Thursday, March 26, 2015
Tragedy in the French Alps
The horrible news today, that Germanwings Airbus that crashed into a remote region of the French Alps was brought down deliberately by a kamikaze co-pilot killing all 150 passengers on board. He locked the other pilot out of the cockpit so that he couldn't even use the code to get back in and then pressed a button for a swift descent into the Alps. Of course the vast majority of suicides are just that, suicides and he could've simply downed some sleep aids with a bottle of Scotch so why this mad exit? Was he a lone wolf or part of a larger ISIS plot? Was he none of this but simply wanted to take others with him? The news gets stranger by the day.
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As the news keeps coming in, one of my first thoughts regarding the suicidal co pilot
ReplyDeletewas Cherchez la femme .
Along those lines it could be las femmes as in those 72 virgins.
DeleteScanning the wires just now and the German gov't said the crazed pilot had no terrorism background. Think about it, I could've said that before the newswires did because WHAT airline company would hire someone with terror links? DUH
ReplyDeleteOff topic, but big biz front office jugheads upset me. I model the Union Pacific RR
ReplyDeletein my basement, so I buy a lot of Union Pacific stuff, including 125 locomotives. A few years back, the top brass at Union Pacific, the largest US railroad, decided that
copyright laws permitted them a kickback of 10% of each model engine and car sold.
Of course there was outrage in the model railroad community (yes, they have a community, sort of like Sasquatch hunters) and an affordable small town lawyer was hired to fight the case in court. The judge didn't buy that no railroad have ever done that, or that having models of your trains was good business. What overturned the
case was the fact that Union Pacific had painted the US flag on thousands of their locomotives alongside their 'building America' slogan. "Does Union Pacific pay 10% extra to the US government for each of these?" the small time lawyer asked. Model railroad guys 1: huge railroad 0.
Growing up I used to collect wheatstalk pennies I found in my backyard and in spare change ("I got a wheatie"). No value whatsoever but to a kid it was interesting.
DeleteSuicide is rather common, and maybe half understandable, but taking 150 innocent
ReplyDeletepeople with you strikes me as very strange. Whether he was mad at the world, or
was set off by rude customers, whatever...it will be interesting to see how or if the
story develops. Guy out this way strung a rope from a bridge, but police caught him before he could put his neck in the noose. They gave him intensive psychological
care and released him: next day he sat on a pile of dynamite and lit the fuse. Life
is stranger than fiction sometimes.
IMHO the collective professional gut reaction should lean towards terror first. Instead we get the Obama Administration issuing very preliminary statements to the opposite effect.
DeleteMost of the professionals seemed to think terror was remote in this case.
DeleteThe guy being ethnic German and a Lufthansa pilot, etc. Perhaps they
will learn of a Yemini great grandfather or something. But, if he were a
terrorist, why not fly into the Eifel Tower instead of the Alps?
Isn't it very early in the day for professionals to say it wasn't terror? kinda like detectives ruling out the spouse right off the bat when a husband or wife is murdered. Bear in mind Ft. Hood is still officially listed as "workplace violence."
DeleteEarly reports seem to be going with depression which kinda gives depressed people a bad name. Dunno, did he mix his meds up?
DeleteIt does give them a bad name: probably more psych testing for airline pilots. Then you have the whole temporary insanity trial defense thing.
DeleteIt seems some depressed people hate taking their meds. Dunno, its
complicated. I see a large asteroid is passing by our planet this morning.
Over in rural Washington state, some old lady on a ranch got a threat from ISIS: her son was on a ten year old US military servicemen list which the ISIS geniuses got a hold of. Old lady says she has a shotgun
by the kitchen door. New Muslim group..Houthis, fighting in Yemen.
Supported by Iran and being bombed by Saudi Arabia. Back in the
day it was simple: Cavalry vs Apaches. Now there are more groups on the terrorist watchlist than flavors at Baskin-Robbins.. gonna go out and
check for asteroids.
Color me a gov't cynic but if it's not self-evident it was terror they're not gonna go with terror. Why undercut the airline industry?
DeleteSome are saying it's a bit racist to assume terror wasn't involved.
DeleteI'm thinking a simple engineering fix would be to simplify the cockpit door
Deleteand add a dang toilet, so crew won't wander. The copilot had an order from his physician stating he should not fly. He tore it up. What makes you think he was a terrorist in the current vernacular?
The letter/order from his physician stating he should not fly - one would have to presume his doc did not pull a Nostradamus and state specifically, prophetically "look son you're gonna fly that damn plane deliberately into a mountainside with all those passengers on board."
DeleteUnless I've been blogging while I'm asleep I'm not aware I've concluded he was a terrorist. I do go by a rough rule of thumb though in these type situations: if it is possible the government will deny something is terror unless to do so woud be absurd in the eyes of the public. For example Charlie Hebdo was obviously terror but Ft. Hood is still officially classified as "workplace violence." Benghazi of course was initially denied to be terror so I think my rough rule of thumb kinda holds here. I do not believe the government is by nature a direct purveyor of truth.
DeleteBy what epistemological theology does HobbyLobby provide healthcare with vasectomies and Viagra while having apoplexy over birth control pills? Just
ReplyDeletewondern'.
You see here's the virtue of my position: I would deny coverage to All of the Above.
DeleteSpeaking of theology,
ReplyDelete"Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen, who is a Republican if you can believe that, suggested this week (while explaining her vote for a bill that would allow people to carry guns basically everywhere) that Arizona lawmakers should debate a bill to force citizens to attend church on Sunday" Sumpin's screwed up, Constantine
should quick and hold another Council.
Kinda like forced conversions huh?
DeleteGetting back to depressed pilots shoud be movie ushers instead I was wondering why that French prosecutor keeps issuing statements like who's he gonna prosecute? The guy is dead. Now about having better psych testing of pilots, for what? We can speculate/theorize here but what Lubitz did was an extremely rare thing indeed so basically we'd be putting alot of time and effort into preventing the next extremely rare thing.
ReplyDelete& I was only bringing up the racial angle because some are accusing the media of basically saying only certain ethnicities are terrorists and so Lubitz doesn't fit the bill.
ReplyDeleteWhile I'm not a big fan of Occam's Razor if we applied it here what would we come up with? any Allahu Akbars on the home computers? Is an almost exclusive focus on the Big D (depression) a good or bad thing from an investigative angle? Meanwhile I'll continue to scan the wires even if they are fairly homogeneous of late.
ReplyDeleteYou're right about the automatic link between deadly disasters and terrorism, since
ReplyDeletethere have been so many instances since, and even prior to 9-11. In this particular
case, there were no immediate suspected links, which is fair enough to observe.
Fair enough but in my view or understanding depression doesn't normally lead to such events. Had to be other disorders working in tandem. Bottom line he wanted those 150 people dead. Occam's Razor?
DeleteI'd be interested in what Lubitz's ex-girlfriend has to say. Apparently there was a break up a couple months back. Will they open his psychiatrist's files? It is said he was undergoing treatment for other none mental health issues. What sort of health issues would a marathoner have? Cherchez whatever.....Meanwhile, Hillary destroyed her remaining personal e-mails...can you do that? The files that Adam
ReplyDeleteLanza destroyed were recovered. We have clouds now. Clouds can rain, right?
I'd be interested in knowing his religious beliefs at the end which they should also be investigating. I never said he had ties to any official terrorist organizations but sometimes mental illness and religious mania go hand in hand. IMHO the foreign investigation seems rather narrowly tailored.
DeleteIn strictly semantic terms, the 'Lone Wolf' concept seems to apply regardless of cause. One psychiatrist noted that in this case there was evidence of anger suppression related to the problem of depression; eg
Deletetearing up the doctor no fly orders, keeping his problems under wraps, etc. So the semantics permit of projected anger at humanity in general;
suicide while killing others has seemed restricted to Islamic extremists
(and maybe invented by the Kamikaze mindset near the end of WWII.)
Since we agree he's a lone wolf it would seem incumbent upon investigators to probe his religious beliefs if any. It's as if the investigators early stumbled upon his mental troubles, saw they had a goldmine but stopped at other dimensions that may have rounded out the man. Meanwhile the public is curious for more but the msm ain't delivering.
DeleteAlso the alienated, the disaffected and the isolated could be attracted to different ideologies. Now this former girlfriend of his who said he once said he was gonna do something horrifying to be remembered by shame on her for only coming out now and not then.
DeleteKind of interesting when you think about how a single person can affect so many lives. All the people in food service..what if one is having a bad day? The rogue cop. The road rage individuals. Life ain't simple.
ReplyDeleteWhich is why I've never been a fan of open salad and olive bars.
DeleteIn my mind there's still something missing. How does one's depression turn into an intense animus/rage against 149 others? Was it too much jogging?
ReplyDeleteI always check out Alex Jones in such situations. I get the sense his writer Paul Joseph Watson wanted to go with terror early on but is now into heavily covering the SSRI drug links. Even professional conspiracists sometimes get confused in their enthusiasms.
ReplyDeleteHard to resolve lone wolf vs conspiracy theory. Regarding Lubitz, I'm a bit surprised
ReplyDeletethat if he was as bonkers as they seem to think, how come no fellow pilots reported
him until the scratchy blackbox recording.."Open the *%^&$ door!"
Re that shrink who said he was probably mad at his depression, dunno. We all have something. I might be mad at my occasional insomnia but I'm not gonna plow my car into Mama Leone's at dinnertime.
ReplyDeleteI also think we're gonna be left with not much answers here like Newtown.
ReplyDeleteThey are still wondering about that Malaysian flight that disappeared in the Indian
ReplyDeleteOcean Triangle.
Destined to be one of them enduring mysteries for the ages, the biggest cold case going.
DeleteSaw some German expert speaking this AM. He was reading a report in English and
ReplyDeletestated that Lubitz had a history of being "suicidical". Which I take is their understanding of our "suicidal". Reminded me of some Mexican explosives chemists
that visited our lab one time. The impact energy to set off a small arms primer is
called "sensitivity" by we US folks. But these guys referred to that as "sensibility".
"These are very sensible, those lack sensibility". We thought they were talking about
the management, not ammunition primers. :) English is a confusing language.
Let's not forget the detached retina.
DeleteIn case your news apps are not on yet, we note that someone tried to ram the gates
ReplyDeleteat NSA headquarters. An Edward Snowden relative? Then the oil problem. We are
now producing so much that the country has run out of storage. I know, how about
lowering the price, guys?
Men dressed as women apparently. Wasn't there the world's first penis transplant somewhere quite recently?
DeleteDressed up as women, crashing their car into NSA HQ gates?
DeleteMy guess, more of those frolicking Secret Service guys.
If Lubitz flew for Malaysian Air, we would never know.
ReplyDeleteToo bad Jacques Cousteau isn't alive. He'd have solved it by now and in the process discovered a new species of fish.
Delete