Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Hot Air, Theories, and the Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370





















Shortly after midnight on March 8, 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur with a crew of 12 and 227 passengers. They headed toward Beijing, then turned to the west and just disappeared. Eventually it became clear that it had headed into the southern Indian Ocean and was presumed to have crashed.

There still is no physical evidence. What we know came only from radio transmissions and sonar pings. When will this mystery be solved? Perhaps in two to five years, based on what occurred after the crash of Air France Flight 447.

Much of what I have seen on television and read merely is hot air - theories that have no basis, and should be called fairy tales. These stories tell you nothing about the crash, but a lot about the prejudices of those who tell them. They made me think of a movie line spoken the  Major T. J. Kong, the B-52 pilot in Dr. Strangelove:

“Well I've been to one World's Fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard...”

Back on March 20th on MSNBC Chris Hayes had a six-minute segment which lamented that The plane is not in a black hole.  

The opening segment (titled American Idle Speculation) on the March 24th The Daily Show with Jon Stewart skewered the overblown TV coverage by US cable news networks CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.

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