Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen show we welcome everybody of course, but also our new listeners Victor is a scholar. He's an author. He works for the Hoover institution. He's the Martin and Ili Anderson senior fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover institution and also at Hillsdale College.

He is the Wayne and Marsha busky distinguished fellow in history. You can find Victor at his website Victor Hansen dot com. It's called the blade of persias. Please come join us either with a free subscription or to read the VD VDH ultra material. You need to have a subscription for $5 a month or $50 a year and we welcome everybody. There's lots of material and especially ultra content is just invaluable.

Well, we have a lot on the agenda. This is our weekend edition. So we are looking at his the history of warfare and we have the no Napoleonic wars on deck, but we'll look at a few political things first. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show Victor we like to start things off on a positive note. So I noticed in the news that a proposal by or actually cursed in cinema and representative tune had proposed to reduce the flight hours to become a commercial pilot for the federal aid.

The federal aviation administration's constitution they wanted to amend it and that got a lot of bad press. So I thought that that was a happy note. I was wondering your thoughts on on that.

If they fly a lot. They're starting to notice certain things and this is just anecdotal that the number of rocky landings, the number of kind of abrupt takeoffs that go straight up or when you're at L.A.X.

R.J.F.K. or O'Hara and you start to see the margin of error between baggage carrier tractors or wing tips going in and out. They seem to be less and less.

And by that, I mean, you get the impression that there's more and more people flying and there are either labor shortages or there's nonmerocratic criteria being used at very whether it's air traffic controllers or pilots are people on the ground.

I hope it doesn't include mechanics, but there's been a whole list of near accidents that have had near crashes where we've had planes almost coming down on top of each other or near misses or slight little collisions at places like L.A.X.

So the last thing in the world we need is to lower the requirements and let's face it.

We were getting a lot of great pilots that came out of the military and they know how to fly jets and they know how to fly them under the most stressful conditions and they can adapt very quickly through simulators.

But that's a different experience than just going on a simulator. Most of your career without a lot of civilian or military prior flight experience.

So when you hear that United was going to hire into their pilot to draft into their pilot training programs 50% of their pilots would be based on equity diversity equity inclusion.

That's kind of scary not because they people who are so-called minorities are not just as good pilots, but the very fact that you have to identify that particular groups by race or minority status rather than just let the system work is in itself an admission that you're using criteria other than merit.

Again, this is a scene that we've talked about a lot that nobody really cared about affirmative action or identity politics when it was destroy the English department or don't hire a white guy as an administrator or outside of the Ivy League, you're not going to have white male university presidents who cared.

But the cautionary rejoinder was there never going to do this with nuclear plant operators or air traffic controllers or pilots or neurosurgeons are medical school.

And in fact, they're doing that right now. Right now.

Yeah, I know. And so they.

I quoted Tom. So I'm quoted Tom so a lot he used to say something it was he predicted this at a luncheon. He and I used to go to lunch all the time. He said, you know, as a role of thumb, you always want to conduct legal or medical business with those in the field that that got there against great odds and you do not want to conduct them with those who had very few obstacles.

And so on his way of reasoning, he told me that in the night late 50s and 60s and early 70s, he always would seek out a black doctor because he knew that endemic racism and prejudice meant that if you were going to be a black doctor, you had to be better than anybody.

But then he said, once the affirmative action kicked him, then he was less willing to find a black doctor and he would like to see a white male once in a while because he thought it would be very hard for a white male to get through current day medical school.

These are the other minorities. In other words, he was racially blind. He didn't care about a person's race. He just wanted to know.

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