Politics: National

A helicopter crew aboard the destroyer USS Kidd in the Indian Ocean, involved in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue

There will be much Monday-morning quarterbacking on the Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Not here. Over two days, beginning March 17, I predicted where the missing plane would be found and by whom, providing reasoning to back it up. Thereafter I gave frequent updates of analysis and criticism as new developments occurred.  Sift through the full record of date-stamped comments, here.

The errors of investigators and of the media reporting on them can be summed up as three logical fallacies: confirmation bias, argument from authority, and argument from ignorance.

Searchers began their efforts in a part of the ocean known to accumulate vast collections of garbage (it's even called a "garbage gyre"), yet the media treated every stray object floating in the water as if it had a good chance to be plane debris instead of almost certainly being garbage, despite repeated disappointments. 

Soon the satellite photographs showed many hundreds of objects, an embarrassment of riches. Suddenly, the search shifted hundreds of miles to the north, to an area which, coincidentally, offered searchers far more congenial weather. The mass of objects in the old search area was summarily dismissed, even though most of these remained unexamined. When new objects were spotted in the new search area, the media response remained the same. This time for sure!

When Republicans were conservationists: Theodore Roosevelt with Sierra Club founder and activist John Muir.

Obamacare is doing better than expected. Benghazi lacks traction. The vast enterprise of "conservative" politics needs something, anything, to keep the red-state proles in the state of constant agitation that is so profitable for the oligarchs that bankroll it. Could Cliven Bundy be the ticket?

This is the man who has been flouting the law for years, grazing his cattle on public lands northeast of Las Vegas. When the feds finally moved in to seize the livestock, an armed protest caused them to withdraw.

To the right he is a hero standing up against federal "tyranny." A National Review writer likened his "little sedition" to the non-violent movement of Ghandi.

I broke away from a larger Rogue project to offer a few thoughts, given the interest by our readers here. You should especially read Soleri's excellent comments on l'affaire Bundy on the thread below the previous post.

Actually being someone from the West, among my first thoughts was how could Bundy be grazing 900 head in such desolate country? At least when I was growing up, a 640-acre "section" of Arizona rangeland could support only about 20 head — and that was barring drought.

Comes the New York Times with an op-ed headlined, "Global warming scare tactics." One point is indisputable: that journalists and those concerned about climate change shouldn't leap to blame the phenomenon for every major natural disaster.

But the deeper point embedded is that those of us in the reality-based community can't reach our fellow citizens on the right unless we tamp down our sense of "obligation to convey the alarming facts":

While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.

A host of little nagging problems trails this article like feral dogs chasing an SUV through the remains of suburbia. The authors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, are primus inter pares among the robooted "pragmatic" environmental movement. In almost every case, they argue environmentalism has lost, apparently because of its bellicosity, and must "move on." Alternatives must become cheaper than fossil fuels. How this can happen when policy prevents fossil fuels from being accurately priced, they never say. And new nukes aren't being built because of resistance from greens, but from Wall Street.

But this is the small stuff. The big one is how America has pretty much come to the end of dialogue. This has happened only one other time, during the 1850s, with the compromisers dead and the nation headed to the Civil War. Oh, my stars and garters! I am being alarmist! Uh…hmmm…can I not alienate conservative readers?

The first F-35 Joint Strike Fighter arrived at Luke Air Force Base this week, which will be the primary training base for the new airplane.

The memory of Frank Luke deserves better. But it is also appropriate that the quintessence of the Military Industrial Complex's rackets should be operating alongside the top guns of the Real Estate Industrial Complex's hustles.

If you're new to the F-35 Lightning II, the program was intended to produce an affordable, durable, next-generation stealth fighter that could be manufactured in mass numbers to replace all of today's fighters. Not only that, but it would be used by all the jet-based services, including the Marines who demanded a short take-off and vertical landing version.

It was intended to be widely sold to U.S. allies. And this backbone of the future Air Force, Marine and naval tactical aviation was touted as a wonder: Not only with stealth capabilities, but a highly advanced "combat suite" for the pilot, including a helmet providing 360-degree "situational awareness" and relaying this to other F-35s and controllers.

Instead, it has become a disaster of trillion-dollar proportions. Only Lockheed Martin is happy.

Godwin's Law posits that the longer an Internet discussion goes on, the greater the risk of an analogy to Hitler and the Nazis. It didn't take long with Ukraine*. Thus, conservatives have compared Vladimir Putin's grab for the Crimea to Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland on the eve of World War II. That makes President Obama a Chamberlain appeaser. Even Hillary Clinton reportedly brought up Hitler.

Putin is not a Hitler. Obama is not a Chamberlain. This is not Munich revisited — oh, how many foreign policy disasters have we made in order to forestall a "second Munich." This is ignorance mixed with bad taste considering how the Russians suffered under Hitler.

The first thing to remember is that only Americans forget history, and history lays heavy on Ukraine.

U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen after a visit aboard a Chinese submarine.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. — Mark Twain

As we approach the anniversary of World War I, we face another situation of an unprecedented globalized economy, with nations knitted together by trade, a long period of peace among the major powers ensured by a dominant imperial naval power trying to manage the rise of an ambitious, aggressive continental power.

Then, it was Great Britain working to "contain" Germany. As for the degree to which the world was connected, under the ideal that nations that traded together didn't go to war with each other, here is John Maynard Keynes:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.

He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.