2014 is already the deadliest year for air travel since 2010, data show. http://t.co/6SfvjTtDrm pic.twitter.com/BfILvsHsN4
— Gerard Baker (@gerardtbaker) July 24, 2014
Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal tweets, “2014 is already the deadliest year for air travel since 2010, data show.”
Meanwhile, PJM’s David Steinberg spots an alarming bit of synchronicity in a Drudge-linked post: “Boeing 777s, After 18 Spotless Years, Crash Three Times Since July 2013:”
The disappearance of MH370 certainly appears to have been terror — the pilot intended to at least hijack the flight, though I have yet to hear evidence that he chose a 777 for any reason relating to the product itself. And MH17 most definitely was taken down by terror, though intercepted recordings point to the malicious operators of the Buk having not intended to target a passenger craft, much less a 777 specifically.
The San Francisco crash, strange at was, was stranger still in that a fatality occurred when a survivor was struck by an emergency vehicle.
In a year, 540 people have perished on one of the safest, soundest transports ever created — and it’s still just as safe as ever. Crazy world.
It’s always been a crazy planet; as Michael Ledeen recently wrote, “The World Is Returning to Normal:”
Of all the popular myths about “how the world works,” the most dangerous to us at this moment is the one that goes “peace is normal, war is an aberration.” Truth is, war is normal and peace very unusual. We’ve lived through a happy time, ever since the Second World War. Thanks to American superpower, and the destruction of the totalitarian regimes in Rome, Berlin and Moscow, we’ve had a happy period of relative peace. Very few big wars. Little genocides (China is exceptional, but they changed to accommodate the global pattern). Deterrence (as in “mutual assured destruction”) mostly worked.
That was a rare time. Now we’re getting back to normal. There’s a good reason for that old Roman wisdom “if you want peace, prepare for war.” It’s because “peace” most always happens when somebody wins a war, and then imposes conditions on the losers. That’s what “peace conferences” are all about. Our recent happy time was the result of war, and our adoption of the Roman wisdom. We smashed our enemies, we created military alliances to deter our new enemies (NATO, etcetera), we built and maintained a big arsenal on land, air and sea.
We prepared for war to make peace possible.
As Michael notes, in the past, the world was made safer when men who had America’s best interest at heart were in power and the notion of America as the world’s policeman was met with, well, perhaps a sneer from our enemies, but not a dismissive eye roll and chuckle.
Related: “President To Dem Donors: ‘You’re Chronicling The Slow Deterioration Of Barack Obama.’” And funding the rapid deterioration of America itself. (Not to mention the rest of the world as well.)
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