We're talking about a vast search area, maybe the size of Texas or larger, depending on how generous you want to be in drawing the boundaries. What are the odds that you cover an area that large with satellites and don't find *something* floating? Whether it's from the plane seems less likely. What are the odds that over two weeks after the plane crashes into the ocean, wreckage is still afloat? In rough water, it will tend to break up, fill with water, and sink. There's also the possibility that the pilot put the plane into a power dive like in the SilkAir murder-suicide. In that case the plane would be broken up into thousands of fragments. Some of the pieces would probably float, but they'd be so small you'd never be able to spot them.
There are plenty of likely scenarios where we never find a scrap of the flight, or maybe an isolated scrap drifts up months or years later and two thousand miles away. And every day without recovery of wreckage, those scenarios become more likely.
We're fixated on the technological fixes- emergency locator beacons, satellite tracking devices. So why are so few people talking about the obvious: the psychology of the crew? Whoever hijacked this airplane was familiar with piloting a 777 and familiar with the route, which points to the pilot or the copilot stealing their own plane, then deliberately crashing it in the Indian Ocean.
This would not be the first pilot suicide, either; EgyptAir Flight 990 and SilkAir 185 are both believed to be pilot suicide. In the EgyptAir crash, the First Officer shut down the engines and the plane went into a dive. In the SilkAir crash, the plane went into a power dive and descended so steeply and rapidly it actually broke the sound barrier and disintegrated the plane on impact— they didn't even get a single complete body.
Since 9/11 all the effort has been devoted to protecting the pilots from the passengers, but what about protecting passengers from the pilots? The SilkAir crash killed 114 people, the EgyptAir crash killed 217 people, and MH killed 239 people. That's 3 planes and 570 people taken out by pilots- versus 2 planes and 227 civilians taken out by terrorists in the same timespan. These numbers suggest that you're more likely to be killed by your pilot than your fellow passengers. The message seems to be clear: the most dangerous person on any flight isn't the dude with the turban, it's the guy with the captain's hat.
Incidentally, there's a really disturbing parallel between the SilkAir murder-suicide and MH 370- safety systems designed to monitor the flight, in the case of the SilkAir flight, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, were both manually shut down. That raises a disturbing possibility- unless they've changed things since the SilkAir crash, the person piloting MH 370 would have been able to shut down both the flight data recorder and voice recorder. That means that even if we find the black boxes, they may contain no useful information.
Moral of the story, though... the people who mocked the F22 as the boondoggle to the F35 should have been fired from the DoD and run out of Congress. The F22 ended up being cheaper and still better (IIRC). There's no excuse for being naive enough to believe "oh yeah, we'll be much cheaper" when building something like the F35.
The F-22 IS a huge waste of money, it's only when you put it next to the fiasco of the F-35 program that it doesn't look so bad. The fact that one is a disaster doesn't make the other one a success. That's like arguing that Hitler was a good guy because he killed fewer people than Stalin.
Both programs are relics of the Cold War era, which have persisted only because they fill the need of congressmen to deliver pork to their states, and because the former fighter pilots who run the US Air Force are unwilling to admit that the era of manned fighters is coming to an end. The smart move would be to ditch the F-35 and the F-22, focus on upgrading the F-15, F-16 and F-18 to maintain air superiority for the next ten years, while developing UCAVs to fill the air superiority, attack, and carrier-based attack roles currently filled by those planes. We're witnessing the end of an era. Guns made knights and castles obsolete; internal combustion engines made cavalry obsolete; carriers made battleships obsolete... the same thing is happening here. If we refuse to admit it because Air Force generals are sentimental about the role of pilots, because congressmen want to steer money to their district, or because the public thought "Top Gun" was an awesome movie, then we stand to waste billions of dollars and lose our technological lead.
I believe something like that happened. Occam's razor and so on...
The fact that the pilot had built his own simulator also has a mundane reason that somebody on pprune had tracked down: He assisted with giving a real pilot's feedback to a third-party developer of aircraft for flight simulators (X-Plane IIRC).
Occam's Razor isn't the simplest explanation, it's the simplest explanation that fits all the facts. And this is definitely not that. According to the fire scenario, there's a fire and so they shut down the electrical systems, set in a new course on autopilot, and after the crew succumbs, the plane keeps going in a straight line... the problem with this scenario is that the plane DOES NOT follow a straight line.
According to the military radar the plane turns west, climbs to 45,000 feet, then descends to 23,000 feet, turns again, climbs, and flies towards the Indian Ocean- and then the satellite pings suggest it turns again, either north or more likely south, towards the Indian Ocean. All facts suggest that the plane is being actively piloted, and not towards safety but deliberately away from it, in such a way that finding the plane, let alone rescuing the victims, will be impossible.
The reason that the fire scenario is popular is not because of Occam's Razor, but because it appeals to what we want to believe about human nature, and about the people flying our planes. We'd like to believe that whatever happened, the pilots did their best until the very last, and were heroes trying to save everyone. The alternative is that the person piloting the plane- most likely the pilot or copilot- was a deeply disturbed human being, someone who not only decided to kill everyone on board, people who had entrusted their safety to him, but to do so in a way that would torment their relatives and capture international media attention. It's also unlikely that it would be possible to convince the other pilot to go along with this plan, so they would have to be killed or incapacitated before shutting down the transponders and changing course. Maybe that's not what happened, but that's the simplest explanation that fits all the facts... and it does not point to a hero.
It would seem like there should be a number of options for tracking planes. For $150 and $100 annual service charge, you can buy a SPOT personal GPS tracking device that will broadcast your position every five minutes. It needs an unobstructed view of the sky to work. In other words, stick it up on the dash of the airplane.
FLYHT Aerospace from Calgary sells a satellite tracking system that sends routine updates on position, heading, altitude, and airspeed via satellite. It is also designed to be able to function as a black box. It's too expensive to be continuously transmitting the data, but it's set up so that during certain circumstances the device will trigger, and then transmit flight data in real time. The system is already in use by a number of companies, including Netjets, but hasn't been widely adopted by larger aircraft. If the system had been installed on the Air France flight, they would not have had to wait two years for the black box data. If it had been installed here, it could have tracked the plane or, if the pilot turned it off, they would have immediately known that there was a problem. This is the one that costs $100,000 but you're talking about a plane that can cost $260,000,000; requiring that companies install satellite tracking is not going to radically change the price of the aircraft, and presumably as technology improves the price will come down.
And of course what a lot of people in the media seem to be missing is that the plane in question already had satellite communications, it just wasn't using them. The engines were designed to talk to a satellite; it should have been possible to use that system to routinely send position data. Many planes have internet in flight. If the planes are already capable of using satellite internet, then it's just an issue of being able to send position/speed/heading data over the plane's wifi network.
It just strikes me as amazing that after all the security theater following 9/11, we have a system that carefully controls how much shampoo you can bring in your carry-on luggage, yet is completely incapable of responding if someone steals an entire aircraft.
I think that we are going to be in for a very, very long wait before we find out what happened— we're not talking about weeks or months, but many years. When Air France 447 went down, debris and an oil slick was spotted within 24 hours of the plane's loss. Even with that lead, it took almost two years, including the use of towed sonar arrays, nuclear and robotic submarines, and autonomous robotic underwater vehicles, to finally located the wreckage and salvage the plane and black boxes.
Here, the situation is vastly more challenging. Locating the wreckage of Air France 447 quickly, before it had time to drift far, meant that it was possible to narrow down the search area considerably; the initial search area was around 2400 square miles- a 50 mile by 50 mile area. Here, the search area is almost a hundred times that- the area the Australians have been searching is something like 230,000 square miles. That's roughly the size of Texas. It's also in the middle of nowhere- between Australia and the Kerguelen islands, putting it about 1500 miles away from land. That's making it difficult to do aerial searches- the planes burn most of their fuel getting there and back, so there's little time for searches. It sounds like the weather isn't fantastic either, so visibility is limited, and satellite photos of the suspected wreckage show a lot of white, which I assume is whitecaps from heavy seas. That's going to make it difficult or impossible to spot wreckage on radar- the waves are going to be reflecting back a lot of signal, creating a lot of noise- or visually. The heavy wave action could also cause floating sections of wing or tail to fill up with water more quickly and sink. Finally, the plane went down two weeks ago, so if any wreckage is recovered, it could be hundreds of miles from the crash site.
At this point, I'm going to guess that no wreckage will be found, or it will be found too late to provide any useful information about the location of the plane beyond confirming that it's in the southern Indian Ocean. Given that, we are talking about an underwater search using sonar that is going to cover hundreds of thousands of square miles, in waters up to 16,000 feet deep. That would require either years of effort, or a small fleet of underwater vehicles scanning the seafloor. This assumes that the deductions made from the satellite data are even correct. It's not impossible, but it is very, very difficult. My guess is that new technologies- making it possible for robotic vehicles to scan larger areas of seafloor, in higher resolution than ever before- may be necessary.
This project is the type of thing that makes people who are interested in science and exploration stop and think, "Hm, International Space Station? Do we still have one, and we're still sending people there?"
The thing cost $150 billion dollars, and in terms of research it's produced... what, exactly? For that, we could have doubled the National Science Foundation's funding levels for ten years, and created 30 robotic probes like the Mars Curiosity mission, and done some real science. The sooner we kill of the manned space program in favor of real science, the better. The ISS is just welfare for aerospace companies, and they get plenty of money already for defense contracts.
I'm sure this will be very useful for U.S. intelligence— it's long been rumored that the head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, has spent the past ten years hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in a secret compound built entirely out of chicken fat.
Russia is not some infinitely powerful state. By and large, it's a petro-state, and any move that causes precipitous global economic decline will do it significant damage in the process.
Well, the West could frack the hell out of them. The ICBMs are just bluster; Russia's main leverage is those fossil fuels- they sell them to generate money, and they can temporarily shut off (or threaten to shut off) gas pipelines to punish the Ukraine and Europe. However, there are huge shale gas reserves in Poland, France, and the Ukraine. Developing them as an alternative to Russian gas would deprive Russia of it's main weapon against Ukraine and Europe. In the long term, the bigger impact would be to drive down the price of gas in Europe, reducing the amount of money flowing to Putin's regime.
Obviously, this can't happen overnight; it took years for the U.S. to build up the shale gas industry so it's not going to drive Putin out of Crimea tomorrow, but since the world is probably going to be stuck dealing with Putin for years to come, and he's unlikely to get any less paranoid and aggressive, it's probably worth thinking about.
The most likely scenario is suicide. It's hard to imagine, but it's happened twice- SilkAir Flight 185 and EgyptAir 990. I don't think there is one case of someone stealing a commercial aircraft, just because there's no way to sell it. It's not a Honda Accord you can sell for cash or strip for parts; it's now the most famous plane in the world and you'll have as much success selling it as you would have selling a stolen Mona Lisa. And the parts have serial numbers.
No other scenario make sense. If the plane was hijacked for a terrorist plot, it should have turned up. Plots like 9/11 rely on the element of surprise, so you need to strike as quickly as possible, instead of giving the authorities an entire week to track you down. Similarly, if the plane and passengers were taken hostage, this would have been announced by now. If your hostage-takers are politically motivated, parading hostages on TV advances their cause; if they're just after money, they need to open negotations. Either way, we should have heard.
It all points to pilot suicide. That raises the question of why the pilot would fly on for hours instead of just nosediving into the ocean, but by definition pilot suicide isn't the act of a rational mind. It suggests not a desire to end one's own suffering but to inflict suffering on others and a complete disregard for human life- in other words, a sociopathic mindset. Eric Harris- the sociopath behind the Columbine killers- comes to mind here. He wanted to end his own life but also to take as many people as possible with him, and get as much attention as possible in it. Some careers attract this kind of person- lawyers, CEOs and surgeons are often sociopaths- and being a pilot may be one of those. You probably find that flying induces anxiety, now imagine that you not only have to worry about the anxiety of flying, but have to actually take responsibility for the safety of the airplane itself and several hundred lives... most normal people wouldn't enjoy that. Sociopaths have no anxiety, and actively enjoy control over and manipulating other people, personality characteristics that would make them a natural for the job.
If you don't believe that the government should support research and technology, why do you still use the internet and the web- which were both developed with public funding by DARPA and CERN, respectively? This is the classic hypocrisy of libertarians- when it comes time to pay they claim it's a form of theft, but they have no problem with using all the public services- roads, universities, the internet- that have been paid for with my tax dollars. They're happy to take government services, they just don't want to pay for them. If their house catches on fire, they're going to call 911 just like everyone else.
The system already exists; FLYHT Aerospace based out of Calgary sells it for around $100,000. There's been a push for this kind of technology following the loss of Air France 447, when it took almost two years to recover the black boxes and figure out what happened. Warren Buffett's Netjets started installing this technology in 2012 but the larger carriers have been slow to adopt. Presumably after this latest disaster, it will become standard- either the big companies will realize the advantages of being able to track their planes, or governments will make this technology mandatory. It might not have been enough to avert the disaster, but it would have spared a week (or however long it ultimately takes) to find the plane and figure out what happened.
Lets say you were a pilot with intent to commit suicide (and take everyone with you; ignoring the sociopathy involved in that)... Why go through the effort of 'hiding' the plane? Turning off the transponder and comms, changing altitude and direction, and flying for a few more hours? The plane was already over the ocean, easy to dive it straight down. Less than a minute and it's done.
My intuition says that someone wanted a 777 and wanted to hide it.
So first, a potential argument against the suicide scenario is that it would be more rational to simply fly the plane straight down instead of flying on for 7 hours. Of course, if we are talking about a suicidal pilot, then we're talking about someone sadistic and deranged enough to kill 238 people. This is, by definition, not someone who is thinking in terms of what is the most rational response to a given situation, but a deeply fucked up individual. If they're sadistic enough to kill over 200 people and inflict untold suffering on their loved ones, maybe they're also sadistic enough to torment them for seven hours first. We're not talking about a simple suicide here, we're talking about a murder-suicide like Columbine or a suicide bomber.
Second, if someone wanted to steal a 777 for a terrorist attack, then why haven't we seen the attack? If there's a terrorist plot like during 9/11, then it requires the element of surprise. The more time passes, the more time there is for people to unravel the plot and send in the Special Forces to take out the plotters.
Third, if it's piracy, why haven't we seen the ransom? If you're a Somali pirate, then once you've got the ship safely in the harbor in Somalia, you send a message to the owners of the ship that you're open for negotiation. Also, if you want to do the piracy thing, you have to find somewhere sufficiently lawless that they won't arrest you when you land. Even a place like Kazakhstan isn't lawless enough; you don't just need a repressive dictatorship, you need a failed state level of anarchy, somewhere like Somalia or the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. And as for selling the plane on the black market, you might be able to pinch and sell a few parts... but this is the most famous airplane in the world right now. there's no way in hell you could sell so much as a rivet if it had the serial number on it.
Pilot suicide is, unfortunately, the simplest explanation that fits the facts. We've seen it before and it would fit what happened here. For the sakes of the crew and families, I desperately hope that's wrong, but it's been more than a week- if these people were alive, we'd probably have heard by now.
It's not unreasonable to say that they should be able to track the plane using satellite. There are a lot of media reports to the effect that it's not quite as easy as Find My iPhone but the technology is there. In fact it should be far easier to locate a plane than an iPhone, because unlike an iPhone, a 777 is a very large piece of equipment with plenty of power, so it's trivial to install satellite communications. So sure, it's true ACARS won't do it, but that's because ACARS is an obsolete system.
For $150 and a $100 annual fee you can get a portable satellite beacon that broadcasts the position of your trek or your kayak trip every 5 minutes. It's bullshit to argue that it's difficult or expensive to do for an aircraft what you do for your kayak trip, and ridiculous that this isn't already required for every large commercial aircraft. And in fact there's a company- FLYHT Aerospace- that already delivers a system that does real-time black-box reporting via satellite networks. It costs around $100,000 to install during routine heavy maintenance, and it will automatically relay data on position, altitude, heading, fuel use, etc. every few minutes.
If they had had this technology installed, not only would they know what happened to the plane, they would have known within minutes that the plane had changed course. They could have radioed the pilot, and if he didn't respond they could have scrambled interceptors, and if it still crashed, they could have put rescue helicopters in position to respond. Not having real-time reporting in place cost lives.
(Disclaimer- I like to play the stock market, so I took a sizeable position in FLYHT).
Agreed. If this is in fact a pilot suicide, then it's also a homicide of over 200 people. That's no better- in fact, far worse- than a suicide bomber who kills dozens of unarmed men, women and children by blowing up an explosive vest in a crowded market.
BULLSHIT. I don't care how much fucking pain you're in. You want to end your own life? Fine, go right ahead. I believe everyone has the right, and God knows I understand the appeal. I've been there. It's not so much the pain, which is bearable, as the lack of joy or any pleasure in your work, your friends, or your family, and the prospect that it will never end. In that situation, suicide becomes a rational decision.
But even when things were at their darkest, I never lost sight of one fact: the fact that killing myself was in the end a purely selfish act, and one that would cause a tremendous amount of pain and suffering and trauma. For my friends and my family when they found out, for the people who would find my body hanging by a rope, for the people who would have to go through my things and figure out what to do with them... it was the quickest and easiest way to relieve the suffering, but I never thought for a moment that there would be anything remotely noble about going through with it.
But if killing yourself is selfish, how much more selfish is it to kill 233 other people- the people who put themselves in your care, in your trust? That's not selfish, that's outright malicious. There is something deeply fucked up, purely malicious, and wholly evil about someone who, in the process of killing themselves, takes other people with them. It's one thing if your life is so fucked up you just want out. But just because you're miserable, what the hell gives you the right to deny other people their happiness? The poor bastards from Iran who just wanted to have opportunities abroad that they didn't have at home, and used those stolen passports... if this was a pilot suicide, no matter how much pain he's in, what gives him the right to deny them their dreams, to take them from their friends and family? If this is in fact a pilot suicide, then I hope there's a Hell, and I hope it's got all nine levels like in Dante, because this guy should straight to the lowest fucking level, the level for people who commit treachery, and there's no amount of suffering that would be too much for a crime like that.
The big question is, how the HELL is it possible to lose an entire commercial aircraft in 2014? I've seen some articles to the effect that it's difficult to cover the entire earth with enough radars to track planes over the ocean. OK, sure, but that's the obsolete ACARS system. That's why we have satellite communications. For $150 you can buy a portable GPS beacon from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Spot-Sat... and then there's a subscription fee which is maybe $100/year. Basically, for $250 your kayak trip sends GPS updates every 5 minutes so it can't be lost at sea, it just seems bizarre that a commercial aircraft carrying 200 people wouldn't have even that minimal sort of tracking ability. And there are companies building similar technology for aircraft- basically, streaming the black-box data in real time over satellite networks. It would be expensive to implement, but how many millions of dollars have been spent on ships and helicopters for the rescue effort?
Diet can have a profound effect on brain health. One example of this is epilepsy. It turns out that fasting can reduce epileptic seizures- in fact this was originally documented by the Greek physician Hippocrates, in the 5th century BC- but obviously that's not a viable long-term treatment, since eventually you have to eat or you starve. However, it's possible to mimic the state of fasting if you cut your carbohydrate consumption- the body burns fat, instead of sugar, just as it does in a fast. Using low carbohydrate diets- either a fat-heavy ketogenic diet or the induction phase of the Atkins diet- it's possible to reduce seizure frequency in most people with epilepsy. Often it's effective where drugs fail, and a small percentage of people- around 15% actually see seizures eliminated, sometimes permanently, even after they discontinue the diet. In other words, in a small number of patients, diet can actually cure a severe neurological disease like epilepsy.
A few years ago some psychiatrists speculated that it might work for bipolar disorder as well. The thing is, drugs that work for epilepsy also work for bipolar, suggesting they are somehow related. This was purely speculation at the time, but there are now a couple of documented cases of people suffering from bipolar who have been successfully treated with low-carbohydrate diets- and they claim it works better than the drugs.
The implications are profound. Some psychiatric and neurological disorders may in fact be metabolic disorders, perhaps in part caused by diet. There's been a big push in the past few decades to focus on DNA as the answer to everything, but there's a huge environmental component to these disorders. Twin studies show that if one twin has epilepsy, the odds of the other getting it are only around 50%. So even with identical DNA, and being raised in a similar environment, they only have about a fifty-fifty chance of getting the disorder... clearly genetics aren't destiny. What we really need is a better understanding of the environmental effects that cause one person to get a neurological disease, while the another stays healthy. Throwing drugs with severe side effects at people after they get sick is a good business model for pharmaceutical manufacturers, but what we really need to do is prevent people from getting these disorders in the first place.
Last, the observation that low-carbohydrate diets can be effective in treating severe neurological and psyhicatric diseases... well, it has disturbing implications for modern, high-carbohydrate diets.
One major difference between Crimea in Ukraine and South Ossetia in Georgia: unlike South Ossetia, Crimea is a peninsula, isolated from Russia by water. Google Maps shows two major roads leading south from the Ukraine into Crimea, whereas the peninsula is separated by 2 km of water from Russia.
The logistics involved here aren't impossible, obviously islands like Hawaii, Iceland, Great Britain or Ireland can survive by shipping in food, fuel, and goods from elsewhere. But the Ukraine can shut off the flow of supplies into Crimea, and it will hurt. If they have to truck everything to a port and then ship it over- all the food they can't grow locally, all consumer goods, all fuel- it's going to cause severe disruptions to supplies and hurt the local economy. It's not impossible for Russia to hold onto the Crimea -the Alies managed to hold onto West Berlin even though it was isolated in the middle of East Germany- but it's going to be more difficult for Russia to supply and defend.
The situation in the Ukraine just confirms that Obama f***ed up on Syria. Obama explicitly warned Assad against using chemical weapons, saying that this was a "red line" that wouldn't be crossed without serious consequences. And Assad crossed that line, and crossed it again, and finally crossed it in a massive way, gassing 1400 unarmed men, women and children in a coordinated assault on civilian populations.
The consequence? Obama dithers, says he'll ask congress for permission to act, and finally brokers a deal (with Putin's help) to hand over the chemical weapons.
The correct response would have been to launch the goddamn Tomahawks. Hit Assad hard: bomb his runways, destroy his artillery, blow up his communications centers and headquarters. Obama's response, or lack of a response, showed weakness. Imagine if a teacher tells the school bully to stop beating kids up, and then the bully goes and beats a kid up with a baseball bat and puts him in the hospital... and the only consequence is that the baseball bat is taken away. Would you have even the slightest amount of respect for that teacher? Obama's response showed weakness. It showed that he was more afraid of congress, more afraid of Assad's ally- Putin- than he was committed to America's values. This is the consequence of that.
I'm not saying that American power should be used recklessly; the Iraq invasion was a massive mistake. But failing to exert that power can also be a mistake.
I think the whole situation just confirms that Obama really f***ed up on Syria. The United States- the most powerful nation in the world- said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is a "red line" that cannot be crossed. And then Assad crosses that line, and crosses it again, and finally crosses it once more by gassing 1400 unarmed people with a series of massive, coordinated attacks on civilians... and Obama sits back and defers to congress, until finally the Russians step in and help negotiate a deal where Assad agrees to hand over the chemical weapons. This is roughly analogous to a schoolyard bully beating a kid up with a baseball bat, after the teacher warns him not to, and the only consequence is that the bully has to surrender the baseball bat. If your teacher handled an incident like that, would you have even the least amount of respect for them?
That's not the way you handle that situation. You don't dither. You don't consult congress. You just arm the goddamn Tomahawk missiles and you take out some of Assad's runways, artillery, and communications centers, and make him pay. The issue isn't supporting the Syrian opposition or not, the issue is that the U.S. said that there would be severe consequences if Syria used chemical weapons. And then there weren't. Maybe Obama shouldn't have gotten involved or not
What Putin saw was that Obama was more afraid of Congress, and more afraid of Assad's ally —Russia— than he was committed to standing up for the principles we claim to believe in. Putin saw weakness. I do think the Iraq invasion was a huge mistake, and I voted for Obama twice, but I think he's really screwed up on Syria, on the coup in Egypt, and now on the Ukraine.
It's simple, while I may not be rich now, tomorrow I could be! And then I won't want my hard earned money going to poor people like I was.
Wow! He managed to sum up the entire Republican platform, AND went an entire 28 words without saying anything positive about rape in the process! Just add in a few words about doubting global warming and maybe 'teaching the controversy' on evolution, and I think we will have our 2016 Republican presidential nominee!
There appears to be much evidence that it was in fact the rebels that used the chemical weapons which were supplied by the Saudis
Your "source" is a bunch of TV broadcasts by Syrian TV, which is controlled by the Syrian government. That's not actually a news outlet, it's just the propaganda wing of the Assad regime. They're going to say whatever they need to say to keep Assad in power.
The thing to keep in mind here is the scale of these attacks. You could see the rebels launching an attack on a small scale, maybe. But the attacks were actually launched against three different areas near Damascus, and used rockets and chemical weapons, and killed something like 1400 people and injured more. This kind of large, coordinated attack takes a large, well-trained, well-organized military with heavy weapons in the form of rockets and large chemical weapon stockpiles. The rebels are a bunch of disorganized factions with assault rifles; they just don't have the weapons or organizational ability to do that.
As for why would Assad use chemical weapons? Well, why wouldn't he? He'd previously sent in tanks and soldiers to put down demonstrations. He'd sent paramilitary groups in to murder civilians in their beds. He'd used artillery against civilians. He'd previously used chemical weapons on a small scale. He'd killed 100,000 people. All the while, the U.S. had done nothing, and Putin stood up for him and was going to veto any UN resolution. Assad had already gotten away with so many atrocities, he drew the conclusion that he'd get away with this one as well. And so far, no one's proven him wrong...
Apparently we should use 'cyber' weapons; but not against the finances of the guy we accuse of killing ~100k people; because the poor, poor, banks might get weepy or something. What kind of bullshit is this? Sure, target the Syrian electrical grid (it's "dual use"!) but don't touch the financial markets, they have feelings too(and apparently financial markets aren't "dual use" much to the confusion of money launderers, mercenaries, and plundering kleptocrats worldwide?)
As tempting as it would be to attack the finances of the Assad regime, it would be a really, really bad idea. Let's say we hack into his bank accounts and where it says "$37 billion" we change a few decimal places and all of a sudden, it's 37 cents, or maybe we write a $37 billion dollar check to that charity that buys cows for people in Africa. Then the regime collapses because he can't pay for supplies or buy the loyalty of his cronies. This might be effective, but it creates a nasty precedent. During the next conflict, maybe someone decides to attack finances in the U.S. If bank accounts are vulnerable, everyone is going to start panicking and withdrawing their funds trying to put it somewhere safe, and people will be reluctant to loan money, and you'll have a financial panic on your hands like in 1939 or 2008. And of course, everyone's connected to everyone else. U.S. firms borrow money from Germany and China... if those firms suddenly go belly-up that's going to cause a global panic.
the funny thing about this "war", is that the "facts" come from the same people that the Democrats discredited during the Iraq war. Now that Obama wants a war to distract everyone from his other disastrous wars (like Egypt, Benghazi,...), the press is willing to forget their claims against these sources. Anything for Obama, and the Democrats.
It's night and day. You can go on Youtube and see the victims of the chemical weapons yourself- children suffering seizures, row after row of men, women and children laid out on concrete floors without any signs of physical injury. Medecins sans Frontiers came out and said that the doctors treating the wounded described symptoms consistent with nerve gas. Some of the people treating the victims got enough exposure that they fell ill and some of them died. Tissue samples taken by doctors have tested positive for Sarin gas. The British recently came out and said that it's chemical weapons. So we have US intelligence, British intelligence, and a French NGO all saying it's chemical weapons. And the Syrian Army is the only group in the area that has the weapons and capability to launch 3 different attacks and kill 1400 people. The accounts indicate that the attack was launched using rockets; the rebels don't have heavy weapons.
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There are plenty of likely scenarios where we never find a scrap of the flight, or maybe an isolated scrap drifts up months or years later and two thousand miles away. And every day without recovery of wreckage, those scenarios become more likely.
This would not be the first pilot suicide, either; EgyptAir Flight 990 and SilkAir 185 are both believed to be pilot suicide. In the EgyptAir crash, the First Officer shut down the engines and the plane went into a dive. In the SilkAir crash, the plane went into a power dive and descended so steeply and rapidly it actually broke the sound barrier and disintegrated the plane on impact— they didn't even get a single complete body.
Since 9/11 all the effort has been devoted to protecting the pilots from the passengers, but what about protecting passengers from the pilots? The SilkAir crash killed 114 people, the EgyptAir crash killed 217 people, and MH killed 239 people. That's 3 planes and 570 people taken out by pilots- versus 2 planes and 227 civilians taken out by terrorists in the same timespan. These numbers suggest that you're more likely to be killed by your pilot than your fellow passengers. The message seems to be clear: the most dangerous person on any flight isn't the dude with the turban, it's the guy with the captain's hat.
Incidentally, there's a really disturbing parallel between the SilkAir murder-suicide and MH 370- safety systems designed to monitor the flight, in the case of the SilkAir flight, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, were both manually shut down. That raises a disturbing possibility- unless they've changed things since the SilkAir crash, the person piloting MH 370 would have been able to shut down both the flight data recorder and voice recorder. That means that even if we find the black boxes, they may contain no useful information.
Moral of the story, though... the people who mocked the F22 as the boondoggle to the F35 should have been fired from the DoD and run out of Congress. The F22 ended up being cheaper and still better (IIRC). There's no excuse for being naive enough to believe "oh yeah, we'll be much cheaper" when building something like the F35.
The F-22 IS a huge waste of money, it's only when you put it next to the fiasco of the F-35 program that it doesn't look so bad. The fact that one is a disaster doesn't make the other one a success. That's like arguing that Hitler was a good guy because he killed fewer people than Stalin.
Both programs are relics of the Cold War era, which have persisted only because they fill the need of congressmen to deliver pork to their states, and because the former fighter pilots who run the US Air Force are unwilling to admit that the era of manned fighters is coming to an end. The smart move would be to ditch the F-35 and the F-22, focus on upgrading the F-15, F-16 and F-18 to maintain air superiority for the next ten years, while developing UCAVs to fill the air superiority, attack, and carrier-based attack roles currently filled by those planes. We're witnessing the end of an era. Guns made knights and castles obsolete; internal combustion engines made cavalry obsolete; carriers made battleships obsolete... the same thing is happening here. If we refuse to admit it because Air Force generals are sentimental about the role of pilots, because congressmen want to steer money to their district, or because the public thought "Top Gun" was an awesome movie, then we stand to waste billions of dollars and lose our technological lead.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
I believe something like that happened. Occam's razor and so on...
The fact that the pilot had built his own simulator also has a mundane reason that somebody on pprune had tracked down: He assisted with giving a real pilot's feedback to a third-party developer of aircraft for flight simulators (X-Plane IIRC).
Occam's Razor isn't the simplest explanation, it's the simplest explanation that fits all the facts. And this is definitely not that. According to the fire scenario, there's a fire and so they shut down the electrical systems, set in a new course on autopilot, and after the crew succumbs, the plane keeps going in a straight line... the problem with this scenario is that the plane DOES NOT follow a straight line.
According to the military radar the plane turns west, climbs to 45,000 feet, then descends to 23,000 feet, turns again, climbs, and flies towards the Indian Ocean- and then the satellite pings suggest it turns again, either north or more likely south, towards the Indian Ocean. All facts suggest that the plane is being actively piloted, and not towards safety but deliberately away from it, in such a way that finding the plane, let alone rescuing the victims, will be impossible.
The reason that the fire scenario is popular is not because of Occam's Razor, but because it appeals to what we want to believe about human nature, and about the people flying our planes. We'd like to believe that whatever happened, the pilots did their best until the very last, and were heroes trying to save everyone. The alternative is that the person piloting the plane- most likely the pilot or copilot- was a deeply disturbed human being, someone who not only decided to kill everyone on board, people who had entrusted their safety to him, but to do so in a way that would torment their relatives and capture international media attention. It's also unlikely that it would be possible to convince the other pilot to go along with this plan, so they would have to be killed or incapacitated before shutting down the transponders and changing course. Maybe that's not what happened, but that's the simplest explanation that fits all the facts... and it does not point to a hero.
It would seem like there should be a number of options for tracking planes. For $150 and $100 annual service charge, you can buy a SPOT personal GPS tracking device that will broadcast your position every five minutes. It needs an unobstructed view of the sky to work. In other words, stick it up on the dash of the airplane.
FLYHT Aerospace from Calgary sells a satellite tracking system that sends routine updates on position, heading, altitude, and airspeed via satellite. It is also designed to be able to function as a black box. It's too expensive to be continuously transmitting the data, but it's set up so that during certain circumstances the device will trigger, and then transmit flight data in real time. The system is already in use by a number of companies, including Netjets, but hasn't been widely adopted by larger aircraft. If the system had been installed on the Air France flight, they would not have had to wait two years for the black box data. If it had been installed here, it could have tracked the plane or, if the pilot turned it off, they would have immediately known that there was a problem. This is the one that costs $100,000 but you're talking about a plane that can cost $260,000,000; requiring that companies install satellite tracking is not going to radically change the price of the aircraft, and presumably as technology improves the price will come down.
And of course what a lot of people in the media seem to be missing is that the plane in question already had satellite communications, it just wasn't using them. The engines were designed to talk to a satellite; it should have been possible to use that system to routinely send position data. Many planes have internet in flight. If the planes are already capable of using satellite internet, then it's just an issue of being able to send position/speed/heading data over the plane's wifi network. It just strikes me as amazing that after all the security theater following 9/11, we have a system that carefully controls how much shampoo you can bring in your carry-on luggage, yet is completely incapable of responding if someone steals an entire aircraft.
I think that we are going to be in for a very, very long wait before we find out what happened— we're not talking about weeks or months, but many years. When Air France 447 went down, debris and an oil slick was spotted within 24 hours of the plane's loss. Even with that lead, it took almost two years, including the use of towed sonar arrays, nuclear and robotic submarines, and autonomous robotic underwater vehicles, to finally located the wreckage and salvage the plane and black boxes.
Here, the situation is vastly more challenging. Locating the wreckage of Air France 447 quickly, before it had time to drift far, meant that it was possible to narrow down the search area considerably; the initial search area was around 2400 square miles- a 50 mile by 50 mile area. Here, the search area is almost a hundred times that- the area the Australians have been searching is something like 230,000 square miles. That's roughly the size of Texas. It's also in the middle of nowhere- between Australia and the Kerguelen islands, putting it about 1500 miles away from land. That's making it difficult to do aerial searches- the planes burn most of their fuel getting there and back, so there's little time for searches. It sounds like the weather isn't fantastic either, so visibility is limited, and satellite photos of the suspected wreckage show a lot of white, which I assume is whitecaps from heavy seas. That's going to make it difficult or impossible to spot wreckage on radar- the waves are going to be reflecting back a lot of signal, creating a lot of noise- or visually. The heavy wave action could also cause floating sections of wing or tail to fill up with water more quickly and sink. Finally, the plane went down two weeks ago, so if any wreckage is recovered, it could be hundreds of miles from the crash site.
At this point, I'm going to guess that no wreckage will be found, or it will be found too late to provide any useful information about the location of the plane beyond confirming that it's in the southern Indian Ocean. Given that, we are talking about an underwater search using sonar that is going to cover hundreds of thousands of square miles, in waters up to 16,000 feet deep. That would require either years of effort, or a small fleet of underwater vehicles scanning the seafloor. This assumes that the deductions made from the satellite data are even correct. It's not impossible, but it is very, very difficult. My guess is that new technologies- making it possible for robotic vehicles to scan larger areas of seafloor, in higher resolution than ever before- may be necessary.
The thing cost $150 billion dollars, and in terms of research it's produced... what, exactly? For that, we could have doubled the National Science Foundation's funding levels for ten years, and created 30 robotic probes like the Mars Curiosity mission, and done some real science. The sooner we kill of the manned space program in favor of real science, the better. The ISS is just welfare for aerospace companies, and they get plenty of money already for defense contracts.
I'm sure this will be very useful for U.S. intelligence— it's long been rumored that the head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, has spent the past ten years hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in a secret compound built entirely out of chicken fat.
Russia is not some infinitely powerful state. By and large, it's a petro-state, and any move that causes precipitous global economic decline will do it significant damage in the process.
Well, the West could frack the hell out of them. The ICBMs are just bluster; Russia's main leverage is those fossil fuels- they sell them to generate money, and they can temporarily shut off (or threaten to shut off) gas pipelines to punish the Ukraine and Europe. However, there are huge shale gas reserves in Poland, France, and the Ukraine. Developing them as an alternative to Russian gas would deprive Russia of it's main weapon against Ukraine and Europe. In the long term, the bigger impact would be to drive down the price of gas in Europe, reducing the amount of money flowing to Putin's regime.
Obviously, this can't happen overnight; it took years for the U.S. to build up the shale gas industry so it's not going to drive Putin out of Crimea tomorrow, but since the world is probably going to be stuck dealing with Putin for years to come, and he's unlikely to get any less paranoid and aggressive, it's probably worth thinking about.
The most likely scenario is suicide. It's hard to imagine, but it's happened twice- SilkAir Flight 185 and EgyptAir 990. I don't think there is one case of someone stealing a commercial aircraft, just because there's no way to sell it. It's not a Honda Accord you can sell for cash or strip for parts; it's now the most famous plane in the world and you'll have as much success selling it as you would have selling a stolen Mona Lisa. And the parts have serial numbers.
No other scenario make sense. If the plane was hijacked for a terrorist plot, it should have turned up. Plots like 9/11 rely on the element of surprise, so you need to strike as quickly as possible, instead of giving the authorities an entire week to track you down. Similarly, if the plane and passengers were taken hostage, this would have been announced by now. If your hostage-takers are politically motivated, parading hostages on TV advances their cause; if they're just after money, they need to open negotations. Either way, we should have heard .
It all points to pilot suicide. That raises the question of why the pilot would fly on for hours instead of just nosediving into the ocean, but by definition pilot suicide isn't the act of a rational mind. It suggests not a desire to end one's own suffering but to inflict suffering on others and a complete disregard for human life- in other words, a sociopathic mindset. Eric Harris- the sociopath behind the Columbine killers- comes to mind here. He wanted to end his own life but also to take as many people as possible with him, and get as much attention as possible in it. Some careers attract this kind of person- lawyers, CEOs and surgeons are often sociopaths- and being a pilot may be one of those. You probably find that flying induces anxiety, now imagine that you not only have to worry about the anxiety of flying, but have to actually take responsibility for the safety of the airplane itself and several hundred lives... most normal people wouldn't enjoy that. Sociopaths have no anxiety, and actively enjoy control over and manipulating other people, personality characteristics that would make them a natural for the job.
If you don't believe that the government should support research and technology, why do you still use the internet and the web- which were both developed with public funding by DARPA and CERN, respectively? This is the classic hypocrisy of libertarians- when it comes time to pay they claim it's a form of theft, but they have no problem with using all the public services- roads, universities, the internet- that have been paid for with my tax dollars. They're happy to take government services, they just don't want to pay for them. If their house catches on fire, they're going to call 911 just like everyone else.
The system already exists; FLYHT Aerospace based out of Calgary sells it for around $100,000. There's been a push for this kind of technology following the loss of Air France 447, when it took almost two years to recover the black boxes and figure out what happened. Warren Buffett's Netjets started installing this technology in 2012 but the larger carriers have been slow to adopt. Presumably after this latest disaster, it will become standard- either the big companies will realize the advantages of being able to track their planes, or governments will make this technology mandatory. It might not have been enough to avert the disaster, but it would have spared a week (or however long it ultimately takes) to find the plane and figure out what happened.
Lets say you were a pilot with intent to commit suicide (and take everyone with you; ignoring the sociopathy involved in that)... Why go through the effort of 'hiding' the plane? Turning off the transponder and comms, changing altitude and direction, and flying for a few more hours? The plane was already over the ocean, easy to dive it straight down. Less than a minute and it's done.
My intuition says that someone wanted a 777 and wanted to hide it.
So first, a potential argument against the suicide scenario is that it would be more rational to simply fly the plane straight down instead of flying on for 7 hours. Of course, if we are talking about a suicidal pilot, then we're talking about someone sadistic and deranged enough to kill 238 people. This is, by definition, not someone who is thinking in terms of what is the most rational response to a given situation, but a deeply fucked up individual. If they're sadistic enough to kill over 200 people and inflict untold suffering on their loved ones, maybe they're also sadistic enough to torment them for seven hours first. We're not talking about a simple suicide here, we're talking about a murder-suicide like Columbine or a suicide bomber.
Second, if someone wanted to steal a 777 for a terrorist attack, then why haven't we seen the attack? If there's a terrorist plot like during 9/11, then it requires the element of surprise. The more time passes, the more time there is for people to unravel the plot and send in the Special Forces to take out the plotters.
Third, if it's piracy, why haven't we seen the ransom? If you're a Somali pirate, then once you've got the ship safely in the harbor in Somalia, you send a message to the owners of the ship that you're open for negotiation. Also, if you want to do the piracy thing, you have to find somewhere sufficiently lawless that they won't arrest you when you land. Even a place like Kazakhstan isn't lawless enough; you don't just need a repressive dictatorship, you need a failed state level of anarchy, somewhere like Somalia or the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. And as for selling the plane on the black market, you might be able to pinch and sell a few parts... but this is the most famous airplane in the world right now. there's no way in hell you could sell so much as a rivet if it had the serial number on it.
Pilot suicide is, unfortunately, the simplest explanation that fits the facts. We've seen it before and it would fit what happened here. For the sakes of the crew and families, I desperately hope that's wrong, but it's been more than a week- if these people were alive, we'd probably have heard by now.
It's not unreasonable to say that they should be able to track the plane using satellite. There are a lot of media reports to the effect that it's not quite as easy as Find My iPhone but the technology is there. In fact it should be far easier to locate a plane than an iPhone, because unlike an iPhone, a 777 is a very large piece of equipment with plenty of power, so it's trivial to install satellite communications. So sure, it's true ACARS won't do it, but that's because ACARS is an obsolete system.
For $150 and a $100 annual fee you can get a portable satellite beacon that broadcasts the position of your trek or your kayak trip every 5 minutes. It's bullshit to argue that it's difficult or expensive to do for an aircraft what you do for your kayak trip, and ridiculous that this isn't already required for every large commercial aircraft. And in fact there's a company- FLYHT Aerospace- that already delivers a system that does real-time black-box reporting via satellite networks. It costs around $100,000 to install during routine heavy maintenance, and it will automatically relay data on position, altitude, heading, fuel use, etc. every few minutes.
If they had had this technology installed, not only would they know what happened to the plane, they would have known within minutes that the plane had changed course. They could have radioed the pilot, and if he didn't respond they could have scrambled interceptors, and if it still crashed, they could have put rescue helicopters in position to respond. Not having real-time reporting in place cost lives.
(Disclaimer- I like to play the stock market, so I took a sizeable position in FLYHT).
Agreed. If this is in fact a pilot suicide, then it's also a homicide of over 200 people. That's no better- in fact, far worse- than a suicide bomber who kills dozens of unarmed men, women and children by blowing up an explosive vest in a crowded market.
BULLSHIT. I don't care how much fucking pain you're in. You want to end your own life? Fine, go right ahead. I believe everyone has the right, and God knows I understand the appeal. I've been there. It's not so much the pain, which is bearable, as the lack of joy or any pleasure in your work, your friends, or your family, and the prospect that it will never end. In that situation, suicide becomes a rational decision.
But even when things were at their darkest, I never lost sight of one fact: the fact that killing myself was in the end a purely selfish act, and one that would cause a tremendous amount of pain and suffering and trauma. For my friends and my family when they found out, for the people who would find my body hanging by a rope, for the people who would have to go through my things and figure out what to do with them... it was the quickest and easiest way to relieve the suffering, but I never thought for a moment that there would be anything remotely noble about going through with it.
But if killing yourself is selfish, how much more selfish is it to kill 233 other people- the people who put themselves in your care, in your trust? That's not selfish, that's outright malicious. There is something deeply fucked up, purely malicious, and wholly evil about someone who, in the process of killing themselves, takes other people with them. It's one thing if your life is so fucked up you just want out. But just because you're miserable, what the hell gives you the right to deny other people their happiness? The poor bastards from Iran who just wanted to have opportunities abroad that they didn't have at home, and used those stolen passports... if this was a pilot suicide, no matter how much pain he's in, what gives him the right to deny them their dreams, to take them from their friends and family? If this is in fact a pilot suicide, then I hope there's a Hell, and I hope it's got all nine levels like in Dante, because this guy should straight to the lowest fucking level, the level for people who commit treachery, and there's no amount of suffering that would be too much for a crime like that.
The big question is, how the HELL is it possible to lose an entire commercial aircraft in 2014? I've seen some articles to the effect that it's difficult to cover the entire earth with enough radars to track planes over the ocean. OK, sure, but that's the obsolete ACARS system. That's why we have satellite communications. For $150 you can buy a portable GPS beacon from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Spot-Sat... and then there's a subscription fee which is maybe $100/year. Basically, for $250 your kayak trip sends GPS updates every 5 minutes so it can't be lost at sea, it just seems bizarre that a commercial aircraft carrying 200 people wouldn't have even that minimal sort of tracking ability. And there are companies building similar technology for aircraft- basically, streaming the black-box data in real time over satellite networks. It would be expensive to implement, but how many millions of dollars have been spent on ships and helicopters for the rescue effort?
Diet can have a profound effect on brain health. One example of this is epilepsy. It turns out that fasting can reduce epileptic seizures- in fact this was originally documented by the Greek physician Hippocrates, in the 5th century BC- but obviously that's not a viable long-term treatment, since eventually you have to eat or you starve. However, it's possible to mimic the state of fasting if you cut your carbohydrate consumption- the body burns fat, instead of sugar, just as it does in a fast. Using low carbohydrate diets- either a fat-heavy ketogenic diet or the induction phase of the Atkins diet- it's possible to reduce seizure frequency in most people with epilepsy. Often it's effective where drugs fail, and a small percentage of people- around 15% actually see seizures eliminated, sometimes permanently, even after they discontinue the diet. In other words, in a small number of patients, diet can actually cure a severe neurological disease like epilepsy.
A few years ago some psychiatrists speculated that it might work for bipolar disorder as well. The thing is, drugs that work for epilepsy also work for bipolar, suggesting they are somehow related. This was purely speculation at the time, but there are now a couple of documented cases of people suffering from bipolar who have been successfully treated with low-carbohydrate diets- and they claim it works better than the drugs.
The implications are profound. Some psychiatric and neurological disorders may in fact be metabolic disorders, perhaps in part caused by diet. There's been a big push in the past few decades to focus on DNA as the answer to everything, but there's a huge environmental component to these disorders. Twin studies show that if one twin has epilepsy, the odds of the other getting it are only around 50%. So even with identical DNA, and being raised in a similar environment, they only have about a fifty-fifty chance of getting the disorder... clearly genetics aren't destiny. What we really need is a better understanding of the environmental effects that cause one person to get a neurological disease, while the another stays healthy. Throwing drugs with severe side effects at people after they get sick is a good business model for pharmaceutical manufacturers, but what we really need to do is prevent people from getting these disorders in the first place.
Last, the observation that low-carbohydrate diets can be effective in treating severe neurological and psyhicatric diseases... well, it has disturbing implications for modern, high-carbohydrate diets.
The logistics involved here aren't impossible, obviously islands like Hawaii, Iceland, Great Britain or Ireland can survive by shipping in food, fuel, and goods from elsewhere. But the Ukraine can shut off the flow of supplies into Crimea, and it will hurt. If they have to truck everything to a port and then ship it over- all the food they can't grow locally, all consumer goods, all fuel- it's going to cause severe disruptions to supplies and hurt the local economy. It's not impossible for Russia to hold onto the Crimea -the Alies managed to hold onto West Berlin even though it was isolated in the middle of East Germany- but it's going to be more difficult for Russia to supply and defend.
The situation in the Ukraine just confirms that Obama f***ed up on Syria. Obama explicitly warned Assad against using chemical weapons, saying that this was a "red line" that wouldn't be crossed without serious consequences. And Assad crossed that line, and crossed it again, and finally crossed it in a massive way, gassing 1400 unarmed men, women and children in a coordinated assault on civilian populations.
The consequence? Obama dithers, says he'll ask congress for permission to act, and finally brokers a deal (with Putin's help) to hand over the chemical weapons.
The correct response would have been to launch the goddamn Tomahawks. Hit Assad hard: bomb his runways, destroy his artillery, blow up his communications centers and headquarters. Obama's response, or lack of a response, showed weakness. Imagine if a teacher tells the school bully to stop beating kids up, and then the bully goes and beats a kid up with a baseball bat and puts him in the hospital... and the only consequence is that the baseball bat is taken away. Would you have even the slightest amount of respect for that teacher? Obama's response showed weakness. It showed that he was more afraid of congress, more afraid of Assad's ally- Putin- than he was committed to America's values. This is the consequence of that.
I'm not saying that American power should be used recklessly; the Iraq invasion was a massive mistake. But failing to exert that power can also be a mistake.
I think the whole situation just confirms that Obama really f***ed up on Syria. The United States- the most powerful nation in the world- said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is a "red line" that cannot be crossed. And then Assad crosses that line, and crosses it again, and finally crosses it once more by gassing 1400 unarmed people with a series of massive, coordinated attacks on civilians... and Obama sits back and defers to congress, until finally the Russians step in and help negotiate a deal where Assad agrees to hand over the chemical weapons. This is roughly analogous to a schoolyard bully beating a kid up with a baseball bat, after the teacher warns him not to, and the only consequence is that the bully has to surrender the baseball bat. If your teacher handled an incident like that, would you have even the least amount of respect for them? That's not the way you handle that situation. You don't dither. You don't consult congress. You just arm the goddamn Tomahawk missiles and you take out some of Assad's runways, artillery, and communications centers, and make him pay. The issue isn't supporting the Syrian opposition or not, the issue is that the U.S. said that there would be severe consequences if Syria used chemical weapons. And then there weren't. Maybe Obama shouldn't have gotten involved or not What Putin saw was that Obama was more afraid of Congress, and more afraid of Assad's ally —Russia— than he was committed to standing up for the principles we claim to believe in. Putin saw weakness. I do think the Iraq invasion was a huge mistake, and I voted for Obama twice, but I think he's really screwed up on Syria, on the coup in Egypt, and now on the Ukraine.
It's simple, while I may not be rich now, tomorrow I could be! And then I won't want my hard earned money going to poor people like I was.
Wow! He managed to sum up the entire Republican platform, AND went an entire 28 words without saying anything positive about rape in the process! Just add in a few words about doubting global warming and maybe 'teaching the controversy' on evolution, and I think we will have our 2016 Republican presidential nominee!
There appears to be much evidence that it was in fact the rebels that used the chemical weapons which were supplied by the Saudis
Your "source" is a bunch of TV broadcasts by Syrian TV, which is controlled by the Syrian government. That's not actually a news outlet, it's just the propaganda wing of the Assad regime. They're going to say whatever they need to say to keep Assad in power.
The thing to keep in mind here is the scale of these attacks. You could see the rebels launching an attack on a small scale, maybe. But the attacks were actually launched against three different areas near Damascus, and used rockets and chemical weapons, and killed something like 1400 people and injured more. This kind of large, coordinated attack takes a large, well-trained, well-organized military with heavy weapons in the form of rockets and large chemical weapon stockpiles. The rebels are a bunch of disorganized factions with assault rifles; they just don't have the weapons or organizational ability to do that.
As for why would Assad use chemical weapons? Well, why wouldn't he? He'd previously sent in tanks and soldiers to put down demonstrations. He'd sent paramilitary groups in to murder civilians in their beds. He'd used artillery against civilians. He'd previously used chemical weapons on a small scale. He'd killed 100,000 people. All the while, the U.S. had done nothing, and Putin stood up for him and was going to veto any UN resolution. Assad had already gotten away with so many atrocities, he drew the conclusion that he'd get away with this one as well. And so far, no one's proven him wrong...
Apparently we should use 'cyber' weapons; but not against the finances of the guy we accuse of killing ~100k people; because the poor, poor, banks might get weepy or something. What kind of bullshit is this? Sure, target the Syrian electrical grid (it's "dual use"!) but don't touch the financial markets, they have feelings too(and apparently financial markets aren't "dual use" much to the confusion of money launderers, mercenaries, and plundering kleptocrats worldwide?)
As tempting as it would be to attack the finances of the Assad regime, it would be a really, really bad idea. Let's say we hack into his bank accounts and where it says "$37 billion" we change a few decimal places and all of a sudden, it's 37 cents, or maybe we write a $37 billion dollar check to that charity that buys cows for people in Africa. Then the regime collapses because he can't pay for supplies or buy the loyalty of his cronies. This might be effective, but it creates a nasty precedent. During the next conflict, maybe someone decides to attack finances in the U.S. If bank accounts are vulnerable, everyone is going to start panicking and withdrawing their funds trying to put it somewhere safe, and people will be reluctant to loan money, and you'll have a financial panic on your hands like in 1939 or 2008. And of course, everyone's connected to everyone else. U.S. firms borrow money from Germany and China... if those firms suddenly go belly-up that's going to cause a global panic.
the funny thing about this "war", is that the "facts" come from the same people that the Democrats discredited during the Iraq war. Now that Obama wants a war to distract everyone from his other disastrous wars (like Egypt, Benghazi, ...), the press is willing to forget their claims against these sources. Anything for Obama, and the Democrats.
It's night and day. You can go on Youtube and see the victims of the chemical weapons yourself- children suffering seizures, row after row of men, women and children laid out on concrete floors without any signs of physical injury. Medecins sans Frontiers came out and said that the doctors treating the wounded described symptoms consistent with nerve gas. Some of the people treating the victims got enough exposure that they fell ill and some of them died. Tissue samples taken by doctors have tested positive for Sarin gas. The British recently came out and said that it's chemical weapons. So we have US intelligence, British intelligence, and a French NGO all saying it's chemical weapons. And the Syrian Army is the only group in the area that has the weapons and capability to launch 3 different attacks and kill 1400 people. The accounts indicate that the attack was launched using rockets; the rebels don't have heavy weapons.