orleans seeing one of the largest homicide rate increases of any U.S. city since the start of the pandemic, many residents are looking for answers — and someone to blame.
With at least one judgeship possibly opening this year, voters may soon have another chance to decide if the city is at the beginning of a new experiment or at the end of one.
Pollock, 60, healed bodies in her day job as a physical therapist, but she could also test bodies’ limits as a black belt martial artist. She was a regular drummer at Congo Square, the park near her Tremé home where on Sundays musicians honor the enslaved Africans who used to drum and dance there during slavery.
That’s where Denise Graves met Pollock, attracted by what she called Pollock’s “quiet leadership energy.” The two became fast friends and music partners.
Graves, a pastor and community organizer, said she and Pollock dreamed of one day buying an RV to drive around the country doing healing work and teaching African cultural workshops.
Now, Graves, 69, is left working to heal herself, and that work has been slow. “I think there's a part of you that breaks. There's a part that you think cannot be repaired,” Graves said.
Like Muse, Graves is no one’s idea of a “tough-on-crime” ideologue. She calls prisons an “expansion of enslavement” and says the criminal legal system is “criminal” itself. But she also has strong feelings about the value of consequences.“If we keep telling people you can carjack, and you’ll get off, you can carjack, you’ll get off — murder is going to happen,” Graves said.
The man who killed Pollock, 46-year-old Bryan Andry, was accused in an armed robbery and a carjacking in the summer of 2020. He remained in jail for months until a newly inaugurated judge, Angel Harris, who ran on a reform platform, agreed to reduce his bond in February 2021.
Four months later, he killed Pollock. Andry pleaded guilty to manslaughter in May and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. At sentencing, he apologized and said if he could trade his life for Pollock’s, “I would.” He said that because of the influence of drugs, he didn’t remember the crime.
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Fight Inflation by Lowering Deficits, Not Boosting Them
Yesterday, President Biden told reporters the Administration was nearing decisions on whether to cancel student debt by executive order and whether to endorse a gas tax holiday. Media reports also suggest Senate Democrats may be nearing agreement on a reconciliation bill that includes new revenue, drug savings, climate investments, and net deficit reduction.
The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:
Inflation is surging at the fastest pace in four decades, and policymakers need to start taking that seriously. Cancelling student debt or extending the current payment pause will worsen inflation while delivering substantial benefits to higher-income Americans and driving up future tuition costs.
A gas tax holiday would modestly reduce prices at the pump but exacerbate overall inflationary pressures and increase demand for an energy source already short in supply.
Together, these policies could cost the federal government $250 billion or more over a decade at a time when debt is already headed toward record levels. These policies aren’t solutions; they are gimmicks that shift costs onto taxpayers and consumers.
Instead of making the Federal Reserve’s job harder, Congress and the President should be working to assist the Federal Reserve in its inflation-fighting efforts. A reconciliation bill that boosts tax revenue, lowers drug costs, and reduces deficits would represent an important step in the right direction.
Deficit-boosting legislation is part of how we got into this mess; it’s not going to get us out of it. The White House should put an end to ongoing COVID relief and focus its attention on deficit-reducing legislation.
https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/fight-inflation-lowering-deficits-not-boosting-them
**************************************Sexist attacks on men won’t advance gender equality
JANET ALBRECHTSEN
Abraham Lincoln is credited with one of the best pieces of advice for everyone from old-style academic feminists to corporate board members: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
Sadly, many women routinely indulge themselves in such juvenile stereotyping of men that they succeed only in making fools of themselves. They line up to make sexist attacks that if made by a man would be derided, rightly, as prehistoric chauvinism. Sometimes they pretend humour, but these fig leaves of comedy that are manifestly just camouflage for spleen-venting disappear as quickly as they appeared.
A prime example of this genre is Jenna Price’s screed in The Sydney Morning Herald last week headed “Men: Talk less, smile more to help fix equality deficit”. Her thesis is that by talking too much, men snaffle more money and promotions. If only men would talk less, the gender pay gap would disappear.
What followed was a collection of all the gender stereotypes some women utter about men in their private moments but would usually be wise enough to keep hidden in mixed company.
“Men aren’t active listeners,” said one woman described by Price as “extremely, extremely senior”. Diane Smith-Gander was quoted bragging that “I am a serial interrupter. I can give a masterclass in it and actually do when I speak to young women. I tell them to learn the art of the elegant interruption, or they will spend their life listening to men.”
At this point some would have expected a few jokes about nagging women or garrulous wives or bossy mothers-in-law that male comedians used to make but that went out of style, and acceptability, with Benny Hill.
Undeterred, Price ploughed on. Even those old favourites “mansplaining, manterrupting, bropropriating” got a run, though mainly to complain that these words trivialised “damaging behaviour” by men. It’s a shame Henry Higgins’s famous lament in My Fair Lady – “why can’t a woman be more like a man?” – wasn’t updated as a role reversal.
At least Professor Higgins was joking. Price was not. Anyone who has spent time in board meetings, or in business generally, or among people for that matter, will know there is no natural connection between a big talker and a big brain. Often those people who talk the most, in meetings and in life, have the least to say. And, for the record, many women talk a lot, including in board meetings and, like big-talking men, they frequently have little to say of relevance or importance. Less is often more.
One would think Price, an old-school feminist, would notice the hypocrisy of women making this kind of crass generalisation about men. This stuff also is potentially an own goal for women. Once you start acting on these sorts of characterisations about men, you admit the legitimacy of generalisations about women. When generalisation is permitted as a basis for action, women will suffer as much as men. As we all know there are plenty of unhelpful generalisations about women that, if accepted, would set women’s cause back decades.
Not all the culprits are women. Australia’s Male Champions of Change accepted so many feeble generalisations so willingly, the group’s name became a byword for gullibility – so much so that it had to change its name. Alas, a name change hasn’t altered its adoration for generalisations.
Boris Johnson would get an invitation to join the Male Champions of Change if he were an Australian business leader. Johnson recently told German broadcaster ZDF, “If Putin was a woman … I really don’t think he would’ve embarked on a crazy, macho war of invasion and violence in the way that he has.” Now, while there may be some truth in saying Vladimir Putin’s personality and upbringing contribute to his bad-boy approach to geopolitics, it’s too simplistic and unhelpful to reduce the war in Ukraine to pop psychology. Putting the war down to whether Putin has “mummy issues” does no service to analysis. It ignores the deep questions of history, security and economics that are undoubtedly relevant. Has Boris heard of Catherine the Great, another expansionist Russian ruler?
All this over-reliance on cardboard cut-outs in lieu of analysis obscures the question overlooked in Price’s column. Anthony Albanese has come to power claiming the ALP will bring gender equity. The teals are similarly evangelical in their desire to rectify what they see as gender injustice. At the heart of this is the so-called gender pay gap. However, when this bunch and others talk about gender pay gaps or gender equity, they almost invariably ignore all the difficult components of the issue in favour of a simplistic focus on aggregate pay.
According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, “The gender pay gap measures the difference between the average earnings of women and men in the workforce.” The comparison is unadjusted for anything that happens in the real world to explain the difference. It is a bogus measurement used to drive a bogus agenda. If the WGEA used a more sophisticated measurement that factored in different choices women make, its agenda and relevance would be in ruins.
Since when do we prefer equality of outcome to equality of opportunity? Since when is individual choice irrelevant? We can get to equality of outcome only by eliminating all differences between men and women that contribute to different pay outcomes.
That means effectively mandating that men and women must be 50-50 in all jobs (not just the nice cushy jobs but garbos and grave diggers too), that men and women must be 50-50 in all university or training courses, that men and women must split 50-50 all domestic and childminding work and must share all holidays or absences from work 50-50. Only through this social engineering can we make men and women statistically the same in an aggregate sense.
Finally, we would need to eliminate differences in choices and attitudes to life, work and family between men and women. Only then could we have equality of pay outcomes.
Oops, now I see Price’s point. To borrow from Professor Higgins again, we just want women to be more like men. And vice-versa. Problem solved.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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