The abortion misconception

 As a conservative Christian, when I talk about voting for Democrats, one of the first questions I usually get is some form of “What about abortion?”

That’s a reasonable question, because I am still pro-life and anti-abortion, but I now realize that the two are not the same. In my early years of political awareness, I looked at three main issues: abortion, guns, and taxes. My thinking was that if a candidate got those three issues right, the chances were good that I’d agree with him on most other stuff. For a long time, that strategy worked pretty well, but eventually things got more complicated.

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One of the first problems that emerged with my thinking was that electing candidates who spouted pro-life/anti-abortion rhetoric didn’t necessarily change things. Part of that was due to Supreme Court decisions that limited how restrictive anti-abortion states could be. Now, with the Dobbs decision as a legal precedent, the playing field is different, but that caveat remains.

What many pro-life people don’t understand is that the abortion rate was in a long-term decline for decades, regardless of which political party was in power or who was president. The abortion rate in the US peaked about 1990 and then declined under Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama. That long-term trend reversed itself under Donald Trump before the Dobbs decision and has continued to rise since. Pro-life political groups applaud Trump for his pro-life actions, but they won’t tell you that there were big declines in abortion under Democratic, pro-choice presidents or that abortions have been increasing under Trump for years.

There is an argument that these trends are related to other factors aside from the policies of individual presidents. I agree, but that also undercuts the argument for why voting for pro-life candidates is so important.

For example, one reason that the abortion rate is rising is probably because of the growth of pharmaceutical abortions, some of which can be delivered through the mail. Louisiana filed a lawsuit seeking to ban such deliveries, but the same Supreme Court that handed down Dobbs paused an injunction that would have suspended postal deliveries of mifepristone. The FDA is conducting a safety review of the drug, but the agency has said the study won’t be ready until March, long after the midterm elections.

The case involves the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that bans the transfer of “lewd” materials and drugs that could end a pregnancy by mail. The law also initially banned the shipment of birth control drugs, but that provision has been repealed.

Pro-life groups would like for the Administration to enforce the Comstock Act, and some parts of the Administration would like to do so. Attorney General Todd Blanche has indicated that he is open to the idea.

The rub is with democracy. In 2022, after the Dobbs decision was announced, Republicans faced a backlash from the voters. That was true even in red states.

Long-term polling shows that Americans became more prolife over the years, even reaching a small majority at times. Pro-life was slowly winning the ideological war until May 2021, when prolife identification took a nosedive. It’s probably not a coincidence that this was when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Dobbs case. In the long view, it may be true that electing politicians who appointed pro-life justices actually set the pro-life movement back.

I think the explanation for this may be that pro-life groups forgot that they were in a democracy when they got a friendly president. They stopped trying to persuade and started trying to control.

There were probably other reasons as well. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, the threat to abortion rights became real rather than theoretical. A lot of people who claimed to be pro-life suddenly realized that they didn’t want abortion bans after all. Or maybe they weren’t really anti-abortion to begin with.

I also would not be surprised if Donald Trump’s toxic personality caused a shift against the whole pro-life ideology. There might be some truth to the idea that some people don’t want to be seen as pro-life just because Trump claims to be as well.

The current situation is that anti-abortion groups probably have the political clout and legal arguments to enact some additional abortion restrictions, but if they do so, it will be very unpopular. That’s not a recipe for lasting success. That’s a recipe for another backlash.

In retrospect, it was a mistake for the pro-life groups to allow the issue to become divided along partisan lines. There were once pro-life Democrats. In fact, there still are. But part of the reason that these are such a rare breed now is that, in addition to facing strong pro-choice pressures from inside their own party, they are also targeted by Republican groups.

The partisan strategy is a recipe for long-term defeat, however. The problem is that it means that pro-life policies only have a chance of advancing when their party is in power, and as we’ve seen, that means there aren’t many successes. Growing a pro-life caucus in the Democratic Party would enable bipartisan agreement to actually get laws passed that would survive a transition of power.

I’d also like to take a moment to address the myth of abortion up to the point of birth. There are claims that some blue states, like Massachusetts, allow abortion up to the point of birth. The Massachusetts law, passed in August, still requires a doctor’s judgment that the abortion is necessary and did slightly relax earlier rules that allowed late-term abortion in certain circumstances, but the reality is that late-term abortions are rare, less than one percent, per the Kaiser Foundation.

Further, late-term abortions are rarely elective except in some cases where the mother lacked access to earlier-term abortions or found out about the pregancy late. A larger share of late-term abortions are due to learning new information about fetal abnormalities or health risks to the mother. As someone once said, it simply isn’t true that women are carrying babies nearly to term and then having elective abortions for reasons of convenience.

In my opinion, the pro-life movement needs to get back to its roots and start winning converts. The argument that an unborn fetus is a living human being that should not be killed is a strong one, and that’s especially true as technology advances and gives us compelling pictures of life inside the womb.

Pro-life activists should also adopt strategies that address the reasons that women choose to abort. A study by the Guttmacher Institute found that the typical abortion patient is young, poor, and unmarried. Seventy-seven percent are under 30, 72 percent were never married, and 60 percent were below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Further, about 60 percent also had at least one additional child.

This data suggests that making it easier and less expensive to raise children could help more women to choose life. Government programs to help single mothers feed their kids, provide them with health insurance and medical care, and pay for clothes and daycare could save countless unborn lives. Unfortunately, these are the same programs that many Republican pro-lifers consider to be socialism.

Another alternative might be providing free or low-cost birth control. Again, however, this idea runs afoul of many pro-lifers on the right.

We have arrived at a fundamental problem. Conservative pro-lifers want to prevent abortions, but many don’t want to adopt the policies that could help to reduce the abortion rate. They just want to enact bans. This is why many consider Republicans to be pro-birth rather than pro-life. The charge isn’t entirely unfair.

I’m against abortion, which I see as a moral issue, but I also don’t see it as the only moral issue. Corruption is rampant within the MAGA Republican Party. That’s a moral issue. The president started an unnecessary war that is getting untold numbers of people killed. That’s a moral issue. The Administration is now siding with Russia as it kills Ukrainians and kidnaps Ukrainian children, exporting them to Russia. That’s a moral issue. DOGE incinerated food and medical aid rather than giving it to needy countries that depended on it. The abrupt termination of US aid led to hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation and disease. That’s not only a moral issue. It’s a pro-life issue and an issue of poor stewardship. I could go on.

I’m against abortion, but speaking pro-life platitudes does not mean that politicians should be exempt from basic standards of competence, ethics, and decency. I’ve often said that people in public life who claim to be Christian should be held to a higher standard, not given passes when they abuse the public trust.

So yeah, it’s gotten more complicated than my original three-pronged political test. Life and politics have a way of becoming gray, but the bottom line is that abortion won’t be ended by top-down bans. That’s especially true since most Americans get more hesitant about restrictions as they become more onerous.

Only about 10 percent favor a full ban. An outright ban will never happen. Pro-life activists don’t want to hear that, but it’s true.

I believe the way to reduce abortions is to reduce the factors that make women feel like they need an abortion. That is an achievable goal, but it will require bipartisan cooperation, and both sides want to keep the issue as a wedge. 

From the Racket News

Why Dems are under/overperforming

 There’s a curious dynamic developing in this year’s midterms. A lot of the polling shows that Democrats are doing much better than normal in red states while lagging in a number of races in their home territory. I think the explanation is simple.

If you haven’t been following the polls, the scenario is simple. Democrats are racking up impressive polling results in states like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio. Red states are becoming battlegrounds, yet the traditional battlegrounds are remaining close, and the Democrats haven’t been able to close the deal in blue areas like Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota. The result is a larger number of battleground states than normal.

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There are several possible explanations for this situation, but it seems to me that the most likely is that what we are seeing is not a blue surge on the merits of the Democratic Party, but a widespread rejection of both Trumpism and progressivism.

The core problem seems to be similar for both parties in that the members of the base that vote in primaries tend to select bad and extreme candidates. We all know about the disastrous choice of Ken Paxton in Texas, but the nomination of Abu El-Sayed in Michigan and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota were unnecessarily risky partisan choices by progressive and, in some cases, DSA voters. Maine has had its own unique problems with Democratic nominees this year, first nominating a communist and then scrambling to find a replacement when a series of scandals forced him to drop out.

The bottom line here is that moderate and independent voters, the voters who decide elections, don’t like either the Republican MAGA right or the Democratic progressive left. The radical fringes are unconcerned about (or, more likely, blissfully unaware of) their unpopularity, and both keep nominating candidates who would be unelectable if the other side wasn’t nominating people just as bad, or worse.

So far, it looks as though MAGA is less popular than progressives. In most of the swing-state polling, Republicans are trailing. But Republicans are beating themselves more than being victimized by the Democrats. More specifically, the Republicans are being beaten by Trump, who remains unpopular amid high gas and consumer prices, and who just won’t shut up.

Last week, Trump started openly siding with Putin against Ukraine. At roughly the same time, the White House reportedly ordered Ukraine cut off from Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system (Trump denies this) and then waived the just-passed sanctions against Russia, a move that is drawing criticism even from Republicans. All this while, Russia is providing Iran with intelligence to target American soldiers.

And then there is the Homeland Security raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home. The government has not been forthcoming about the raid on the Minnesota congresswoman’s residence, but a similar investigation in the first Trump Adminstration did not find evidence of the immigration issues that are reportedly at the heart of the search. If the situation looks like lawfare and harassment of a Muslim Democrat for no legitimate reason, the raid may end up motivating more voters to vote against Republican candidates.

Charlie Cook, of the Cook Political Report, christened the polling phenomenon “the red undertow” to underscore the fact that Republican unpopularity hasn’t made Democrats more popular. As I described last week, most voters understand that, while the choice on the ballot isn’t necessarily binary, the outcome of the election almost certainly is.

There have also been a lot of questions about possible polling error. In every election, the theory of the shy Trump voter resurfaces, even though it seems that talking to pollsters just prior to elections is about the only time that Trump voters are ever considered to be shy about anything. And Trump isn’t on the ballot, so Trump voters, shy or not, may not show up anyway.

There is truth to the claim that pollsters are having a hard time talking to Republicans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Republican voters are being undercounted. Pollsters weight their results based on what they think the Republican share of the electorate will be. This does introduce more uncertainty into the process, but the error doesn’t always favor the same party, as Nate Silver pointed out. In 2025, much of the polling underestimated Democratic voters. Adding to the confusion, state polling is often much more difficult and less reliable than national polls.

There is a chance that the missing Republicans will show up by Election Day, and polling will break against the Democrats. There is also a chance that Republicans who don’t answer polling calls won’t bother to go to the polls to vote. The Democratic wave might be undercounted.

What seems to be certain is that the national mood does not favor Republicans. Each week seems to bring more stories of Trump hitting a record low in approval. Issues polling, typically national polls with less propensity for error, is finding that the biggest issues for voters are concerns like corruption (88 percent), inflation (85 percent), and high gas prices (83 percent). Those particular numbers are from a Fox News poll, and they don’t sound encouraging for the party in power.

Meanwhile, the Administration is out of touch and unconcerned about voter concerns. As voters worry about prices and the Iran War, Trump seems more concerned about his ballroom and overhauling golf courses. Republicans are partying like it’s 1789, and Trump is in the role of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.”

The big question then is, if voters are so sour on the job that Trump and the Republicans are doing, why is the polling so close?

The most obvious answer is that we are looking at shy Democratic voters. These are likely moderates and independents who are leaning Democrat but who haven’t fully committed yet.

I think it’s likely that the blue wave still emerges. Whether it’s a red undertow or a blue wave won’t matter much this year, but what Democrats take from the win will make a difference in coming elections. If Democrats get the mistaken impression that their victories this year are based on voter desire for a progressive agenda rather than a rejection of Trump and Republican overreach, those nice, new majorities won’t last long. 

From the Racket News

One simple trick to stop Donald Trump

 It’s that time again. Early voting is starting in Georgia and many other states, and I’m seeing a chorus of my online friends who have been critical of the Trump Administration trumpet their intent to sit out the election and vote for neither side. Sometimes they say they’ll vote for a third party, while other times they don’t plan to vote at all. That’s a great plan if you don’t care what happens to your country. 

I’ll confess that I used to sympathize with this point of view. Back in 2016, I didn’t think either Trump or Hillary was suited for the presidency. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either of them, and I ended up both volunteering and voting for Evan McMullin. I did some third-party voting after that as well, mostly as a protest vote. I might as well have just flushed my vote down the toilet. 

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What I’ve realized since then is that, no matter whether you think both major party candidates are unqualified or unsuitable, one of them is going to win. (Extremely rare cases to the contrary, like this year’s Nebraska Senate race, prove the rule.) Knowing that, it is logically better to have input into which side is chosen, because even though both candidates may be bad, they aren’t equally bad. 

It’s the old complaint about voting for the lesser evil, but that isn’t really a bad thing. By definition, the lesser evil is preferable to the greater evil (unless you like evil), and those who don’t choose the lesser evil are likely to end up with the greater evil. 

This also becomes a question of how you look at life. The optimistic way of looking at the lesser evil is that it’s the greater good. Is the glass half empty or half full?

In certain situations, it’s true that your vote probably doesn’t matter. In a presidential election, if you aren’t in a swing state, your vote won’t make a difference in the presidency, but it might in down-ballot races. In deep red or blue states or districts, that may also be true in off-year elections. 

But the flip side to that is that the only way to make races competitive is for the opposition to get out and vote. This year, states and districts that are often deep red are becoming battlegrounds. Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and South Carolina are in play, as well as Michigan on the Democratic side, thanks to a bad primary choice by Democratic voters. 

The reason for that shift this year is that the two sides are not the same level of bad. Yes, there are some extreme candidates on the Democratic side, but they pale in comparison to what is considered mainstream in the Republican Party. Even the best Republican candidates are totally beholden to and subservient to Donald Trump, a president who is completely unbound by the Constitution and increasingly unaccountable to the courts. 

It’s also true that the smaller the voter pool, the more your vote counts. So, in local and district races in an off-year election, your vote matters more than when voting for president. A few votes can make a difference in these races.

The list of Trump’s transgressions is too long to cover completely, but any other president who acted so imperiously and corruptly would have rightly been impeached and removed. It is the Republicans who are up for re-election this year who have enabled his grift and abuses of power. If they are returned to power, it will be more of the same. 

I’m not a Democrat. I’m a conservative and a former Republican, but I’ll be voting Democrat again this year, because the parties are not equally bad. We have a liberal party, and we have an insane personality cult that already tried to steal one presidential election and is currently talking about an unconstitutional third term and seems to be seriously considering martial law if they don’t get the midterm results they want. 

In other words, this election is not about policy differences. This election is about whether we want to continue enabling a wannabe authoritarian and whether we want him to lock in his power grab or be held accountable for his crimes. This election is about whether we want to continue being a constitutional republic (which is a form of democracy, for those who say we aren’t a democratic country) or if we want to keep ceding our freedom to a lawless, political strongman. 

Those who choose not to make the not-so-difficult choice to rein in the man who would reign over us are not being politically courageous. They are being apathetic. They are throwing their hands up into the air and saying, “Let the chips fall where they may.”

I agree that Democratic candidates are flawed and sometimes even dangerous, but it’s a matter of degrees. We should be considering political triage. When a patient with multiple illnesses presents at a hospital, doctors treat the life-threatening problems first. They don’t let a patient bleed out or die from a heart attack while they wheel him to radiation treatments. No, the proper sequence is to stop the bleeding, stabilize him after the heart attack, and then worry about the long-term threat from cancer. 

It’s the same with politics. Trump and MAGA represent a serious, existential threat to our survival as a free nation. That doesn’t mean the Democrats are not a threat, but they are not the imminent danger that a Trump grabbing power at the expense of the Constitution is. 

As a longtime follower of conservative and Republican media, I can also point out that many of the accusations that Republicans now level at Democrats are either hypothetical or things that Trump’s Republican Party is already doing. Republican fearmongering over Muslims is hypothetical, for example. Muslims are a small minority (less than two percent of the US population), and the First Amendment already prohibits Sharia law.

Most of the Republican accusations lack self-awareness. Socialism? Trump is nationalizing American companies at an alarming rate. Taxes? Trump’s unconstitutional tariffs are costing Americans thousands of dollars. Endless wars? Wars and rumors of wars are constant under Trump. Government overreach? Trump has created a vast, brutal and unaccountable police state that is already targeting American citizens. Lawfare? Trump already has a long list of political persecutions, even before the recent raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar, while pardoning his criminal friends at eight times the rate of Biden pardons. Corruption? Trump has amassed billions of dollars with open graft and monetization of the presidency. Kimberly Guilfoyle’s $100,000 alleged bribe request is small potatoes. Pro-life? Not only is the Trump Administration not reining in abortion (the abortion rate is increasing), but his cuts to USAID have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, most of them children, and now the Administration is planning for public executions.

Back in 2025, I predicted that the Trump presidency would be like another dark age. That prediction is coming true. The world is sinking into conflict and chaos. Trump’s government is internationally aggressive and he is openly siding with Putin, even violating recently passed Russia sanctions to make a deal for a token amount of Russian diesel. This as Russia aids Iran in targeting American soldiers. Trump’s trade barriers mean the US is being left behind internationally, and his attacks on scientific funding and research will cost us in terms of technological leadership. RFK’s assaults on health research and vaccines are allowing disease to flourish. America is in decline, thanks to MAGA.

Your vote matters. That’s why Trump and the MAGA Republicans are trying so hard to make voting difficult and to convince their opponents to stay home. 

In fact, voting matters more than anything else when it comes to holding the government accountable. Election results are the one thing that politicians can’t dismiss or ignore, even though they sometimes try. 

If you have spent the last two (or more) years complaining about Donald Trump’s government, now is your time. Don’t screw it up. Be an adult and make the unpleasant but necessary choice to vote Democrat and block a tyrant. 

If you love America, the stakes are too high not to.

From the Racket News

Don’t fear the reapers

 Ah, fall. The days start getting shorter, the nights get cool and crisp, the leaves explode into vibrant colors, and if it’s an election year, we get word that migrant caravans are streaming towards the southern border.

In all seriousness, I don’t recall any caravans in 2024, but pretty much every election year in recent memory before that, Fox News and other Republican outlets had wall-to-wall coverage of the ragtag bands of migrants walking through Latin America. I’m pretty sure I even remember countdowns to their estimated arrival at the border that stayed in the corner of the screen.

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There has been a lot of angst about whether polling is accurate or not as an apparent blue wave builds, but a lot of Republicans believe it. You can tell because the migrant caravan fearmongering has returned. Over the past few days, I’ve started seeing more breathless posts about a new caravan headed north and warnings that American democracy is doomed if it isn’t stopped.

Those who don’t have the memory of a goldfish may recall these same warnings in years past. I remember folks online being whipped into a frenzy with dire warnings of what would happen. I remember commenters saying that the caravan should be bombed before it reached the US, never minding that a) the caravan members hadn’t broken any laws, at least none in the US, b) they were unarmed migrants, including women and children, and c) they weren’t even in the United States, so bombing them would be crossing the red line of an act of war on a neighboring country.

In 2026, we’ve crossed several red lines already, I guess. Unarmed migrants are now deemed a national security threat, and the list of countries that we (and by “we” I mean Trump) have bombed gets longer all the time.

Folks, these people are not an invading army, no matter how much the MAGA talking heads like to call them invaders. (Legally, illegal immigration does not fit the definition of an invasion.) They are laborers, women, and children looking for a better life. They’re coming to pick our crops, mow our lawns, build our houses, and clean our hotel rooms.

Thinking back to recent years, what happened when the migrant caravans arrived at the US border? Did they dig up weapons and mount raids on US settlements like Pancho Villa in 1916? Did they swarm across the border and cut all the lawns within a 50-mile radius? Did they proceed directly to the nearest welfare office without passing “Go” to collect $200?

No. IF they reach the US border, they mostly set up camp in Mexico and ask for asylum in the US. Often, the result is a humanitarian crisis on the Mexican side of the border, because the US-Mexico border runs through some pretty inhospitable territory. There isn’t much as far as living off the land, and these people didn’t have a lot when they started their walk.

If there was little welcome for the refugees under Joe Biden, there will be none whatsoever in the current Administration of Ming the Merciless. Donald Trump has lost heavily at the Supreme Court, but one area where the Court has deferred greatly to presidential authority is on illegal immigration and deportations. A recent small victory on the emergency docket was last week’s temporary reversal of a lower court’s injunction against deporting immigrants to pretty much any random country that will take them.

I say all that to say this: Why are MAGAs afraid? They claim that Trump has solved the illegal immigration problem, and the courts have unlocked new tools to use against those who would have the audacity to come pick our crops. If they really believe that Trump is not asleep at the border, why bother fearing the crop pickers coming to ask for asylum?

Don’t fear the reapers.

They’re not even here, and they’ll soon be gone.

The obvious answer is that the Republicans believe that their base needs to be frightened to the polls, and the boys who cry “communism” aren’t doing the trick. They have to ramp things up a bit with some racism.

I try not to toss the R-word around lightly, but at times it applies. It applied to Bo French, and it applies to the caravan fearmongering. It’s race-based fear of people different from us. It’s fear that they will eat our pets or spread leprosy or bring a crime wave with them. Never mind that none of these things are true.

If we stopped to think about it, we might realize that, while immigrants do commit some crimes, they commit them at a lower rate than Americans, because immigrants don’t want to attract the attention of law enforcement. They don’t want to get deported. The statistics bear out the theory that immigrants, legal or illegal, commit few crimes and are more likely to be victimized than to be predators. Again, they want to be Americans, and sometimes that comes with a cost.

The fearmongering is about keeping people frightened enough that they are afraid not to vote Republican. It’s the strategy of a party that is out of good ideas.

There are those who tell the truth. In 2018, Shepard Smith, one of my favorite anchors, tried to put his viewers at ease, saying, “There is no invasion. No one is coming to get you. There is nothing at all to worry about.” It wasn’t long after that when he was forced out of Fox News.

This year, it’s none other than Marjorie Taylor Greene. Thankfully, Greene is no longer in Congress, but she does seem to have grown up at least a bit since her break with Trump. Greene posted to the platform formerly known as Twitter, “We have not seen a caravan headed to the US southern border in several years; why now? Oh yeah, there is an election coming, and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working.”

I get a little frightened when I agree with MTG.

And to those of you panicking about the caravan who are Christians, you should be better than this. Realize that these warnings have been made before, and the sky did not fall. People who repeatedly make false predictions should not continue to be trusted. Remember that Christ told us not to be afraid, and don’t immerse yourselves in the lies of those who would enslave you with fear.

The Bible tells us to love foreigners, including our enemies. Jesus would have us helping the poor, not fearing them.

At the very least, we shouldn’t be clamoring to bomb them.

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From time to time, I have to play a bit with the AI for the illustrations, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out. When I tried to include a reference to Blue Oyster Cult in the graphic, this is what I got. It’s a no-go for the thumbnail, but it’s good for a giggle.

Rejected Meta AI image

PLAGUE INC A medical worker in Siberia has reportedly died of pneumonic plague, apparently after a lab accident. Hundreds of people are isolated and under observation, and five hospitals are reportedly under quarantine. Pneumonic plague can spread from person to person, but experts say the risk of a widespread outbreak is small because transmission is insufficient and the disease is too lethal.

FLYDUBAI UPDATES The FO reportedly used the cockpit crash axe to attack the captain. He reportedly planned to use the airplane to attack Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport and planned the attack before taking the job at FlyDubai.

A NEW LIE Accounts on the MAGA right are claiming that “activist judges” are overturning laws that criminalize noncitizen voting. In reality, the Florida ruling affects one person who was prosecuted by the DOJ. The judge held that he needed to be prosecuted by the state because the Constitution grants states, rather than the federal government, the power to regulate elections.

BOOK NOTES Thanks to those of you who recommended books in my last post. I’m going to look into them. I just started the “Lost City of Z” after spontaneously checking it out based on author recognition. David Grann also wrote “Killers of the Flower Moon.” I’d recommend that in both book and movie form. My daughter also just passed me her copy of “Project Hail Mary.” I’m looking forward to that one as well.

From the Racket News 

120 seconds over Tabuk

 This was a nightmare scenario.

A heavily loaded airliner is in cruise flight when the first officer attacks the captain with a knife and points the airplane towards the ground. The airplane hurtles towards the ground with hundreds of people on board and a madman at the controls.

In the case of FlyDubai 1073, the nightmare has a happy ending. Several of the 174 passengers, most of them Israelis, rushed the cockpit and subdued the mutinous first officer, an Omani national. A passenger regained control of the airplane, and another pilot, traveling as a passenger, ultimately took over the flight, landing safely at Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

It was a close thing. Radar data shows that the Boeing 737 MAX 8 lost almost 20,000 feet in a matter of minutes. Such a massive loss of altitude would come with an increase in airspeed that likely exceeded the airplane’s structural limits. Just pulling out of the dive without ripping the wings off would be a challenge, especially for a nonpilot. In fact, the airplane seems to have lost its rudder, a movable piece of the vertical tail used in lateral steering.

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The Israeli man credited with pulling the airplane out of its dive said that he knew what to do from watching “Air Crash Investigation,” which the show should put on its commercials. This is an important point because airplane flight controls are somewhat reversed from the video game controls that many are used to. In a video game, you typically push the control up to go higher, but in an airplane, you pull back on the controls to raise the nose and climb.

In our flight simulator training, we regularly practice recovering from an extremely nose-low unusual attitude. Beyond pulling the nose up, typical steps include reducing power and deploying speed brakes or flight spoilers to reduce the airspeed. Simultaneously, the pilot rolls the wings level and pulls back on the controls to bring the nose up, but this must be done carefully, especially if the speed has exceeded the red line limits. Pulling up too quickly, especially if the airplane is in a turn, could overstress the airframe and cause structural failure.

Miraculously, no one was killed, and only the two crew members seem to have been seriously injured. Even the captain, an Indian national, and the first officer are both alive and recovering.

The obvious question here is motive, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has said the first officer “underwent Islamic radical indoctrination.” That’s definitely a possibility, but there are other explanations as well.

This story is very reminiscent of the September 11 attacks, specifically the heroic actions of the passengers and crew on United Flight 93, but what happened here is even more insidious, as well as more common. Rather than a hijacking by passengers, this was a mutiny by a crew member, which is even more difficult to guard against.

The phrase “suicide by cop” has long been used to describe people who intentionally goad police officers into killing them, but suicide by airliner, while not common, is also not unheard of in the aviation industry.

Other than the September 11 attacks, there have been several infamous examples of airline crewmembers committing suicide with their planes. One of the best-known was Germanwings 9525 back in 2015. Since then, we’ve had a Horizon Airlines maintenance worker who stole and crashed a Dash 8 turboprop in 2018 and China Eastern 5735 in 2022. Malaysia Airlines 370 and Air India 171 were also likely the result of intentional pilot action.

An additional incident occurred in 2023 when an off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot riding in the cockpit jumpseat tried to shut off both engines in flight. The pilot was restrained by the crew, who maintained control of the aircraft, and a spot opened up on the Alaska Airlines seniority list.

Reaching deeper into the past, a FedEx crew in 1994 was also attacked by a jumpseating crewmember, this one a flight engineer who boarded with a guitar case filled with hammers, knives, and a spear gun. The flight engineer attacked the crew with the hammers, intent on killing himself for a life insurance payout for his family, and then the flight devolved into a free-for-all that included aerobatic maneuvers in a DC-10. The crew was severely injured but was ultimately able to land the plane safely.

As a cultural reference, I’ll also add a relatively forgettable 1996 John Travolta film called “Broken Arrow.” I won’t spoil it, but the movie involves an attack on the crew of a stealth bomber.

A big question many are asking is how this could happen. Since September 11, most airliners have been built with hardened cockpit doors, but in these cases the threat came from inside the cockpit. Apparently, the door was either open or unlocked, which allowed the passengers to wrestle the first officer away from the controls.

In the US, flight crews go through the same TSA screenings that passengers endure. As an airline pilot, I was not allowed to carry a pocketknife, even when I carried my government-issued firearm as a Federal Flight Deck Officer. I could give you a list of things TSA has taken from me that include an Allen wrench that came with my suitcase that I didn’t even know was there.

That isn’t necessarily the case in other parts of the world, however. Not all countries are as security-conscious as the US, nor as fastidious about following security rules. For example, in the US and Europe, the flight deck door would probably have been locked from the inside, but in this case, a locked door would have spelled disaster.

Malicious acts by flight crews present a real and difficult security problem. Pilots have to have access to the flight deck, and when the flight deck is secured against outside attack, it can also protect a suicidal pilot from intervention.

Better security screenings of flight crews are a possible answer, but there is already a weapon in the cockpit. Federal aviation regulations require airliners to be equipped with a crash axe that is “accessible to the crew but inaccessible to passengers.” Jack Torrance would approve.

Better mental health screenings and professional help for pilots, as I mentioned in another post recently, would help, as would paying attention to what crewmembers do in their off time. The FlyDubai FO had allegedly posted about killing Jews, but at least in this country, examination of social media posts for radical beliefs and behavior probably wouldn’t fly (pun definitely intended). Still, other employees and fellow pilots should be encouraged to look out for the red flags of both murderous and suicidal behavior. In fact, these days, we should all familiarize ourselves with these warning signs.

Even though suicide-by-airplane is more common than you think, it’s still rare, and aviation is a very safe way to travel. Safe is not the same as risk-free, however, so keep your seatbelts fastened.

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FAIRFORD UPDATE The bomb scare at RAF Fairford had a big plot twist when it was revealed that the vans did not contain explosives. As a result, the five suspects were released on bail. It’s possible that the incident was part of a dry run preceding an attack. The investigation is continuing, and there has been a new arrest involving a British-Iranian man.

SHAMELESS PLUG Our friend, Stan Mitchell, is once again cranking out podcasts. We encourage you to check him out here: https://linktr.ee/stanrmitchell

Stan is a Marine, a centrist, a Christian, and a pretty smart guy (for a Marine) as well as a nice one. His podcast covers politics and military affairs. If you like our stuff, you’ll probably like him.

WHAT I’M READING I went on a Stephen King binge this summer, broken mainly by a detailed history of Guadalcanal by Richard B. Frank. When I checked out “It” and “Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle” at the same time because I had them both on holds that arrived together, it was about seven inches of books to read with the clock ticking. Both were good reads, but I can’t really recommend “It” because it is so deeply weird.

From there, I went to “Shining,” which was also pretty intense. Stephen King novels often make more sense than the movie versions, and that was the case here. The final moments of the movie are almost incomprehensible, but the book explains what the movie expects you to know.

As it turns out, there is also a sequel to “Shining” called “Dr. Sleep.” The sequel follows Danny Torrance as he grows up. Again, it’s intense, but a good read.

After that, I went in a different direction. I’ve always wanted to read Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers,” but it’s hard to find copies. I located an internet copy and then found a library copy, so I was off to the races.

Let me just say that the movies are only very loosely based on the book (like a Stephen King movie). The book is good, but the action is almost an afterthought. I’d almost call it a sci-fi military version of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” There’s a lot of detail about Basic Training for the Mobile Infantry as well as Officer Candidate School. These set the stage for political and philosophical discussions about the morals and structure of the Terran Federation with a lot of criticism of late 20th-century society.

I’m enjoying the book, but it’s definitely not what I expected.

Additionally, I do a lot of studies on the YouVersion Bible app, but the Sermon on the Mount study that I’m doing now has been really good. It’s a 19-day study that almost seemed a little too juvenile at first, but as I got deeper, it got deeper with excellent insights. The Sermon on the Mount is radical today, let alone for its time. Maybe that’s why so many people scroll back to the “thou shalt nots.”

From the Racket News 

Let the fur fly

 Just when you thought politics couldn’t get any more ridiculous, Tommy Tuberville launches himself into the fray with an issue that is not only a bizarre misinterpretation of reality, but one that has no bearing at all on safety or anything else. I’m speaking, of course, about the Alabama senator’s expose’ of an alleged infestation of “furries” in the airline industry.

In a 20-minute floor speech followed by a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter, Tuberville breathlessly opined, “I know the deranged Democrats don’t like the fact that I called out the insane FURRY CULTURE this week. But the truth is, there is an ALARMING number of these DERANGED people working in our airline industry.” [All emphasis is his.]

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If you’re wondering just what in Sam Hill the former Auburn coach is talking about, he provides a clue, adding, “Don’t believe me? Just a few months ago, PILOTS were MEOWING and BARKING at each other over the radio at DCA.”

The incident at DCA, better known to the nonflying public as Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, was real, but it doesn’t necessarily mean what Tuberville thinks it does. Back in April, there was an incident where someone was making animal noises on an air traffic frequency at the airport. If Tuberville is really concerned about this dire emergency, it isn’t clear why he waited five months to sound the alarm.

Here’s the backstory on the meowing. For quite some time now, there has been an epidemic of meowing on an emergency frequency known as “Guard.” Guard is supposed to be a frequency that is reserved for emergencies only, and good practice is to maintain a listening watch on a standby radio while workloads are low during cruise flight. Several years ago, it became a game for some pilots to meow on the Guard frequency when they get bored. I blame millennials and the 2001 movie, “Super Troopers,” which featured a scene in which state troopers meowed at a motorist they had pulled over.

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At any rate, meowing has been a thing for years now, but it doesn’t follow that meowing on the radio means the perpetrators are furries. For one thing, if a pilot was really a furry, he’d probably want to keep a low profile rather than risk outing himself by meowing over the radio.

For those who don’t know, furries are people who enjoy dressing up in animal fursuits. Forbes notes that, for some, this is “part of a sexual fetish and incorporate the furry identity into a broader lifestyle, but for many it is a hobby not of a sexualized nature,” and I’m going to take their word for it without googling further.

Tuberville defended his alarmism in another post in which he claims that a recent furry convention in Minneapolis included an “Aviation Furs Meet-up,” and asked, “Would you be comfortable with a MENTALLY ILL FURRY being your pilot?”

But the senator fails to make the case either that there are a significant number of furries in the airlines or aviation in general, or that, if there are, they are a safety risk. There has never been an incident or accident that was related to furry behavior, and the vast majority of pilots have private licenses and do not fly commercially. The aviation furry meet didn’t necessarily include any commercial pilots.

Further, the evidence that furries are mentally ill is lacking. Psychology Today says furries “represent what you would expect to find in a typical geek or nerd subculture: Above-average school performance (nearly half are college students), an interest in computers and science, and a passion for video games, science fiction, fantasy, and anime,” also noting they are “seven times more likely than the general population to identify as transgender and about five times more likely to identify as non-heterosexual.”

In particular, however, the article declines to call furries mentally ill, but characterizes them as fans of animals and animal characters who enjoy engaging in fantasy. In other words, furries are akin to other fandoms that engage in dressing up as make-believe characters from genres like Star Wars or superhero franchises. They don’t believe that they are actually animals any more than Star Wars fans believe they are actually stormtroopers.

I will acknowledge Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, had apparent ties to the furry community. A lot still isn’t known about Robinson’s motive, and correlation is not causation, but this one horrific crime is not an indictment of all furries. There are no official statistics on violence by or against furries, but such crimes seem to be rare.

Tuberville’s alarmism over furries reminds me a lot of Charlie Kirk talking about DEI at the airlines. Back in 2024, Kirk alleged that black airline pilots might not be safe, musing, “If I see a black pilot, I'm going to be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified.’”

Kirk’s fears were unfounded, just like Tuberville’s, and I’ll explain why. Any pilot hired by the airlines has already been certified multiple times by FAA-designated check airmen before they get near an airline cockpit. These examiners are governed by specific guidelines. They are not allowed to make subjective rulings based on factors like gender or race.

The federal prescreening of prospective pilots also includes a periodic medical exam that includes questions about mental health. Certain mental health issues are disqualifying, but as we have discussed, furry fandom is not considered a mental illness.

Once the pilot is hired, they go through an airline training program for their specific aircraft. Even if they’ve flown the airplane previously, they go through the entire course and take another flight test in the simulator. The instructors and check airmen are airline employees, but they answer to the FAA and must follow the same defined standards. Race and gender considerations might get an applicant to the top of the hiring list, but it won’t get them past the checkride.

When training and checking new and recurrent pilots, check airmen also ask themselves the question, “Would I want to entrust my family to this pilot?” This is not a rhetorical question given the flight benefits that families of airline employees enjoy. The checkers want safe pilots flying for their company.

Tommy Tuberville doesn’t seem to understand either aviation or furries, but that should be no surprise. He has never been assumed to be the sharpest tool in the shed, rising to political power amid a string of bigoted attacks on blacks, Muslims, and immigrants, among others. That may be enough to put him in the Alabama governor’s mansion as well.

Do I think furries are a bit weird? Yes, I do, but I also think that any adult who likes to play dress-up is a bit weird. I don’t make distinctions between those who dress up as animals, sci-fi characters, historical figures, or superheroes. I think furries are probably less harmful to the nation than Patriot Front members who cosplay as fascist brownshirts (although I don’t think that’s cosplay).

Having said that, I also don’t think that dressing up like an animal (or a stormtrooper or whatever) has any effect on a person’s ability to fly an airplane safely. If they can pass the tests, including recurrent training, and hold a medical certificate without raising red flags from examiners or coworkers, then they are most likely safe to fly passengers around the world. Based on the Psychology Today statistics and my own time at the airlines, I’d venture a guess that furries are more likely to be flight attendants than pilots, but I have never known any aviation worker to be a furry.

Tuberville’s rant is yet another attempt to distract from MAGA’s problems by stoking fear at misunderstood subcultures. The fear of flying furries fits with Trump’s claim that immigrants were eating pets, claims that schools were deploying litter boxes for students who identified as cats, or the perennial claims that migrant caravans are about to swarm across the southern border (a claim that I saw again today). These claims have all been debunked, but they are used by the internet pundits to create an atmosphere of chaos in an attempt to induce people to vote Republican.

If Tuberville really wants to help make aviation safer, he could push the FAA to take a more enlightened stance on mental health treatments. Because of the adversarial relationship between the FAA and pilots who need to keep their medical certificates active to keep their jobs, many pilots forgo mental health treatments for actual problems because of the fear of losing their livelihood. Mental health problems exist in the flying community, but they have been driven underground. Maybe Senator Tuberville could advocate for the reform bill backed by the Air Line Pilots Association that would help to address this problem.

Don’t worry about the furries. And also don’t be distracted from the real issues that we, as a country, face in the upcoming elections. I’m talking about political officials who partied with and protected Jeffrey Epstein, a slowing economy with rising prices (better known as “stagflation” in the 1970s), and a president who has indicated that he plans to resume bombing Iran after the midterms, as well as potentially starting yet another new forever war in Cuba.

Yes, the furries are deeply weird, but they aren’t the deranged ones.

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FAIRFIELD FUROR On Sunday, major news broke about an attempted bombing at RAF Fairford in the UK. Per news reports, locals tipped off police to the presence of strange men and three vans, which turned out to contain explosives. The base was reportedly already on high alert due to intelligence about a possible attack. Iran is my prime suspect in the incident.

RAF Fairfield is one of the US bases in the UK that was used to stage bombing missions on Iran. The video below from March shows B-1 bombers launching on attack missions from the base.

Because American standoff weapons and interceptor missiles have made it difficult for Iran to strike back with conventional weapons, it should come as no suprise that that they are attempting to use asymmetric warfare. I’m just surprised that it was car bombs and possibly suicide vests as opposed to a swarm of drones.

From the Racket News