Big, busy hubs are just that because of the number of passengers who connect there. ... by shifting a portion of operations, [an airline] instantly loses millions of annual passengers.

Patrick Smith's analysis of all things aviatory is usually very concise, but something's fishy here.

If the "hub effect" is due primarily to connections — that is to say, because of through passengers — how does an airline lose business if it shifts its connection point to a different facility? Are they through passengers or aren't they? If they are, then they don't give a rat's ass where they transfer as long as it's pleasant and efficient.

Let me give an example. Suppose I want to fly from San Francisco to Boise on Alaska Airlines. Alaska runs something like 8 flights per day each out of SFO and OAK, and a few out of SJC. From experience I can say that most if not all are RJs, so they're exactly the kind of thing we're talking about here.

If all of those flights out of SFO — the major hub in the area — are only there to serve through passengers, why doesn't Alaska just run more of its routes through the satellite airports instead? Alaska already has presence at each of the other facilities. It's not like they would need to build an entirely new staff, just reallocate their resources and merge their existing flights, keeping only a few flights originating at SFO to meet residual need — or close down their SFO operations altogether, thereby saving money.

I suspect the real reason why Alaska does what it does is for marketing reasons — it wants to serve a population that it perceives as desiring convenient access to the nearest airport. Whether or not the airline is right in believing this I can't say, but the assertion that they operate the way they do because they would lose through customers if they didn't just doesn't add up.

If you want a structural solution, get the FAA to downgrade capacity limits on major hubs. The federal government has stretched the limits time and again at the behest of the majors and the local airport authorities, both of whom have a great deal invested in the existing infrastructure, and fear having to build out, expand, relocate, or get creative about route planning — anything except what they're used to.

But their hidebound convenience is not what is best for the system as a whole. The FAA is a government agency, not a trade organization, for a reason — we as citizens have the ultimate say over how it sets policy. If we turned every profane, vitriolic slander of pilots, airlines, air traffic control, or the aviation industry in general into a demand from the FAA for saner capacity limits they would be so swamped they'd have no choice but to act.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

— Carl Sagan

Journalistic betrayal? Confidence artistry? Oh, the pathos! The humanity! If only Jacob Riis had photographed the landlords' point of view. If only Woodward and Bernstein had let Nixon tell his own story. If only Helen Thomas would just let George Bush have his presidency the way he wants it!

But no, these journalists have to go nosing around, pretending that there's something called "truth." This poor family has their side of the story. So what if it doesn't jibe with the side of the story that comes out on film. Can't we just agree to disagree?

No. Extraordinary claims, such as a 4-year-old painting like a modern master, require extraordinary evidence. We wouldn't accept a parents' claim, sight unseen, that a recording of a violin was their virtuoso child, would we? Why on earth would we accept the same claim when it comes to painting — let alone shed big, wet tears for their shattered dream when it turns out that there's no "there" there?

If the parents were closet alcoholics and kept insisting that the social workers who called them on it were destroying their family life, would we respect their delusion as having some overriding moral authority?

"A grove of giant redwoods or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral."

I love TR, I really do, but there's a subtle and important factor missing here. One of the ways we "keep" cathedrals and other priceless works of human artistry is by insuring them against loss. We don't insure the natural environment — which raises a basic question: why not?

Imagine an insurance policy on Yosemite against forest fire, paying out in any year that fire damage exceeded a certain amount. Imagine extinction insurance for pandas or gorillas. Imagine insuring the carbon absorption or oxygen content of a given biosphere.

Policyholders-in-trust (governmental or otherwise) would have an incentive to minimize vulnerability through good stewardship, which insurers would reward through reduced premiums. Catastrophic events would generate payouts that could be applied to ameloriation or recovery efforts. And insurers could couple ecological insurance to other types of policies — no property insurance in Florida unless you also subsidize insurance-in-trust against global warming.

Nobody accuses a church of insufficient devotion to spiritual principles just because it reduces a cathedral to a monetary amount for insurance purposes. Indeed, we might question the good sense, if not the piety, of a community that cavalierly failed to plan financially for damage to an irreplaceable human-made asset. Why not natural assets as well?