Bits & Pieces #155

A lot of noise has been made recently about unruly passengers on our airlines. Yes, it’s dangerous and yes, it’s unacceptable but in many cases the cause is actually airlines themselves. I’m not talking about the airline employees. I’m talking about the executive decision making process that destroys the carefully made plans of their customers and ruins expensive vacation trips simply because management is more interested in the immediate result of their bottom line than they are the long-term benefits that will come from customer satisfaction.

I’ve been flying long enough to remember when taking a plane was actually an enjoyable experience. From the moment you arrived at the airport everything was taken care of. People picked you up in the parking lot, handled your baggage and dropped you at he ticket counter where upon giving your name the reservations clerk had everything under control and correct. She handed you your tickets, straightened out any changes and you were off to the waiting flight which would supply comfortable seating, a wide variety of refreshments and snacks, on some flights even a separate dining area. When you arrived your baggage would be ready momentarily in a clean, welcoming arrivals area. Any of that sound even vaguely familiar to recent travelers? Of course not! It’s a fantasy world that no longer exists. It has been replaced by baggage clerks more interested in their tips than the condition in which they return your bags, by non-functioning computer stations where you are supposed to pick up long ago erased reservations and seat locations. The reservation clerks when you can reach them from the mile long line that leads to them are still helpful but usually stymied by a broken system that is filled with cancelled flights, impossible to make connections and a diabolically contrived system that has been designed by the airline executive class, which long ago decided that once they had your money you can go fuck yourself.

So the guy who has gotten to the airport only to find his flight has been cancelled and that his connection in Charlotte that was supposed to take him to Atlanta will now take him through Vancouver, Hawaii and the Virgin Islands adding a brief 12 hours of flying to his original 3 hour trip is maybe a little entitled to be miffed and when he must start his trip with a 4 hour wait on uncomfortable seats at the loading area while they change planes because of mechanical difficulties he is beginning to lose it. Then he’s stuffed into a seat that would be uncomfortable for a cocker spaniel and his carryon is taken away which he knows will mean that it will be lost long before the second transfer. So now he’s well and truly pissed and somebody says the wrong thing or maybe bumps into him a little too hard and bingo, you have an unruly passenger. Whose fault is that? The airline has already done its best to destroy this guys trip, so he starts to yell and some security guy puts his hands on him and you have round three of the Thrilla at LaGuardia.

So whose fault is it? Sure there are a lot of assholes who can’t control themselves but I have seen normal people trembling with anger as a ticket clerk tells them that because of events beyond her control, their years planned vacation has turned into a trip to Scranton. If the airlines don’t want unruly passengers, how about providing functional service. How does that sound for a serious solution to a self-created problem?

*****

Our troops are leaving Afghanistan and the country is falling apart even faster than expected. But contrary to common belief it isn’t necessarily our fault.

The Afghanis have had twenty years of our protection and investment to create a viable nation and they have failed miserably. Instead of building a modern nation that could lead its people by example, the money we have flooded into the country has gone into the pockets of crooked politicians and greedy businessmen. The Talban may stand for religious repression but it also seems, at least at this point, to stand for functional government. We’ll know soon if that’s accurate because they are certainly going to be the rulers of that nation in the near future.

Was it finally time for us to get out? Hell yes, way past time.  All that nonsense about creating a home base for terrorism is superfluous.  The terrorists have plenty of places in which to organize. They don’t need Afghanistan. Don’t forget when they wanted a place to hide Osama bin Laden it was Pakistan they chose. That is and has been the real terrorist base for twenty or more years. We’re well rid of Afghanistan and we would be well rid of Pakistan too if they didn’t have nukes.

But we do have a responsibility and it’s a serious one that we have often ignored is in protecting those Afghani’s who worked for us and supported our troops. We have an unfortunate history of abandoning those who have helped us in other wars. Most recently we acted disgracefully toward the Hmong and other Vietnamese allies and then turned our backs on the Kurds, allowing the Turks to invade them. Biden can’t let that happen here. We must finally stand up to our responsibilities.

*****

It’s funny how every few years someone sees some lights in the sky at night and there’s a revival of UFO Interest. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, except for the Kennedy Assassination but I do kind of believe in UFOs. I mean why not? You have to be way over your quota of arrogant to figure that we are the only ones in this massive universe capable of getting a vehicle into the air and far enough away to find another inhabited planet. I mean if the estimates of trillions of planets are right then the smart money is on UFOs being driven by something a hell of a lot smarter than us.

What I don’t understand is all the noise about investigating them. The same turkeys that don’t want to spend a nickel on child care for working mothers want to spend billions on finding out what the hell is dancing around in the sky. And when we do find out, what then? What else? We’ll blow them out f the sky. That’s what humans do in any situation in which we are confused, or think we are threatened. Finding little men or whatever they are, looking at us from space ships, will blow the minds of most of the politicians and all the military. So we’ll shoot at them; they’ll decide we’re hostile and they’ll dissolve our planet. So instead of finding out what they are and getting all humanity killed, why don’t we just keep enjoying their brief visits. Maybe in a couple of hundred years if we haven’t destroyed the planet ourselves we can revisit the concept of finding out more about our visitors. Of course that will depend on whether or not our billionaire space investors will let us trespass on their tourist routes to luxury spas in space.

*****

On Tuesday at the beginning of the Jan6 Hearings, GOP Minority Leaders Kevin McCarthy and Moscow Mitch McConnell stated that they hadn’t bothered to listen to or watch the testimony of the four policemen who appeared before the Committee. These were only four of the many that had risked their lives to protect these two degenerate assholes from an army of low-grade morons egged on by the sociopathic egomaniac they had helped put in the White House.