Doom-scrolling updates: the LaGuardia crash, the predatory economy, Ayla Lucas is still in ICE jail, the Iran War

As I was doom-scrolling today, I seemed to find a lot of crazy or sad or angry stuff, or all three! This Canada Goose reference seemed apt:

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About the LaGuardia crash
The two pilots who died are being remembered as heroes, because their handling of the immanent collision ensured that the plane didn't pinwheel or crash off the runway. They died so everyone else could live.
When I first heard about the controversy over Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau's condolence video being in English, I thought it was overblown, just a distraction. But I can understand it now -- this guy has had years to improve his French but apparently hasn't done the work, and he didn't even seem to realize that the grieving Montreal Air Canada staff and families were disrespected. They needed to hear from Rousseau in their own language, the language they speak every day.

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More comments on these pilots:

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72 passengers lived. Two young Canadian heroes did not. This is their story. I found myself welling up this morning, and I’ve been asking myself why. Why has this story got so far inside me? Why am I mourning two young men I never even met? I think it’s this: There is something in the human condition—something ancient and aching—that breaks open when a young life is taken at the exact moment it is becoming everything it was meant to be. Antoine Forest (24) and Mackenzie Gunther. Two young Canadian pilots. Vibrant. Dedicated. On the absolute verge of the lives they had spent every waking second training for. We don’t just mourn the person. We mourn the world that was about to exist. The flights not yet flown. The passengers not yet carried safely home. We feel it because we know, in our bones, how fragile that "verge" is. The Moment the World Stopped On Saturday night, Jazz Aviation Flight 8646 from Montreal began its descent into LaGuardia. There were 72 passengers on board. As the plane landed, it struck a fire truck crossing the runway. Passengers felt a jolt. They heard a grinding sound. The nose of the plane was torn apart. 72 passengers lived. Antoine and Mackenzie did not. One of those passengers, Rebecca Liquori, said it best: “They did everything they can to save us, and they didn’t save themselves.” The Boy Who Belonged to the Sky Antoine Forest was 16 years old when he flew his first plane. Not 16 and dreaming about it—16 and already in the sky. Growing up in Coteau-du-Lac, Quebec, he and his brother called their great aunt Jeannette after school every single day. In Grade 11, he moved in with her specifically to learn better English. Not because he had to, but because he had decided he was going to be a pilot and he would do whatever it took. He flew bush planes, spotted forest fires, and protected the wilderness. His instructor said he was destined for the big international routes. You can feel the shape of that life, can’t you? The absolute certainty of where it was going. The Unanswered Text Mackenzie Gunther, a 2023 Seneca College grad, was just starting his first professional job. He was a regular at a coffee shop in Peterborough. When the news of the crash broke, the shop owner, Daniel Biro, texted him just to check in. He waited a day for a reply that never came. A Story Every Canadian Should Know That is the "why." That is why it hurts. It is the cruel randomness of it paired with the heartbreaking nobility of it. The last thing these two young men did on this earth was exactly what they had spent their lives preparing to do. They ensured 72 strangers got home to their families, while they never made it home to theirs. The CN Tower dimmed its lights. The flags at Seneca flew at half-mast. But somewhere in Quebec today, a great aunt is remembering a little boy who used to cuddle up beside her at bedtime. A boy who set out to become a pilot and became one of the best. Rest in peace, Antoine Forest and Mackenzie Gunther. Two heroes. Two Canadians. We will not forget you. 🕊️🍁 Please share this. Their story needs to be told. Every Canadian should know the names of these two young men and the sacrifice they made. They deserve to be remembered.

- American Pulse

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About the predatory economy

With the oil prices rising and the stock market falling, everyone is getting nervous about the economy these days - though there doesn't seem to be anything we can actually do about it.

You can tell a lot about the economy when you say to a stranger, “Oh look at that, she’s got pre-cut pineapple money.” And they laugh with you.

- Kyrie

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But our economy also rewards predatory behaviour - the people with money trying to take more from the people without as much - and this is something we could get a grip on.

💯

- Gerald Butts

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Yes, this worries me too -- substacker Nick: Capital & Commonwealth at AmericaUndivided writes The 24/7 Casino in Your Pocket: How AI and Legal Loopholes Are Betting Away a Generation’s Wealth

The rapid legalization of sports betting has transformed the modern athletic experience from a test of skill into a 24/7 digital casino, bringing with it a tide of social and financial consequences that are only now beginning to be fully realized. While states and leagues celebrate record-breaking tax revenues and lucrative partnerships, a “hidden crisis” is unfolding in the pockets of millions—particularly young men and adolescents. Far from being a harmless pastime, the gamification of gambling through mobile apps has created a high-speed pipeline to addiction, eroding the financial stability of a generation and normalizing high-stakes risk-taking among those whose executive functions are still developing....
The challenge of 2026 is not about a total ban on betting; it is about deciding whether we will allow the “wisdom of the crowd” to be algorithmically harvested by predatory platforms. ...

From the radical communist lefties at the University of Chicago Business Law Review: “Private equity (PE) funds control over $9 trillion in assets and thousands of companies, yet their leverage-driven model often amplifies financial fragility and social harm. This article argues that the core tools of PE value creation—high leverage, cash extraction, and short-term exit incentives—externalize predictable risks to third parties including workers, healthcare patients, consumers, unsecured creditors, communities and the environment.” https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/dark-side-private-equity

- Matthew Mendelsohn

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About Ayla Lucas and Trump's ICE scum
The Trump administration will never admit to being wrong and, in fact, will continue to try to punish anyone who shows them up -- they're still trying to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda, and send Liam Ramos and his dad to Ecuador. They still haven't releaset Canadians Ayla Lucas and her mother.

I am disgusted - little Ayla Lucas & mom Tania Warner are still locked up in a horrible Texas jail, being taunted by guards because they're Canadian! #ICEGestapo vancouversun.com/news/ice-gua... via @VancouverSun

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— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) March 25, 2026 at 1:34 PM

Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to hold fast to their determination to cut off Homelane Security until the ICE Gestapo are dealt with. With unpaid airport security staff now reaching the breaking point, airport lines are too big to ignore. So Trump decided to send his ICE Gestapo to airports to stomp around and look important. It isn't working.

Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner to ICE agents at Philadelphia’s International Airport. “I will put you in handcuffs, put you in a courtroom, and I will put you in a jail if you make this airport anything like what you did in the streets of Minneapolis." #ProudBlue #Pinks #SheShed

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— LA Blue Dot in GA 🌊🐸 (@namwella1961.bsky.social) March 25, 2026 at 1:25 PM

And the DOJ finally had to 'fess up:

Bondi just threw Miller, ICE & DHS under the bus. After a year in US Court, now DOJ says "Oopsie" - ICE did NOT have legal authority to arrest people at US immigration court hearings. 10,000s arrested due to "agency attorney error"

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— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) March 25, 2026 at 3:28 PM

About the Iran War
The posts I saw today on the war were all over the place, because things are getting fucked up, aren't they.
And now we know why:

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America has no idea what it is getting into.

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I'm just gonna be real with you and admit that I didn't know the Strait of Hormuz even existed until a couple of weeks ago when everyone started talking about it. So, when I heard it existed, you know what i did? I shut the fuck up. Because I don't know shit about it. But I did take the opportunity to look it up online and I read about it for an hour or so. You wanna know what I did then? I shutted the fuck up some more. Because, even though I'd spent a negligible part of my day reading about it, I still didn't know enough to be talking about it in the way that we're talking about it now. I have no military, tactical sense. Hell, I barely have a grasp on geography most of the time. So, you know what I did then? I kept the shutting the fuck up up. I listened to people who know about it. People who have spent years and years of their lives studying such things and I learned a few things. And then I kept shutting the fuck up. Because listening to people isn't the same as experience. I was surprised to find out that I have a friend who has been through the Strait and he had a lot to tell me in the way of personal experience. Then guess what i did. Yeah, you guessed it. I shut all the way the fuck up. It's astounding to me that so many people who didn't know that Puerto Rico was an American territory until last month are all of a sudden experts on the Straight of Hormuz. Shut up.

- Brian Broome

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Here's a terrific though upsetting article that explains Minab, where those Iranian schoolgirls were bombed. In Artificial Bureaucracy, Kevin Baker writes Kill Chain  On the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children

...As military jargon goes, “kill chain” is a remarkably honest term. In essence, it refers to the bureaucratic framework for organizing the steps between detecting something and destroying it. ...
The United States military has been trying to close the gap between seeing something and destroying it for as long as that gap has existed, and every attempt has produced the same failure. ...
...The target package for the Shajareh Tayyebeh school presented a military facility.... This package looked like every other package in the queue. But outside the package, the school appeared in Iranian business listings. It was visible on Google Maps. A search engine could have found it. Nobody searched. At a thousand decisions an hour, nobody was going to. A former senior defense official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.” How indeed.
Congress did not authorize this war. In three weeks, American forces struck six thousand targets. The school was one of them. American forces killed almost 200 people, and the reporting reached for “AI error,” which domesticated the event into something a better algorithm or better guardrails could have prevented. In the days after the strike, the charisma of AI organized the entire political conversation around the technology ... The constitutional question of who authorized this war and the legal question of whether this strike constitutes a war crime were displaced by a technical question that is easier to ask and impossible to answer in the terms it set. ...

Excellent piece. Thoroughly sums up how and why we've arrived at this point.

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— Shirley Siluk (@ebishirl.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 4:43 PM

And Al Gore chimes in -- Gore was the greatest president America never had.

EXCLUSIVE: Al Gore calls Trump's Iran war "an astonishing mistake"—says he ignored 50 years of war planning and told advisors "they'll surrender." They didn't. "It has put us in a terrible situation." Watch the first clip from our sit-down with the former Vice President.

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— Mother Jones (@motherjones.com) March 25, 2026 at 6:02 PM