Category Archives: Writing

January 25, 2019 · 10:43 am

Personally, I’ve had enough of the ACHDTB* Government Shutdown


The ACHDTB* Government Shutdown

As many of you know, I spent over 34 years of my life performing the duties of Air Traffic Control, and I’ve been training air traffic controllers since September, 2011. Also, I’m sure many of you have noticed that I seldom blog anything political. That’s by design. Because of the highly polarized political environment in which we find ourselves today, it just doesn’t pay to get in the crossfire.

But enough is enough. Today, a ground stop was initiated into LaGuardia Airport. Flow control restrictions have been implemented for Philadelphia International and Newark Liberty International. The reason? Not enough controllers showing up because many can no longer afford to go to work for zero pay. Today, by the way, marks the second payday in a row that controllers have received $0.00 on their pay statements. That’s over a month without one dime being paid to them for performing one of the most stressful jobs in existence.

And for what? No, not a wall, if that’s your answer. The wall was a non-issue for the two full years that Donald Trump had majorities in both houses of Congress. At any time Republican senators and congressmen could have inserted wall funding into any one of  dozens of bill reconciliations between the two houses of Congress, and there there would have been nothing Democrats could have done to prevent it. But even Republican senators knew an unguarded wall in a remote area is a waste of money, so they opted otherwise.

Indeed, as recently as December 19, a mere 38 days ago, President Trump was onboard with a short term spending bill passed by the Senate—a spending bill that had no funding for an extension of existing urban wall into remote areas. But a funny thing happened on the way to the House of Representatives. Ann Coulter publicly attacked Donald Trump. By the end of the day, President Trump reversed course, and on December 22 a quarter of the government went unfunded. Ironically, for someone who now claims the wall is essential to national security, the unfunded agencies include Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Coast Guard, the F.B.I., the U.S. Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and, yes, the Federal Aviation Administration and the air traffic controllers who work for it.

So, here we are some 35 days and two paychecks later. Air terminal passenger inspection stations are closing because TSA agents cannot afford gasoline to get to work. For the first time in history, a uniformed branch of the U.S. military is going unpaid. And, now, airports are experiencing delays, and even ground stops, because controllers are reaching their financial limits. If you think that’s bad, consider this: while controllers are considered essential, and must work even without pay, their support staff are not. Those staff employees are furloughed and sitting at home.

“So what,” you may ask. Well, next week is Super Bowl Sunday. And with Super Bowl Sunday arrive a lot of aircraft. Airliners. General aviation. Corporate aircraft, Air taxis. All streaming into (and later out of) Hartfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. As any controller who has worked aircraft on Super Bowl Sunday (or any major sporting event) can tell you, weeks and weeks of pre-planning and inter-facility coordination goes into handling the massive influx of aircraft that occurs during such an event. But the people who handle that planning and coordination have been furloughed since just before Christmas.

So, even if, by some miracle, staff were recalled tomorrow, the window of opportunity to provide for smooth air traffic operations during Super Bowl Sunday has long passed . . . assuming, of course, there are enough controllers around next week to even keep open Atlanta Int’l Control Tower, Atlanta Terminal Radar Approach Control, and the Atlanta Air Route Traffic Control Center. Without all three of those facilities operating at 100% and in a complete, coordinated harmony, total chaos in the skies within hundreds of miles of Atlanta’s airspace is a certainty.

And it’s going to get worse from here as the ACHDTB* Government Shutdown continues. Several air traffic controllers around the nation have already resigned, three from the Dallas-Fort Worth area today alone. Others, preparing to jump ship, have submitted applications to air traffic service providers operating overseas. One more missed paycheck, two on the outside, and my prediction is that the system collapses, taking with it some 5% of the U.S. economy.

Senator Mitch McConnell has the power to end the ACHDTB* Government Shutdown, but he’s afraid to buck the president. Senator McConnell could, tomorrow, put together a veto-proof majority to pass government funding to end the ACHDTB* Government Shutdown — a shutdown that we now know has nothing to do with a wall and everything to do with Donald Trump being publicly challenged by a woman.

But he won’t. And the *Ann Coulter-has-Donald Trump’s–Balls Government Shutdown continues as a direct result. Prepare for the crash.

 

© 2019 R. Doug Wicker
Permission to reprint with
attribution of the author is
granted to all

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December 28, 2018 · 11:40 am

Indentured Servitude is STILL alive and well in the U.S.


Back in October of 2013 I posted my most read blog article . . . by far. It garnered an astounding 7,368 views. And now, unfortunately, that article becomes timely once again. Only, this time, substitute President Donald J. Trump for any references that were previously made about Senator Ted Cruz (another absolutely despicable human being). And this time the hissy fit isn’t Obamacare. This time it is over a wall that nearly everyone acknowledges will neither add anything to national security, nor mitigate crossings along our border with Mexico, all at a cost that would eventually exceed $40 billion if completed along our entire southern flank. Besides, the president has had two years now to make Mexico pay for that wall, right?

And here is that reprinted article:

An Airport Traffic Control (ATC) Tower

An Airport Traffic Control Tower (ATCT)

Take it from a former controller who has in his 34 years in the business worked at some pretty busy facilities under less than ideal conditions with obsolete or failing equipment and uncooperative weather:  There are few if any jobs more stressful than air traffic control.  Period.  It’s certainly more stressful than being, say, a congressman or a senator.

Imagine working New York TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) during a busy inbound rush of air carriers, failing equipment, and a line of thunderstorms pushing into the area from the west.  Throw into that mix an inflight emergency or two and perhaps an aircraft with minimum fuel that needs to get on the ground right now.

Then let’s add to all that stress.

Let’s tell those controllers that they have to go to work, but a group of about thirty congressmen and a senator or two who didn’t agree with the results of the last election are going to refuse to allow the United States Congress to pay them.

These already overworked, stressed controllers have mortgages to make, utilities to pay, car payments, grocery bills, kids in college . . . but none of that makes any difference.  They are required by federal law to work.  For free.  Indefinitely.

Think that’s fair?  That’s what’s happening right now, this very second.  In New York.  In Dallas.  In Atlanta.  In Chicago.  In Los Angeles.  In myriad other busy facilities across this great nation.  All because of thirty-some-odd Congressmen and at least one delusional, grand-standing Senator from Texas who has ambitions beyond the senate seat he’s held for less than ten months.

Tomorrow, these controllers will be paid for only 48 of the 80 or more hours they worked — the 48 hours they worked before the shutdown that occurred just thirteen days ago.  Those controllers received that bad news when they got their “pay” statements last Thursday.  Two weeks from tomorrow the amount in their paychecks drops to Z-E-R-O despite working another 80 or more hours during the next pay period.

How long do you think you could financially hold on under such conditions?  How long do you think it’ll be before some of these controllers have to resign to find jobs that pay the bills?  How long do you think it’ll be before retirement-eligible controllers with 20 or 25+ years of badly needed experience and who are currently mentoring an already far-too-young and inexperienced group of new controllers decide that they should go into retirement just to pay the bills?  (Controllers, by the way, are only allowed to work to the last day of the month in which they turn 56 because of the stresses inherent to their jobs, and because before that reduction in the retirement age, very few controllers could make it to mandatory retirement because of failing health and deteriorating abilities and reaction times.  These are the professionals who your congressman is stiffing on pay for work they’ve already done.)

How long before that radar control room guiding your airliner is staffed like this?:

The Control Room of a Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON)

The Control Room of a Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON)

And while these people are working for free, I’d like for you to consider this:  Those congressmen?  The ones who before the last election proclaimed the 2012 elections a “referendum on Obamacare?”  The congressmen who are now having a temper tantrum because, at their core, they apparently only believe in democracy when it suits them?

Those congressmen work on average just two days out of every five-day workweek, earn at a minimum $174,000 a year (Speaker Boehner gets a whopping $223,500 for not doing his job), are vested for retirement benefits after only five years on what I laughingly call “the job,” get federally subsidized healthcare (which those thirty want to deny people who make one tenth as much as they), and they continue to receive those pay and all those benefits while your air traffic controllers are forced to do without.  Those congressmen certainly aren’t hurting financially during this self-induced “crisis,” but your air traffic controllers certainly are.

How dare any elected representative do this to employees who work for them?  How dare any elected representative put employees’ families through this kind of stress and uncertainty?  How dare anyone whose job is given to them by a democratic process repudiate the outcome of a democratic election because they do not agree with the results?

It is way past time to start reducing the stress levels of your already overstressed air traffic controllers, and to start raising the stress levels of your elected representative.  And if you live in the state of Texas, as do I, it’s way past time to tell the wealthy Senator Ted Cruz (55th wealthiest member of the U.S. Senate) that if he doesn’t agree with democracy, then it’s well beyond time to democratically terminate his employment come next election.

These people, quite frankly, disgust this former Republican who, effective October 1 of this year, no longer affiliates himself with what once was truly the Grand Old Party . . . but is no more.

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October 31, 2018 · 2:00 pm

Happy Halloween — The Apollyon Particle


 

The Apollyon Particle — A Halloween Tale of Terror

The Apollyon Particle — A Halloween Tale of Terror

Time for this year’s Halloween Story. If you enjoy it, please “Like” it below and spread the word. If you don’t, keep your mouth shut or suffer the wrath of Apollyon:

Friday, September 12, 2019

For immediate dissemination from Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN):

My name is Dr. Vlad Draken, and I led the team that brought us to this catastrophe. The following is a brief synopsis of how we arrived here, what Apollyon has brought forth, and why there is no way out for Mankind.

We should have known better after we found the Higgs Boson — the “God Particle” — but we let our hubris convince us that an opposing particle does not exist even though history told us otherwise. We naively believed that a particle with zero spin wouldn’t have a correlating antiparticle with negative zero spin.

But most of all we should have clued in on the mass of the Higgs — 126 gigaelectronvolts. If the Higgs weighed in at 126 GeV, so too would the corresponding antiparticle. And our ancestors warned us of the significance of 126, or any other number in the sequence: 1, 5, 35, 70, 126, 210, 330, 495 and so forth. Pentatope numbers. It is no coincidence that two out of every three pentatope numbers is a pentagonal number, even though 126 is not. Perhaps that is what led us to believe our search would end well — that while 126 is pentatope, it is not pentagonal. Alas, Satan does disguise himself, and we should have known because we were warned by that most ancient of symbols, La Clef de la Magie Noire — The Key to Black Magic, Satan’s Pentagram.

Past interactions between Mankind and naturally occurring Apollyon Bosons were fortunately transitory, for the Apollyon Boson was until last week a rapidly decaying particle with a duration measured in days to weeks, although the resulting contamination may run for years beyond the initial dimensional breach. This new CERN-created Apollyon Boson exhibits no such decay, even though the effects are the same as with previous historically documented encounters:

  • Lycanthropy encounters of 14th and 16th Centuries.
  • 12th Century accounts of Walter Map and William of Newburgh of vampirism in England.
  • The vampire encounters: Istria, 1672; East Prussia, 1792; the Habsburg Monarchy outbreak from 1725 to 1734 (and which nearly spread out of control to other areas); the early 18th Century Habsburg-related pandemic that engulfed Eastern Europe; the sporadic incidents of vampirism in late 18th Century-early 19th Century Rhode Island and Connecticut.
  • The Satanic possessions of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692-1693.
  • The 1611 Aix-en-Provence demonic possessions of Ursuline nuns.
  • The 1634 Loudun demonic possession of Ursuline nuns.
  • The 1647 Louviers Convent demonic possessions.

It was only following the Apollyon Particle dimensional rift near Geneva that we realized what we had unleashed — Hell on Earth. And this release of Satanic force is not confined to the CERN Euro-Asiatic breach. In keeping with the pentagonal aspect of the particle, other rifts developed simultaneously in four other global locations — on the North American Continent along the U.S.-Canadian border that has already engulfed both Detroit and Windsor; Paraguay, with demonic creatures already reported in neighboring Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil (Rio de Janeiro is being evacuated to the north); in Africa all contact has been lost from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and flesh-eating zombie-like manifestations are reported in the streets of Mutumba in Burundi; and a final rift reportedly developed between Adelaide and Melbourne. The last reports from these Australian cities before communication abruptly ceased indicated a joint infestation of both vampires and werewolves with cannibalistic attacks continuing unabated even after sunrise and in the absence of a full moon.

CERN concludes these rifts are irreversible and spreading exponentially. It is estimated that Mankind has less than seventeen hours remaining before being completely overtaken by forces of evil heretofore considered mythical in nature.

History will forever tie my name to this catastrophe, but according to our calculations history ends at 06:06:06 tomorrow.

Copyright © 2018 R. Doug Wicker
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