It's Never Too Soon To Politicize Anything, Plus
So long, Marianne Faithful, plus
It’s Never Too Soon To Politicize Anything
although one should hope for politicization based on fact. Trump getting all racist and misogynist about the crash at D.C.’s federally-owned airport is not based in fact other than that Trump and the Republican party have gone as far in on racism and misogynism as they ever have, which is all the way, which is how the press should report it. When they say Trump is blaming the crash on “DEI,” that means he’s blaming it on women and people of color, because that’s what “DEI” means in the governing parlance.
Did the new administration’s wholesale firing of FAA personnel have anything to do with the crash? I have no idea and probably at this point nobody else does either. Could have done; might have not. What quite probably did was the congressional decision to increase traffic at the airport without increasing the number of people in the tower.
Months before Wednesday night’s fatal midair collision of an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army helicopter in Washington, lawmakers brushed off safety warnings amid midflight near-misses and passed an industry-backed measure designed to add additional flight traffic at the same D.C. airport where the Jan. 29 disaster unfolded.
Soon after a March 2023 near collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, House lawmakers considered a provision to increase the number of flights allowed at the facility. It is one of only two airports in the country owned by the federal government, giving Congress unique authority over its operations.
The legislation was supported by lawmakers seeking more direct flights to their home states and airlines eager for expanded routes. It was opposed by lawmakers who asserted that the airport was already overstressed by flight volume in the capital region’s busy airspace.
And of course that decision included airline industry-funded hacks on both sides of the aisle, complicating the calls for Democrats to go on the attack about the current administration’s culpability.
Still, you gotta wonder how confident the relevant Trump cabinet members are about their lack of culpability when one of them feels obliged to say, “Obviously, it is not standard to have aircraft collide. I want to be clear on that.”
That’s the new transportation secretary, an alumnus of both MTV’s “Real World” and Fox “Business.” He is stupid but that’s purely an editorial judgement if obviously a solid one, unlike the factually racist and misogynistic character of the “DEI” bullshit.
Marianne Faithful
had a rough go of it but she never quit.
This Financial Times
is not your grandfather’s Financial Times. While discussing the rise in Tesla’s stock price following Trump’s win and again following the company’s just released, pretty dismal 2024 results, FT writer Dan McCrum says
Tesla’s market capitalisation has dropped four Hyundais since its Technoking’s Nazi salute, but at $1.2tn it is still valued at about 100 times estimates for profits in 2026, or 35 Hyundais.
Business journalism as it should be, at least sometimes.
Frank Zappa and Steve Allen
play the bicycle together. Every now and then I have to watch this again. It’s a long clip, 16 minutes or so, but it just gets better as it goes along.
Music other than
Frank Zappa and Marianne Faithful: The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, “You’re Gonna Miss Me.”
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Be well; take care.