by Barry Hastings

While our idiot government is messing its collective pants over drones and lasers threatening the safety of passenger aircraft near just about every airport (often hundreds of times a week), the Japanese government developed a bigger, stronger drone, equipped with a rectangular hanging net, to snare unauthorized drones and bring them, or knock them, to the ground.

Kind of reminds me of a line I wrote a month or two ago: “Yeah, I’ve seen a couple of ’em.” “Well, for a big one, use Double ‘0’ buckshot — a smaller one, Number Six shot.” Just a (brilliant) thought.

Why not just ban sale of the damned things (lasers and drones), and solve the problem? “Why, you can’t do that, someone might want to attache a gun (or gun with laser sight) to his drone (so he can knock out a mosque…  or at least a couple of home-grown mullahs) — it would interfere with our Second Amendment rights. Who needs guns when the (cowardly) bastards can very cheaply make Molotov Cocktails.

Hell, there’s a ton of empty whiskey bottles all over vacant lots and run­down housing in our cities. And besides, gasoline is (currently) much cheaper than bullets (even .22 bullets), at a buck sixty-nine point nine a gallon. You can get more than six gallons for the price of a 100 rounds of CCI mini-mags. (Be prepared for rapidly rising or falling prices, though, cause it’s all determined weekly at area coffee klatches, by a flip of a coin.) The ‘K’ in ‘klatches is a nod to all those wonderful Republicans so attached to the ideals of the KKK.

I see where something over a thousand Californians (many of them babies and very young children), are feared to have been exposed to tuberculosis through a FUBAR at a medical clinic. Treatment for the disease is extremely dangerous for the very young, and can permanently damage their livers, and other critical organs. Oh, don’t be worried, it can’t happen here. Maybe.

Though there’s another problem in American medicine, involving Peace Corps volunteers going way back to origins (Kennedy Administration) of the outfit. It seems the medical claims of all those volunteers are handled and paid through the Department of Labor (no longer a high-visibility department, what with the utter demise of labor). Well, hundreds, if not thousands of those people are not getting the medical care they were promised, and have continuously been promised — some of them for upward of 50 years. So the Department of Labor and the Defense Department (in this respect) are Birds of a Feather. They’re not being denied care, just run around in endless, and meaningless, circles by those who (claim to) run the DOL. Many of them for many, many, many years. (Several appeared on the Charlie Rose morning show this week.) More ugly crap oozes out of our national cracks and crevices daily.

‘Nother big problem they’ll allow to fester ’til the system breaks is a looming shortage of commercial pilots. Many of them, working for the smaller “feeder” airlines, make less than half what a Grand Rapids City bus driver earns, yet it costs them something near $200,000 to gain enough education to fly the derned things. Huge numbers of commercial pilots (many thousands) are rapidly approaching age 65, the industy’s mandatory retirement age. At this rate, within a decade, we’ll have tens of thousands of aircraft, not a stinkin’ pilot to be found. Coming to an airport like the one you use. Very soon.

(Personally speaking, the only way you’d get me into the crowded skies with our Reagan-ruined Air Traffic Control System, is at gun point, and even then, I’d likely put up a good struggle.) Oh! Here’s an idea, give the pilots a title to make up for the low salaries. Got it! Call ’em Captain. That’ll make ’em quit whinin’ for a year or two, give ’em some stature. If you’re on an airplane at 40,000 feet and it stops working, it’s about five minutes to “slam-down.” That is long enough the become very pissed off at yourself for being there in the first place.

I stopped flying in big planes in 1988 after landing in Detroit on a flight from Boston, coming home for my daughter’s high school graduation. On the next runway over lay the burned-out skeleton of a large airplane that had crashed in Detroit a week earlier. I cashed in the return ticket, and took a train back to Boston, and a Provincetown-Boston Airways DC-3 back out to the island. Once, returning to the island from a weekend in the Big Apple, I awoke from a nap to find the old DC-3 flying at 500 (or so) feet above the Atlantic…  on one engine. Knowing the craft’s reputation for reliable flight on one engine, I wasn’t even worried, but found myself wishing I’d burned one before takeoff (and not an incense stick). If ya know what I mean, if ya get my drift, if ya see my point. We islanders always referred to PBA as, “Pretty Bad Airline.” But the old WWII DC-3 (some are still flying today) was a hell of an airplane. And in the winter, PBA took us round trip to NYC, or Bean Town, for $50 on weekends.

Hey! Have ya noticed all the money the military forces are spending on recruitment ads in newspapers, magazines on TV. The price of patriotism. Well, all the thieves, gang-bangers the Bush Administration took into the Army (in particular) to staff the Great Iraq Oil Exploration Project, added the damage done to better recruits through brain damage by IEDs, RPGs, and other military-related causes, has resulted in a record number of veterans living in the jails and prisons of America. Well, look at it this way, when they get out they’ll be both well-trained killers, and hold MA degrees in Criminal Enterprize.

We really need to bring back the draft.