The Witness Chronicles, 2/18/25

Messing with airline safety, really?

Feb 18, 2025

white Delta passenger plane — Photo by Miguel Ángel Sanz on Unsplash

Trump and Musk Will Have Blood on Their Hands

Firing aviation safety professionals? WTF?

There is no logic in anything they are doing, but firing aviation experts only weeks after the worst plane crash in sixteen years, defies any sense. Though why I should be surprised by a lack of sense after years of seeing these guys scam their own supporters over and over again is a good question. But even having seen this stuff, there are still things that shock even the biggest skeptic, me.

Me, and a lot of people. But not many Republicans. But those folks fly on planes, and if they are politicians they fly on a lot of planes. We have seen numerous aviation accidents and near misses lately after many years of a relatively pristine safety record.

Btw, we are currently short 1600 air traffic controllers and it takes two years to train one. The people they are firing are probationary which means they are trainees. I wonder how the families of 67 dead victims from the Potomac crash feel about this? It’s obvious Trump and Musk do not give a damn.

Both Trump and Musk have never had to be accountable for anything. They both grew up rich. People may think Musk is a self made man but that is simply not true. He never built PayPal, he did not start Tesla, and he did not start SpaceX. All were existing companies that he invested in after they had a viable business and then claimed credit for their considerable accomplishments.

Donald Trump was fond of saying his father had gifted him a modest stake of one million dollars in his early twenties and that his billions were the result of his business acumen. That was an outright lie. The New York Times discovered he had actually inherited $400 million dollars in a tax evasion scheme his father cooked up. And anyone who had $400 million 55 years ago would be worth far more than Trump, even with the most conservative money management.

Basically, Trump is a serial failure, or was, until Putin helped him get elected in 2016. If you don’t believe that he is a lousy businessman, ask yourself why he does low budget stuff like selling bibles, Trump vodka, running a phony university, and other grifts disguised as businesses. And for MAGAs who thought The Apprentice was real life, I hate to rain on your parade but it was a scripted fable, in other words, fake.

Fake is a word that describes Trump’s entire life, but he is good at something, self-promotion, relentless self-promotion. He accomplishes that by blatantly lying over and over again.

Literally as I was writing this, news came out that a Delta commercial aircraft flipped over while landing in Toronto, ending up upside down with its wings and tail ripped off. All people aboard have been accounted for, but there is no more information at the moment (update: so far all are survivors but there are two at least in critical condition, including a child).

Though this crash took place in Canada, it originated in Minnesota. That means the Canadians will lead the investigation but the NTSB here will work with them. This puts an exclamation point on the dangers inherent in taking apart government agencies involved in regulating dangerous businesses.

Weather may have been a factor. I live only about eighty miles from the crash site and the weather here is terrible. Trump and Musk are also talking about privatizing NOAA, including the National Weather Service, another agency involved in regulating things like air travel.

Eliminating weather forecasting as a government activity is another attempt to eliminate climate change by removing any reference to it, a head in the sand approach. Climate change is the primary challenge we face as a society and weather forecasting is the canary in the coal mine warning us of catastrophic storms, fires, landslides, and flooding.

If you have any doubt about the cynicism of these people, this absurd denial strategy of simply hiding any reference to a problem, as a solution, tells us just how little they think of the intelligence of the American people.

Hard as it is to believe, the second Trump administration is still less than a month old and they have thrown foreign policy into chaos, every federal employee is freaking out, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed, and the list goes on. The effect is going to be exhausting to anyone trying to understand why this is happening and how it will affect all of us.

It’s challenging just to simply catalog all this activity, much less understand what the short and long term effects of this will be. It’s bewildering. It seriously looks like this is a planned storm designed to cover up ethical conflicts, while eliminating regulatory agencies that directly affect the business interests of Trump’s billionaire oligarchs, particularly his partner in crime, Elon Musk.

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

Discussion about this post