It may still be some time before we find out what was really going on in the cockpit of the jet that operated as NW 188 from San Diego to Minneapolis. What is known is that for something over one hour, the plane was unresponsive to attempts to contact it by air traffic controllers and the company itself (via whatever means it has to communicate with planes in-flight). During this period of “running silent”, the plane overshot its destination and had to turn around to land in Minneapolis. And this, only after flight attendants had to bang on the cockpit door to get the crew to respond. Meanwhile, interceptor jets were apparently prepared to take-off to intervene. In the post-9/11 era, “intervention” includes the unthinkable possibility of a military jet shooting down a commercial airliner.
So-called experts called in by the media to speculate on what had gone wrong seemed to generally agree that the pilots had probably fallen asleep. They “reassured” us that it is not at all uncommon for pilots to fall asleep while flying. (Don’t you feel better knowing that?) But the pilots themselves claimed that they were embroiled in a heated argument and failed to hear the attempts to contact them. That explanation always seemed implausible to me. But now, their explanation has been revised to them both working on laptop computers, and were not aware of attempts to contact them. What!? We move from a verbal knock-down, drag-out, to simply a couple of people working on laptops and distracted to the point that for over an hour, they are unaware of the very radios they are required to listen and respond to? Do you suppose anyone is buying this? I’m not.
And now, according to reports I heard today, the cockpit voice recorder is…blank. Uh huh. When that voice recorder could corroborate one or another of the various “explanations” of what was going on in that plane, but now it cannot, I am lead to believe that there is yet another explanation that is far more embarrassing, or scandalous that neither pilot wishes to have disclosed and that is why they erased the recorder, which a report today said they could do, once they had landed the airplane.
All three scenarios that have been offered (sleep, argument, laptops) are utterly unsatisfying. Irrespective of which one it might be (or even another, yet to be reveled), these pilot have betrayed the trust of their employers, the agencies that license them to fly, and especially the passengers they are paid to safely deliver to their planned destinations. And given the catastrophic possibility of the plane having to be brought down by a fighter jet as a contingency against a terrorist hijacking the two pilots involved in this incident really should be planning on a new line of work. No matter what was REALLY going on in that plane.
On some level,this product makes me glad that I am not a golfer. But for those of you who are, you should check this out and consider adding it to your bag. It’s “the only club in your bag guaranteed to keep you out of the woods!”
Has anyone seen a man holding a golf club under a towel that is hanging from the front of his pants? If you have, NOW you know what he was REALLY doing.
I acknowledge the inherent risks in being a man and posting a link to this article, as it might leave the impression that I do so out of some satisfaction from its conclusions. As the husband of a wife, father of a daughter and hopefully someday the father-in-law to a daughter-in-law, that is not the case at all. Instead, I found it contained some refreshingly honest criticisms of “feminism” from inside its camp by some of its members and spokespersons…(I used that word as I assume “spokeswomen” might be taken with offensein our age of gender neutrality, thanks in part to feminism.)
The link above is to an interesting article by Albert Mohler that reflects on several newspaper and magazine essays and a book about feminism. On one hand, I am surprised by what has been revealed in these finding, and then again, I’m not. Having worked for many years in the corporate world, with many women professionals, the downsides to the women’s revolution were played out right before my eyes.
This whole matter can be filed in the “you need to be careful for what you ask for, because you just might get it, and then some” category.
This article is an opinion piece from the WSJ, but it also cites studies and research from respected institutes and academia. The conclusions found in this article come closer to the truth than anything you will hear out of the Obama administration, or Congress.
And these the same same folks who are rationalizing all sorts of savings for the U.S. economy from remaking the health care system. Yeah, right!
Readers of JT’s blog are already aware the subject of this post. But for those who are not familiar with that blog, here is a LINK to an article in the September issue of The Atlantic Online. It is written by a man named David Goldhill, who identifies himself as a Democrat and a business executive. It is a long article; over 10,000 words and it will take you some time to go through it. However, this is the most powerful and informative thing that I have seen yet on the broad subject of health care in the United States, and its institutionalized problems, that are in fact in need of reform. As the writer of the article notes though, virtually nothing that is being discussed by Congress now, comes even close to fixing the fundamental problems with our health care system.
This article stands so far and above all of the other highly partisan/politicized rhetoric, that I emphatically encourage you to read this thing carefully. My linking to it is not to suggest that I agree with all of his recommendations. But his is the first voice of reason that I have heard among all of the other conversations about this very hot topic.
Stand up and stretch, grab a cup of coffee and dig in. You will be amazed. At least I was.
No question about it, college basketball is big in the state of Kentucky. The Universities of Kentucky and Louisville are both winners in the sport and that makes them big deals in their home state. And apparently, winning in basketball is sufficient to cause administrators at Louisville to overlook a particular covenant in the contract they hold with their head basketball coach, Rick Pitino. That covenant stating that Pitino can be terminated for: “Employee’s dishonesty with Employer or University; or acts of moral depravity.” (emphasis mine)
Pitino has admitted to having engaged in extramarital sexual relations with a woman (who later became an assistant coaches’ wife…talk about awkward), and paying her $3,000 to obtain an abortion of the child that the she claimed was his. The matter has become national news as the woman involved in this situation tried to extort Pitino for $10 million dollars and is now under arrest. Pitino had revealed the details of his extramarital relationship to the University of Louisville prior to the woman being arrested. This fact, I suppose, allowed him to escape certain of the clauses of his employment contract dealing with honesty, that could otherwise have resulted in his dismissal.
But what is odd to me is the apparent relativism of the term “moral depravity.” If the sexual betrayal of his wife, now a fact known far and wide, does not qualify as moral depravity, I am not sure what would. Apparently Louisville has no plans to dismiss Pitino as a result of his breach of this clause. Should we therefore conclude that only such things such as theft or embezzlement, or fraud, or other matters of that nature qualify as “moral depravity”?
Or with respect to sexual morality, would only the more radical forms such as paedophilia, or homosexuality, or bestiality be extreme enough to qualify as “moral depravity” under the terms of Pitino’s contract? I have to wonder exactly what would be the trigger mechanism to activate this clause in Pitino’s contract thus leading the university to terminate him.
Oh, wait a minute, maybe “moral depravity” is only something related to losing basketball games. Perhaps losing, and losing alone, is what constitutes immorality and depravity at the University of Louisville. That is about the only conclusion you can draw from this whole “affair”, pardon the expression.
Even serious news channels seem to be obsessed with “the big announcement” that came from the trainwreck of a show, otherwise known as “Jon & Kate plus Ei8ht“. (And no, I did not misspell eight, this is how TLC has graphicly titled the show, using the numeral “8″ instead if a “g” in the word eight. Oh, ha ha ha, aren’t they clever?) And here it is, the big announcement, in case you missed it… Jon & Kate are going to get a divorce. Wow, who could have seen this coming? If these two can’t make it, what hope is there for the rest of us?
What a sham this show is. From two ostensibly stay-at-home parents of sets of twins and sextuplets, to Jon and Kate’s on-camera complaints about the unnatural lifestyle they are “burdened” with by having a production crew around all the time, and now lamenting that their relationship problems are being played out in the tabloids, where is the “real” in this so-called “reality” show? Give me a break. Typical of our culture that seems to value victim status, these two knuckle-heads are looking for scapegoats to blame for their just impending divorce. Apparently, they see right past themselves as they sit in front of the mirrors while being made-up for the filming of their show.
I’ll grant you that the very nature of this odd show and its production would put a strain on any relationship. But, who exactly is responsible for that? The short answer, that does not require a whole lot of deliberation is, Jon & Kate. In the promotional pieces leading up to the show that aired Monday night, they claim that their just announced divorce has been long in the making. Yet they appear to be too dumb to figure out the cause. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with their intellectual capacity, maybe it is just good old fashioned greed. Either way, rather than try to repair the rift in their marriage by putting an end the very show that has contributed to the ripping of their “one flesh” and privately starting an effort at reconciliation, they have now contrived some “arrangement” wherein, they will house their kids on their Pennsylvania estate, and the two of them will alternate residence. One can only assume that the schedule of which parent is present at any given time will be dictated by the production needs of the television show. If this is not ample evidence of the lower priority they place on the integrity of their collective family, versus the money to be made by the nearly unbridled exploitation of it, I don’t know what else can be offered.
Perhaps the most charitable thing that people of good conscience can do would be to stop watching this show in such convincing numbers that its advertisers and the network cancel it so that these 10 people can get back to a true reality. As a sad commentary on our voyeuristic culture, I am guessing that our appetite has not been satisfied by merely watching this family come apart at the seams.
I admit, I am probably not terribly cool. Of course, being in my mid-50’s no doubt contributes to that. It simply goes with the territory. That said, I do consider myself open to the benefits that are derived from so-called social media. I suppose that this blog itself falls somewhere in the genre of networking, although it clearly falls well short of the ”power to connect” in near real-time, as is the case with other forms of social media.
I don’t have a facebook account, for a couple of reasons. Even after it was opened up to people who were not still in college, I thought it seemed a little weird for someone my age to have an account. I know lots of “mature” folks who have facebook accounts, including my lovely wife. She enjoys the networking and often tells me about people she has “friended” via facebook. Perhaps on a subconscious level I fear rejection and being a person with a facebook account and no friends, or worse, just a bunch off “pity-friends”, a term I may have just made up. And, as someone who is mildly competitive, I am not sure that Ashton Kutcher’s million plus friends is a goal that is, in any shape or form, one that would be attainable by me.
In all seriousness, while I am still groping for the real benefits, I remain open to the possibility that I will someday understand why I would want to establish a facebook account. Perhaps it is the ability to communicate more effectively with my younger friends who seem to prefer this method above all others for staying in contact electronically with their peers. And that might be the only reason to do so. Still, the broader benefit of having a facebook account is not readily apparent to me at the present.
One of the social networking tools that absolutely defies understanding for me is twitter. I cherish the thought of someone actually sitting down in front of me, face-to-face, to explain what twitter is all about. I’ve seen and read the blogs, I’ve seen the YouTube video published by twitter explaining how it works, and I still absolutely don’t get it. It is so not apparent to me that this graphic says it all. (In the process, it might also provide something of a near clinical diagnosis of why other types or forms of social media are so popular.)
In complete fairness, as a straight man, I am perhaps not the most qualified to assess the “beauty” of another man. That said, I do understand how women find certain men to be handsome, which I guess is the masculine form of beauty. And of course, we know that ”beauty is only skin deep” and that the adjective “beautiful” can be used to describe both the outward and the inward qualities of a person.
Still, I suspect that People Magazine is largely referring to physical appearance when they create their annual World’s Most Beautiful People editions. This year’s cover will be graced by Christina Applegate, and others on the list include Halle Berry, the stars of the TV show 90210, Taylor Swift, Zac Efron, and Julianna Hough.
Reuters is reporting that these two Obama Administration officials are also among this year’s World’s Most Beautiful People. Really!
In the event you do not recognize these gentlemen, they are Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff (on the left), and Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury (also on the left).
I’ll be up front and say that I am not in the least bit suggesting that these guys are so hideous that they scare small children. But I strain to see how they are lumped into the same category as Zac Efron, Channing Tatum, and Tristan Wild, or some of the old stand-bys such as Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who also make this year’s list.
So, what am I missing? Is it possible that People Magazine is so charmed by our new president and his cabinet that this is what happens? Would it have been a bit too apparent that they are simply enchanted(to use a hot new term) by Barack Obama himself if they had put him on the list along with his wife?
With the assumption that you are far more objective about this, help me out and take the poll below. Are these guys on the right list?
Posted by Chuck 
Posted by Chuck 
Posted by Chuck 
