Bracing for the Impact of the Election

Bracing for the Impact of the 2024 Election

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I was an airline pilot for 35 years. We were trained to handle every kind of emergency, and if a crash landing became inevitable, we were to be sure to warn the flight attendants and passengers, a moment before contacting the earth.

We were to get on the PA system and tell everybody, "Brace for impact! Brace for impact!"

This is how I feel about our impending election votes tomorrow, no matter which way the election turns out:

Brace for impact! Brace for impact!

E P N

2024.1004

Juneteenth--

Many Matters Remain to Ponder

by 

Eric Paul Nolte

Happy Juneteenth!

Slavery has been practiced everywhere in the world by nearly everybody enslaving nearly everybody else, since the dawn of history.

Do I overstate the matter?  Whites, Blacks, Yellows, Reds—mix and match any of them at your leisure!  Nearly every culture enslaved other groups of people.

Hmm. How does this bear on slavery in America?

Well, Juneteenth is the celebration of the end of slavery in America.  

Hallelujah!  A truly wonderful thing!

And yet many matters remain to think about slavery.

How many people believe that slavery itself is largely a matter of white Europeans harpooning hapless Black Africans and shipping them off to oppressive and horrible lives in the Americas?  

I would wager that it is a majority of people who believe this idea.

But this idea is far too narrow a picture of slavery in the history of the world.

As for slavery in the United States, July 19th, 1865 was the day that slavery was officially ended, 

This proclamation finally put an end to the official hypocrisy of slavery that continued in the face of Jefferson’s personally conflicted struggle with his own contradictory thoughts on slavery. 

On the one hand, was Jefferson's guilt-ridden approval of slavery, and on the other hand, the unprecedented eloquence of his soulful opposition to slavery. 

It took a godawful civil war to end slavery, officially.  There can be no doubt that the Civil War was essentially a matter of the South’s assertion of its right to keep slavery.  

Keep in mind here, that the enslavement of one group of people by another was practiced by nearly every culture.  Outright slavery is illegal today everywhere in the world, except for countries ruled by dictators where everyone is ruled as if they are the property of the dictators.  However, in many countries, including the US, there remains de facto slavery, in the form of human trafficking—the capture and abuse of persons by means of coercion and deception for sexual and other forms of forced labor.

Now, to those who continue to condemn solely white people for slavery, let the record show (these numbers are coming from history.com) that, of the approximately 620,000 soldiers who died in the war, more than 360,000 were Union soldiers (some of whom were freed Black slaves), and 258,000 were Confederate soldiers (surely none of whom were willing slaves.)  

These figures show that Union soldiers died at a ratio of 3:2— three Union soldiers died for every two Confederates.

Of course, the terrible aftermath of the Civil War has left scars to this day. 

As an old man who grew up in the Jim Crow South (I'm from Richmond, Virginia, which was, let it not be forgotten, the capital of the Confederacy) I witnessed more of the ugliness of this legally racist segregation than did many who lived outside the south.  

But now let’s turn our attention to the nature and morality of slavery itself.

All those who enslave others must believe that it is acceptable to force others to work against their will for a predatory advantage.  

Suspend your doubt for a moment, when I will return to government behavior in the public sphere.

It is axiomatic that those who enslave others are predators.

This matter raises the question of evil itself.  What is right, what is wrong?

The heart of the matter here is that the essence of evil is exactly this idea of using other people against their will for a predatory advantage.

Is it moral to use other people against their will?  

I think not.  

And while any decent person would agree with this assertion, I doubt that many people actually appreciate how widely this abomination shows up in the world.

Every horrible action against other individuals is an example of this formulation of evil.

What else is murder, if not that a predator uses others against their will?  (That is to say “murder,” meaning the unprovoked killing of another person, which is not to be confused with killing a predator in self-defense.)

Rape?  What is rape?  Again, here is a predator forcing someone to be sexually used against their will.

Mugging?  The same.  A predator using victims against their will.

How about taxation?  Even if you are happy to pay the government for their services, the fact is that if you do not pay the taxes demanded of you, they will come after you to make you pay, and if you resist, they will send legal documents demanding payment.  If you resist these, they will send agents to your house, and if you resist intensely enough, they will ultimately kill you on your own property.  Whose property is it?  Hah!  Clearly not yours.  You are being used against your will.

What about conscription?  

I was drafted during the Vietnam War.  I sent letters to my draft board to object to my impending induction into the Army during that war.  As a matter of conscience, I objected to the war and to the draft.  Would this objection make me a conscientious objector?   No!  It did me no good to say that I objected to the draft as a matter of conscience.  Why?  Because I would have needed to prove that I had a long-standing association with one of the “approved” religious groups, like the Quakers or Shakers, or the many others.  My individual conscience was not sufficient to prove the legitimacy of my opposition.

What is the draft, if not the explicit assertion by the government that the nation’s interests trump your own beliefs?  

The importance of the collective is held above that of the individual.  I was to be used against my will, by the predatory will of the government.

What is slavery, if not the assertion by the rulers, that the nation’s interests, or in other words, the interests of the plantation owners, are more important than the interests of the ill-fated slaves in chains?

What of the regulations issuing forth from the myriad agencies of the government—these armies of unelected bureaucrats who are empowered to demand your obedience to everything they regulate?  

Resist with enough confidence, and you will surely wind up in jail, or worse.

Slavery means being forced to live against your will for the sake of those others who dictate how you are allowed to live.

Governments everywhere dictate how we are allowed to live in an ever-encroaching circle of control.  

This dynamic is surely a kind of slavery, properly understood.

Therefore, a legitimate Juneteenth—the spirit of Juneteenth—the spirit we wish to celebrate, must lie at some point in the future, after governments free their citizens from being slaves of another form.

As with so many other areas of cultural and intellectual improvement, we await the day when a growing and deeper consciousness can lead us to making the world a better place.

E  P  N

Should Airlines Hire Pilots with Minimum Flying Time?

 

                                  Should Airlines Hire Pilots with Minimum Flying Time?

                                                                          by

                                                                 Eric Paul Nolte

 

There is a pilot shortage in the airline industry today. Southwest Airlines is said to start hiring pilots who meet merely the FAA’s minimum required hours in the air. 

How much experience does it take to make a good pilot?  Much less a good airline pilot?

The military takes recruits with no flying experience at all and trains them for a year of extraordinary intensity to win their wings.  At that point, they have about 200 hours total flying time.  Then they send them out to get qualified on the equipment they will fly at their ultimate military units.  Maybe another couple or few hundred hours or so.  Now they may indeed fly single seat fighters, but on all the other equipment they will not be aircraft commanders, they will fly as co-pilots for a long time.

In the civilian world, you can get a commercial pilot certificate with 200 hours as a pilot, but nobody will hire you with that kind of experience except when you get an instructor's certificate, where you will be allowed to teach private pilot students to fly mostly the simplest and least sophisticated airplanes, and strictly in good weather.  

(Incidentally, do you wonder how bizarre is this?  That the pundits and mentors of future pilots should be the least experienced pilots in the community?  But it makes sense when one realizes that pilot pay, like that of every other worker, is predicated essentially on the revenue that can be generated for the company by the capital equipment at the disposal of the worker.  The worker with a pick and shovel cannot possibly generate the productivity of the same worker operating a big backhoe.  Airplane trainers are the smallest and least profitable equipment in the inventory.  Whereas, a great big old Boeing or Airbus, seating up to from 300 to 800 passengers, each paying thousands of dollars, flying from, say, New York to Hong Kong, will generate a big pile of money.  Pilot pay is invariably a fraction of the revenue generated by their equipment.)

To be a charter pilot requires 1200 hours.  An ATP (airline transport pilot) must take a special ground school class and then have a minimum of 1500 hours total time just to be allowed to take the written exam.  After my retirement from the airlines, that's the class I used to teach at Flight Safety International’s Tucson campus.  Then the applicant must pass a stringent oral exam and a flight test before winning this ATP certificate. 

In the old days, no airline would hire a pilot with so little experience.  When I hired on at People Express Airlines in 1983, I had over 4000 hours, and half of that experience was flying Martin 404s and DC-3s.  The Martin was a 1950's twin-engine airliner with hydraulically boosted flight controls, a pressurized cabin that allowed it to fly up to an altitude of 20,000 feet, and other advanced features.  The DC-3 was a twin-engine World War II transport airplane (renamed the C-47 by the Army.)  It was a cantankerous and challenging old bird with piston engines and a bad habit of suffering frequent broken parts, including, in my case, nine in-flight engine failures (well, four of these were on the Martin.)

Even so, like all the other airlines, one is not hired as a captain.  I was a co-pilot for another ten years of flying before I was given the chance to train to become a captain.

To the point here, airline flying is an unending series of training, retraining, testing, and re-testing for every different airplane you fly and then at every six months there is recurrent training in the classroom and in the flight simulator.  Hours and hours every year.

So should we be alarmed that Southwest is reducing its hiring requirements to accept pilots who meet merely the FAA's minimum standards?

The mischief is in the details, and I don't know all the details, but I would assure anybody that Southwest will not soon be putting minimally qualified pilots in the Captain's seat of any of their airplanes.  These newly hired pilots will no doubt fly for many more years under the tutelage of experienced Captains before being given the opportunity to upgrade to Captain. 

It doesn't sound outright dangerous to me.

 

                                                                    E   P   N

word count: 710

2023.0204

 

September 11 Redux

 

September 11 Redux:

Making Our Way Home 

from the World Trade Center

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Four years ago, I wrote a piece on my blog called, "Making Our Way Home from the World Trade Center."  I am feeling even farther away from home now, in light of this month's appalling fall of Afghanistan.  Afghanistan is America's gift to the same Taliban who nurtured and trained the 9/11 hijackers who made their way to us and felled the twin towers.  What follows is a much-rewritten version of that essay.

On the early morning of September 11, now 20 years ago today, I was at Newark airport, right across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center.  I was picking up my flight papers at the Concourse C-3 weather room, where the pilots did their pre-flight planning.

As usual, I had left my car at the employee parking lot F, on the south side of the airfield.  When I parked there I always looked up fondly at the Trade Towers just across the marshes and the river. 

I had lived in New York twenty years before, driving a taxi cab while a student, and I watched the towers going up a little every day.  My feelings about those buildings were personal. I had a visceral affection for the awe-inspiring majesty of the structure and, as I learned more and more about sound economics, I came to harbor an intellectual appreciation for the activities of the many venture capitalists who toiled there in the towers above.  I came to understand how this vibrant center played a central role in the global financial networks that served the creation of so much wealth in the world. I had also learned that relatively few people actually understand that these financial markets are not merely a bunch of paper pushers exploiting everybody else.  But grasping the nature of financial markets is difficult for many because their work is so abstract and arcane, but this work is nonetheless crucial to directing the flow of scarce resources into those ventures that directly benefit everybody in the free world—and the freer the nation, economically, the greater the benefits. 

Immediately outside the weather room where I stood, in the near distance, the Boeing 737 I was scheduled to fly was there at Gate 80.  In the middle distance were the World Trade Towers, and my view of it was like being near the front of an auditorium, watching someone on stage.

I took a break and walked over to the Garden State Diner and ordered breakfast. 

As is my wont, I sat at the counter of the diner with my nose buried in a book.  

I vividly remember what I was reading—economist Russell Roberts’ didactic, yet touching novel, The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance.  The novel is about two academics in love, one of whom is a liberal progressive who believes that government control of things is vital to our well-being in life.  Where the one character sees victims in life, the other sees victors and creative heroes.  This other protagonist is a passionate champion of free markets and believes that government regulation tends to create perversely unintended consequences for almost everything it touches, and that the economic freedom of capitalism dramatically, stupendously supports peaceful, voluntary trade in the world, trade for mutual benefit, and thereby enables people to flourish better than any other system ever to appear in history anywhere in the world.

I kid you not!  This is the truth!  Such a nerd!  Yet I was indeed reading Russ Roberts' book and I remember this fact as vividly as I remember where I was the day President Kennedy was shot. 

Then I heard a woman cry out, “Oh my god, an airplane just flew into the World Trade Center!” I looked up and witnessed the first puff of smoke beginning to billow out of the north tower of the WTC.

I thought to myself that the jagged and bloody hole a big airplane would make on the side of that tower would be an ugly scar that might take months or even years to repair.  More importantly, the tragic loss of all those poor souls who died in this accident would certainly leave behind bereft relatives and friends whose grief might never subside or heal. 

But this awful event was already jangling my nerves, so I settled up for breakfast and went directly back to the flight planning room for my papers.  My departure time was just an hour later and I needed to meet my crew down at the airplane.

As I stood at the window in the flight planning room, the second airplane blasted a mushroom cloud of fire and flesh and steel and glass out of the south tower.

At that moment, all the pilots in the room knew that these were no accidents, these were acts of terror. 

Everybody there knew that our world was listing gravely towards a loathsome and dangerous ocean. 

I stood with my colleagues, weak and stagnant with horror.

And then the south tower fell in a pall of smoke against that pellucid blue sky like an ugly smear of paint thrown against a beautiful painting by some stinking little punk.

I never imagined that there was the remotest possibility that one of the towers could ever collapse as a result of an airplane’s crashing into it.  

Then the second tower collapsed.  

The authorities closed the airport then and I joined a miles-long refugee column of dumbfounded, shattered, and woozy humanity, and, pulling my roller bag and flight kit, trudged the three miles back to my car at the far end of employee parking Lot F.  

In the traffic jam of bewildered people that followed, I began trying to make my way home.

In a sense, like every decent person in the world, I am still trying to make my way home. 

E   P   N

2021.0911

985 words 

Happy Juneteenth!--a Footnote

Happy Juneteenth!

a Footnote

Eric Paul Nolte

I celebrate the end of slavery in the US, but Juneteenth is now being tied to critical race theory, which is as racist as the KKK.

Last year I posted a link to Chris Campbell's article on celebrating Juneteenth, which I am reposting on Facebook. While I continue to believe that we should celebrate the end of slavery in America (and remember that slavery was practiced everywhere in the world throughout human history!), and while I am happy to have this day named as a holiday, I am troubled to hear some voices who are using this occasion to advocate critical race theory.

By the philosophy of critical race theory, whites are inherently oppressors, and blacks are inherently victims. The essence of the matter is the color of one's skin, which is obviously racist!

Critical race theory derives from critical theory, which arose with the German Frankfurt school, wherein thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno came to the US after WW-II and devised strategies for promoting outright Marxism for the purpose of dismantling capitalism.

Racism is evil, outright evil. It is not the only evil. Moreover, racism is clearly insane, given that all of our ancient ancestors came out of Africa. Therefore we are all essentially the same species! The significance of the color of your skin, metaphysically and morally speaking, is equivalent to the color of your eyes.

Celebrate the end of slavery! Happy Juneteenth! And utterly reject critical race theory!

E P N

2021.0619

(.0901, "eyes"

instead of "teeth.")