If You Want To Play With Big Boy Toys........

Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysian Minister for Education. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Acting Transportation Minister of Malaysia, Hishamuddin Hussein, today announced that the "raw" Inmarsat data is to be released perhaps within the next twenty-four hours or so in an effort to maintain transparency and to establish truth as to how searchers for the MH 370 arrived at their conclusions that the doomed flight ended in the south Indian Ocean. I was under the impression that this information would be released last week but then perhaps I was confused yet again by the inept and downright dishonest way that Malaysia has handled this entire matter and the total disregard with which the families of the passengers have been treated.

This latest debacle has become just par for the course in terms of the mismanagement of this investigation. It is clear that the Malaysians are idiots and that any attempt on their part to interpret the Inmarsat data for the public is as doomed as their investigation into the disappearance of the Boeing Triple Seven.

The plane is gone without a trace. Not a seat cushion, a plastic cup or a laminated baggage tag, attributable to the missing flight has been retrieved from the multiple search sites in the south Indian Ocean despite assurances from Malaysia and the Australians (who are looking like as big a bunch of losers as the Malaysians right about now) that the "data" was being constantly refined and that there were countless trained pairs of eyes aboard ships, choppers, P3s, New Zealand Air Force planes...the list of resources goes on and on. All of the ELTs apparently failed on this aircraft and there was no infrared satellite event that would have indicated a crash. The supposed experts laughed when the Chinese reported pings from the black boxes but did not doubt the results from their own pinger locater despite the fact that they were not the correct frequency for black box transmissions but were the correct frequency for fishing net locators used by south Indian Ocean fishermen. One might ask why no one in Malaysia or Australia knew about these pingers on these fishing nets...presumably no one in either country knows fuck all about fishing or perhaps they're all too busy being all too important to concern themselves with such mundane matters. In any case the plane is still gone without a trace; the investigation is hopelessly botched, the families are pissed and the Bluefin 21 (the wrong equipment for a search of the deepest parts of the south Indian Ocean) is not available after the end of this week. The Aussies believe the search will be delayed until perhaps August!

What do we know for certain in all this mess? We know that grief in any language looks and sounds the same. We also know that government officials, no matter what country they represent are all a bunch of entitled, condescending, emotionally retarded nut jobs that should not be trusted with the very simplest of tasks (folding laundry in a locked psychiatric ward comes readily to mind). We know that investigations of this scale are perhaps best conducted by impartial, private sector companies less concerned with how things look and more concerned with how things really are. What is not so clear, to my mind at least is why a company like Boeing with its reputation is selling Triple Sevens to Banana Republics incapable of tracking, servicing, flying or maintaining them let alone conducting an investigation when (notice I did not say if) something goes terribly wrong and dozens if not hundreds of souls are lost. Selling a Triple Seven to Malaysia seems to me as irresponsible as giving a BMW to a two year-old and instructing him to "have fun". To date, I do not know of a plane with training wheels  but if Boeing makes one, I would recommend they sell it to Malaysia!

More about the big boy toys in my next post.......

Related articles

• MH370: What's next?
• Missing Plane Found? Nope, but Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370 Data to get Another Review

Would Dr. Atkins Approve?

Robert Atkins (nutritionist) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Would Dr. Atkins approve of garcinia cambogia or green coffee bean extract or the new probiotic Cardioviva which is already approved for the Canadian market and is due to hit the American, European and Australian markets sometime this year? The answer is an unequivocal YES!
While there has been a good deal of speculation as to the cause of Dr. Robert Atkins‘ death, I have it first hand from the foundation he and his wife Veronica started and which she administers to this day, that Dr. Atkins died due a slip and fall injury which caused a subdural hematoma (bleeding in the brain), coma and ultimately death.
While Dr. Atkins was a minimalist when it came to both pharmaceuticals and supplements, he was always careful to use evidence-based practice, rather than fad thinking. Very few people also know that Dr. Atkins was initially a cardiologist, that he loved good food and had his own battles with weight management during his years in medical school, internship and residency. He never became an emaciated rake of a man and never advocated anyone becoming an advertisement for anorexia nervosa!
Dr. Atkins established the relationships between obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and heart disease pretty early on and advocated diet wherever possible to combat hypertension, high cholesterol and the sedentary lifestyle that often accompanies obesity.
Was Dr. Atkins bulletproof? Not hardly! Did he have atherosclerosis? Quite probably since there is not a person alive past the age of 12 who does not! Was Dr. Atkins subject to accidents, injury, disease and death? Certainly! All too often detractors of the low carbohydrate diet forget Dr. Atkins’ advocacy of whole foods, often raw and unpeeled. And few would see commercially prepared bread, sugar in all its disguises, genetically modified food or highly processed food as healthful in any way.