Inmates, running the asylum.

We used to have mental hospitals, sanitariums, asylums, for the seriously, and long-term, mentally ill. We locked dangerous people away. But too damned many of those facilities were terrible. Outright abuse of patients, well-intended treatments that were abusive, neglect… you name it, they did it. There was a backlash against them. We still have some comparatively small, specialized in-patient treatment centers, but for the most part, we started “mainstreaming” the mentally ill, the out-right crazed. Give enough drugs to keep them from completely flipping out, and hope they’ll keep filling the prescription and taking the meds.

We didn’t just mainstream crazy people, society mainstreamed insanity. A generation grew up watching crazy people acting out around them without knowing they were crazy. It became acceptable to act that way. And as more people picked it up, it set the example for even more.

That’s why we have people like “crewcut lady” who think sharing their psychotic breaks in videos to the world is a good idea. If they left it at that, fine. But they didn’t.

Our new batch of lunatics applied their crazy and illogic to everything in life. That’s how idjits like David Hogglet can demand that oh-so-mature sixteen year-olds be able to vote on life or death issues, but eighteen year-olds are to immature to be trusted with a firearm.

Not entirely sure whether that’s crazy per se, or just fucking stupid. No matter, I suppose; we all wind up in the same place either way.

That’s how we got Alexandria Occasionally-firing-Cortex’ grand plan to save the planet by strip mining it, and filling the holes with the toxic waste left over from manufacturing all those wind gennies and solar panels. Or her plan to simply print monopoly money to pay for it all, then tax every bit of it back to “prevent inflation.” (Hint: Paying for something, then taking the money back without returning the thing is theft. Paying people to work, then stealing the pay back though taxes is slavery.)

Contra my above statement, I am one hundred percent certain that Toothy McBigTits, however out-of-her-mind she may seem to sensible people, is really just plain old-fashioned stupid. That enough New Yorkers voted for her dumb ass to send her to Congress instead of keeping her in her titty-bar habitat humping the pole, as God intended? THAT’S what’s crazy.

That’s how we got a generation of socialist-indoctrinated schoolkids, who see so much crazy on the street that the crazy in classroom doesn’t faze them a bit.

So yeah; when I wrote about how everyone got too dumbed down to keep up the infrastructure? Remember that they are just dumb, they’re crazy. Enjoy operating appliances — “water-saving” clothes washer and dishwashers that take hours to not clean and use more energy, “water-saving” toilets that require multiple flushes to actually flush — designed by the criminally insane.

Bad enough, sure, but there’s worse.

United Airlines plans to hire and train 5,000 pilots, including some with no flying experience

It appears that the skies are about to get a lot less friendly, to repurpose United’s old ad tagline for use against them.

United Airlines says it will train 5,000 pilots this decade, including taking on applicants with no flying experience, and plans for half of them to be women or people of color.

United will borrow an approach used elsewhere, notably at Germany’s Lufthansa, by taking people at the beginning of their flying careers and training them at its own academy, which it bought last year. United will continue to draw pilots from traditional sources such as the military, however.

Airline officials began accepting applicants for United’s flight academy Tuesday.

The subject of a pilot shortage — it is not universally accepted that one exists — was hotly discussed in the airline industry before the coronavirus pandemic hit, and then receded as airlines around the world grounded planes and reduced their pilot ranks in response to the plunge in air travel.

Now travel is rebounding, although it hasn’t returned to 2019 levels.

Much as I’ve always loved to fly, I can guar-on-TEE I won’t be getting on any commercial flights now that I know that they no longer consider being, y’know, a fully-trained, capable pilot a more essential requirement for strapping on an airliner and calling him, zxher, or itself a bona fide, pro-fessional Bus Driver In The Sky than gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, Wokeness, or any of the myriad other irrelevancies to which our society now grants primacy of place over such oppressive and hateful inequities as aptitude and ability. In the unlikely event I’m forced to fly someplace, it damned sure won’t be on United, their having officially declared a newfound disinterest in recruiting the best, most qualified people for left-seater employment, preferring instead to bump Diversity and PC Feelgoodz right on up to Item One on the job application.

Nice of them to be upfront about their total abandonment of all standards of safety, rationality, and corporate responsibility, I suppose. But after a bonehead move like this, I’d rather crawl on hands and knees over a mile of alcohol-drenched broken glass than Fly United™. Henceforth, if I want to fly my brother and I will drive to one of several local civil-aviation facilities, rent ourselves a 172, Seminole, or something along those lines (or a King Air—YES!!!), and just DIY it, thenksveddymuch. We’ve actually done quite a good bit of that very thing over the years, whether for strictly Point A-to-Point B purposes or just an afternoon’s amusement. If you’ve never traveled on a small private aircraft, you can take my word for it when I say that it’s one heck of a lot more fun than flying commercial anyhoo.

Yes, renting a small plane ain’t exactly cheap, especially the fuel cost. But these days, the airlines ain’t exactly cheap either. Throw in a plethora of indignities and/or abuse at the halfwit whim of handsy, thuggish TSA mouthbreathers; interminable delays, endless lines, long walks, surly counter personnel, layovers, and scheduling cockups; and too much other terminal and concourse unpleasantness to list, before you even board. All of that, to then put your very life—quite literally—in the hands of some diversity-hire horrorshow who can’t even run the preflight checklist without more-competent supervision? Someone hired not because thorough vetting confirmed them as the best person for the job, but because there’s a box on the gooberment’s Mandatory Diversity Form that the airline needed to put an X in?

Yeah, no. Spendy or not, the fly-it-yourself option begins to look like a real bargain in comparison, don’t it?

Update! Diversity is NEVER a strength, in any business or industrial context. But in certain fields where the hazard to life and limb is both real and significant, diversity goes from being merely an expensive but more or less bearable nuisance to a serious threat.

After a hard year of reduced travel from the coronavirus, United Airlines decided it was time to announce a new initiative: “Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.” This type of corporate mantra is so common these days as to be unremarkable. But this announcement led to a lot of critical comments on social media—the dreaded ratio—about how this initiative has nothing to do with making flying safer.

United’s policies, however, are a rather typical expression of the ideology of diversity, a successor to the earlier, more limited concept of affirmative action.

By the 1990s, diversity itself became an entire industry. There were diversity consultants and chief diversity officers. Everyone in the public and private sector now mouths platitudes in support of diversity. An important factor missing from all the diversity talk was data. One reason, of course, is that certain questions are simply too dangerous to explore. The wrong conclusion can lead to pariah status, as The Bell Curve authors learned.

This is why diversity is especially prominent in soft fields with vague metrics of productivity: higher education, government, journalism, nonprofit management, marketing, and human resources. These fields have diffuse responsibility and limited accountability. Bad work by a mediocre employee cannot easily be measured or found out.

In a sense, diversity is a luxury good. Profitable enterprises can absorb people who are not the best of the best, particularly for jobs where being the best is not an important requirement; other talented and hard-working people can cover the slack. In large organizations, there are also jobs where less skilled people can do relatively little harm, like “community liaison.”

For more tangible fields, like firefighting or police work, the costs of lowering standards are more tangible—sometimes directly causing real headaches—but there is little courage inside or outside organizations to speak frankly about the costs of diversity.

This brings us back to United Airlines. There are certain jobs—heart surgeon, pilot, oil tanker captain—where there is almost no room for error. There is a linear relationship of talent and skill, and those on the customer side, as well as the general public, insist on excellence. Mistakes are immediate and costly.

In response to customer criticism, United insisted there would be no degradation in standards or quality. This seems unlikely. In every other field where diversity becomes the watchword, excellence becomes a secondary priority. After all, excellence is rare. Whatever criteria were used to pick the best people before could simply be applied to all comers, the results listed first to last. Everyone knows this would undermine diverse outcomes. 

Another important reality undermines diversity propaganda. Hiring and promotion are zero-sum games; to advance one group, one must artificially hold back another. For example, United has said it will definitely not hire more than 2,500 white men to be pilots no matter how skilled. These messages have an impact. Even so, we are told “diversity benefits everyone,” and it is “our” strength. 

Surveying the country, it’s hard not to see a more general reduction in quality across the board…not in strength, but fragility. Consider the recent COVID episode. Does this look like a society with a lot of resilience, or one with highly skilled elites and decision-makers? 

One would think the airline business is fundamentally simple: get people from point A to point B quickly, cheaply, comfortably, and, most important of all, safely. Presumably airplanes not falling out of the sky is just as important as who wins the Super Bowl.

But for United, safety has to fly coach. 

Unfortunately for United, there are other options out there. After this self-inflicted debacle, UA can expect those alternatives to be carefully weighed, by a large number of prospective passengers—planeloads of ’em, one might say.