It is shocking that 80% of Americans do not have a passport. Half of Americans cannot find China on a world map. For most Americans, the U.S. is the world. One of the many benefits of marrying outside your race/language/culture is the opportunity to travel with an expert guide. I will be going on my fourth trip to China soon, having already visited Beijing, Shanghai, the Gobi dessert, the clay soldiers at Xian, the Buddhist sculptures at Dunhuang and many other places. Every trip is fascinating. Forget Disneyland and get out into the world - it is a beautiful place. As for the stereotypes about "asians" and "whites", that's all they are. I could have met a good western women, but I happened to meet a very intelligent, well-educated and beautiful Chinese woman instead. Lucky for me. And as for "asian women" being submissive or lacking power, my wife with 2 graduate degrees, fluency in 3 languages and earning a high income will get a good laugh out of that. One final thing - as I said, the world financial situation is changing fast. China will soon be as rich or richer than the U.S. and the whole history of european domination of the resources of asia will be seen as a temporary aberation.

Your point is well taken. On the other hand, I think that if most Americans can afford the 2,000 square foot house, the 2 SUVs and the trip to Disneyland, they can afford a trip abroad. Once you are in Asia, the dollar goes very far. The U.S. is one of the world's richest countries. If Australians and Canadians can travel, why can't we?

Patrick,

What I get from this article is that there are several serious design problems with this airbus plane.

1. Pitot tubes can lead to overspeed.

2. Plane is far too dependent on flight computers and these computers are much too easily confused by sensor data.

3. Composites are not tested adequately and the way the tail was cleanly sheered off in both the Air France crash and the Rockaways crash may indicate a weakness in tail design.

These are all very serious issues and I am glad you have now addressed them.

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As I said in a previous letter, Patrick is quite correct in his use of "so-called". According to the Oxford English Dictionary,

2. In attributive use (hyphened): Called or designated by this name or term, but not properly entitled to it or correctly described by it. Also loosely or catachr. as a term of abuse.

More recently, and now quite commonly (esp. in technical contexts), used merely to call attention to the description, without implication of incorrectness, as in (b). Cf. Du. zoogenaamd, -genoemd, -gezeid, G. sogenannt.

Patrick is using "so-called" to call attention to a technical term without any implication of incorrectness.

You write:

"there is a specific procedure, expected to be memorized by all A330 pilots, to be used when airspeed sensors fail. That procedure calls for manually setting engine thrust to a specific value. So the particular "computer generated" overspeed scenario laid out by Patrick, in order to be true, would imply pilot error as well"

Well and good. But what if the computers and pilots have no idea that the pitot tubes are partially blocked with ice and giving falsely slow readings, causing the computers to increase thrust to dangerous levels? Should this situation not have been anticipated? I can think of another situation in which ice and excessive speed caused a great loss of life in the Atlantic. That was also due to hubris.

There are other pilots who have very different ideas about the events of 9/11. See http://pilotsfor911truth.org/

Regarding the official explanation of the "so-called" terror attacks on 9/11:

"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action"

Bertrand Russell

I sill believe that it is incredible that a modern airplane could be brought down by an automated system relying on faulty pitot tubes. This is what I mean by hubris - the overreliance on advanced technology, which is a form of arrogance every bit as bad as the arrogance of steaming full speed into a field of icebergs just to set a speed record.

As far as the pilot who died during the flight - this is, of course, a non-issue except for one thing - how could the medical exam have failed to stop his heart condition?

I meant "spot" his heart condition. Entropy intrudes.

For those, like me, with limited vocabularies:

Adiabatic:

1. Impassable to heat; involving neither loss nor acquisition of heat

"Life somehow goes on no matter if it was caused by psychotic government officials with their hearts set on the new world order or some bearded people in a cave"

Interesting. By this reasoning, there is no point in investigating, apprehending, prosecuting and incarcerating mass murderers. This is a novel and fresh approach to what we used to call "justice" and "truth". Anyway, I hear there's a sale on at the mall....

As a LW pointed out, very few Americans are psychologically prepared to dispassionately look at the evidence regarding 9/11, which I don't intend to go into given the hundreds of books and thousands of articles on the subject. Instead, they swallow the absurd official explanation holus-bolus. WTC 7, a steel and concrete building, simply collapsed, we don't know why, and don't ask. The steel from the site was immediately shipped to China to be melted down instead of testing it for explosive residues, thereby illegally removing evidence from a crime scene.

To paraphrase Voltaire, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you accept atrocities"