Why Sanna Marin and her cabinet weren't all that

Earlier this year, Finland had a very miserable election. Our prime minister, Sanna Marin of the social democrat party, had become an international celebrity, but her party lost the election, and she is stepping down as party leader. This has surprised people around the world, because she cut a very progressive and popular figure. Sadly, I'm here to tell you that she was not exactly a great prime minister.

First, there was our pandemic policy. Finland had a world-class response to Covid and we were doing a great job suppressing the virus - until we quit. In September 2021, Marin and her cabinet decided to lift practically all suppressing measures, including things like mask recommendations. Since then, thousands of people have died. I did another post on the subject, with the statistics. So when people say Marin's cabinet handled the pandemic well, I don't entirely agree. They did, until they decided to stop.

Another failure was the Sami parliament act. Finland has been reprimanded several times by the UN for our failure to implement proper representation for the Sami indigenous people, whose lands Finland continues to colonize. The Marin government was supposed to change that with a new bill on the Sami parliament. However, the cabinet allowed the agrarian party, which resists indigenous rights, to sabotage the bill, and it failed to pass. This is absolutely disgraceful.

The most colossal disappointment of the Marin cabinet, though, was their environmental policy. It was sold to us as a "climate cabinet". What they did was the total opposite.

We can start with peat. Finland produces approximately 5% of our energy by burning peat, which accounts for 10% of our greenhouse emissions, while peat extraction is immensely destructive. It's an incredibly dirty and wasteful fuel. So obviously it receives huge government subsidies and tax breaks into the hundreds of millions of euros.

In 2021, the end result of a huge budget battle with the obstructionist agrarian party was that the Marin cabinet handed 70 million euros of additional subsidies to peat production (IL). 

Later that same year, the social democrat minister for communications, Timo Harakka, called a new motorway "a climate act" in a tweet. The same minister oversees domestic flights, which have received additional subsidies of tens of millions of euros during his time in cabinet. There's so little demand for the flights, that some have flown with single passengers, or even empty (Yle).

When the invasion of Ukraine made electricity prices spike, our government rushed to subsidize households by dropping the tax on electricity. Most of the subsidies are going to well-off households that spend large amounts of energy (Yle). Similarly, when fuel prices rose, the government was there to subsidize diesel fuel (Yle).

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Marin's cabinet spent millions upon millions of extra euros subsidizing fossil fuel consumption, sometimes in the stupidest possible ways, propping up tiny, moribund industries like peat, or ridiculous boondoggles like flights with no passengers on them.

It just so happens I've taught the 1973 oil crisis quite a few times already. Finnish Wikipedia has quite a nice list of energy-saving measures the government of the time implemented, which ranged from regulating indoor temperatures to shop window lighting. The prime minister was also a social democrat, by the way: Kalevi Sorsa. Fifty years later, it did not apparently even for a moment occur to his successor that something like this could be done. Instead, as with every other crisis and policy question, Marin's answer was subsidies for fossil fuels.

**

I've lived in Finland for almost 40 years, and the media persecution of Sanna Marin was like nothing I have ever seen before. The misogyny was absolutely hysterical. One of the main precepts of Finnish journalism is that no criticism of it can ever be justified, so there will be no post-mortem, as it were. All our major medias are busy reassuring each other that they did a great job. This is deeply depressing, especially since we all know full well that they're going to spend the next several years worshipping the ground the new right-wing government walks on.

We also suffer from the same disease as Britain, as explained by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis: our media doesn't understand macroeconomics at all, and believes the right's austerity fairy-tales. This was also painfully obvious in this year's election, which was dominated by all our major medias and the ministry of finance battering us into submission with their austerity agenda of billions of euros of cuts.

However, two things can be true at the same time: Marin can be the victim of concerted misogynist media persecution, and a terrible disappointment as a prime minister. Her cabinet let thousands of people die needlessly in the pandemic, cheerfully trampled over indigenous rights, and faced the escalating climate and biodiversity crisis with millions upon millions of subsidies to fossil capitalism. Yes, misogyny was a large reason why her party lost the election. But so was the fact that the policies of her cabinet were absolutely terrible.

Let's Paint Fallout: the Board Game

Several unidentified aircraft were spotted flying over the REPCONN Test Site by a local crackpot. He spoke to a toy bear near one of our microphones. "It's ghouls, I tell you. Religious ghouls in rockets, looking for a land to call their own. Don't you laugh at me! I know a spell that'll make you show your true form! A cave rat taught it to me."
- Radio New Vegas

Even though our board gaming has mostlt been on hold because of the pandemic, we did really enjoy Fantasy Flight's Fallout board game, and I got to thinking that I really should paint the miniatures. So here we go!

**

Super Mutant

I've gone for the Fallout 3 super mutant look instead of the classic green, because it's so much more interesting and will, I hope, make the model stand out a bit. The skin was done in Flat Yellow, the rags in (I think) Saddle Brown, and the metal bits are Gunmetal Grey and Brass. I then gave the whole thing a wash with watered-down Black Glaze, Skin Wash and Smoke to make the dude look appropriately grimy, and I think it worked pretty nicely!

This model was fun enough to paint that I'm seriously considering getting some Mödiphius Super Mutants.

**

Vault Dude

Of course the Vault guy had to be among the first models I painted as well!

His skin is Burnt Umber, and the hair is Black Grey. The vault suit is Dark Blue, with Saddle Brown, Gunmetal Grey and Copper accessories, with a little Smoke wash.

**

Mister Handy

I'm skipping ahead to the New California expansion here, but Mr. Handy had such a memorable debut in our first attempt at the co-operative New California scenario as a drug-dealing murder robot that I felt I had to paint him.

Of course, a robot is also kinda easy to paint! The upper body is Natural Steel and the lower Gunmetal Gray, and the eyes are Silver; the body got a wash of Black Glaze and a little Smokey Ink, and there's some Light Green to represent the drugs, and some Scarlet for the murder.

**

Ghoul

The ghoul was the MVP of our first co-op attempt and a past winner as well, so he was definitely next.

His shoes are black, the pants are London Grey and the vest is Light Grey; the shirt is Ivory. I painted the skin Tan Earth, gave it a light drybrush with Green Sky and a sort of wash with Sunny Skin Tone, followed by some watered-down Smokey Ink. I'm very happy with the result!

**

So here's the first batch of Fallout characters; there'll be more.

Warhammer 40,000: Let's Play Filthy Casual - Encounter at Red Rocket

It is once again time for Warhammer 40,000! I've got my 500 points of Word Bearers and my Modiphius terrain; my opponent has 500 points of Grey Knights; we are ready to Filthy Casual.

**

We set up on my 4'×4' table, with some fairly ancient Necromunda terrain as well as my newer additions.

To keep things simple, we decided to play the Only War scenario, and placed objectives accordingly. As this was the debut of my Red Rocket station, my opponent decided the game would be called Encounter at Red Rocket. We made sure to place an objective marker by the coolant pumps.

My deployment was fairly simple: I decided the Berzerkers and Dreadnought would capture the Red Rocket, while the Cultists moved up the center of the table and grabbed the objective at the container stack.

My opponent's army consisted of (below, left to right) a Terminator squad held in reserve, a Librarian, a Strike Team and an Interceptor Squad, all deployed in cover behind some buildings.

The Grey Knights got the first turn, and immediately the space wizard fuckery started. The Interceptors zoomed over to capture the objective by the word wall, and the Librarian used Gate of Infinity to teleport the Strike Squad right onto my left flank.

Obviously I couldn't let this stand; I sent my Cultists around to attack the Strike Squad, with the Berzerkers rushing over to support them, while my Dreadnought lumbered over to secure the objective at the Red Rocket.

Since the Strike Team was in range and my Cultists were encouraged by the Dark Apostle's successful prayer, it was time to charge!

The Cultists immediately start taking hevy casualties, but they take a Grey Knight with them.

Here's the situation at the end of the first battle round:

The Grey Knights Librarian is literally hiding inside the little building at top left, next to the blue dice tray. My Dreadnought is under the Red Rocket canopy; the Berzerkers are making their laborious way toward the fight.

**

The Grey Knights opened the second battle round by teleporting the Terminators in to face the Dreadnought at the Red Rocket. The Librarian blasted my Dread with Vortex of Doom, doing the maximum possible seven wounds, of which my Legion trait let me save exactly none. He then hit the Dread with Fatal Precognition, meaning I risked additional mortal wounds if it did anything!

On the other side of the table, the Interceptors charged into combat with my Cultists and pretty much wiped them out - but not without taking casualties themselves!

When my turn rolled around, the Dreadnought tried to get to grips with the pesky Loyalist tormenting it - and dropped down dead!

Meanwhile, the Cultists were wiped out in the Fight phase. They accounted for one Interceptor and two Grey Knights, which I think we have to consider slightly heroic. All that remained of my army was the Berzerkers and Dark Apostle.

It was pretty obvious at this point that I had lost the game. My opponent could easily have run circles around my Berzerkers for the last three battle rounds, collecting enough victory points to win the game twice over. I said as much, and offered to concede. To his credit, my opponent wanted to fight it out, very sportingly bringing out the Interceptors to engage my Berzerkers so that I got to roll the absolute buckets of dice they generate in mêlée.

The Berzerkers made short work of the Interceptors and went on to wipe out the Strike Squad survivors as well. Meanwhile, the Grey Knights Librarian struck down my Dark Apostle.

Eventually, their numbers depleted by psykery and such, the Berzerkers were run down by the Terminators and wiped out.

And so the game ended with me being tabled. Hey, Khorne cares not whence the blood flows, and it definitely flowed.

**

In retrospect, it's fairly obvious that my biggest mistake was the deployment of my Berzerkers. They should have been right there with the Cultists in one great big blob of death, or alternatively they should have stuck to the original plan and stormed the Red Rocket with the Dreadnought. I also should have been more decisive with my Dark Apostle and gotten her into mêlée with the Cultists. So yeah, my deployment was bad and I was too indecisive.

This is to take nothing away from my opponent, though: he played very well and decisively outmaneuvered me, taking excellent advantage of my bad decisions and using his mobility and psykery edge to full advantage.

I will freely admit that I was not prepared for space wizard fuckery. I expected a deluge of mortal wounds; I did not expect all the flying around. The answer for my Chaos Marines is clear: more mobility. I have already ordered some jump packs.

**

On a broader note, we were left with two strong impressions. First of all, Filthy Casual is just fun, especially with smaller armies. Having said that, I'll quote my worthy opponent, who said, after the game: "There's a lot to remember." There certainly is. Even without secondary objectives or stratagems, and playing a very simple mission, datasheets and rules to hand, we still found it a struggle to remember all the particular rules and exceptions. I still feel that 40k is far too strongly designed for tournament play by people young enough to memorize huge rulesets, and even though 10th edition promises to simplify everything, well, I'll believe it when I see it.

Even so, I certainly enjoyed myself, and I'm full of ideas on what kind of army to build for the rematch!

Mission tactics at sea

For future reference, I want to record this outstanding example of mission tactics / Aufragstaktik / whatever you want to call it. I've been thinking about World War II and specifically naval warfare in it, so I'm re-reading Correlli Barnett's excellent Engage the Enemy More Closely. There's a lot to disagree with in Barnett's account, and David Edgerton has done so, at length. I still think that much of Barnett's criticism of British grand strategy in the war is fundamentally correct, and I think I'll want to return to that later.

For now, though, here's a quote from Barnett's narrative of the Second Battle of Sirte in 1942, where a Royal Navy cruiser squadron under Admiral Philip Vian drove off a considerably superior Italian force.

"His own flagship Cleopatra had been hit in the bridge early in the action, killing fifteen and temporarily knocking out her radio. But, wrote Vian in his memoirs, "The damage sustained was of no importance. The leaders of the divisions of the striking force were well aware of my intentions, and communication, for the time, was unnecessary.""

That's command for you.

Warhammer 40,000: 500 pts of 9th Edition Word Bearers

I've been threatened with a 500-point game of Warhammer 40,000, so I'd better get my army ready.

**

Since my last game, the 9th edition Chaos Marine codex dropped, and changed quite a lot of things. First and foremost, it destroyed the MVP of my previous games by capping Cultists at 20 models per unit and nerfing Tide of Traitors completely. However, it gave my Word Bearers a useful legion trait as well, so win some, lose some, I guess.

I'm still bringing my old Necromunda Escher gang, even if I can only have twenty of them. I painted these Escher juves:

And added these Brother Vinni Jungle Fighters.

Finally, here's two fairly ancient Sisters of Sigmar I found to round out the unit.

That makes 14 models and the champion with autopistols and close combat weapons, because I'm hoping I can swamp some Marines in close combat again. That leaves five more, and since I can now have two grenade launchers in the squad for no cost, and I arguably have the models, why not? That leaves three autogunners.

**

I wasn't that sold on my Chaos Lord last time around, so this time I'm bringing back my favorite 8th ed. HQ choice: my Dark Apostle. She now automatically comes with two Dark Disciples, and I have a Davidians Command box from Raging Heroes (which I used earlier to make an Enginseer for my machine cultists); it occurred to me that they would also make nigh-on perfect Slaanesh Dark Disciples.

**

Last time, I had a Vindicator that got very little done and blew up. This time, for a little taste of Gladius, I got myself a Chaos Dreadnought.

This was a fun model to assemble, with lots of weapon options. I went for the Gladius loadout of reaper autocannon and power scourge, but magnetized everything so I can swap them out if I want. The gun arm was easy: I drilled a hole and slotted in a magnet.

The model has been done quite cleverly so that all the various weapons fit onto the shoulder joint, and with a matching hole and magnet on the weapon, it fits perfectly.

The left arm is different, with each mêlée weapon having its own shoulder, so I put a magnet on the body and another one inside the power scourge shoulder.

Here's the finished article:

The dreadnought is wearing the same dark green and silver livery as my Chaos Lord, and I kinda like it. Now that most of the weapons don't cost anything, though, I built myself a multi-melta.

**

I also wanted to bring my Berzerkers, Faciebam Deum Ex Sanguine. In their debut, they were gloriously wiped out in close combat, carving their way through several characters and a conscript blob. They were also the stars of our third game, where they were nearly destroyed beating up some loyalist vehicles and Knight Armigers. I love my Berzerkers, and I've managed to paint them as well.

I will again register my disappointment that they no longer get any meaningful wargear choices. I don't like this new 40k at all.

**

Here's the list:

HQ - Dark Apostle - 95 points 

Troops - Cultists Mob (20) - 100 points [195] 

Elites - Helbrute - 105 points [300] 

Elites - Berzerkers (8) - 176 pts

+ Mark of Khorne [15], Berzerker icon [5] = 196 points [496]

And here's the army.

My strategy is very simple: I'm going to run at the sniveling loyalists and beat them up.

Pandemic diary: Year 3

It's now been three years since my first pandemic diary entry on this blog. My previous one was a year ago, when I noted that our government had pretty much abandoned trying to contain the pandemic at all. The official death toll on 1.1.2022 was 1 564. As I write this, the WHO Covid dashboard has our total deaths at about 8 900. In my previous post, I said we'd need to triple our death toll from what was then about 3 000 to reach per capita numbers like Sweden. Well, we've done it.

So what happened? I'll show you. I no longer have screenshotted graphics from our government broadcaster, because they've quit publishing covid statistics. These are from Our World in Data.

The graph below shows the story of our pandemic. For the first year or so, we were very successful at suppressing the pandemic. Deaths were well below the world average, let alone the EU average. We were on par with Asia. Until something changed, and away we went.

In the fall of 2021, our government pretty much decided that we're going to stop suppressing the pandemic. The next graph is from about a week ago, and it shows the consequences of that decision.

Over the past year, covid deaths in Finland have been way higher, per capita, than in the UK or the US. We're also way above the EU average, let alone the world. We simply decided that actually, we're just going to let people die.

The one thing I associate this with, more than anything, is a cheerful media appearance by our very cinematic prime minister. On September 24, she was on the cover of one of our major afternoon papers, with the huge headline: It is time to live!

Obviously it wasn't just one interview: rather, it coincided with a general lifting of restrictions. Masks and distancing are no longer recommended, and in general, people are being encouraged to behave as if there was no pandemic at all. Below you can see the results.

It's actually really interesting to look at all the Nordic countries. First of all, this is the only real frame of reference for assessing Sweden's performance. People in English-speaking countries occasionally make very misleading arguments about Sweden, because they compare Swedish policy outcomes to their own. Surely the comparison point has to be very similar societies, with very different pandemic policies. Below is what it looks like. Frankly, if you think pandemic mortality in Sweden wasn't high, your baseline is wrong.

**

So here we are. On New Year's Day 2022, 1 500 people in Finland had died of Covid. Now the number is 9 000. We were doing a world-class job of suppressing the pandemic - until we decided to quit. Almost ten thousand people died, and we're still pretending it isn't happening. Get on the subway today, and there's barely a mask in sight. We're doling out record amounts of sick pay, but even that can't sway the government into doing anything. It is time to live. Except, of course, for the 7 500 people who died after we lifted restrictions.

What's horrible about all this is that this pretence that there's no pandemic is empowering all the worst people. We now have folks who were grumbling about the restrictions claiming that they were never necessary in the first place. It's honestly kind of terrifying that hundreds of thousands of people get sick, thousands die, and there are actual people out here saying that the greatest atrocity was that they weren't allowed to go to the gym or the karaoke bar. It's certainly now easier to understand why the 1918 pandemic seems to have vanished from the historical record.

First it was hoarding pasta and toilet paper, then it was "time to live", i.e. "I don't give a shit who dies, it won't be me". The necropolitics of Covid suggest that we're in for an unbelievably grim time with the climate crisis.

The facts in the disappearance of flight MH370

I'm going to do another of these posts where I've watched a stupid Netflix documentary and it's left me profoundly unsatisfied. This time it was MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, on Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the Boeing 777 that vanished in 2014 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and inexplicably ended up crashing in the Indian Ocean.

What's annoying about the three-part documentary series is that it does such a bad job of presenting the actual facts of the case. What's downright irresponsible, in fact unethical, is that they give huge amounts of screen time to fantasists hawking ridiculous conspiracy theories. So, just to register my protests, I want to go over what we actually know about the MH370 incident, and then say a few words about the so-called "theories" presented on the show.

**

Let's start with the facts. Sadly, the official report released by the Malaysian government doesn't seem to be online any more, or at least I couldn't access it. So I'll be doing this based on secondary sources, with the help of Wikipedia.

Here's a useful map from Wikimedia Commons, which shows the known flight path of MH370.

Here are the facts of the matter.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, a Boeing 777 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, took off at 12:41 MYT (UTC+8). At 01:19, the flight was approaching the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, and Kuala Lumpur air traffic control instructed them to get in touch with Ho Chi Minh ATC. The captain of MH370 acknowledged the message.

However, MH370 never got in touch with Vietnamese air traffic control. Instead, as it passed navigational waypoint IGARI, the plane's transponder stopped transmitting.

A short digression is in order, as aviation people apparently say "radar" to mean two different things, which is confusing for a layperson, and terribly confusing for someone who knows a little about military aviation. What I believe most of us think of as radar, i.e. an electronic transmitter that detects objects based on their radar reflection, is apparently known in aviatiom as primary radar. When popular accounts of MH370 say that the aircraft "disappeared from radar", they mean secondary radar, which isn't actually a radar system at all in the sense I understand it, but rather a system similar to military IFF, which communicates with transponders on aircraft. When MH370's transponder stopped transmitting, air traffic control could no longer see it on secondary radar.

Military radar data would later show that the plane then made a sharp (at least for a passenger plane) turn left, onto a southwesterly heading. The official investigation would later determine that the turn could not have been done by autopilot, and therefore must have been made by hand. So either some frankly unbelievable sequence of events occurred on board, or someone deliberately turned the aircraft using the flight controls.

After flying to a point very near the island of Penang, the aircraft made a right turn and flew up the Strait of Malacca, along an established air route, passing several waypoints, until it flew out of the range of Malaysian military radar at 02:22. Thai military radar also detected an aircraft believed to be MH370, and as it passed Penang at 01:52 MYT, the first officer's cellphone briefly registered with a nearby cell tower.

After the plane's transponder stopped transmitting, the satellite communication system on the aircraft rebooted and established contact with an Inmarsat satellite. Using the satellite communication data, it was later determined that MH370 kept flying west, and then turned south, into the southern Indian Ocean. As the aircraft had limited fuel, there were no possible landing sites in the vicinity, and pieces of debris confirmed as coming from that specific Boeing 777 were later found, it seems that flight MH370 eventually crashed into the ocean. Because the specific crash site is not known and the conditions and size of the area make searching extremely difficult, the wreck has not been found as of this writing.

As I understand it, while the initial hard turn off the plane's expected flight path must have been made by hand, the subsequent turns could have been flown by autopilot, but in that case, someone must have programmed the autopilot to do so. Again, it seems almost impossible to conceive of any other explanation. Based on the evidence that exists, it is a fact that MH370 flew into the Indian Ocean and crashed there. It seems very difficult to believe that it was not flown there intentionally by someone.

**

Unfortunately, the Netflix program does not make these basic facts at all clear, and indeed omits some of them. It's probably not a coincidence that some of the absolutely bizarre conspiracy theories peddled on the show require this omission of facts.

Something that genuinely annoys me is when people ask rhetorical questions that they absolutely should be asking as real questions. A particularly egregious example on the Netflix show is the French reporter, who points out that MH370 "supposedly" flew right over Malaysia, in fact almost directly over a Malaysian airbase. She then asks, rhetorically, whether it's supposed to be possible that no-one would have noticed this and attempted to intercept the plane.

In my capacity as a military historian, let me assure you that the answer to any question that starts "could a military organization be so incompetent" is yes. This is almost certainly true of all human organizations, but the ones I've studied happen to be military. In this case, as can be read online (ironically, in French!), the air base MH370 overflew was not in operation at night. Even if someone had wanted to intercept the unknown radar contact, it would have taken two hours to get a plane in the air. Is this believable? In my opinion, absolutely. It also explains much of the delay in publishing the radar data, as no nation will want to advertise the fact that they don't, or even worse, can't effectively police their own airspace.

If you still think it's unbelievable that an unidentified aircraft could fly through air defenses without being intercepted, well, by coincidence I gave a lecture on the Soviet Union and the Cold War earlier this year, where I discussed the extraordinary flight of Mathias Rust.

**

Sadly, instead of concentrating on the facts and some sensible attempts to explain what happened, two of three Netflix episodes are dedicated to totally ridiculous conspiracy theories.

The first is peddled by an American journalist, who has been inexplicably elevated to the position of Will Buxton in the program. His version of events is that Russia hijacked the aircraft, flew it to Kazakhstan, and... something. Ostensibly to distract everyone from their invasion of the Crimea. The story is childish nonsense. Obviously it would make sense for the Russians to risk a catastrophic breach in their relations with China as they're embarking on a military operation in Europe. Murdering over a hundred Chinese civilians for a stupid media distraction is completely insane.

The hijack theory is foreshadowed by linking it to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 by Russian-controlled "separatists" in Ukraine. But no link between the two is actually ever made, except that apparently the shootdown of MH17 gave the American journalist vibes.

A far more serious objection to the Russia/Kazakhstan theory is that there's simply no way the plane could have been flown there without anyone noticing. It would have had to cross vast swathes of Indian and Chinese airspace, either completely undetected by anyone, or with the inexplicable complicity of at least those nations. There's simply no excuse for taking drivel like this seriously.

However, it gets so much worse. In the first episode, we already encountered a lady from Florida who participated in a volunteer satellite imagery interpretation operation called Tomnod. Apparently it was an effort to crowdsource looking for things in publicly available satellite pictures.

As this article in the Guardian makes clear, Tomnod volunteers have no training in satellite image interpretation. So when the Florida lady cheerfully explains to us that she found aircraft wreckage in some of the pictures, this is frankly nonsense. She can't tell a crashed aircraft from a wave or a flock of seagulls. This is never explained on the show, and we're simply left with this woman insisting she has "evidence" MH370 crashed in the South China Sea. Apparently she couldn't get Tomnod or indeed anyone else to take her "evidence" seriously, to their credit.

Sadly, she is taken very seriously by a French journalist, whose idiotic conspiracy theory takes up almost all of the third episode. With the help of a man who tragically lost his partner and child on the flight, she spins a moronic story that is totally implausible from start to finish, which must have been obvious to anyone with even a cursory understanding of, say, military aviation.

The French story is that MH370 was carrying some kind of super secret Chinese cargo, which the Americans were determined to stop from reaching Beijing. Supposedly, two E-3 AWACS planes intercepted MH370, jammed its communications and ordered it to divert somewhere. When the flight crew refused, the Americans shot the plane down. Everything we've been told about the plane turning west and so on is a deliberate lie to conceal this.

It's hard to know where to even start with this. AWACS planes have no radio jamming capability. If somehow they'd made enough noise to stop MH370 from communicating and mask its transponder signal, this would have been very obvious to everyone around. The AWACS planes are also completely unarmed, so then some other aircraft would have shot down the plane. This would all have been clearly visible on Malaysian and Vietnamese radar screens.

Also, by the way, all the debris from the shootdown inexplicably vanished, with none of it washing up anywhere on the nearby coasts. When small amounts of debris are recovered from the actual crash, that "proves" it didn't really happen. When a made-up crash produces no debris whatsoever, somehow this isn't a problem.

This "theory" also requires all of the evidence to the contrary to have been faked. The Inmarsat data is just completely made up, as is the Malaysian, Vietnamese and Thai radar data, and the cellphone tower ping at Penang. Instead of saying the plane crashed or disappeared, supposedly a massive Malaysian-Vietnamese-Thai-UK deception operation was set into action, telling an almost unbelievable fake story that captures interest and imagination a decade later. Some coverup!

The hawkers of this idiocy make it amply clear on the program that they have no idea what they're talking about. They don't seem to know what an AWACS plane even is, let alone what electronic jamming is. They have literally zero evidence for anything. They can't tell us what cargo could even in theory have been so important that the US armed forces would deliberately shoot down a passenger airliner to stop it getting to China. The whole thing is raving madness, and none of the glaring holes in the supposed logic, none of the ludicrously false statements, are in any way challenged. It amounts to pure disinformation.

**

Speaking as a historian, the most fundamental problem with these crackpot theories is not how stupid they are. It's that they're asking us to believe in incredibly elaborate deception operations, and discount factual evidence, in favor of a "theory", or rather an entirely baseless conjecture, that even if you accept its premises, still doesn't do a better job of explaining what happened.

In history terms, none of the alternate explanations for what happened to flight MH370 have better explanatory power than the ones based on what we believe are the facts. To put it crudely, we're being asked to discard facts and official investigative findings, and we're not being offered anything better in exchange.Why should I believe that the Inmarsat data is faked, or that the Malaysian air force is lying about their radar data? What better understanding of the case do I arrive at if I do that? None whatsoever.

That's the most elementary test that all of these conjectures fail, and it's why I consider them nonsense conspiracy theories. They're disinformation: deliberate lies cooked up to sell books and media appearances, at the expense of real people who lost loved ones in the tragedy. It's beyond repulsive that Netflix collaborates with these ghouls.

**

There are some theories of how the otherwise inexplicable flight of MH370 could have been caused by an accident. Two are dealt with quite well in this blogpost, even if I don't quite agree with its conclusions. The problem with all accident theories, in my opinion, is that the accident would have to have happened at such an incredibly convenient time, at the exact handover point between two air traffic control stations. Of course it's entirely possible that this is what happened, but it's a hell of a coincidence.

Where I disagree with the blog I linked just now is that I also find the most popular theory, that the captain of the aircraft deliberately crashed the plane into the ocean, equally difficult to believe. There's been so much nonsense talked about the captain that it's quite hard to figure out what the truth is. As far as I know, no-one has been able to explain why he would have done it, and my understanding is that the significance of the recovered flight simulator data is unclear. It certainly doesn't prove anything, and I think the blog I linked is wildly incorrect in maintaining that other explanations have been eliminated. They certainly have not been.

Even though I clearly know more about military aviation than some of the people involved in that risible television program, that's an indictment of them and Netflix, not a sign that I'm any kind of expert on anything related to this case. Still, since this is my blog, I can offer up my two cents on the whole thing.

My starting point is that someone selected the route that MH370 flew from the point where the transponder was switched off. If someone wanted to make the flight disappear, that handover point between two ATC areas has to be the best possible place to do it. This is the contention at the heart of the popular theory that the pilot did it, for which there is still no actual evidence whatsoever.

It would also be the best possible place to hijack the aircraft, especially if you wanted to fly it to some completely different destination and wanted to get a head start on the authorities. I think this theory has been unfairly discounted.

The specific objection I want to make is to the idea that hijacking can be discounted because the various authorities have checked up on all the passengers and crew, and found no-one to suspect. I maintain that with the information we have now, no-one can possibly know whether there were people on board MH370 who should not have been there.

People do stow away on planes, often in wheel wells, and it mostly ends badly for them. But only last year, someone survived an 11-hour flight from South Africa (or at least Nairobi) to Amsterdam (BBC). If someone wanted to hijack a plane, one way it could be done would be by stowing away on board.

This may sound implausibly far-fetched, but something like this has happened at least once: in 1986, a man snuck on board an airplane at Eugene, Oregon and hijacked it when it was in flight (UPI).

The same arguments that are made in favor of the pilot hypothesis also support the hijack hypothesis, for example, the choice of a flight path down the middle of the Strait of Malacca, along the border of different national airspaces. If I remember correctly, when only the military radar data was available, it was calculated that there were hundreds of airfields that the plane could have flown to after it left Malaysian radar coverage.

What if someone, one or more people, did secretly board the plane, hijack it over the South China Sea, and order the pilots to fly the route the plane flew? I'm not aware of any evidence that contradicts this. It's a somewhat far-fetched scenario, sure - but so are all of the other explanations.

By a startling coincidence, the first ever fatal crash suffered by Malaysia Airlines happened in 1977, when it was still called Malaysian Airline Systems. Flight MH653, a Boeing 737 from Penang to Kuala Lumpur, was hijacked and diverted to Singapore. The hijackers were told that the plane didn't have enough fuel to reach Singapore, and they then apparently shot the pilots, and the plane crashed. Everyone on board died. As I understand it, nobody ever really found out who was responsible, and why they did it.

In the case of MH370, if it was hijacked, I would assume the hijackers had some kind of plan, but it went badly wrong, and the plane ends up crashing into the ocean. Or there was no plan, or it was a stupid one, as seems to have been the case with MH653. I didn't know about MH653 before I started looking into this, but I think it's a powerful reminder that sometimes hijackings don't seem to make sense, and can remain unsolved.

I have no idea who could have wanted to hijack a Malaysia Airlines flight to Beijing or why, or where they might have been trying to fly the plane. I also have no idea whether something went wrong that led to the aircraft ending up in the Indian Ocean, or if that was actually the plan all along. It would be an exceptional sequence of events. However, none of the people advocating for the theory that the pilot flew the plane into the ocean deliberately can explain why he did it, or why he chose that particular flight path.

I would be willing to go so far as to say that the theory that the plane was hijacked is actually a better explanation than the pilot being responsible, for one reason only: the hijacking theory does not require any known person to suddenly behave inexplicably. Again, none of the people blaming the pilot can explain why he would have done it.

To sum up, I think the theory that what happened to MH370 was a hijacking gone wrong, or a really weird hijacking, by people who were neither part of the crew nor on the passenger manifest, cannot be discounted. I would even go so far as to say that I think it is one of the most likely explanations for what happened, but that's just a layman's opinion. At the very least I maintain that this hijacking theory is much less stupid than the one Netflix dedicated an entire damn episode to.

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I suppose the odds are that we'll never find out what really happened to flight MH370. Maybe the wreckage will eventually be found, but I don't know if there's really the slightest chance that any meaningful information could be gleaned from it after all this time, or what other evidence could possibly emerge.

I can't imagine what it's like to have a partner, family member or other loved one disappear like this, with no explanation and not even any real certainty that they're dead. That's why I think it's all the more despicable that there are people willing to use this tragedy as fodder for childish conspiracy theories, and to make money exploiting the suffering of the people affected by it.

I think the ethics of Netflix participating in this are absolutely deplorable. To air this kind of Ancient Aliens-level garbage about the deaths of real people is disgusting commodification of human suffering for our leering consumption. I freely admit that I'm fascinated by unsolved mysteries, and in that sense I, too, am partly culpable in this. But I don't see why we can't discuss things like this without platforming profiteering liars and irresponsible conspiracy theorists. Companies like Netflix simply must do better.