mothballsuitor

BREAKING: Nikita Kucherov has won the Hart Trophy, as the most valuable player to his team. Full voting table as selected by the PHWA. #GoBolts #NHLAwards

Because you are a former Royal Air Force general, let me put the reason for @PeteHegseth’s D-Day speech in terms you will recognize. In 2005, Boeing hired James McNerney, a disciple of Jack Welch’s school of cost-cutting, as CEO. He later said, “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” The results were catastrophic. As Eric Ries documented in his book Incorruptible, management focused more and more on financial engineering while the engineers inside Boeing watched one program after another unfold with growing horror. We have their internal records because of the investigations into the 737 MAX crashes. Engineering raised the alarm. Management’s answer never changed: costs, deadlines, stock price. The number on the slide had become the mission, and the airplane underneath it had become an afterthought. That is the trap. Stock price was never the product. It was a proxy for the product, a stand-in for whether Boeing built aircraft people could trust their lives to. McNerney optimized the proxy and destroyed the thing it was supposed to measure. Two planes full of families paid for the difference. One Boeing employee later confessed, “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year.” Psychologists call that moral injury: the inner damage a person carries from knowing they did harm by saying nothing. What does this have to do with DEI, migration, and the agendas being pushed across the EU and UK? Everything. They run on the same machinery. A minority arrest rate is not justice. It is a proxy for justice, a stand-in for whether a city is safe and its law applied equally. Starmer’s government optimized the proxy. Officers who flagged the cost of a pivot to DEI, the victims who came forward, the communities who watched predators walk, all of it was feedback, and all of it was waved off because the statistic was moving in the politically correct direction. The number improved. Justice did not. Just as Boeing’s engineers were told costs, deadlines, stock price, Britain’s police were told the quota, the optics, the politics. Welch chased ROI. Starmer chases DEI. John Kerry chases CO2. All ignored the people in front of them telling the truth. Both mistook the dashboard for the world. I too want safe minorities, higher share prices and a cleaner planet. We all do. That is exactly the point. McNerney wanted a higher stock price too. The disaster was not the goal. The disaster was measuring the proxy and calling it the product. Last year, touring colleges in London, a family friend asked me a version of the question Boeing’s own engineers asked each other before the crashes. Theirs was, “Would you put your family on a MAX simulator-trained aircraft?” The answer was no. Mine was simpler: would I put my daughter on streets policed by a two-tier system, where carrying pepper spray to defend herself is a crime but the men she fears walk free? Which brings us to Hegseth. This is not the usual venue for these arguments, and I understand the objection. I endorse his saying it here anyway, because it needs to be said, and because the people who most need to hear it are the ones who have learned to look at the dashboard instead of out the window. You know the cost of silence better than I do. The veteran who watched Afghan allies rape children on our own bases and was told to stand down, to protect the relationship. They enforced the rules of engagement because those were being measured by you. That man is carrying moral injury for the rest of his life. Some of them did not survive it. Too many witnessed a dual tiered system - US/UK troops held accountable for honest ROE mistakes while Taliban used women and kids as shields - and paid the ultimate price for saying nothing. This is not the ideal place to bring up politics but is absolutely the right place to prevent further moral injury.

@SensCentral @LockedOnFlyers As a Canes fan, the Sens series was much more of a battle. This Philly team isn't ready.