Odd Is My Co-Pilot

United Airlines has announced a new diversity initiative intended to guarantee that 8 years from now, fully half of their new pilots will be women and people of color. So far, there is no word on how many will be illegal aliens, LGBTQ+ (who will naturally fly biplanes), or Uber drivers looking for a side gig.

Currently, women and people of color represent a relatively small percentage of airline pilots, which can apparently be blamed entirely on the racist and sexist attitudes of airline HR departments that use job applications with trick questions like "do you know how to fly?"

Only kidding, of course. The real reason for the under-representation, according to a United Airlines employee who wishes to remain imaginary, is "black applicants don't have any I.D. and women can't commit the time to pilot training because of their unwanted pregnancies." Situations which, tragically, didn't improve under Donald Trump.

Of course, we'd personally be fine with pilots of any color or gender as long as they were in the cockpit solely because of merit. But affirmative action programs have painfully taught us that this isn't how the system really works. In order to hit the right numbers for quotas/goals, standards will always be lowered. Unlike the landing gear when these new pilots turn routine landings into tragic headlines.

IN MEMORIAM: Rem1875 & Judi King

We're sad to report the passing of longtime reader and commenter Rem1875. Joe, his actual name, was a regular (that's a word used with love and respect here) who could always be counted on to add wit, wisdom, or probably both to any conversational topic. You can read additional details at this link.

We've subsequently learned of the passing of Judi King, who has likewise been a cherished presence here on the blog. Both of them will be greatly missed.

Fair To Maudlin

 You know the drill by now. We didn't want anything to do with the news, which is why we're posting this instead...

...and because the journalistic importance of "padding" can hardly be overstated, here are some random bits and pieces of Wednesday-ish stuff:

• Ladybug the pitbull (Penny's second-in-command) is recovering splendidly from her recent leg surgery, and is actually ahead of the curve. She has no discomfort at all and our biggest therapeutic duty will be keeping her from running around like a Tasmanian devil for the next couple of months.

• We just received another letter from the Social Security Administration saying that Mrs. J's monthly payment is being withheld (again) because she has overdue Medicare premium payments on the books. We already wasted a couple of hours of our life on this last month and established that we are in fact paying the premiums directly from her Social Security benefit and paying the premium by check, so have been double-paying for quite a while and they actually owe us a refund of hundreds of dollars. We haven't called them to complain again yet, because experience tells us there will be no satisfactory conclusion anyway.

• Speaking of governmental incompetence, we've still found no way for Daughter J to get a Texas driver's license until mid-August (the DMV only allows you in by appointment and, thanks to Covid, appointments take about six months)...meaning she can't work until then. Are illegal aliens waiting this long to be given a driver's license? We wouldn't bet on it.

• We're hearing a lot of BS about the difficulty of obtaining photo IDs for certain segments of society and wonder why no one has taken action on the obvious solution we suggested back in 2014:

Just Another Mish-Mash Monday

Discerning readers (and if you're here, that's you) may be aware of a subtle shift in the tenor of the Stilton's Place blog following the events of last (alleged) election day. We no longer really provide in depth coverage and analysis of current events, but rather just get within spitting distance of the news. And we mean that literally - we just get near enough to news stories to vigorously hock up big, wet mucousy phlegm wads and spit it right on them.  Because that's all the "news" deserves these days.

Let's look at the gob-covered stories listed above...

• In Washington, a black man, theoretically deranged from repeated football concussions and exposure to the rantings of Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan, rammed his car into two policemen (killing one) and a concrete barrier before waving a knife around and getting shot deader than a mackerel. This is a horrible story...but it's not a big one. A crazy lone wolf did a horrible thing and now he's dead. Yet politicians and the "news" media are more or less calling this "insurrection two" (ignoring the fact that there was no "insurrection one") and citing it as evidence that our nation's capital needs to remain a guarded military outpost. Unlike, oh, our southern border.

• Hunter "Foot Job" Biden has just released his autobiography, which is titled "Beautiful Things" because "Child Molesting, Crack Smoking, and Bribery" didn't test as well with publishers (although it will likely still be the name of the eventual movie). Not to put too fine a point on it, but Hunter Biden is human scum, due at least in part to the fact that his father more or less abandoned him (after Hunter's mother and sister were killed in a car accident that the boy and his brother, Beau, survived) to devote himself to politics full time. Not that anything good ever came out of it, other than giving Joe the chance to sniff a lot of women's hair...and likely worse.

• Major League Baseball is moving its All-Star Game out of Atlanta, Georgia because the state wants to ensure legitimate elections by requiring voter ID. Which, apparently, no black person in Georgia has or is able to figure out how to acquire. Of course, the MLB itself requires people to produce ID to pick up their "will call" baseball tickets. But hey, who are we to criticize them for loathing black people? 

• Do we really need to say anything at all about what an offensive idiot AOC is? She apparently wants U.S. taxpayers to cough up "reparations" to illegal aliens because...well...we don't know why and we don't effing care. Meanwhile, small children are being dropped over the border wall (recent video shows a 3-year-old and 5-year-old girl being dropped from a 14-foot high wall to thud heavily onto American soil). Theoretically, that's the sort of thing that Kamala Harris should be looking into, but she's apparently too busy laughing hysterically and supervising the remodeling of her vice-presidential quarters. Not that she plans to stay in them long.

• The George Floyd trial continues to drag along, setting the stage for a fresh round of rioting and outrage no matter what verdict comes in. Adding to the merriment, Cher recently tweeted that if she'd been present at Floyd's final encounter with the police, she could have saved his life. Which, appropriately, got her spanked by the Left for presenting herself as a Great White Savior for black people incapable of determining their own fates.  Cher is sticking to her metaphorical guns, although she hasn't yet clarified just how she would have saved George Floyd after climbing into her time machine. Presumably she might have told him not to try passing any counterfeit money that day. Or advise him to simply get in the back of a police cruiser when asked to. Or maybe she would have suggested that he not take a potentially-lethal dose of drugs. But we do know what she wouldn't have done: just STFU.

Okay, end of rant for today. But seriously, we're holding the "news" at arm's length until further notice. Which fortunately still leaves one hand free for pinching our nose.