The Decline and Fall of a Once Great Company

August 22, 2023 By Scott Sturman

On August 25, 2023, the United Services Automobile Association (USAA) will convene its annual members meeting to re-elect the CEO and Board of Directors.  For over 100 years, USAA has provided insurance and banking services to the military community and relied heavily on this symbiotic relationship to promote its business model.  But since 2020, when Wayne Peacock became USAA's only non-veteran CEO, the corporation has embraced diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE), corporate social responsibility (CSR), and environment, social, and government (ESG) programs. 

Soon after Mr. Peacock's appointment as CEO, USAA renewed its exclusive sponsorship with the National Football League, disregarding pushback from many of its members, who objected vehemently to players taking knee during the playing of the National Anthem.  USAA executives dismissed these concerns, framing the disrespectful display as a freedom of speech issue.  The implication was that USAA's financial support of unpatriotic, controversial behavior is compatible with the company's mission............To Read More....

Destroying Meritocracy Is Deadly

Our government is playing with our lives as it prefers diversity, equity, and inclusion over ensuring the best qualified employees are hired.

  By Victor Davis Hanson February 15, 2023

A recent epidemic of airline near misses deserves both attention and reflection. 

In mid-December, a San Francisco-bound United Airlines Boeing 777-200 airliner, just a little over a minute after taking off from Maui, Hawaii, suddenly dived. It lost more than half its altitude and came within 800 feet of crashing into the Pacific Ocean before pulling up.  About a month later, an American Airlines jet crossed the runway at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport just as a Delta Air Lines plane was accelerating for takeoff. The two aircraft nearly collided.  Then in February, a FedEx cargo jet at the Austin, Texas airport just missed crashing into a Southwest Airlines airliner by a mere 100 feet.  The same month an American Airlines Airbus A321 was being towed out of the gate at Los Angeles International airport, and smashed into a bus carrying passengers between terminals, injuring five.

These near and actual accidents come amid a general landscape of aviation chaos. After Christmas, Southwest Airlines simply canceled 71 percent of its flights. It blamed staff shortages due to storms. The airline seemed incapable of ensuring enough of their pilots, attendants, crews, and airport staff could get to work. The Federal Aviation Administration in January canceled all flight departures from the United States for two hours due a computer safety system collapse. Thousands of additional flights were canceled, many for over 24 hours. 

Something has gone terribly wrong.................To Read More...

Things fall apart

November 22, 2018 By James Mullin

I recently picked my nephew up from a suburban train station just outside Philly at 5:55 P.M. one evening. Reassuringly at five minutes to six, I saw a train coming toward the station, but then shooting past it. So I assumed this train was an express and the local train would be soon behind it. But then I noticed that the train I saw shoot past was actually stopped about a hundred yards past the station. Then, it started slowly, seemingly reluctantly, backing up into the station. When my nephew got off, I asked him what the conductor said about why it overshot. He was told that “leaves on the track” were causing trains to be unable to brake properly. I noted this explanation for future reference to myself to not cross any tracks in the months of October and November, while also pondering the absolute imbecility of the statement..........

In the socialist theatre-of-the-absurd that has overtaken our major cities in America, there could only be two reasonable explanations for said train missing its station by a hundred yards: 1) the engineer is high/on a cell phone/completely inept; or 2) the brakes don’t work. As one who often drives over train tracks, I must say I like explanation #1 much better, because #2 implies we are in an even worse mess. Failure to maintain equipment in a high-tech society is the bell-tolling-in-the-distance that push is coming to shove for us as a nation. ........ Read more

The Man Who Had Obama’s Number

March 6, 2018 Herbert W. Stupp

Herb London chronicled the Obama administration’s foreign policy disasters.

Leading From Behind:  The Obama Doctrine and the U.S. Retreat From International Affairs By Herbert I. London, with Bryan Griffin (editor) (Liberty Island Press, 344 pages, $14.95 paper)

.In Leading From Behind, London offers an overwhelming intellectual indictment of the Obama administration and its sad litany of foreign policy failures and debacles around the world. The book is an anthology of scores of Herb London columns, op-eds and analyses on foreign policy and President Obama’s attempts to address such issues, or retreat from them. The writings cover the 2009 to 2017 period, and are culled from publications and websites, ranging from the Washington Times to Newsmax, The American Spectator, Pundicity, the Gatestone Institute, Townhall and Accuracy in Media, among other venues. It would be impossible even for devoted followers of Dr. London to have practical access to most of these publications and writings. Having his various writings on our foreign policy challenges in one book should please London’s many fans...........The London writings provide example after example of our overseas failures, from Russia to ISIS, Europe, China and the Far East, on to Israel and its hostile neighbors..........offers a specific and prescient critique of the Obama “nuclear agreement” with Iran, detailing how much the U.S. gave and how little we got. “In most respects,” he writes, “the agreement is a capitulation to Iranian dictates. It is a paean to utopia and ignores reality.........To Read More....

Debunking the EPA’s fake accounts of the Gold King mine disaster

Bureaucrats and politicians should no longer be able to get away with sweeping their sins under the rug

By Rob Gordon July 26, 2017 by CFACT, 0 Comments 

After almost two years, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General released its report on the Gold King Mine disaster that dumped over a million pounds of metals into the Animas River, turning dozens of miles of the river orange.  While inspectors general are tasked with finding out the truth and holding agencies accountable, this recently released report sheds no more light on the disaster than previous misleading reports.  EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has inherited not only an environmental mess, but also the mess created by an agency more interested in its narrow self-interests than truth. Pruitt now has an opportunity to send a message that would ripple far beyond the EPA........There you have it: Experts “inadvertently … initiated an internal erosion failure.” It could have happened to anyone.

The line that the EPA crew never intended to breach the natural plug (blockage) is flatly contradicted by a recently released Interior Department email that includes an account that appears to have come from the main on-scene coordinator........Important facts supporting this Interior Department account are omitted from the inspector general report. What the inspector general kept in is less important than what the he left out........EPA accounts have constantly..........To Read More....