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Corner post from Mark Steyn.
On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.
Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:
When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
More on the subject from David Warren.
When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
This in turn was quoted in an excellent article in the Daily Telegraph this week. Fraser Nelson asked all the pertinent questions about the indifference displayed by the British Foreign Office to the persecution of Christians (along with other minorities) in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria; indeed, throughout the Middle East. Why do our diplomats refuse even to raise the issue with their counterparts in these countries?
The same could be asked of most western foreign ministries. Germany is an exception, and apparently Angela Merkel has, to her credit, interceded discreetly but forcefully to get some restrictions lifted on Catholics in Turkey. If Canada is doing something, it is even more discreet.
But of course, formal restrictions on Christian life and worship in Muslim countries – which would be considered outrageous if they were applied to Muslims in any western country – are endemic. They vary not so much in content, as in enforcement, and as a rule, become heavier when any society is in convulsion, lighter when it is not. In other words, Christians, formerly Jews (before their general exodus, when Israel was founded), and other minorities such as Shia Muslims in Sunni lands, are accustomed to becoming scapegoats when things having nothing to do with them go wrong.
And this is the case now. The “Arab Spring,” which was welcomed this year as an expression of “democracy” by the West’s political, media, and chattering classes, has brought social convulsion to one Arab state after another. Against the background of what is to my view instead a large catastrophe, Christian communities that have existed in each state since centuries before the arrival of Islam, are being eliminated. …
Air France Flight 447 that crashed in the South Atlantic two years ago has been the subject of two items from Der Spiegel in Pickings here and here. Now, cockpit conversations from the flight recorder have been translated and explained by Popular Mechanics.
For more than two years, the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the mid-Atlantic in the early hours of June 1, 2009, remained one of aviation’s great mysteries. How could a technologically state-of-the art airliner simply vanish?
With the wreckage and flight-data recorders lost beneath 2 miles of ocean, experts were forced to speculate using the only data available: a cryptic set of communications beamed automatically from the aircraft to the airline’s maintenance center in France. As PM found in our cover story about the crash, published two years ago this month, the data implied that the plane had fallen afoul of a technical problem—the icing up of air-speed sensors—which in conjunction with severe weather led to a complex “error chain” that ended in a crash and the loss of 228 lives.
The matter might have rested there, were it not for the remarkable recovery of AF447′s black boxes this past April. Upon the analysis of their contents, the French accident investigation authority, the BEA, released a report in July that to a large extent verified the initial suppositions. An even fuller picture emerged with the publication of a book in French entitled Erreurs de Pilotage (volume 5), by pilot and aviation writer Jean-Pierre Otelli, which includes the full transcript of the pilots’ conversation.
We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with a large system of thunderstorms, its speed sensors became iced over, and the autopilot disengaged. In the ensuing confusion, the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots.
Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. After all, the men who crashed AF447 were three highly trained pilots flying for one of the most prestigious fleets in the world. If they could fly a perfectly good plane into the ocean, then what airline could plausibly say, “Our pilots would never do that”?
Here is a synopsis of what occurred during the course of the doomed airliner’s final few minutes.
At 1h 36m, the flight enters the outer extremities of a tropical storm system. Unlike other planes’ crews flying through the region, AF447′s flight crew has not changed the route to avoid the worst of the storms. The outside temperature is much warmer than forecast, preventing the still fuel-heavy aircraft from flying higher to avoid the effects of the weather. Instead, it ploughs into a layer of clouds.
At 1h51m, the cockpit becomes illuminated by a strange electrical phenomenon. The co-pilot in the right-hand seat, an inexperienced 32-year-old named Pierre-Cédric Bonin, asks, “What’s that?” The captain, Marc Dubois, a veteran with more than 11,000 hours of flight time, tells him it is St. Elmo’s fire, a phenomenon often found with thunderstorms at these latitudes.
At approximately 2 am, the other co-pilot, David Robert, returns to the cockpit after a rest break. At 37, Robert is both older and more experienced than Bonin, with more than double his colleague’s total flight hours. The head pilot gets up and gives him the left-hand seat. Despite the gap in seniority and experience, the captain leaves Bonin in charge of the controls.
At 2:02 am, the captain leaves the flight deck to take a nap. Within 15 minutes, everyone aboard the plane will be dead. …
… Today the Air France 447 transcripts yield information that may ensure that no airline pilot will ever again make the same mistakes. From now on, every airline pilot will no doubt think immediately of AF447 the instant a stall-warning alarm sounds at cruise altitude. Airlines around the world will change their training programs to enforce habits that might have saved the doomed airliner: paying closer attention to the weather and to what the planes around you are doing; explicitly clarifying who’s in charge when two co-pilots are alone in the cockpit; understanding the parameters of alternate law; and practicing hand-flying the airplane during all phases of flight.
But the crash raises the disturbing possibility that aviation may well long be plagued by a subtler menace, one that ironically springs from the never-ending quest to make flying safer. Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplane’s avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what’s going on. They’ll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can’t be trusted? What’s the most pressing threat? What’s going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers.
Michael Kinsley defends Wal-Mart.
In cultural commentary about the American economy, one company at a time always seems to be the goat. Everything it does is interpreted as evil. In the 1950s it was General Motors. GM’s CEO, Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson, became a national figure of ridicule for telling a congressional committee, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” Except that he actually said, “For years I thought that what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa” — which is quite a different proposition.
In the 1990s the goat was Microsoft.* That famous antitrust case looks a bit silly in retrospect, don’t you think? Turns out it wasn’t Microsoft that was about to take over the world: It was Google.
Who is the goat today? Clearly it’s Wal-Mart, with perhaps an honorable mention for Amazon. But Amazon has ardent fans as well as ardent enemies. Does anybody really love Wal-Mart? Well, I’m a pretty big fan. It’s fun to roam the aisles and see what people are buying. Nineteen-inch flat-screen TVs for $98! That’s pretty great, but I don’t need one.
A couple of weeks ago, my colleague at Bloomberg Jeff Goldberg launched a ferocious attack on Sam Walton’s daughter, Alice (net worth: $21 billion), for building a billion-dollar art museum in Bentonville, Ark., where Wal-Mart has its headquarters, and stocking it with American art. He calls it a “moral tragedy.” Why? Because Alice Walton’s money is tainted by its source: Wal-Mart.
What is Wal-Mart doing that is so wrong? …