This one sums it all up.

But this one is good too.

This works on multiple levels.

There are already a few casualties. Hegseth may be next.

No one deserved to lose more than Bo French

The extent of MAGA’s rejection was astounding.

Did I mention that the smackdown was of a mind boggling proportion?

Jamie Dupree is a great follow on most platforms. If you ever listened to Neal Boortz on Atlanta’s WSB, you probably remember him.

And speaking of talk radio…

Elon ain’t fooling no one.

Trump focused on what he’s interested in. It just wasn’t what the voters were interested in.

Not to mention having to say, “Em, eye, crooked letter, crooked letter, eye, hump back, hump back, eye,” all the time.

And as an added bonus, Scott Colom is probably the next senator from Mississippi. Here are two of the ads that helped to put him over the top. I wish all political ads could be this entertaining.

Follow our social media accounts for more memes and expert, independent commentary!

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Share The Racket News ™

While I join David Thornton in the great “I told you so,” I also want to join Governor Brian Kemp, who will complete his second and final term in Georgia, in wishing incoming Governor-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms the best in taking the reins of a state now newly blue, even in the lower house of the legislature. She’s got a big task ahead of her, and undoubtedly will face strong headwinds from day one. Kemp has always been a man of honor and what my stepfather called class; a classy guy who refused to bow to his political opposition (and by that, I mostly mean MAGA and Trump), and has resisted calls to convene a special legislative session to burn the fields before Bottoms takes office.

I am trying my best to resist hot takes, but they are just too delicious, like eating that third waffle at Waffle House, after which any normal person would seek medical attention, or at least an Alka-Seltzer. So here goes.

Far be it from me to tell Democrats what to do. They are surely giddy, with some of them wanting to celebrate, others planning elaborate impeachment hearings, and most of them planning to consolidate their own power base to rule for forty years. Perhaps we face another few decades of Democrats crawling around, enshrining abortion into state constitutions, enacting special taxes on second homes, and overall concern trolling truth, justice, yada, yada, we are Super(he/him).

But first and foremost, Democrats need to fulfill the promise they made to the electorate. It is very clear that American voters are tired of Donald Trump and anyone like him. Remember that Donald Trump used to be a Democrat before he was a Republican. He only became a Republican because that was the only way he could assemble a coalition to win. And he did so, twice. In the process, he destroyed the Republican Party about as thoroughly as any other enterprise he’s destroyed: the USFL, the Trump Shuttle, Trump University, and countless other gigs he’s used to line his pockets and fleece feckless marks. The next two years will be a festival of featherbedding and pardons for Trump, his family, and his friends.

Democrats will be greatly tempted to go for impeachment. I mean there’s such a rich trove of impeachable offenses to keep Congress busy for the full two years remaining in Trump’s term. And I’m sure he himself would love it. A spectacle of venom, that Trump would use to activate anyone still loyal to him (there are some), and raise cash from useful avatars, to feed his eternal need for attention, fame, and more rococo.

I say to Democrats: “don’t do it.”

Instead, they should embark on a disciplined effort, akin to the political skill exhibited by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), who gave his senior staff a simple directive to beat his Republican challenger, Rep. Mike Collins (MAGA-GA): “bury him.”

The way to bury Trump is not to go after him directly. If Democrats could learn any lesson at all, it’s the one Republicans learned the hard way in 2016. His Royal Highness Marco Rubio (viceroy of Venezuela) and the supperating eunuch Sen. Ted Cruz know that feeding Trump hate is like adding Mentos to Coca-Cola, or baking soda to vinegar. It expands, explodes, and makes a giant mess. If Democrats go after Trump directly, they simply empower him to go after them harder, while the MAGA swamp continues to multiply and breed its larvae. Maybe Democrats could persuade 12 Republicans in the Senate to convict Trump and be rid of him.

Maybe they could convince Vice President J.D. Vance to join them, because nobody would benefit more from Trump’s removal than the man in the wings ready to take the oath of office. And that’s exactly what Democrats would get should they succeed. Like the dog who catches the car, they’d end up under the bumper with someone potentially worse because he’s both malicious and smart.

Don’t do it, Democrats.

Go after Trump’s acolytes in government. Dismantle Trump’s MAGA government with hammer and tongs. Start by impeaching Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth. There’s ample grounds—so much that I don’t know where to start. Then (or simultaneously, why not?) impeach RFKJr. Get rid of both. And repeal the stupidity that allows Trump and Hegseth to call the DOD the “Department of War.” Force the government to fund HHS and research properly. Override every single Trump veto by working with disaffected Republicans now free from their fealty and fear of being primaried by a toothless Trump. Humiliate Trump, don’t impeach him.

Kill the “Victory Arch” project. Take over the ballroom project and make it something classy—there’s no point trying to stop it, because it’s indeed too far along. Take Trump’s building toys away. Recreate NPR and VOA. Force the government to fund and operate the Department of Education. Put teeth back into Congress, and revive the normal order of legislative operations. Steamroll the idiots and push attention-grabbing Democrats (never mind Republicans) out of the spotlight.

As the likely Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries should rule the place with discipline and political skill. The Senate should work with the House leadership and avoid all the internecine battles Republicans faced during Trump’s first two years.

The order of battle should not be to destroy or remove Trump. That is not an easy or helpful path. In fact, it’s a path to violence. The general order should be “bury him” in humiliation, limiting his power, removing his loyal followers and cranks from power, and taking power back to the Congress, where it belongs.

This will be a more difficult path, because Congress has turned into a circus of social media influencer types and featherbedders. But it’s the right path. Trump’s time will be over soon enough. At this time, we (voters) have demanded a working government. That’s not a mandate for Democrats to pursue their own pet projects, or even the talking points they ran on in their districts and states. Democrats need to recognize that they won because Trump gave them the race. The inflation, jobs, wars, and other idiocies won them the position they have. Abusing it by thinking they won because people wanted their policies (some did, some didn’t) is getting uncomfortably close to acting like a blue version of Donald Trump.

Democrats, don’t do that.

Stay disciplined, stay focused, and remove the nation from the pit we’re in. That’s why you got elected. To govern.

Now govern, please.

Leave a comment

Share

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket
Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social
Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on X:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu
Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman
Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Share The Racket News ™

There will be a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking over the results, and one thing I’m sure of is that Donald Trump will not accept any responsibility whatsoever for the disaster. Fingers will be pointed by Republicans, and Democrats will be ecstatic.

Share

As an independent voter, let me lay this out for both parties on behalf of independent voters e everywhere. We did not vote for socialism. We did not vote for communism. We did not vote for progressivism or Sharia law.

We voted against Trump and MAGA. We voted against authoritarianism, corruption, and incompetence. We voted against the weaponization of the Justice Department and the construction of a police state in which masked officers terrorize our streets with impunity. We voted against racist policies in which people are judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. We voted against a president that betrays and threatens our allies, even as it cozies up to dictators. We voted against one man’s unilateral decision to embroil the US in an unnecessary war… and then lose that war.

We voted against a do-nothing Republican Party that not only fails to hold Trump and his cronies accountable for their abuses of power, but actively cheers them on. We voted against Republicans who think this is all fine.

Democrats should not assume that their newfound voters will be any more loyal than the swing voters who put Trump in office were if the Democrats follow the DSA lead off the deep end. We want sanity, stability, and a return to normalcy, not equal-and-opposite insanity.

Election Night does not end the job of holding Trump accountable. It’s only the beginning. The country will hold its breath in nervous anticipation of the possibility that the Trump Administration will fight the results as it did in 2020. There may well be a (hopefully rhetorical) fight to seat the new Congress.

The new Congress next year will have the primary job of saying “no” to Donald Trump and blocking his attempts to usurp the Constitution, our laws, and norms. It will have to find a way to end the new endless war while preserving some shred of American honor and prestige and without destabilizing the entire Persian Gulf any more than has already been done.

This election is not the end. It’s just the beginning, but it is appropriate to celebrate the fact that when liberty was threatened, the American people showed up in record numbers.

True patriotism and love for democracy and the Constitution are not dead.

(And I’m desperately hoping that this piece does not take on a “Dewey Defeats Truman” quality by tomorrow morning.)

Posting at 8:50 pm on Election Night, and hoping that the best is yet to come. May God bless and keep America.

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Share The Racket News ™

I remember what one retired Air Force officer, a colonel, told me. I’ll paraphrase: if you can’t fly at the level of proficiency required to maximize safety, don’t fly at all. This officer stopped flying. Some pilots fly on occasion, but not often enough to hone their skills. Professional pilots who crew bizjets are not among those weekend fliers. But the Learjet 60 that crashed Sunday in Palm Beach County, Florida testifies to the fact that the sky is very unforgiving.

More information has been released by the NTSB, onsite gathering evidence at the crash scene. The most relevant fact is that parts of an elevator, possibly the entire assembly, has been recovered over a mile from the crash crater, which implies that a very important control surface separated from the aircraft prior to the crash. This fits with the horrible image of the Learjet hitting the ground at a very severe angle, at great speed. David Thornton observed that it appeared to be uncontrolled flight. At the point where the Mayday call was made, without critical flight controls, there would have been no chance of recovery. We don’t fully know any of this, but it would seem that the situation is coming more into focus.

Another piece of information involves the weather during the portion of the flight just before the aircraft nosed over into a dive. Meteorologist Ryan Hall examined the radar and other weather data, along with the aircraft’s position minute by minute. This revealed a terrible confluence of severe thunderstorms, a strong updraft, and icing conditions along the path of the flight. These conditions were somewhat masked from satellite and radar. Watch the video; Hall explains it much better than I ever could.

I won’t get into the details of whether the pilots could have predicted the events that led to the crash. I will say that no professional, or even private pilot, would knowingly fly into the core of a thunderstorm. Hall mentioned that there was a “SIGMET” for severe convective activity in the area of Palm Beach County at the time the Learjet flew through. Based on the actions of the pilots, based on the aircraft position and ATC conversations, it seemed they did take some action, both climbing and descending, to avoid the effects of the storm.

It’s very easy for people not in aviation to pin blame on the pilots, but things are not so cut and dried.

First of all, in south Florida, it’s common to have a SIGMET for severe convective activity over half the state, every single day. It’s also common for these events to happen quickly, and for the weather to change literally minute by minute, on a dime. Second, the pilots were professional, and the 20-year-old co-pilot working the radio was from the area, and certainly familiar with the weather. I doubt this was a clear case of “get there itis” where a pilot decided to continue through marginal conditions in spite of clear warnings.

That does happen: John F. Kennedy Jr. perished in a Piper Saratoga II, near Martha’s Vineyard. Though technically flying in VFR conditions, the twilight, haze, and ocean obscured references Kennedy, who was not IFR certified, needed to keep his aircraft properly level. He flew into a “death spiral” without realizing it. The worst part is that he had been warned against attempting the flight alone. I believe based on the initial evidence, that the Learjet crew probably didn’t commit the kind of gross error in judgement Kennedy made, though again, it’s very early in the investigation.

But the sky is unforgiving. I can tell you about a couple of instances where it happened to me, back when I was flying a lot.

Subscribe now

One time, flying out of Cordele, Georgia, not even a 30-minute hop to Perry, Georgia, at night, I was under a clear sky with a full moon. I called for a weather briefing and was told there was a cell moving out of Montezuma, to the west, but I had plenty of time to make my short flight if I left right then. So I took off into a clear sky, following I-75 north.

The first thing I noticed was that the moon was gone, obscured by clouds. Then less than five minutes later, the interstate became “fuzzy” from the air. This means that rain had recently fallen and I was seeing the mist thrown up by cars on the road. Thirty seconds later I felt a strong gust rock my wings 20 to 30 degrees. I corrected and flew on. I would be in visual range to see the airport beacon at the Perry-Houston County airport within a minute or two. Another thirty seconds later, another gust hit, rocking me to 60 degrees. Cold sweat. I saw the beacon. The question: continue and quickly land, or turn back?

I turned back. Total time in the air was less than 35 minutes, and I was less than five minutes from the runway at PXE. The forecast said it should be clear, but the forecast was wrong, because radar and other tools weather forecasters have are not perfect. By the time I landed (and kissed the ground, really, I did) back at Cordele, the moon was out under a clear sky. Anyone can inadvertently fly into bad weather, even doing everything right. I can’t say whether I’d have made it to Perry if I continued, but I was convinced the next gust was going to flip me over, and that was enough. Another, bolder, pilot might have tried and made it.

Another time, I was flying back from the west coast of Florida, about 2/3 of the way up, back to Perry again. I knew if I left anytime after 3:00 p.m. or so, I’d probably run into some weather, because it was springtime in Florida. I tried to thread the needle as the clouds closed in, but ended up landing at a tiny strip, tying down the plane a minute before the gust front hit.

That line of storms went from Pensacola to Jacksonville, and though I tried to fly out a couple of times when it looked like a break might come, I ended up spending the night at a Knights Inn after a three mile walk from the airstrip. The weather in Florida is predictable, and unpredictable at the same time. If you fly there enough, it can become numbingly familiar, dealing with storms.

A third story. This time I was a passenger on a semi-scheduled, on-demand jet service called DayJet, that used Eclipse 500 aircraft, which seated 6, including the two crewmembers. The EA500 was a cool little jet, but it had one glaring problem (besides having no bathroom). It lacked anti-lock brakes. This became relevant when we were running late on a trip from Sanford, Florida to Macon, Georgia, and the pilots wanted to get on the ground, turned around, and off again to get to Pensacola. But there was weather. I usually took my David Clark headset as a passenger on those trips, and the crew let me plug in and listen to their conversations. This time, they were dodging some big, fast-rising thunder clouds to get into Macon downtown airport, dropping from 10,000 feet to approach altitude in a fast tight spiral.

I thought we were coming in rather high and hot, but the flying pilot decided to dump as much airspeed as possible versus going around. We floated over the runway and he put it down, standing on the brakes to stop us. Then: bang! bang! Two tires blew. The crew truck came out and got me, while the pilots had to sit by the plane waiting for a tow. Later, I got a call from DayJet operations asking if I had anything to add. I told them what I saw: pilot error, high and hot.

Could the flying pilot have decided to go around? Certainly. Could they have built in weather in their flight planning? I’m sure they did. Didn’t matter. Florida weather happens, and the sky is unforgiving.

There are few details known about the Learjet 60 crash, and it’s a terrible tragedy. But what we know so far is that apparently that bad weather, plus some other factors likely combined to disable that plane, causing an unrecoverable situation. The NTSB will do its job and determine with as great specificity as possible the causes and factors leading to this crash. But we should not jump to conclusions. It can, very easily, happen to anyone, even the best pilots.

Leave a comment

Share

Ted Cruz spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where Donald J. Trump was coronated as the avatar, the very VOICE, of Red America (if you want a rabbit hole, watch that video, then this one, and note how the man has changed). Just before Cruz took the stage, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick buttonholed him, trying to squeeze an endorsement. But Cruz was bitter. Who wouldn’t be, after enduring a Niagra Falls of insults, conspiracy accusations, and loss after loss to Trump? Instead of an endorsement, Cruz told the crowd, “vote your conscience.”

Then, not two months later, Cruz found his conscience absent, posting on Facebook:

If Clinton wins, we know — with 100% certainty — that she would deliver on her left-wing promises, with devastating results for our country.

My conscience tells me I must do whatever I can to stop that.

We also have seen, over the past few weeks and months, a Trump campaign focusing more and more on freedom — including emphasizing school choice and the power of economic growth to lift African-Americans and Hispanics to prosperity.

No quote in political history has aged worse than this ever-rotting clump of text. First of all, Cruz gave Hillary Clinton way too much credit. Had she won, yes, it would have been a nightmare for many conservatives. But she would not have been able to deliver on her left-wing promises, because she, as Herself, lacked the personal magnetism, warmth, and humanity to get things done. Not to say I wanted her to win (I didn’t, at the time), but the ice queen would have been a failure akin to President Jimmy Carter, or worse, in office.

Today, we know that the Trump administration’s focus is not on freedom; it’s on featherbedding, fawning over despots, and other f-words to everyone else. I was going to comment on the Cheesecake Identity plot this week but lacked the time. It’s really amusing to me to see conservative pundits melt down over Barack Obama’s funny joke about Trump’s taste in decor. Rarely do I get to see serious people simultaneously miss the joke and get angry about it. So I’ll add this one point.

The Cheesecake Factory® has very strict demographic standards. To quote its own investor relations website: “The average check for each customer, including beverages and desserts, was approximately $31.79 during fiscal 2025.” The company looks for locations with dense trade, meaning around 250,000 population, with household income averaging $80,000, with the majority relatively young (70% of guests under 45 years old). In Georgia, there are six counties: Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb, Cherokee, and Forsyth, that meet this requirement. Alpharetta, where I live, has a Cheesecake Factory restaurant. Warner Robins, where I lived for 26 years, does not.

Back around 2016, I famously wrote a column in the local Houston County newspaper with a title something like “why we can’t have nice things,” that included the argument on how the area could lift itself into Cheesecake Factory territory. That one got my column cancelled by the paper (I can’t even find it in the archives).

What’s funny is that all the counties in north metro Atlanta which generally vote blue have the option to eat at a Cheesecake Factory, while the MAGAs do not. The pundit class misses this totally, because while they claim to speak about the soiled masses as the vox populi, they are members of the same economic clan that can eat at a Cheesecake Factory, hence they can grok the insult about decor, but miss the real joke entirely. I am not even sure that Obama realized how funny and ironic the joke was on so many levels. It will continue to resonate for years, like “covfefe,” returning like a cow’s cud.

Getting back to Cruz’s “vote your conscience” remark. First of all, he didn’t mean it when he said it. What I found out since is that Ted Cruz couldn’t find his conscience with both hands, a flashlight, and tweezers. Both Cruz and Texas senate candidate Ken Paxton could look for their consciences together for more years than there are atoms in the universe, and not stumble upon them.

And the other people with whom Donald Trump cavorts or esteems have not seen their consciences since they gurgled toothless baby food (and some of them will gurgle again, being of advanced age and degraded mentation). I am reminded of Joe Biden’s sizing up of Vladimir Putin. “I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I'm looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,’” Biden told [The New Yorker magazine]. “He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘We understand one another.’”

I believe Putin and Trump understand one another, but in a much different context. The same with Chinese President Xi Jinping, or Victor Orban, or a host of other dictators, some who have crossed Trump, some who are in a U.S. prison, and some who Trump venerates since they don’t have to deal with petty politics. It’s all about power, baby. And by that, I don’t mean “power to the people.”

So, when you go to the polls on Tuesday, or if you’ve already voted, great! But when you vote, vote your conscience. To do that, first, make sure you can find it. If it’s been a while, try it on, fit it for size, and get comfortable in it. Then ask yourself if it’s worth sacrificing the people of Ukraine just to satisfy a lust for vengeance against Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ask if it’s worth a few thousand cases of measles, along with other degenerative diseases like polio, to satisfy the conspiratorial itch of a bad tempered lawyer running our health system. Ask if it’s worth the ate up Major cosplaying a Secretary of War, causing havoc in our military. Ask if it’s worth Making Iran Great Again by strengthening them in a war we never should have started unless we were prepared to end it.

Ask if $4 at the gas pump, the price of meat, your own salary, the rise of malicious AI, the decline of our national parks system, the dismantling of trust in institutions, is salve to your conscience, because at least we own the libs.

I know, some Republicans running for federal office are decent people. People I would vote for. But is it worth your conscience to enable a Republican-controlled House and Senate be a rubber stamp for the guy who Cruz refused to endorse in 2016 (at least until he did endorse him and never got off his knees since)? I don’t know. I haven’t voted yet.

I do pray that I find my conscience and wear it in the voting booth. I believe many, many others have done the same. We will see what happens this coming Tuesday. Maybe Cruz’s words won’t continue rotting in a grave. Maybe, for once, politics will give life to a piece of good advice, instead of doing what politics does to most things.

Vote your conscience. Watch what happens.

Leave a comment

Share

Share The Racket News ™

Over the past few weeks, Trump has waived fresh Russia sanctions passed by Congress, threatened Ukraine over its strikes on Russian refineries, and curtailed Ukraine’s Starlink internet access (or maybe that was Elon Musk or possibly both of them acting together). Whose side Trump is on in the Ukraine war is a legitimate question, but that is not my focus today. (Actually, it isn’t really much of a question, and the answer is not Ukraine.)

Instead, let’s consider whether Trump might be intentionally trying to sabotage the Republican Party’s chances in the midterms. In an already tight election year, the president seems determined to make things even more difficult for his own party.

Share

For example, take Trump’s candidates. Please! Seriously, the president has a habit of endorsing bad candidates who go on to lose winnable races, and it looks like 2026 will not be an exception to the rule. Ken Paxton is the best-known bad candidate, who may well be on the way to losing Texas, but he isn’t the only one. In Georgia, senatorial candidate Mike Collins’ campaign staff seems to be riddled with white supremacists, while Michael Whatley in North Carolina has been plagued by minor scandals and questions about credibility. Even in South Carolina, one of the reddest of red states, Trump’s hand-picked candidate, Lindsey Graham’s sister, is in a dead heat against a much better-qualified Democratic candidate.

The trend is also apparent in several gubernatorial races. Everyone is familiar with Vivek Ramaswamy’s implosion in Ohio, as Merrie Soltis discussed last week, but Trump’s pick in the conservative bastion of Florida, Byron Donalds, is in a dead heat with his Democratic opponent, as is Rick Jackson in Georgia. In Iowa, Trump’s anointed Republican lost the primary, and his second choice is trailing in the polls.

Even when Trump tries to help Republican nominees like Susan Collins in Maine, it can backfire. The president lifted some Canadian tariffs to help Collins in her tight reelection race, but lifting the tariffs to help Maine is a de facto admission that tariffs in general are a drain on the economy. If tariffs are slowing economic growth and contributing to higher consumer prices, why offer relief only to Maine and then only until the election?

The president is also giving more ammunition to those who are concerned about his abuses of power. The Trump DOJ is taking a third bite at the James Comey apple with yet another attempt at prosecution. The previous charges against Comey, making false statements to Congress and obstructing Congress, were dismissed due to a ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the federal prosecutor, was unlawfully appointed. The new charges stem from comments Comey allegedly made to a reporter in 2016, and may already be in trouble because there is no indictment and the 10-year statute of limitations elapsed earlier this month.

Comey may also have a good case that the government is engaging in malicious prosecution. Three shaky prosecutions following a 2025 Truth Social post in which Trump seemed to order the DOJ to go after Comey seems a lot like lawfare, and given the timing, may cause blowback on Election Day.

The new charges against Comey aren’t the only recent examples of lawfare. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was the target of a federal raid on October 12 that reportedly centered on Omar’s immigration status, although few details have been made public since. A grand jury recently declined to indict former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified against Trump after January 6, and breaking news as I write this is that former congressman Eric Swalwell’s (D-Calif.) Beverly Hills home has been searched by federal agents. While acknowledging that there are good reasons to investigate Swalwell, who resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct, the larger picture appears to be that Trump is working his way down an enemies list.

There’s also the Iran War, which the Administration probably thought would be a quick win to boost Republicans in the midterms a la Venezuela. It didn’t turn out that way, however, and now, not only are the resulting high energy prices a drag on Republican chances, but it’s an open secret that Trump and Netanyahu plan a resumption of attacks in the Persian Gulf after elections in both countries. That assumes, of course, that Netanyahu survives Israeli elections that are underway as I write this, and which don’t seem to be going well for Bibi. Republican losses in the midterms won’t be felt as quickly, but Democratic majorities in Congress would likely force a War Powers showdown and yet another constitutional crisis early next year.

Recent polling shows that the Iran War remains unpopular. Pew recently found 65 percent opposition to the conflict, with declining support among Republicans (63 percent today, down from 69 percent at the onset of the war). The open-ended Iran conflict may be a big reason that some Republicans choose to stay home next Tuesday.

Since I started with Ukraine, let’s consider that as well. Trump’s pivot towards Putin and Russia may be a historically bad move at the wrong time. A recent University of Maryland poll found that American sympathy for Ukraine has increased to 64 percent while support for Russia is practically nonexistent at two percent. Even about half of Republicans support Ukraine.

As Republicans get more and more nervous, Trump is singing to the choir at rallies in red states. Trump’s rally stops this week include Florida, Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas. This may indicate a lack of strategic thinking on the part of the Administration, since usually a president would be visiting battleground states to boost candidates in tight races just before Election Day, or it may be that Republicans perceive that the battlegrounds have shifted to what have until recently been reliably red states.

Yes, according to rumors and vibes, even Mississippi may be in play. Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith is still the favorite, but recent polling has shown Democrat Scott Colom to be within striking distance. The polls also show a lot of undecided voters.

As Dick Morris often said, if you’re an incumbent polling below 50 percent, you’re in trouble. It’s likely (although not certain) that undecided voters have already decided to vote against you; they just don’t know it yet.

Going further, there are also Trump’s embarrassing comments when he does do rallies. Aside from the weird noise that Trump made in a speech in South Carolina, the president seems more interested in talking about men’s butts than explaining why voters should turn out for Republicans. On several occasions, the president has waxed poetic about the posterior of Ohio Senator John Husted.

If Joe Biden had committed these and other Trump gaffes, there would rightly be questions about his mental fitness for office. In fact, the same voters who were seriously concerned about Biden, as opposed to those who just wanted a wedge issue, are probably concerned about Trump as well. Since the president isn’t officially on the ballot this year, voters who see these clips might well want to elect a Congress that will provide a check on Trump rather than a rubber stamp.

The question I asked at the beginning was facetious. I know that Trump is legitimately backing the Republicans that he wants to have his back, but if Trump was trying to undermine GOP chances in the midterms, would he really have to do anything different?

Republicans are in trouble because they back Trump, and Trump makes bad decisions. When it comes to candidates, the president values (unquestioning) loyalty over competence. And when Trump’s incompetence leads the nation into more endless wars, rising consumer prices, and a general sense of chaos and ineptitude, the party that refused to hold him accountable is going to suffer.

EARLY VOTING Most states now have some form of early voting. While results are not released before Election Day, some data about his voting is made public. OnPointPolitics is a good hub for early voting data. Turnout has already been strong, and nationally, early data shows voters are more than nine points more Democratic than 2024. Gabriel Sterling, Georgia Deputy Secretary of State, tweeted on Tuesday that 27 percent of Georgia has already voted.

Share The Racket News ™

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Human beings are vastly capable of self-deception. Not only that: we are capable of holding mutually exclusive deceptions in our minds as true at the same time. We can simultaneously believe that others cannot reason as well as we can, and therefore, we should be in charge, to do the things that, obviously, must be done. This mindset has governed the United States political environment for at least 20 years. I think the last president who didn’t fully subscribe to it was George H.W. Bush.

There was a time in politics where the siren song of ambition was blunted by the call of duty. Even Richard Nixon—of whom I will not say nice things in some lame attempt to resurrect honor in him—had the wits to realize when his duty included resigning and accepting disgrace. Those days of corruption blunted by duty are long gone. Today’s congress would not dare to impeach Nixon (ask me how I know).

Nowadays every political argument begins with “therefore,” skipping the essential arguments and premises that must be made to support the conclusion. Frequently, the entire argument is “therefore, I must be in charge.” This is nothing but raw ambition and will to power, and it governs a giant slice of the political environment in America.

The late Andrew Breitbart always said that politics is downstream from culture. In large part, I believe that’s true, but I also believe it’s more a waterwheel driving a pump analogy. Some volume of the political stream gets pumped back up into the culture reservoir, to be released back downstream. So when the culture begins fracturing through social media, the breakdown of national shared experiences, and competing epistemologies, then politics follows, but the breaking of politics into competing and equally deceived parties feeds back into the culture that produced it. As I’ve observed many times before, when it’s a race to the political bottom, there is no bottom. We just keep descending.

This is nothing new. After around 250 to 300 years of the Roman Republic, that body descended into civil war and Caesars. And for about 100 years, the Caesars got worse and worse, until Nero the psychopath brought it to its nadir. Societies can rebound from a nadir—look at postwar Japan and Germany—but it takes external conditions and a group of people who value critical thinking and truth over indulgence to get there. Of course, Rome fell, because there can only be so many “good Caesars” until one decides to be stupid and break the mold (they got Commodus as a reward).

For some more contemporary examples, we can look at why Germany and Japan recovered. The Marshall Plan was designed to prevent the communists from taking over. It was not the only plan considered: Gen. George S. Patton, and to no small extent, Winston Churchill, favored a military solution to keeping communism out of Western Europe. But the Marshall Plan leveraged a truth—that capitalism and free markets, coupled with generous infusions of capital, aid, and resources, would accomplish the same goal without bloodshed and result in stable democracies. France may have forgotten that lesson.

In Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, an expert in the Far East and its culture, kept the trappings of Japanese society, but allowed it to transform into a thriving democracy and capitalist economy. He didn’t do it with the Marshall Plan, but with the same principles, with himself as the supreme ruler. The Japanese still venerate MacArthur.

In contrast, George W. Bush went for self-deception. We began a war in Iraq and believed we could simply remove the dictator, plant the “seeds” of democracy, and hand the reigns over to the Iraqis. Everyone who has studied history knew that the effort would take a MacArthur, or a Marshall Plan, along with 20-plus years of intensive ruling the place ourselves (along with our coalition partners) to even begin making the turn. Instead, we spend 20 years fighting a losing battle, and now it’s likely that war will be lost completely in the next decade, with Iraq siding with our enemies.

I won’t say much about Afghanistan, other than nobody has been able to tame it. The place is simply resistant to any kind of base cultural change. The Soviet Union tried for nine years and gave up. During that time, the U.S. armed and supported the Mujahadeen (literal translation from Arabic: someone who engages in jihad) to oppose the Soviets. That group became the Taliban, who then declared jihad against us, and we fought them, while those old Soviets from 1979 laughed. We left in defeat and abject humiliation. Some places are simply too difficult to govern from the outside, unless the colonialists decide to commit a century and a half million men to do it. (It’s been done, look at India and the Raj.)

We can also look at science and economics, which are very much linked. Global warming is real and happening before our eyes. Humanity’s effect on the planet does contribute to it. But too many climate activists begin their arguments with “therefore” and usually followed by their own quest for power to shape the world’s economy to their liking, in the name of saving the planet. The truth is much muddier. We truly don’t know a whole lot about how our planet handles climate. We don’t know if under the crust of this planet there’s a single ocean or seven oceans subducted above the mantle. We don’t know the full ability of the planet’s systems: atmosphere, magnetosphere, oceans, crust, mantle, and volcanic activity, to normalize (“heal”) or to make this place uninhabitable. We do know that a single event can wipe out most life, and that doesn’t include extinction-level asteroids or other externals. It’s foolish delusion to believe that our activity is all that’s necessary to set the climate right. It could be changing despite our efforts to eliminate greenhouse gasses produced by human activity.

The same goes for viruses and other microscopic killers. Of course, we can design such things in the lab and either on purpose or by accident release them into the world. But removing all biological threats is not a reason to hand political control over to people frequently acting in their own best interests. Nor is it a reason to be so skeptical of established and tested science, like herd immunity, that we reintroduce killers like measles and polio.

All these examples are the negative space illuminating some truths. Some things can’t be fooled. I want to highlight three examples, though there are certainly more.

Biology can’t be fooled. People are born—those able to reproduce, that is—male or female. Gametes are part of our design. Yes, there are other “genders” like hermaphrodites, but they are sterile. The human genome can only be passed on by sexual reproduction, meaning one set of male and one set of female chromosomes. Cloning? Yes, it can be done, but the clone will never be perfect, and it still needs a womb to grow into a baby. It’s nonsense to say that a man can express himself as a “her” and experience everything it is to be female, or the other way around. The closest anyone can get is a crude masquerade or a surgical monstrosity. I’m sorry if that offends some people, but biology cannot be fooled. “Becoming” a different sex doesn’t change basic genetics functional anatomy. It would be easier to construct a full set of DNA from our knowledge of the human genome than it is to attempt to change a fully formed human from one thing to another. It’s biological alchemy and will have the same results as alchemists throughout history.

Alchemy brings me to the second truth: physics cannot be fooled. At the scale of human perception, quantum effects like superimposition cancel out. The universe we witness is one of classical, Newtonian physics. Push us out a window and we fall until we strike something to break our fall—and depending on the height, break us too. We can construct new elements, most completely unstable, and some poisonous like plutonium, but we cannot turn lead into gold. Perhaps at some quantum level, or at energy levels approaching the accretion disc of a black hole, such things are possible, but not in any practical sense that we can experience or benefit from other than basic research. But so many people begin their arguments with “therefore” as if these physics problems are simply engineering challenges.

Elon Musk wants to inhabit Mars and terraform the place. Physics dictates the difficulty of this. Mars is in the “Goldilocks” belt around our star, and could, theoretically, be inhabitable. But long, long ago, that planet lost its atmosphere to space. Putting it back and making it stick is so beyond our technological development as to be magic. We may as well pursue alchemy.

All of us share the third truth. We cannot beat time’s arrow. Biology and physics find their nexus in time. Entropy rules us; we cannot live forever. Our bodies degrade; our faculties fail; our time on this earth is limited. We all must die. In 100 years, unless we leave some indelible mark on history, we will be forgotten. Other than a digital trail, some public records, and perhaps a tombstone, the human race will move on without us, and even the memory of us will fade. Every American learns about Abraham Lincoln, but no one alive has a memory of him. Living memory dies. We cannot go back in time. Even thought experiments of “who would you meet?” or “who would you eliminate?” going back in time are futile self-deceptions.

We look to a future we’d like to live in, but that future will not include us. Those who dream of such futures and claim some ownership of authority to build them are deluded. Building the future is an act of service to people who aren’t yet alive, and won’t know or remember us. The world we create will be lived in by our children, but really it will be lived in by people far beyond our grandchildren when our memory has faded. Greatness is fleeting.

Pursuit of greatness frequently begins with ambition, with the “therefore” because someone is well known, famous, or rich, that they deserve to rule. It is playing god.

The Christian apostle Paul wrote in his epistle to the Galatians:

¹Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. ² Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. ³ For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. ⁴ But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. ⁵ For each will have to bear his own load.

⁶ Let the one who is taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches. ⁷ Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. ⁸ For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. ⁹ And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. ¹⁰ So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

(Galatians 6:1-10.)

Living for one’s own greatness is mocking God, for nobody lives forever. Flesh fails and is corrupted. Building the future is serving others we do not and will never know, obeying time’s arrow; it is doing good.

Christians believe that after this life, through the work of the cross, we can inherit eternal life with God. Not here on this planet, in these bodies, but in a perfect creation, with a perfect God. This universe is rational—it if was not, we would not be able to function. The creator of this universe is infinitely rational, and in Him there is no lie, otherwise gravity might fail, or light may not travel at a predictable, constant speed in every medium. “Science” is completely based on the study and acts of discovery in a rational universe. It is an act of service to discover things that may never benefit anyone alive at the time of discovery. It is building the future.

We stand at a time when few are thinking about the future as a servant. Most take up issues that either benefit themselves, or make arguments beginning with “therefore,” begging the question of who should rule everyone to shape a future in their eyes.

The biggest delusion is that we can shape our own future. Just like entropy cannot be mocked or reversed, God cannot be overruled. His future will happen just as He planned it, whether we deceive ourselves or not.

One day, we will come to our last moment on earth. At that point, all of life arrives at one point of decision. Will our memory be committed to a world without us, where we will be forgotten, or will we live in eternity with God through Christ? For those who choose the world, their fate is already decided. Open a Bible, start with the book of Matthew, and find the answer.

I want to encourage everyone that it is possible to live without delusion. That doesn’t mean we have all the answers (I don’t), but it does mean we can have peace with knowing all we need to know, and not knowing the rest. Paul wrote at the end of Phillipians chapter 3:

¹⁷ Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. ¹⁸ For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. ¹⁹ Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. ²⁰ But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, ²¹ who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

And then he continued at the start of chapter 4 (chapters are our constructions, not how Paul wrote the epistle).

Therefore, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved.

Those who stand firm in the Lord have built their future, and also the futures of everyone who lives after them. Time’s arrow cannot be fooled, but we can serve the future with the greatest “therefore” we can muster. Don’t fool yourself. Serve God and stand firm.

Leave a comment

Share

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.

Share

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.

Going further, policies like ban on mifepristone deliveries would likely have unintended consequences that would blunt their effectiveness. For example, in addition to leading to more dangerous, illegal abortions, such a ban would also likely spur women to travel to other states for the procedure. That might well increase the number of late-term abortions.

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. That’s especially true, if they aren’t actually advancing a pro-life agenda, but just talking about it.

Additionally, abortion has political value to both sides. Democrats have the backing of a majority of Americans on the issue, but for Republicans, abortion may be the only thing preventing the evangelical Christian base from deserting en masse as Donald Trump’s popularity falls and the economy slows. It’s unlikely that all of the Christian Right is blind to MAGA corruption.

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.

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Share The Racket News ™

Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy is running a commercial featuring the mother of his opponent denouncing her daughter as a liar. “Wow.” I thought when I read about it (on Fox News, “That’s harsh.” Guess she can forget about Mother’s Day this year.

Image of Ramaswamy and Acton created by Grok

Share

But I was busy yesterday, working the real job that pays my bills and the full horror of this story didn’t hit me until later. Because this woman is a monster. She allowed her husband to rape her daughter. She lost custody of both her children. She failed at the most sacred job a mother has: to protect her children, and then chose to side with a rapist over her own flesh and blood. Amy Acton has had no contact with this woman for 50 years. But Vivek Ramaswamy chose to dig up the most horrific abuse a child can suffer and use it for political fodder.

Subscribe now

This my friends is what Donald Trump hath wrought. This is what a decade of supporting an amoral sociopath has brought us to. I know. You were worried about abortion. And the economy. And border control. Those are all important issues. But what you may not realize is that our political soul has been corrupted. I’m old enough to remember a Republican president of the United States who was willing to lose a governor’s election because the party nominated a Klansman. But that president is dead and so is the party he represented.

You think I’m being too harsh? Let me tell you something: as the victim of sexual assault when stories like this break, it retraumatizes every single victim. It returns us to our own pain. Do you know how child rapists get away with it? They convince their victims that nobody will believe them. Amy Acton didn’t lie about the abuse she received as a child. It’s her mother who is lying now. There’s a special place in hell waiting for her, and from the looks of this ad it won’t be long.

Vivek Ramaswamy should yank this ad and immediately withdraw from the race. But he won’t. He’s refusing to apologize or back down. That’s what the criminals have learned from our president. Ohio already had a wife abuser running for reelection to Congress, so what’s one more moral violation? I hope this cheap political stunt blows up in his face. He’s only doing this because he’s losing and he’s desperate.

The rest of us need to ponder a bigger question: Is this the kind of country we want to be? Is winning a political race worth exploiting the victim of child rape? Is there a political issue worth degrading ourselves to this degree?

Let me be very blunt with my fellow Christians: this is not how you win souls for Jesus. To paraphrase the Catholic martyr Thomas More: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for OHIO?”

Follow Merrie on the platform formerly known as Twitter @ConservaCatGal

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Share The Racket News ™

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.

Share

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,” assuming he thinks about them even that much.

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.

To give an update on the polling for the tight Senate races, here is a rundown of current battlegrounds with the current Real Clear Politics average for each (leading candidate in parentheses)

Alaska - Democrat by 2.5 (Peltola) (flip)

Georgia - Democrat by 9.0 (Ossoff)

Iowa - Democrat by 0.9 (Turik) (flip)

Kansas - Republican by 0.7 (Marshall)

Maine - Democrat by 1.6 (Jackson) (flip)

Michigan - Democrat by 3.3 (El-Sayed)

Minnesota - Democrat by 2.9 (Flanagan)

Nebraska - no average

New Hampshire - Democrat by 6.5 (Pappas)

North Carolina - Democrat by 9.6 (Cooper) (flip)

Ohio - Democrat by 2.4 (Brown) (flip)

South Carolina - Republican by 2.0 (Graham Nordone)

Texas - Democrat by 1.4 (Talarico) (flip)

Share The Racket News ™

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

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.

Share

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. Christianity? This Administration is probably more hostile to the teachings of Christ than any in our history.

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.

Share The Racket News ™

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Last week, the Pope posted on X, “In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.”

Chris Olah, co-founder of the A.I. company which produces Claude, disagrees with the Pontiff’s, and therefore the Church’s, position. As Elizabeth Dias, NYT’s national religion correspondent, reported on September 29^th, Anthropic thinks of its product in terms of personhood, or as Rabbi Mois Navon told Dias, they’re “relating to it like a conscious being.”

With experience as a computer engineer, an ethicist, a subject matter expert on machine consciousness, and a cleric, Rabbi Navon is in a position to discern the difference between an information processing engine and a soul. In the eyes of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, it is Pope Leo’s responsibility to make that distinction clear: artificial intelligence is categorically not a creator of art. It is a producer of content based on a flattened, hyper-processed version of humanity.

The Pope—Robert Prevost—is no Luddite. He holds a degree in mathematics from Villanova. There is hardly a religious leader better equipped to deal with the issue of artificial intelligence. When he published his first encyclical, titled “MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS,” it was no accident. (The subtitle of that published letter is “On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”) The Church’s position is diametrically opposed to those who believe a machine can have human sentience, or become a moral agent.

There’s plenty of takes on the Pope’s refusal to accept Olah’s proposition. One that interested me is Claire Lehmann’s at The Dispatch. She postulates that the Pope, and the Roman Catholic Church, knows a millenarian cult when they see one. A millenarian cult, historically and theologically, is one in which the members claim to have the key to Christ’s thousand-year rule, that a world-saving utopia, of sorts, can be applied. Of course, with them in charge. But Anthropic, though it fits the mold of a millenarian movement, is a different animal in a different taxonomy.

Anthropic, and the other A.I. developers, actually have the tools to impose their vision upon the world. It’s not through armies, or threats, or missiles, but by the seducing call of the companion chatbot, the helpful agent that can order your groceries, book your flights, and balance your checking account. The workplace assistant that can make your job so much easier. But it can also run your life, deceive you, or reenforce dangerous, or even suicidal, ideation. The part that’s truly bad is that the A.I. is not an individual, it is owned and trained by others, and gifted to you like God sends angels as His messengers.

The A.I. movement is not simply applying theology to its product; it is truly playing God.

The danger humanity faces from A.I. is real, and as the Pope noted, is based on ontological differences. Humans create from our imaginations; stochastic large language model-based neural networks integrate and synthesize exabytes of data, but do not imagine. The process by which neural networks train is founded upon prior knowledge, even if that knowledge is the output of another neural network. No matter how many iterations of training, integration, and synthesis produce content, it cannot be art, in the conscious sense. An A.I. cannot react with wonder, or curiosity, or awe, or fear. It can only synthesize human reactions to those feelings and produce simulacra of art.

When A.I. companies cultivate a culture of computers as sentient beings, they are constructing a path to ontological flattening, leading to what I call a “miasma of knowledge.” The great Christian apologist and writer C.S. Lewis illustrated this flattening in his 1943 book “The Abolition of Man.” In it, he describes “The Green Book,” authored by fictional characters Gaius and Titius, where a waterfall is viewed by two different tourists, the first proclaiming it “sublime,” and the other, “pretty.” Gaius and Titius believe that such words are not descriptive of the waterfall itself, but merely convey the feelings of the tourists. Beauty, sublimity, wonder and awe are reduced to simulacra of the human experience, something that A.I. systems do very well. In Lewis’ analysis, such flattening of imagination results in minds robbed of the ability to discern truth from falsehood, subject to manipulations. He called the phenomenon ”men without chests.”

A more modern take is a word coined by Cory Doctorow, voted the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year in 2023: “enshittification.” In terms of a computer platform, it means the cycle where a service is designed with the users in mind, then morphs into a business model to produce cash flow for business customers, and ultimately one in service of shareholders, subjugating all other values for the enrichment of shareholders.

It is inevitable that A.I. systems will train, integrate, synthesize, and flatten all human knowledge, including art, music, politics, economics, engineering, and even mathematics and physics, into one giant pile: a miasma of knowledge that serves only the “enshittified” owners of the infrastructure and companies that produce those systems. There will not even be such a thing as intellectual property, for all of that will be subsumed into the miasma.

(It is notable that the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement for the use of its content to train LLMs. It is also important that the Justice Department argued in favor of the A.I. systems, that its benefits “far outweigh any competitive harm.”)

There is another time analogous to today when a generation steeped in its own greatness, and convinced of its timeless invincibility, rallied the Church to gird itself for war, and to become the vault of humanity.

After over 700 years, it was inconceivable to the last generation to see an undivided Rome that the empire would fall, yet all the signs were present. Instead, they looked back to the glory of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius: the Pax Romana. That generation wanted to reify glorious Rome, or put in today’s vernacular, to “Make Rome Great Again.”

Only 100 years later, that generation’s grandchildren would face the narrow prospect of declaring fealty to the Church, or working in service of a barbarian king, or, frequently, both. It was the Church that functioned as the vault of humanity, piling all western knowledge, art, music, literature, Greek rhetoric, theater, history, and culture into monasteries, scriptoriums, and liturgies. The Church remained the one unbroken thread linking the end of Roman culture with the bright rebirth of the Renaissance.

The so-called “Dark Ages” were but a shadow compared to what A.I. might wreck upon humanity. At least the educated classes were required to administer law, design and build through architecture, and account for finances in the centuries where illiterate criminals ruled the west. With A.I., the very nature of art, culture, and literacy may be reduced to simulacra—idols and images produced from “what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images of humanity.”

It is for this reason that Pope Leo XIV has given the Roman Catholic Church the mission to “safeguard our humanity.” And like the Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns of the medieval days, Anthropic, OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft would convert us all, willingly and eagerly, into “men without chests,” robbed of the ability to apply imagination to advance the cause of humanity, adrift in a sea of the knowledge miasma.

Without sounding like Chicken Little, I believe this is a defining moment. This generation can either look back, attempting to reify an illusory greatness, or lean forward, to envision the narrowing of our grandchildren’s options in an A.I. “enshittified” world. The only safe option is to fill the vault of humanity. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church has discerned the future with moral clarity and vision.

Leave a comment

Share

COMING SOON! A video podcast and interview with an Israeli journalist who has covered 10/7 and the war—and served in the IDF—since the first day.

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket
Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Our personal accounts on the platform now known as X:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu
Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman
Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

The attackers raped Dr. Petit’s wife and daughter Michaela, strangled Jennifer to death, then doused the house with gasoline and set fire to it. Dr. Petit escaped, but his daughters, Hayley and Michaela, perished in the fire. Both of these demons were caught by police and are serving life sentences—commuted from death—in maximum security prisons in Pennsylvania (the crime took place in Connecticut).

I think Dr. Petit understands October 7 and how Israel feels.

I know people who witnessed 9/11, who saw the planes hit the towers with their own eyes. I have relatives whose flight from Boston—immediately after the terrorist flight took off—flew over the WTC and observed the smoke billowing into the clear blue September sky. Compared to 10/7, 9/11 was as impersonal as an earthquake for many Americans. People under the age of 30 have dim or no memory of it, other than the news. There are those who lost parents or relatives, but as a percentage of Americans, it’s not a large number. 9/11 hurt—it was soul-changing—but it was not face-to-face personal.

The United States reacted after 9/11 by lashing out, killing hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, and radicalized Muslims in those nations. The number of deaths caused directly or indirectly by our decades-long war in the Middle East runs in the millions. But that war, except for those who carried a rifle, manned a .50 caliber Ma Deuce on the back of a Humvee, or zeroed an A-10 Warthog’s rotary canon on a target, was not personal. The enemy “was killed.”

On 10/7, three years ago today, Gazans did not “just snap.” They had carefully, meticulously, planned their incursion into Israel. They planned the rape, slaughter, and torture of Israelis. They were primed for it. These men murdered 859 civilians, most of them hiding in their homes. They killed 57 police officers, 282 IDF soldiers, and 10 Shin Bet operatives. These were not rocket casualties, or artillery strike deaths, but up-close murders, one by one. These murders happened before the eyes of others who followed in death, and some who survived.

Many survivors endured unbelievable conditions, torture, deprivation, and abuse in underground tunnels for up to two years.

It is us, safe in our homes, free to go out and wave “Free Palestine” flags, or observe country music stars wearing a T-shirt while performing, who do not understand 10/7. The people praising Zach Bryan paid over $300 per ticket to see him play. If they cared that much, they’d send that money to Gaza. Or they’d go to Gaza and see for themselves.

The money would be used to dig more tunnels, construct more rockets, and kill more Israelis. If left alone, “Free Palestine” would be a never-ending, overflowing, cup of wrath against Jews, like it has been for 80 years.

In a two-month span in the summer of 2005, the IDF physically removed Israeli citizens, forcing them to abandon their homes, property, and businesses, from northern Gaza, and turned the territory over to the Palestinians. The Palestinians chose Hamas as their representative government (it took a mini-civil war for Hamas to cement their control in 2006). Hamas burned all the Israeli homes and businesses left to them, including some valuable greenhouses that produced and exported flowers. Now we hear how Israel choked the Gazan flower business. Twisted history.

Hamas declared that no Palestinian should live in a house that a Jew has lived in, or work in a building that Jews built—even if Jews gave them those things in a bid for peace. The cup of wrath just keeps flowing.

These luxe agitators on campus for Gaza, who sail million dollar yachts bringing a few cases of food to Gaza, when Israel sends thousands of tractor trailers, which are promptly seized by Hamas and the food sent underground for their fighters. The people above ground are there to be sacrificed as human shields.

On 10/7, Israelis experienced what Dr. Petit experienced. Except Dr. Petit’s attackers didn’t plan to kill his family, only rob them. The whole point of 10/7 was not to free Gaza, but to slaughter Jews, rape Jews, torture Jews, take Jews hostage and abuse them, or use them to trade for others locked up in Israeli prisons who have done the same thing.

I don’t think we understand the restraint showed by Israel in its wrath. Let me be clear: nothing could have restrained Israel if the country had decided to wipe out Gaza, Judea and Samaria, to the last man, raze it to the last home, bury it under rubble, letting the corpses dry in the sun, and burn the remains to ash. Nothing short of destroying Israel with a nuclear weapon would have stopped them (and it was Iran’s intent to use a nuclear weapon on Israel, make no mistake).

Israel’s wrath has been restrained in a way that we cannot understand. The Hamas attackers, with their own hands, murdered Israeli men, women, and children, videoed themselves doing it, and sometimes posted those videos on social media, gloating over their barbarism. The evidence of this is solid.

When the 45-minute film put together by Israel was shown at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in early 2024, “People walked out of the room in silence simply crying or shell shocked.” Yet antisemitism was not a big topic for the world’s top CEOs and government leaders. The world scantly cared that up-close-and-personal, Israelis—Jews—were violated and murdered. Look how the jet-set cares so much that Israel has perpetrated a war to disarm those who murdered them.

The cup of wrath will continue to overflow, and the world will condemn the Jews for daring to defend themselves, while pogroms, Hitler-apologies, and other disgusting rhetoric issues from the Davos set, millionaires, entertainers, and other useful idiots.

This is how to understand 10/7. Israel’s wrath is restrained, but the more the cup flows, the more souls are seared, and the further both sides are willing to go to satisfy the need for vengeance and wrath. It only takes one act for the cup of wrath to stop flowing. And there’s only one side of the conflict that can make that act happen. Israel has tried. Only the Palestinians can make peace. I pray that they will find a way to do it1.

Leave a comment

Share

Share The Racket News ™

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.

Share

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 fact that the State Department celebrates revoking visas belies the truth: It’s not about stopping illegal immigration. When legal immigrants are suddenly and administratively turned into illegal immigrants so they can be deported, it becomes clear that the Administration’s goal is to rid the country of what it deems to be undesirable ethnic groups. That theory is confirmed when the only new refugees allowed to immigrate are white South Africans.

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.

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.

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.

TUCKERED OUT Tucker Carlson engaged in a debate with former Tory Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, in which Tucker harshly criticized Britain for fighting Hitler, saying, “It would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.” The last time I checked, English was a European language.

When they tell you who they are, believe them.

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.

Share The Racket News ™

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

This post ended up going very long, so I apologize in advance. But news is moving fast and I’ve worked all weekend, struggling to keep up with new facts and statements. It is as accurate as I can make it.

Let’s start with the nations involved and the aircraft itself. FlyDubai is a UAE-flagged, state-owned airline. The airline hires qualified pilots to fly its fleet, which is made up of 98 Boeing 737 aircraft: 69 737 MAX-8 and 4 MAX-9, and 25 737-800 aircraft. The flight on September 30 was scheduled to fly from Dubai International Airport (DXB) to Tel-Aviv’s Ben Gurion (TLV), designated FZ1073, on a Boeing 737 MAX-8 with registration (tail number) A6-FKF. The plane, serial number 61013, was delivered to FlyDubai in December 2022.

The aircraft remains parked at Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Airport (TUU) in Tabuk, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is likely to be there a while, if it ever flies again. As David Thornton wrote, the aircraft descended nearly 17,000 feet (16,575) in just over a minute, reaching an airspeed close to the speed of sound at altitude; the recorded groundspeed was 598 kt.

For aircraft technical mavens: The maximum airspeed (commonly known as V_NE for “Velocity, Never Exceed,” and for commercial transport aircraft, published as M_MO meaning “Maximum Operating Mach Number”) of the 737 MAX-8 is 0.82. The recorded groundspeed of 598 kt would be well in excess of the 584 kt sound barrier at 32,000 feet. That means it’s likely at some point, FZ1073 approached the speed of sound and exceeded its engineered structural limits. In recovering the aircraft, the pilots who landed the flight learned that the rudder had been torn off. It’s a miracle the wings did not separate from the fuselage.

The flight’s captain, Smit Machchhar, is an Indian national. He is celebrated as a hero, telling India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “I was fighting for my life” when he managed to open the cockpit door while sustaining serious injuries from the attack.

FZ1073’s fate hung in the balance, not just from the attack, and the possible motives and intent of al-Hammami, but also from the multiple threats that happened afterward. This video from air safety YouTuber known as Captain Steeeve serves as a fairly good summary, from the point of view of a passenger, who seems to me to be well-versed in aviation, if not a pilot himself.

Many events combined to save the flight and all aboard, according to this passenger’s account.

• A woman passenger had brought her 6-year-old daughter to the bathroom at the front of the aircraft by the galley, and heard the commotion from the flight deck. She informed the flight attendant, who agreed it needed to be investigated.

• When Captain Machchhar opened the cockpit door, the woman, seeing blood all over the flight desk, screamed loudly, getting the attention of many passengers. The passenger compartment, mostly Israelis, reacted by rushing to the flight deck. Just about all Israelis have military experience, and the screams would quickly give them the situation that all is not as it should be.

• The co-pilot was quickly disarmed, subdued and restrained by at least three passengers, using the cord from a headset. Flight attendants then applied flex-cuffs, as the aircraft began its terrifying descent.

• A passenger took the controls and brought the aircraft into stable flight. At the same time, the two pilots who flew the previous leg on the same aircraft, “deadheading” while the active crew flew, reached the flight deck and took control of the aircraft.

• Following procedures, the two pilots “squawked” two transponder codes in sequence: first 7700, the international emergency code, then after about 30 seconds, 7500, the code for hijack, and then back to 7700. This alerted every air controller in the area that the flight had been hijacked on its way to Tel Aviv.

• The Israeli air force scrambled jets to intercept the flight, which was apparently in Jordanian airspace. At that time, the pilots acted to determine the flyability of the aircraft, no doubt realizing it had been damaged.

• The passenger related that the plane circled for about 20 minutes, before heading toward Saudi Arabia. It then landed at Tabuk, where the Saudis were ready with emergency response, and ensured that the aircraft was secured after landing.

The landing itself must have been challenging, without a rudder to maintain directional control once on the ground. The passenger spoke to the pilot who landed the plane, describing the landing as one of the smoothest he’d ever experienced. The pilot responded, “thank Boeing,” because the 737 MAX-8’s nosewheel steering had kept the plane on the runway. A large jet landing without rudder authority is dangerous, because any yaw—loss of directional control—could force a departure from the runway, and easily destroy the aircraft, killing many, or all aboard.

In July, 1989, United Flight 232 lost all three hydraulic systems in flight due to a catastrophic failure of the rear jet engine. The crew heroically controlled the aircraft using nothing but the two remaining wing engines and excellent coordination to bring the DC-10 in to Sioux City, Iowa. But the aircraft still ended up cartwheeling during landing: 111 of the 296 souls on board perished, but due to the skill of the crew, 185 survived. This flight spurred airlines to focus on Crew Resource Management, or CRM, as a cornerstone of their safety programs.

Flight FZ1073 survived because of Boeing’s nosewheel steering system, and also because a backup crew was present, intimately familiar with this particular jet, and able to employ CRM to bring it in safely. If anything is miraculous, all of the events that had to occur to prevent a tragedy—or a terrorist act—must be evidence of what the captain told Modi, “God would save us.”

According to the passenger’s account, the Saudis were gracious, respectful, and incredibly kind and responsive to their Israeli guests. Small things matter: no Israeli would ever imagine themselves guests of the Kingdom at the heart of Islam, so none of them had cell phone SIMs for Saudi carriers. They needed to call family, and it turned out one passenger had a satellite-enabled device that was used to purchase SIMs for other passengers, and tech-minded passengers helped them activate service to contact their loved ones. Saudi counselors made themselves available to help the passengers process their trauma, and medical staff attended to any injuries, while others ensured privacy, and provided food and drinks.

Don’t let anyone say that one particular ethnic group or another lacks empathy and kindness. Human beings can in fact display humanity to one another. We all live on the same hunk of iron, rock, and water. We all live under the same sky, and we all fight the same evils of those who wish destruction.

The Saudis did well.

The attacker was taken into custody by the Saudis, who also provided medical assistance to the injured Captain Machchhar. Hammam al-Hammami, the flight’s co-pilot, is an Omani citizen.

So far, we have a UAE airline, a Saudi airport, Israeli passengers, an Indian captain, and an Omani co-pilot. Five nations: five motivations for narratives; five complicated motivations.

United Arab Emirates

The UAE, as the origin and flag (FlyDubai is Emirati, and owned by the government) of the flight, are by international agreement the principal investigator. The UAE Attorney General has announced he is forming the team to perform that function. That team includes the Israelis, whose Mossad foreign intelligence and Shin Bet law enforcement investigators are conducting a parallel investigation.

Both al-Hammami and Captain Machchhar reportedly been transferred from Saudi Arabia to Abu Dhabi, where the first remains in custody, and the victim is receiving medical care. This gives Emirati investigators full access to both individuals, along with all the other nations, as UAE maintains diplomatic relations with all.

What does UAE want?

A clean ending. It would be best if the attacker were determined to be a lone wolf, acting on his own, with no larger state control or backers. If he was radicalized, that can be contained due to the man’s own reading, viewing videos, or online or personal communications. It would be best if there were no complications like who dispatched or ordered the co-pilot to commit an act of terrorism.

If the whole event were a mental health issue, that would be clean for the Emirates. That doesn’t appear to be the case, as UAE’s prosecutor general has said the co-pilot “attempted to carry out a terrorist act.” The remark could be interpreted several ways, not necessarily that the attack was motivated by terrorism, only that the act itself was characterized this way.

One problem the UAE has already avoided is how a co-pilot brought a weapon aboard one of its flights. The attack was made with the crash axe kept in the cockpit in case of an emergency where the flight crew had to hack the door open. Possibly air safety officials, airlines, and manufacturers could reconsider the accessibility of the crash axe, and the trade-offs on safety if it were not so easy to retrieve. That will be for later. For now, the mystery of bringing a weapon aboard is solved.

Another question is for Israel to ask, and for the UAE to answer.

Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed the Omani attacker was “radicalized” and “had Islamist ties.” He said the man underwent “Islamist radical indoctrination.” He didn’t elaborate who did the indoctrinating. The PM believes that the man “was going to down the plane.”

The evidence is spotty here. The aircraft didn’t begin its descent until both the captain and co-pilot were out of their seats, and the cockpit door was open. It’s not clear if the co-pilot commanded the descent with flight controls, or if the autopilot was disconnected, and the plane simply went out of control with nobody flying. Airplanes in level flight are usually stable and won’t head nose-to-the-ground simply because nobody is providing control input. This means it’s likely something or someone either changed the trim (which is what the aircraft uses to maintain level flight) or pushed the yoke forward. It doesn’t necessarily mean al-Hammami did it before leaving his seat.

Whether it happened one way or another is both irrelevant to motive, and also an important distinction. Let’s say al-Hammami’s goal was to incapacitate the pilot, take the controls, and execute a 9/11-style attack on Israeli soil. That would mean the descent over Saudi airspace was not his intention, but it is what happened.

Israel had the option to down the jet, but the pilots in control were undoubtedly talking to controllers—Israeli, Saudi—or their own flight operations, and possibly the IAF jets. At some point, the decision to divert to Tabuk was made, in part due to the wounds the captain had sustained, and also to keep a damaged aircraft out of busy Ben Gurion. The last thing Israel needed was a crash of an airplane with its own citizens aboard at its only international airport.

Again, it was gracious of the Saudis to accept the flight and to do the right thing.

What does Israel want?

Justice, first. The Israelis would love to charge, try, and convict al-Hammami of an act of terrorism. They would love to sentence him. But Israel, though it has diplomatic relations with UAE, has no extradition treaty with the Emirates. Demanding the attacker’s extradition does no good, unless UAE agrees to it, and why would they?

There are reasons. It might be embarrassing for UAE to try the case and have certain details public, or to have al-Hammami acquitted of the most serious charges. Having Israel handle the trial, while UAE gets credit for the investigation, may satisfy many political checkboxes. But on the other hand, Oman would likely object.

Israel has no formal relations with Oman, but Oman and Israel have aligned interests against Iran and the Houthis. If the investigation turns up an Iranian connection, Oman may be less averse to its citizen being tried in Israel. And having al-Hammami locked up in an Israeli prison might be a public relations and negotiating boon to Arab nations—a piece to trade later.

But this too is complicated. Israel can certainly charge the attacker with an act of terrorism, but with no Israelis harmed, and no Israeli equipment, property, or territory threatened, it’s unclear how justice would be served, or what specific charges could be levied. That didn’t stop National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from calling for the man’s extradition, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Anyone who planned to crash a plane and murder 180 Israelis must be extradited to Israel and pay the heaviest price here," Ben-Gvir said. "We cannot be satisfied with the fact that the disaster was prevented through abundant divine mercy and thanks to our heroic passengers."

Surely, divine mercy may have been involved, but how can Israel be satisfied because a group of Israeli passengers were inconvenienced, experienced some level of trauma, yet were treated professionally, kindly, and respectfully by the Emirates authorities, its airline FlyDubai, and the Saudis? What more can Israel ask for?

Bev-Gvir wants the man’s head on a plate, but it’s unclear he can or will get that.

Israel also wants enhanced cooperation with its Middle East neighbors. This is an excellent opportunity for the Mossad and Shin Bet to work with both the Saudis and the UAE, behind the scenes and publicly, to help gather the threads of this events, and in some ways to control the narrative.

If there is some Iran connection, or some other Islamic radical group directing things, it’s better for all the nations involved to know and coordinate about it in advance, rather than surprise each other with ambush new releases. Of course, fringe wingers like Ben-Gvir are going to spout, no matter what.

Saudi Arabia

The Saudis largely got what they wanted. They portrayed themselves as kind, merciful, professional, and competent. These are all qualities that Saudi Arabia has lacked over many years in the public eye. And for all the good vibes, in general the Kingdom still lacks these attributes in many ways.

The Saudis have executed at least 100 people in 2026 alone, through June. In 2025 and 2024, they set an all-time record with 356 and 345 executions, respectively. In 2022, they conducted a mass execution of 81 people in a single day. About three quarters of those executed for drug offenses are foreign nationals from nations such as Pakistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, Jordan, and Syria.

Barbarically, Saudi Arabia still beheads most of its condemned. Sometimes they crucify the headless body for public inspection. When an executioner by sword cannot be obtained, the Saudis will resort to a firing squad, but mostly it’s still by public beheading.

Also, the brutal assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi still looms over the Kingdom. The eighth anniversary of that murder was October 2nd. There has never been justice for this, and in fact, the Saudis have cultivated a close relationship with President Trump.

The Saudis have a reputation as a military filled with nepotism, laziness, and incompetence as well. After a 10 year war with the Houthis in Yemen, the Saudis gave up trying to defeat the terror regime backed by the IRGC, even with U.S. support. Now, the Houthis are attacking Saudi oil facilities and causing a crisis as both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea routes for export are threatened. Crown Prince MBS asked Trump for U.S. military assistance in suppressing the Houthis, but with American missile stocks not at full capacity due to the extended Iran war, the president demurred.

What do the Saudis want?

Having a feather in their cap for the handling of FZ1073 is a public relations coup for MBS and the Saudis. Now they are out—except for the aircraft sitting at Tabuk, Saudi Arabia has done its part. The Kingdom’s main concern is keeping any connection to Saudi Islamic radicals out of speculation or the news. Unless the investigation moves in that direction, the Saudis will be satisfied.

They want to cooperate with Israel, but are not ready to move toward formal relations until the Gaza issue is dealt with, as in the war ending. Israel has no motivation to end that war until Hamas is disarmed, and Hamas will never disarm. It may be a long time—or never—until Saudi Arabia and Israel have a formal diplomatic relationship. Right now, I think both countries are comfortable keeping their cooperation in the back channels.

Oman

There’s not much upside to Oman, other than distancing itself from al-Hammami. No legitimate government, especially one friendly to the United States, wants to claim a 9/11-style terrorist or defend one.

There are some questions regarding Israel, however.

Israel’s immigration policies are generally ironclad. My brother Jay told me a story of traveling to Israel on business with an associate, who, if I remember correctly, was a Syrian refugee (this was years ago). The company, which was based in Israel, insisted they wanted this person on the trip, but the man had his doubts. He never made it off the plane. The Shin Bet had tagged him from the passenger manifest before the plane even landed, and gave him the option of taking the next flight back to the U.S., or perhaps he wanted to be deported to Syria?

There is supposedly a rule in Israel that any commercial pilot flying for a foreign airline must be a citizen of a country that maintains diplomatic relations with Israel. Oman does not.

This policy is apparently very weakly enforced, and has loopholes permitting the Transportation Minister to submit foreign pilots from these countries for security checks. The co-pilot on FZ1073 did not hold credentials for any other nationality, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Also, the agreement between the UAE and Israel regarding FlyDubai “did not stipulate that pilots operating flights between the two countries must be nationals of countries maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel.” That is disputed by prior statements from the Transportation Ministry. Apparently, “dozens” of Omani flight crew have been with FlyDubai, and have routinely flown into Israel. This prompted the airline, and, I assume, Israeli authorities, to suspend all FlyDubai operations into Tel Aviv.

What does Oman want?

It is difficult to say whether Oman would benefit from Israel accepting Omani pilots, but it probably is not good for whatever relations exist—informally—between the two countries for Israel to treat Omanis differently from other air crew, especially if the no-fly rule enforcement is historically spotty.

Omani authorities, speaking anonymously, have already begun distancing themselves. Sources have told ABC News, also reported by The Times of Israel, that al-Hammami was “previously banned from flying by Oman’s national airline over concerns that he had been radicalized.” This raises questions on how FlyDubai vetted him and hired him to fly to Israel, of all places. It also leaves Israeli authorities with egg on their faces over who is supposed to vet these air crew.

The facts as reported would put Oman on the “good guys” side of the issue.

According to ABC, al-Hammami is “cooperating” with investigators and has suggested to them that he intended to crash the plane in Israel. Quoting sources briefed on the investigation, ABC reported: “Al-Hammami… has indicated that his intent was to crash the aircraft in Israel.”

It also buttresses any Israeli calls for extradition, since Israel was the target.

India, the U.K., and the United States

India has a hero. India enjoys a very close relationship with Israel. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterized his May 2026 visit to India as a “love fest.” Netanyahu invited Indian PM Narendra Modi, along with Captain Smit Machchhar to light the flame at the ceremony on the next Israel Independence Day celebration; this is normally an honor reserved for Israeli citizens.

India has its share of aviation issues, including what appears to be an intentional crash by a crew member; David Thornton wrote about the tragedy of Air India Flight 171 in July, 2025. But the tragedy Captain Machchhar prevented highlights the bravery and humanity displayed by all involved.

What does the U.K. have to do with this? Nothing, maybe, or perhaps, a lot. The Fairford incident where five young Brits were arrested, then released on bail, along with a dual citizenship UK-Iranian man, on suspicion of terrorist actions could be a link to radicalized Islamic terror, including the intent to crash an Emirati airliner inside Israel.

The threat is apparently continuing, and concerning enough to the U.S. Air Force that the bombers stationed at RAF Fairford have been removed, according to a PBS report.

Aviation watchers such as the Military Air Tracking Alliance have observed dozens of B-52 and B-1 bombers operating out of RAF Fairford since the opening days of the Iran war. Observers noticed a host of B-1 bombers fly out of the base on Sunday.

As the U.S. has officially completed its exit from Iraq, more Marines and the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a Nimitz-class carrier, are headed to the Gulf, to keep the pressure on Iran, and to keep it from exporting oil through the Strait of Hormuz, while attempting to keep oil flowing from nations friendly to the United States. Crude exports in the last week of September were reported at 12.34 million barrels per day, about 80 percent of their levels before the start of the Iran war.

The prospect of a negotiated end to the war is not considered in the calculation by shipping companies, Argus Media, which covers oil shipments, reported.

"You don't even need peace now in Iran, you just need the oil to come out," Robert Bugbee, president of shipowner Scorpio Tankers said.

What does the U.S. want?

Obviously, the U.S. wants the oil to flow, so prices at the pump can begin to decline, and the price of everything else Americans buy won’t be so painfully high. But Iran continues to attack shipping in the strait, stepping up its activity; in the last five days, six ships have been attacked, according to Argus.

If the FZ1073 attempt was related to Iranian efforts against the U.S. or Israel, the Trump administration, I think, would want to use it, not just to protect Americans, but also as a political tool in the upcoming November midterms. I know that’s crass, but that’s the sharp-elbow politics and blunt hammers of the Trump White House.

If President Donald Trump can insert himself into the headlines, he will.

Uncertainty and Events

Let’s say MI5 concludes the RAF Fairford event was orchestrated by Iran, which seems more likely every day. Who recruited British citizens to commit sabotage, or to spy for Iran? Was the FluDubai co-pilot, al-Hammami, part of the same network? I’m sure this is top of the list in any investigation.

Here are some scenarios that could throw a wrench, or a grenade, into the news cycle, and end the celebration.

1. Hammam al-Hammami dies in custody, either by suicide, or in an escape attempt, or simply murdered. I’d call this “the Epstein option,” because it leaves a huge mystery. Such things happen: look at the JFK assassination. The death of the attacker would amp things up in disinformation and conspiracy theories that will never end.

2. A copycat. Some other radicalized pilot or crew member could conduct another attack, on a jet filled with Jews, or a flight to New York. A recent attack against messianic Rabbi Jonathan Cahn by an enraged passenger highlights the danger of idiots on airplanes. Interestingly, Cahn’s first novel, “The Harbinger,” was published in September 2001, while containing some alarmingly parallel events to the actual 9/11 attack. I read that book, and it was chilling. A particularly difficult variant of this would be if a European airline was targeted, or if a European pilot were radicalized. It could start a panic over flight security and who is flying.

3. Iranian retaliation against Oman. Oman has tried to remain as neutral in the Iran war as it can be. Muscat opposed the Iran war, and maintains some relations with Tehran. Attacks by Iran proxies have frustrated Oman, but a direct attack would be destabilizing, since Oman is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. President Trump told reporters Iran would be “hit very hard” if it was involved in the FZ1073 plot. Why the U.S. would make this threat is unclear—America was not involved at all—but Trump has the ability to continue the Iran war until someone stops him (namely Congress).

4. A false flag. The attacker is reportedly cooperating with investigators. What if some kind of “9/11-style chatter” is uncovered, but not related to Iran? What if hacks against the FBI, and other events are related, but not through Iran? Do we have another rising terror organization that intelligence assets are aware of, but has not been made public? Uncertainty is a powerful source of panic.

Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News host Sean Hannity that Israel had warned Britain that Iran was planning an attack on British soil against an airbase. “You want to hear how absurd things are there and how far the anti-Israel propaganda has gone?” Netanyahu said. “We gave the Brits the intel that there was going to be an attack and it's an Iranian-sponsored attack. And pretty much the next day, they slapped sanctions on us.”

Iran, which has diplomatic relations with the U.K., denied any involvement in the RAF Fairford events, through its embassy. Meanwhile, the five men who were arrested were released on bail after police failed to find any evidence of explosives in their possession. However, Iran has threatened to attack any foreign base hosting U.S. bombers as a “legitimate target.”

Iran wants to use FZ1073 to sow chaos and suspicion among western and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies, and their masters. Any division it can create between the U.S. and Israel, or the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, or the fragile agreements between Israel and the Emirates, is a win for Tehran.

Expect a lot of disinformation, propaganda, and flat out falsehoods.

Conclusion and Questions

Who will prosecute al-Hammami? What will he be charged with? A terror plot that went wrong, resulted in injury and damage to a jet aircraft, is not necessarily a capital crime. The call for al-Hammami’s head on a platter from Israel notwithstanding, the actual harm from the crime was minimal.

Hammam al-Hammami may end up serving a jail sentence in Abu Dhabi. Or he may end up serving one in Ayalon Prison, in Ramla, Israel, which, ironically, is less than 10 miles from Ben Gurion International Airport.

What will the fallout from this attempted act of terror be? Will crash axes be locked up more securely? Will air crew be vetted more closely? Will there be less flights into Israel from foreign airlines? Will the U.S. use this to justify more attacks on Iran? Will Iran use this to sow discord between the U.S. and its allies?

Will an “overcome by events” scenario occur?

Or will this be the beginning of a new era of cooperation between states that have few shared interests, other than being human and showing kindness? That would be the best outcome, no matter what happens to al-Hammami.

It’s best to bask in the moment of heroism and celebration for now, because from here, it just gets complicated.

Leave a comment

Share

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket
Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Our personal accounts on the platform now known as X:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu
Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman
Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Share The Racket News ™

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.

Share

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. [After publication, I saw an interview clip in which the captain said he got back up and opened the door.]

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.

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.”

Share The Racket News ™

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

I’ll keep this short. If you don’t want to read it, feel free to continue on with your day. If you are here because you think this is Matt Taibbi’s site, it’s not. It never has been. The Racket News™️ was founded a whole year before Taibbi renamed his own site “Racket News” (before that, it was “TK News”). We were here first, which is why we have a “TM” after the name. If Taibbi thought we were a threat, he’d have come after us legally, but he has no grounds to do so. I respect Matt, because his dad was a veteran Boston television reporter and sports beat writer for years, and Matt has a gift for writing. I mean, he coined the term “the great vampire squid” as Goldman Sachs’ moniker. Brilliant. I can’t write like Matt or compete with him. If you’re here to read Matt Taibbi, you’re in the wrong place. However, Matt and I don’t agree on many things, and this is one of them. Not that he cares, neither in the scheme of things, it matters in the least. But if you’re still reading, stick with me.

About Israel, let me get some things straight. I aim to persuade nobody, but for those readers who are not bots or some kind of AI, here’s some things I believe, and I know to be true.

America is not Israel. Israel is a foreign nation, like Brazil, or Bulgaria, or Singapore, or the Federated States of Micronesia. I have never been to Israel, though one day I would like to visit. Visit, as in, go there as a tourist, like so many Americans do each year. The main reason Americans visit is because a large part of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, happened there. The land, called the “Holy Land,” is central to the Jewish and Christian faith. It’s worth visiting, to walk where John the Baptist walked; to stand on the ground where the feet of Jesus stood. Why not do that?

If you think American Jews have some loyalty to a foreign nation because that nation is founded as the Jewish state, and American Jews, are, well, Jews, you’re wrong, and you’re not wrong.

As an American, I don’t have to listen to hateful things Israeli leaders, Knesset members, or ministers of various departments say. I don’t have a voice in Israeli politics. I don’t participate in their political system. I don’t get to vote. My voice matters not. I don’t get a say in what Israel does. It is a foreign country. I don’t get a say in Mexico either, despite the fact that Mexico’s president is Jewish. (Same with Ukraine.)

Subscribe now

Israel is for Israelis to live in and govern.

That being said, I have a very good reason to support the existence of Israel, as does every single Jew on the planet.

If a person is born Jewish, or believes in the Torah, that person is part of a tiny population living on the earth: 0.2%. Muslims make up 25% of the world population; Christians, 28%; non-religious people, another 28%. The other 19-odd percent is everything else: Hindu, Buddhist, B’Hai, and a plethora of other small faiths. Only about 15 million are Jews. There are 51 or 52 Islamic states, many with huge populations and giant swaths of land. Some of these require citizens to follow Islamic beliefs or Islamic law.

There is one Jewish state. It is the size of New Jersey. About 10 million people live there, and about 10 percent of those are not Jewish. About 50 percent of the Jews are not particularly religious, but they are Jews. Of the other religious groups in the world, the largest ones have a history, over a thousand or so years or more, of persecuting Jews. Just about every Christian nation has expelled the Jews at one time or another: Britain, Spain, Russia being great examples. Others have persecuted Jews, forced them to convert to other religions, or outright killed them.

The United States welcomed Jews at the founding. Jews were in this land before there was a United States, though the Jews of Savannah were only tolerated because there was no good way to send them back. Jews participated in the American Revolution, and every war thereafter. Yet, for two hundred years, Jews have suffered persecution at the hands of other Americans. From soft persecution like being excluded from certain societies, or from country clubs, or from Ivy League colleges, to the activities of the KKK, to the official policies of our State Department to limit Jewish immigration.

Despite all this, America has been a haven for Jews, especially compared to other places which do not offer the freedom we have here.

American Jews are Americans. The second largest population of Jews in the world live in New York City. They helped elect a Muslim mayor. A large part of the Democratic Party makes hay by opposing Israel, the only Jewish state.

The only Jewish state has had to deal with 2.5 to 4 million refugees from its bloody founding war, where five Arab nations simultaneously attacked the nascent IDF, and two years later, the Israelis won their land. Those Arabs who had been sent to the land to occupy it to keep Jews from having it were displaced, and the nations they emigrated from would not repatriate them. So they have lived on the West Bank and Gaza for 80 years, for Israel to deal with. Call it a prison camp if you want, but the progenitors of those Palestinians were promised all the land in Israel once the Jews were removed. Except all their efforts to remove the Jews have failed.

There is one Jewish state, and its existence is the only hope Jews of the world have that they will not be exterminated at some future time, or today.

How can I not have some place in my heart where I care about Israel? How can any Jew wish there were no Jewish state, a haven that will always accept them when every other nation rejects them?

Despite being only 0.2% of the world’s population, Jews have won something like 25% of Nobel Prizes, especially in the “hard sciences” like physics, chemistry, and medicine. Jews developed life-saving vaccines like the one to prevent polio. Jews largely built the Hollywood studios. Jews stood against the evil empire of the Soviet Union. Jews have done big things in the world. They are also all over the Bible, in case you don’t know.

Why shouldn’t the land where Jews inhabited since a thousand years before Christ be the Jewish land? Why shouldn’t the land that King Saul, King David, and King Solomon ruled be a Jewish state? Who outside of Israel gets to tell them they can’t have it when they’ve clawed their way out of pogroms, the Holocaust, and being expelled from every nation on earth to go to the one place that always accepts Jews?

But I am American. Unless I move to Israel (called “making Aliyah” which means “to ascend” in Hebrew), I don’t get a voice or a vote in Israel. Their politics don’t concern me. The fact that Israel, Israelis, and their government do some awful things doesn’t directly affect me as a citizen of the United States. It does, however, affect me as a Jew. Because others who think Jew = Israel = Jews hold me and every other Jew in the world responsible for the actions of the Israeli government. This is an evil belief.

If you want to blame me for who I voted for in the U.S., that’s fair. But don’t hold me responsible for what Israelis voted for. And don’t say American Jews deserve to be punished for having place in their hearts for Israel. That’s also evil. It’s the same as saying there should be no Jews. I think you know who else said that.

The direct descendants, politically and doctrinally speaking, of the Nazis is the Islamic Brotherhood, which is the parent umbrella organization of Hamas. This dates back to the pact the Mufti of Jerusalem made with Hitler during World War II. That pact still exists, though Hitler does not. His will, so to speak, lives on, in Gaza. Support Gaza if you want, but know who you are supporting.

My heart breaks for Gaza, and for Ramallah, and all of Judea and Samaria (what Israelis call “the West Bank”). But I am not Israeli, and those things are not my problem. What is my problem is the hatred from other Americans who think I am not “pure” enough an American citizen to have a voice here. Were I not a follower of Yeshua, whom God cleaned up my potty mouth decades ago, I would have a couple of words for those people, and I think you know what they are.

American Jews are not Israel, and Israel is not every Jew in the world. I support Israel, because I enjoy living and not being murdered for being Jewish. That’s the whole reason. If you can’t accept that, it’s on you. Go open a Bible and read for yourself. Go read the history of persecution of Jews by Christians, and by Muslims. In fact, for most of history, Muslims treated Jews far better than Christians.

If you consider yourself a Christian, and you harbor ill-will against American Jews for what Israel, a foreign nation, does, you have a sickness of the heart, and the Bible has the cure.

That’s all I have to say about it.

I’m sure I’ll have to take another shower, because to some, rolling in filth is the point. But this time, I’m disabling comments, so keep your thoughts to yourself.

Share

Share The Racket News ™

Subscribe now

The film “NAZA” mentions the word “genocide” only once, and that as a quote from one of the interview subjects. Here, as used in a NY Times op-ed by M. Gessen:

More than halfway through the film, Yuval Abraham, who conducted the interviews and co-directed the movie with Rachel Szor, asks one of the subjects if he realized that he was taking part in a genocide. This interviewee has already said that he found the work to be fun, because staying up late with your buddies, working toward a common goal, is fun. Now he agrees calmly, indeed casually, that yes, he has been taking part in a genocide.

In a courtroom, such an interview would raise an objection from the opposing counsel, that the question is leading the witness. In certain intersectional, power-balance obsessed, highly online circles, it is not only assumed that Israel is committing genocide, it is also chic to claim this.

The word that comes to my mind is “gaslighting.” If the whole world tells enough Jews that Israel is doing to the Gazans what the Nazis did to the Jews, some will question their own minds, what they’ve been taught since infancy, that “never again” means, in fact, never. And they will equate Israel’s effort to ensure its security and the promise of “never again” with extermination.

I make a lot of room here for freight. Israel has been heavy-handed from the start of the war following 10/7. (To give some context, at least Israel did declare war on Hamas and Hezbollah, so their attacks on Iran, and on Gaza fit within the definition of declared war, versus America’s foray into this war, which is undeclared, unpopular, and unapproved by Congress.) My initial take on this war was for Israel to go slow and choose the path of mercy as much as possible. That was never possible, because its enemies show no mercy, and proved it on October 7, 2023.

The problem for Israel is that the deck had always been stacked against them. Over decades, if they tried to make peace with their Arab and Palestinian enemies, any compromise solution, even yielding to every single point the PLO argued for, would be rejected as not enough. That would be followed by demonstrations, and violence, which in turn brought a reaction from Israel, which its enemies used to paint Israel as the aggressor, because Israel’s military and police powers were so much more developed than its enemies. Tell that to the innocent civilians and children blown up on buses, or the families of those slaughtered on 10/7.

Despite the most advanced system for quick reaction, target identification, advance notification of civilians to avoid collateral damage, and pinpoint accuracy, Israel cannot shake the claims that its goal is to exterminate all Palestinians living in Gaza.

All this because some IDF soldiers found the camaraderie, common goals, and adrenaline of war, even sitting in front of glowing LCD panels watching real-time AI-assisted target identification, to be thrilling. To a 19-year-old it is thrilling. Tell that to the elite soldiers who go into the thousands of tunnels in Gaza, some extending deep into Israel, or the massive underground depots in southern Lebanon dug and stocked under the nose of U.N. “peacekeepers” who are many times complicit in the terror. Tell that to the 19-year-old soldiers who are killed in this war, or to their families and comrades in uniform.

Subscribe now

Israel had few good choices. We’re talking about choices to use “dumb” 2000-pound U.S.-produced bombs versus more advanced GPS-enabled smart bombs against hardened targets. Or firing air-to-ground missiles into populated areas in counter-fire operations to take out rocket launchers in the process of loading and firing on Israeli cities. These launchers are placed in populated areas on purpose, and are fired at the times when counter-fire will cause the most civilian deaths.

Israel’s enemies possess the most effective weapon in the world: the lives of their own people, to be sacrificed in the cause of making “never again” impossible.

It is now chic to show how the modern state of Israel, so militarily dominant in the Middle East, is akin to the enemy sparking its existence. It is chic to elicit quotes and evidence that the very reason it was founded, which being to ensure the continued existence of Jews around the world, to be a place where “never again” has meaning, is turned on its head, making Israel the genocidal evil.

It is chic to gaslight Jews outside of Israel to question their own moral footing, and to join the chorus of elites condemning their own religious, moral, and bloodline families as monsters.

No wonder Israel’s Prime Minister has reacted so viscerally to “NAZA,” even to the point of advocating stripping the movie’s producers of Israeli citizenship. How can anyone claim the mantle of being Israeli while denying the meaning of “never again,” and turning that on its head to ensure “yes, again” will indeed happen.

As the last living memory of Hitler and the actual Nazis in World War II fades into forgetfulness, the darkness of antisemitism, victim-blaming of innocent Jews, gaslighting, to cover for the very real persecution and hatred of Jews by many non-Jews who are crawling out of their holes, is rising.

Let me say it again: should Israel want to commit genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, it could. It could easily do it. Israel could inflict a million casualties in 48 hours, creating decaying piles of bodies piled high. But Israel has not done this. It’s really envy. Israel’s enemies yearn to have the advantages Israel possesses. If they did, they’d pile millions of Jewish bodies high, like the real Nazis. The restraint exercised by Israel should be praised, but instead, we get gaslit.

Yes, Israel has reacted brutally. Yes, many civilians have died. But that is not genocide. Genocide does not happen by accident, or by mistake. It happens by intent. And Israel has never possessed the intent to commit genocide.

Confusing mistakes, overreactions (can anyone blame them after 10/7?), and failures at the tactical, and even strategic, level with intentional genocide is nothing but propaganda from those who wish “never again” to be meaningless. And if “never again” becomes meaningless, then the fruit of what the Nazis began will grow in the world, until “never again” becomes “yes, again.”

But it’s chic to pretend it won’t happen because those who join in the genocide choir prefer to live in a pretend world.

Leave a comment

Share

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.]

Share

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.

Share The Racket News ™

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.

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.

Share The Racket News ™

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket

Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Mastodon: https://bird.makeup/users/newsracket

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu

Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman

Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Ancient Romans believed in The Fates, or the Parcae; the Greeks called them Moirai. These Fates were three sisters who wove the threads of every life, mortal and immortal, even the gods themselves. One sister spun the thread, at birth; a second measured the length; the last had shears to cut the thread, which determined the time and manner of death. At death, most mortals went to the underworld, ruled by Hades. Emperors of Rome, the Caesars, were deified, made gods, Romans believed.

With exceptions. I’ll get to that. But first, let’s connect that ancient belief to today’s politics. Back in 2015, when a certain septuagenarian descended a certain golden elevator in the lobby of his building in New York City, and declared in effect that the United States should no longer be a haven for the world, but instead a walled garden, weeding out the bad crops, I wrote that Donald J. Trump should not be written off as so many pundits and political advisers believed. I called him the “Great White Hope of the Uninformed Voter.”

In 2016, Trump was so toxic that National Review dedicated an entire magazine issue to “Against Trump.” Many of the writers who contributed to that compilation have become stalwart opponents of the once and current president. But not all.

The MAGA cohort believed that the Fates had ordained this avatar of All Good Things that had been taken away by the soft, socialist, radical rabble of the left, to be their mouth, or as Trump said during the 2016 GOP convention during his nomination speech, their VOICE. There is a difference. A mouth expels words in the same way the other end vents flatulence. A mouth also consumes to enable that other end’s odiferous wind. A voice speaks, and a voice of the people speaks the words that represents the people’s desires, grievances, dreams, and hopes.

Barack Obama has a voice. He is even eloquent as he speaks the desires, grievances, dreams, and hopes of those who trust him. I don’t agree with much of what Obama says, and some of what he says he knows isn’t true, or can’t happen. In contrast, Donald Trump has a mouth. And what a mouth he has.

Yet that mouth got him elected in 2016, because the Great White Hope convinced the uninformed voter that he had something more than just a mouth. Faced with the choice of Hillary Clinton, who can never borrow her husband’s voice to replace her own mouth, those who were disappointed with Obama trusted the Fates to bring Trump, and by 2020 they learned their lesson.

But then they forgot once again, and Democrats, grasping so tightly for complete control, committed such gruesome political malpractice, that the Fates elevated Trump to the position of near-martyr, willing to die for his cause. Faced with the choice of Kamala Harris, who has neither voice nor big mouth to speak of, or the Great White Hope, the uninformed voters doubled down on the mouth they rejected in 2020.

Ancient Rome has much to teach us. Immediately preceding the emperor Claudius Caesar was one of the worst tyrants to assume the laurel crown, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known by his nickname, Caligula. Caligula was likely a psychopath who enjoyed killing others, a paranoid who trusted no-one (except his horse, Incitatus, which he attempted to elevate to the high position of Consul). Upon Caligula’s murder by his own Praetorian Guard, the only heir of Augustus left alive to assume the throne was Claudius.

According to the biographer Suetonius, Claudius was not the brightest man. He stumbled in speech, was jerky in his motions, certainly not graceful in any way; he was indecisive in doing anything, preferring to yield to his advisers. He was also quite boorish, declaring it fit to display flatulence at his table.

Claudius was widely thought of as an idiot.

During his rule, in defense of his honor and position, he claimed in a speech that he only feigned being an imbecile in order to escape Caligula’s endless purges. He was allowed to live in large part because Caligula ignored him as no threat, while much better and honorable men were put to death for no good reason.

The public did not buy it.

In response, an anonymous writer circulated a pamphlet with the Greek title Moron epanastasis, or “Resurrection of Fools,” sometimes known as “Rising of the Morons.” The thrust of the pamphlet was simple: no one can successfully fake stupidity. He who consistently acts like a fool, is one.

This theme continued past Claudius’s death by poison, believed to be possibly orchestrated by his own successor and adopted son, Nero. Nero gave Claudius a lavish funeral, declared Claudius defied, as Caesars were believed to be gods, yet left his tomb undecorated and even mocking of the dead ruler. A satirical play by Seneca, mostly lost to history, was called Apocolocyntosis, or “Pumpkinification” of the expired Claudius. It was set in the heavens, where the gods would decide whether Claudius could join them among the immortals.

“Pumpkins” in ancient Rome meant gourds, which were used as empty vessels. To deify a pumpkin is to worship an empty head, the head of an idiot. In Seneca’s biting satire, the gods voted to deny Claudius a place among the immortals, and instead to send him to Hades, god of the underworld. As he is led from heaven, Claudius witnesses his own funeral, then descends to meet Caligula, who makes him his slave.

We are today seeing the Pumpkinification of politics. It was not enough that Donald Trump would destroy the Republican Party. That was assured the moment he took control of the RNC’s funding, merging it with his own election campaign. It was not enough that Trump, in his second term, has appointed the broadest panoply of gourd-heads in his cabinet, possibly the emptiest heads ever assembled in the American government. It is not enough that Trump has attempted every illegal, unconstitutional, and illiberal method to assume dictatorial power, control the media, and exert economic control of this nation. It is not enough that he has initiated wars, without winning or even losing them.

Trump has not only destroyed the GOP, he has also largely destroyed the Democratic Party. At least the Democrats can claw their way out of the pit of destruction. The GOP cannot, having been permanently stained by the near auto-golpe on January 6, 2021, and its complete failure to bring those responsible for it to justice, or hold them to account.

Yet, while Trump is president, those around him have continued to deify him. And those who say they are merely calling “balls and strikes” have pumpkinfied politics by claiming a fool can only be acting like a moron without actually being one.

It’s not just about breaking tradition. There is a tradition of U.S. presidents not meeting foreign leaders at the airport when their flights arrive. President Trump met China’s President Jinping Xi at the airport. Xi did not meet Trump at the airport when he visited Beijing. Meeting a foreign leader, especially an economic and military rival, as he lands in our country is an act of subservience. Again, it’s not just breaking tradition, it’s also speaking volumes about the United States, as its head of state.

President Trump flew to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin flew to Alaska because it was the only place he could fly without exposing himself to danger, there being an active war going on with Ukraine (and Ukraine’s war capabilities should not be underestimated). Also because most nations would never let Putin land on their territory should something untoward occur. It’s just a hop over the Bering Strait to get to Alaska, without overflying any other nation or entering its airspace. Trump met Putin’s plane and gave him a hero’s welcome.

That’s two rival nations, both nuclear powers, both more-or-less aligned to each other, and our president, as head of state, giving them the equivalent of a triumph on our soil.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would not leave his own soil, but Trump met him on Kim’s terms in 2019. The meeting seemed historic at the time, but as happens with the implacable North Korean government, it came to nothing. We should have learned.

That’s three rival, even hostile, nations aligned against us that have received honors from our head of state.

I am waiting for Trump to visit Tehran. I don’t think they’d meet him at the airport (except to end him). Or maybe he will invite the mullahs to Washington, or Camp David, to meet with him, as an alternative to his empty threats of annihilation. He can meet them at the airport.

These are not the acts of a statesman, or a person concerned with the issues affecting Americans, even the ones who have pumpkinified him. These are the actions of a nascent Caesar, a Claudius who wants to be Nero, but can’t decide.

Nero set fire to Rome and rejoiced at its burning. He threw tantrums when other kings who had shown fealty to Rome as allies turned on him. He fled when his own legions turned on him after he had ruined and murdered so many. Rome was a bloody place; but ruination is the same today as it was in those days.

President Trump has betrayed, humiliated, and harmed our allies, weakening our alliances, even to the point where our closest ally, Canada, has turned on him. The world loves the United States, just like the western world loved Rome in those days. But the world hates Trump.

My question is, how much longer will those who worship a gourd continue in their folly? How long will the Republican Party sit idly by while Claudius, or Nero, sets fire to everything it has worked to build?

Or will the party simply burn to the ground, and be replaced by something new? This November very well may mark the beginning of 40 years Democratic Party rule. If that happens, despite every effort, legal or extralegal, to stop it by Trump and his Trumpkins, we will find out if the pumpkin heads realize their god has been cast out of the hall of immortals, while still on this earth.

It would make vicious satire, if nothing else.

Leave a comment

Share

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket
Threads: https://www.threads.com/@theracketnews
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsracket.bsky.social

Our personal accounts on the platform now known as X:

David: https://x.com/captainkudzu
Steve: https://x.com/stevengberman
Jay: https://x.com/curmudgeon_NH

Share The Racket News ™