The General Discussion Thread

[Publish Date updated to restore to front page]

Okay as an experiment here it is. Discuss your favourite generals here!

Well perhaps… Really this is simply the place to post news-items, fun-items or whatever takes your fancy. In short just post what you want here.

It’s just another wee experiment – comments welcome.

Squonk.

[Image: General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett (Stephen Fry)]

17,285 thoughts on “The General Discussion Thread

  1. Just to say that the tragedy above the Alps seems to be investigated with professional speed and determination to find out what happened. Black box is being retrieved and soon we all will know what happened . This site seems to have some photos and twitter feeds of comments But there must be some real time info on the German wings site itself.
    Anyway, contacts for those who like to know more are also given.
    http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/germanwings-absturz-absturz-von-airbus-a320-in-sued-frankreich-a-1025312.html

  2. You seem to be totally ignorant about what happened in the Sukhoi 100 crash, the MHs ones, the Asiana 14 one in SFO, etc., Nevermind.

    We were continually told that the cause of them would be told in due course, but we never got even part of the story in the end.

  3. Hello Nevermind.

    I’ve just set Phil’s telescope up. It’s a nice evening; hardly any wind and very mild. I got a couple of nice views of the moon and Venus, and then a bloody great cloud came over. I’ve left the ‘scope set up hoping the sky will clear.

  4. Nevermind

    Sorry to see that sad news of your Mother Country Folks…Blessings.

    Clark

    Hope you had luck with the Scope…i got deffo Aurora on mars photos…wasn’t sure at first but I’m convinced now…Just visible at the North Pole area.. There was Aurora activity at the time. Here –

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/115454618@N06/16921050152/

    Also Here is one from Monday about 10pm –

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/115454618@N06/16920909752/

    And a Big Bird for John –

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/115454618@N06/16920909152/in/photostream/

  5. Brian, the photo of Venus and Mars is remarkable. How did you take that?

    No, I ended up on the ‘phone for hours and hours, and by the time I was free I was too tired and chilly to try any more with the ‘scope.

  6. Yes I’m ignorant, its a human trait trowbridge, but I do not think that this accident will be anything others than that. It might even point to a floor in their software, who knows. It had some problems with landing some hours before, so whatever was or was not done in Spain, i.e. lets bring the bird back home for a serious look, could have led to this. We shall see.

    Great photos Clark and Phil, well done.

  7. Thanks Brian , just back from the dentist, had me molar drilled and filled, now the injection is slowly wearing off.

    Putting it into the A320 perspective, even the most perfect workhorse can fail, and what is a little toothache anyway. The sun is shining but there is a bitterly harsh north easterly blowing. Now going to light the fire.

  8. The investigation of the crash of the germanwings plane only gets more mysterious as there is nothing on the CVR except one of the pilots being outside, banging on the door in the futile effort to get back in, and the memory card of the FDR is missing.

    So it’s anyone’s guess what happened, but sabotage is still not an option!

  9. Now investigating and Lufthansa authorities are setting up the germanwings captain as the culprit for its crash, making out that he deliberately locked the cockpit door, and refusing to identify who he and the co-pilot are.

    It’s much more likely that the door could not be opened electronically because it had been damaged somehow by those who had already put the plane in its deadly descent – what had already removed or killed him in the process.

    In short, he didm’t answer or do anything about the co-pilot’s banging on the door and entreaties to open it because he couldn’t.

    Beginning to look more like the Sukhoi tragedy, and the stupid FBI should not just be assisting this cover up by looking for terrorists on the flight (the captain?) but for service personnel on the ground back in Barcelona who apparently made it happen.

    Like in Sukhoi, Lufthansa wants it now to look like a loony employee did it than it was a work of sophisticated sabotage.

  10. Shades of mh370. The co pilot was not responding to radio or crew banging on door and was breathing normally. Strange he wasn’t hyper ventilating.

  11. Right, Ben, and unconscious people are still breathing, and it takes a strong-willed, conscious suicide bomber to face his oncoming death for eight minutes without moving.

    Given the French record on getting to be bottom of complicated plots, don’t forget their record, and the one on CM of the still unsolved al-Hiilli murders – what William Hershkovitz apparently did, and was subsequently murdered for.

  12. “Shades of mh370. The co pilot was not responding to radio or crew banging on door and was breathing normally. Strange he wasn’t hyper ventilating.”

    Speaking of MH370 I hear two American airlines have since placed a ban on carrying lithium batteries in the cargo holds.

  13. He must have been in a trance. It seems humanly impossible to meet your death so calm and collected.

  14. Reminds me when the TVP, British media and the MoD went to the greatest lengths to make out the Royal Cadet Stephen Hilder had killed himself, so the planned murder of Dr. David Kelly could go ahead.

    As a result, both murders were declared suicides, though Hilder was not at all depressed, and Kelly tried to fight off his four killers.

    Anything goes those days with the media willing to claim the most outrageous things.

    Just heard Richard Quest, CNN’s biggest bullshitter about man-made air disasters, respond that it was “Absolutely not premature to declare the co-pilot a mass murderer!”

  15. Hello Squonk,

    DNS for squonk.tk wasn’t resolving; all other sites I tried were fine. I first noticed it at just before 20:00; still the same at 22:05. I’ve reported it to Plusnet tech support who have passed it on to their backend team. I’ve got here by using Google’s public DNS server at 8.8.8.8

    212.159.13.49 and …50 are Plusnet’s default DNS servers; tech support gave me 212.159.6.9 and …10 to try but they couldn’t resolve squonk.tk either.

  16. Revisiting the issue of psychotropics and unexplainable psycho reactions the 6 year estimated duration is a red flag. Many loose cannons lerking about.

  17. It seems some ISPs have no network route to the tk domain nameservers. Other ISPs do and the servers are definitely up. Problem said to be in the Netherlands. Hopefully fixed soon.

  18. Still the same DNS problem; can’t find the site with Plusnet’s DNS but Google’s work. I’ve manually entered an extra set of connection settings to make it easy to swap over.

    I hope these antibiotics start having some effect soon. Excruciating this morning.

  19. Whenever there is film of people in white overalls digging up a back garden or something and they are interviewing the neighbours they always say the same things: Nice; quiet; friendly; polite; kept himself to himself; loved his mother. The mass murderers are never violent antisocial crackheads.

    Then they say “he’s the last person you’d have thought”.

  20. Live launch to ISS at 7:42pm UK / 3:42pm EDT
    http://www.nasa.gov/

    Two humans are getting ready to say farewell to Earth for nearly 12 months. Today at 3:42 p.m. EDT, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka will launch to the International Space Station. Kelly and Kornienko will begin a one-year mission in space, testing the limits of human research, space exploration and the human spirit

    http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv



    Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

  21. “Now investigating and Lufthansa authorities are setting up the germanwings captain as the culprit for its crash, making out that he deliberately locked the cockpit door, and refusing to identify who he and the co-pilot are.”

    _________________________

    And not even 24 hours later we were told the names of the pilot and co-pilot.

    So much for the “refusing to identify”….

    Is there nothing to which Trousers Trowbridge will not react in knee-jerk fashion?

    Is there no shit he won’t come out with?

  22. Just the usual troll fight here and on CM to prevent any real discussion of the tragedy.

    Captain Patrick Sondenheimer did set up Andreas Lubitz as the fall guy for the disaster by leaving the cockpit permanently after the plane had reached cruising altitude – what led the co-pilot to lock its door for security reasons, and the Captain to go so slowly and quietly so the drugged co-pilot could not be roused to rectify the growing chaos.

  23. Funny how Washington and the Kremlin are publicly at loggerheads; John Goss tells us we might be immanently nuked, but a US astronaut is still welcome aboard a Soyuz with a couple of cosmonauts to go to the ISS. Maybe the Kremlin isn’t as pissed off with the US as it makes out; after all, that Neocon-supported coup gave the Kremlin a perfect excuse to snatch Crimea…

  24. Trowbridge,

    You don’t have 1/4 oz. evidence for all your speculation. Just your own fevered imagination.
    And nobody is trying to stop you posting about the tragedy, either here or at Craig’s.

  25. Have nothing but was has been reported by the media in setting him up as the fall guy for the crash.

    Today we are told by Bild that an ex- girl friend, flight attendant – still nothing from his current girl friend – said that he wanted to make a name for himself who everyone would remember, and that he had nightmares, once crying out “We are going down!” – what is made to look like he himself did it rather than the coming crash caused the nightmares!

    Then there are claims of his normal breathing while the plane was diving towards the mountains was because he practiced doing so for the real thing!

    (I practice doing all kinds of criminal acts in my bathroom, and pull them off every time, with no nightmares!)

    The shit in this mind-bogging cover up just keeps coming.

  26. And now the DM has headlined what his ex=girl friend said, changing her saying that he claimed he would do “something” to make himself famous into a “heinous act”!

    The media has descended into being nothing more than a hanging jury!

  27. I thought that it was only the restored Stuart monarchy that executed people who were already dead?

  28. Well, Tim, you are right until now, as the execution by the Windsor monarchy of poor Gareth Williams et al. showed after he had been placed in the carryall while he was dying, but other powers are now getting the idea, even killing their own citizens too.

  29. Trowbridge your knowledge of the German media is breathtakingly simplistic, you are quoting the Sun equivalent, a newspaper that makes things up as they go along, milking the issue , stirring the pot whilst the fire is hot. Your desperation in trying to find a sinister plot is almost funny, if not annoying, well worth the Blogs header
    ‘Adventures in cloud land’ , but futile.
    Are you a little obsessed with search terms?
    read this and calm down, no worries, there will be another conspiracy finding you in a minute.

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/the-germanwings-crash-and-the-pilot-who-caused-it-a-1025914.html

  30. Just more pathetic diversion from you. Nevermind.

    I have known what Bild is like for ages, like its cover up of Pim Fortuyn’s murder, apparently by the Mossad.

    Just reporting what it and the DM made out about what Andreas Lubitz’s former girl friend said about him – what is also in The Guardian.

    Why don’t you just shut up!

  31. Ah the antibiotics have started to improve things. I was woken up at six o’clock by the pain, had something to eat so I could pop some more pills, went back to bed and had my best sleep for over a week through till eleven. It still hurts but I don’t need so much ibuprofen now.

  32. Can you believe the lack of media interest in Germanwings Captain Patrick Sondenheimer who apparently set up Andreas Lubitz to look like the pilot at the controls when the hacked transponder did it.

    Sondenheimer’s name isn’t even got correctly often, and no more is said about him than he was an experienced pilot with a family.

    His name indicates that he may be a German-Jew whose family will be compensated grandly , it seems, without question, and be moving to Israel soon where he is already recognized as a hero.

  33. Trowbridge, I haven’t been following the matter particularly, but your theory doesn’t really seem to make any difference. Even if Sondenheimer caused the dive rather than Lubitz he still died in the crash, so you’re just dealing with one suicidal mass-murderer rather than another. If any actual evidence emerges I’ll take an interest, but so far all I’ve seen is speculation based on the tone of news media articles.

    I did follow Tony_Opmoc’s link at 9:01 pm yesterday at Craig’s and I was disgusted; the usual “faked disaster” rubbish criticising the demeanour of friends and family of the deceased and making unsupported allegations of them being “crisis actors”. Don’t people making (or linking) such claims ever stop to think “and what if I am (or they are) wrong”? I think there’s much too much such material on the Internet.

  34. Trowbridge, fair enough, it does matter who was guilty, but you’re saying that one set the other up when both were killed. But if Sondenheimer was gong to kill himself along with all aboard, why bother setting up Lubitz? You reckon to save his reputation for his family. But it seems unlikely that there was no possible way to make the crash look like an accident.

    Trowbridge, sorry, but you seem a bit obsessed to me. I suggest you take up computer programming as a hobby. It’s great. You define your problem, draw your flow-chart, write your code, look through everything carefully to correct any errors, load it into your machine and run it, and it does something you didn’t expect at all. The next part of the process is called “debugging”, wherein you discover that your own logical thinking is nowhere near as reliable as you believed.

  35. The crash had to look like Germans were becoming increasingly depressed by Merkel’s growing use of German power for international purposes, not only to curb fa-right growth in places like Spain, France and the UK but also governments in Putin’s Russia, and Netanyahu’s Israel.

    So just crashing an airplane would not work.

    It had to look like Germans killing Germans and other troublesome Europeans, especially Spaniards, Greeks and Britons – problems which would induce Angela Merkel to resign in disgust, and other German leaders to settle for more insular ambitions.

    The conspiracy which brought down the Germanwings airliner was Netanyahu’s answer to his critics, especially Merkel, about not favoring a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem, though she is opposed to a unilateral recognition of a Palestinian one.

    Glad to see you are still finding palliatives to your tooth problem.

  36. Hullo

    Clark, Nevermind.

    Hope those wee Wounds Heal up Soon… or Already.

    Am i famous for My Carl Sagan Quotes yet ?… When he wonders How Interplanetary Space Travel can be done…Minus a Dentist…. Oooch

    apart from effin Hiding..been busy with wee yins –

    Heres The teeny one, –

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/115454618@N06/16785464910/

    Time for some Haiku… I have a very nice Calendar of Haiku – For March is this one –

    Ume Ichi Rin
    Ichi rin Hodo no
    Atatakasa

    As on the Plum Comes
    Blossom after blossom, so
    comes the warmth of Spring

  37. Congratulations granddad Brian and thanks for letting us have a picture of your latest addition to the family, what a lovely little nipper, health and happiness to all involved, normal sleep patterns will be resolved in three month time, approx……;

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