Hey look! It’s my first foray into a current event. Well, a sort of current event. Whatever, who’s going to quibble over a blog being written about an event a mere four weeks after it happens, it’s not like this blog has family…. waiting for it in a hotel somewhere keeping a desperate eye on the sky.
5. No one knows anything about geography
Or history. The first thing I thought of when I heard there was a missing (and not crashed Malaysian Air flight) is that maybe the Indonesians had something to do with it as the two countries share a land border, have fought a war, have some current “issues” regarding where the border should be, and a little area called Ambalat. Of course my little bit of idle speculation was wrong (see item number 4 on this list) but I got to drone on and on about something no one cares about. Which was fun, for me. More fun was had later when some important facts became established (see item #3 on this list) when it became widely known that contact with the doomed airliner was lost over the South China Sea (not the part near China) near Thai waters then turned hard left to fly back over Malaysia, possibly Indonesia and onward to either Kazakhstan or the middle of nowhere in the Indian Ocean (but not the part near India). China was searching waters around Vietnam. The USA was searching somewhere (see item number 2 on this list) south of India, and suddenly Australia became important. I should really carry a map in my pocket when I need to explain things like this.
4. Don’t trust some dude with a blog on the internet
I’ll admit it, I got taken in by A Startling Simple Theory. It made so much sense to me, it was the elusive Occam’s Razor for why a Boeing vanished. Sadly, some facts were overlooked and the simple theory didn’t hold up to the harsh critique of a peer, media, and expert review. This is probably because the theory was so startlingly simple that more than one person had to have thought about it. This meshes nicely with a theory I have and hold dear:
You’re not the smartest person in the room.
3. News organizations are stupid
The old school hater in me blames CNN and the advent of the 24 hour news cycle for this. The hipster in me blames Twitter. But I love Twitter and hating on CNN is too mainstream, so those reasons can’t be right. In actuality there are a lot of people on the planet, seeing a lot of things, having a lot of different opinions on the same event. We’re in a new age where limitless information is available, unfiltered, at any time. Humanity isn’t capable of processing what’s coming into our brains and news organizations haven’t managed to balance the immediate need for information with the need to filter the speculation from the fact immediately. I suppose news organizations aren’t really stupid and that my paragraph title is needlessly inflammatory, but that’s what it is. Choose to accept it or discard it. Your choice.
2. The World is really really freaking big
Try looking for something that’s lost somewhere in your house, like a passport. There are only so many places you would possibly put a passport, but damn if it isn’t hard to find it when you’re leaving the country in the morning. You’ll spend 5 hours tearing the house apart, looking at every piece of paper you can find, only to discover you used it to register the car and it’s in the glove box. Hypothetically. Now imagine you had to find something, anything, in your city. Or your province. Or TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND square miles of remote, ill tempered ocean. Even if you have some clues (a passport can only be in so many damn places) to narrow down the search. Good god is the world big.
1. Humanity is not nearly as safe as we think we are
I have to admit the world I live in is pretty damn good. There’s no group of people anywhere in the world, or in history that have it as good and as easy as me. The fact that we, as a species, can master flight yet lose a gigantic airplane has to make you pause and ponder. Despite our navies, satellites, iPhones, radar, internet, exactly 6000 years of human intellectual evolution design, and everything else we’ve accomplished to this point, we lost a plane. We lost a plane, we cared about losing the plane, and we tried to find the plane, yet all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t find the damn thing. On an average day, for the average person, living an average (or slightly above average) lifestyle the world seems pretty easy. Food, shelter, love, security are all readily available until something goes wrong. And things will always go wrong.
Your One Stop Stalk 