Day: February 1, 2025

The relentlessly woke HE comment-threader Glen Runciter has rhetorically shot himself in the foot.

Here’s something Runciter posted earlier today about Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, who was apparently piloting the Blackhawk helicopter when it smashed into a commercial jet last Wednesday evening, resulting in her immediate death along with two fellow soldiers plus 64 people on the jet.

Has everyone read the above carefully?

Runciter has stated that because Lobach was objectively well-qualified, she was, in his words, “clearly not a DEI hire.”

Repeating for emphasis: Wokey-woke Runciter has admitted that being well qualified = not DEI.

Put another way, he’d just admitted that DEI is synonymous with lower qualifications.

HE to Runciter: Given this admission, how exactly would you define DEI?

CBS News has reported that two bodies — a man and a woman — were recovered yesterday (i.e., Friday) from the wreckage of the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into a commercial airplane near Reagan Airport three days ago.

The deceased woman was the phantom co-pilot who was commanding the Blackhawk — “phantom” becauese the Army isn’t releasing her name at the request of her family. The apparent idea is to keep her identity an indefinite secret.

Why the mysterious suppression of this woman’s identity? As the unnamed woman was reportedly piloting the chopper, she was almost certainly to blame for the recent Potomac tragedy.  Her family is presumably concerned about some sort of negative blowback, but who knows?

The other body is believed to be that of Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Loyd Eaves. The body of the third member of the flight, Staff. Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, was recovered a day or two ago.

I wrestled this morning with whether or not to discuss this situation. Was there any way I could write about the phantom female pilot, I asked myself, without sounding like a MAGA asshat, which I really don’t believe myself to be?  (I’m a sensible left-centrist.) What is the soundest explanation for the family’s no-name request? I’m asking.

Before watching last night’s Real Time With Bill Maher episode (actually the Overtime segment), I had never heard the above term.

It was uttered (coined?) by novelist Max Brooks (“World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War”).

Brooks at 6:25 mark: “[Trump’s recent pardoning of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, which in the early teens became the first modern darknet market or “the Amazon of drugs”] is part of the bigger picture, which is the rise of crypto, which is the ultimate dark money…the super-rich are going to run everything.”