Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Getting the Ducks in Order

Tomorrow Linda will be home late from Branson. Tomorrow Patty, the cleaning lady comes. Usually Linda works hard on Wednesdays to make sure the house is cleaned up before Patty arrives on Thursday. I don't understand, even after all these years, how my wife's mind really works. Maybe that's why I have trouble writing from a woman's POV. All I can say is that Patty is in for a big surprise when she gets here tomorrow morning.

I bought this old balsa antique RC model airplane. It is a Piper Cub, 44 inches long with a 70 inch wingspan. It needed to be covered and have the electronics hooked up. My friend Ron did a spectacular job and I have been simply looking at it all day and drooling. There is no way I could have worked the magic that he did.

Still no word on the missing Southeast Asia Airliner. There is plenty of speculation going around on the fate of the passengers given some of the scenarios being offered. I won't be doing that because I wouldn't want a family member to hear me speculating on the gruesome details. I have not given up on them, because if the plane was hijacked they could be ransomed for big bucks. So, there it is, hope springs eternal.

Thailand says they picked up an unidentified airliner the night it disappeared. That is a part of the world I expected it might be heading. It makes sense that the hijackers would decide to land in a Muslin controlled country. Malaysia is a Muslin country, and that's where the aircrew came from. While it looks like a pretty professional piece of work, mistakes have been made.

1. The hijackers would have wanted it to appear that the aircraft had crashed in the ocean like that Air France jet did a few years ago.

2. They didn't anticipate that punching in the coordinates for the corridor window would be discovered.

3. They didn't realize the engines would keep pinging for 8 hours.

4. Assuming the Pilot was part of the plot, he didn't realize that deleting material from his home simulator didn't mean it couldn't be retrieved by experts.

If no ransom demands are forthcoming in the next couple of weeks the hypothesis that the hijacking was to obtain a delivery system for a WMD grows in credibility. If that was the purpose then the hijacking is a piece of a larger puzzle. Investigators need to be looking at the Sarin gas possibility, A bioweapon, and most likely of all, a primitive nuclear device. Each of theses possibilities would have a unique chain of links any one of which could shed further light on the question.

With no ransom demands, the intent of the hijacking, short of finding the wreckage on the bottom of the ocean, points clearly to the Delivery System scenario. The above failures by the terrorists have cost them the element of surprise, and given the West a precious opportunity to get their ducks in order.