Inner cruising

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a couple of these Princess Cruise ads on TV, and they really drew my attention. I think they’re brilliant, actually.

In a rut? The ads sell the company’s cruises as a way to get out of that rut, not by visiting new places in the usual travel sense, but through a more internal journey that involves renewing relationships in a relaxing and luxurious atmosphere. It’s the theme and variations rather than the symphony.

That some of the ads may be quite obnoxious is of little import. The husbands or wives of a certain age, archly studying their long-term spouses in the shipboard light as though they were prize heifers and deciding they’re not so tedious after all, might strike the viewer as repugnant. But the demographic that might be expected to go on cruises may feel otherwise, and the idea of interpersonal renewal may be a good part of the reason.

Princess Cruises is certainly counting on it being part of the reason, and willing to spend quite a bit of money to prove it. It’s a new twist on the idea of a shipboard romance—this time, you’ll be having a romance with the person you’re already with, who’ll seem like a new person.

One who knows how to order wine, for example. This particular ad rubs me the wrong way for all the stated reasons and probably a few more besides, but I continue to think it’s masterful:

Here’s a similar ad with the sexes reversed:

Similar, and yet different, and not just because the couple is younger in the second ad. The woman in the first ad is admiring her slightly-graying guy because of his behavior—he’s such a sophisticate with the wine! The man in the second is admiring the way his wife looks rather than something she does, and that ad might appeal to women because it indicates that on a cruise he won’t be so mad at them for taking too long to get ready.

Brilliant, as I said.

[NOTE: My parents used to cruise every year before tax time, a way for my father (who was a CPA) to relax in winter before the big big crunch that had him burning the midnight oil. They went with at least three other couples and often more, all good friends, and they had a whopping good time.

I don’t think there was a lot of contemplative re-evaluation of the marriage. It was more about interacting with other people and experiencing some warm weather, usually the Caribbean. When I was fourteen they took my brother and me on a Christmas Caribbean cruise. I’ve never been on a cruise as an adult, but I remember that one well, especially the all-you-can-eat food. I gained about five pounds in ten days, and stayed in a room with my brother. The ship was the Mauretania, which was scrapped not long after my cruise. It seemed archaic even then; the cabin I shared with my brother was tiny and dark, without windows of any sort, which meant we could sleep late because there was no sense of time. There was a shared dorm-like bathroom down the hall. Not exactly the lap of luxury, but it was fun nevertheless.]

Flight 370 update

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, this certainly narrows it down, doesn’t it? What an “interesting” neighborhood:

[Malaysian Prime Minister] Razak said countries located in the flight corridors that are now the focus of the search have been contacted so they can share radar data and “all relevant information” with the investigative teams, which include the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board.

That northern corridor runs through Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Burma.

There is a southern corridor too, but it goes mainly to the west of Australia over the Indian Ocean.

The Prime Minister added 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,” at which point it would have been close to running out of fuel.

Here is all that’s known (or at least, reported to be known) of the earlier path of the plane:

path

This is a strong statement:

[An unnamed Malaysian] official said a deliberate takeover of the plane was no longer a theory. “It is conclusive,” he said, indicating that investigators were ruling out mechanical failure or pilot error in the disappearance…

The Malaysian official said only a skilled aviator could navigate the plane the way it was flown after its last confirmed location over the South China Sea.

The possibilities are almost endless, and some of this will be pieced together through military radar from a host of countries. I would imagine most people (and here I’d include myself) would have assumed that a rogue plane would have been detected by radar whether it had its transponder on or not, and would be considered at least potentially hostile in this post-9/11 world. And yet this one was hardly noticed, and if it was it seems to have elicited a yawn—even though a Malaysian plane was already reported to be missing! The implications are staggering.

The sad and mind-boggling truth is that we don’t know what human agent was responsible for this, where the plane was taken, if it crashed or landed safely, and if the passengers and crew are alive or dead. That’s a lot of unknowns, although I believe we are not being told everything the authorities know.

[NOTE: I’ve also noticed many people in the comments sections of various articles keep asking why none of the passengers managed to call on their cellphones. But at very high altitudes and far from any cellphone towers, no calls could be made successfully. Some of the 9/11 passengers managed to do it because those planes were flying relatively low at times, and what is especially important is that they were always over land that tended to be generously equipped with cellphone towers (here’s a very lengthy discussion; even at fairly high altitude cellphones can sometimes work if over towers). In addition, many of the 9/11 calls were on special airphones, installed in planes and designed to be used while flying.]

More on Flight 370

The New Neo Posted on by

New information on Flight 370:

Radar signals recorded by the Malaysian military appear to show the missing airliner climbing to 45,000 feet, above the approved altitude limit for a Boeing 777-200, soon after it disappeared from civilian radar and made a sharp turn to the west, according to a preliminary assessment by a person familiar with the data.

The radar track, which the Malaysian government has not released but says it has provided to the United States and China, then shows the plane descending unevenly to 23,000 feet, below normal cruising levels, as it approached the densely populated island of Penang, one of the country’s largest. There, the plane turned from a southwest-bound course, climbed to a higher altitude and flew northwest over the Strait of Malacca toward the Indian Ocean.

This is being treated as very big news. But I’m not sure it adds a whole lot, except that it’s very consistent with the current theory that the plane was hijacked by a passenger or diverted by one of the regular pilots. I’m a bit suspicious of the article, though, because it also refers to the data transmitted from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines, whereas most people seem to be saying that no such data was transmitted.

But confusion is the standard in this story ever since it began.

I find the following quite intriguing and disturbing (the latter a word I’ve been using over and over for the Flight 370 story):

The erratic movements of the aircraft after it diverted course and flew over the country also raise questions about why the military did not respond to the flight emergency. Malaysian officials have acknowledged that military radar may have detected the plane, but have said they took no action because it did not appear hostile.

I am confused as to how a plane could “appear hostile” on radar. It’s not as though radar can read its mind. I assume it would be through the plane’s suspicious behavior/actions/movements. But it’s hard to understand why going up and down precipitously like this, and turning off one’s transponder, wouldn’t be considered at least potentially hostile, and rouse some sort of response such as scrambling.

Nothing about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 makes sense

The New Neo Posted on by

At least, not yet.

I hope that someday we’ll learn enough to make sense of it. But I’m beginning to wonder if that day will ever happen. Or if we’ll ever get a straight story on it from the authorities.

In the meantime, we weave speculative tales about it in an effort, probably vain, to make as much sense of it as we possibly can with the limited amount of information we have so far.

I’ve been writing about this story on a daily basis because it’s unusually gripping, with all the elements of a Tom Clancy novel except the author’s explication, or the pleasure of knowing it’s just a story. This is a story, but not just a story; it’s reality, unfortunately for the passengers, their families, and the rest of us. Just as 9/11 was a revelation about what was possible with a bunch of determined and planful terrorists, so Flight 370 is a revelation about how a flight can go missing in real time without a whole lot known about it, if certain human agents (which it appears were responsible) want it to disappear.

Here’s my best theory of the moment. It goes almost without saying that this is pure speculation, but it’s speculation based on the “facts” as best we know them:

I don’t think the cockpit was breached by a stranger, although that is certainly possible. It would help to know whether the 777 had a locked cockpit door; I haven’t seen that information offered anywhere. I think that one of the pilots (most likely the younger one, who was only 27) caught the other completely off-guard and disabled or killed him. But whether it was one of the actual pilots or an outsider, it would have to have been someone who was very familiar with this type of plane and how to turn off its feedback systems.

Once alone, the pilot was able to act as he wished without being observed. He proceeded to turn off the transponder and other systems and fly the plane according to a preconceived plan, which probably did not involve crashing it. The passengers would have been, quite literally, in the dark. Especially with a locked door, they would have noticed nothing. It was night, after all, and most were probably sleeping. They were flying over a relatively unsettled area with few lights, so why would anyone have noticed a diversion, even if it went on for many hours? When they looked out the windows, they would have seen darkness either way.

Whether the perpetrator succeeded in his plan I do not know, nor do I know what the ultimate goal was, although you can be fairly sure it was a bad one, and probably involved other people on the ground. Was his destination a country, or a remote landing strip? Did it involve further weaponizing the plane, holding the passengers hostage, or something else?

If he succeeded, we will probably learn in time, although what we learn will be even more disturbing than what we already know. Possibly even catastrophic. Alternatively, he crashed (most likely by accident) and we may or may not ever recover the plane’s wreckage, the finding of which could give us many more clues as to what happened.

A week ago I would have considered the above a wild fantasy, and I probably would not have entertained it. Things have changed, and truth may have become even stranger than fiction.

[ADDENDUM: Newer information here. The gist of it is that the plane’s new flight path was ” a commonly used navigational route.” That indicates a non-rogue pilot to me. Of course, the actual pilot might have been placed under duress by a highjacker.]

This is what the young folks are reading these days

The New Neo Posted on by

Basically, what they’re reading is a lot of what used to be called porn. And I don’t mean sneaking around to get it, or looking at it online. I mean that the young adult book market—books written expressively for young teenagers—has a certain segment that has become highly sexualized.

The idea of innocence, naivete, protecting children (or those just emerging from childhood) from matters that used to be considered adult seems to have fallen by the wayside. It wasn’t so very long ago that the relatively sedate Lady Chatterly’s Lover was still banned in the UK even for adults; the unexpurgated version couldn’t be published there till 1960.

And Lucy and Desi slept in those twin beds, at least in their TV lives. But oh, how far we’ve come since then!

lucyDesi

Michael Totten has written a zombie novel

The New Neo Posted on by

You may think the title of this post is some sort of joke, but it’s not. Michael Totten, traveler to the world’s most dangerous countries and reporter extraordinaire, has indeed written a zombie novel.

Now, I know Michael Totten, and I must say I didn’t know he had a zombie novel in him. Or that he’s written fiction longer than he’s been a journalist. And I can’t even imagine where he found the time in his incredibly busy life to write a novel. But he did, and it sounds like a good read:

The zombie apocalypse is just a way to blow up the world in a story. The real story of Resurrection is about how humans struggle to behave as civilized people after civilization has been annihilated. Would you be able to it? It might be harder than you think.

Oh, probably not harder than I would think, because I think it would be extraordinarily hard.

The book’s for sale at Amazon. The more copies that are purchased (paperback or Kindle), the more Amazon is likely to promote it.

Senator Obama on the Constitution and the balance of powers

The New Neo Posted on by

What a difference a few years—and a seat on the throne of power—make.

The context in which Trey Gowdy was speaking here was the debate on the Enforce the Law Act, by which Congress would attempt to give itself standing to sue a president for not “faithfully” executing the law. It has passed the House, with Republicans joined by five Democrats.

One would think that members of Congress would support this bill in a bipartisan way, but Democrats in Congress seem all too eager to cede their power to President Obama, who would like to be able to modify Congressional acts at will (which he has done so far, with impunity).

Here’s Gowdy:

I’m going to read a quote, and then you tell me who said it. “These last few years, we’ve seen an unacceptable abuse of power, having a president whose priority is expanding his own power.” Any guess on who said that, Mr. Speaker? It was Senator Barack Obama. Here’s another one: “No law can give Congress a backbone if it refuses to stand up as a co-equal branch as the Constitution made it.” Senator Barack Obama. “What do we do with a president who can basically change what Congress passed by attaching a letter saying, ”˜I don’t agree’ with this part or that part?” Senator Barack Obama. “I taught the Constitution for ten years, I believe in the Constitution.” Senator Barack Obama. And my favorite, Mr. Speaker: “One of the most important jobs of the Supreme Court is to guard against the encroachment of the executive branch on the power of the other branches, and I think the Chief Justice has been a little too willing and eager to give the president more power than I think Congress or the Constitution originally intended.”

So, my question, Mr. Speaker is, how in the world can you get before the Supreme Court if you don’t have standing? What did the president mean by that?…If you don’t have standing, how can you possibly get before the Supreme Court?

Even in the unlikely event that the Senate were to pass the bill, Obama is on record as saying he would veto it. That’s President Obama, of course; Senator Obama would have said otherwise, when a Republican president was in power.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s today’s example of the genre.]

Rick Perry’s eyeglasses: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

Previously I’d praised Rick Perry’s new eyeglasses, but at that time I’d only seen a still photo. Now that I’ve seen a video, I have to say my approval has gone up a few notches.

He looks faaahbulous. It gives him a soupé§on of a hipster vibe, and Rick Perry could use a little of that.

To those who accuse me of triviality, once again I say “yes, but not really,” because people pay attention to looks when they vote. Obama’s perceived hipsterism was probably worth at least 10 points.

In his Jimmy Kimmel appearance, Perry looked and sounded good (as a woman roughly in his age demographic, I’d say very good), relaxed and funny, and he won over a fairly hostile Austin audience. Not bad for a guy who self-destructed in the primaries in 2012 (with a little help from his non-friends, the MSM).

Maybe he should run in 2016 and change his name to a new one along with the new eyeglasses. I bet 20% or so of viewers will think he’s a different person. Call himself “Richard Perry”?

[Hat tip: Ace.]

How many bona fide Obamacare signups?

The New Neo Posted on by

We still don’t really know how many people who “signed up” for Obamacare have actually paid premiums.

And Sebelius isn’t telling:

“They have a lot more information than they’re letting on,” one [health insurance] industry source said of the Obama administration. “They have real hard data about the percent that have paid ”¦ If they have not processed those yet and compiled the data, that is a choice they are making. But they have that data now.”…

“If the administration won’t provide transparency, we will work with every insurance provider to get the real picture the White House seemingly wants to hide from the public,” said Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) in a statement.

Federal officials say they count sign-ups ”” people who select plans on HealthCare.gov or in state exchanges ”” because they can’t yet rely on the insurers’ figures. They say the industry reports are not comprehensive, and they change month to month…

“I can’t tell you because I don’t know that,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Wednesday when Republicans asked about the number of paying Obamacare customers during hearings on Capitol Hill. “We don’t collect it.” She reiterated her contention Thursday, telling lawmakers that she’d provide the information as soon as it’s available.

So, just release the figures and explain they’re unreliable but they’re the best we have right now.

Yes, I know—they’re not going to do that. They don’t want to do that, most likely because the figures are less than optimal. And they probably don’t have to do it; what are the consequences?

Actually, I’m rather surprised they haven’t just released false figures. Who would object? The insurance companies? I imagine that even they only know what each one of them have reported, not the whole picture. So who would question the administration? And why would it matter even if the public finds out the administration has lied about it? They’ve lied through their teeth about everything related to Obamacare, and a host of other things as well.

Most. Transparent. White House. Ever.

Obama’s mighty pen—or is it his phone?—works its magic on overtime pay

The New Neo Posted on by

The latest of Obama’s imperial moves:

Business groups and congressional Republicans are blasting regulations President Obama will announce Thursday that could extend overtime pay to as many as 10 million workers who are now ineligible for it…

“This came as a shot out of the blue,” said David French, the National Retail Federation’s senior vice president for government relations. “Just on the surface, this looks like an enormous new administrative burden.”…

Current regulations require employers to pay overtime to salaried workers making less than $455 a week. Obama’s proposal would redefine which employees can be classified as “executive or professional” and thus ineligible for overtime pay…

But the plan could backfire if employers choose to limit the hours of employees or cut their base pay to account for expected overtime.

No one seems to have seen this coming. I would say that the details of what Obama will do are sometimes hard to predict—what will his next target be?—but the broad outlines are very very clear.

Note this important sentence:

McCutchen presided over the last update to overtime regulations, which took well over a year to complete a decade ago, and were the subject of an intense fight in Congress.

“An intense fight in Congress?” That’s for chumps—those without a pen and a phone. For other presidents, the ones who had a hostile press to deal with, or a Congress they respected and/or feared.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air writes an excellent article that points out the following:

[The proposed change is] not really executive overreach, though. Unlike the minimum wage, which is set by statute and has to be amended by Congress, the definition of overtime exemption is handled by Department of Labor regulation. However, that regulatory process takes quite a long time, and it may be months or even into next year before Labor can act on the directive from Obama. Business groups and Congress will weigh in on the proposal, and no doubt Republicans will demand a CBO analysis of the impact of this change, too.

And ”¦ what is the proposal, anyway? No one knows, and the White House isn’t saying…

Can Obama do this on his own? Yes, within the parameters of regulatory changes at Labor, and the White House has already said it will respect that process. Should he? Republicans and the business community will have trouble defending the current definition, but this ignores the real problems of the economy ”“ and may well aggravate them, especially if the redefinition is as sharp as Bernstein wants. It’s recutting a shrinking pie rather than figuring out how to make it larger, and it’s bound to fail in every way except perhaps politically ”” and even that win will be minor and short-lived.

“Except politically”? But for Obama and most Democrats, there is no other consideration except the political. And minor and short-lived is good enough, because they need whatever they can get. This is the sort of regulatory change that looks good on the surface to a lot of people but probably isn’t in terms of its long-term and unintended consequences. It’s the “good on the surface” part that matters politically, though.

Here’s an old article about that earlier “intense fight” over similar issues. It occurred in 2004:

The House voted 223 to 193 yesterday to block the Bush administration’s sweeping new eligibility rules for overtime pay, giving Democrats a significant victory that they hope will boost the party’s standing among middle-class voters in key battleground states in the fall election.

The article goes on to describe the factions, the battle in Congress, and the issues, which seem to include a similar regulatory change over the definition of who is exempt because “they perform certain supervisory or managerial tasks.” Sure seems similar, and yet the regulatory change was submitted to Congress. It all seems very quaint now, doesn’t it?

Obama’s entire presidency has been one long test. Little by little he has been pushing and pushing to see how much pushback there will be. He has discovered there hasn’t been much that’s been effective.

The wandering airplane

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE: Malaysia’s acting Transport Minister, Hishammuddin Tun Hussein, has said the report linked below from the WSJ is “inaccurate.” He didn’t say how inaccurate, though. He also said that the area where the Chinese claim to have spotted debris was searched and that there is “nothing.”]

It’s becoming more apparent, if this WSJ article is correct, that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did not suffer a sudden catastrophic event that caused it to explode or crash quickly. Information from its Rolls Royce engines was sent to the ground periodically and automatically, and that data indicates the plane flew for four hours after the transponder was turned off or became inactive.

This is beyond disturbing, although it does raise the possibility that some of the wilder-sounding conspiracy theories that envisioned the passengers alive and held hostage in some remote area could actually be true. That would be disturbing, too, albeit in a very different way than imagining them dead at the bottom of the sea. The unspeakable torment the families are enduring is something one doesn’t even want to contemplate.

And the wild and changing reports from the varied authorities don’t help matters.

This is what we know so far—maybe, perhaps:

(1) The transponder stopped working, either through purposeful pilot action or by other means.
(2) The plane continued to fly for four hours, across an area that theoretically could have been well over 2,000 miles.
(3) There is some radar record of something that might be the plane, turning around and flying elsewhere, although we don’t know exactly where, or whether it actually was Flight 370.
(4) No debris has been found, despite reports of debris.

If anyone can think of a greater aviation mystery involving a large commercial flight, I’d like to know what it is. Sometimes we have a crash site and no apparent reason for the disaster, but in those cases we know we’ll gather information from the wreckage and the recorders. Sometimes, as with Air France 447, we know very little, but we still knew a lot more about that flight from the outset than we know about 370 today.

For example, Air France 447 had sent a series of automated messages right before crashing that indicated cockpit warnings and systems failures. Within a day after the crash, debris was spotted and identified as coming from an airplane; it included an aircraft seat. Five days after the crash, two bodies were recovered, along with a briefcase that contained a boarding pass for the flight. In other words, the location was known fairly quickly; what remained to be done was the recovery of the black boxes (which took a long time) and figuring out the why of the crash, which turned out to be a weather and equipment issue compounded mightily by pilot error.

Instead, with Malaysia Airlines 370 we have a unique situation. No transponder. No debris. A wandering plane. No knowledge of much of anything, really, including whether the plane actually crashed. Horrible.