MH370.

Kuala Lumpur:  Confirmation that plane debris washed up on a remote Indian Ocean island is from missing Malaysian airlines flight MH370 appears imminent — representing the first breakthrough in one of the world's most baffling aviation mysteries.
-Sydney Morning Herald.

That's it, folks! There is only a bit of territorial jealousy standing in the way of official confirmation. The Aussies KNOW, the flaperon is from MH370, but the flaperon was found on a French possession, Reunion, and so only CHIEF Inspector Clouseau and the Malaysians can make the official confirmation. The Aussies are peeing themselves they want this so badly so they're getting their toe as close to the line as they can without being official-official which would make the French and Malays go ballistic-ballistic

Case solv-ed. A part of MH370 has been found.

"Talks for Pacific Trade Deal Stall at a Critical Step."-NYT.

WAIT? WHAT!

I thought this was so done you could stick a fork in it.

LAHAINA, Hawaii — Trade negotiators from the United States and 11 other Pacific nations were headed toward failure Friday, with difficult talks on the largest regional trade agreement ever breaking down over protections for pharmaceutical companies and access to agriculture markets on both sides of the Pacific.

Boy oh boy. Never expected that, did you? Look: with negotiations there's always time. GOD! did we learn that with Iran. But you know, the Iran deal is looking peaked, too. These would be terrible blows to Obama. The Iran deal does blow, this one...I think I was in favor of this one but man, outta sight outta mind, baby. I haven't thought about this recently. Can't even remember the acronyms. Alls I knows is this is a surprise and POTUS is concerned tonight.

Israeli Terrorism.

That is the word Prime Minister Netanyahu himself used to describe the murder of a Palestinian baby in an arson attack on the child's home in the West Bank.

"Revenge." I had trouble understanding this, had to read the article (NBC) a couple of times till I got it right. That house, where the baby died, had been an Israeli settler's house. It was illegal, the settlers had no right to construct it and the government kicked them out. A Palestinian family moved in. So, "Revenge" was directed by an Israeli Jew or Jews against the Israeli government! That's messed up.

These are called "price tag" attacks and have been going on for years. Here's another one from 2014:

That says "price tag" according to NBC.

An 18 month old baby. Killed in an attack by Jews against the Jewish state. That is really fucked up. Been a fucked up 24 hours in Israel.

Krugman.

China’s Naked Emperors

Does this guy write every fucking Friday? Krugman, some other color than blue for once, okay? Let's see what he has to say:





Politicians who preside over economic booms often develop delusions of competence.... We’ve seen it in many countries: I still remember the omniscience and omnipotence ascribed to Japanese bureaucrats in the 1980s, before the long stagnation set in.

Words can be hurtful, Paul. I invested in the Japan Fund in the early '80's. Didn't get quite "full return" on my investment.
...
This is the context...understand...strange goings-on...China’s stock market. In and of itself...shouldn’t matter... But the authorities...chosen...put...credibility on... line...trying to control...market...

Yes, they have.

...are in the process...demonstrating...China’s remarkable success over the past 25 years notwithstanding,...nation’s rulers...no idea what they’re doing.

You can't notwithstand 25 years for godssake. Okay, go on Krugman:

...fundamentals,,,: China...end of an era...era of superfast growth, made possible...large part...vast migration...underemployed peasants...cities. This reserve...surplus labor...dwindling...growth must slow.

That was the part I got tired on before. Don't have enough peasants now, thought there were too many. Not enough. Okay.

But China’s economic structure is built around the presumption of very rapid growth. Enterprises, many of them state-owned, hoard their earnings rather than return them to the public, which has stunted family incomes; at the same time, individual savings are high, in part because the social safety net is weak, so families accumulate cash just in case. As a result, Chinese spending is lopsided, with very high rates of investment but a very low share of consumer demand in gross domestic product.

That is the next paragraph but it doesn't flow. He just ditches the peasants. Don't use "But" then, Krugman. He wrote that before, too. Too much hoarding not enough investment, like the Japanese.

This structure was workable as long as torrid economic growth offered sufficient investment opportunities. But now investment is running into rapidly decreasing returns. The result is a nasty transition problem: What happens if investment drops off but consumption doesn’t rise fast enough to fill the gap?

Gettin' tired again. Isn't that circular? I don't know.

What China needs are reforms that spread the purchasing power...

Said that before, too. I understood it. Can't hoard, gotta buy toys. Gotitgotitgotit. Next.

Meanwhile, China’s leaders appear to be terrified — probably for political reasons — by the prospect of even a brief recession.

That makes total sense, although I've said that before.

So they’ve been pumping up demand by, in effect, force-feeding the system with credit...

Don't get that. If people aren't using the money they have--they're hoarding it--why would they want to use credit to buy? In other words, he's saying the Chinese have some dough, they're just not spending it. In my experience anyway people who stuff money under the mattress aren't going to spend money they don't have, i.e. on credit, incurring interest rates however minimal, when they won't spend the money they do have. The image I have of those people is millionaires living in shacks, driving old rust-bucket cars like mine. 

 ...including fostering a stock market boom....

How does fostering a stock market boom increase purchasing power?

Such measures can work for a while, and all might have been well if the big reforms were moving fast enough. But they aren’t, and the result is a bubble that wants to burst.

There is a bubble! Bubbles aren't good, we know that!

China’s response has been an all-out effort to prop up stock prices. Large shareholders have been blocked from selling; state-run institutions have been told to buy shares; many companies with falling prices have been allowed to suspend trading. These are things you might do for a couple of days to contain an obviously unjustified panic, but they’re being applied on a sustained basis to a market that is still far above its level not long ago.

That's the next paragraph and that is what Zhongnanhai is doing...I don't know why they're doing that and KRUGMAN ISN'T EXPLAINING IT TOO GOOD!

What do Chinese authorities think they’re doing?

I don't KNOWWWWW! 

In part, they may be worried about financial fallout. It seems that a number of players in China borrowed large sums with stocks as security, so that the market’s plunge could lead to defaults.

Eyes glazing over.

But it also looks as if the Chinese government, having encouraged citizens to buy stocks, now feels that it must defend stock prices to preserve its reputation...

Gotitgotitgotit.

...And what it’s ending up doing, of course, is shredding that reputation at record speed.

Indeed, every time you think the authorities have done everything possible to destroy their credibility, they top themselves.

Then why are they fucking doing it if they're shredding their reputation, huh? What, do they think they're creating a market for reputation shredders? Maybe people will buy reputation shredders instead of paper shredders? If you see that they've bird pumped, if even I see that this market intervention is a bird pump, why doesn't Zhongnanhai see it as a bird pump? Maybe Zhongnanhai sees it as keeping 25 years of...What did you say?..."remarkable growth" going? 

So what have we just learned?

I haven't learned SHIT from this?

China’s incredible growth wasn’t a mirage, and its economy remains a productive powerhouse. The problems of transition to lower growth are obviously major, but we’ve known that for a while. The big news here isn’t about the Chinese economy; it’s about China’s leaders. Forget everything you’ve heard about their brilliance and foresightedness. Judging by their current flailing, they have no clue what they’re doing.

Times, do you have to have this guy write EVERY Friday? Is that what we've learned? Who amongst us learned that from this article? All I learned was there aren't enough peasants. Pisses me off every time.

This is from Borat, "The Running of the Jew" scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McN0JT7YChU

Amazing. Horrifying. Art imitating life imitating art. The Israeli people must be thoroughly embarrassed, humiliated.

This is not the scene I had in mind. This clip is only 19 seconds long. As soon as they saw him they started chasing him! BrunoIsrael

As dressed. He-he-he-he.

And, it's on!

I did not know Orthodontics were so violent in their homophobia. Really, as soon as they see him they go after him.

Psycho Schlissel.

I'm sorry, that is just so absurd a scene.

*#

# UPDATED 7/31, 4:20 pm UTC. I have a question. Sometimes a news photographer is just in the "right" place at the right time and gets amazing photographs. But this photographer seems to have known who Schlissel was and what he was about to do. How else to explain the third photo below of Schlissel at the moment that he is pulling the knife out? Why didn't the photographer at that moment toss aside his Kodak and try to prevent murder? The photographer is clearly focusing on Schlissel, he's maybe three feet in front of him when Schlissel pulls the knife, ignoring the Gay marchers in the background who, presumably, he was there to cover. Why was he focusing on Schlissel?

Second question: The Israeli police are right there, one is reaching for Schlissel just as he stabs the young woman. Kudos, Israeli police. But why didn't they prevent him from attending the march? The weiner just got out of prison after serving a 10 year sentence for an attack at the Gay parade in 2005. Doesn't look like he changed his appearance any! Really sticks out among the rainbows! They should have known who he was and should have been watching him from the time he left his house. They should never have allowed him to get within "striking" distance of that parade.

Horrific images. Yishai Schlissel, an Orthodox Jew (obviously), knife-attacked six people at a Gay Pride march in Jerusalem today. Stabbed a young woman from behind!

Look at that. An Orthodox Jew running through the streets with an upraised, bloody knife in his hand. It just does not compute. It looks ludicrous. It's almost comical-looking.

                        

Here is Schlissel about to pull his knife. Amazing photographs. 

Schlissel in custody and a cop holding the knife.

Poor kids. Just because they're Gay. It's unbelievable.

In either Borat or Bruno, Sacha Baron-Cohen, dressed in his neon green slingshot bathing suit approaches a group of Schlissels in Israel and begins talking to them. Immediately, one of them takes off after him but Baron Cohen, younger and anticipating an attack, escapes.

*UPDATED, 7/31/15, 1:04 pm UTC: I just saw an article that Schlissel had just been released from prison for a similar attack. Man, incomplete rehabilitation there.

Eliyahu Fink

Twitter › efink

36 mins ago

The way @CNN talks about Malaysian Airlines Flight #370 debris, as if it's actual breaking news, makes me scared for the future of humanity.

Ha-ha! Way to go Eliyahu!

Watch "Vanished: The Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370" tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CNN.

I was wondering if the Chicken Noodles had gotten the gang back together again. Oh CNN, lolol.

Beijing Awarded 2022 Winter Olympics.

My goodness, only 14 years after they hosted the Summer Games. Congratulations Beijingers and Chinese! (The runner-upper was Almaty, Kazakhstan. Great success. NOT!)

We de-Schlisselfy our header on accounta it's Friday and replace hisself with a beeyou-tee-ful picture of a Blue Moon on accounta it's Blue Moon Friday! Tonight will be the second full moon of the month.

The Blue Moon is Rising, Schlissel (Etihad, A-rab airline :o). Go howl at it.

Everything humanly possible.

“We have long thought it went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean and at last, it seems, we may be on the verge of some confirmation."

-Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot.

Way to pinpoint it, Tony, and you were right. Congratulations. And thanks!

"We owe it to the families...of all on board, we owe it to the travelling public...to do everything we humanly can to get to the bottom of this.”

All you can do.

Check out this headline:


ISIS-led car bomb attack kills seven Nusra militants near Aleppo

...Is that good or bad? Who the fuck are "Nusra militants?" It says al-Nusra Front is al-Qaeda in Syria...So I repeat, is that good or bad?

Islam is so fucked up you can't keep track of all the players even with a scorecard. It's unbelievable, they kill Jews, Christians, Hindus, Chinese atheists, Russians, Americans, French, British, other Muslims. "Islam has bloody borders," Samuel Huntington wrote. Those borders are being constantly re-drawn and they are shrinking to individuals.

Islam as it is practiced and preached today.

For the Mideast, It’s Still 1979

Friedman has come out in favor of the Iran deal but under that headline writes today:

What happened in 1979? For starters, there was the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist extremists who challenged the religious credentials of the Saudi ruling family, accusing them of impiety. The al-Sauds responded by forging a new bargain with their religious conservatives: Let us stay in power and we’ll give you a freer hand in setting social norms, relations between the sexes and religious education inside Saudi Arabia — and vast resources to spread the puritanical, anti-women, anti-Shiite, anti-pluralistic Sunni Wahhabi fundamentalism to mosques and schools around the world.

This Saudi lurch backward coincided with Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, which brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power. That revolution set up a global competition between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia for leadership of the Muslim world, and it also led to a big surge in oil prices that gave both regimes more money than ever to export Shiite and Sunni fundamentalism. That is why the Egyptian scholar Mamoun Fandy liked to say, “Islam lost its brakes in 1979.”

That competition was further fueled by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 — which spawned the Sunni jihadist movement and eventually Al Qaeda — and by the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, also in 1979, which basically ended all new building of nuclear power plants in America, making us more dependent on fossil fuels.
...
So the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal marks a big change — but because it will lead to an end to economic sanctions on Iran, it could turbocharge 1979 as easily as end it...Will the nuclear deal empower the more moderate/pragmatic majority inside Iran rather than the hard-line Revolutionary Guards Corps? The reason to be worried is that the moderates don’t control Iran’s nuclear program or its military/intelligence complex; the hard-line minority does...
...
A lot will depend also on Saudi Arabia moderating the anti-modernist trend it imposed on Sunni Islam. On Tuesday the Middle East Media Research Institute released a translation of a TV interview by the Saudi author Turki al-Hamad about the extremist discourse prevalent in Saudi Arabia. “Who serves as fuel for ISIS?” he asked. “Our own youth. What drives our youth to join ISIS? The prevailing culture, the culture that is planted in people’s minds. It is our youth who carry out bombings. … You can see (in ISIS videos) the volunteers in Syria ripping up their Saudi passports.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/opinion/thomas-friedman-for-the-mideast-its-still-1979.html?_r=0

On the Meaning of the Disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Yeah, I mean it. I'm gonna do an "On the meaning of..."

This has been exasperating, no? Why has it been exasperating? Because a frigging Boeing 777 full of passengers just...disappeared!

And how did it "just disappear?" Didn't we learn something about radar in this whole thing? Yes, we did. We learned that there are gaps, big frigging gaps, in radar.

"Data from Malaysian military radar showing Flight 370 (green) crossing the Strait of Malacca and Andaman Sea to where it was last seen by radar. The left of the two segments of the flight track follows air route N571 between waypoints VAMPI and MEKAR; the white circle appears to highlight a section where the aircraft was not tracked by radar." (Wiks)

Who amongst us knew that there were big frigging gaps in radar? Not many of us general public usn's.

We learned that there is civilian radar and military radar and "secondary" radar,  which relies on blips or beeps or tweets emitted by a plane's transponders. Who knew? I thought there was Radar, singular and it worked on a green screen with like a clock second hand sweeping around and around and you could "see" the frigging thing's--a plane's, a UFO's--second-by-second progress across your green screen. I didn't think the object had any say in it but with secondary radar the object does have a say in it; if the transponder doesn't...transpond secondary radar doesn't "see" it. Who the fuck knew?

And with at least three kinds of radar we still lost a Boeing 777 passenger jet.

We can't even find one of those things after it stops movin'! Look at this map today from the Quasi's:

On the right, where we've been lookin', the search area. On the left, where that chap here is,

lookin' at part of the wing of MH370!...Have had at least one view pager from Reunion in the past, maybe that's him.

We're not all that.

Radar, satellite tracking, in-flight communications--the image we usn's have is that a plane never really "leaves," the plane is redundantly tethered to terra firma by all of this invisible technology. It is impossible in the 21st century for a plane to just disappear.

Well, it did. We're not that good. We're not good enough in the 21st century to not lose a big passenger jet. That's pretty bad!



Modernity has been a grievous disappointment to humanity. We think we're doin' good, it's the age of Progress, we think we're making progress and BOOM! World War I. We think that's the "War to End all Wars" and then BOOM!

-Lotta booms in the 20th century, lotta wars, different kinds of wars,--Who knew?--we thought there was just War, singular. No, there's hot war, cold war, conventional war, guerrilla war, unconventional (nuclear) war. All of our progress, all of our enlightened thought, all of our technology couldn't prevent the 20th century from becoming the bloodiest in mankind's history. We were not that good.

-Redundancy: Built-in redundancy. It's impossible for the space shuttle to fail, it's got all that "built-in redundancy."

Gotta keep them rubber O-rings from freezin' up, bubba. Who would have thought that something so mundane, so technologically primitive, could be the cause of THAT?!

-The internet. The "wild, wild web," remember that? Totally "free" speech, impossible to control. Oh, heads of state can simply pull a plug and boom, no more internet free speech, no more internet. Apologize for any misunderstanding.

Limits. We are limited; mankind is limited, we're not as good as we think we are. That to me is the meaning of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. 

MH370*

The news worldwide right now, the top story in Google News' Top Stories, is that a piece of airplane debris found off Reunion Island looks very much like it came from a Boeing 777*, the type plane MH370 was. Looks like part of a wing some experts say. The location of this debris is 4,000 miles from MH370's last position. All the "grownup" media are reporting on this, a good indication that this is it.

UPDATE: The "component number" matches that of a Boeing 777, there is only one Boeing 7x3 missing, ergo this is from MH370. (June 30, 4:02 pm.)

"Lithium found in exploding star clears up stellar mystery."-Christian Science Monitor.

Bipolar star. 

"Google Translate just got way better."-Fortune.

Today:

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min nari al-samani	2
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They find ya, don't they! Somehow they find you.  I am indeed Min Nari al-Samani and yes, this is a zentai site. Just can't hide on the web.

Remembrance of things not long past.

I get on subjects, I get off subjects and sometimes I don't recognize the posts, even recent ones, that people read.

-"Just hand me down my Martin s..."
What? Clicked on it:

Just hand me down my Martin for soon I will be startin'

Back to dear old Charleston and my kin

Since Roosevelt's been re-elected, we won't be neglected

We've got Franklin D. Roosevelt back again. (July 7)

Oh yeah. Sometimes the stuff written about here is interesting, important even. Imagine a song being written about a president's reelection today--or anytime in your life! I had not realized until I watched that FDR documentary again, I had watched it before and it hadn't sunk in, how inspiring Roosevelt was to Americans. Initially I pooh-poohed "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" and concentrated on other passages in his first inaugural that were more substantive and important--to me, over 80 years later. I'm old but I'm not that old; I didn't live through the depression but that documentary (the second time) brought home to me 80 years later how pervasive fear was in America at the time. "It was everywhere and nowhere," the documentary said. A bank run in New York City, then it would break out on the Great Plains with farm foreclosures, then in Texas. Must have seemed like a Valkyrie flying around the country touching these for death, sparing those, a ghost, substance-less, incomprehensible, deadly. Ghosts are frightening.

And then this fucking guy, crippled by polio, stands up there and says we're panicking for panic's sake...and the country goes "YEAH! WTF." Banality of banalities, it was precisely what the country needed to hear. He goes on to lay out a thrilling (little frightening too!), detailed program of action. His dolt predecessor had said before the inauguration, "We're at the end of our rope!" That was the contrast Hoover presented with FDR. Happy Days are Here Again.


-"As the thunders of the thickening fi..."

Click.


As the thunders of the thickening fight broke in upon her loneliness, her cries...could be heard with great distinctness...Her strength of voice appeared to grow with the increasing darkness, and above the continuous thunder of the cannon were the cries--"God Almighty, help me!" "Lord, save me!" "Have mercy on me!"...(June 10).

Oh God. The Civil War. Red-Tape. I could see that scene in my head when I first read it, Armstrong described it so vividly, powerfully, poignantly. It was so horrible. I can see it now, now that I remember it.

South Korea	31
United States	6
Russia	2

That's now. Those posts are now, too. So odds are I have the South Koreans to thank for reading those posts and for making me remember. Welcome back, South Koreans. Good night everybody.

"Sword of Islam" Hammered.

Now it becomes our disagreeable duty to record that the Sword of Islam, Saif al-Islam Muammar al-Gaddafi, pride of the London School of Economics, and of his father, is to be offed.

Sword, who gave a "tough love" television speech to the rebelling Libyan people in 2011 in which he pointed out that he and dad Muammar were still in charge lost those pointer fingers in an unfortunate accident when the rebels took charge.

Sword received his sentence today from a Libyan court. "Those who live by...", etc., etc. Public Occurrences takes this, last, opportunity to wish him success in his future endeavors.