• Malaysia’s prime minister has announced that new satellite data showed that flight MH370 crashed into the Indian Ocean. In a brief statement Najib Razak said: “It is with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that… flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”
• Malaysia Airlines announced that it was “beyond reasonable” doubt that the plane was lost with no survivors. “We must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean,” it said in a statement.
Here’s an open thread.
Elizabelle
I hope they find enough of the plane and black boxes to learn why it went down — malfunction or misdirected.
The pilots’ families and reputations deserve no less.
Oh, and I’m very sad for the families and friends and Malaysians. Bad enough to lose loved ones in a terrible accident; worse to be feasting on glimmers of hope for over two weeks that you might see them again in this life.
Rob in CT
Coates responds to Chait. As usual, it’s excellent:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/black-pathology-and-the-closing-of-the-progressive-mind/284523/
I think each has made good points, but on balance Coates has the stronger argument. It will be interesting to see if Chait responds further.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Can we be completely sure Flight 370 didn’t encounter a time rip and journey into the recent past where the passengers are trying to stay one step ahead of the Langoliers?
/mainstream news
Comrade Scrutinizer
Does this mean that we’re finally done with all plane, all the time? What will CNN do?
Chyron HR
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
Send Wolf Blitzer to kidnap some more white girls.
Mnemosyne
G ran across something on Metafilter this morning with people discussing the crash where one guy was spouting his conspiracy theories and someone came up with a line that I think I need to put on a t-shirt: Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean they’re lying to you about it.
It applies to so many things right now: global warming, evolution, abortion and contraception. If you don’t understand how Plan B suppresses ovulation to prevent pregnancy, that doesn’t mean that it’s a lie and the pill is secretly aborting zygotes.
dmsilev
I’d just like to admire this headline from TPM’s newswire: “Germans Intercept Cocaine-Filled Condoms Destined For Vatican”.
SiubhanDuinne
Sad indeed, but not unexpected. Agree with Elizabelle that the families of all those aboard deserve as much clear, factual information as may become available. And good point about the pilots’ posthumous reputations.
(But whatever will CNN find to talk about now?)
ETA: I see Comrade Scrutinizer beat me to the CNN punch.
kindness
Let me take a moment to send energy to the families of the departed. At least they now know what happened. It’s the why that will haunt us.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
What a great line!
evodevo
Sounds to me like the onboard fire scenario. I doubt if anyone was still alive past the coast of Malaysia. Flew on autopilot till it ran out of fuel, then nosedived. Not a happy ending.
And, yes, WHAT WILL FIXED/CNN DO FOR NEWS NOW?!!!111!!!!
Ronnie Pudding
I’m working on a movie script in which CNN secretly shoots down planes in order to help their own ratings.
Certified Mutant Enemy
I hope they find enough of the plane and black boxes to learn why it went down — malfunction or misdirected.
Unless Obama is somehow implicated, Fox “News” will scream “COVER-UP!”
WaterGirl
My first thought was relief. oh, good, at least now the families can know what happened. About 30 seconds after that, I burst into tears.
There will surely be an initial sense of relief for the families, because the uncertainty must have been beyond bearable. But the difference between a sliver of hope and no hope at all will be devastating, and my heart goes out to everyone who lost someone.
gbear
I still blame Obama.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Payne Stewart scenario likely caused by onboard fire and subsequent depressurization – which then put out the fire.
I hope they find the black boxes – or really anything at all – but given where this likely went down odds of that are pretty much zero.
gene108
@Mnemosyne:
I’ve been watching a lot of Ancient Aliens on H2 lately. If I ever have to deal with people wanting to teach Creationism, I will demand Ancient Astronaut Theory also be taught, because both AAT and Creationism both derive from the same basic concept you cited above that because we do not fully understand something does not mean what we do understand needs to treated with skepticism.
Both AAT and Creationism proponents want to undermine science by interjecting unprovable hypothesis into the points on global warming or evolution that we do not fully understand and attribute the causes to some third party with powers greater than what is observable in the cosmos.
Persia
@WaterGirl: Yeah, I’m glad there’s news and hope that it will soon be clear what happened, but it’s still so heartbreaking that they’re gone.
NotMax
@evodevo
Minor point, but all the engines would not have run out of fuel and cut out simultaneously.
Rather than nosedive, would have banked and come down more in a spiral.
The Dangerman
So, did plane go to 40+K feet to put out the fire or knock out all the passengers? Lots of speculation for CNN to run with for several more days (weeks, months, etc).
Joey Maloney
@The Dangerman: And did Obama just know about it in advance and let it happen, or did he actually concoct the plan himself?
Elizabelle
@The Dangerman:
And by the time CNN comes back down to earth, they can continue having Republicans and glibertarians disparage Obamacare again.
ETA: I don’t actually know what CNN says about Obamacare. Stopped watching them about the time they let Aaron Brown go. (2005, per Wiki …)
Belafon
@Rob in CT: I disagree with one of the comments made by Coates: “Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past.”
As a progressive, the older I get, the more that I see that it still exists, from the obvious white supremacists, to the almost white representation in government, to the dog whistles by Republicans, to the white privilege, to the number of cars pulled over on highways here in Texas driven by minorities vs whites.
scav
@Joey Maloney: He built the Southern Pacific. This is a vast, long-term plot.
JPL
@The Dangerman: That’s what I’m thinking but I think it could take years. Fox will adopt the Obama did it and CNN will have comments all over the place.
Elizabelle
@Ronnie Pudding:
That’s actually a great idea. (The screenplay, not the ratings boosting idea.)
People thought “Network” was outrageous in its day.
burnspbesq
@Rob in CT:
Coates was doing OK until this:
That’s beyond absurd.
Amir Khalid
@Elizabelle:
That part of the search is still going on, of course. The Aussies think the various navies searching the Indian Ocean location may have located pieces of, well, something — although they still need to examine first what they find. If they find something with the blue and red wau bulan* on it, that will pretty much confirm it is indeed from MH370. If they find any human remains, it might be better just to leave them where they are and treat the site as a grave.
I’m not so hopeful that, if the plane was hijacked, they will find out for sure who the hijacker was. There is now no one to be questioned.
*Moon kite.
Elizabelle
@Belafon:
I still need to read Coates (and Chait’s?) essays, but re white supremacy:
If anything, you see it frighteningly more than you ever supposed, now that you are looking for it.
(The “you” being me in this case, but one can see the backtracking and never-tracked-at-all along with the progress.)
srv
@Rob in CT:
Christ on a pogo stick, where is a hippie supposed to go when Coates is punching them?
Progressives don’t believe in finding ‘not race-specific policies’ because they are confused about history or reality, but because they realize that it’s the only viable political strategy in an era where that vast majority of Not-Progressives have supported or acquiesced to rolling back affirmative action and don’t give a ratfuck about anything racial.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I don’t. I had that attitude until around February 2009, and then reality, in the form of a psychotic reaction to a black president where a lot of nominally liberal white folks realized they were liberal no more, slapped the shit out of me and I realized that my world was pretty fucking racist and built on a granite foundation of white privilege.
Most folks of the liberal persuasion I know did not have that realization. And still don’t. It’s a little disheartening.
MikeJ
They might have split up or they might have capsized;
they may have broke deep and took water.
Amir Khalid
@WaterGirl:
This report from ABC News suggests the initial reaction from family members gathered at the hotel in Beijing was something other than relief. Possibly not as restrained as the reaction you might expect from families in Europe or the US, but it’s consistent with my experience of Chinese culture.
Anoniminous
@Mnemosyne:
I am SO stealing that!
D58826
I can understand the Paine Stewart scenario. There was a similar situation with a Greek jet where the plane flew on autopilot till it ran out of fuel. It followed the programmed flight path for several hours shadowed by Greek Air Force jets.
But here is my question – 1. the crew made the left turn manually and then became disabled. 2. the plane resumed flying on autopilot. 3. wouldn’t the autopilot return the plan to the programmed flight plane i.e Beijing? 4. or if the autopilot was off after the turn, how did it fly straight and level for 7 hours?
The Dangerman
@JPL:
I’m not confident they will ever know for certain; seems like each scenario has a “but wait, what about this” factor. All theories seem to have a hole. If they recover something off the deleted simulator files, that might be as much of a smoking gun as they will get, but that has holes, too.
Anoniminous
@Belafon:
It would have been nice (and more accurate) to put “Some” as the first word in the sentence. Reckon Chait is a busy person, with column inches to fill, and accuracy has to take second place to covering the news.
Rob in CT
@Belafon:
As with the first exchange, I do think Coates overstates his case. I think he’s basically right, but taking things a touch too far. I too have figured out that white supremacy has more staying power than I used to think. 10 years ago I’d have asserted that the evils of the past had been stopped, and now there are some remaining after-effects. Today, I’d find that assertion glib and ahistorical. The evils of the past morphed into (somewhat lesser? Certainly less overt) evils of the present. But Coates isn’t writing about us. He’s talking about Chait, Obama, and other liberals in positions of influence.
MikeJ
@The Dangerman:
Probably neither. There are doubts that it ever went to 40k. Radar isn’t very good at determining altitude at long range. The pilots have controls for the pressurization system in the cockpit and there’s not more much oxygen available at 35k than at 40. There’s no need to climb to do either of those things. For the pax, just turn off cabin pressurization. I’ve never heard of anybody ever climbing to put out a fire. A few WWII stories mention diving to increase airspeed and blow out a fire, but I don’t know how reliable those stories are.
The first thing I thought of when I heard about the climb and dive was TWA 800. When it broke in half, the cockpit plummeted and the rest of the plane climbed. Here’s a NatGeo animation at about 5:45. If something similar happened, the wreck is where it disappeared.
maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
There must be a blonde woman out there somewhere getting kidnapped.
SiubhanDuinne
@Elizabelle: I loved Aaron Brown! And for the most part, I pretty much gave up on CNN around that time as well.
Hard to believe it’s been that long, though.
SFAW
@gbear:
Well, of course.
1) The flight data recorder is referred to as the “black” box
2) After the U-turn, the flight was heading directly (within a reasonable approximation) for Nairobi
3) There are (unconfirmed) rumors that an operative, carrying both Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate AND a verified/certified copy of the “Whitey” tape was a passenger
4) Obama needed a distraction from
the IRS scandalBenghaziiii!!!1!Russia’s invasion of CrimeaAnd the best part about this list? Alex Jones has probably already put forth some, or perhaps all, of the points.
Robert Sneddon
@NotMax: This has been discussed on PPRuNe, the Professional Pilot’s Rumour Network site. Assuming the 777’s flight controls were still working (and if the plane got as far into the southern Indian Ocean as it seems it did then it almost certainly was working OK) then the autopilot would have reduced the other engine’s power level and set the rudder and trim to maintain the aircraft in level flight while screaming its little electronic head off for someone to do something. Even after the other engine quit it would still attempt to fly the plane as best it could until it hit the sea. 777s and other twin-engine aircraft are rated to fly for several hours on only one engine — the 777-200ER has in fact been flown for nearly three hours in that condition operationally after one of them lost an engine over an ocean.
If they handed out medals to robots then this 777’s FCS would be in line for a gong for going “Above and beyond the call of duty”.
Ruckus
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
My findings exactly. White supremacy is everywhere. In politics, the courts, our jails, news media, many people’s minds. I’m sure that many progressives/liberals see this, but many do not grasp it yet. We have made progress as a society but it has been painfully slow and spotty. Recognizing that it still exists, is part of the solution and the corollary, not recognizing it, is a huge part of the problem.
Punchy
If I’m a CNN Exec, I’m chartering a private plane to the Southern Indian Ocean, and in the dark of night, I’m releasing 239 seat cushions into the water. That’d provide at least 2 more weeks of speculation and programming.
Librarian
@MikeJ: The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay if they put 15 more miles behind her.
srv
@D58826: 3) You can steer the a/c heading by a knob on the autopilot. They might have turned it the nearest runway heading, fought the fire and lost. Or it could have just failed.
4) Airliners are designed to be aerodynamically stable. Barring turbulence or CG issues (I’ve not found a straight answer on if 777’s require active fuel tanking changes), it could remain stable for hours.
D58826
@srv: thanks. as some one said upthread, the computer served above and beyond the call of duty on this one
SFAW
@maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor:
By Gary Condit
… in Aruba
… and her body will eventually be found in Fort Marcy Park
… by Sarah Palin
? Martin
@Rob in CT: I did think that was excellent. This at The Atlantic is also excellent.
blueskies
@burnspbesq: It’s certainly what I saw in the Atlanta ‘burbs, especially in Gwinnett.
Or is it that you’re assuming segregation doesn’t still exist?
Amir Khalid
I’ve tried going to askthepilot.com to see what Patrick Smith had to say, and I’m getting the “unable to connect ” message. His server is pleading for mercy.
D58826
Ouch, the number of unaccounted for (still tentative) is up to 108 in that mudslide in Washington state. They hope that it will come down but at the moment it looks ugly. What they are afraid of is that the landslide hit when the homes would normally be occupied.
SFAW
@burnspbesq:
It’s not unreasonable to infer that de facto (vs. de jure, I guess) segregation can/will lead to redlining, and the various problems that that practice engenders.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne:
That is a great line. Perfect response to climate science deniers and people who don’t accept evolution.
shelly
Well, it did…in medieval times. Then Henry VIII went and broke up all the monasteries and everything went to hell.
Craig
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: The recent past? Hardly. You will almost certainly find the flight data recorder in Olduvai Gorge. WE ARE THEIR DESCENDANTS.
Elizabelle
YOU GUYS HAVE GOT TO CHECK OUT THE CNN WEBSITE.
I am not kidding. If a website could be yelling …
dww44
@Rob in CT: I’d read the Chaits piece and the comments, which were enlightening in many respects and discovered that there are no comments displayed to Coates’ piece? What’s up with that?
From a black commenter, Jade7243, at Chait’s place, who made several informative comments, there was this:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/obama-ta-nehisi-coates-poverty-and-culture.html
Rob in CT
@? Martin:
That article would’ve been stronger with more data (which may not exist) about the extent of poverty pre-New Deal/Great Society. The Great Depression, after all, wasn’t the only pre-New Deal depression. The panic of 1873 was really nasty, and triggered a ~5 year depression. Ditto 1893, IIRC, though I know less about that one. I’d bet private charities were overwhelmed during those shocks too. Another thing to point out is that, unlike the 19th century, 21st century America can’t just say “well, head out West! We’ve got some free land for you we took off the Indians.”
I know, it’s a relatively short article so it can’t have everything. I just felt it didn’t make the strongest case.
Btw: the comments, as usual, are despair-inducing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
It’s not hard to guess. I just saw a headline that says the WaPo has listed “if you like your insurance, you can keep it” as one of the biggest presidential lies. Without clicking, I’d a mortgage payment that this, “I did not have sex with that woman”, and WMDs are all lumped together, apples to apples.
muricafukyea
Of course it’s sad but….”news”? Really? Is this not obvious to anyone with half a brain? You do have at least half don’t you? Or maybe you’re buying into conspiracy theories? Frankly would not surprise me. After all remember your “Palin is running for president in 2012” prediction? I sure do.
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The Washington Post. We jump sharks. And we’re still losing subscribers …
tk
Obama’s election taught me that race is the main factor in our political decisions. Simply because more than half of all whites are racist and view any policy decision as a either helping them and screwing the browns, or the reverse.
Rob in CT
@dww44:
I can’t speak for Coates, but I think that misses his point. I don’t think Coates is talking about the best message to any given individual young black man. In his latest, he points out the difference between the coach of a team facing unfair umpiring and the Commissioner of the league. As Coates says, Obama isn’t the coach, he’s the commissioner. This changes his role. Role modeling is nice and all, but Coates is talking about bigger things. The structure of our society, if you like.
It’s like liberals and conservatives talking about poverty. Conservatives, by and large (e.g., not total sociopaths), see it as bad but the result of personal choices. Their solutions always involve bettering the poor person. Liberals tend to respond by pointing out systemic problems. If there are 10 applications for every open job, bettering one person just moves them up the line, and someone else down. It doesn’t lower unemployment.
There’s something similar going on here between what Coates is saying and what that commentor at Chait’s place is saying. Advice to the individual is one thing. Public policy is another.
nancydarling
@Anoniminous: Already stolen and used by me.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Elizabelle: Bless my soul.
No matter who cynical you get, you can’t keep up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/03/24/dear-readers-what-are-the-biggest-presidential-lies-in-recent-history/
Elizabelle
That guy — the actor — died.
RIP James Rebhorn. I never remembered his name either, but he was good in anything I ever saw him in. And he played a convincing villain.
(First time I ever saw him was in The Guiding Light. He played an incestuous father, if memory serves… very briefly watched TGL because they had some “Nick and Nola” plotline that I loved … And Mrs. Renfro.)
Elizabelle
Three of my comments are in moderation. FYWP does not like me linking to news stories. 2 response to Amir Khalid with NYT, one about James Rebhorn RIP.
MikeJ
@D58826: Just yesterday they were saying 18 missing that they knew of. The problem is if a whole family got his there was nobody to report them missing. Today’s 100+ number reflects that. I’m curious if any of that number are people who were thought to be driving through the area and haven’t shown up yet. It’s easier to figure out what houses are missing but there’s no way of knowing what cars were in the path until you get them dug out.
Cervantes
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s stupider even than that:
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Wait just a minute.
You needed to tell me that Glenn Kessler (!) wrote that article.
How he is not at Politico, I cannot say.
Elizabelle
@Cervantes:
“We are looking”
Glenn Kessler is always looking.
It’s seeing that he has problems with.
Effing tool.
RaflW
@burnspbesq: It’s not absurd.
De Facto segregation has been central to our white supremacy housing system since, oh, forever. The creation and maintenance of concentrated Black and urban poor ghettos fueled the predatory lending system created whole neighborhoods that have few homeownership stabilization resources.
I’m not an aliens/illuminati/whatever conspiracy theory type. No tinfoil here. But if you ask me, there was a conspiracy to defraud black homeowners in particular in the last boom/bust cycle.
Was it by design, in the overt sense? Probably not. I don’t think people at the banks & mortgage broking firms sat around and said “hey, lets rip off black people!” with everyone nodding and getting excited.
But the system is so steeped in white privilege and racist segregation that the effect was to conspire to sell rip-off priced services to concentrated markets of easy marks who have systematically been deprived by our edumacational system of any useful consumer training, minimal family history of home ownership (white people take for granted that they can ask dad “hey, is this mortgage a good deal?”), etc.
If I were to put a tiny tin foil hat on, I could start to believe that ACORN was destroyed not for its voter mobilizations but for its housing and consumer finance advocacy. Huh.
rda909
@Elizabelle: Fux Newz lost massive amounts of money every year of its existence right up until 9/11/2001. They then became the America Fuck Yeah! Channel and we all MUST support OUR President George W. Bush 24/7 for years after, with no questions asked. They turned their finances around based upon 9/11. Just throwing that bit of factual information out there…
Ruckus
@Rob in CT:
Perspective is very important, but how many have the time, energy, or wherewithal to live through it? I mean most will live through it, but is it really living?
Coates is right but so is the commenter. The problem is too big, too immediate, too long standing, too engrained to stand back and separate out the parts that people play and try to work on them one by one. I don’t by the way, think that is what Coates is doing but I do think that some are assuming that.
Hill Dweller
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The Obama administration did everything short of not actually passing the law to keep people on their existing insurance plan. If an individual didn’t have a policy that was grandfathered in during 2010 or changed to a new policy after the law passed, they were subject to the law’s new regulations on Jan. 1, 2014, but that was the result of their actions.
As is always the case, Dems are held to a much higher standard than Republicans.
Roger Moore
@The Dangerman:
When the black boxes are finally recovered, the conspiracy theorists will claim they’re fakes intended to hide the truth.
Paul in KY
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I guess these ‘nominally liberal’ white folks didn’t vote for Pres. Obama?
If you voted for McCain, (IMO) you are in no way ‘nominally liberal’.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: Seems that alot still held out hope for their loved ones.
The Ancient Randonneur
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
I’m pretty Don Lemon and his panel have already determined that probably didn’t happen. But, it is entirely possible they overlooked something.
Mandalay
Chris McLoughlin, SVP of INMARSAT (the British satellite company which concluded that the plane crashed in the southern Indian Ocean), was just saying that the cost of planes transmitting their flight data every 15 minutes would be very low.
So something good coming out of this disaster may be that this will be the last time that a large plane completely disappears. Or at least there will always be data to locate a plane’s exact position within the previous 15 minutes.
Belafon
@Elizabelle: He was the Secretary of Defense in Independence Day.
Snarki, child of Loki
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: “Can we be completely sure Flight 370 didn’t encounter a time rip..”
Why use all that newfangled terminology, when there’s a perfectly good traditional word for it? Raptured.
Tell all the RWNJs: they bet on the wrong horse.
Roger Moore
@SFAW:
There’s also very strong evidence that the banks deliberately steered minorities into the worst kinds of subprime loans, even when they qualified for prime. Minorities have been especially hard-hit by the mortgage crisis, and racism is at the center of it.
Belafon
@RaflW:
It was for helping black people. Doesn’t require any parsing or any hats.
catclub
@SFAW: Of course, redlining would lead to no minorities even given a chance to default.
The actual cases show some (very uncertain value for some) focus on minority homeowners as targets
for the scam lenders. Still the opposite of Community Reinvestment Act forcing banks to lose money there.
? Martin
@Rob in CT: Data on charitable giving prior to that point is almost useless because we know that not one thin cent went to african americans in large swaths of the country.
To connect it to Ta-Nahesi’s post – charitable giving is the one remaining institution where discrimination is not only tolerated, but forms the entire basis of the system. The right’s calls for charity are just a sugar coated version of ‘we can keep this wealth in the family’.
Mandalay
@Roger Moore:
Not so sure about that. The financially vulnerable, and the financially naive may well have been especially hard-hit by the mortgage crisis, but it seems a bit of leap to conclude that “racism is at the center of it”. Is there supporting data for that conclusion?
Roger Moore
@Rob in CT:
That was never a plausible alternative for the poor people worst hit by depressions anyway. For all the romance about homesteading as a way of moving up in the world, it required some means to get started. Homesteaders needed a lot of supplies to build their new homes, and they couldn’t count on getting a reliable supply of food until after they had become established. That meant they needed substantial financial reserves to have a real chance of success. It was generally something that established farmers did as a way of getting a better farm, or the children of successful farmers did with financial support from their parents, rather than would-be farmers did as a way of getting started.
Frankensteinbeck
@Roger Moore:
It was the 1800s ‘Borrow $20,000 from your parents and start a business’, yes.
cokane
@Rob in CT: That’s one of the best things I’ve read from Coates. Aside from the weird and useless interjections of french at the beginning (Coates can’t help but include some excess that grates me I guess).
Still, very strong argument, solid research. The only problem is there isn’t much context to the level of white supremacy being talked about, and this undercuts Coates’ logic, which is probably why his article evades it. I’m not trying to be a denier, but white supremacy is definitely at an historical low in the US. This is not to say it doesn’t exist. But obviously compared to slavery, Jim Crow, and the Southern Strategy of Nixon-Reagan-Bush I, it’s hit an historical ebb that only seems destined to slowly diminish.
And yet some of these problems that Obama worries about in the black community persist. Now I’m not saying I blame anything peculiar in the black community. Things like fewer marriages and stagnant wages are prevalent in every sector, and I’m not even sure the marriage drop is a social ill. But it’s Coates who puts forth this logic that white supremacy is to blame for specific social ills he is witnessing in the black community. If it’s at a current nadir, then the logic doesn’t really add up. I’d also add that the perceived social ills in the black community are greatly exaggerated. There’s great data out there about rural and ex-urban poverty, which is like some silent problem that’s never getting discussed.
But thanks for sharing. I rarely read Coates and that was a treat.
Roger Moore
@Mandalay:
Yes. Several lenders have agreed to settlements for deliberately steering minorities into subprime mortgages when whites with similar finances would be offered prime loans. For example, here’s a DOJ settlement with Wells Fargo, and here’s one with Countrywide.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@dww44:
TNC has regularly disabled comments for posts on more…contentious subject matter like race, mostly because (as I can vouch for) the comments regularly turn into a shitshow of culture blaming and insistences of blacks being the REAL super-mega-racists and how calling people racist means you’re an even worse racist and all that crap.
Mandalay
@Roger Moore: Yes, very persuasive. Thanks.
bemused
@? Martin:
Joe Conason touched on this in Big Lies, 2003 in his chapter on Faith, Charity and the Mayberry Machiavellis. He wrote about how ridiculous it was to think that the private sector could replace the public sector in maintaining the social contract quoting a Century Foundation study several years before saying the total assets of US foundations, not their annual income, of US 34,000 foundations added up to 10% of the gov’t expenditures for social welfare and programs. Foundations and religious charities alone can’t even keep people surviving minimally let alone lift them up out of poverty.
PaulW
Sad to know they’ve finally found something, but was expecting it. Most likely scenario was a crash. :(
cat
@Mandalay: “it seems a bit of leap to conclude that “racism is at the center of it”. Is there supporting data for that conclusion? ”
Minorities who had the same income and FICO scores were given higher interest loans and interest only loans more often then whites. This was big news back in the day so you should have no trouble finding it online.
phoebes-in-santa fe
@MikeJ: Do you think Gordon Lightfoot will sing a song about MH370?
Amir Khalid
The headline on a Salon story asserts
(Italics as per Salon headline)
This use of italics implies, falsely, that MAS didn’t think to communicate this very important news to passengers’ families by any other means.
ruemara
@burnspbesq: Some days, you are so from Orange County.
gopher2b
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
Speculate endlessly about the timing of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and more importantly, the type of weaponry he’ll use.
Roger Moore
@Mandalay:
Sure. I was actually in the market for a house during and after the sub-prime debacle, so I was paying a lot of attention. I can see how it could get lost in the general chaos of the era for somebody who wasn’t as engaged in that specific area.
Roger Moore
@ruemara:
Only some days?
Bokonon
@bemused: From talking with some fundamentalist Christian acquaintances, I think that there is some magical thinking going on, coupled with a twisted-up version of neoclassical economics. In other words … if you blow up government, the market will then create an alternative! And the churches will step in to take the functions that the government used to fulfill. And the new substitute system will work, because it has to! Magic!
Of course, there are some ugly subtexts here – one of which “hey, you had better get religion and join a church (and get ready to kneel and pray if you want to eat, or if you want that unemployment support).” But I think that is entirely the point of the whole scheme. The people pushing this sort of devolution WANT that. They want to have a pointedly judgmental and partisan and opinionated set of gatekeepers for social welfare, instead of one that tries to be non-religious and non-judgmental. They just think their viewpoints will win.
And viewing things this way, this all looks like one more form of partisan cultural warfare. And a really scary, nasty one at that.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@ruemara: We finally agree on something. There’s no creature more loathsome in this world than an Orange County liberal. Fuckers are practically nazis but like to call themselves progressive because they once gave spare change to a panhandler for fear of being mugged.
Fair Economist
An interesting hypothesis for the plane flying to where it did is that the crash is vaguely close to the location of Beijing – except with the latitude switched to the Southern Hemisphere. So Chris Goodfellow’s model (reported on here) is looking pretty good. Something went wrong and the pilots plotted a course for the nearest emergency landing site. They couldn’t make the landing (probably due to being incapacitated) and the plane flew on without human piloting. The autopilot being misprogrammed for the Southern Hemisphere can explain the big problem with Goodfellow’s model before – the multiple purposeful turns after the presumed accident.
It’s a little freaky to have both a major on-board accident and a misprogrammed autopilot – but not totally implausible.
Roger Moore
@Bokonon:
I think this is a major goal of doing away with the welfare state. They want to be allowed to judge the worthiness of welfare recipients so that charity goes only to the deserving poor. You can see some of the same thing with the right wing desire to place all kinds of lifestyle limitations on recipients of welfare today, e.g. drug testing, restricting how and where they can spend welfare money, etc. They want social welfare to come with restrictions and limitations, and that can only happen when a government that’s legally required not to discriminate gets out of the business.
Fair Economist
On the debate about “black culture” I think it’s a case of everybody is partially right. Racism is at an all-time low in America – but it’s still really bad. The vast majority of Americans grew up in a society where extreme racial segregation and discrimination was the norm, to the point where inter-racial marriages were severely frowned on. And a not-yet trivial section of the population grew up when extreme racial segregation and discrimination was actually the *law*. At the same time, being mistreated as a child due to bad schools, dangerous neighborhoods, discrimination against parents, etc. can have permanent bad effects, so even if discrimination just disappeared today there would be after-effects for decades.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
It’s more plausible if you assume that the autopilot was reprogrammed during the emergency, when time was short and mistakes were more likely to go unchecked.
bemused
@Bokonon:
Ha, I always want to ask those folks why their churches haven’t been stepping in and stepping it up all along and showing everyone how much better they can do it than the government.
Rob in CT
@Roger Moore:
Fair point, that. But today we lack even that fantasy.
…
Regarding the mortgage crisis, I remember articles detailing how certain folks were “steered” into subprime loans even though they qualified for better. IIRC, they were often ESL and thus easier to screw with. I doubt that bigotry wasn’t the plan (hey, let’s screw some minorities b/c they’re minorities). But it’s still got racism all over it. Why? Well, if you set out to screw vulnerable people in this country, you will disproportionally screw minorities. And why is that? Once you ask that question, we’re back to the bad stuff that we like to think we don’t do anymore (and we really have cut out a lot of it). This shit no longer requires racial animus to work. It can be pretty mindless. Like autopilot…
Trollhattan
Time left for the flight recorder batteries is waning and I wonder if there’s any chance of finding them before they turn off, or at least narrowing down the search region so they can deploy ROVs to search the sea floor.
One pilot’s take on the various fire scenarios, here:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/535538-malaysian-airlines-mh370-contact-lost-380.html#post8396452
And his closing paragraph.
And, AFP on the historical causes of crashes occurring during cruising phase. At the top of the list is sabotage.
https://twitter.com/AFP/status/447017673080074240/photo/1
Chris
@Bokonon:
Yep. To them, charity is control. Long thought that that, far more than any tax cuts they might get out of it, is why so many of our elites are determined to destroy the concept of a mandatory safety net that’ll be there for you no matter what.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne:
Yes. This.
Origuy
Billy Graham’s daughter thinks the plane was raptured. She doesn’t explain why God would take a plane full of Muslims and Buddhists.
Roger Moore
@Rob in CT:
That specific fantasy, yes, but we’ve replaced it with plenty of other get-rich fantasies. Now we’re going to get rich through multi-level marketing or writing successful smartphone apps. I also assume that homesteading as a fantasy way of advancing in the world has become bigger as we’ve become further separated from the practical issues involved.
raven
@Trollhattan: They are close enough now that they’ll find it eventually. They got shit for tracking stuff that we don’t have any idea about.
Another Holocene Human
@Trollhattan:
From the beginning you’ve challenged the consensus here on this issue, and I respect that, but I do have some questions about what you just wrote.
First, why wouldn’t the data storage on that flight recorder be solid state?
Second, are there enough ROVs on the planet to search an area of ocean floor that large that quickly? Considering how treacherous the ocean floor can be, the currents, etc, sounds like a fucking longshot. Not only that, but at this point debris are probably scattered everywhere. It’s a shame the various governments coordinated poorly and weren’t able to share data quickly enough to get out there before the pieces sank and broke up, but there you have it.
Finally, is there a reason you believe the crew of MH370 to be skilled to American standards and not glorified bus drivers like those nitwits that crashed the Asiana flight? I read up after that crash, seems like South Korea churns out underskilled pilots. That happens elsewhere in the transpo industry so frankly I find that believable. To be specific, it’s not unheard of for Class B passenger to be trained by the first employer and tossed out alone on the road after 8 weeks or even 6 or 7 weeks of training, but, hey, they’ve got a CDL! Now, put someone who did a tour of duty in the US Armed Forces and who also drove commercial interstate Class A or B for a couple of years, and now hire them to drive a bus: there is someone who, typically, is WAY more skilled and capable and probably a far sight safer. A transit agency trained me, so it hurts to say it, but there it is.
Eric S.
I haven’t gotten through all the comments here but this post on LGM is worth a read. It really calls into question the disabled crew theories. I don’t think it completely debunks the idea but it lays out how so many things have to go just right – or wrong – for the crew to be disabled, for all communications to fail, and for the plane to continue flying for hours.
ulee
I just watched the video of the police shooting and killing a man in cold blood in New Mexico. These idiots are supposed to be helping us, not fucking us up. I hate this police state.
Roger Moore
@Origuy:
Probably because she never thought about it that way. It’s one thing to realize that people in other parts of the world are Godless heathens; it’s another to actually think that those specific people fall into that category. And, BTW, I’d guess that many of the Chinese nationals on the plane were at least nominally atheists rather than Buddhists.
Punchy
Yeah, but then that extra $3.74 per flight would prevent United’s CEO from making $11.4 million a year, instead forcing him to settle for a measley $10.9 Extra Large. Cant be having that. How’s he supposed to afford that 5th house in Aspen on less than $11 milly a year?
Doesn’t anyone think of the soon-to-be-marginally-poorer?
Another Holocene Human
@raven: There’s only really two, maybe I should say one, way to track “stuff,” that’s using EM forces or signals, unless you’re talking about a radioactive target actually throwing off boson ejecta. There’s “metal detection” and there’s photons. Well, okay, three ways–I guess you could sonar shit and then try to guess what the shapes mean. That’s not a fundamental force.
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
It also doesn’t mention that the authorities had previously asked all the families whether they wanted to receive news bulletins* via texting or through some other medium. According to what I heard earlier, families overwhelmingly opted for texts.
*I don’t mean CNN-type news, but official communications. They wanted text messages.
Comrade Mary
@Mnemosyne: Oh God, is that thread still going?
/sigh
Where’s my asbestos lingerie?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Fair Economist: Interesting thought. The search area is at 40 degrees S while Beijing is at 40 degrees N, but the longitude of the search area is different than Beijing. It doesn’t seem to be just a “simple” sign or N/S error. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the autopilot was misprogrammed in an emergency. (Presumably, though, an autopilot would flag a warning if it was way off – “Hey! There’s no airport there! Are you sure?”.)
http://theaviationist.com/2014/03/20/mh370-total-recap/ is a good summary.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I don’t mean to start any blasphemous rumors
But I think that God’s got a sick sense of humor.
Since CNN has out-CNNed itself with this story, can I assume their the ones keeping the Graham offspring in the spotlight? I saw Franklin belched out something stupid the other day.
Robert Sneddon
@Another Holocene Human: The Flight Data Recorder and the Cockpit Voice Recorder are not solid-state units, they are quite old technology. They are also rated to survive the aircraft pulling enough gees to kill everyone on board, impacting solid ground or a sea surface at several hundred miles an hour, burning in a avgas-fired inferno for at least an hour and more and survive immersion in seawater at depths of thousands of metres and hundreds of atmospheres of pressure for several years (as in the case of AF 447) and still have clearly legible information that can be read back from the stainless-steel “tape” inside when they are eventually recovered. There’s a reason they’re not modern technology.
Tone in DC
@SFAW:
RWNJ assumption: MH370 is Obama’s fault.
As well, Kosovo was Obama’s fault, as was the 1973 oil embargo and the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Bill Ayers must have been his babysitter back during the Nixon administration.
It is most irresponsible not to speculate/use faith-based intelligence/arbitrarily make shit up.
ulee
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: She operates from a baseline of superstition. She doesn’t have to make sense. She just has to be a believer.
Roger Moore
FYWP! Stop eating my comments!
[ETA: I’ve been trying to respond to AHH about the black boxes. The problem is with the battery on the underwater transponder, which runs out in about 30 days. After that, it’s very hard to find.]
raven
@Another Holocene Human: Like I said.
Amir Khalid
I am surprised by this question. Let’s not forget, we’re talking about a very experienced captain, 33 years with MAS, an instructor on this aircraft type, certified by Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation to examine other pilots. I think his competence is beyond question.
The first officer was much less experienced, true; but he had been with MAS from his trainee-pilot days, and had just passed a probationary period during which he was supervised by an instructor pilot. I’ve already mentioned he was flying with a very experienced captain.
stinger
@? Martin: No kidding. Religious-based charitable giving tends to be funneled through the giver’s church — still one of the more segregated areas of US society. If members of black churches are poorer than members of white churches, their ability to give is lower. (Although I believe, without any data to hand, that poor people give proportionately more than do the well-off.) And recipients tend to be members of that church or at least that segment of society.
In other words, in a segregated society, which we still are, white people live near other white people and attend a white church; at least some of their charitable giving benefits members of their church and their immediate community. It’s the same reason that suburban schools (funded by relatively wealthier white suburban taxpayers) have more money than inner-city schools (funded by relatively poorer inner-city taxpayers). Them as has, gets more; them as doesn’t have, gets less. Reliance on charitable giving will only increase income disparity.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I could get behind a God who liked to troll American fundies.
Another Holocene Human
@ulee: Shit’s getting real in NM. Have you seen the latest pronouncements of their evil governor?
Another Holocene Human
@raven: Like I said, what is it that we “don’t know about”? Aliens? Definitely aliens?
Okay, okay, I’m a physicist, not a technologist, I always reduce the chicken to a point mass (perfect sphere my ass–whoever made that joke was soft-pedalling some shit right there).
Cacti
Can’t we all agree that this was Obama’s fault?
I’m sure Faux and CNN will before the sun goes down.
gwangung
But isn’t it the case that accidents in this day and age ARE, by definition, a concatenation of so many things that have to go wrong—all the moe “probable” stuff is already blocked,.
Cervantes
@Another Holocene Human:
In suggesting these comparisons, have you looked at the relevant safety records?
ulee
@Another Holocene Human: I have not, but I’ll look for it.
gwangung
@Mandalay:
Coates’ statements are more of a conclusion than a statement. There is a set of supporting data (at least from his viewpoint) in his links (a series of prior articles detailing how policy decisions through at least the 80s embedded white supremacy into urban areas in Chicago). From past experiences, a lot of commenters would skip those establishing articles and rip into Coates; it is quite clear he got tired of all that.
Another Holocene Human
@Amir Khalid: Well, that’s fair, Amir. And you’re probably right.
I’m still troubled, though, by what I found out from the Asiana crash. And that’s that there seems to be a thing now of training pilots to fly, but not to know enough about it. And just going from my own experience, I’ve seen bus drivers put in over 10 years and be very skilled at driving, but be totally shit on the equipment. Unfortunately, equipment usage has a safety consequence. If you do something very infrequently then you’re likely to be shaky on it when the time comes. And if you’ve only heard about it in a classroom, not done it or drilled it, then forget about it. I’ve seen very experienced, frequently commended bus drivers drive off the lot with critical defects they’d failed to identify or fail to communicate in the proper manner even though people’s lives can hang on those critical communications. So, you have something happen that is a couple of standard devs out from what a commercial airline pilot expects to deal with and is it not possible that something gets omitted?
Another bus example–an experience bus driver will be good at crash avoidance, just because of all of hours and hours they’ve been driving. But if they have an electrical fire, will they be able to disconnect the battery?
?
They’ll only be able to do it if they had prior experience outside of the company that provided them with that skillset or if the company is drilling it–not talking about it, drilling it.
We don’t think about this stuff because in terrestrial transport we just expect drivers to avoid/save from collisions and always figure that we can climb out of a wrecked vehicle.
Another Holocene Human
@ulee: I’ll make it easy: she declared war on all unions in NM.
Amir Khalid
@SiubhanDuinne:
ABC pulled the same trick.
Plus, I note that your Republican lawmakers are being so generous with their advice on how Malaysia could have better handled the search for MH370. A few days ago, one of them upbraided Malaysia’s government for not cooperating with the US on this, getting things precisely backwards. I have a hunch, I don’t know why, that it’s not really my country they’re criticising.
Trollhattan
@Another Holocene Human:
Damnit, I had a lovely interleaved response that WP ate. FYWP!!
Another Holocene Human
@Cervantes: Nope, going on claims made by American commercial pilots; sure, they could be full of shit.
There are two sides to airplane safety–the mechanics and the pilots. US loves to skimp on keeping equipment in good working order I’ve noticed.
eta: plus we’re talking about big birds, in the US the little birds are driven by new pilots, crazy hours, low pay, and it’s so bad some of the EAS carriers have pulled out of markets b/c new USDOT safety regs slammed into their superlow pay and they can’t recruit fresh meat.
ulee
@Another Holocene Human: My grandfather worked for Kraft foods as a machinist for thirty years. He retired at 55 and collected his pension until he died at age 82. How dare he be helped after delivering on his end.
Another Holocene Human
EAS just plain pisses me off b/c of the hypocrisy. Every time Amtrak comes up it’s “what a waste” even though their cost (subsidy) per passenger is so, so much lower than EAS and the Amtrak unions get bitched out even though the labor costs have to do with safety requirements, all of which are in place because PEOPLE DIED. Now the same HOS and other safety regs are being applied to the airline industry and it’s becoming similarly uneconomical, I mean it didn’t make money without the ICC to begin with, but now it’s even more obvious, you have market collapse–SUBSIDIZED market collapse!
This all goes back to deregulation and also the magic belief in new technologies.
Another Holocene Human
@Trollhattan: dammit, it was probably brilliant and excellent, those are exactly the posts FYWP likes to destroy
Trollhattan
@Robert Sneddon:
Okay, WP hates the word for the place in an airplane where pilots do their piloting. Stupid WP!
The uh, crew voice recorder only contains the final two hours, so will me missing the crucial period when the plane left course. The flight data recorder will have all the information from that flight, to whatever level the T7 collects.
The location beacon batteries will last a month, after which finding one becomes far more challenging, even in a small known area like Air France.
Trollhattan
@Another Holocene Human:
Sigh, some of my bestest work….
Another Holocene Human
@Amir Khalid: Republican lawmaker = not arguing in good faith + has not a clue what they’re talking about
idk, I guess I feel like it’s okay for me, private citizen, to say stupid shit on a message board, after all, you will correct me, versus my elected officials making irresponsible comments that impact foreign relations, in conclusion, what a bunch of shitheads and I’m embarrassed as an American
Mnemosyne
@stinger:
Generally speaking, yes, though there can also be regional differences. Our (mostly white) suburban Roman Catholic church had a “sister church” in inner-city Chicago whose congregation was mostly African-American (though starting to get an influx of Latinos as I was graduating high school). We would have several fundraising and canned food drives specifically to benefit that parish every year.
That was a deliberate policy by the archdiocese, though, and the RCC is tightly controlled enough from the top down that they can enforce things like that … if that archdiocese makes it a priority, of course. For churches with less hierarchy, the effect you talk about would be greater.
scav
@Mnemosyne: Control and all that, well, maybe. Some elements still are more concerned about “Smelling like the Flock” and apparently Entertaining parishioners in the style they are accustomed to. Atlanta must smell Divine.
ETA: NJ Too, to add to the German guy that was called out on it (so it’s not just a ‘mercan hobby).
Mnemosyne
@scav:
Yes, this was in the Cardinal Bernardin days when Chicago’s archdiocese was being steered in more of a social justice direction. No idea if it’s been kept up since I left Illinois and left the church soon afterwards.
ETA: Plus Bernardin’s actions were in part a reaction to what had happened under John Cardinal Cody, who managed to “misplace” over $1 million in church funds and was strongly rumored to be supporting a mistress and a son.
shortstop
Good friend of mine once observed of Orange County “liberal” Kevin Drum: “The single act of authority-questioning he ever committed is calling himself a Democrat. Not acting like one. Just calling himself one.”
I’d say about the same is true for Burns, with the added hilarity that until quite recently, he voted Republican. Still does sometimes.
shortstop
@scav: They learned nothing from Jersey, eh?
Are you old enough to remember when Gregory became auxiliary bish here in Chicago and was held up as an example of the church’s growing outreach to the black community and especially to low-income African Americans? You can host hella outreach in his recent and current shacks, I’d guess.
Of course the Atlanta archdiocese has come up with the same tired line the New Jersey spox trotted out: “The mansion is supported by restricted gifts from a donor. No children were harmed in the making of this personal Valhalla.” Of course, people experienced in major gifts understand that an entity doesn’t have to unquestioningly accept gifts that are absolute PR nightmares. There will always be elderly wealthy Catholics who make close family friends of their bishops and feed these clergyboys all sorts of treats — often in tacit exchange for pastoral care that requires little in the way of self-examination on the part of the family — but an institution with a real interest in serving the poor and not further alienating an already struggling flock steers those gifts in more seemly directions. And, if that’s not possible, it turns them down.
redoubt
@blueskies: Heck, all you have to do is hit the Grady Curve on the downtown connector. Under fourteen lanes of asphalt, concrete and steel used to be Sweet Auburn.
Better yet, take I-20 east from downtown and notice the twist it takes to avoid going through East Lake Country Club, back when that was still a suburban enclave.
scav
@shortstop: My Chicago side (in fact anyside) family fail utterly to be Catholic — there may have beem token attendence by just-off-the-boat non-C immigrants looking for company and infrastructure circa 1900 but nothing since. So I could easily have missed any brief Renaissance of local outreach, esp as I likely would have been in CA.
Comrade Mary
@Trollhattan: I think it’s called the “flight deck” these days. Damn feminazis!
Robert Sneddon
@Comrade Mary: A couple of pilots I’ve known called it “the front office”. It was also known as “first on the scene of the accident”.
scav
@Robert Sneddon: I rather like Cabin Pressure’s “The Pointy End”
Comrade Mary
@scav: OMG Cabin Pressure squeeeee!
Ruckus
@scav:
Many of us non lifers used to say that in the navy. Pointy end, flat end, floor, wall, door, etc. This was not well received by those who had decided that a career in the navy was their best(or only most likely) bet to be able to fuck with people below them in the food chain.
scav
@Ruckus: It’s always charming to learn one is annoying exactly one’s targets du choix,
Ruckus
@scav:
Yes, yes it is.
Ruckus
@scav:
Not only non lifers did this. Senior NCOs generally did it differently but the effects were the same. So, a little story.
bk
And from Duke.