“Last month, there was a terrorist attack in India-controlled Kashmir that killed 26 tourists. Yesterday, India conducted several airstrikes on Pakistan, saying the strikes were retribution for the attack.
The strikes may not have been as successful as the Indian military had hoped. “At least two aircraft were said to have gone down in India and the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, according to three officials, local news reports, and accounts of witnesses who had seen the debris of two,” reports The New York Times. “Pakistani military officials said that more than 20 people had been killed and dozens injured after six places were hit on the Pakistani side of Kashmir and in Punjab Province. Residents of the Indian side of Kashmir said at least 10 people had been killed in shelling from the Pakistani side since India carried out its strikes.””
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“”The scale of the strikes went far beyond New Delhi’s response to previous attacks in Kashmir it has blamed on Pakistan, including in 2019 and 2016, which some analysts said meant the risk of escalation was higher,” reports Reuters. But “the last time India and Pakistan faced off in a military confrontation, in 2019, U.S. officials detected enough movement in the nuclear arsenals of both nations to be alarmed,” reports The New York Times.
There’s also, of course, the China factor: Pakistan now gets lots of its weapons from China, whereas India is more reliant on the West; relations between India and China have soured in recent years, while China and Pakistan have gotten much closer.”
“India launched military strikes on targets in Pakistan, both countries said on Wednesday and Pakistan claimed it had shot down five Indian Air Force jets, in an escalation that has pushed the two nations to the brink of wider conflict.
India’s missile strikes early Wednesday morning targeted “terrorist infrastructure” across nine sites in Pakistan’s densely populated Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, it said. They came in response to a massacre by militants of tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir two weeks ago, that New Delhi blamed on its neighbor.
Pakistan said at least 26 people were killed in Wednesday’s strikes – including women and a three-year-old girl – and 46 wounded. The country’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif described the strikes as “an act of war” and Islamabad has vowed to retaliate.”
“While trying to escape from a Yemeni missile and drone attack, the U.S.S. Harry Truman veered so hard that a F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter jet fell from the aircraft carrier into the Red Sea, the U.S. Navy informed CNN. None of the crew were harmed, except for a sailor who suffered “minor injuries,” according to the Navy’s statement.”
The F-22 could have been far more capable, but the U.S., thinking threats to its air superiority were over, canceled the upgrades to save money. Now, U.S. air superiority is threatened by China.
“Before deregulation, a cross-country flight could cost thousands of dollars (inflation adjusted) and would take all day. Afterward, travelers benefited from myriad choices that dropped prices and promoted innovation in scheduling and aircraft design.
It’s not as bougie to fly these days, but almost everyone can now afford to do it. Yet the nostalgia never ends. “The professor obviously never talked to passengers, pilots, flight crews, investors and airline executives,” author Rene Henry argued last year. “All were happy with regulation and the way things were.”
Of course, passengers, pilots, airline executives, and investors liked the old system. Passengers were usually wealthy or engaged in business travel. Airlines didn’t have to worry about upstart competitors. Investors were largely guaranteed a huge return. For the rest of Americans, well, they were stuck taking Greyhound or driving. The number of airline travelers increased from 383 million in 1970 to 4.4 billion today.”
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“Carter also signed laws deregulating trucking, rail, and telecommunications, which paved the way for transformative innovations that have vastly improved our lives. “He set up cabinet-level oversight councils to review the new agencies’ most important regulatory proposals and to encourage more cost-effective forms of regulation,” wrote Susan Dudley in an article appropriately title, “Jimmy Carter, The Great Deregulator.”
Many of us remember when Vice President Al Gore, who during a 1999 interview when he was running for president, boastfully said, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet” based on legislation he authored in Congress. Carter never claimed to help create the resulting technologies, which emanated from private-sector savants. But he helped enable everything from FedEx to the iPhone by dismantling government rules that impeded these developments.
“Freight deregulation was key to our modern, robust supply chains where customers can find just about anything in retail stores across the country, and next-day shipping is the norm,” explained the transportation journal Freight Waves in its remembrance of Carter.
Many progressives and populists now complain about the results of these emergent industries as they ramp up antitrust efforts and wax poetically about an ideal past that never existed. Criticize Carter if you choose, but much of the progress we take for granted would never have emerged without deregulation. He wasn’t only a fine man, but a notable president.”