- There was no intro course on how to be a cable-news expert. The Town Car would show up to take me to the studio, I’d sign in with reception, a guest-greeter would take me to makeup, I’d hang out in the greenroom, the sound guy would rig me with a mike and an earpiece, a producer would lead me onto the set, I’d plug in and sit in the seat, a producer would tell me what camera to look at during the introduction, we’d come back from break, the anchor would read the introduction to the story and then ask me a question or maybe two, I’d answer, then we’d go to break, I would unplug, wipe off my makeup, and take the car 43 blocks back uptown. Then a couple of hours later, I’d do it again. I was spending 18 hours a day doing six minutes of talking.
I'm hopeful someone equally knowledgeable writes a rebuttal, as most of us don't have the technical ability to know what flaws might exist with this theory. It would be nice to have a pro/con sort of comparison. I definitely had the same feeling as the author when a second MA 777 was shot down. The odds of that are so strikingly low that it seems out of the realm of possibility that it was pure chance. If it is true that this is a technical possibility, I'm sure the US government and Boeing both know about it, as there's nothing that one guy could figure out that their teams of experts couldn't. Anyway, I'll look forward to the response pieces, because at the pace this is making the rounds of the internet, there will be one in short order, I'm sure.
Well... Most conspiracy theories become "conspiracy theories" because they fail to pass Ockham's Razor. For example, there's a good 3000 words there about how but exactly fuckall about why. Meanwhile, the "how" skips over how three decidedly nondescript Georgians managed to disable a 777 with 230 passengers on it all while managing to spoof Inmarsat. On the other hand, a demonstrably incompetent organization losing two airliners to tragedy within six months seems unlikely so we assign nefarious agents to the problem. Nefariousness, to our thinking, is more probable than dumb chance for the simple reason that we can protect against nefariousness. I mean, if the Russians wanted to send a message, they'd send a fuckin' message. 007 was the second airliner the Soviets shot down and they really didn't much give a fuck. Are we somehow saying Putin is less belligerent than Yuri Andropov?I'm hopeful someone equally knowledgeable writes a rebuttal, as most of us don't have the technical ability to know what flaws might exist with this theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 First off, holy shit. The Soviet Union once shot a commercial plane down? With hundreds of people and a US Congressman on-board?! And this was during the Cold War? I've never heard this before. And to add to the goat-getter, the last paragraph: wat. Add that to the list of hugely significant (and recent!) geopolitical events that I've never heard of.In addition, the event was one of the most important single events that prompted the Reagan administration to allow worldwide access to the United States military's GNSS system, which was classified at the time. Today this system is widely known as GPS.
Twice. Twice shot a commercial plane down. That's okay. It's not like the US has clean hands on this one. Flight 007 was one of the reasons cited as to why Mathias Rust was allowed to land a Cessna in Red Square; contrary to the narrative at the time ("Soviet air defenses were just that bad"), Soviet Air Defense followed him the entire time, just nobody wanted to be the guy responsible for blowing a Cessna out of the sky.
Apparently my mind loathes the sort of cognitive dissonance imposed by an unsolved mystery so much that it will "self-correct" itself. If you would have interviewed me candidly, in person, I would have told you that they finally found the wreckage and bodies just a few weeks ago, somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Yep, I dreampt it, then shelved it away with actual memories, accepting it as truth. My brain faked news footage, complete with a news ticker and everything, of boats anchored near floating pieces of the fuselage, claiming the recovery of several tens of fish-eaten skeletons. So I see this headline, scoff, google "MH370 found", and realize that I've been had by myself (not the first time)! I'm also anxious to see this debated. Some excellent sleuthing work here by Wise, but in his own words: Is Malaysia considered "west"? The majority of the passengers were Chinese, and Putin's pretty deep in bed with China at the moment. All of these motivations are pretty baseless, but at least the author acknowledges that. In fact, this lends legitimacy to the rest of his suggestions.Why, exactly, would Putin want to steal a Malaysian passenger plane? I had no idea. Maybe he wanted to demonstrate to the United States, which had imposed the first punitive sanctions on Russia the day before, that he could hurt the West and its allies anywhere in the world. Maybe what he was really after were the secrets of one of the plane’s passengers. Maybe there was something strategically crucial in the hold. Or maybe he wanted the plane to show up unexpectedly somewhere someday, packed with explosives. There’s no way to know. That’s the thing about MH370 theory-making: It’s hard to come up with a plausible motive for an act that has no apparent beneficiaries.
Oh man I love me a good conspiracy theory and this one has it all.
This was... fantastically compelling. I don't have anywhere near the technical knowledge to claim it's true or insane, but it's presented well enough to seem plausible. And all the oddities of the event do point to something involving tampering in some way; that is, a hijacking or something similar. There's no other reason for the U-turn and the end and restoration of data. I want to see this get attention at least so someone can dispute it. I'm intrigued.
Fascinating argument, but the paragraph below has applications beyond this article. Next time you have the sensation of being sure of your belief, pull this out: Neurobiologist Robert A. Burton points out in his book On Being Certain that the sensation of being sure about one’s beliefs is an emotional response separate from the processing of those beliefs. It’s something that the brain does subconsciously to protect itself from wasting unnecessary processing power on problems for which you’ve already found a solution that’s good enough. “ ‘That’s right’ is a feeling you get so that you can move on,” Burton told me. It’s a kind of subconscious laziness. Just as it’s harder to go for a run than to plop onto the sofa, it’s harder to reexamine one’s assumptions than it is to embrace certainty.
Indeed.