Pet Blogging

With SNAP benefits going out late, nonprofits are begging for pet food donations to prevent desperate owners from surrendering their dogs and cats to animal shelters.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) November 8, 2025 at 11:00 AM

From Mr. Pierce’s weekend blog (which is only available to subscribers):

… I have flown all over this country and Canada, and to Ireland, and to South Korea, and to Japan, and to Qatar, before we turned it into an aircraft carrier. I have flown on commercial jets and on a prop plane in rural Alaska. (The difference in customer service between the two was not vast.) I have bounced through all kinds of different weather. On a flight to the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, I woke from a long nap to discover that Michael Jordan’s parents were sitting in front of me. Stan Musial once gave me his first class seat so he could sit with his wife back in coach. (Nice job there, MLB.) I once flew on John Kerry’s campaign plane in 2004 only to discover that it had once been a tour plane for the Rolling Stones. There were mirrors everywhere, and I seriously considered asking for a hazmat suit before buckling my seatbelt. If those seats could talk, they’d all end up in jail.

But all of those flights, and all of those experiences, had one thing in common: Fundamentally, they were all acts of faith. To step on a large metal tube that does its work 35,000 feet above the ground, you have to believe in the principles of aerodynamics. You have to believe the plane’s mechanics know their business and that the pilot is sober. And you have to realize that you are completely in the hands of people staring into screens in dark facilities several miles below.

In 2015, the National Institutes of Health issued a quality-of-life report on the effect of their jobs on air-traffic controllers. According to that report:

Air-traffic controllers (ATC) work shifts and their work schedules vary according to the characteristics of each airport. The human body adapts to shiftwork differently. These adjustments affect the health-disease process, predisposing ATC to risk conditions associated with sleep deprivation and lack of night sleep, which can lead to conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, mood disorders, anxiety, and obesity. This study investigated the characteristics of health, sleep, and quality of life of ATC exposed to eight-hour alternate work shifts and six-hour rotational work shifts. As though the job weren’t crushing enough on the people who do it, ever since the last presidential election the work pressures have grown even more intense.

First came DOGE, and then came the government shutdown, during which the administration has chosen to treat the controllers the way it’s treated hungry poor children—as bargaining chips, as a gun to the heads of congressional Democrats. In doing this, it threatens the act of faith that is necessary for anyone to step off the Jetway and into the cabin. In October, as the shutdown was beginning, the ATC union warned of dire consequences if the job was somehow made harder…

In our current moment, the ostensible authority is Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, a former reality TV star and egregiously forgettable congresscritter. In truth, of course, like every Republican official in this administration, Duffy is merely a finger puppet for the president with the tiny hands. Circumstances are turned on their heads. Air traffic controllers are caught in the middle again. And this time, they have no control over their fates. From The Hill:

“If this continues, and I have more controllers who decide they can’t come to work, can’t control the airspace, but instead have to take a second job — with that, you might see 10 percent would have been a good number, because we might go to 15 percent or 20 percent,” Duffy said at a Breitbart News event in Washington, D.C. on Friday.
. . . Duffy on Friday also responded to concerns that the flight reductions were a political move aimed at pressuring Senate Democrats to pass a Republican-crafted, “clean” stopgap to reopen the federal government, which they have repeatedly rejected as they make demands on health care and other issues. “I’ve had some complaints from Democrats, ‘We want to see the data . . . This is political,’” Duffy said during the event with Breitbart. “This has not been political. We have worked overtime to make sure that we minimize the impact on the American people.”

Every airplane flight is an act of faith, and faith is too easily shaken these days.

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