USA falling of the demographic cliff

Fewer babies as US birth rate fails to rebound with economy

 The nation’s birth rates last year reached record lows for women in their teens and 20s, a government report shows, leading to the fewest babies in 32 years.

The provisional report, released Wednesday and based on more than 99% of U.S. birth records, found 3.788 million births last year. It was the fourth year the number of births has fallen, the lowest since 1986 and a surprise to some experts given the improving economy.

The fertility rate of 1.7 births per U.S. woman also fell 2%, meaning the current generation isn’t making enough babies to replace itself. The fertility rate is a hypothetical estimate based on lifetime projections of age-specific birth rates.

Whether more U.S. women are postponing motherhood or forgoing it entirely isn’t yet clear.

In a first-world society, it takes 2.1 live births per woman to maintain a level population. The 1.7 average is an all-time low for the United States. But birth rates have been falling for, well, 200 years.

However, the decline in only nine years, from 1.93 to 1.7, is precipitous.

Births were down across racial groups, with small declines for Hispanics, whites, blacks and Asians. The number of babies born to native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders was stable.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report also found:

—Overall, the U.S. birth rate for women ages 15 to 44 was 59 births per 1,000 women, an all-time low.

—Last year, there were 2% fewer births than in 2017.

Some observers of the trend say that the decline can partly be explained by the fact that women who bear children are doing so at an older average age, and that presently childless women will catch up as time passes. But that still does not account for the fact that women are still bearing fewer children than ever, no matter what age they bear them.

Demographers have pointed out that some European countries are gripped in a demographic death spiral, where the birth rate is so low that there is no realistic chance of recovery back to the 2.1 sustainment level.

What does America's falling birth rate portend? The WSJ explains (firewalled):

The nation's falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country's fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem—a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall—has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences. ...

Low-fertility societies don't innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don't invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don't have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

Simply put, a shrinking population means a bleaker, poorer, and less sustainable future.

Ft Lauderdale attack not an amateur event

Shots fired, five dead at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport

A gunman opened fire inside a baggage claim area of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Friday afternoon, killing five people and injuring eight more before police arrested him, the Broward Sheriff’s Office reported.

About an hour after the shooting, a second incident occurred at a different terminal of the airport, causing panic and sending dozens of passengers fleeing across the tarmac as police in armored gear responded with drawn weapons. Police and passengers at the terminal took cover behind parked cars.

BSO said in a Twitter post that one subject was in custody, but police did not identify the individual. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida said on MSNBC that the shooter is named Esteban Santiago and that the man was carrying a military identification.

"First reports are always wrong." As I write, the cable news channels are covering this almost exclusively, live. The airport is being evacuated and reports are that there is at least one other gunman at large and apparently still active.

Mark Lea, who said he was a witness to the shootings, told MSNBC that the shooter was a man, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt, and that he walked into the baggage claim area of Terminal 2 and opened fire with a single handgun.

Lea said the man said nothing as we he went through three magazines before giving up and sprawling spread-eagle on the flood as a police officer took him into custody.

“He had no intention of escaping,” Lea told MSNBC.

But who is the other shooter, and in fact is there really another shooter? As is always the case in events like this, which are so sadly no longer rare, what we think we know now will turn out to be incorrect in whole or part.

But from reports, this was not an amateur hour at the airport. Mark Lea's account is does not describe a suspect who acted tentatively or uncertainly. His actions are those of a planned attack, indeed, a practically rehearsed one.

If there is a second gunman, which has not been confirmed, then what are the odds that two men, quite independent of each other, would decide to shot up the same airport at the same time? Zip, nada, nil.

But this is very bad, no matter how it turns out.

Update: Santiago is reported to have received a general discharge from the Alaska Army National Guard. A general discharge is a lesser one than an honorable discharge but is considered to be "under honorable conditions," as the Fort Hood Sentinel explains:

[A] “General, Under Honorable Conditions” Discharge (commonly referred to as a General Discharge) is for service members whose service was satisfactory, but involved situations where the Soldier’s conduct and/or performance of duty were not so meritorious to warrant an Honorable Discharge. Recipients of General Discharges usually have engaged in minor misconduct or have received nonjudicial punishment under Article 15, UCMJ. While the “under honorable conditions” terminology is slightly confusing, there is a clear disadvantage to receiving a General Discharge in contrast to an Honorable Discharge. While recipients of a General Discharge will receive entitlement to benefits such as VA medical and dental services, VA home loans and burial in national cemeteries, they will not receive educational benefits under either the Montgomery or Post-9/11 GI Bill.

Santiago's brother is reported to have told media that Santiago was grappling with "mental issues," but the brother said he did not know what they were.

Santiago was reported to have arrived at the airport on an Air Canada flight, with a firearm and ammunition in his checked baggage (which is legal to do). Presumably, after receiving is baggage he went somewhere, locked and loaded, and started shooting. However, Air Canada has stated that no passenger named Esteban Santiago is recorded on any Air Canada flight, nor was any firearm and ammunition declared and checked on its flights.

A statement from a Florida official that the shooter had traveled to Florida on a Canadian flight sent officials in Ottawa scrambling, but Global Affairs Canada said the shooter had not been a passenger on any Canadian flight, and the plane on which the gunman arrived did not originate in Canada. ...

Air Canada and WestJet, which service Fort Lauderdale, said they had no record of any passenger with the name of the suspect or of any checked guns on any of their Friday’s flights to the U.S. city.

Link.

Explosive tragedy in Mexico

This is not Aleppo, Syria. It is the San Pablito fireworks market in Tultepec, Mexico, near Mexico City.



People were killed:

Mexico City, Dec 21 (IANS) At least 26 people were killed in a fireworks market explosion near Mexico City, an official said.

Mexico State Prosecutor Alejandro Gomez raised the toll of the Tuesday's blast from the previous nine deaths, Xinhua news agency reported citing a local television.

Earlier on Tuesday, Mexican federal police said on Twitter that at least nine persons were killed in an explosion Tuesday at the San Pablito fireworks market in Tultepec, a town close to the capital Mexico City.

At least 60 people were initially reported by Luis Felipe Puente, director of Civil Protection, to have been injured in the blast.

Firefighters and rescue teams from the state and capital converged at the site following the blast.

More recent reports state the death toll is "at least 29."

Justice for Mike Brown finally achieved

I am so happy to see that at last justice for slain black teen Michael Brown has been achieved:

That's what Natalie DuBose gets for being a racist oppressor!

snark off: This photo illustrates the real, ongoing tragedy of Ferguson.

This seems relevant, too.

Did Flight 370 catch on fire?

Last night a currently-serving, American B-777 pilot (airline not identified) was interviewed at length on FNC. He said that absent compelling evidence to the contrary, the most likely explanation for the plane's bizarre course change and subsequent disappearance from civil-aviation-tracking systems was an on-board emergency, not hostile hijacking by either the flight crew themselves or a passenger.

Today, in the continuing silence of new facts from Malaysian authorities, that theory is getting more play. What sort of emergency? Fire.

Take a look at this airport on Google Earth. The pilot did all the right things. He was confronted by some major event onboard that made him make an immediate turn to the closest, safest airport. 

For me, the loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense in a fire. And there most likely was an electrical fire. In the case of a fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. If they pulled the busses, the plane would go silent. It probably was a serious event and the flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra in such situations.

Much is being made today that the plane's course reversal just after loss of comms was a turn programmed into the plane's flight management system, or autopilot. The 777 pilot last evening addressed that, too, saying that new destinations and waypoints can be programmed into the FMS by the flight crew and that is the usual way to do it.

Even in an emergency? he was asked. He replied that unless he actually needed to physically control the airplane, using the FMS is preferable, since once it is reprogrammed the pilot is free to devote attention and effort to other things than flying the plane.

Like fight a fire.

The fire theorem doesn't fill in all the holes, such as why the plane flew so erratically after overshooting its now-presumed landing destination back on Malaysia's coast. Nor does it explain why, even with the crew overcome by smoke, the plane didn't land itself there since a previously-interviewed 777 pilot said that the plane can do that.

But it makes more sense than that either the pilot or copilot hijacked the airplane or that it was flown to the Asian mainland for another, nefarious purpose. As I said before, even while probing the implications of a hijack, that the plane wound up dropping into the southern Indian Ocean seems its most likely fate. If so, eventually debris will turn up somewhere.

But why on earth didn't either pilot key the mic for just three or four seconds and send a mayday? Especially since, in the "fire" theory, the pilot would want air clearance at the airport and crash vehicles and rescue personnel alerted? The lack of such a call is the weakest link.

Update: This is significant and supports that the plane demise was accidental even if there remain gaps in the explanation: "U.S. Intel Agencies Say No Terror Chatter on Vanished Malaysian Airlines Flight."

Update: The problem with the fire theory is that now media are reporting that the FMS was programmed for the U-turn 12 minutes before the copilot radioed, "All right, good night." The reprogram was, reportedly, communicated via ACARS at the 0107 report, the last one that ACARS made. Presumably, the FMS might have been reprogrammed even before 0107, but that was the time it was reported.

So if the plane was U-turned because of any kind of in-flight emergency, why program it to turn at least 12 minutes later? And why would the copilot's last transmission be so routine?

If the report is true that the FMS was reprogrammed so early - and we surely have learned to treat all info coming from Malaysian authorities with suspicion - then ISTM that it pretty much shoots down the fire-in-flight theory.

Flight 370 - Failed Terrorist Hijacking?

A British al Qaeda "supergrass" (slang for informer) told British authorities quite some time ago that al Qaeda had supplied Malaysian Islamists with shoe-borne explosives to use to gain access to a locked flight cockpit on a Malaysian airliner, a plot that had been in the works for at least two years.

(Grabbed from American Digest, reported in The Telegraph.)

In the last day or so we have learned that there is no longer any doubt that the flight was hijacked and that instead of staying in the air for four hours after communications ceased, its automatic electronic pinging of satellites continued for more than seven hours - right up to the time its fuel would have run out.

The final satellite contact was at 8.11am, five-and-a-half hours after the jet’s last known position. During that time, the aircraft could have flown 3,000 miles at its normal cruising speed.

Apparently the hijackers killed the passengers to prevent them from opposing:

"This is feeling like kind of a failed hijacking," a federal law enforcement official said, speaking anonymously because the investigation was ongoing.

He said U.S. authorities theorized that once the plane was diverted toward the Indian Ocean, it was flown erratically at high altitudes in an attempt to depressurize the cabin and render the passengers unconscious. "That could have neutralized any threat from them to take the plane back," he said.

A consensus seems to be emerging that the plane was then flown either to a Islamist-controlled area of Pakistan or to Iran. But forget the maximum range of the Boeing 777 aircraft of 7,000-plus miles. Flight 370 was not carrying that much fuel. The fuel range of the flight on that particular night was rather less. Iran was not in range and only the southeast corner of Pakistan was.

Meaning that the plane made an intermediate landing where the dead passengers and their baggage were dumped and more fuel taken, then took off again (for Iran, I would say), which I developed here, or in suffocating the passengers the hijackers managed to suffocate themselves, and the plane flew on until fuel ran out, then dropped into the sea.

Because we know that the plane was definitely airborne until very close to the time of fuel exhaustion, the latter case seems thankfully more likely (as of now, anyway). But it also means that the area where the plane could have gone down is in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of square miles, and there is no way of knowing where to start searching.

We may never know what happened to it.

Update: This diagram of possible flights path gives an idea of the vastness of possible destinations before it ran out of fuel (link). Note that the maximum range of Flight 370 reaches only a small part of Pakistan and none of Iran. The shaded arc illustrates only major land potential destinations, but to encompass the entire area the plane could have flow, the arc would need to be extended down to the bottom of the diagram.

Plus this: "... if it was diverted into the Indian Ocean, the task of the search teams becomes more difficult, as there are hundreds of uninhabited islands and the water reaches depths of around 23,000ft."

IIRC, that depth is greater than the range of the emergency locator transmitters aboard the plane, which are automatically activated by immersion or high g-forces of an impact.

Update: Here is the WaPo's map of the maximum distance the plane could have flown from last known location:

This is interesting, too:

Update: In 1996 hijackers took over Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 and forced the crew to fly the airliner until it ran out of fuel.

The plane crash-landed in the Indian Ocean near Grande Comore, Comoros Islands, due to fuel starvation; 125 of the 175 passengers and crew on board died, along with the hijackers

The crash was so close to shore that beach goers actually videoed the crash.

Why we should hope Flight 370 crashed

At the Denver Post: "Where is the Malaysian plane? 16 possible scenarios"

All 16 scenarios boil down to one of three categories:

Murder: Either a flight officer or a hijacker deliberately crashed the plane. Or it was shot down by a hostile power.

Accident: A systems failure caused the aircraft to go down, one example is the hypoxia theory. The idea that there could have been a catastrophic disintegration of the aircraft has been all but abandoned because of electronic data (see below).

Hijacking: The plane was taken over and flown away by either the flight crew or one or more passenger-hijackers for criminal or terrorist ends.

Thankfully, none of the scenarios enumerated by the Post fall into the tinfoil hat category.

There are only three possible fates that befell the airliner:

• It crashed into the sea
• It crashed onto the land
• It was flown somewhere and landed safely

ABC News has a good summary so far of what authorities (mainly US officials, who had been largely frozen out by the Malaysians) think probably happened, based on evidence:


ABC Entertainment News | ABC Business News

The search area has been enlarged far into the Indian Ocean because there is practically no doubt that the airliner stayed in the air at least four hours after transponder contact was lost, and that it flew sharply westward generally following established air corridors. But once well out to sea, electronic data are lost and there is no way to know where it went then.

I broached the possibility that the plane could have been hijacked for terrorist purposes last Monday.

I am reminded of a novel I read a few months ago by either Tom Clancy or Frederick Forsyth, can't recall which. It opened with the hijacking and disappearance of an airliner in Africa, run by a large charter company. The craft was repainted and reconfigured to pass for a scheduled-airline plane with the goal of using it as a kamikaze weapon against an American target. Of course the good guys won, but it makes me think: what could account for the instantaneous disappearance of a Boeing 777 that leaves no trace at all?

Now authorities in Malaysia and elsewhere have concluded that indeed the evidence points to hijacking.

Kuala Lumpur: Investigators have concluded that one or more people with significant flying experience hijacked the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, switched off communication devices and steered it off-course, a Malaysian government official involved in the investigation said on Saturday.

It does not ease the mind much that the satellite-connected ACARS system aboard the aircraft cannot be turned off in flight. Those were the signals the told investigators the plane stayed in the air for four hours after transponder contact was lost [update, now up to 7.5 hours, see below]. That means, presumably, that within an hour after the final signal, the plane either crashed or was landed then powered down.

But where would a hijacker take it? A 777 pilot interviewed on FNC today said that a 777 needs only about 3,500 feet of runway to land. That, he said, means that the number of landing strips it could have gone to is enormous. But he said it needs a much longer runway to take off because presumably it would be refueled, adding enormous weight. He did say that takeoff distance would be much shorter with minimal fuel.

So: Suppose the plane was landed at a short runway where the passengers were forced off and the cargo and luggage dumped. Now you have a much lighter aircraft that can take some decent amount of refuel and still be light enough to take off from a runway ordinarily thought to be too short. And a fully-qualified pilot and copilot come aboard. From there it proceeds sans transponders to, say, Iran, where it awaits their first nuke, which they have for years called "The Islamic Bomb."

Next stop Tel Aviv? Haifa? Washington? Even Jerusalem?

We may truly be in nightmare territory now. At this point we'd better hope the plane crashed somewhere because an alternative is too potentially terrible to contemplate.

Update: Slate reinforces this line of thought:

When the flight first disappeared from air traffic controllers’ radar a week ago, the default assumption was that the plane had crashed. Now it seems unlikely that a plot as ingeniously planned and carefully executed as this one would not also have included plans for safe arrival at some ultimate destination. As I reported earlier, the 777 is capable of landing on small airstrips and on relatively unimproved surfaces, such as packed dirt and dry lake beds. In such a scenario, the odds are good that, unless they were murdered, the passengers remain alive. The motives and intentions of whoever took MH370 remain as murky as ever, but possibilities include a hostage scenario, the repurposing of the aircraft as an enormous flying bomb, or some combination of these and other outcomes.

As I said, it is increasingly looking like the best outcome will be to find positively-identified wreckage or remains floating on the sea.

Update:  Power Line:

... the time during which Flight 370 apparently remained aloft continues to be extended:

Although U.S. officials previously said they believed the plane could have remained in the air for several extra hours, Najib said Saturday that the flight was still communicating with satellites until 8:11 a.m. — seven and a half hours after takeoff, and more than 90 minutes after it was due in Beijing. There was no further communication with the plane after that time, Najib said. If the plane was still in the air, it would have been nearing its fuel limit.

Missing plane hijacking more likely?

I first proposed this possibility last Monday, "Malaysia 777 still missing - maybe didn't crash?"

A news report today said that a circle drawn on the globe with its center in Kuala Lampur and its radius the maximum range of Flight 370 when it left there would have an area of 20 million square miles - greater than the area of the United States.

This plane may never be found.

US Navy to search Indian Ocean for Flight 370

US Officials Have 'Indication' Malaysia Airline Crashed into Indian Ocean - ABC News

U.S. officials have an "indication" the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner may have

crashed in the Indian Ocean and is moving the USS Kidd to the area to begin searching. 

It will take another 24 hours to move the ship into position, a senior Pentagon official told ABC News. 

"We have an indication the plane went down in the Indian Ocean," the senior official said. 

The official said there were indications that the plane flew four or five hours after disappearing from radar and that they believe it went into the water. 

Pentagon officials said that the USS Kidd was being moved at the request of Malaysia and is heading towards an area where the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea meet. It has helicopters aboard that can scour the area.

I wrote yesterday about the theory that the aircrew suffocated because of cabin decompression, and that thought is picking up some steam more comprehensively because of a November 2013 federal airworthiness directive (AD) proposal due to "cracking in the fuselage skin underneath the
satellite communication (SATCOM) antenna adapter" (link).

However, Boeing has stated flatly that this AD did not apply to the Malaysian airliner since it did not have the antenna referenced in the AD. Nonetheless, the source, an insider in pilot training and procedures, explores the implications of some possibilities.

Malaysian Airliner Tinfoil Hat Brigade Marches In!

The Chinese satellite photo of presumed wreckage of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 brought a search of the photo area that turned up nothing.


Neither have authorities confirmed that the airliner radically changed course and flew far to the west before disappearing. Malaysian military leaders have asked the United States to help them sort out their radar records.

In short, the situation today is the same as it was last Saturday: the airliner is gone and no one has the slightest idea why or where.

Except, of course, the Tinfoil Hat Brigade:

)
Yep, space aliens got 'em! So now ya know!

But if the Greys got 'em, the THB needs to explain why there is credible reason to believe that the flight 370's engines continued to send engine-performance data to ground receivers for four hours after the plane disappeared from contact.

If this is so - and it is not confirmed - then it would argue against transponder contact being lost because the planes altitude fell too low for signals to reach ground stations. They would not have been out of range more than the engine-status radios.

This is the first I have ever heard that an airliner's engines send data continuously to ground stations. The data include altitude and airspeed, but not direction. But presumably, a rough plot of the flight path could be made by identifying the ground stations that received the data.

Curiouser and curiouser!


ew

Flight 370 wreckage sighted?

China claims one of its satellites has located what is more likely than not pieces of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Boeing 777.

(CNN) -- A Chinese satellite looking into the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 "observed a suspected crash area at sea," a Chinese government agency said -- a potentially pivotal lead into what has been a frustrating search for the aircraft. 

China's State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense announced the discovery, including images of what it said were "three suspected floating objects and their sizes."

The objects aren't small: 13 by 18 meters (43 by 59 feet), 14 by 19 meters (46 by 62 feet) and 24 by 22 meters (79 feet by 72 feet). For reference, the wingspan of an intact Boeing 777-200ER like the one that disappeared is about 61 meters (200 feet) and its overall length is about 64 meters (210 feet).

The images were captured on March 9 -- which was the day after the plane went missing -- but weren't released until Wednesday. 

The Chinese agency gave coordinates of 105.63 east longitude, 6.7 north latitude, which would put it in waters northeast of where it took off in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and south of Vietnam, near where the South China Sea meets the Gulf of Thailand.

Link.

Authorities backing away from latest Malaysian 777 theory

Yesterday, Malaysian authorities of the search for the missing Malaysian Airline Boeing 777 said that military radar showed the plane radically changed course to the west and flew for up to 350 miles before dropping from radar trace. It was that analysis that caused the search area to broaden enormously.

Today? Not so fast. CNS News reports that the authorities now say that the radar track concerned has not been actually identified as the missing airliner and that the track is not conclusive.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Malaysian authorities defended their handling of the hunt for the missing Boeing 777 on Wednesday even as they acknowledged they were unsure which direction the plane was headed when it disappeared, highlighting the massive task facing an international search mission now in its fifth day. ...

Malaysian authorities have since said that say air defense radar picked up traces of what might have been the plane turning back and flying until it reached the Strait of Malacca, a busy shipping lane west of the narrow nation some 250 miles from the plane's last known coordinates.

Military and government officials on Wednesday said American experts, and the manufacturer of the radar systems, were examining that data to confirm it showed the Boeing 777. Until then, they said the search would continue on both sides of the country, with an equal focus.

So far, many hypotheses and darn few facts.

Update: A short course in how transponders work.

Malaysia airliner hundreds of miles off course

Have not found a link for this yet, but radio news announced 10 minutes ago that Malaysian authorities say that Malaysian Airlines flight 370 is now known to have diverted possibly hundreds of miles from its planned course before contact was permanently lost.

This was apparently discerned from analysis of radar tracks from Malaysian air force air-defense radars.

That may be why the Malaysians previously announced the search area had been extended far to the west.

In a statement, Malaysia Airlines said search and rescue teams "have expanded the scope beyond the flight path to the West Peninsula of Malaysia at the Straits of Malacca." An earlier statement had said the western coast of Malaysia was "now the focus," but the airline subsequently said that phrase was an oversight. 

"The search is on both sides," Civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said, adding that the previous statement didn't mean that the plane was more like [sic] to be off the western coast.

If the prior search areas were hundreds of miles away from where the jet went down (if it really did go down) that would certainly explain why no trace has been found.

Update: The Telegraph: "Malaysia Airlines live: military says last tracked plane hundreds of miles off course"

(Reuters) - Malaysia's military believes a jetliner missing for almost four days turned and flew hundreds of kilometers to the west after it last made contact with civilian air traffic control off the country's east coast, a senior officer told Reuters on Tuesday. 

In one of the most baffling mysteries in recent aviation history, a massive search operation for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER has so far found no trace of the aircraft or the 239 passengers and crew. 

Malaysian authorities have previously said flight MH370 disappeared about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur for the Chinese capital Beijing. 

"It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait," the senior military officer, who has been briefed on investigations, told Reuters.
That would appear to rule out sudden catastrophic mechanical failure, as it would mean the plane flew around 500 km (350 miles) at least after its last contact with air traffic control, although its transponder and other tracking systems were off.

One way or another, this aircraft was hijacked. No expert am I, I admit, but I cannot imagine a navigation-system failure that would both cause this flight path and result in no attempt of the flight crew to contact ground controllers.

This deviation was done by the crew on purpose, but whether under duress or on their own accord is impossible to answer at this time.

But perhaps the plane was not so much hijacked (at least in the conventional sense) as hacked:

The integrated network configurations in the Boeing Model 777-200, -300, and -300ER series airplanes may enable increased connectivity with external network sources and will have more interconnected networks and systems, such as passenger entertainment and information services than previous airplane models. This may enable the exploitation of network security vulnerabilities and increased risks potentially resulting in unsafe conditions for the airplanes and occupants. This potential exploitation of security vulnerabilities may result in intentional or unintentional destruction, disruption, degradation, or exploitation of data and systems critical to the safety and maintenance of the airplane. 

Federal Register, 11/18/2013, "Special Conditions: Boeing Model 777-200, -300, and -300ER Series Airplanes; Aircraft Electronic System Security Protection From Unauthorized Internal Access"

Malaysia 777 still missing - maybe didn't crash?

Malaysia Crash Search Taps Technology as Debris Eludes

Consider that the waters in the region where the Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777, Flight 370, disappeared are only about 50 meters deep. Consider that no floating debris has been found when a broken-up airliner the size of a Triple-Seven would have tons of material much lighter than water. Consider that the oil slicks discovered by searching Vietnamese air force pilots turned out to be unrelated to the missing plane. Consider that the plane's black boxes are designed to withstand 3,700 Gs and automatically send radio signals in an mishap, and no such signals have been detected.

Consider that passports used by two ticket holders were reported stolen about two years ago and whomever used those tickets are unknown to authorities. And that altogether, five ticket holders did not board the airplane (which may not be unusual, actually).

Consider that absolutely no trace of the plane has been found despite a coordinated multi-nation sea and air search. There is no clue what happened to it - no reliable transponder track, no communication from the crew before it went missing, no active radar track.

No nuthin.

I am reminded of a novel I read a few months ago by either Tom Clancy or Frederick Forsyth, can't recall which. It opened with the hijacking and disappearance of an airliner in Africa, run by a large charter company. The craft was repainted and reconfigured to pass for a scheduled-airline plane with the goal of using it as a kamikaze weapon against an American target. Of course the good guys won, but it makes me think: what could account for the instantaneous disappearance of a Boeing 777 that leaves no trace at all?

I do not know what happened to the plane, of course. But I won't be surprised when (if) it is discovered to be intact on a remote airfield in southeast Asia or an island in the SWPA. Consider that preliminary information is that the plane turned back toward its origin a short time before disappearing. Why?

Civil aircraft are not really tracked by radar by flight centers. Airliners have radio transponders aboard that send signals to flight centers. The signals identify the aircraft with basic flight information. If there is an actual radar track of the missing plane it would have been done by military air defense radars. Presumably, various air defense commands are searching their radar records, but absent any indication of a threat, there is no reason radar records would have been retained.

When did the transponder track disappear and at what altitude and course heading? No question that investigators are trying to learn that now.

Breaking:

And I'll bet the satellites are not looking at only the ocean, either.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Update: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 "Conspiracy theorists take to the Internet":

Naturally, conspiracy theories are already flying left and right on social media. One theory suggests the plane's sudden disappearance is a "false flag" operation intentionally planted by CNN. Another claims that some relatives of the passengers onboard have even reported hearing their phones ring--but no one is answering. 

Other tin foilers have gone so far as to suggest that the plane simply vanished. "If we never find the debris," writes one theorist, "it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence." 

Another, just as bizarre conspiracy theory suggests terrorists hijacked the plane, and have parked the plane intact in an abandoned hanger to use as "a weapon of mass destruction" in the future:

Note that the Youtube vid was posted at the linked article. I offer no endorsement of it.

"Like the Armageddon movie"

A meteorite struck the ground near Chelyabinsk, Russia, early this morning and was caught on video.


More than 500 people required medical treatment and there was extensive damage to parts of the city. Story here. Naturally, America is already being blamed.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the nationalist leader noted for vehement statements, said 'It's not meteors falling, it's the test of a new weapon by the Americans,' the RIA Novosti news agency reported. 

I blame George W. Bush. Or maybe it's an advanced Obama-sent drone. Anyway, speaking of space objects,

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA Television will provide commentary starting at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST) on Friday, Feb. 15, during the close, but safe, flyby of a small near-Earth asteroid named 2012 DA14. NASA places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them. This flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close. 

The half-hour broadcast from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will incorporate real-time animation to show the location of the asteroid in relation to Earth, along with live or near real-time views of the asteroid from observatories in Australia, weather permitting.

The meteorite and the asteroid are unrelated, according to Dr. Robert Massey of Britain's Royal Astronomical Society, who said that they objects were not only following different flight paths but were also more than a half-million kilometers apart when the meteorite hit earth.

Baumgartner helmet cam video

A camera mounted on supersonic parachutist Felix Baumgartner's helmet shows what happened when, tens of thousands of feet above the earth, he went into an uncontrolled spin.



Baumgartner later related that he knew he was in trouble. The spinning could have pushed too much blood into his cranium, causing a blackout or possibly rupturing vessels in the brain. He considered deploying his drogue chute to stabilize but he knew that if he did, the attempt for a supersonic record would be gone forever.

With only seconds to decide, Baumgartner got his fall sorted out, probably aided by entering denser air that enabled greater control from his arms and legs. He did keep accelerating, though, and went on to hit Mach 1.24 before landing safely.

Neil Armstrong dies

The first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, has died at age 82.

A wonderful tribute is online by Gerard Vanderleun, with this and more.

Murphy's Laws of Police Operations

Nine New Yorkers shot by cops

Years and years ago, an instructor at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Ft Bragg put together a little instructional chart called, "Murphy's Laws of Combat." It went viral throughout the Army, insofar as something can could have gone viral in the dark ages before Youtube or even email. One iteration is here.

The original Murphy's Law, of course, is, "If something can go wrong, it will." And so the MLOC include such gems of wisdom as,

"If the enemy can't get in, you can't get out."
"The enemy attacks only when you're not yet ready."

These kind of aphorisms were going around a long time before Ft Bragg was even founded. One of my favorites that I drummed into my troops was scripted by Carl von Clausewitz almost 200 years ago: "In war, everything is simple. But even the simplest things are very difficult."

And so we come to the day after the sad day when a man in New York sought and achieved vengeance against the man who terminated him from his job a year ago. The murderer, Jeffrey Johnson, stood on the sidewalk outside his former place of employment and confronted his former boss (or coworker), Steve Ercolino, whom Johnson shot in the head three times.

Then Johnson bagged his pistol and walked away. Alerted by a bystander, two police officers pursued Johnson. According to reports, Johnson made motions with his pistol that the officers perceived as threatening them, so they fired at Johnson 16 times. Seven of those bullets hit Johnson, killing him.

And the other nine bullets hit New Yorkers who were in the line of fire, fortunately killing none. As Glenn observes,

I’m not saying they did the wrong thing, because I don’t think they did. I’m just saying that if it had been a private citizen, rather than a pair of government employees with government guns, this would be treated very differently by Bloomberg and the press.

That's true, of course. And like Glenn, I am not finding fault with the officers for shooting Johnson. But 16 shots from 10 feet away? And they miss more than half?

I carried a pistol for a long time in the Army but I never had to gunfight with it. But just time spent in competitive pistol shoots was quite enough to teach me that accurate pistoleering is difficult. I always qualified expert, but no shot can be taken for granted. Under stress, heart rate elevated, moving target, fear factored in - very hard to shoot well.

I don't know what the cops could have done except engage Johnson when they believed he was about to shoot at them. I guess I would have, too. But over and over, I come back to this: 16 shots from 10 feet away? And they miss more than half?

And so my beginning list of Murphy's Law of Police Operations:

1. Police carry guns to defend themselves, not you.

2. Cops are not skilled shooters. If you see a police officer with a drawn gun, run as far as you can as rapidly as you can. (Actually, I did find myself in that situation once, and I did exactly that.)

3. Police bullets are just as happy to kill you as the bad guy.

Add your own in the comments.

Media already know why Aurora

Now we know what compelled accused gunman Jim Holmes to his (alleged) acts of murder.

He is a chronically depressed, bullied, Tea Party member and opponent of Judeo-Christian heritage who was a Star Trek fan who played violent video games when he wasn't taking part in Occupy Wall Street protests.

Aren't we all glad we got that cleared up?

And he is also a Democrat who listens to Rush Limbaugh.

"He has a demon, and is mad" redux

That my daughter and I briefly discussed going to the midnight showing of the new Batman movie last night somehow heightens my sickening at what happened in Aurora, Colo., last night. That my local theater is at least, oh, 1,500 miles from the scene of the carnage means that my heightened revulsion is not very logical, but it is nonetheless real.

So let me type out what almost needs its own text-message abbreviation: IHHA-GSS. "It Has Happened Again - Gunman Shoots Scores."

Colorado is no stranger to IHHA-GSS. It happened in a high school in Columbine there in 1999. Then it moved to Appalachian State University in 2002. Virginia Tech University suffered its abattoir in 2007. Then in Phoenix, Ariz., early last year and in a Christian college in California just three months ago.

Now Aurora. 

After the Phoenix shootings, I posted, "He has a demon, and is mad."

In arguing that, "He has a demon, and is mad," I am not trying to argue the literal existence of demonic beings who actually enter the bodies and spirits of human beings, taking "possession" of them and controlling their actions. The modern mind has no room for that. I refer instead to sickness of the mind and of the soul, a spiritual sickness that aligned itself with the evil that is out there.

Evil is within us, but not only within us

French philosopher Paul Ricouer argued in his book, The Symbolism of Evil, that one of the things taught by the temptation stories of the Bible is that evil resides within the human breast but not only there. There is an "externality of evil," as he put it, symbolized in Genesis by the serpent. Within these texts is a strong subtext, not only in the Bible but in cultural myths around the world that there is a seduction of the human mind and the human body by the "tragic" of creation into which we are born, "which is alreadythere and already evil" (his emphasis). There is, he says, 

... a mystery of iniquity which is not reducible to the clear consciousness of actual evil, of the evil beginning in an instant; it points toward an underlying peccability which, as Kierkegaard says inThe Concept of Dread, endures and increases quantitatively. That underlying peccability is like the horizon of actual evil... .

"Peccability" means that we mortals are temptable. Because of this fundamental fact we will be tempted by an externality much and yield to it often - usually, happily, on harmless things like another piece of chocolate but not infrequently to evil itself. When we yield to the harmful rather than the merely frivolous it is sin, indeed, too often mortal sin which, as we saw in Tucson, can be lethal as well.

This is not a modern world view. We have exorcised sin conceptually from our vocabulary, our discourse and hence, our understanding of the human condition. "He has a demon, and is mad" is eye-rolled for the former part and medicated for the latter - psychiatry today exorcises pharmaceutically, not ritually. And yet for all its chemically-reliant wonder, no mental-health professional will ever be able to explain away that the human being is predisposed to cooperate with the iniquitous, a cooperation that not merely endures but increases until it forms the horizon of actual evil, evil that erupts so tragically.

I well realize that this is a decidedly unfashionable analysis. After all, do we not know that "everyone is basically good?" Well, thank God for that, or else the world's history of just the last 100 years would be unspeakably violent, with world wars, genocide of millions, atom bombings and brutal terrorism.

Oh, wait . . .

I wrote 18 months ago a certain though grim prophecy:

Always, the ancients knew that the tragic is woven inherently in the human condition because they understood what we have progressively dismissed: that "there is no one who does good, no not one," except now and then, here and again, but almost never as a habit. Virtue, said Aristotle, is excellence made habitual, which is exactly why virtue is so rare: the habits of man are rarely excellent and left to themselves, without rigorous moral training or an externality of constraint to the good, will always become corrupted. 

What makes the human condition tragic in this sense is that evil is never temporary and triumphs are never permanent. Salve of compassion, care and grieving is being applied to Tucson, but some must be saved for the next venue. For certainly another there will be.

And so, IHHA-GSS.

How ironic that a genuine insight into the Batman massacre is found in a short sequence from The Dark Knight:



He has a demon, and is mad.