Archive for Law & Order - page 7

Since all the new reporting on Malaysian Airways Flight 370 seems to be speculation, I am not going to post about it again until some new concrete information comes out.  All that is known for sure is that that plane is missing and presumed crashed.  The who, what , when, where and why are all unknown.

As I stated in my first post, the simplest explanation is usually correct, and that is that the plane has crashed.  Though I believe there is a strong possiblity that this was an attempt to “steal” the airliner, IMHO the likelyhood of a successful undetected landing is very slight.  What is also unknown is if the mystery will ever be solved.  And so, continuing prayers for the passengers, crew and their families.

This is now officially a criminal investigation, as reported in The Washington Post.  The Airliner’s ACARS system initiated periodic “handshakes”with comm satellites approximately every 30 minutes for an additional seven hours after civilian radar contact was lost.  The plane’s location could not be ascertained from the signals and it is not known whether the plane was in flight for the duration of that time or if it had landed, nor is it clear whether it crashed or was landed and shut down when the system stopped communicating.

The exact amount of fuel on board is not known, but it would  have been sufficient for the scheduled six hour flight to Beijing and common practice is to carry a minimum 1 hour reserve.  Authorities have several working theories, mainly falling along three lines.  First is that the plane was hijacked either by the crew or terrorist passengers and then crashed intentionally into the Indian Ocean as an act of either terrorism or suicide.  Another theory is that the plane was hijacked by either crew or passengers with the intent to divert and land at an unknown location, but then ran out of fuel and crashed.  The final theory is the same as the second theory except that in this scenario the plane was successfully landed at an unknown location.  This third theory is deemed the unlikeliest, since authorities believe that for this to happen, the plane would have been detected entering either Indian or Pakistani airspace and as of yet there is no indication that this occurred.

Additional information:

ABC News (autoplay video)

CNN

UK Daily Mail

All bets are off now.

Reuters reports: Radar Data Suggests Missing Malaysia Plane Deliberately Flown Way Off Course: Sources

Associated Press:  1 US Theory Is Someone Diverted Missing Plane

New York Times: Satellite Firm Says Its Data From Jet Could Offer Location

How Can An Airliner Just Disappear?  The same way your Porsche disappears from your driveway.

Someone steals it.

Yeah, I thought so.

Mummified Michigan Woman Seemingly Voted In the Afterlife, Records Show.

Nothing to see here…move along.

In the continuing saga of Malaysian Airlines flight 307 there was a bit of a bombshell dropped today when the Wall Street Journal reported that the Boeing 777‘s on board telemetry system continued to operate in a sort of “standby” mode for approximately 4 hours after the last confirmed radar contact with the jet.  The initial report was that monitoring systems embedded in the plane’s Rolls-Royce Trent 800 engines were emitting data, but the article was corrected to say that the plane’s satellite communications link was the origin of the signals.

Rolls-Royce Trent 800 High Bypass Turbofan engine on a Boeing 777

Modern aircraft are equipped with a digital datalink system called the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) whereby the aircraft sends packets of information about flight systems autonomously to ground crews.  The Wall Street Journal’s anonymous sources say that according to investigators the plane’s ACARS system, though not sending data, did send signals attempting to establish a link to communication satellites and this leads investigators to believe the plane was intact and still flying.  Official sources, however, denied the report.

Let us stipulate that California is a lovely place to live.  And further let us agree that people are free to believe whatever they like.  But it gets harder and harder to stay here due to the fact that some of the people in power here believe some of the stupidest things.  Among the majorities in the city councils of our most populous cities, and in the Democratic majorities in both houses of our state legislature there are, in my opinion some seriously fuzzy headed thinkers.  Which in and of itself should not pose a problem, since as I stated earlier I believe they are free to believe what they wish.  The problem comes when they deign to impose their fallacies on everyone in the name of their utopian thinking.

There is a plan afoot to ban plastic shopping bags – First they came for the paper shopping bags and I said nothing, because I preferred plastic.  Now there is a bill in the state assembly that will impose a statewide ban on disposable plastic shopping bags.  Because they take up to much room in the landfill or something.  THERE IS NO GOOD REASON TO DO THIS (caps intended).  If you believe there is, you are wrong.  Never mind that environmentally friendly reusable shopping bags cause the spread of e. coli, norovirus and salmonella.  This constitutes a serious public health risk.

Public Enemy #1

Now their sights are set on plastic water bottles – the San Francisco city council has banned the sale of plastic water bottles on municipal property and will pursue a city wide ban.  For no reason other than some people don’t like these and so you shouldn’t either.  Oh, they have their reasons, but they are nonsensical.  Supervisor David Chiu’s reason is that it takes 1,000 years for 1 bottle to bio-degrade!!!!!!  That’s a long time!  I have an idea that makes just as much sense.  Just pass a law stating that a year will now be 365,000 days long.  Now those pesky bottles will degrade in only a single year.  That’s more like it!  Or we could recycle them.  I wonder how many years that takes….oh, never mind.

There is no aspect of your life that is too profound or too trivial that a do-gooder won’t step in and tell you how you must do it, or that you can’t do it.  And when their utopia is finally realized it is certain to be hell on earth.  Because every single person will be oppressed to one degree or another when all that is not forbidden is mandatory.

“However, it said unarmed”.  That is the google translation of this title which you may recognize as “gibberish” text that sometimes randomly fills text boxes when you are viewing theme examples in various publishing applications.  It is a real language, Latin,  the language of the Romans and it is often termed a “dead language”.  Yet it persists in many areas of our modern lives – science, law and medicine to name a few.  Some of our modern languages are derived from it.  Since wordpress autofilled it into a sample text box I thought it fitting to retain the title and use it for a blog post.  Inspiration is where you find it, am I right?

Guess I’ll play it by ear…

The title of this blog is also in Latin.  Ego Vero translates roughly to “I Seek Truth”.

Ideas and language go hand in hand.  Without language, ideas exist.  But without ideas, language serves no purpose.

I intend to use this platform to practice the expression of my thoughts and ideas regarding various topics of interest to me through the use of the written word.  I believe that Ideas are the puzzle pieces that make up our lives and make up the human experience.  As each idea is expressed another piece of the puzzle falls into place – another pixel is illuminated.  Eventually the truth emerges and God’s idea comes into focus.  If you should choose to look into my little world I hope you may be entertained, informed or perhaps stimulated toward an idea or thought of your own.  And since you may be walking around inside my head, please wipe your feet first.

So… off I go.  Please join me if you will.  However, it said unarmed.