777crash confirms jihadists turning to make trouble for China. Chance for US to make common cause, befriend China while Russia bullies.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) March 9, 2014
World seems transfixed by 777 disappearance. Maybe no crash but stolen, effectively hidden, perhaps in Northern Pakistan, like Bin Laden.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) March 15, 2014
Rupert is the only guy who knows what really happened to flight 370. (via)
BGinCHI
Maybe all that (V)iagra hardened his brain, if nothing else.
Felonius Monk
Polite people decline to comment when Rupert and his ilk take a shit on the sidewalk. They just ignore it and think “What an Asshole”.
c u n d gulag
Too bad, Rupe, Rog, and all of the FOX Zoo Crew aren’t missing somewhere – with no one looking for them.
Violet
Saw that first one over at James Fallows blog. He noted that it “confirms” a lot of judgments about Murdoch. Heh.
Citizen_X
And this guy is, ultimately, one of the English-speaking world’s main sources of “news.”
Villago Delenda Est
:Proof that the “jihadists” are not our friends: this crazy old man still lives.
eric
You libtards just attack the man for speaking his mind. So much for the first amendment….Rupert owns Fox and because Fox is the only network calling out libtard lies like so-called global warming (tell that to the frozen midwest) and the harmlessness of the gay lifestyle and the need to take away real americans’ guns while handing out free phones and lobster to Obambi’s “urban” army. Mr. Murdoch is a true American. Suck on it libtards!
Villago Delenda Est
@eric: not bad! Needs a reference to the near sheriff, though…
Oh, wait, you got one in! Very good!
I’d have replaced “lobster” with “tiger shrimp”, though, as an added jab to the lamestream media (registered trademark, Sarah Palin Inc., all rights reserved)
kbuttle
More posts from Eric!
kbuttle
It’s colder somewhere today than it was sometime before!
Amir Khalid
Well, Uncle Rupert’s theory is no loopier than the Daily Mail‘s: Capt Zaharie is a Pakatan Rakyat supporter who hijacked his own plane because he got mad about Anwar Ibrahim’s conviction on sodomy charges the week before. (Zaharie is indeed a Pakatan supporter, but so are a great many other Malaysians. Pinning a hijacking on him because of that makes as much sense as accusing an American of a crime because they were a Teabagger.)
Anoniminous
@Villago Delenda Est:
And capital letters and many more exclamation points.
All in all, a very disappointing effort. I can only give a 5.3 on the WingNut Scale.
Violet
@Amir Khalid:
I’m suspicious of all American Teabaggers.
Botsplainer
Murdoch is dumb as a fucking stump, same as everybody else in a 24/7 news pundit environment.
Dipshit speculation in favor of the terrorist theory has taken an event that is most likely a mechanical and engineering tragedy and flipped it to something that can lead to ridiculous government policy that looks the wrong direction, away from a regulatory fix.
The terrorist theory is stupid, because it is a Malaysia to China flight, with no responsibility claimed. Of course, to the American right wing, the plane is being reworked in Abottabad, configured to carry enough lasers and missiles to attack and destroy every outlet mall, police station, VFW hall, flea market, Baptist church and gun superstore from Plano to Jacksonville and Dothan to Nashville. It’ll be marked as a Delta flight, and Obama will order personally that it can’t be shot down.
I think I’ll plant that story to see how long it takes for Tapper, Gregory and Crowley to pick up.
Interrobang
I just heard something similar on the local radio here. When I heard that the person with the theory had said it on Faux News, I kind of went “pffhhyeah, that is as demented as it sounds.” I didn’t realise it came directly from Uncle Rupe.
Why I’m hearing retransmitted Faux glurge on a Canadian radio station is beyond me, though.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid: Well, given that teabaggers are all loons to begin with (keep the government’s hands off my Medicare!), I think your analogy is somewhat poor. Capt Zaharie does not strike me as a loon.
c u n d gulag
@Anoniminous:
Yeah.
Lame effort.
MikeBoyScout
More from eric, true political & literary genius!
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer:
You say this like it’s not desirable at all.
Three people whose heads would look MUCH better on pikes than on their shoulders.
Just sayin’.
Baud
I would have gone with “Jihadists make big trouble in little China.”
Oh. And bin Laden isn’t in northern Pakistan. He’s at the bottom of the ocean. Thanks, Obama!
scav
@c u n d gulag: utter spelling fail, not enough red and green squiggly underlines to indicate freshness and authenticity.
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud:
FSM will get you for that one.
MattF
It’s apparently impossible to come up with a theory that’s too weird. I can just see a clickbait Newsmax headline: “Eight weird theories that someone believes!”
JPL
@Botsplainer: That is plausible but I’m still thinking it was an alien abduction.
MattF
@JPL: Eek! Someone is probing my turbojets!
Botsplainer
@Villago Delenda Est:
I just realized – my geographic lines demarcating the area of Kenyan Islamofascist attack make an inverted cross.
If you play my post backwards, it says “re-elect Obama to a third term and worship Him”.
GregB
I think the Symbionese Liberation Army is making a comeback.
Schlemizel
@eric:
Mixy – you need to work on getting your grammar worse, true wingnuts are not capable of writing that many sentences without mucking up English (ITS ARE LANGANGE SPEEK IT!).
Other than that this was a pretty tired attempt.
Tommy
What exactly would he suggest we do to China? No I am really curious. Cause it seems to me Americans are drawn to cheap China products like crack. I am thinking right about now we need them more then they need us. You know, just saying if we couldn’t buy cheap shit at Wal-mart there might be riots in the streets.
RepubAnon
@eric: We know that Rupert Murdock is speaking his mind – that’s why we’re pointing out that Mr. Murdock’s mind is a bigoted, jingoistic place, where conclusions are drawn through prejudices and an underlying political agenda rather than evidence.
As Hunter S Thompson once observed: “Even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn.” It is of course possible that we’ll eventually find that some terrorist group was involved, and that it was a jihadist terrorist group. However, it is also possible that this was done for reasons ranging from suicide to ransom to pure piracy.
Had Mr. Murdock waited until after the evidence came in that the plane was in the air for many hours after the transponder was cut off and the course changed, we wouldn’t be criticizing him. What makes Mr. Murdock’s equalling his initial suspicions as established facts irresponsible and contemptible was that he did so as soon as we heard the plane had lost contact with the ground.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tommy: Rupert’s got cable deals to think about for that huge market that’s waiting to be ruthlessly exploited. He hates some commies, unless they’re commies holding the keys to the Middle Kingdom.
Violet
@Tommy: He would suggest that we do to China whatever will benefit his businesses, increase his power and control, and make him richer.
dopey-o
Rupert Murdoch wasn’t always a true American. I’m just saying’…..also, too.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer: Another clue for you all…the walrus was Paul!
Tommy
@Violet: Well that is a given. And BTW, doesn’t he own the satellites that deliver TV to most of Asia? I mean he owns pretty much everything else.
Citizen_X
@Botsplainer:
So where’s the link to where we can contribute?
CaseyL
The Right wants it to be a terrorist plot so they can blame Obama for it and justify another war somewhere.
The latest non-crazy theory is that the pilot committed suicide, like the pilot of that EgyptAir flight a few years ago. The pilot wanted to crash the plane and die, and the rest of the flight crew tried to stop him… but that doesn’t explain the radio silence, since I would think someone on the flight deck might’ve tried to get the word out.
feebog
I don’t think this is the onset of dementia. The old asshole has been bugshit crazy for years. That said, it really is frightening to think that this guy is the owner of a massive global wide information system that reaches millions daily.
J.D. Rhoades
if this is a terrorist attack, it’s the worst one ever. No one’s terrified.
Villago Delenda Est
On a serious note, I think they need to check out the backgrounds of the passengers…it’s possible that the pilots were incapacitated and then some of the passengers with knowledge and training diverted the plane from its planned course. Right now they seem to be concentrating on the pilots as responsible, and I’m not sure how fruitful a pursuit that might be. I suppose they need to eliminate them as suspects first, given the circumstances (Occam’s Razor and all) but so far the well seems to be dry, at least from what has been publically revealed.
Tommy
@Citizen_X: I made the terrible mistake of following a link at like Buzzfeed about the plane and conspiracy theories. Ended up on the crazy side of the Internet. All I can say is wow. But I also learned that Tom Clancey was working on a book about how a sleeper Muslim became POTUS, so Obama had him killed.
Villago Delenda Est
@CaseyL: It also doesn’t explain four hours of additional telemetry from the engines…if you’re going to commit suicide by jetliner, wouldn’t it be logical to take it down right away? Why prolong things and fly off in a totally different direction, when you’ve got plenty of Vietnam jungle just ahead of you to get lost in?
El Cid
The pilot knew the secret location of the continent of Lemuria and insisted on demonstrating this to his unbelieving passengers by landing upon it in the middle of the ocean.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tommy:
Wingtard loons are projecting what they’d do on to Obama, again. Sort of like how Oregon’s own Art Robinson was convinced that Peter DeFazio personally intervened in Oregon State University’s graduate school programs to disrupt his kids’ degree bids. After all, it’s what Art would do to his political opponents…
Tommy
@Villago Delenda Est: I think most folks tend to over think things and make them more complex then they need to be. The question I keep asking myself is how did the plane even have the capability to lose contact? I mean my cell phone knows exactly where I am at all times. How don’t we have something similar on a plane that can’t be turned off.
raven
Russia and Ukraine have agreed a truce in Crimea until 21 March, Ukraine’s acting defence minister has announced, in a move that appears to reduce tensions between Moscow and the western-backed government in Kiev.
Baud
@raven:
Crazy situation. I’m actually as worried about our war mongers as I am about Putin.
Joey Giraud
I thought it was proven that Edward Snowden hijacked the plane using a remote control he stole from the NSA and carried in a usb memory stick, and, after dumping the passengers in the Gulag of Eastern Siberia, is flying to rescue Julian Assange from the grip of evil Ecuadorian overlords.
Will these terrorists never stop?
C.V. Danes
Maybe they’re LOST on a mysterious island…
Villago Delenda Est
@Tommy: Well, we do. The Boeing ACARS system can be “switched off” after some toggles are switched and a computer screen asks for confirmation, but to disable the transponders in the engines requires maintenance work that would be difficult even for someone who knew exactly what to look for to perform while in flight.
Also, too, while the civilian ATC system no longer tracked the plane, the Malaysian Air Force still could via radar, and confirmed that it turned west after the ATC system stopped tracking it.
? Martin
@raven:
How can there be a truce when Russia has no idea who those masked military men are?
? Martin
@J.D. Rhoades:
Republicans are. They’re always terrified. Of everything.
raven
@? Martin: Sorry, Link.
Randy P
@Tommy: From what I’ve read, you can manually switch off the signal that talks to the civilian systems, and that happened early on. This is a complex operation that can’t happen accidentally and needs a knowledgeable person. This is the signal that vanished about 1 hr into flight.
What we’re hearing now is reports from military intelligence of various countries, because there were other signals that weren’t switched off, that are much harder to switch off or take engineering knowledge (I think one was in some sort of electronics bay under the cockpit). This is the signal that was active up to 4 hours past the civilian signal.
And then the satellite was watching yet another signal, or maybe it was the above signal but the satellite systems had it in view longer than the ground-based systems. And that signal was tracked for another 7 hours, or maybe it was 7 hours from takeoff.
Unfortunately you need several different observations to pinpoint a location, so all they’ve got from the satellite are two different arcs, one over land and one over the Indian Ocean.
At any rate, everything the flight did after “disappearing” from civilian air traffic control is at human hands. The possibilities running through my mind are equally disturbing: (1) A conspiracy among the crew, (2) a rogue crew member who killed the rest of the crew, (3) a passenger who managed to get a weapon on board and managed to get into the cockpit and take over the plane.
I’m most worried about #3 at the moment, because if that’s what happened and we don’t know what the terrorists have figured out to get around the safeguards, it will happen again.
Joey Giraud
@RepubAnon:
Having a hard time find the source for that aphorism, but I *really* doubt it’s HRT, if only because the language is far too mild.
I just can’t imagine HRT uttering the word ‘occasional’
Tommy
@Villago Delenda Est: The only situation that makes any sense to me is that something happened to the plane like what happened with Payne Stewart’s plane. But the experts say that would be close to impossible to happen on a plane this size.
But I guess even that doesn’t explain a lot of things.
I like what some “expert” said on a clip I saw online. They’re like it is a large plane, it just can’t go missing without us being able to find it. Another person said yes in fact it was a large plane, but you know the ocean is kind of large as well.
GregB
@raven:
Hopefully John McCain can do something about this, perhaps launch a Bay of Pigs style invasion with him and Lyndsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte leading the charge.
raven
@GregB: Things been pretty quiet from Squeaky since this week’s “revelation”.
Randy P
Way, way OT but on a much lighter note: Does anyone remember the order of succession on the bridge of the Enterprise on the original Star Trek? When Kirk is away, Spock takes over. If Spock is away, then… Scotty? And who after him.
This is part of a running joke. Apparently I’m somewhere on the lineup for supervisor of my office when enough people are away, which I found out about 6 months ago when there was an actual important duty to perform. They found me buried deep in a programming task in some lab, cut off from phones and email. “Did you know you’re in charge? Did you know you’re supposed to do X by noon?” I joke that this is probably about like when they get down to Sulu (or maybe Nurse Chapel) in the line of succession.
Tommy
@Randy P: Well hindsight is always 20/20, but it just seems to me there ought to be some signal on the darn plane that can’t be turned off. I also get what you and others have noted, that turning off the system is something that you have to actually try to do. You can’t just “bump” a button.
Villago Delenda Est
@GregB: Lead the charge? Only from their command post out of theater, they will. Actual boots on the ground shit is for the peasants.
Baud
@GregB:
The Charge of the Right Charade.
Elizabelle
It surprises me that, with 239 souls on board, there was not another Malaysian Airlines pilot or two deadheading. You find that a lot on US aircraft.
Statistically, you would expect to find other pilots among the passengers; commercial, military, or private.
Villago Delenda Est
@Randy P: They handed off bridge duty to some watch officer a couple of times. In “Mirror Mirror” Sulu was third in command, instead of Scotty.
TNG did a better job of defining this than TOS did, actually having Troi train up for bridge command duty, which Dr. Crusher occasionally did, when Picard, Riker, Data, Worf and LaForge were all away from the bridge.
Baud
@Tommy:
Every plane should have its own Twitter account.
joel hanes
Rupert Murdoch is an old man at 83.
Someday relatively soon we will celebrate his passing.
(The bad) Roger Ailes is unfortunately a decade younger; but fortunately is aging badly.
Chances are good that many of us will live to see a world without these two malignant parasites.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
And now we quote the all the lines from Airplane!
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud: “Excuse me, miss, but I speak Jive.”
rk
@joel hanes:
You know there’s plenty more where that came from. Humanity has no shortage of malignant parasites.
Violet
@Tommy: I read that the aircraft designers and pilots are more concerned with what would normally be a greater safety issue–fire–than they are with this kind of mysterious disappearance and needing a signal that can’t be turned off. Any kind of electrical signal would possibly be a danger in a fire, so the pilots can turn everything off in the interest of safety.
Professor
Has anyone blamed Obama yet?
FlyingToaster
Millenium was a documentary.
jeffreyw
cookie, please and ty
Tommy
@Violet: That kind of makes sense. I just watched one of those shows about “how do they make that” that looked at a Boeing plant. I mean I knew these modern planes were pretty high-tech, but I had NO idea how much so. I mean the plane is basically a large computer with engines on it.
Baud
@Villago Delenda Est:
Rumack: Can you fly this plane, and land it?
Ted Striker: Surely you can’t be serious.
Rumack: I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.
El Cid
@Villago Delenda Est: Maybe McCain will be willing to crash one last plane.
Baud
@El Cid:
It could be like the end of Independence Day.
raven
God Vitale is such a moron.
tybee
@El Cid:
just to make ace status.
JPL
@raven: Did you see this from the Guardian
Elizabelle
@Baud:
@Villago Delenda Est:
Something had to get us off the Miracle Whip discussion and on to other matters of grave cultural significance.
raven
@JPL: Rotsa Ruck
Villago Delenda Est
@JPL:
Sounds like the all-Canada hockey team to me.
the Conster
@eric:
The scare quotes around “urban” are your tell. Give those up and you’ll be good to grift. You’re almost there grasshopper.
Baud
@raven:
News to you?
Ash Can
@Professor: Hannity and some other shit-for-brains guys at Fox did, a couple of days ago.
Frankensteinbeck
@Botsplainer:
Please do plant this. Try to phrase it as uninsanely as possible, but with the same insane points. It will be a wonderful and entertaining experiment.
Amir Khalid
Off-topic (way, way off topic):
Is a beard trimmer expensive? I’m thinking I might need one.
raven
@Baud: No but here I am with the volume on. Great game if it were not for his babble.
raven
@Amir Khalid: Hey, I asked earlier about Rooney and a Liverpool player. They were sharing a drink during a stoppage and seemed pretty cozy.
Tommy
@Amir Khalid: It depends. I bought a few cheap ones (around $25) that didn’t last very long. Got one for about $45 and had it for years and works like a charm. Use it almost daily to both trim my beard or even shave my head.
Amir Khalid
@raven:
I did not see the incident. It could be an England teammate of Rooney’s in which case sharing a bottle would be quite unremarkable.
raven
@Amir Khalid: Yea, it didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. Maybe I’ll “get it” better when I get through “Inverting the Pyramid”!
Violet
Link. Sounds pretty definitive.
Ash Can
And in other news, Fred Phelps Sr. is on his deathbed. I hope that, in his absence, his church and his cause fall victim to internal power struggles to fill the leadership void, and that the whole stinking mess is finally relegated to the trash dump of history where it belongs.
Violet
@Ash Can:
First comment on that story:
Edit: Apparently he was ex-communicated from his “church” in August 2013. WTF?
smith
@Ash Can: You suppose someone will picket his funeral?
Tommy
@Violet:
As a straight guy you might think I’d be worried by the “powerful homosexual interests” but alas I can’t recall a single time the gays did anything that even remotely impacted my life.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ash Can: A FB friend from high school is talking about going to protest at Phelps’s funeral.
Ash Can
@smith:
@Omnes Omnibus:
Wouldn’t that be glorious? Imagine a huge, diverse crowd, a sea of rainbow flags, signs reading “God loves everyone, even assholes like Fred Phelps,” music, dancing… That would be splendid.
Tommy
@Ash Can: That would be wonderful. In like 2006 they came to a funeral in MO. One of the soldiers family members put up a Facebook page asking for people to come out and support her family in the face of their hate.
Thousands showed up. Many with poster boards to block the family from those crazy, hateful people. I recall see the local news about it, watching as tears rolled down my face.
Ash Can
@Tommy: If Fred Phelps has anything at all to show for his life, it’s the fact that he’s been able to unite entire communities in love and friendship in the face of his hate. It will forever be a part of his wretched legacy that he wouldn’t have wanted any part of the good that actually did come from his actions.
RobertDSC-PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25
I thought this was a Sarah Palin thread. Oops.
Tommy
@Ash Can: That was something talked about in the local newscast. There were pro-war and anti-war people standing shoulder to shoulder. Arm in arm. It was actually heartwarming.
Bitter and Deluded Lurker
@Amir Khalid: In Canada I’ve seen them go for anywhere from about $15 to $50 in drugstores. However, I haven’t been terribly happy with my current one so I may try to find something a little more professional (and presumably more costly).
Suffern ACE
@J.D. Rhoades: I kind of agree. “We can make people think we can make planes disappear” is hardly scary.
Southern Beale
I am increasingly convinced that there was in fact no flight at all, that the entire world has been punked, and this is all an elaborate promo for the new “Lost” movie.
Mark B.
There’s a report that a Greek tanker has spotted luggage in the water in the Straits of Malacca near Malaysia.
Hat tip to Mick West at Metabunk: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/mh370-reports-of-debris-in-malacca-strait-by-elka-athina-oil-tanker.3300/
Fred
I feel I should point out: Murdoch isn’t crazy. Murdoch isn’t stupid. Murdoch is an evil, greedy grifter who knows just what the rubes are slobbering for and he delivers 24/7.
If Murdoch thought he could make a buck proclaiming Obama is Jesus reborn and claiming his own mamma was The Whore of Babylon he would do it while swearing on the Bible or the Koran or The Betty Crocker Cook Book and dressed in drag if that would up the take 5%.
Murdoch’s doings in China started when he was broadcasting anti Commie screeds until the Chinese gov retaliated by outlawing satellite dishes at which point he got the message and did a ideological 180 because MONEY. Now him and the Communist Chinese are good buds. He’s cool with slave labor if he gets a cut.
CaseyL
The Mystery of the Disappeared Airliner is just fascinating.
I think one reason it’s fascinating is that today, with all the tech available, and so many people using it non-stop, resulting in an interconnectedness unlike anything ever before, it’s just mind-boggling to think a 777 full of people could disappear without a trace, with nary a word from any of the passengers. It’s like something out of the 19th Century.
Over at Charlie Stross’ place, commentors are coming up with interesting, as in bad, scenarios. The consensus seems to be this was a theft, probably of something in the cargo (apparently trouble with an X-ray scanner at Kuala Lampur meant the plane’s cargo wasn’t scanned at all); or possibly of the passengers (there were 20 Freescale employees on the plane, and speculation that North Korea wanted them). But all that assumes someone knew about the cargo and/or the employees in advance, which means an inside job.
Not sure how the recently-recreated flight path factors into those speculations.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tommy: It’s not so much that they’re impacting your life, as it is that they exist at all.
The preverts.
Bill Arnold
@CaseyL:
Consensus is a little strong. People there are spinning up lots of different movie (or book) plots, taking more than usual care to keep them consistent with the known-facts-of-the-day.
One twist that was unsettling was a statement that the range of the aircraft can be increased a bit if air conditioning for the passenger cabin is turned off.
Steeplejack
@Amir Khalid:
I don’t know what you have available there, but I’ve got a pretty good Wahl that cost about $20. Seems to be one of those categories with prices all over the map and not necessarily correlating to quality.
RaflW
@Tommy:
Well, I guess your girlfriend didn’t commandeer the TV to watch Johnny Weir and all that damn Olympic figure skating, huh.
karen
@? Martin:
FTFY
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
I use a cheap one. Works great for a while and then, I buy a new one. They seem to break about the time they get dull and need to be replaced anyway. Tried using the grooming one I got for my dog and was that a mistake. Not wonder he hated getting trimmed. It pulled as much as cut and it had really good replaceable blades. Went back to the cheap beard trimmers and am happy with that.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: Snopes already debunked a conspiracy theory that Freescale had the plane destroyed so they could get full ownership of some sort of revolutionary patent co-owned by their employees.
David Koch
Need Moar BEN GZAZI!
steverino
@Randy P:
Chain of command: in the War of 1812, the USS Chesapeake had all its officers killed or wounded early on: the HMS Shannon focused its fire on the quarterdeck. Command devolved (unbeknownst to him) on a “temporary third lieutenant,” essentally a cadet in training, who was helping get the mortally wounded Captain Lawrence belowdecks. He was later court-martialed fo abandoning his post in the face of the enemy.