…that Joe Biden is too old, too white, too Sleepy (is that the same as “unwoke?”), and too loaded with baggage to be able to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020.
Funny thing is, till now Biden had seemed to be the one best poised to beat Trump. Then again, it’s very early. But I really don’t know who the Democrats think should be their front-runner instead. Seems to me that none of the present candidates have the oomph to be carried to victory.
But voters often surprise me.
[See UPDATE below]
I happened to turn on my TV late last night to a cable news station and I immediately started hearing talk about how Trump was going to start a war with Iran.
The line went something like this: “he is surrounded by people who are all telling him to attack Iran.” Then lots of discussion of how he was teetering on the brink of such action. Even though he’d often criticized presidents who had sent troops to faraway places too readily and gotten mired down, he was nevertheless poised to do it because of these warmongering advisors (such as Bolton) who were all around him.
And then his presidency and re-election chances would be ruined. This would become “Trump’s War.”
And the funny thing was, I happened to have been tuned to Fox at the time.
I already knew about recent heated events involving Iran, including the shooting down of the drone. But what else had happened since then that I’d missed?
So I Googled around a bit and discovered that two articles had appeared earlier in the day—one in the NY Times and one in the WaPo—saying that Trump had actually ordered a strike on Iran and then pulled back at the very last minute. However, I no longer trust a word they say about the inner workings of Trump’s mind and his White House.
But if you don’t think the Times and WaPo drive the news, think again.
I went to read the Times story, and as I had expected, it was from the usual anonymous sources who supposedly were in the Trump inner circle. This particular story had as its sources “multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.” This could mean someone in the know or not, someone friendly to Trump or not, someone lying or not, and note “involved in or briefed.” So perhaps not even present.
This sounds quite familiar.
Of course, it’s possible the story is true. I can’t verify it; I certainly haven’t spoken to any sources, much less “multiple” “official” “senior” ones who may have been “involved in” or “briefed” on this. But I’ve seen this picture too many times before.
Why would someone who actually was close to Trump leak this information? It seems to me that it could hurt Trump and feed into the “he’s so crazy he’s gonna start a war” mentality. Then again, someone loyal to Trump might leak this information (with Trump’s approval of the leak) if Trump actually has no intention of attacking Iran but wants Iran to think he just might be crazy enough to do it. What good’s a threat if there’s no chance whatsoever that it will be carried out?
More from the article:
Officials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries.
The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said…
It was not clear whether Mr. Trump simply changed his mind on the strikes or whether the administration altered course because of logistics or strategy. It was also not clear whether the attacks might still go forward…
Asked about the plans for a strike and the decision to hold back, the White House declined to comment, as did Pentagon officials. No government officials asked The New York Times to withhold the article…
Mr. Trump’s national security advisers split about whether to respond militarily. Senior administration officials said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; and Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, had favored a military response. But top Pentagon officials cautioned that such an action could result in a spiraling escalation with risks for American forces in the region.
If I had to guess, I’d say that—if it’s a bona fide leak of mostly true information—one of these “Pentagon officials” is the leaker, and is fuming at Pompeo, Bolton, and Haspel, and has been at odds with them for a long time. Not necessarily because they actually were actually advocating a military response; perhaps they just were discussing it as one possible option to consider, and this official exaggerated somewhat.
But as I said, it may be an engineered leak for strategic reasons.
Take your pick. Or maybe you’ve got another idea.
UPDATE 9:15 PM
The word we’re getting seems to be something resembling this particular guess of mine: “Then again, someone loyal to Trump might leak this information (with Trump’s approval of the leak) if Trump actually has no intention of attacking Iran but wants Iran to think he just might be crazy enough to do it.”
Trump has weighed in, explaining that:
….On Monday [Iran] shot down an unmanned drone flying in International Waters. We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019
….proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019
In other words—as I see it—it seems that he is trying to send the message that he is willing and ready to retaliate if Iran decides to escalate and test him further in the future. The idea that he almost attacked and that he was that close to pulling the trigger in response to this recent provocation by Iran is probably intended to act as a warning to Iran not to go further.
Ocasio-Cortez Gets Head Stuck In Bucket, Journalists Rush To Explain Why It Was Actually A Genius Move
On Wednesday, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez somehow got her head stuck inside a bucket. She was heard yelling, “Who turned out the lights?” while repeatedly running full speed into walls. Republicans immediately pounced, using this as proof that Ocasio-Cortez is “kind of a dummy.” Many journalists, on the other hand, leaped to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, saying her getting her head firmly wedged inside of a plastic bucket was further proof of her being an intelligent and dynamic politician….
Please read the whole thing.
Almost a year ago, we witnessed the weeks-long drama of hearings to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. While progressive outrage theater transpired on the streets of DC and Democrats in the chamber made fools out of themselves, a very serious crime unfolded behind the scenes.
A Democrat aide named Jackson Cosko, who was angry about Kavanaugh, stole private information about Republican senators and made it public. Now he is going to jail.
The sentence is four years.
U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan said the sentence for Jackson Cosko, 27, was needed to send a signal that criminal harassment driven by political motives would be punished severely in an era marked by extreme political polarization…
In April, Cosko pleaded guilty to five felonies, admitting that after being fired last year from his work as a systems administrator on Hassan’s staff, he repeatedly used a colleague’s key to enter the office, install keylogging equipment that stole work and personal email passwords, and downloaded a massive trove of data from Senate systems.
Cosko also acknowledged that after growing angry about the GOP’s handling of the Supreme Court nomination, he released home addresses and phone numbers of Sens. Lindsry Graham, Orrin Hatch, and Mike Lee on Wikipedia. After initial press coverage of that doxing, Cosko released information about Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul.
I wonder—if someone from the MSM had broken into the systems and published the information, would there have been any repercussions?
I am going to assume that this decision will be appealed. The judge, by the way, was a Reagan appointee from 1982. That’s 37 years ago, which illustrates the long reach and influence of judicial appointments.
Just keep going, Democrats. Most of America doesn’t think much of what you’re doing.
The slavery reparation hearings yesterday in the House were all theater anyway; an attempt to shore up the base. The Democrats in charge of this have no idea how reparations would actually work. What the House was actually debating was whether to formally study the idea of reparations—debating whether to debate.
The details of how reparations would actually be done remain extremely obscure because in addition to being a bad idea in general there’s no good way for it to be put in operation. The Democrats would rather do a lot of virtue-signaling and jaw-jaw about it.
Reparations would be difficult to quantify and make practical laws about in order to apply in the real world. One thing we do know, for example, is that there are no people alive who were slaves in the United States, and there are no people alive who owned slaves in the United States.
There are people who are slave descendants, but for some of them, that would be hard to prove since the details of their ancestry have gotten lost. There are people who are descendants of slave owners, but how many of them even know their genealogy in that respect? And some of those present-day descendants of slave owners are actually people who are of mixed race, because the slave owners often had children by their female slaves. So, do people who are descendants of both slave owners and slaves get reparations, too? And what proportion of slave-owner-DNA to slave-DNA would allow such a person to become a recipient of reparations rather than a contributor to the fund?
That’s not an facetious question. It describes a real situation that probably exists for many people labeled as black who are actually around 50% white genetically speaking, or people labeled as white although they have DNA that is 15% of black origin. Any serious reparations law would have to deal with that reality. This points out the preposterous nature of trying to figure out rules for reparations many generations after the fact, and after the races have become somewhat mixed. Do we administer DNA tests and give money on the basis of percentage of black DNA vs. white DNA? It is a repellent thought, but I don’t see how those issues could be avoided if reparations were to actually be taken seriously by those discussing them.
And of course, what about slave descendants who are now wealthy and successful? Do they get payments from a poor white person whose great-great-grandpappy had some slaves and after that the family fell on hard times?
Or will it be that all white people must pay all black people? Are Hispanics exempt? What about recent white immigrants to this country? All my ancestors came here post-Civil War except one branch, and that branch came here in the 1840s and lived in New Jersey, and only one person in that group was of fighting age (very marginally; he was in his 40s) during the Civil War. Maybe he even served in the Union Army; I simply don’t know. Should I pay reparations, without an ancestor who had anything whatsoever to do with slavery?
Are those whose ancestors came here after 1865 not going to have to pay, or if they’re white do they have to pay anyway, just for the unspeakable crime of being white? And if descendants of post-1865 arrivals wouldn’t have to pay, do those people have to prove how recently their families came here? What constitutes “proof”? Do they have to document the arrival dates of all eight great-grandparents or all sixteen great-great-grandparents? What if one great-great-grandparent was already here before slavery ended but the others weren’t? Would reparations be pro-rated?
How about white people who lost ancestors fighting against slavery during the Civil War? Would it matter? Do they get a reparations break, having already paid in blood? What if it’s only one ancestor who died? How many ancestors would have had to die in order to qualify for the exemption? What if the ancestor only had lost a leg? How much of a discount is a leg worth?
I could go on and on, but the absurdity and complexity of the entire enterprise is obvious.
At least Bernie Sanders has come out as being against it. Bu the hearings yesterday were a travesty, and perhaps the lowest point was reached when Coleman Hughes (a black writer) took the floor and was booed for saying things like this:
“Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today. They told me that even though I’ve only ever voted for Democrats I’d be perceived as a Republican, and therefore hated by half the country. Others told me that by distancing myself from Republicans I would end up angering the other half of the country,” he said. “And the sad truth is that they were both right. That’s how suspicious we’ve become of one another. That’s how divided we are as a nation.”
…”If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today,” he continued. “We would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors. And we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction. From a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.”…
He used his own situation as an example, saying that even though he grew up decades after Jim Crow in a “privileged household” and attends an Ivy League school, reparations would be allocated to him.
“You might call that justice, I call that justice for the dead at the price of justice for the living,” he said.
As he spoke, people in the room audibly objected and contradicted him several times. After he finished and said the bill was a mistake, he was widely booed.
The chairman of the hearing, Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen (Tenn.), banged the gavel for order, saying, “Chill, chill, chill, chill.”
Cohen then said of the young black writer who spoke of his enslaved ancestors that “he was presumptive, but he still has a right to speak.”
“Presumptive”? Excuse me but—WTF?
The disruptions continued, to include laughter and mocking.
The Democratic members of Congress who did this should be ashamed, but shame is foreign to them.
[NOTE: Another impressive speaker was Burgess Owens. See this.]
…but if it does it could be massively entertaining:
President Trump has reportedly made plans to live-tweet the first two Democratic primary debates scheduled for next week against the advice of his closest aides.
Guy’s a showman.
Actually, I have come to reflexively distrust almost everything reported as inside info coming from the White House. Likewise, I distrust this report.
However, if Trump does have this plan, I do believe that his closest aides might indeed warn him against it. And I do believe that if they do, he’ll do whatever he wants to anyway.
…according to Victor Davis Hanson:
By many criteria, 21st-century California is both the poorest and the richest state in the union…
…[B]y some indicators, the California middle class is shrinking — because of massive regulation, high taxation, green zoning, and accompanying high housing prices. Out-migration from the state remains largely a phenomenon of the middle and upper-middle classes. Millions have left California in the past 30 years, replaced by indigent and often illegal immigrants, often along with the young, affluent, and single.
If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks he would have been considered unhinged…Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse…
California’s transportation system, to be honest, remains in near ruins…
California’s cycles of wet boom years and dry bust years continue because the state refuses to build three or four additional large reservoirs that have been planned for more than a half-century, and that would store enough water to keep California functional through even the worst drought. The rationale is either that it is more sophisticated to allow millions of acre-feet of melted snow to run into the sea, or it is better to have a high-speed-rail line from Merced to Bakersfield than an additional 10 million acre-feet of water storage, or droughts ensure more state control through rationing and green social-policy remedies.
Much more at the link.
However, on the issue of building more reservoirs, there’s this, which contends that the picture is far more complex than ordinarily painted (and more complex than what VDH has written in that article). It seems like a no-brainer to build them, doesn’t it? But maybe not.
However, now I’m getting into one of my many fields of non-expertise. But I’ll give it a try. VDH speaks of building reservoirs, and the link in the paragraph above talks about building dams, but I am under the impression that the two are ordinarily linked and that the dam is constructed to form and control the reservoir which is the result of the dam (I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong on this).
At any rate, here’s an excerpt:
Think California should build a lot more dams to catch these deluges? Forget it.
Yes, the next severe drought is inevitable. And after California dries out and becomes parched again, we’ll wish we’d saved more of the current torrents. Instead, the precious water is washing out to sea.
There’s one dam being planned north of Sacramento in Colusa County that makes sense: Sites. There are also some dam expansion projects that could work.
But California is already dammed to the brim. Every river worth damming has been. And some that weren’t worth it were dammed anyway….
In total, California dams can store 43 million acre-feet. We’re nearing the practical limit for what water geeks call “surface storage.”
We’ve about used all the good dam sites.
And dams have become almost unaffordable, like a lot of other things in California. People may like the idea of a brand new reservoir — until they realize who’s going to pay for most of it. They are, through higher water bills…
“Right now everybody thinks all this water is rolling out to San Francisco Bay and there are missed opportunities,” Mount says. “That’s the traditional ‘wasting into the ocean’ argument. But then ask yourself, how much of the time does that happen in California?…
“If you use these reservoirs only about every 10 years, if they don’t fill often enough, then they’re not paying for themselves.”
Water sales are how the dams mostly get paid for.
Dams also get silted up, and that reduces their capacity. De-silting them is a big project that costs a lot of money, too.
The article ends abruptly with this sentence: “the future for California water storage is underground.” What does that involve? And how much does that cost? Probably plenty, as well.
I tend to think any solutions to the California water problem aren’t so very simple. California is a place that supports a much larger population than can be easily sustained, and providing water has always been one of the biggest issues. It will almost certainly remain so.
But as VDH describes, California has many many more problems than that, and some of them are indeed of California residents’ and government’s own creation. The waste of money and effort involved in the high-speed rail fiasco is an excellent example.
The Scandinavian systems are similar to Medicare for All in the respect that they use regional offices to administer reimbursements to providers.
Yet they differ in critical ways: They employ cost-sharing for certain services, they are less comprehensive in their coverage, and they allow for private health insurance plans to complement or supplement the government system to cover out-of-pocket expenses and to circumvent wait times or rationed access to specialists.
These are precisely the things Medicare for All would abolish. It’s intriguing that while socialists in America would rush to nationalize the health care system, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes are all gradually increasing their use of private health insurance.
Between 2006 and 2016, the portion of the population covered by private insurance increased by 4% in Sweden, 7% in Norway, and 22% in Denmark…
Private plans in Sweden and Norway are mainly designed to supplement the government-run plan.
In addition to covering out-of-pocket costs, these plans also guarantee prompt access to specialists or elective procedures, which the state plans often fail to provide.
Denmark also allows “complementary” insurance plans, which cover services that are partially or not at all covered by the national system, including dental and vision services.
This growing European interest in private health insurance typically stems from dissatisfaction with the state-run systems, which often provide poor or incomplete coverage and long wait times…
This would all be illegal under Medicare for All. Private health insurance would be abolished for everyone.
I was first exposed to the problems with government health care coverage in the 90s, when as a result of my chronic arm and back injuries I participated in an online forum for chronic pain sufferers. We had some members from Canada and Great Britain, and their stories stood out in marked contrast to those in the US. The foreigners not only had to wait unconscionable amounts of time for appointments, they sometimes did not even qualify for tests or surgeries that they needed. The treatment of chronic pain in this country is hardly perfect—and treating chronic pain is inherently difficult—but in Canada and Great Britain the suffering of such patients seemed immensely greater than the suffering experienced by those in the US.
It was an eye-opener for me at the time. Prior to that, if I’d thought about the British or Canadian health care systems at all, I thought they were pretty good. But even back then in those countries there was a two-tiered state of affairs in which the rich often hot-footed it out (most likely to the US) for treatment, and the rest of the population stayed put and was greatly underserved.
So the developments in Scandinavia are no surprise, nor should they be.
Not that AOC actually cares about history.
AOC is a rabble rouser and a demagogue. She may be ignorant about a particular fact or she may actually know the truth and be blatantly lying about it. But either way, she is a smooth operator who knows exactly what she’s aiming for in terms of effect. She has many admirers who are simpatico with her inflammatory rhetoric and cheer her on.
Recently AOC got a lot of criticism (and attention, which she almost certainly has as a goal) for the following remarks of hers:
In her social-media remarks, the freshman congresswoman said she wants to talk to those “who are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”
“The fact that concentrations camps are now an institutionalized practice in the Home of the Free is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it,” she continued.
Ocasio-Cortez warned, “We are losing to an authoritarian and fascist presidency.”
“I don’t use those words lightly,” she continued. “I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is. A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist, and it’s very difficult to say that.”
Well, I guess the US has long been fascist, then, including during the administration of President Obama, because detention centers have been in operation prior to Trump and under the previous president. And I suppose we’d have to include as “fascists” the victorious allies over the Nazis in World War II, with their postwar displaced person camps:
Displaced persons camps in post-World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A “displaced persons camp” is a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Ukrainians and Czechoslovaks.
At the end of the Second World War, at least 11 million people had been displaced from their home countries, with about seven million in Allied-occupied Germany. These included former prisoners of war, released slave laborers, and both non-Jewish and Jewish concentration-camp survivors. The Allies categorized the refugees as “displaced persons” (DPs) and assigned the responsibility for their care to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
These camps were an enormous undertaking and involved an enormous number of people, and it took a long while—commonly longer than people are held in a detention center in the US—to sort it out.
And I suppose that all the countries of Europe and Asia and Africa that hold refugees in camps are fascists as well.
In fact, everyone except AOC and her supporters are probably fascists.
AOC later pointed out to her critics that she didn’t say present-day camps were like “death camps” during WWII, and she didn’t. But of course she knows that most people are unaware of the distinction between WWII work/labor camps and death camps, and she’s aware that death camps are what is conjured up by the phrase “concentration camps” and the words “fascist” as well as the phrase “never again” (which refers to the Holocaust).
What AOC may or may not know is what the Nazi concentration camps (or labor or work camps) of WWII (as opposed to the death camps) were actually like. They were usually a form of death camp, too. Although the Nazis had various ways of treating different populations within these camps, some were mistreated more than others. But the basic idea of a Nazi concentration/work/labor camp was to work people to death and then replace them with others, who would in turn be worked to death. That’s different than gassing people outright on arrival, to be sure. But it’s horrific, vicious, and evil nonetheless (you can find more information and links here).
And those camps bear no resemblance whatsoever to detention centers for illegal immigrants to this country, and it’s obscene to say it does. Just for starters, those in our camps have only to return to their countries of origin and they’re perfectly free. They are kept under conditions that would seem almost paradisaical to those in Nazi work camps.
Unlike those people who think AOC is merely ignorant, I believe that AOC knows at least something of the truth and would prefer to lie for political reasons. I can’t prove that—maybe she really is a fool rather than a knave. But that’s been my impression.
[NOTE: And for those who would defend AOC by saying that concentration camps originated during the Boer War, that couldn’t be more irrelevant. AOC was clearly referring to WWII with the words “fascist” and the phrase “never again.”]
Brandon Straka is the founder of the #WalkAway movement. A gay man and former liberal, Straka recently left the Democratic Party and made a YouTube video about his defection and the reasons for his change of mind. The video went viral and started a movement in which people who have made a similar political switch have made their own videos explaining their own paths to political change.
For obvious reasons, Straka and his group are a thorn in the side of the left and the Democratic Party, both of which count heavily on certain demographic populations and interest groups being almost 100% in the fold.
So Straka and his group have been under attack for a quite while in an attempt to discredit them. The latest skirmish in this campaign involves the cancellation of an event that was scheduled to have taken place at the LGBT Center in Greenwich Village. The cancellation happened just days before the event had been due to occur, and it was supposed to have involved Straka, two gay men, and a transgender woman talking about the reasons they left the Democratic Party.
Straka is now suing the LGBT Center:
“I’m considered a traitor. [The community] wanted to silence me, they wanted to roll over me and make me disappear,” said Straka, who is seeking $20 million in damages.
He alleges that the LGBT Center caved to pressure from liberal activists who, Straka said, “mounted a smear campaign.” Some 280 people signed an open letter to the center, demanding that the event be canceled. The letter refers to Straka and his panelists as “racist” and “transphobic.” (One of the panelists, Rob Smith, is black.)…
Per the complaint, “the LGBT Center, which ostensibly cultivates a welcome environment for all members … violated their own mission in addition to engaging in unlawful discriminatory practices by specifically targeting particular members of the LGBT Community whose … identity does not conform to the subjectively homogeneous community for which they advocate.”
The reason the LGBT Center gave for the cancellation is that the Center is able to cancel any event that “promotes discriminatory speech or bigotry; negatively impacts other groups or individuals … [and/or] would make many of our community members feel unsafe.” Straka in turn alleges that the Center’s statement about the reason for the cancellation of the #WalkAway event was “intentionally defamatory.”
It seems that the mere idea of gay people or transgendered people or black people being conservative or supporting Trump is considered so disruptive and unsettling that their reasons cannot even be heard in a public forum that is described as serving gay and transgendered people.
I cannot predict how Straka’s lawsuit will ultimately go. But although the idea that he and the other gay, transgender, and black members of his group are racist or transphobic seems preposterous, it no longer shocks. It’s the sort of story heard all too often these days; anyone who goes against the liberal line is labeled a bigot even if that person belongs to the group against which the person is supposedly prejudiced.
And the most terrifying people of all to the left are those who are members of groups the left feels it owns and yet who have dared, like Straka, to defy the party line. The left hates those who once were members but have since left the fold, and their very existence threatens the left’s reliance on the monolithic support of particular groups.
It’s been five years since MH370 and all its souls on board seemingly vanished from the face of the earth, and although the mystery remains unsolved, we have plenty of information. This Atlantic article presents an overview of what’s known so far.
One thing in the article that is no surprise whatsoever is that the Malaysian government’s response has been inadequate at best and perhaps even negligent. Another is that the disappearance of MH370 has provided perfect fodder for conspiracy theories. Just a few of them are described here:
On the internet you will find claims that the airplane has been found intact in the Cambodian jungle, that it was seen landing in an Indonesian river, that it flew into a time warp, that it was sucked into a black hole. One scenario has the airplane flying off to attack the American military base on Diego Garcia before getting shot down. A recent online report that Captain Zaharie had been discovered alive and was lying in a Taiwanese hospital with amnesia won sufficient acceptance that Malaysia angrily denied it.
That Atlantic article summarizes what we actually do know, based on the data. Most of it conforms to what I’ve read elsewhere, and most of it makes sense to me—if such an act can be said to “make sense”:
In truth, a lot can now be known with certainty about the fate of MH370. First, the disappearance was an intentional act. It is inconceivable that the known flight path, accompanied by radio and electronic silence, was caused by any combination of system failure and human error. Computer glitch, control-system collapse, squall lines, ice, lightning strike, bird strike, meteorite, volcanic ash, mechanical failure, sensor failure, instrument failure, radio failure, electrical failure, fire, smoke, explosive decompression, cargo explosion, pilot confusion, medical emergency, bomb, war, or act of God—none of these can explain the flight path.
Second, despite theories to the contrary, control of the plane was not seized remotely from within the electrical-equipment bay, a space under the forward galley. Pages could be spent explaining why. Control was seized from within the cockpit. This happened in the 20-minute period from 1:01 a.m., when the airplane leveled at 35,000 feet, to 1:21 a.m., when it disappeared from secondary radar. During that same period, the airplane’s automatic condition-reporting system transmitted its regular 30-minute update via satellite to the airline’s maintenance department. It reported fuel level, altitude, speed, and geographic position, and indicated no anomalies. Its transmission meant that the airplane’s satellite-communication system was functioning at that moment.
By the time the airplane dropped from the view of secondary—transponder-enhanced—radar, it is likely, given the implausibility of two pilots acting in concert, that one of them was incapacitated or dead, or had been locked out of the cockpit. Primary-radar records—both military and civilian—later indicated that whoever was flying MH370 must have switched off the autopilot, because the turn the airplane then made to the southwest was so tight that it had to have been flown by hand. Circumstances suggest that whoever was at the controls deliberately depressurized the airplane. At about the same time, much if not all of the electrical system was deliberately shut down…
An electrical engineer in Boulder, Colorado, named Mike Exner…has studied the radar data extensively. He believes that during the turn, the airplane climbed up to 40,000 feet, which was close to its limit…Exner believes the reason for the climb was to accelerate the effects of depressurizing the airplane, causing the rapid incapacitation and death of everyone in the cabin.
Much much more at the link. It makes for fascinating albeit depressing reading. It’s depressing because of what happened to all those people. It’s depressing that it was almost certainly done deliberately. It’s depressing that the perpetrator was almost certainly a member of the crew and most likely the captain. And it’s depressing that it’s still largely unsolved despite all the evidence.
The article goes into quite a bit of technical detail as to why a hijacker was not the culprit, and why the crew member most likely responsible for the plane’s disappearance and the deaths of all aboard was the captain Zaharie:
In the case of MH370, it is difficult to see the co-pilot as the perpetrator. He was young and optimistic, and reportedly planning to get married. He had no history of any sort of trouble, dissent, or doubts…
…The police discovered aspects of Zaharie’s life that should have caused them to dig more deeply. The formal conclusions they drew were inadequate…
…The truth, as I discovered after speaking in Kuala Lumpur with people who knew him or knew about him, is that…[h]is wife had moved out, and was living in the family’s second house. By his own admission to friends, he spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms waiting for the days between flights to go by. He was also a romantic. He is known to have established a wistful relationship with a married woman and her three children, one of whom was disabled, and to have obsessed over two young internet models…There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed…
Forensic examinations of Zaharie’s simulator by the FBI revealed that he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370—a flight north around Indonesia followed by a long run to the south, ending in fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean. Malaysian investigators dismissed this flight profile as merely one of several hundred that the simulator had recorded. That is true, as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone…
…[T]here is some suspicion, from fuel-exhaustion simulations that investigators have run, that the airplane, if simply left alone, would not have dived quite as radically as the satellite data suggest that it did—a suspicion, in other words, that someone was at the controls at the end, actively helping to crash the airplane…We know from that descent rate, as well as from…shattered debris, that the airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water.
I don’t think we will ever know any more than this. And I doubt any of this will change the mind of a single conspiracy theorist.
The families of the victims have gone through one of the worst nightmares possible, and there’s no end in sight. I hope they’ve found some sort of peace and comfort, but I can’t imagine that most of them have.
RIP.
Kyle Kashuv, a conservative who is one of the young people who became somewhat of a celebrity for speaking out after the Parkland shootings, was recently accepted at Harvard.
And then Harvard changed its mind and rescinded its acceptance.
Why? Because some kindly and helpful soul brought to their attention the fact that two years ago Kashuv had made some racist comments (for which he almost immediately apologized) with some friends in a private text.
Some things cannot be forgiven, apparently (particularly if a person is a conservative). Youthful indiscretion? Growth opportunity? Fat chance. Harvard doesn’t seem to have much faith in its own diversity and tolerance education program, because apparently only those who have been pure of any thoughtcrimes of the racist variety for their entire lives can enter its sacred portals and be subjected to it.
On Monday, Parkland survivor and outspoken conservative Kyle Kashuv announced that Harvard University had withdrawn his admission from the school over the revelation of racist, offensive, idiotic posts written on a private Google document with friends when he was sixteen years old. Never mind that Kashuv [had] apologized publicly for the comments; never mind that his public behavior has evinced no racism whatsoever…
There are ex-convicts who, quite properly, have been admitted to Harvard — they earned forgiveness. There are current students who undoubtedly have said things privately that would shock the conscience. There are likely administrators who have said things when they were 16 years old that embarrass them now.
But no one’s out to get them for their conservative politics, so their youthful indiscretions can be ignored. For Kashuv, it’s one strike and you’re out.
12/ I believe that institutions and people can grow. I've said that repeatedly.
In the end, this isn’t about me, it's about whether we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistakes brand you as irredeemable, as Harvard has decided for me.
— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) June 17, 2019
Kashuv also points out that he refused offers, including financial assistance, from other universities when he accepted the Harvard offer. So now he is left in the lurch. He’s a bright guy, and I think he’ll land on his feet.