Past few days I’ve been in the Jeep rather more than is good for my fuel budget. My entertainment choices this far out are talk radio, “country” music and a couple of guys yammering about sports celebrities. On the talk radio station, conservative gasbags have been going on and on and on about how ineffective Barack Obama has been concerning that airliner that got shot down. Congressvermin right and left are demanding that he do … something. I gather he just gave a speech this morning and fell short of threatening Russia with thermonuclear war, so that shows what a wimp he is.
And I find myself for perhaps the second time in the course of his administration, in the exceedingly odd and uncomfortable position of almost kinda sorta defending Barack Hussein Obama. Please stop doing this to me, world.
Look, you’ve got some Ukrainian rebels who used a Russian missile to shoot down a Malaysian airliner, probably by oopsie. They’d used the same hardware to shoot down a Ukrainian transport plane in the same area not long ago and nobody said a word. What do people seriously expect Barack Obama to do about any of this? How is it even any of his business? Of all the things Obama ought to be doing and isn’t, or ought not to be doing and is – and it’s a lengthy list – this isn’t even an item.
I like Tam’s take…
…because seriously, this is how big wars get going for no apparently logical reason.
Also I notice one thing conspicuously missing from the discussion, at least on the part of the conservatives, is a ship called the USS Vincennes. Pot, meet kettle. Or should the Russians have declared war on America in 1988? They had marginally better cause.
You often get us conservatives wrong. Let me help.
Obama ALWAYS threatens actions just short of nuking from orbit, but the only time that mattered was for social justice causes. Everyone reading this knows that he isn’t going to do anything meaningful. (I’m not saying he should, but when he lays out a red line, then does nothing, we look even weaker, which invites even more excrement flung our way.)
What he COULD be doing is whipping up international support to help end the whole mess (like W did before Iraq…yes he did…YES HE DID…look it up). He’s spent less time doing that than he has at fundraisers. None of us conservatives think we should send in troops.
>How is it even any of his business?
Some of our allies lost a substantial number of citizens. An ally should at least speak up.
The Vincennes debacle isn’t in the same league. We did everything except let foreign investigators onto an active-duty American warship in a war zone (which few in their right minds debated), but we at least did a good investigation, apologized and sent out shedloads of checks to Iranians. The Russians are looting the bodies and currently have them stacked like wood in your woodpile in a refrigerated car. Have you seen the news lately? How about Obama at least bow down before Putin and ask pretty-please for an investigation?
WWI is a whole other topic and I’ve overstayed my welcome. Thank you for your time, sir.
I guess that the politicians would much rather pretend to be Churchill, than take the heat for all of that paper money they’ve had printed, coming home to roost.
they certainly seem to be desperate to frame Putin, and get WWi, act iii going before the centenary of act 1 arrives.
A friend noticed that all of the papers today at the local newsagent had identical front pages – that only happens when the story has been written centrally.
There’s a long history of false flags, and I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t another one. We certainly seem to be very short of the wonderful spy satellite images that have been shoved into our faces other times
and why the hell did Ukrainian ATC and Malaysian navigators take the bloody thing over a war zone?
There is more to the Vincennes incident than perhaps is readily known about. In any event Iranians are hardly unused to getting blown up.
My opinion of Tam is ambivalent at best. She seems to have a very high regard for herself.
As to our getting into a war for no good reason; what war was ever avoided? Delayed perhaps but not avoided. The underlying issues don’t go away.
.
“An ally should at least speak up.”
Their circus, their monkey’s; if they don’t speak for their own dead, we have no business doing it for them.
Period.
“they certainly seem to be desperate to frame Putin,”
I think he does a pretty good job of that himself. Kina like the old farts in the Mafia….hijack a truck full of cigs then when the investigators as about mafia, the say “Mafia? There’s no Mafia”. He’s deep in this and everyone knows it. Give a bunch of stupid drunks anti-aircraft missiles(cough, and crews to run them, cough) and you get shit like this.
But again, not our problem.
Reagan warned the Europeans to NOT become reliant on Russia for anything, especially that cheap wonderful natural gas. They did it anyway, we(by that I mean the government) then poked the bear by shitting on the “we won’t involve anyone else in NATO” agreements that were at least hinted at at the end of the Soviet Union, and Putin is showing us his ass over it.
“and why the hell did Ukrainian ATC and Malaysian navigators take the bloody thing over a war zone?”
Ukraine? Dunno, despite the pretty tourist brochures it’s a very low budget, almost third world entity. Depending on who you talk to, it is a third world entity.
Malaysian airlines I do know, well. My ex-wife works for them. Her dad was middle management and in fact built the airports at Kota kinabalu and had a hand in the “modernization” of the one in Kuching.
It would not be unusual for them to take the cheapest route. It would not be unusual for there to be lax security, bad maintenance and clusterfuckery abound. One simply does not lose 777 aircraft; though that was of no surprise to me. I saw things at the airports in Kuching and KL that would curl your hair. I walked across the runways at Kuching with staff and had a nice up close look at a Malaysian Air force Mig. Granted I was family at the time and was with an air force staff officer, but there really wasn’t a lot of serious security going on.
There is a very definite reason I don’t fly MAL. Ever.
Let Malaysia handle it. I’m ok if they want to take revenge on Russia, Ukraine, or whomever. Not our business.
Everyone keeps saying that Putin gave the drunken rebels the missiles. Got a newsflash here. The Buk system is not a manpad missile. It’s a complicated bit of kit. It has a sophisticated IFF system that automatically flags civilian transponders. They can limit the upper and lower ceilings of engagement to prevent such incidents as this. It can track targets nearly 30 km away and engage at 23 km, however the UKs daily mail showed two vehicles being smuggled across the border. One was certainly a launcher but the other appeared to be a command vehicle, they were shrouded so have to go off the overall length. That would have given the ability to engage multiple targets and track from 100 km. It carries a fragmentation warhead of 70kg that can bring down the heaviest of bombers.
Cluster munitions were designed for targets like this. Killing the crews was far more important than the launchers because the crews require so much training.
Now whoever downed that airliner was also competent enough to hit a Ukraine military transport a few days earlier.
Hundreds of airliners have crossed the airspace since the war began at an agreed safe height of 33,000 feet.
Given the skills required it is highly unlikely tye rebels would have men capable of operating the system and if it was an accident the Russian crew are now certainly safely tucked away on a military base in Russia shortly to die in a training accident!
Ukraine has the Buk, it sold a lot to Georgia. They used them against Russia when they were inbaded. They electronic warfare capabilities of this system were such that it easily defeated all the counter measures the Russian planes deployed.
Yeah bunch of drunks did it, sounds plausible………… yeah right!
Buck, interesting what you say about Malaysian airlines professionalism.
I’ve been through in through Miri and out through Kuching about 10 years ago . Hot, scruffy and stinks of piss. Sarawak and Sabbah (as you well know) are Christian majority states, yet everyone in the airports was Moslem, including the little Mrs mop, who spread the piss accross the floor around my feet while I took a piss, having a good stare at my dick while she worked
all was ok though – she had her head scarf on.
We had first class tickets (and had paid for them), but the fat slob at the gate shouted at us and would only give us cattle class boarding passes back to Kuala Lumpur. I don’t know how much he sold our first class seats for – $20?
Back a KL, the bottom of the steps at the boarding gate had been used as a pissing place by employees too lazy to go find a toilet.
Interestingly, every private business that I came into contact with in Sarawak and Sabbah, had plenty of local staff, the managers were all either of Chinese or Indian origin.
My many, many flights to OZ were mostly on MAL. Cheaper and not as good as the other Asian Airlines (which are much better than any US based service) but still pretty good, even the wing flappers.in country. Never crashed, so that might color my opinion.
I will grant though that Malaysians are not considered competent by any Western or Asian businessmen. They have long had affirmative action for ethnic Malays to the detriment of Indians and Han Chinese who perhaps are a rung or two higher up the evolutionary ladder and (try to) run most business.
Course you find that all through Africa, the Middle East, SE Asia and the Pacific Islands – and most any large American city.
“yet everyone in the airports was Moslem, including the little Mrs mop, ”
That depends on, or rather did, on where you were in the airport. The ticket agents would generally be anyone who could negotiate the linguistic labyrinth in Malaysia or had family(ex-wife) who gave them an in. The ex-wife speaks Iban, Bedayuh, Hakka Chinese, Engrish, Bahasa Malayu, fluent gold digging bitch and some Arabic.
All the girls she worked with regularly in the ticket desk were Christian with the exception of one or two of about a dozen that I knew. All the male office staff were Malay.
The tech staff were all Malay. The air force staff were all Malay as were security, most of the ground crews, baggage manglers, canteen and housekeeping.
And I would venture a guess that 80% were major drunks being I did a good bit of partying with people who worked at the airport in Kuching. There was a good deal of philandering. So much for Islam.
Also, there was a civil service or establishment union employee attitude. There was very little it seemed that would cause there to be any firings.
My ex could not, for love or money, be expected to arrive to work on time, like ever; nor could she be expected to act in a professional way when she was there. I attribute most of her problems to her being something of an addict, enabled by the list of doctors she visited.
Her closest friend could not be expected to arrive sober, she literally passed out while making flight arrangements for people at the ticket counter one night. They did finally transfer her to KL…a much busier airport where she could really raise hell.
Another was known to simply leave without notice; she was allowed being as she was banging one of the Parliamentarians.
One of the back office staff jumped the counter and backhanded an old Chinese guy who was not being happy about something and had a typical old Chinese guy attitude about it, meaning loud and mouthy.
There was one security guard who had TB and refused to do anything about it because the drugs made him feel worse than the disease.
Take into consideration that I was only part of the picture with her for a few years and I saw so much more there.
I will say that for the most part that the pilots were very professional and from what I can tell were not as much a part of the general circus as the ground staff appeared to be from what I was able to witness.
Well, there was the incident of a few of them and the flight stews making porno movies in the parked aircraft and uploading them onto “youporn” or some such…… That resulted in some dismissals.
If it is of any comfort, I gather that this kind of thing is more common than anyone would be comfortable with. I know, again from personal experience, that the security is quite lax in Singapore and Bangkok if you are with the right people. I don’t know that the tomfoolery I witnessed among the ground staff is so present being I didn’t spend any real length of time in either, but I suspect it is to some degree or another.
My lovely current wife was married to an American pilot who flew for Kuwait Airlines. She says there was no such silliness there. In fact she says the regimen in Kuwait and Jordan(He flew Royal Jordanian while they were married) was very strict. The caveat there being, he was grossly obese and flew those lines because he could not pass the physical for any US or EU airlines. It wasn’t hard to pay a doctor to sign him off in the Middle East. Fucker keeled over from a stroke when he was about 53. The good news is he did it in USA on the ground after an initial stroke in Thailand grounded him a year earlier.
“…because seriously, this is how big wars get going for no apparently logical reason.”
Well…this is certainly how people who rilly rilly want someone else to start their big war for them, would do that.
Expat,
“My opinion of Tam is ambivalent at best.”
I can’t tell you how tore up that makes me.
“She seems to have a very high regard for herself.”
Whereas it takes a humble man to have opinions of strangers on the internets.
Tam,
Actually you’ve insulted me a few times before so perhaps we’re almost acquainted?
Good to hear from you though. Keep trying to grow a pair.