How to Fall 35,000 Feet — And Survive

You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?

You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.

Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.

Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.

Granted, the odds of surviving a 6-mile plummet are extra ordinarily slim, but at this point you’ve got nothing to lose by understanding your situation. There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page—an onlinedatabase of nearly every imaginable human plummet.

That classification means you have the advantage of being attached to a chunk of the plane. In 1972, Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulovic was traveling in a DC-9 over Czechoslovakia when it blew up. She fell 33,000 feet, wedged between her seat, a catering trolley, a section of aircraft and the body of another crew member, landing on—then sliding down—a snowy incline before coming to a stop, severely injured but alive. . . . (continue reading)

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Atheists "go postal" over new Mother Teresa stamp

It’s predictable that atheists would work themselves into a froth over this. It’s silly and petty, of course, but it’s also a useful reminder that an increasing number of the God-deniers who walk among us are not content to simply deny the truth and scoff at believers, they are becoming ever more militant and aggressive in their efforts to ramrod their intolerance and narrow-mindedness down everyone else’s throats. Catholics! Stand up to these bullies.

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The NASCAR of Catholic Apologetics

Patrick Archbold of Creative Minority Report fame penned a witty and insightful take on Catholic “combat radio” in today’s National Catholic Register. Maybe someday I’ll do an interview with him and tell him “the rest of the story.”

"You never stop thinking about the baby you killed."

This is one of the strangest, most schizophrenic abortion-related things I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever.

Penelope Trunk, a successful career advice columnist/blogger, wrote a blog piece last summer called “What’s the Connection Between Abortion and Careers?” The title caught my eye and drew me in to what at first I thought would be just another “yeah, so what if I had an abortion?” kind of piece. I was wrong. Or maybe I should say I was half wrong.

I did not expect Trunk to say some of things she said in that article. After reading it, I was left scratching my head in wonderment that, on one hand, this obviously intelligent woman could be so honest and forthright in her admission of what abortion is and what it does — to the mother and the child — and still be four-square in favor of legal abortion.

Later, Ms. Trunk sent out a note on Twitter announcing that she was having a miscarriage. The Twittersphere and, soon afterward, the blogosphere, freaked out about that, with many people excoriating her for publicly discussing something so private.

Personally, I don’t really care about the propriety or lack of it in her Twitter message. When I watched this video, I was again nonplussed at how this woman is able (with a straight face that neither dissolves into a smirk or into sobs [either of those reactions would seem more natural, more human, if you ask me]) to so blandly admit that she was glad she had had a miscarriage, because it saved her from having to “wait in line to get an abortion.” And this, after she had just finished telling the goofy CNN talking head about how much she loved her two children and how sorrowful she was when she miscarried another pregnancy.

At one point, she intoned glassily that “Whether or not you believe women should have the right to abortion, they do in this country.” If the hapless host had been thinking clearly, he should have reminded her and the audience that, in 1860, a white man could just as blythely have said, “Whether or not you believe whites have the right to own black slaves, they do in this country.”

Or, “Whether or not you believe men should have the right to prevent women from voting, they do in this country” (prior to 1920), etc., etc.

That’s the point. Because enough Americans believed that white’s should not have the right to own other human beings as slaves is why we were able to abolish that terrible “legal right.” Similarly, though of far, far less a magnitude on the injustice scale, Because enough Americans came to believe that it was wrong to deny women the vote is the only reason why that unjust law was eradicated. (And that didn’t happen until 1920!)

Penelope Trunk’s attitude toward abortion is just . . . weird. It’s schizophrenic. I don’t understand it. I feel so very sorry for her.

I have had two abortions.

The first one was when I was twenty-seven. I was playing professional beach volleyball. I was playing volleyball eight hours a day and I spent two hours a day at the gym. I noticed that I was getting tired more easily, but I thought it meant I needed to train harder.

Then one weekend, a doctor friend on a visit saw me drop a plate one day, and a vase the next. I told her my hands just gave out because they were so tired.

She said I was anemic. Then she said, “Maybe you’re pregnant.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I have a regular period.”

It turns out, though, that you can have a regular period and still be pregnant.

And I was. Fourteen weeks.

My friend said, “Schedule the abortion now. You’re already late for it.”

I didn’t do anything. I was in shock. My boyfriend was in shock. Neither of us had ever had a pregnancy. I couldn’t believe the whole process actually worked, to be honest.

I told my mom I was pregnant. She said, “Get an abortion.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t really thinking I had any choices. I didn’t have a job that could support a child. And I wasn’t sure if I was planning to marry my boyfriend, although we were living together. I knew that I had big ideas for my life and I hadn’t figured things out yet.

My mom got militant. “You’ll destroy your career possibilities.”

She riffed on this theme for a week, calling me every night. Her passion is understandable. My mom took . . . (continue reading)

John Calvin, call your office

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Two things:

1) I really hope they don’t get divorced. I’d hate to see the trailer they’d produce for that disaster epic.

2) Looks like Jeff has pretty good bo staff skills. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. Bow to your sensei.

Rush of terror alerts on three continents plus Middle East

The Israeli security blog Debka has this story:

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