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Into the Dark Needs Less Wokeness, More Evil

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It’s generally acknowledged that we’re living in a golden age of television. We have been at least since The Sopranos first aired in 1999, with the trend having been kept alive long past the normal lifespan of high-water marks by streaming services that have changed the formatting of shows just enough to encourage experimentation, ambition, and investment. What’s less discussed is that we’re also living in a wonderful time for horror. The past few years alone have seen a resurgence of quality horror (It Follows, The Babadook, The Witch, Hereditary, Halloween, etc) the likes of which haven’t been experienced since the VHS horror boom of the 1980s. Occasionally, as with True Detective and Channel Zero, the two bull market trends meet and overlap and we’re left with binge-worthy horror television exemplifying high-quality popular cinema. Sometimes both the format and the genre are used to exceed entertainment and creep into the realm of middlebrow art.

Hulu’s recent series Into the Dark isn’t quite that. It is, however, a wonderful experiment in this blending of genre and format, even if it ultimately fails to achieve anything truly significant. The timing is right, for what it is: a monthly serial with each roughly hour and a half release being an independent story with new actors and a different director. It definitely utilizes the streaming format to full effect. Its failure is a failure of genre: it just makes itself too self-consciously timely to be good horror.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t entertaining. The first episode, which aired last October and was set on Halloween night, featured a British hitman struggling to recover a body from a squad of loathsome trust fund kids. Hard to go wrong with that. And the episode “New Year, New You,” which first aired on December 28, is a psychological free fall through the banal evils of internet blogger stardom and the inevitable resentment that follows in its wake. Like most of the other episodes, it’s thrilling and suspenseful without quite being scary.

The structure of Into the Dark isn’t necessarily a bad idea, and it achieves some successes. Having a sort of “holiday of the month” theme gives the show just enough continuity that it can experiment with cast, writer, and director shifts episode to episode. Where the show really shines is in its high-quality performances. Veteran actor Dermot Mulroney and newcomer Diana Silvers are able to sort of tag team the ratcheting up of father/daughter paranoia and violence in last November’s “Flesh & Blood.” In what might be the best episode, “New Year, New You,” Suki Waterhouse and Carly Chaikin engage in a tense psychological battle that, when it reaches its violent crescendo, could easily be something from a DePalma film. And the best performance comes unsurprisingly from Jimmi Simpson. Simpson has the range to play anything from a comedically louche half-dressed brother in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to the naive young searcher William in Westworld, so it’s really no surprise that in the episode “Treehouse” he’s able to convincingly play an Americanized, low-rent Gordon Ramsay character.

The problem with Into the Dark isn’t the acting. It’s the stories themselves. It isn’t necessarily that the show isn’t scary, a subjective category that even the most appreciative horror fan might find doesn’t cover their favorite works. The problem is that the show isn’t willing to sink down to the depths of myth. It stares too superficially at the present moment, focusing on the surface of our current social preoccupations (mostly perceived imbalances in power between genders, putting particular emphasis on men being rotten to the core) without quite being able to transform them into myth with a penetrating gaze. In other words, the show stays on the level of sociology. It doesn’t jar our expectations by introducing transcendent elements—there’s hardly anything supernatural in Into the Dark—and it doesn’t confront us with the abject powerlessness we have when faced with the facts of ultimate reality. Evil doesn’t win in Into the Dark because the show refuses to acknowledge its existence. At the end of most episodes, the stronger woman wins. Not because, as in the best horror, she has confronted and accepted the aspects of reality that remain beyond our ability to change, but because, you know, isn’t it about time?

The worst example of this failure is the episode “Treehouse.” It’s a time-stamped and self-congratulatory #MeToo thriller where an egotistical male predator is kidnapped by a coven of fake witches, drugged, and put through an hallucinogenic brainwashing torture session in which he’s made to realize the error of his ways. Why does this not “work” as horror? Because good horror gives us the stuff that resists timeliness. Instead, “Treehouse” is just the zeitgeist admiring itself.

Horror doesn’t necessarily need to feel surprising (in fact, some of the best horror tortures viewers with the predictably inevitable), but “New Year, New You,” released at the end of December, presents an incredibly taut plot which twist and unfolds in unpredictable ways and showcases up and coming episode director and co-writer Sophia Takal’s talent. Daniel Kurland wrote that “New Year, New You” is “a chilling story that only gets darker and more complex as it goes on. It also doesn’t shy away from an incredibly bleak ending that makes her point with eerie poignancy. Takal doesn’t try to overextend herself and this boiled down take on friendship and jealousy gone wrong is arguably the best addition of Into the Dark to date and hopefully just the start of Takal’s filmmaking career.” Without giving too much away, let’s just say that at first you think the episode is about surviving trauma before you think it’s about bullying before you think it’s about the lengths people will go to for internet fame before you think it’s about the particular arrangement of an individual human soul. “New Year, New You” is good horror because it’s critique of human vanity uses the internet as a medium without reducing it to a cause. As William Burroughs said in another context, the evil was already there, waiting.

Overall, Into the Dark isn’t great horror, but it showcases such a broad collection of talent that each new episode is worth watching. And it’s a laudable experiment. As saturated as we might feel with binge-watching, we’re still in the early days of figuring out what new formats streaming services might allow. Into the Dark provides some measure of hope for the future of (what for some reason we still call) “TV” that streaming services are willing to continue to experiment with format and packaging in interesting ways. If only they would acknowledge the existence of true and unavoidable evil, then we’d really be in business.

Scott Beauchamp’s work has appeared in the Paris Review, Bookforum, and Public Discourse, among other places. His book Did You Kill Anyone? is forthcoming from Zero Books. He lives in Maine.

TAC Bookshelf for the Week of March 18

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Bradley J. Birzer, scholar-at-large: There’s always something gloriously pretentious about proclaiming, “Yes, I’ve been reading a lot of Nietzsche lately.” And, it’s true. I’ve been reading a lot of Nietzsche lately. In the context of preparing for a C.S. Lewis seminar I’m teaching this semester, I had the pleasure of re-reading the ultimate “Un-man,” specifically re-reading Beyond Good and Evil, The Birth of Tragedy, and Ecce Homo (Penguin versions). From my perspective, Nietzsche is far more important for understanding modernity and post-modernity than Darwin, Marx, or Freud. Critically, Nietzsche understands the necessity of spirit and the spiritual in the way the other three men simply ignored or explained away in their materialist longings and ecstasies. Yet, reading Nietzsche is also nothing less than a perverse pleasure, akin to rubbernecking when encountering a horrific accident on the interstate. No matter how great a writer Nietzsche was, his spirit was unclean, uncouth, and outrageously hubristic.

On a much happier note, I’ve also been reading What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book, edited by Mark Fisher, and published very recently. For those who remember the rock and pop scene of the late 1970s through 1990s, it would be impossible to forget one of the greatest bands of that era, XTC. From Drums and Wires through Nonesuch, XTC proved that pop did not mean banal or mediocre. XTC was as clever as pop culture comes, with lyrics that reached the heights of late 20th-century cultural criticism achieved only by a few others, such as William F. Buckley and Jack Kerouac. Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding provided the flash of the band, while gentleman and guitarist Dave Gregory held it altogether with a steady and good soul. What Do You Call That Noise? is a retrospective appreciation by fans and musicians of what XTC so wonderfully accomplished over almost two decades. The highlight of the book—considerations by Big Big Train’s Greg Spawton and Danny Manners as well as an extended interview with Gregory, arguably one of the best guitarists (in any style) of the last half century.

Along with lots and lots of C.S. Lewis and Shelby Foote (again, for classes), I’ve also been reading about the life of Jack Kirby, comic book artist and writer extraordinaire, creator of such mythic “Fourth World” heroes and villains as Darkseid, Mister Miracle, Orion, Desaad, and Steppenwolf. Reworking the Icelandic Ragnorak, Kirby brilliant offered a Manichaean vision of good and evil, mixed with some utterly Hebraic ethics and morality. I’ve been especially taken with Tom King’s stunning reworking of escape artist Scott Free as a survivor of post-traumatic stress syndrome in Mister Miracle (DC Comics).

Grayson Quay, contributor: I’m currently in my final semester of grad school, and my final class is on Charles Dickens. The professor, a kindly dinosaur (I mean that in the best possible way) who has been on Georgetown’s faculty for over three decades, has been a godsend for me. He assigns manageable amounts of reading and sticks to old-school formal and historical criticism while avoiding the increasingly radical identitarianism currently in vogue throughout much of the department (nay, much of the field; nay, much of the academy). For his Dickens class, we’ve been assigned three novels: Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations.

It was my first time reading Bleak House, and despite its thousand-page bulk, I read it eagerly.

Some of the book’s charm came from Dickens’s characteristically colorful cast of characters, including the oily and pedantic Rev. Chadband, the childish parasite Harold Skimpole, and the seemingly omniscient Inspector Bucket.

More than the characters, though, it was Dickens’s skillful juxtaposition of different types of time that held my attention. First, there is human time, which takes place on the level of human experience and is associated with lower-class characters. Institutional time takes place on a non-human scale that spans centuries, is associated with the law and the aristocracy, and is recursive—meaning that it has no purpose beyond perpetuating itself and preserving the status quo. Eschatological time is associated with the end of history (and often with the Last Judgment) and is teleological rather than recursive.

Jarndyce & Jarndyce, the interminable lawsuit that drives the plot of Bleak House and ruins the lives of everyone who touches it, and the Court of Chancery in which the case is heard are the perfect examples of institutional time. Characters who allow themselves to be drawn into such affairs quickly lose their humanity, having become incapable of normal relations with their fellow man.

Miss Flite, one of these institutional idolaters, allows herself to hope that institutions might actually lead to some end beyond their own perpetuation. She conflates the institutional and the eschatological to the point that it’s often hard to tell if she’s talking about the Judgement described in the Book of Revelation or the judgement she hopes to receive in her court case.

Dickens rails against the inhumanity and inefficiency of bureaucracies better than most authors, but despite his passion for social reform, he never indulges in revolutionary, utopian daydreams. Instead of insisting that we could create an earthly paradise by replacing our institutions with better ones, he urges us to humanize our present institutions.

Conservatives do well to preserve the functioning institutions we have inherited, but we would also do well to remember that people, not institutions, possess souls.

Trying to Kill the Iran Deal Could End Up Saving It

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The Trump administration has made a priority of punishing and pressuring Iran. But the same administration that withdrew from the nuclear deal that President Donald Trump dubbed “a great embarrassment” may actually end up preserving it.

Iran and all the other signatories are still observing the deal’s terms for now. The U.S. reimposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic last fall, driving down its oil exports and further stressing its weak economy. But even as the administration pursues what it calls a “maximum pressure” campaign against the country, it has also made exceptions through sanctions waivers that have helped keep Iranian oil flowing and even preserved some international nuclear cooperation with the country.

Now, ahead of a key deadline in May, the administration is sending conflicting signals about just how far it plans to go to confront the regime. At issue, in part, is the stated intent to choke off Iran’s oil exports entirely and throttle its oil-dependent economy. Following through could mean fights with allies that import Iranian oil, or even a higher risk that Iran ditches the deal altogether and starts racing to a nuclear weapon. Backing off the promise could leave the deal limping along for a potential new president to reenter it, as the Democratic Party has called for.

While Trump-administration officials are all singing from the same hawkish hymnal about the march to zero exports, cracks are beginning to show. State Department officials say they are not “looking to grant” new waivers when the current round expires around May 4, but won’t comment on renewing existing ones; they hedge about getting to zero “as soon as possible” and the need to avoid disrupting oil markets. Representatives from the Department of Energy and the National Security Council (NSC) have meanwhile pointed to data showing that oil markets are well supplied enough to keep prices stable, even with the loss of Iranian crude. “We’re not very worried about it,” a Department of Energy spokesperson told me. “We think the market will balance itself out.”

Hawks in Congress seem to agree. “If our policy objective is zero, our policy should be doing its damnedest to get to zero,” one Republican congressional staffer familiar with the interagency discussions told me. “My sense is we’re not. There is hedging.” This person and another source familiar with the discussions said the disconnect is fueling an interagency argument between members of the State Department and the NSC as the deadline approaches. Asked for comment on the purported disagreement, a spokesperson for the NSC said, “The National Security Council coordinates closely across the interagency to apply maximum economic pressure against Iran.” A State Department spokesman also did not comment directly on the interagency disconnect, but offered a statement from Brian Hook, the U.S. special envoy for Iran, reiterating the policy to get to zero and noting that “we have already achieved significant reductions in Iran’s exports.”

[Peter Beinart: How sanctions feed authoritarianism]

There’s public unity, at any rate, about forcing change in Iran. Trump has directly threatened Iranian President Hassan Rouhani via tweet, vowing “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE” should Rouhani threaten the United States. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has vowed “unprecedented financial pressure on the Iranian regime.” National Security Adviser John Bolton has dubbed Iran the “central banker of terrorism” and noted, “That’s not behavior we should tolerate.” Hook said in his statement to The Atlantic that sanctions on Iran are “draining their resources to fund terrorism.”

Yet there’s also discord beneath the surface. Hook spent months negotiating with the Europeans to preserve a version of a deal that Trump would accept, only to have the president announce his withdrawal last May. At a recent conference in Warsaw, Vice President Mike Pence publicly demanded that the Europeans leave the deal, reportedly infuriating Pompeo, who has made no such demands.

Hook has consistently reiterated the zero-exports goal, but he also told a conference this week that Trump “doesn’t want to shock oil markets,” even as he acknowledged market surpluses. In a sign of the interagency disconnect, Richard Goldberg, director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction at the NSC, said, “The oil market is well supplied and can absorb the loss of Iranian crude,” speaking at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies last month. Projections from the Energy Information Administration released this week show the same thing, even accounting for losses of Venezuelan oil exports due to additional U.S. sanctions.

Trump’s exit from the Iran deal last year came with some caveats. The basic framework of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the pact is formally known, was an exchange of economic incentives, including a suspension of past sanctions, for Iranian nuclear restraint. Ahead of reimposing sanctions on Iranian oil exports, though, Trump gave Iran’s trading partners about six months to make other arrangements, and bargained with Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to keep prices stable. But the idea was that any country still importing Iranian oil by that November would be sanctioned.

[Read: Iran will continue to try to evade U.S. sanctions]

Iran’s exports began declining even before then, as countries fled the possibility of financial punishment. And even as Trump worried about prices, Energy Secretary Rick Perry was sanguine about the issue on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal: “The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects global oil supply to meet demand in 2019 even without Iranian oil.” So it was a surprise that the deadline came and Trump handed out some sanctions exceptions, including to China, Taiwan, India, and South Korea, granting them access to Iranian oil for another six months without penalty. The markets didn’t see it coming; oversupply resulted; prices dropped.

Over the period since Trump announced he was leaving the Iran deal, though, Iran’s oil exports have fallen by more than half, from more than 2.5 million barrels per day to about a million barrels per day. But neither Hook nor Pompeo will specify over what time period they hope to get to zero. Asked at an energy conference this week whether it was even possible to get there, Pompeo would only say, “I’m not going to get ahead of myself or ahead of the president, but make no mistake about it, that’s the direction of travel.”

Meanwhile, Reuters has reported that the United States is leaving the door open for waivers, even if at a reduced number. Japanese and South Korean officials have stated publicly that they’re seeking them; outside analysts have also suggested that China is a likely candidate, given how much Iranian oil it currently imports and its ongoing trade negotiations with the United States. Sources in India have told reporters that that country, too, is engaged in waiver negotiations with the U.S.

Hook is adamant that “maximum pressure” means just that. “The United States is not looking to grant any exceptions or waivers to our campaign of maximum economic pressure on the Iranian regime,” his statement said. “Our policy is to get to zero imports of Iranian crude as quickly as possible.”

But Hook’s comments about oil markets leave room for maneuver, and they echo concerns that Trump raised before granting oil-sanctions waivers last time. Leaving aside possible geopolitical or diplomatic reasons to grant waivers—say, to avoid having to sanction an ally such as South Korea, or to sweeten trade negotiations with China—the oil-prices rationale conflicts with the analyses of other agencies. Energy Department projections say the market has 2 million barrels per day of spare production capacity—more than enough to replace a million lost barrels of Iranian oil per day if needed. The price spike feared last fall has not come to pass. When the Energy Information Administration published its latest projections this past week, the price of oil was $64 a barrel—right about where it was this time last year, though oil prices fluctuate.  

“If you know the oil markets right now, you know that price is not a factor,” said Amos Hochstein, President Barack Obama’s international-energy special envoy, who managed Iran sanctions. By contrast, in the first two years of Iranian oil sanctions under Obama, he said oil prices were more than $100 a barrel.

[Read: How Mike Pompeo sees the world]

Still, technical problems will complicate the push to zero Iranian exports. China, for example, is still importing roughly half a million barrels of Iranian oil per day. “It is difficult to sanction China on this issue,” Hochstein said. “They have financial institutions that can facilitate the oil trade that are not engaged in the U.S. financial market, and therefore [are] immune to sanctions.”

Separately, however, the administration has used sanctions waivers in other ways. At a conference in December, Christopher Ford, the assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, noted that even as the administration sought to sanction Iran to drive it to negotiate a better deal, they were seeking to preserve some international cooperation with Iran on things such as civil nuclear research and energy projects. The waivers basically prevent the Europeans from facing sanctions for participating in projects allowed under the deal. There, too, the effect, if not the intent, of the waivers could be to keep in place parts of the basic framework of the deal Trump vowed to eliminate.

“We don’t agree that we should have maximum pressure right now, considering that we want the Iranians to stay in the nuclear deal,” said a Democratic congressional aide. “But if you’re going to have maximum pressure, then waivers don’t work.”

Even if a Democrat won the White House in 2020, though, he or she might not think it wise to reenter the JCPOA as it currently stands. Robert Einhorn, who helped negotiate the nuclear deal in the Obama administration, noted that some key provisions would expire not long after a hypothetical Democrat took office in 2021. Besides, Iran is, according to the public assessment of the U.S. intelligence community, still abiding by the terms of the deal under current U.S. sanctions—what’s the political benefit of giving up sanctions leverage right off the bat?

Richard Nephew, who was the sanctions expert for Obama’s negotiating team with Iran, told me that even if a Democrat made a tactical decision to reenter the deal, “we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with the lost time.” The current terms of the JCPOA, he said, are “rapidly becoming not worth it.”

Administration officials have repeatedly said that they seek not regime change but behavior change, and that their goal is to drive the Iranians to the table to strike a better deal. But critics of the “maximum pressure” policy I spoke to, whether or not they supported the Iran deal initially, all agree on one thing: Iran is prepared to wait out the next two years of the Trump administration. “Absent an unforeseen U.S. sweetener, I believe Iran is willing to wait,” Hochstein said. “They’re willing to take the pain. They’ve demonstrated that. They’ve had bad times before.”

Training, Regulation, and the 737 Max

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Previously on this topic: “Is It Time to Worry About the Boeing 737 Max?”, “A Shorter Guide to the Ethiopian Tragedy and the 737 Max,” “What Was On the Record About Problems With the 737 Max,” “‘Don’t Ground the Planes, Ground the Pilots,’” and “The Implications of the 737 Max Crashes.”

As the investigation goes on, additions for today:

1) The Seattle Times. Over the decades The Seattle Times has been a leader in aerospace reporting, no doubt in part because of Boeing’s huge presence in the area. In the 1980s, our friend Peter Rinearson won a Pulitzer prize for his Times coverage of the Boeing 757. In recent years our friend Dominic Gates has broken a number of important aerospace stories for the Times.

His latest one, today, is about the 737 Max and is very much worth reading in detail. Here is its summary of Boeing’s internal assessment of MCAS—the automated pitch-control system that is known to have been involved in the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last fall, and may or may not have played a part in this month’s Ethiopian Airlines crash.  

Gates writes of the Boeing internal analysis, which he has seen and discusses with industry experts:

The safety analysis:

  • Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.
  • Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward.
  • Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor—and yet that’s how it was designed.

The whole story is worth reading carefully, as is all of Gates’s coverage.

(By the way, looking for a reminder of why local- and regional-based news operations matter? Look again at The Seattle Times on this topic.)

2) Veteran pilots, on the fundamental training question. I continue to learn from, and be grateful for, a stream of messages from professionals within the aerospace community, about their views on the 737 Max tragedies.

The first note comes from a long-time pilot for a major U.S. airline who flies a different model Boeing plane. It responds to a previous dispatch, “Don’t Ground the Planes. Ground the Pilots.” In that post, another long-time pilot, Wally Magathan, said that one technical approach would be to require all 737 Max pilots to stop flying until they had undergone additional training.

This pilot writes:

By way of background, I’ve been flying at [a major U.S. airline] since 1985, and am currently a 777 Captain. I have never flown any model of 737.

Here are a couple of my own considerations about the 737 MAX grounding:

First, had the two recent tragedies occurred within a few months of the first MAX deliveries, there surely would have been no debate about the wisdom of stopping operations with that aircraft until causes and solutions were clear.

However, apparently there have been more than 350 MAX aircraft put into service in the last two years.  I have read that worldwide the MAX has flown more than 70,000 flights.  So while it’s now clear that some Boeing engineers and FAA certification people made egregious and unfortunate errors with the MCAS system precisely as Mr. Magathan indicated, it seems quite unlikely to me that MCAS was a singular causation either of the recent crashes. [JF note: Extra emphasis on the word “singular” in this sentence. Given the redundant safety systems of modern aircraft, when they crash, the reason usually turns out to be a complex “accident chain” of mistakes or failures. Usually it appears that the “chain” leading to a crash could have been interrupted at any point—and the plane would not have crashed—if a mechanical part or sensor hadn’t failed, or if some person involved with the flight had made a different choice. For instance, in the ASRS reports quoted earlier, U.S. airline pilots noticed a pitch anomaly with their 737 Max planes—and switched off the automated systems, “breaking the accident chain,” and flew on.]

In short, if the MCAS system was flawed to the point that the 737 MAX was inherently dangerous to fly, it seems to me that pilots, NASA, FAA, and the airlines would have been screaming at Boeing long before the Lion Air crash.

At the same time, great focus has been placed on the fact that both accidents involved this new version of the 737. But given the astronomical numbers of airline flights every single day and the small number of aircraft types that make up the vast majority of the worldwide airline fleet, is it really that improbable that two accidents involving similar flight profiles and the same aircraft type might occur?  Might we have something on the order of two Black Swan events here?

Last, the hair on my neck has been standing up since I heard news of the Ethiopian First Officer’s lack of experience. [JF note: the Captain on the Ethiopian flight was highly experienced, but the reportedly the First Officer, the pilot sitting in the right-hand seat, has only 200 hours total flying time, which is hardly any at all.]  As you probably know, numerous countries, not least Germany and Mexico, have long employed “ground up” training systems for airline pilots. [JF: In these programs, new pilots start practically from the beginning flying alongside experienced pilots, in the airline fleet. This is in contrast to the U.S. approach of having prospective pilots “build time” elsewhere—in the military, as instructors, as charter pilots, etc—before switching to the airlines.]

The selection process of U.S. airlines has always seemed far superior to me, but of course for many reasons our nation has long had the luxury of a far greater pool of available experienced talent.

One more note: This comes from a very long-time military pilot and instructor. He stresses that, even as technology changes, fundamental questions about approaches to training remain:

I am a retired B-52 pilot/flight instructor, ATP [Air Transport Pilot certification], with extensive other experience in regional airlines and as a Flight Safety instructor in King Air.

In 1968 Boeing modified the flight control system (stability augmentation system, as I recall) for half the B-52 fleet, which took several months/years to accomplish.  I was an Air Force copilot at the time, and for several months we regularly sent our planes to depot maintenance or Boeing factories to install the new system.  They simultaneously sent out factory representatives to each base to accomplish classroom training in the new system …  

Each crew was briefed and given classroom training, but despite the effort, it was still possible to be assigned later to fly an airplane without notice which had the new system installed, and some confusion to be experienced.  One of the aircrew reports you quoted echoed, 50 years later, the same complaint.

The fault, in my opinion, lies with the airlines involved and their associated training.  Flight positions are coveted, nobody in one wants to rock the boat and admit his inadequacy.  A recipe for accidents.  The manufacturer, airline, and pilots themselves all share some of the blame for putting up with less than adequate training.

The Max versions of the 737 could/should be considered a different type aircraft which would require the type rating for that specific model, not just the basic 737.  

In the Vietnam war, in 1968 the Air Force started augmenting flight crews flying the b-52D models in theater with other flight crews who had been retrained at Castle AFB from newer models.  Even then for the first two flights in the D models in theater, an experienced pilot and navigator instructor on that plane flew (over the shoulder) along to insure adequate training in that plane.  Boeing could do the same here, send avionics representatives along with each crew on a training flight to insure adequate training.

Bonus: This Twitter thread, by Trevor Sumner, is worth reading and considering.

Yes, They REALLY ARE Coming For Your Kids

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News from the UK:

The parents of an autistic teenage boy were warned he would be taken into care after they objected to him being given powerful hormone drugs to help him change sex.

Doctors at an NHS clinic had recommended he be given puberty-blockers – which delay adolescence – after the youngster declared he believed he was female.

But his mother and father, fearing the potential side-effects of the drugs, stopped him going to the clinic. And they suspected his abrupt decision to change sex was a result of his autism.

After the boy told the school he had been barred from treatment, a teacher told his parents that they should find alternative accommodation for their son or else he would be put into temporary foster care. And the school reported the couple to children’s services for being ‘emotionally abusive’ to their son by not supporting his wish to change gender.

A month later, the local authority placed him in a child protection plan after social workers concluded he was likely to suffer ‘significant harm’ under his parents’ care.

The Mail On Sunday reports that at least three children in Britain were put into foster care by the state last year because their parents wouldn’t agree to transgender treatment. The boy was struggling to cope with school because of his Asperger’s and autism. When he started to self-harm, his parents asked his doctor to refer him to children’s mental health services.

When the child met with a child psychotherapist, he said he believed he was female. According to the parents, that was the first the boy had ever said of such a thing. They assumed that it was another of his autistic obsessions (parents of kids on the spectrum are well aware of how these kids become obsessed with particular topics, and then drop them as suddenly as they acquired the obsession). Too late! The state therapy bureaucracy already had its claws sunk into the boy.

Read the whole thing. 

Americans need to wake the hell up. We need legislation right now to protect families from these fixers. Congressional Republicans, where are you?

Readers, I strongly urge you to follow 4th Wave Now on Twitter. It’s the Twitter feed of a politically non-partisan website for concerned parents of gender-dysphoric kids. Here’s a link to an interview with Denise, who founded the site when her daughter Chiara told her a few years ago that she was a trans male. Chiara has since desisted, and has started the Pique Resistance Project, a movement of detransitioners/desisters. The interview is actually with both Denise and Chiara — neither of whom are right-wing in any way, shape, or form. Excerpt:

Denise, as every parent knows who has experienced something similar, hearing your daughter suddenly declare she is transgender and tell you she needs hormones immediately is very stressful. How did you cope?

Starting the website—which was initially a cry into the wilderness, just hoping to find and speak to other parents who were skeptical of their teen’s desire to embark on medical transition—was crucial in helping me to cope with the situation. I suspect there would have been more arguments and difficult times between Chiara and me if I had not had the outlet of writing and finding others online who were in the same boat.

Pretty much all my “in real life” friends at the time were lifelong liberals/lefties like me, who saw (as I had) everything to do with trans activism as purely and simply the next civil rights movement; they hadn’t had a reason to look into some of the more controversial aspects because their lives hadn’t been touched by the issue. So, for the most part, I couldn’t talk to them openly about what was happening in my family.

Here’s a bit from Chiara, who identifies now as a lesbian:

Was there a lot of talk about suicide online? If so, did that influence you in any way?

There was a large amount, the most notable being the case of Leelah Alcorn, an MtF teenager who committed suicide in 2014. Her death affected me, along with many others, as it was sensationalized and widely held up as a warning to parents: “This is what happens when you don’t let your kid transition.” This mantra continues to be repeated online and everywhere, and perpetuates the idea that suicide is the “only way out” for kids whose parents will not accept their gender identity—this is a false statement that should under no circumstance be peddled to impressionable young people.

What made you feel unhappy about being a girl?

I was dealing with trauma, which caused me to want to escape my body. This, in addition to my resistance to accepting my same-sex attraction, resulted in a rejection of being female.

How did your dysphoria manifest itself? What “triggered” it for you?

It came on in the span of a couple months, but was still a fairly gradual process. The main triggers were my increased usage of social media, which facilitated my exposure to trans ideology and activism, as well as my social isolation and beginning to learn about and come to terms with past trauma. My dysphoria caused me to adopt an appearance that was as masculine as possible—I cut my hair short, wore men’s clothes, bound my chest, and packed off and on for over a year. I even used the men’s bathrooms in public, and felt good about myself when I passed successfully.

More from Chiara:

You mentioned that you had no desire to transition until you heard about others doing so. Did your dysphoria increase the more you learned about gender identity and transition?

Absolutely. The more information I consumed on the topic, the more adamant I was that transition was right for me. Other people’s hormonal and surgical results appealed to me at the time, and I desperately wanted that for myself. It was a vicious circle: the more I watched, the more my dysphoria grew, and the more my dysphoria grew, the more I needed to “escape” in the form of this addictive media.

Parents! Wake up! The smartphone and unfettered Internet access is not your child’s friend.

Read the entire interview. Educate yourself. The mainstream media is not going to do it for you.

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