As the sky was still a vast expanse of blue and the ground still a patchwork of green, grey, and occasional glints of water, there came a time when maniacs ruled. Not the kind you’d see in old horror flicks, with wide eyes and wild hair, but the kind who wore suits and ties, and smiled reassuringly on your screen. They were the high priests of Anarcho-Tyranny, a term I borrowed from a writer in a different timeline, to describe the unique blend of chaos and control they wielded with the deftness of a maestro.

Their latest symphony was the managed decline of aviation. It began subtly, as these things often do. A new regulation here, a tax there, all in the name of safety and sustainability. The public nodded along, for who could argue against safety? Who would dare stand against the noble cause of protecting our planet?

The modern left, a term as malleable as it was misleading, had long declared their disdain for air travel. It was a symbol of a bygone era where people had the freedom to move about without permission. In their eyes, the people should remain grounded, both figuratively and literally. Fear was a currency they traded in, and the populace, bombarded with daily doses of impending doom, bought it in bulk.

I realized we were ruled by maniacs not when they started to dismantle the aviation industry, but when they began to sell the decline as an achievement. The narrative was masterful, a story of sacrifice for the greater good, of a return to a simpler, more grounded way of life. But beneath the veneer of altruism, there was something far more sinister at play.

The world was to shrink as the skies emptied. People, once connected by a network of steel birds that soared across time zones, would become increasingly isolated. The global village crumbled, replaced by insular communities, suspicious and unaware of the outside world which would be replaced by propaganda, fake AI images, and controlled access to information about alternatives to their tightly restricted 15-minute city. The maniacs in their high towers preached about the virtues of this new world, but their words rang hollow. The cracks in their narrative began to show, revealing the ulterior motives that lurked beneath.

They spoke of protecting the environment, but their actions reeked of control. There was no problem in need of a solution, and the proposed solutions noticeably reduced quality — the purpose of their policies. The world became a game board, and they, the players, moved the pieces at their whim, dictating who could go where and when.

In their quest for power, they created problems where none existed. The aviation industry, once a marvel of human ingenuity and a symbol of progress, was now painted as the villain in their story. They dismantled it piece by piece, not to save the planet, but to reshape society in their image – a society where fear was the norm, and submission the only acceptable response.

People were scared, and rightfully so. But not of the climate or the crumbling of old systems. They were scared of the new world order that was emerging from the shadows, a world where freedom was a relic of the past, and every aspect of life was micromanaged by those who claimed to know better.

The modern left, or whatever they chose to call themselves, were clear in their intentions. They masked their authoritarian measures in the cloak of environmentalism and public safety, but their eyes gleamed with the lust for power. They didn’t just want to stop air travel; they wanted to restrict movement and glimpsing alternatives to their rule, to reverse the clock and return to a time where the masses were ignorant and easy to control.

As the skies grew silent and the world shrank, a realization dawned on me. We were not just witnessing the managed decline of aviation; we were witnessing the managed decline of civilization itself. In their quest for power, the maniacs had set us on a path to a new Dark Age, where fear ruled supreme and the human spirit was shackled.

But in every story of decline, there lies a seed of resistance. In hushed tones and secret gatherings, people began to whisper of a different future, a future where the skies were filled with steel birds transporting people to their desired destinations and the spirit of freedom soared high. The maniacs may have had their hour, but the final chapter was yet to be written.

It was a Tuesday, I think, when they announced the new policy. Tuesdays have a way of sneaking up on you with bad news, don’t they? The policy, draped in the language of progress and equality, was anything but. The powers-that-be had a new plan: to revolutionize the aviation industry, this time under the banner of DEI – Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

The idea was simple, yet profoundly misguided. They decided that the problem with pilots wasn’t their skill or experience – no, it was their lack of diversity. So, in a stroke of what they must have thought was genius, they announced a new initiative. Experienced and skilled pilots, predominantly white, were suddenly deemed a problem, a relic of an unequal past. They would be replaced, not by the next best set of skilled aviators, but by a group chosen solely for their diversity credentials.

To facilitate this, they turned to colleges, ones where the average SAT score hovered around 920. These institutions, languishing in the lowest echelons of academic achievement, were now the breeding grounds for our future pilots. These pilots, it was proudly proclaimed, would have an average IQ around 85-90. The message was clear: competence was out, diversity was in.

As a lover of absurdity, I couldn’t help but see the dark humor in it. Here we were, entrusting our lives, our safety in the skies, to individuals selected not for their ability to navigate the heavens, but for their ability to tick a box on a diversity checklist. These new pilots, in addition to being inexperienced, were ill-equipped for the rigors of aviation. The disciplined routine safety checks, the critical problem-solving skills needed for emergencies – these were beyond their ken.

The result was predictable, and yet, the public seemed bewildered by it. The skies, once a realm of precision and professionalism, became a circus of incompetence. Flights, on the rare occasion they weren’t canceled, were exercises in anxiety. Passengers boarded planes not with a sense of adventure, but with resignation, as if stepping onto a rickety old roller coaster with an apathetic teenager at the controls.

The pilots, bless their hearts, were as disorganized as they were dull. They fumbled through pre-flight checks with a mix of confusion and indifference. In the cockpit, they were more likely to be found wrestling with the basics of the control panel than smoothly guiding the aircraft through the clouds. Emergencies, once handled with cool-headed expertise, turned into chaotic ordeals, with pilots as lost as their passengers.

It was anarcho-tyranny in its most absurd form. The rulers, sitting in their high towers, had decided to gamble with thousands of lives, all for the sake of adhering to a dogmatic vision of society. They cloaked their madness in the language of virtue, but what virtue is there in risking lives on the altar of ideology?

The skies, once a symbol of human achievement and freedom, became a symbol of this new, twisted reality. The once-great airlines, complicit in this madness, churned out press releases celebrating their commitment to diversity, even as their planes sat empty, their customers driven away by fear and frustration.

In this world turned upside down, where up was down and incompetence was celebrated, a quiet rebellion began to simmer. People, ordinary people who longed for the days when skill and merit guided our way, started to whisper. They whispered of a return to sanity, a world where pilots were chosen for their ability to fly, not their demographic profile.

But whispers are just that, whispers. As the skies grew more chaotic and the world more absurd, the question on everyone’s lips was the same: How long before the whispers become a roar? How long before the people take back their skies, their safety, their sanity?

In a world ruled by maniacs, the answer was anyone’s guess. But one thing was certain: the skies would never be the same again.

And so it came to pass, in this topsy-turvy world, that the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, unveiled their latest masterpiece of madness. They called it an initiative, a word that once implied progress and improvement. But in the hands of the maniacs, it was nothing more than a euphemism for further descent into absurdity.

Their plan was as diabolical as it was simple: replace mentally stable employees with individuals suffering from “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems, and an array of other mental and physical conditions. The rationale, cloaked in the doublespeak of benevolence and inclusivity, was a thinly veiled attempt to manipulate statistics and budgets.

You see, by shifting these individuals onto a government payroll, they cleverly circumvented statistics on growing disability benefits to an increasingly unhealthy public ruined by decades of incompetent leadership. It was a move that would make any dystopian novelist blush. The public, already numbed by the relentless onslaught of insanity, barely raised an eyebrow. The quality of service, the functionality of our once-great institutions, was of no concern to the rulers. Their goal was to hide the defects, the rot that had set in, not to provide good service.

The airports, already shadows of their former selves, became theaters of the absurd. Employees, tasked with maintaining the safety and efficiency of air travel, were now a mix of the incapable and the unstable. The results were predictably disastrous. Check-in counters became scenes of confusion and chaos, with employees often as lost and befuddled as the passengers they were supposed to assist.

In the control towers, the situation was even more dire. Air traffic controllers, once the epitome of focus and competence, were replaced by individuals who struggled with the basic demands of existing and were totally unfit for their assigned job. The skies, already dangerous due to the ineptitude of the pilots, became even more perilous. It was a miracle that accidents weren’t more frequent.

But perhaps the most tragic aspect of this whole charade was the impact on the employees themselves. Placed in well paid positions for which they were wholly unsuited, they floundered. It was a cruel joke played at their expense, a mockery of their capabilities and limitations. They were pawns in a game of bureaucratic chess, sacrificed for the sake of appearances.

The public, slowly but surely, began to wake up to the nightmare. The decline in quality, the blatant disregard for safety and competence, became impossible to ignore. The whispers of dissent grew louder, coalescing into a chorus of outrage. People demanded change, a return to a world where merit and ability mattered, where safety and sanity were more than just words in a forgotten dictionary.

But the maniacs in their towers were deaf to these cries. They had constructed a world in their image, a world where up was down, where incompetence was celebrated, and where the very idea of functionality was an anachronism. They had sown the seeds of their own destruction, but in their hubris, they failed to see the storm they had conjured.

The skies, once a canvas for human ambition and dreams, were now a bleak reminder of how far we had fallen. Planes, once symbols of freedom and safe connection, began to frequently crash, land at the wrong airports, were grounded, or flew half-empty, piloted by the unskilled and guided by the unstable. Airports, once bustling hubs of activity, were now mazes of fear and confusion, staffed by those unable to navigate their own responsibilities.

In this new world, the absurd had become the norm, and the competent were relics of a bygone era. It was a world turned upside down, where the guardians of the sky were the architects of its downfall.

Yet, even in the darkest of times, there is a glimmer of hope. Amidst the chaos and decay, a movement was born. A movement of people, ordinary people, who longed for the days when flying was a joy, not a gamble. They rallied under a simple yet powerful banner: “Bring Back the Skies.”

Their message was clear – enough of the madness, enough of the incompetence. They demanded a return to a world where skill mattered, where safety was paramount, and where flying was a testament to human ingenuity, not a showcase of human folly.

The Federal Aviation Administration is actively recruiting workers who suffer “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.

“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s website states. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

https://nypost.com/2024/01/14/news/faas-diversity-push-includes-hiring-people-with-intellectual-and-psychiatric-disabilities/

In the strange and twisted carnival that our world had become, the next act was almost predictable. The media, ever hungry for a spectacle, found their new obsession: the drama of the skies. Every hiccup, every stutter of a jet engine, every minor inconvenience was suddenly front-page news, breaking alerts bombarding our screens with the urgency of a world-ending event.

It was as if the entire media apparatus had been lying in wait, salivating for the chance to turn the skies into their personal soap opera. And so, they did. Every minor episode with any commercial passenger jet was blown out of proportion, turned into a gripping saga of danger and incompetence. A failed engine, a cracked window, a landing gear that balked at its job – these became the central characters in the daily drama that unfolded in the air.

This wasn’t journalism; it was fearmongering dressed up as news. Whatever the safety level of aviation, even in its diminished state, the narrative of fear was used to push media stories and boost ratings. And so, the media feasted on it, stoking the fires of anxiety with every report, every incident, no matter how insignificant.

Before long, the world was introduced to the latest tool in the media’s arsenal of terror: the map. It was a high-tech, interactive monstrosity, displaying in real-time every single minor or major problem on every jet across the globe. It was like the COVID maps, those relics of a previous crisis, but for planes. Red dots, yellow dots, blinking and steady, covered the screen, each representing a supposed brush with disaster.

The map was mesmerizing in its horror, a constant reminder of the perceived peril that lurked in the skies. It played on our screens, in our living rooms, in airport lounges – a never-ending stream of supposed near-misses and catastrophes. The message was clear: flying was a gamble, a risk that only the foolhardy would take.

Confirmation bias kicked in with a vengeance. Every incident, no matter how routine or easily resolved, was seen as proof of the insanity of the DEI policies, the incompetence of the new breed of pilots and controllers. The skies were no longer a realm of freedom and adventure; they were a minefield, fraught with danger at every turn.

But amidst this orchestrated hysteria, a few voices dared to speak out. They pointed out the manipulation, the blatant use of fear to drive a narrative. They reminded us that the skies used to be safe, could be made safe again if DEI policies were reversed, and that incidents were blown out of proportion by the media and anxiety ridden social media posters. The map was not a tool of information, but of terror.

These voices were few and often drowned out by the cacophony of fear, but they persisted. They spoke of reason, of perspective, of the need to see beyond the sensationalism and return to reality. They reminded us that the media, in its thirst for drama, had turned the skies into a theater of the absurd, a spectacle where the truth was lost in a sea of sensationalism.

But the damage was done. The public, bombarded day and night with images of blinking red dots and breaking news alerts, grew increasingly fearful of flying. The aviation industry, already battered by the madness of the DEI policies, faced a new crisis: a crisis of confidence. People chose to drive or take trains, shunning the skies as if they were haunted by some malevolent force. This is what the rulers had intended all along. Soon they planned to restrict cars and trains too.

In the grand theater of the absurd that our world had become, the curtain rose on the next act, revealing a scene both chaotic and all too familiar. The rulers, those puppet masters of panic, had set the stage for a new kind of drama, one where the skies were no longer a realm of escape but a source of unending anxiety.

Passenger fear had become the norm. The mere whisper of a delay, a mechanical hiccup, or a bumpy ride was enough to send ripples of panic through the web of social media. Every minor incident, every trivial inconvenience was amplified, echoed, and re-echoed across the digital universe, turning the act of flying into a collective experience of dread.

The rulers, in their relentless quest to reshape our world, seemed hell-bent on creating a narrative arc that would lead to the end of commercial aviation. They spun tales of danger and despair, painting a future where air travel was a relic of a bygone era, a luxury too risky for the common folk. In this bleak vision, our children would grow up with their feet firmly planted on the ground, their dreams of soaring through the skies nothing more than fanciful whimsies.

But as often happens in the darkest of tales, a glimmer of hope flickered in the shadows. This hope came not from a hero clad in armor, but from the cold, unfeeling circuits of machines. Automation, long a specter looming over the horizon, emerged as the unexpected savior of aviation.

The idea was simple, yet profound: replace the chaos of human error with the precision of automated systems. Just as the high wages in fast food and agricultural sectors had ushered in an era of robotic workers, so too could the insanity of the skies be cured by the steady hand of automation.

This new breed of automated planes would be immune to the follies of the mentally ill and the incompetent. They would fly with a consistency and safety that no human pilot, no matter how skilled, could match. The skies would be reclaimed, not by wresting control from the rulers, but by rendering their mad policies irrelevant.

The public, initially skeptical, began to warm to the idea. Here was a solution that promised to restore the safety and reliability of air travel, to counter the narrative of fear with a narrative of progress. The automated planes, with their sleek designs and unfailing algorithms, became symbols of hope, of a future where the skies were once again open to all.

As the first of these automated planes took to the air, a collective sigh of relief seemed to echo across the world. The media, ever hungry for a story, shifted their narrative. The tales of terror and incompetence gave way to stories of technological marvels, of machines that flew with a grace and precision that bordered on the artistic.

And yet, amidst this wave of optimism, there were those who mourned the passing of an era. They spoke of the romance of flying, of the human touch that had once guided these metal birds through the heavens. They whispered of a world that was becoming increasingly sterile, increasingly detached, where the wonders of human skill and ingenuity were slowly being forgotten.

But these voices were drowned out by the roar of jet engines, by the hum of computers and the whirr of machinery. The skies were busier than ever, filled with the steady, reliable drone of automated aircraft. Airports, once scenes of chaos and confusion, became models of efficiency, with machines handling everything from check-in to baggage handling.

The rulers, those architects of chaos, found themselves outmaneuvered. Their attempts to dissuade us from flying, to destroy the very essence of air travel, were thwarted not by protests or revolutions, but by the quiet, inexorable march of technology.

In this new world, where machines ruled the skies, there was a sense of loss, of something intangible that had slipped away. But there was also a sense of triumph, a sense that, despite the best efforts of the rulers, the human spirit had found a way to soar once more.

The story of aviation had taken an unexpected turn, but the destination remained the same. We still looked to the skies with wonder and longing, still dreamed of distant horizons and unexplored realms. The planes that took us there were no longer piloted by humans, but the dreams they carried were as human as ever.

And so, as we gazed upward at the automated guardians of the sky, we realized that in our quest to reclaim the heavens, we had not lost our way, but had found a new path, one that led us through the clouds and beyond the reach of those who sought to keep us grounded. We had discovered that in the face of madness and folly, our salvation lay not in fighting the old, but in embracing the new.

The automated planes, soaring high above, were more than just machines. They were symbols of our resilience, of our ability to adapt and overcome. They were proof that even in a world ruled by the absurd, there is always a way forward, a way to rise above the chaos and reach for the stars.

In this new era of automated flight, we found not just safety and efficiency, but a renewed sense of wonder. We looked to the skies with fresh eyes, eyes that saw not the end of an era, but the beginning of a new chapter, a chapter where the skies were once again a place of endless possibilities, a canvas for our dreams and aspirations.

And in that realization, we found our true freedom, not in the skies above, but in the unyielding spirit within.