People ask me all the time about the fear of flying. They usually follow it up by stating that without flying they would never go anywhere interesting. Then they ask me what to do. Under normal circumstances, that can be a problem for some people.

Everything has a price. A candy bar costs around a dollar. A house costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our choices have emotional and psychological costs. For example, marriage means having less control over your independence in exchange for (hopefully) intimacy. For some, flying comes with a psychological cost, whether it’s a fear of terrorism, being cooped up, or crashing.

Well, let’s look at the facts. Under normal conditions, airlines – at least as long as they are required to make a profit and are held legally accountable for passengers’ lives – have a vested interest in flying safe airplanes. U.S. Airways, for example, had a number of crashes in the mid-1990s. They hired a new safety team and advertised that they were making safety priority one. Of course, accidents are always possible, but they haven’t suffered a major crash in many years.

Years ago America West Airlines suffered the embarrassment of two pilots being arrested for drunkenness. The very next day, the airline issued an unequivocal statement that this behavior would never be tolerated and they fired both pilots on the spot. Fortunately, there were no self-serving psychiatrists or crafty lawyers trying to intimidate the airline into rehiring the pilots. The objective reality of flying, and the safety it requires, is something that even so-called experts, politicians, and attorneys dare not ignore. So we have that on our side when we fly. The professional excuse-makers don’t want to crash any more than you do.

Another fact that can’t be ignored: When airlines are operating normally, there are well over 100,000 commercial flights every single day. We know how few of these crash. The math is pretty convincing. These examples could theoretically reduce your fears, but they probably won’t. Why? Because for most people fear of flying raises issues of control. When you get on an airplane, you are forced to confront the fact that you have no control. You are trusting your life to the pilots and airline executives responsible for the maintenance and operation of the airplane.

When you drive a car, you have more control over what happens. You are the one responsible for making sure maintenance is adequate. When you get into an airplane, you are surrendering this control and this can make many people anxious. And every bit of turbulence reminds us of this fact.

OK. So we’re anxious, but we also want to get somewhere fast. What to do? There are techniques for treating the symptoms of anxiety: anti-anxiety medication, deep breathing, happy thoughts, rational thoughts (full of the facts above), focusing on what you will do when you get to your destination, keeping busy, maybe ordering an adult beverage, etc. But these only address the symptoms. The next flight you take, the fear will return.

I try to convince my clients to not only treat the symptoms, but also to address root causes. This will involve work on the issues of control in one’s daily life. And you don’t start this process three days before takeoff. Every day, ask yourself how you can become more accepting of things over which you have no control. Ask yourself how you can better accept the psychological costs of most things. Keep a journal and note when you handle these situations well. Practice letting go. A skilled cognitive-behavioral therapist can help reinforce your efforts.

If the emotional cost of relinquishing control over certain things is less than the pleasure of a trip to a far-away place, then think of it as the price you pay for living a more interesting life. Then work to keep your fears from tarnishing this benefit.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

If you had relatives who died or suffered in World War II, or Vietnam, or other more recent American wars, ask yourself if this is what they died for.

WE are the generation losing the republic that Ben Franklin and others famously left us.

And we’re losing it to the greatest bunch of smug, inept morons the world has ever seen in a position of such power. It’s more unimaginable than anything projected by Orwell, but it’s actually happening. Right now.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

I am SICK of the pretense. American “progressive” leftists — including America’s present government — are a legitimized gang of terrorists. They are at least as morally bad as the baby-beheading terrorists destroying Israel. I wish the Bidenistas the very same fate as I wish the Hamas terrorists. They deserve that fate even more, so far as I’m concerned. They won’t get it, because they are in charge and have successfully tripled down on their power over both government and culture with a decisiveness and effectiveness that any Hitler, Castro or Stalin would envy.

They — and I mean all of you leftist supporters — are the enemy every bit as much as Hamas. I don’t know what to do about that fact. But I know solutions will come once more of us on the right side start to acknowledge the fact, instead of wallowing in denial and evasion of facts. “Oh, gee, do you think Trump will win the election next year?” My, we are way, way past that point!

“House Republicans sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday, asking for a briefing about how closely the Department of Defense is monitoring the flow of U.S. weaponry to Hamas and used in their terrorist onslaught against key ally Israel, the Washington Examiner reported.” [Newsmax report]

Good grief. Talk about pretense. Republicans know full well that the Biden regime’s “defense secretary” isn’t actively “monitoring” the presence of American weapons in the hands of Hamas. The Biden regime (a puppet government with a clueless, demented “leader”) WANTS weapons in the hands of Hamas.

The Biden regime is openly committed to the destruction of America. We see that in its actions every single day.

The “Democratic” party is openly committed to the destruction of not just America, but all things rational, Western, and even semi-capitalistic or semi-free.

Democrats — like all Communists and socialists today — love money; but only in their own hands. They want everyone else — especially dissenters — poor.

And yes, Israel is far too civilized and Western and free for them. Democrats are totalitarians and statists first. Sure, they disparage religion. They pose as secularists. But their love of totalitarianism trumps their hatred of religion. So they’re just fine with the Muslim religion, at least for now, because the Muslim religion — with American arms — will destroy Israel and (ultimately) America. They’ll take care of the Muslims later.

As for the “average” or ordinary Americans who now virtue signal to their friends that they side with Hamas over Israel … they’re incredibly stupid, and incredibly ignorant. They are mortally disgusting and irredeemably depraved.

They think they’re siding with the “underdog.” They think Israel is big and therefore “mean.” They don’t grasp (or care to understand) the story of Israel not just as a Jewish state, but as a beacon of freedom, material progress and individual rights in the otherwise materially and morally moribund Middle East. Not to mention we still depend on oil from the Middle East, given the fact that envirofascists (also supported by these ignorant Democrat-supporting idiots) won’t let us drill or otherwise manufacture oil anywhere near the United States, as the Trump administration had been moving us toward effectively.

I continue to maintain the sadly obvious: We — the liberty-loving and the life-loving — are the victims of the greatest murder-suicide in human history.

The leftists, their RINO enablers (i.e., most Republicans in power) and their enablers throughout the corporate, educational and entertainment culture (i.e., virtually everywhere) are literally destroying us.

Can’t you see that the sacrifice of Israel is just one more symptom?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Here’s a measure I would LOVE to see the U.S. House pass (and mean):

“Standing with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists, including all members of the terrorist Biden regime and its supporters who still actively fund terrorist-sponsoring Iran and, in some cases, openly cheer the barbarism against Jews in Israel. Steps should be taken in America to arrest and prosecute as traitors Biden, his Cabinet, his VP, members of Congress and other high level officials responsible for actively supporting the arming of America’s most mortal enemies, Iran, and the destruction of our only actual ally in the economically and strategically crucial Middle East, Israel.”

New Speaker of the House. So? Presiding over the fiscal and moral bankruptcy of a republic is no honor. It’s just sad.

The House of Representatives should be treating the executive branch of the federal government like the tyranny it actually, objectively is. Think about it. The party in power uses the executive branch it controls, along with most of the courts (and a Supreme Court that will do nothing), to persecute and prosecute their primary political opponent, Donald Trump, the most recent president. They do so on the premise, “Trump wasn’t a real president. He didn’t count. Americans have rights, but he has no rights. And if you support him too strenuously, you have no rights, either.”

Once a government goes down this road — and gets away with it — there’s no going back. We are officially, actually and irreparably a dictatatorship. Leftists and anti-Trump RINOs smugly think, “Well, Trump deserves it.” Just like many of them say, “Well, Israel deserves it.”

They are too stupid or too intellectually dishonest to think in principle.

Thinking in principle simply means: “If it can happen to him, it can happen to me.”

Think of Castro at the time of the Cuban Communist revolution. He befriended all the newspaper reporters. Once in power, he jailed or murdered the journalists he disliked. Those journalists were all left-wingers; they supported Communism and Castro, but once you’ve got a dictatorship, there is no principle. There’s the whim of the dictatorship — whether it’s a one man show, like Castro, or an Americanized “politiburo,” with a figurehead (Biden, at the moment) and a bunch of oligarchs and corporate billionaires with connections to the government running the show (none the least of which, Obama in his third, fourth and fifth terms).

If you had relatives who died or suffered in World War II, or Vietnam, or other more recent American wars, ask yourself if this is what they died for.

WE are the generation losing the republic that Ben Franklin and others famously left us.

And we’re losing it to the greatest bunch of smug, inept morons the world has ever seen in a position of such power. It’s  more unimaginable than anything projected by Orwell, but it’s actually happening. Right now.

It’s not a matter of starting a civil war or an insurrection. We are already experiencing one.

Unfortunately, the Constitution and Bill of Rights are 100 percent on the losing side, as of this moment.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

https://rumble.com/v3rekhz-college-grad-in-tears-after-experiencing-first-ever-9-to-5-job.html

A suicide bomber drives a truck packed with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. military personnel. That same morning, 58 French soldiers were killed in their barracks two miles away in a separate suicide terrorist attack. The U.S. Marines were part of a multinational force sent to Lebanon in August 1982 to oversee the Palestinian withdrawal from Lebanon. From its inception, the mission was plagued with problems–and a mounting body count.

In 1975, a bloody civil war erupted in Lebanon, with Palestinian and leftist Muslim guerrillas battling militias of the Christian Phalange Party, the Maronite Christian community, and other groups. During the next few years, Syrian, Israeli, and United Nations interventions failed to resolve the factional fighting, and on August 20, 1982, a multinational force including 800 U.S. Marines was ordered to Beirut to help coordinate the Palestinian withdrawal.

The Marines left Lebanese territory on September 10 but returned in strengthened numbers on September 29, following the massacre of Palestinian refugees by a Christian militia. The next day, the first U.S. Marine to die during the mission was killed while defusing a bomb. Other Marines fell prey to snipers. On April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber driving a van devastated the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. Then, on October 23, a Lebanese terrorist plowed his bomb-laden truck through three guard posts, a barbed-wire fence, and into the lobby of the Marines Corps headquarters in Beirut, where he detonated a massive bomb, killing 241 marine, navy, and army personnel. The bomb, which was made of a sophisticated explosive enhanced by gas, had an explosive power equivalent to 18,000 pounds of dynamite. The identities of the embassy and barracks bombers were not determined, but they were suspected to be Shiite terrorists associated with Iran.

After the barracks bombing, many questioned whether President Ronald Reagan had a solid policy aim in Lebanon. Serious questions also arose over the quality of security in the American sector of war-torn Beirut. The U.S. peacekeeping force occupied an exposed area near the airport, but for political reasons the marine commander had not been allowed to maintain a completely secure perimeter before the attack. In a national address on October 23, President Reagan vowed to keep the marines in Lebanon, but just four months later he announced the end of the American role in the peacekeeping force. On February 26, 1984, the main force of marines left Lebanon, leaving just a small contingent to guard the U.S. embassy in Beirut.