Back To The Southwest Denver Memo

While Southwest has acknowledged that the memo above, leaked via a Twitter post from an insider, is authentic, it has denied that 120 or more Denver ramp agents quit in response.

Southwest Airlines says rumors that as many as 150 ramp agents in Denver walked off the job over the last few days after an internal memo from management told staffers that they would be directed to do mandatory overtime or face the threat of termination are unfounded.

Operations in Denver have been under strain as a result of Winter Storm Elliot, and ramp agents have been working outside in treacherous conditions and sub-zero temperatures. A Southwest Airlines spokesperson said a decision to ‘rotate’ ramp crew more often was behind some of the long flight delays and cancellations.

Southwest's explanation in effect falls back on the weather as the efficient or proximate cause of its meltdown, but if that were the case, all airlines would have been equally affected. Comments on Twitter and YouTube have made the point that all major carriers have had to deal with severe winter weather throughout their history, and Southwest was the only one to suffer a meltdown over the past holiday week. The CEO of the Denver airport authority made the point in this media interview that Southwest was the only airline at that airport to suffer a ramp staffing problem, whatever its source.

What interests me about the Southwest meltdown is that it's a textbook corporate crisis that's so far been bungled in a textbook way. This site lists a number of corporate crises, some handled well, others badly bungled. Factors that contribute to successful crisis management include acknowledgement and ownership of problems, clear and transparent communication, and immediate and visible corrective action. Factors that can damage a company long term include wishy-washy reaction, finger-pointing, telling lies, and not fixing what's gone wrong.

Given the thousands of canceled flights last week and the passengers stranded as a result, it was an especially bad sign when the Nashville operation called police to inform stranded passengers that their flights had been canceled and threatened them with arrest for trespassing if they didn't clear the area. As I covered at the time, Southwest claimed they couldn't verify this had happened despite a viral video showing that it had. It's in this context that I've got to treat Southwest's insistence that the story of 120 or 150 ramp agents quitting in Denver is just a rumor with some skepticism.

The memo alone isn't reassuring. My wife, a retired corporate attorney, said immediately after she saw it that it must not have been run by legal before it was sent. It turns out her instinct was correct, I found this on an on line forum:

[T]hat’s not just unreasonable, it’s downright illegal according to Colorado labor laws. Southwest can only ask their employees for a doctor’s note after four consecutive days of absence and that’s according to a post-COVID law.

I checked, and this is true. According to this Colorado state site,

Employers can require documentation for accrued paid sick leave (not for COVID-related public health emergency (PHE) leave), but only for absences of four or more consecutive days — and employees can provide the documentation after the leave ends.

The overall tone of the memo suggests that "employees alleging illness" are malingering, and that the ramp agents in general are slackers. It wasn't until the crisis managment stage a week later that Southwest insisted it had been rotating employees out of the weather to deal with conditions, and one thing I note just as someone who sometimes had to write official company announcements was a complete lack of wording to the effect that we understand the difficult conditions, and we're doing everything we can to help during this extreme weather. Nothing -- just come to work and don't go home or you'll be fired. This is just not how you write this kind of announcement.

A week later, the New York Post, having finally gotten a copy of the memo, contacted Southwest about it:

The Post reached out to Southwest for comment.

On Monday, the Dallas-based company finally cited weather and staffing issues at Denver International Airport for setting off a chain of events that led to massive, systemwide disruptions that began over the holiday weekend and extended into this week.

But this, again, doesn't answer the question of why every major airline and airport deals with cold and snow as a matter of annual routine, and in this particular case, Southwest's week-long meltdown was unique. No other carrier had an equivalent problem. And as the Post story put it,

A Southwest Airlines executive warned of a staffing crisis at one of its major airports days before thousands of passengers were stranded over the Christmas holiday weekend, according to a report.

It's hard not to think something led to an atmosphere of panic in Southwest's Dallas Mahogany Row that was reflected in the December 21 memo that was rushed out, almost certainly without going past legal, and I would also think that if it contradicted Colorado labor law, the union, which has its own legal department, would have been immediately involved -- and whether or not 120, or 150, or 200 ramp workers then quit, Southwest had a major problem on its hands that should not have happened. The big question continues to be why this happened at Southwest and nowhere else.

A question maybe just as big is how this could happen at what is now the biggest US air carrier. Regulators of industries like banking have been assiduous at making sure the US financial system is not subject to equivalent risks. One problem is that secretaries of transporation in administrations of both parties have largely been political patronage appointments; Mayor Pete's predecessor was Elaine Chao, Mrs Mitch McConnell. This needs to change.

Every indication is we're seeing a textbook bungling of a textbook corporate crisis. Ideally, the political system may need to get involved to solve the overall problem. I wouldn't be surprised if in addition to Southwest executives, Mayor Pete has to go as well.

An Aristotelian Approach To The Southwest Meltdown

As I've said here now and then, I'm an Aristotelian, which means I look for causes. What caused the Southwest meltdown? Legally, the proximate cause in this case is probably also Aristotle's efficient cause, which is what appears to be a badly botched management decision in Denver on December 21. A YouTube aviation commentator, Juan Browne, explains it best:

At about 1:40, he begins,

. . . but it was an incident at Denver's airport back on 21 . . . from the 21st of December through about the 24th of December that ignited, that started, this meltdown before the IT failed. As we all know, Southwest Airlines is a point-to-point airline system, but it does operate through other airlines' major hubs, and over here at the major hub of Denver, Colorado, as this bomb cyclone storm began to hit, on or about the 21st of December, an operational emergency was declared by management there specifically regarding the ramp agents, as the temperatures plunged and ramp agents were, of course have to work outside with the aircraft, were having a more and more difficult time of dealing with the aircraft in these freezing temperatures, a strongly worded memo went out from management to the ramp agents declaring that there was too many people calling in sick, and that they were going to have to declare an emergency, and if anybody is sick, they're going to have to have a letter from their doctor the day that they return to work, uh, everybody is going to have to work mandatory overtime, and anybody that is calling in sick and doesn't have a doctor's letter by the time that they show back up for work, they will be terminated.

As this word got around to the ramp agents at Denver, apparently (this has not been verified), upwards of 200 ramp agents quit, and these are jobs that pay about $20 to $28 per hour working with the aircraft out in the weather. Once that hit Denver, the aircraft began to stack up, getting parked, they couldn't get the aircraft into the gates. If, when you cannot get the aircraft into the gates, especially in this kind of weather, you have to start canceling flights, so that started a rolling cancellation of flights from Denver, Colorado. Soon those cancellations of flights ended up shutting down the entire Southwest operation, first at Denver, and that was followed by Dallas, St Louis, Nashville, and Chicago's Midway Airport. The entire Southwest operation was shut down. Now, with this many aircraft being parked, this is when the IT problems began with the SkySolver software thnat Southwest Airlines uses. This software is circa 1990s vintage, 40 year old software that they use to schedule pilots. flight attendants, crews, and marry them up with the aircraft and form the scheduling sequence. This 1990s software is capable of handling about 300 changes. We're talking changes in the thousands now, and the software was simply overwhelmed, and so all the automation for scheduling apparently failed, forcing schedulers to revert to manual scheduling, an extremely complicated job, completely overwhelming the system, thus forcing the airline to do a complete reset. . . and start all over[.]

UPDATE: Review of Twitter posts suggests that as of December 21, ramp agents were leaving work due to frostbite, which I would imagine constitutes unsafe conditions, and the memo may have provoked he walkout in response.

It's been more than a decade since I last flew Southwest, and I was shocked to see that it's now the largest US air carrier. The economy can't be exposed to this sort of calamity. The mass walkout in Denver appears to be confirmed, with the only question being just how many quit -- Juan Browne's version is 200 or so while the tweet below says 120:

Guys… this is why Denver canceled so many. They got this letter and 120 ramp agents walked out pic.twitter.com/uicHcPL3VT

— Overheard At Southwest (@AtSouthwest) December 24, 2022

I see someone named Chris Johnson, Vice President of Ground Operations, is the author of the memo, and this says to me that Johnson himself and at least one of his bosses need to be escorted out. Clearly the most indulgent policy over sick leave would have left a better result than what occurred, and we must recognize that it was Johnson's call to make.

Another version of Southwest's problem is the idea that the airline went downhill after its founder's retirement:

Southwest's problem is that its leadership, after legendary founder Herb Kelleher retired, were financial guys, not operations specialists. Southwest's unions are right in pointing to the airline's low-tech crew-scheduling software called SkySolver as the culprit in the December breakdown. It was also at fault in a smaller but still devastating Southwest breakdown last year linked to an unexpected air traffic control (ATC) outage in the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Jacksonville control center.

This is more like what Aristotle might call the formal cause, the management culture from which the efficient cause arose. In this context, though, the SkySolver software problem is one of several cascading results from the efficient cause, not the origin of the meltdown. I've seen various opinions that say the current CEO, Bob Jordan is more of an operational type than a financial type, and that he'd been trying to turn things around, but apparently to no avail after just 10 months on the job. This video gives me the impression of a corporate pretty boy who speaks in glib generalities:

I assume the Southwest board is already contacting an outside law firm for a thorough investigation. I would hope there would be at least two areas of focus, what the simmering issue was behind the mass walkout in Denver that triggered the meltdown -- at best, Chris Johnson should already be on administrative leave -- and who authorized the situation in Nashville where the police were enlisted to tell passengers their flights had been canceled and clear them out. That person also needs to be fired. (It sounds as though there was a serious sitdown in Denver between the airport authority and Southwest; something like that needs to happen in Nashville and probably elsewhere, too.)

I would imagine, though, that the board is going to have to decide fairly soon that Mr Jordan isn't what they need to turn the company around.

The Southwest Airlines Nashville Incident

It's hard to know where to start with the incident from Christmas Eve at the Nashville airport, in which by this account at The Hill,

According to a statement released by [Nashville airport] officials, a Southwest Airlines employee requested for an officer to escort passengers from the C Concourse to the pre-security ticket counter.

According to the NBC Today show,

A TikTok video shared by passenger and Nashville resident Amani Robinson, 20, shows an officer telling her mother and a fellow group of passengers standing in line on Christmas that they need to leave "or you will be arrested for trespassing."

I think it's safe to say that phones with video cameras have transformed policing. The Nashville airport police officer did not come off well in this encounter, although it's worth pointing out that in many jurisdictions, airport police are a separate agency from the main police department, and potentially they have lower standards for hiring and training. But as a regular On Patrol: Live fan, I see even more trespass complaints than car chases, and one thing I note is that officers called to a trespass situation by procedure separate the parties and get both sides.

In a normal trespass case, it's someone acting crazy at a retail or fast food establishment, the officers try to get the violator's side and get craziness, while the store manager is reasonable with a clear problem. But in any situation that's not clear cut, the respondiing officer calls in a supervisor, who makes any needed policy call. In the Nashville case at hand, the person who recorded the video and her mother weren't acting crazy, they and the numerous passengers around them were peacefully trying to get information from Southwest on their flights, and they had no indication this was out of line until a patrol officer threatened them with arrest.

I think if the officer was of the caliber we normally see on On Patrol: Live, he would see two issues: one would be the size of the crowd, and he would call for backup (later videos suggest he did this), but once he got both sides, this would also raise an immediate question of policy: these are people who are trying to get home on Christmas, they aren't disruptive, and the airline can't handle them. I've seen commentators ask if the officer had discretion to handle the case, but this is the wrong question, he should have called the shift supervisor for guidance. In fact, the shift supervisor should have rousted the chief at home.

In an ideal world, the lieutenant and the chief would quickly work out a temporaary solution where the crowd could be courteously shephereded to a different area while they conferred with Southwest on a better way to handle the situation. The difficulty would arise when it become clear that the Southwest people on site were completely overwhelmed. Nevertheless, the video was close to the worst possible outcome for the airport police, the airport management, and Southwest. The only thing worse would be people being tased.

According to the NBC link,

Southwest Airlines did not comment to NBC News, saying in a statement that they did not have any information to authenticate the encounter with the officer.

Of course there's information to authenticate the encounter, there's a viral video. I have the impression that Southwest is hoping they can just keep quiet, get things together by this weekend, and it'll all fade away.

Hundreds of thousands of travelers continued to bear the brunt of the airline's challenges on Thursday, with Southwest again canceling over half of its flights.

Ahead of the New Year's weekend, Southwest now says a recovery is in sight.

"We are encouraged by the progress we've made to realign Crew, their schedules, and our fleet," the company said in a statement. "With another holiday weekend full of important connections for our valued Customers and Employees, we are eager to return to a state of normalcy."

According to the link.

In an apology statement late Wednesday — and again on a media briefing call on Thursday — Southwest said passengers can apply online for baggage returns, flight refunds and travel expenses from this week's disruption.

. . . "If Southwest fails to cover these costs, let us know and we will investigate and enforce," [Transportation Secretary] Buttigieg said Thursday. "Anyone facing denied or delayed compensation can file a complaint with us and we'll follow up."

Right. They'll get it all fixed right away. I have a feeling this isn't over, and even Democrats may want Buttigieg's head. But that leaves aside Southwest's problem, this is turning into a textbook corporate crisis that threatens both the company's bottom line and potentially its ability to stay in business. Still, maybe their board can get Elon Musk to buy them out with a generous offer. Then he can fix everything.

Elon Can Do What He Wants, But

Let's parse out an article at Red State this morning: What Is a Woman? Elon Shows Pendulum May Be Swinging Back to Reality With Hilarious Babylon Bee Video. Let's just start with some context -- what does the great man himself think of women? As best we can determine, at least some of his numerous offspring were conceived in vitro and sublet out to surrogates, which suggests to me that he himself is a hard Hefnerian who sees women as commodities whose bodily functions can be bought and sold. But at Red State, he's swinging us back to reality. Mister, we could use a man like Hugh Hefner again.

Let's look farther down in rhe piece. It discusses the retweet from Musk of a Babylon Bee video below and how it represents Musk's motivation to buy Twitter:

Spelling Bee Contestant Asks The Definition of “Woman” pic.twitter.com/gOgDj9Oxsg

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 28, 2022

The article says,

The video was from June, but they were suspended from Twitter in March over calling Rachel Levine a man, so they posted the video again on Wednesday. But under Twitter 1.0, you weren’t [sic] have been allowed to see that kind of humor or that speech skewering the present problem with the left. Now you can again, and that’s positive movement. Indeed, it was the Babylon Bee suspension that got Musk interested in buying Twitter, to begin with, because of his belief in free speech.

Let's look at a hypothetical. Let's say Warren Buffett goes to the movies and sees a film that he finds offensive. In fact, he thinks it's so offensive and culturally destructive that it's the figurative straw that breaks the camel's back. Someone says to him after the show, "Mr Buffett, look at the wonderful thing Elon Musk has done in buying Twitter. Why don't you do the same thing for our country and buy a Hollywood studio that will now make the right kind of films?"

Now, I'm no Warren Buffett scholar. But listening to his homespun explanations of investing, I think he'd simply reply, "But I don't know anything about Hollywood. I'd probably lose everything I put into buying a studio," and that would be the end of it.

We might try to parse this out a little farther. Buffett isn't actually investing his own money. He's investing the money of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, as well as the profits from businesses he understands, like insurance. The shareholders trust his business judgment, and if he were suddenly to buy a Hollywood studio, they'd wonder why he'd do this, notwithstanding his idealistic motives, and unless his strategy showed sudden success, they'd likely begin to disinvest from Berkshire Hathaway.

Not only that, but if Buffet bought a studio, laid off half its employees, and simply dithered in public about just what kind of movies he was going to make, displaying in the process how little he actually understood about principles like natural law or classical virtues, he'd wind up doing actual harm to the causes he ostensibly supported.

This is what makes the right's tendency to think the best of Musk so puzzling. There seems to be an instinctive trust that Musk's heart is in the right place, so what could go wrong? But we have the problem of figs from thistles, his business judgment isn't all that good to start with. There was public information in the form of the whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko's allegations that Twitter's internal controls were so poor that repeated data center calamities threatened its continued existence, yet Musk seens to have understood so little about corporate controls and data security that he didn't follow up and instead on impulse made an overgenerous offer for a company that had little actual value.

Musk may now see himself as some sort of John the Baptist making straight the way, or maybe he thinks he's swinging some sort of pendulum, but the problem for him is that the job of prophet doesn't pay very well, and his lifestyle is expensive. And the people who invested in companies like Tesla were expecting to see well-run businesses, but the whole Twitter drama is suggesting that's not what they've got. Soon enough, Musk is going to have to decide whether he's cut out to be a Warren Buffett or a John the Baptist, but I have a feeling he's neither.

The Wall Stret Journal Wonders If Musk Has Lost The Bubble

Just to establish some context, I'm posting a YouTube copy of the famous TikTok video in which a new Twitter employee led us through her typical day. As it happened, this was only weeks before Musk's late October takeover, following which in a very short time he reduced the workforce from about 10,000 to about 2,500. In the process, he transformed that same headquarters environment from what was shown in the video to what a visitor said "looks like a five-star hotel that's been abandoned".

If I were teaching in business school, I would use this as an example of Stein's Law, that which cannot continue must stop. If people are giving Elon Musk credit for it, that's a mistake. All Musk did was relieve Jack Dorsey and the former board of blame for what someone was going to have to do very soon no matter who was in charge.

In fact, as some commentators have pointed out, it's almost as though Twitter's advertisers and investors felt some sort of obligation to maintain Twitter in the style it had become accustomed, when there was less and less justification for doing this. Musk allowed himself to become the scapegoat for the inevitable, something he didn't need to do.

I've already noted that Tesla shareholders are starting to wonder if Musk is still minding that store. Now, according to Breitbart, The Wall Street Journal is asking a bigger question:

The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk is facing financial pressure as Tesla stocks continue a downward trajectory and his $44 billion investment in Twitter has yet to pay off. The WSJ states that Musk’s ability to use his Tesla shares to raise money by selling or borrowing against them is being complicated by their rapid loss in value in recent months.

The WSJ notes that Musk has largely been a cash-poor billionaire for most of his career, depending upon margin loans — borrowing backed by his Tesla shares — for personal expenses and business investments while retaining his shares. But as Tesla’s market value has fallen by approximately $700 billion this year, Musk’s personal wealth has declined.

Tesla shares have fallen by around 65 percent in 2022 and Tesla investors have grown concerned by Musk’s focus on Twitter following his takeover of the company in October.

I can't disagree, although Warren Buffett said long ago, around the time he said he wouldn't invest in bitcoin, that he also wouldn't buy shares in Tesla. I doubut if he'd even waste his time commenting on Twitter. And Musk, rather than, say, recruiting someone who can actually salvage Twitter, is instead basking in his role as cultural hero:

I’m not brainwashed!! pic.twitter.com/4kx61uu4yy

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 28, 2022

Well and good, but Musk is neither a Buckley nor a Limbaugh. He's been thought to be a corporate innovator, and if that's in fact his calling, he should go back and focus on it. But even if he doesn't, we'll get along just fine. Our current problem is that Tucker Carlson is another one who's neither a Buckley nor a Limbaugh, and that's a much bigger loss.

Southwest Airlines Meltdown

In the 1990s, I did a lot of work-related flying, much of it on Southwest. This wasn't because I preferred it, but because the corporate travel departments put me on discount carriers. At the time, though, its corporate attitude was fun, a lot like the famous Volkswagen ad campaigns of the 1960s. For instance,

While peanuts are now a snack, they once stood for how frugal the airline was: other airlines served meals while Southwest served just peanuts. Some Southwest executives felt they would need to increase their investment in inflight food. Then-CEO Herb Kelleher shot that down, “Do you know what the difference in cost is between peanuts and Snickers?”

For several years, I commuted to various job assignments in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Sacramento via Southwest and even became familiar with a few of the crews. One flight attendant, who simply followed then-corporate policy of encouraging individual expression, would sing on the PA a ditty whose first line was, "I wish I was a Southwest Airlines Peanut". Those days are gone. As of 2018, even the peanuts were gone. According to the link,

Southwest Airlines will stop serving peanuts August 1 citing passenger allergies. That’s really notable because of the history of ‘peanuts’ intertwined with the airline since its founding.

By then, any policies encouraging freelance expression by flight attendants were also long gone:

In March 2017, Charlene Carter was fired by all Boeing 737 carrier Southwest Airlines. Carter claims that the airline and Transport Workers Union Local 556 violated her rights by firing her. Carter was fired for sending confrontational anti-abortion messages to the former president of the union, Audrey Stone. According to documents from the lawsuit, Carter called Stone “despicable” for attending a march in Washington DC earlier that year.

. . . Carter added that the union should not support events that included groups like Planned Parenthood. Stone never replied to Carter’s messages, but Carter was summoned by Southwest management for a mandatory meeting about her messages. Eventually, the issue led to a lawsuit, and a judge has just ruled that Carter should be reinstated by the airline.

I liked Southwest so much in the 1990s that I bought shares, but they never did as well as I expected, and the airline gradually became corporate-conventional and boring. By now, it seems to have lost control over both its operations and its once-;refreshing public image:

The U.S. Transportation Department slammed Southwest and pledged to review the airline after thousands of flights were canceled due following days of severe winter weather.

"USDOT is concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service. The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan," the Transportation Department tweeted late Monday evening.

Southwest canceled 71% of its flights on Monday and at least 62% of its flights so far on Tuesday, equaling more than 5,400 flights over the past two days, according to FlightAware.

The problem is especially bad in Southern California, one of its major markets:

What began as a crisis for Southwest Airlines amid a crippling winter storm turned to paralysis Monday evening when the budget carrier apparently canceled all departing flights from Los Angeles area airports until Dec. 31.

Thousands of flights have been canceled nationwide.

The airline’s website lists all departures out of LAX, Hollywood Burbank Airport, Ontario International Airport and the John Wayne Airport as “unavailable” until New Year’s Eve.

A few posters on Reddit and elsewhere tried to clarify that the flights were "unavailable" on the reservation system, not "canceled", and that probably reflected people who'd already rescheduled from canceled flights, but even if that's the case, the distinction is entirely academic for people who still can't fly out, and worse, it reflects that the public relations problem is entirely out of control, since Southwest has clearly been unable even to get Los Angeles media to clarify the situation, for whatever slight advantage that might give them.

It's sad to see them playing corporate catch-up:

Southwest admitted anticipating "additional challenges with an already reduced level of flights as we approach the coming New Year's holiday travel period, and we are working to reach out to customers whose travel plans will change with specific information and their available options."

Southwest added its employees and crews "are showing up in every single way. We are beyond grateful for that. Our shared goal is to take care of every single customer with the hospitality and heart for which we are known. On the other side of this, we will work to make things right for those we have let down, including our employees."

So they've suddently decided to rely on " the hospitality and heart for which we are known". Those days are 30 years in the past, and Southwest has been squandering passenger good will ever since. I hate to say I'm looking forward to a certain amount of Schadenfreude.

UFOs And The Right

I think the US right has lost the ability to think about UFOs, and that'a a problem. The History Channel has made a lot of money off them with Ancient Aliens, Project Blue Book, UFO Hunters, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, and more, but they're entertainment. I like Fringe and zombie apocalypses, too. The problem starts when people take them seriously.

The fact is that there's just too much in the way of seriously believing in space aliens, starting with Fermi's Paradox, that if extraterrestrial life is so likely, we must have seen evidence of it by now.

But just the other day, I ran into a piece by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air, One WSJ editor's war on UFOs. Note the subdivision we're beginning to see on the right: The Wall Street Journal was the intellectual sponsor of supply-side economics and neoconservative foreign policy that underpinned Reaganism, while more recently it's been never-Trump. Hot Air, on the other hand, has been both never-Trump but anti-establishment Republican as well, which means it's anti-Wall Street Journal. And now it's pro-UFOs, which the WSJ is anti:

A reader pointed me to one of the stranger articles to ever grace the pages of the Wall Street Journal last night. Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the WSJ’s editorial board who reports on business and financial matters. But the subject he weighed in on yesterday had little to do with those matters. The title was, “The UFO Crowd Wants an Alien Invasion for Christmas.” The even more curious subtitle reads, “The Pentagon discovers it’s not the flying saucers but their admirers who may be the real security threat.”

. . . It appears that Mr. Jenkins was upset about an email he received from a reader named Lex Fridman. Fridman apparently sent an insulting note criticizing a recent column that Jenkins had published, also on the subject of UFOs. It quickly became obvious that the WSJ editor is very much a skeptic (to put it mildly) when it comes to the idea that some UFOs may be of nonhuman or extraterrestrial origin.

It's hard to outline exactly what Jazz Shaw is for, but if the WSJ is agin' it, he's at least an agnostic:

Just as with the rest of us, Holman Jenkins is welcome to his own opinions and most of us have no way of proving him wrong. If anyone deep inside the government or the military-industrial complex actually does know the full truth behind the UFOs, they’re not bringing that information out for public consumption… at least not yet. I have no idea who, if anyone, is inside of those craft. And I say that as someone who has seen five of them myself over the past two years.

Well, maybe not even an agnostic if he's seen five of them in the last two years, huh?

[M]aybe it really is aliens from elsewhere. We just don’t know yet, but I’m not writing off the idea. When Jenkins speaks of the vastness of space being too great to cross, I agree that it’s too great for us to cross, at least for now. But if there’s a civilization out there that had a million-year head start on us, who knows what they might have cooked up?

But if nothing else, aren't we back to Fermi's Paradox? If we postulate there's a civilization out there with a million-year head start, then let's postualte they've come up with warp drives as well as light sabers and death stars, and flying across the width of the universe at warp speed is no more challenging than flying a B-52 to Guam. But if so, why haven't we seen them?

And this leaves aside the question Holman Jenkins himself raises, which is that even if such a civilization with a million-year head start exists, if it's more than a million light years away, there's no way we can know about it, and if Jazz Shaw objects that maybe they've found something faster than the speed of light, we've still got the retort that if so, why haven't we already heard from them, then?

To which Jazz Show can still answer he's seen five of them just within the last two years. How can anyone argue with that?

This is the US right in the wake of Ronald Reagan, William Buckley, and Rush Limbaugh (who we must recognize was a Buckley protégé). We've got to come up with people smarter than Jazz Shaw or Ben Shapiro, but the Wall Street Journal isn't what it used to be, either.