Southworst officially shits the bed — personal vacation experience, non-Zionist version

For “Southworst,” we’re talking about the legacy airline (you are) officially called Southwest, and for non-Zionist version, we’re riffing on Paul Singer, creator of Elliott Investment Management, to whom the then-current Southworst board and top brass repeatedly and incrementally caved in to in 2024-25, and who is himself indeed an ardent Zionist.

(On that? Washington Report on Middle East Affairs wrote back in 2019 about Singer’s efforts to fund growth in Israel’s high-tech industry. In other words, spyware like Pegasus may be in part funded by the guy who now owns a chunk of Southworst. And, a year earlier, Mondoweiss called out New Yorker for “Zion-washing” its profile of Singer. I have added both links to his Wiki profile; we’ll see if the changes stick. Given Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales’ own well-known Zionism, I won’t hold my breath.)

The first cave (for the general public) was eliminating the old iconic “cattle car” open seating in fall 2024. (The actual first cave was a month earlier, with six board members stepping down and chairman and former CEO Gary Kelly agreeing to leave not too long later.)

As regular Southworst fliers know, the company ended its iconic “bags fly free” in the summer of 2025.

I had not, before that, taken a non-Southwest flight anywhere in more than a decade, probably since Southworst decided to not follow legacy airlines in not charging for checked bags.

That was even though, in October 2024, among the other changes, it had indicated bags would still fly free because an internal survey, per this story, said:

Southwest, which has built years of advertising campaigns around bags-fly-free, estimated that bag fees would raise about $1.5 billion a year, but eliminating the perk could drive away passengers, costing the airline $1.8 billion, or a net loss of $300 million a year.

But, nine months later, they decided to charge for bags anyway.

As a result, I flew American out of DFW rather than Southworst out of Love Field for New Year’s week time off last year.

OK.

Summer vacation time.

Closest major or semi-major airport to Yellowstone is Salt Lake City. Bozeman, Montana, actually had a nonstop on the AA, but omigod the rental car price difference humongous and not worth it.

So, Southworst it was.

And, my non-free bags, I learned, certainly didn’t pay to improve the flight experience. They probably are doing nothing but enriching Singer’s moneybags, which as a good Zionist, to get back to the second part of the header, means, they’re enriching Satanyahu’s bags, a legionary demon I am currently powerless to drive out.

And, Southworst it was.

Outbound from Love Field? More than an hour late.

Why? Our pilot was running another bird, and it was running late. Southworst has a habit of doing this. It’s happened to me personally at least once, if not twice, before.

Return from SLC? About 2.5 hours late. Our bird was coming with our pilot from Baltimore, and who knows where before that. The Midwestern heat dome and too early in the day for heavy thunderstorms shouldn’t have delayed it that much. But it did, including delays before Magic City.

But this is the new Southwest, per this airline industry website piece that notes it is LITERALLY at the bottom of the heap now on on-time percentage. Header:

65% On-Time: Southwest Falls From America’s Most Punctual To Rock Bottom
In 6 Months

Just wow.

Now, the piece notes this is in part due to Southworst’s flight model, which, while not fully point-to-point, is quasi-so, with a semi-hub backbone of sorts. (I long ago saw a term for this, never wrote it down or saved the website, and have never seen it again.) It does mean fewer cancellations, but at the expense of delays that mount up more and more, as well as spreading more and more within the system. Like a Zionist virus? Yes, I went there.

And, after giving you one chance? As I texted back on my Sunday phone alert when told my return flight would run late, after starting with “Fucktards,” said I would be looking American-first again on future flights.

Now, if only McKinney, northeast of Dallas, could expand their soon-to-be commercial airport and get Delta, United or — whoever else is left among the legacy, not the enshittified from the start JetBlue airlines of the world — anybody else reasonable there, per my story about signing up with the AA.

“Enshittification,” he said, per Cory Doctorow.

Yes, and like Southworst’s flight delays dominoing because of their operations model— and also, their long-enshittified crew scheduling software and system still not supposed to be updated until 2028, because “the chariots and horsemen and Merkavas and Uzis of Israel” need more money or something — this dominoed. (Anyway, the main point is that Southworst’s bags fees aren’t paying yet for fixes. If Paul Singer really cared, this would be addressed by now.)

 

My rental from Hertz? I didn’t thoroughly check when I left SLC’s rentals lot. I noticed when I stopped for a Coke in Ogden or wherever, that the back of the passenger side mirror was gone. Didn’t take a photo at the time, because, running late and Grand Teton is a long ways away. I didn’t notice until even later, and didn’t include it on my initial post-return report to Hertz, which enshittifiedly (I can invent that word) is limited to 500 words, that the vehicle had no driver’s floormat, either, so who knows how long it had been since they’d really checked it anyway? So now we get to see if Hertz accepts that, if that rental car insurance peddled by Travelocity is actually worth anything and more.

The 2.5 hours late on return flight? I didn’t get back home until midnight Sunday night/Monday, and didn’t get unwound enough and late-night fed enough to sleep until after 2 a.m. As I type this on Tuesday, I remain in a bit of brain fog. (SLC being hotter than the greater Metromess didn’t help, nor, probably, did me hiking in 100-plus heat up to the last half-hour before having to return the rental.)

I also couldn’t stop by a Barnes & Noble on the way home, as originally planned, to try to snag a copy of the new issue of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, de rigueur for people in my line of work here in Tex-ass.

Scratch that. B&N ain’t open at 11 p.m. It would be (I think) at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday.

As for a vauntedly low cancellation rate? Per the Transportation Department itself, cancellations are the cause of ONLY ONE PERCENT of late arrivals. Do NOT NOT NOT let Southworst gaslight you on that.

Plus, isn’t a delay of 2.5 hours essentially a cancellation anyway?

Or, to put it in Paul Singer terms?

About 2.5 hours may be how often in a day an Israeli kills a Palestinian.

There.

If there were a god, I’d think I was being punished for some moral violations. I don’t even have that opening.

 ==

Southworst are also chickenshits. Can't find a specific email address I want on the website. They've deserted Shitter, with an account inactive for 2-plus years, as well as deserting Book of Face, where I no longer am. (They have no linked logo for either account.) They're not on Threads or Instagram, either. Only LinkedIn and Pinterest of all things. Social media as turd polishing is what that one is. 

Loony Laura Loomer, lying lizard

It's for the alliteration, not David Icke, but if a non-antisemitic anti-Zionist shoe pinches? So be it.

LLL, for short, walks, talks and quacks like being a paid Ukrainian agent while in lying denial of how she got to this point. Here's that:

“I’ve come to realize I was bamboozled by Russian propaganda and I came to believe a lot of untrue things about Ukraine. I used to think that this was a country full of Nazis,” Loomer told Zelenskyy as she interviewed him for her show on Rumble, an online video platform. 

Loomer blamed her indoctrination on getting banned by American social media platforms, leading her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared.

I quoted the second of those two paragraphs when I posted the link to Shitter Monday night, the Shitter where LLL is a blue-check verified (and "verified!") account that I tagged. It's an account that's active and used regularly.

Per this piece, that's the same Shitter that did NOT ban her when she raised anti-Russian conspiracy theories about the "why" of Lindsey Graham's death. I actually thought the Zionist god of Elijah, the god of "the chariots and horsemen and Merkavas and Uzis of Israel," had called him home. On Shitter at the time of Huckleberry J. Butchmeup's death and claims by her and others to this end, I joked about Vlad the Impaler shooting him in the butt with a polonium-210 pellet, but seeing that it was a cardiac problem that killed him, I said that was more likely to have come from snorting too many lines of coke with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Zionist and other neocon reptilians, Jew and Goy alike, lie out their asses in Hitlerian ways, of course. 

Back to the first piece, and this:

Loomer has said repeatedly that Ukraine did not finance her trip and insisted she had traveled in her own capacity. 

“I can guarantee you I wasn’t paid by anybody. I certainly wasn’t paid by the government of Ukraine to come here,” she said.

Really? 

Per the book of Proverbs, the guilty flee when nobody is pursuing. Sounds like you probably are paid and are trying to get ahead of the game. 

Other parts of her nuttery talk about Ukraine being Mooslimrein, but seeming to insinuate Russia has problems because it's NOT Mooslimrein. 

Maybe Jim Stiles wasn't all wrong, and not just about Utah's red rock country

These thoughts were provoked by this Substack piece about a Wilderness Study Area on the South Fork of the Crooked River. 

For the unknowing, here are two definitional points.

First, here's what a wilderness study area is:

Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs) are lands that have outstanding features such as naturalness, opportunities for solitude and recreation, and other qualities that make them suitable for inclusion in the National Wilderness System. Other factors used to determine eligibility as a WSA were historic, scientific, geological, ecological, or scenic values.

There you go.

Second, there are several activities prohibited in actual wilderness lands. (Unfortunately, per the piece above, cow shit is not one of them. "Mr. Reclamation," per Marc Reisner in "Cadillac Desert," Colorado Western Slope Congresscritter Wayne Aspinall, insisted that shitting cows be allowed to remain inside wilderness areas before he'd let the eventual 1964 Wilderness Act see the light of day. 

One of them is "mechanical transport," which, per this federal law site, has always been understood to include bicycles. Mountain bikers hate this. Too bad. 

With that said, yes, a wilderness study area is not wilderness. But, it's preserved in wilderness-like status.

So, why the hell is the Oregon Desert Land Trust promoting mountain biking in the South Fork of the Crooked WSA? I quote:

Spanning both sides of the river, the South Fork Crooked River parcel helps ensure public access to fishing, hunting, hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding in the basin.

Yeesh.

And, I have emailed both their "info" general contact email and their executive director. I've heard nothing back. 

As in, I started writing this piece two weeks ago, before I went on vacation, and have heard nothing back.

Friend Lyle Lewis suspects they want their capitalist piece of the action, so that's surely why. 

So, that gets me to where I say the late, long-term Moabite curmudgeon Stiles was maybe more than half right. 

Or maybe still less than half right.

Directly relevant to the current environmental and land preservation situation, Stiles went apeshit, not over Trump shrinking Bears Ears, but Dear Leader wanting to preserve it better (sort of) a decade ago. 

And, on that part of the story, Stiles was dead wrong. As of 18 months ago, 65 percent of Utahns wanted to keep both it and GSE as is, as part of expressing support for all monuments "as is." That said, I'm not sure if that means size unchanged, or just keeping them rather than eliminating them. Of that, 51 percent were "definitely" in favor. And, 54 percent of Utah Republicans were in favor, with 30 percent definitely in favor.

The Substack that comes from fudged a bit. Yes, more than 71 percent approve of keeping Bears Ears, but that's without the "as is," which is for all national monuments. 

Speaking of? My comments on this Substack that "branding" by naming both GSE and Bears Ears National Park Service national monuments from the start might have helped is getting a lot of support. And, several commenters agree with my take on the modern Democratic party.

Texas Progressives round up the news of the region

Off the Kuff goes back to the future with the latest school finance lawsuit, filed by Midland ISD.

Neil at Houston Democracy Project Blog said Hitchcock City Council in Galveston County voted to reject formal cooperation with ICE. They said it would tank local trust in law enforcement & placed concern for people of Hitchcock over Abbott & Trump.

SocraticGadfly wondered if, post-Trumpian world, more and more public radio and TV that are university-affiliated or owned will sever ties. 

Texas Monthly celebrates Butthole Surfer Summer.

CultureMap introduces us to the 2026 State Fair of Texas' music lineup.

Gwen Howerton is being driven insane by crappy AI-generated flyers around Houston.

D Magazine is done with the Alamo Drafthouse.

Deceleration reports on anti-ICE activity in San Antonio.

Law Dork recounts the many screwups of the Trump Justice Department in their effort to subpoena reporters from the New York Times.

Franklin Strong finds a whole bunch of classic books that have been removed from school libraries, and says that was an intended effect of the school library censorship law.

Texas Progressives

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes that the Guadalupe River takes a nice long break from flooding in the future as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff enjoyed the political theater of an illegal voting complaint filed against Ken Paxton for his incorrect voter registration. 

SocraticGadfly talked about how data centers have their expansions all planned in advance. . 

Your Local Epidemiologist answered your cyclospora questions. 

City of Yes celebrated rowhomes.  

Deceleration lauded human-created art. 

 The Austin Chronicle reported on the Texas GOP's obsession with IVF and surrogacy.

 Texas Monthly examined the longstanding fight to keep Galveston wild. 

 In the Pink Texas found the week's most important news.

Snowden and "his" files and the Intercept

I've never been a 100 percent fan of Edward Snowden. While noting that, in balance, he did a service to the country, he also has his fair share of lies and more, stuffing full the pages of "Permanent Record," as I noted after reading it. 

That said, I had long wondered what his reaction was to Glenn Greenwald, with agreement of Jeremy Scahill and others at The Intercept, but withOUT advance agreement from Laura Poitras, turning over the 95 percent of the files that had not been used, to Intercept owner and Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ techdudebro player Pierre Omidyar.

I already knew that Glennwald had kind of "used" him, while still wondering if somebody in Russia had honeypotted him in the first place. 

Turns out, on Snowden, per a Blogger site called Electrospaces that I stumbled upon while doing some searching on teh Google for stuff related to Scahill's time at The Intercept, he didn't know in advance, and reading between the lines, didn't fully like it. 

That said, while we still haven't seen those other documents, per pieces at Electrospaces in both 2023 and earlier this year, we have had new writing about at least bits of those other documents. (That latter is more about peering around the edges of already published files that may have had bad redacting work.)