Tag Archives: Safety

Lucky and Good, by Patrick Smith

Posted on March 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

Near misses are highlighting just how safe air travel has been . . . and how that’s been taken for granted. From Patrick Smith at askthepilot.com:

A FLURRY of recent close calls finds us nervous. There were near misses on runways in New York, Boston, and Austin. A United Airlines jet plunged to within 800 feet of the ocean after takeoff from Maui. And so on.

The billion-dollar question is, are these incidents symptoms of something gone rotten, or a spate of bad luck? Are they harbingers of disaster, or outliers?

Much discussed are staffing woes both at the airlines and air traffic control. The post-pandemic aviation world is operating at maximum capacity, but with lesser levels of experience and expertise. The job losses during COVID aren’t just measured in raw numbers; there was a brain-drain as well, as many senior employees took early-retirement packages. Now, thousands of new-hire employees are being taken on: pilots, cabin crew, controllers, dispatchers, schedulers, mechanics. They find themselves in a high-stress environment where learning curves are steep and mistakes can be unforgiving or worse.

Whatever the root causes, it’s been alarming enough to gather the FAA and airline officials in an aviation safety summit taking place this week in Washington.

And that’s a good thing. Surely it’s better to be digging into things now, rather than after there’s a catastrophe that kills 250 people. It’s all about being proactive; identifying weaknesses in the safety chain, and fixing them.

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why eliminating the FDA and CDC would probably make the public safer, by el gato malo

Posted on February 21, 2023 | 1 comment

The marketplace and the flow of information have always been the best regulators. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

A false sense of safety is more dangerous than knowing you’re at risk

i’ve used this analogy before, but it remains germane, so bear with me while i frame this:

playing NFL football is dangerous.

playing NFL football without a helmet (when everyone else has one) would be far more dangerous.

but most dangerous of all is this: playing while THINKING you have a helmet when in fact you do not.

that is going to get you killed.

like, immediately.

even if you had no helmet, knowing it would change the way you behaved, the risks you took. maybe you wouldn’t play at all.

but thinking you’re protected when you are not? that’s how you make your very last bad choice…

having a fake helmet made of paper mâché is a literal recipe for quadriplegia.

pretty much anyone can see that.

and yet oddly, very few people seem willing or able to rotate this shape and ask “hey, are our regulatory agencies maybe working just like that?”

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Hardening Soft Targets, by Eric Peters

Posted on May 26, 2022 | Leave a comment

Worried about your kids’ safety in public schools? Take them out and home-school them. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Now the cry erupts for more armed guards in government (not “public”) schools, so that there will be more guns in government schools, so as to shoot back in the event a shooter attempts to shoot up another government school. But there is a much better, much more foundational way to deal with the problem of government schools being the soft-targets of choice of soft-headed people:

Get your kids out of government schools.

And not just because they are soft targets. Do it because government schools are the places where soft-headed people are created. Not just intellectually, either – although government “schools” do their best to stunt the development of critical thinking in favor of critical race theory and other orthodoxies that must be truckled to.

Government schools are emotional wastelands.

Instead of family and friends – people your kid knows and whom the kid knows cares about them – random strangers constantly changing, from classmates to the teachers – some of whom may care but not in the way a kid’s actual parents do (or ought to). Your kid is one of the herd, herded along from class to class, among kids he may not really know and whom you, the parent, are even less likely to know much about, if anything.

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Driving 55, Again? By Eric Peters

Posted on March 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

Driving 55 mph on a freeway is like listening to a Biden or Harris speech. You know it will eventually be over, but every minute seems more like ten as your mind wanders to far corners of the earth. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

If it feels like 1974 all over again – for those who remember 1974 – just wait. Soon we may be driving like it’s 1974 again.

As in 55.

Or even slower.  Maybe not at all. 

Among the ways being floated to deal with the deliberately engineered doubling – perhaps soon tripling – of the cost of a gallon of gas by a regime that promised it would do exactly that is to bring back the National Maximum Speed Limit of 55 MPH.

Or something very much like it.

Millennials and younger won’t remember what it was like to take a walk on the highway. To drive slower on the highway than one drove on many secondary roads. For a 200 mile drive to take four hours rather than three. To live in constant fear of being hassled and mulcted by an armed government worker for driving at speeds that had been legal speeds.

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By Way of Analogy . . ., by Eric Peters

Posted on November 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

Every person any of us cross paths with during our lifetimes poses some risk of transmitting a disease to us. It’s one of the risks we live with because not to do so would pose intolerable costs and destroy freedom. Safety never has been and never can be an absolute. Why Covid became “special” may be a question eventually answered in a Nuremberg-like proceeding someday. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Analogies are more than just another way of saying the same thing. They are a way to explain the essential meaning of a thing.

Here’s one that may help those who don’t understand the opposition of many healthy people to anyone being forced to submit to an injection – of anything – but in this case (the test case, so to speak) of drugs they don’t need for a sickness they haven’t got, to ease the fears of people who’ve become sick in another way:

Imagine a person who is terrified of mental illness. Who obsessively worries that those around him – it could be anyone! – might be deranged or becoming so. That they pose a current and ongoing threat, since they just might lose it and do something crazy.

Even though they haven’t. Even if they haven’t given any reason to suspect they might.

It is the possibility – hysterically exaggerated, within their minds – which alarms.

This person who is terrified of the possibility of mental illness demands that everyone be regularly tested for signs of mental illness to make them feel “safe.” Also that everyone be forced to take psychiatric drugs – just in case and to “stop the spread” – even if they haven’t “tested positive” for mental illness.

Because you never know – and if it saves even one life.

Those who object are selfish people. They don’t care. They are putting us all at risk!

If they refuse to be tested – and refuse the psych meds – fire them from their jobs for “noncompliance,” forcibly ostracize them from public life, deny them access to food and perhaps even forcibly take these terrible people into custody for “treatment”  . . . so as to “keep us safe” and for “the good of the community.”

Would you be ok with that?

If not, then why be ok with this sick insistence that everyone be presumed physically ill? Not just right now – but forever?

 It doesn’t matter – to the people who take this view – that you’re healthy today.

You might not be tomorrow. You could become sick. You might spread what you could get . . . just like you (anyone) might become sick in the head tomorrow, even though you seem (even if you are) just fine today. You might decide to shoot up your workplace, tomorrow – or a school!

We can never be  . . . too safe.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Science, Tyranny

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Your “Driver Safety Score”, by Eric Peters

Posted on October 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

Undoubtedly the driver safety score will be factored into the social credit system. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

One of the greatest – most pernicious – cons associated with car insurance (beyond people being forced to buy car insurance) is that you will “save money” by having the cost of the insurance you’re forced to buy based on how you drive.

The mistaken assumption being that if you are a “safe” driver then you will pay less. In fact, you will pay more – unless you are an obedient driver. One who always drives the speed limit – no faster. Does not accelerate – or brake – faster, in a manner the insurance mafia deems “aggressive.” One who stops – completely – at every stop sign and signals every time he turns.

Even when there is no one around to see him do it.

That’s how you’ll “save money”  . . . if you fall for the con.

Ask anyone who drives commercially as most are already under this regime of electronic monitoring of everything they do behind the wheel – including how long they’re behind the wheel and also when. If it’s late in the evening – or too early in the morning.

If it’s raining. Or snowing.

Anything the company doesn’t like can cost them their job – and all their money.

Elon Musk has the same in mind for you.

In addition to the electric car con, he is getting into the insurance con. Both work together well as the electric car is also the electronic car and thus perfectly suited to monitor – and report – your “safe” driving habits.

Musk says what you’ll be forced to pay him (and all the “five families” that comprise the insurance mafia, who are working hard and in concert to make electronic, real-time driver monitoring mandatory, too) will be based upon a Driver Safety Score.

Can you guess how it will be scored?

In a Tesla, if the car’s electronic “safety” systems clang on – e.g., Forward Collision Warning and Automated Emergency Braking – then you will be dunned for “unsafe” driving. You should know that all new cars – not just Teslas and not just electric cars – have similar “safety” electronics as part of their standard equipment package.

You cannot opt out.

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Elon’s Test Track, by Eric Peters

Posted on May 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

Elon’s test track is anywhere a Tesla owner wants to drive, or anywhere the autopilot wants to drive. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Who gets the blame when the government knowingly allows the public roads to be used as a test-track for dangerous technologies?

That’s the question which the federal “safety” apparat – the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – will probably not be asking itself as it “probes” the self-crashing cars electric car manufacturer Tesla has been testing on public roads  . .  with living crash test dummies.

Tesla has never hidden that it offers self-crashing technology; it simply advertises it as “self-driving” capability, styled Autopilot.  It has been offering it for years. The media has been reporting on it for years. The crashes – and deaths – have been happening for years. Most recently in Texas about a week ago, when a 2019 Model S equipped with Tesla’s Autopilot system left the road “at a high rate of speed” and self-drove into a tree.

Two men were killed. Apparently, neither one was in the driver’s seat.

This is not, however, the first time.

Or the tenth time.

There have been at least two dozen other crashes over the past several years involving Teslas equipped with Autopilot technology. Videos have been posted to social media of people literally asleep behind the wheel of their Teslas. On purpose. Some of these have hundreds of thousands of views and made national network news. Owners openly brag about not driving their cars.

If NHTSA wasn’t aware there might be a problem with AutoPilot, Rip Van Winkle phone home.

NHTSA, of course, is perfectly aware. It is merely selective about “safety” – calling into question whether that is its raison d’ etre  . . . or its excuse.

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Will the Pandemic Panic Card Win in 2020? by James Bovard

Posted on October 3, 2020 | Leave a comment

Lock yourself in a padded cell while wearing a straight jacket and you’ll be safe. There’s more to life than safety, but some people vote as if that’s all that mattered. From James Bovard at aier.org:

“People want to be safe,” Joe Biden repeatedly declared in Tuesday night’s debate. The 2020 presidential race could turn into a referendum on whether vastly increasing government power can provide “freedom from fear.” This has been a recurring theme in recent American history that consistently brings out the worst in both politicians and voters.

The 2020 presidential campaign thus far has plenty of unpleasant parallels to 9/11 and the 2004 election. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were the biggest intelligence failure by U.S. government agencies since Pearl Harbor. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ignored bushels of evidence of an international conspiracy and a bucket of warnings that Arabs with terrorist connections were receiving pilot training inside the U.S. Yet, after the attacks terrified the nation, polls speedily showed a doubling in the percentage of Americans who trusted government to “do the right thing.” The media fanned this blind faith as if it was the high road to public safety. President George W. Bush exploited that credulity to seize far more power and to deceive the nation into war against Iraq.

While Bush is now being lionized by the establishment media (thanks to his criticisms of Trump), few people recall that he ran the most fear-mongering presidential reelection campaign in modern American history. Bush 2004 campaign ads showed firemen carrying a flag-draped corpse from the rubble at Ground Zero in New York and a pack of wolves coming to attack home viewers as an announcer warned that “weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.” One commentator suggested that the ad hinted that voters would be eaten by wolves if John Kerry won.

Just before 2004 Election Day a senior GOP strategist told the New York Daily News that “anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush.” People who saw terrorism as the biggest issue in the 2004 election voted for Bush by a 6 to 1 margin. Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, observed that the Bush campaign was “using the fear factor almost exclusively. This is a highly researched decision with all the tools of public opinion management. It’s nothing but a reflection that it works.”

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The Red Flag Act, by Eric Peters

Posted on August 20, 2020 | Leave a comment

The human race never has and never will achieve “absolute safety,” and that’s a good thing. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

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It can be hard to push back against Sickness Psychosis.

People who know it is a psychosis are social-pressured to comply with such outrages as being expected (and increasingly required) to dress up as if it were Halloween every day for reasons that are exactly the same in principle as driving their car no faster than 5 MPH with the flashers on at all times because someone fears “speeding” cars. That they might get run over – or run into – if cars were allowed to go any faster.

Such neurotics temporarily got their way more than 100 years ago, when the first cars appeared and threatened the delicate nerves of the velocity averse.

The Red Flag Acts (including the Highways and Locomotive Act of 1878) imposed a 4 MPH maximum speed limit in the country – 2 MPH in the city –   and required that the vehicle be preceded by a man walking at least 60 yards ahead of it waving a red flag to warn all in the path of the vehicle that it was coming . . . very slowly.

They got their way again in the early ‘70s, when the maximum lawful highway speed – which had risen to an alarming (to the velocity-averse) 70-75 MPH – was temporarily throttled back to 55 MPH. This was initially presented to a public terrorized by propaganda about artificial fuel scarcity as a necessary fuel conservation measure that oleaginously morphed into a saaaaaaaaaafety measure . . . very much as “flattening the curve” greasily morphed into “stopping the spread,” the latter having no end.

The common denominator being the weaponization of fear.

The difference being that the velocity averse were overruled by those who wanted to get places in hours rather than days and minutes rather than hours and – the key thing – rejected the neurotics’ assertion that their fear of movement gave them the moral right to restrict it so absurdly or even at all.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Media, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

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The Bill of Safety? by Eric Peters

Posted on May 17, 2020 | 1 comment

Try as we might, SLL cannot find a public health exception to the Bill of Rights. Neither can Eric Peters, at ericpetersautos.com:

Will Americans resist being forcibly vaccinated?

The worry is that most Americans have already accepted being force-vaccinated . . . in principle. They did so more than 30 years ago, long before WuFlu Fever – when they accepted being ordered to wear a seatbelt/helmet and to show “papers” on demand – but without probable cause – at “checkpoints.”

They endorsed it when they amen’d forcing people to buy car (and then health) insurance. When they accepted the government telling them they would no longer be permitted to buy new cars that didn’t meet government’s “bumper impact” standards.

Told they would have to buy air bags – and didn’t rise in outrage. 

They gave their implied consent when they didn’t object to their “consent” being implied … when they accepted being forced to assume the degrading I surrender pose at airports and – even more degrading – spread their legs and let a government worker run his hands around their privates. Around the privates of their wives and children.

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