I thought the article on why the media fixates on airline disasters very insightful.

However, as a sometimes white-knuckle flyer, I have to say maybe there is some truth to people's fear about flying. I like to work out the numbers while the plane is taxing for takeoff.

While commercial flying is probably the safest form of travel ( excluding elavators) per MILE, the numbers are very different on a per HOUR basis. According to International Civil Aviation Organization, flying on a scheduled commercial airliner in the USA has roughly 11 fatalities per million flight hours, while driving has 0.47 (Failure Associates).

So flying has a 22x higher fatality rate per hour. In other words, the risk is concentrated into a much shorter span than common transportation methods such as driving or bicycling ( which has 0.25 fatalities per million hours [Failure Associates]).

Since a significant majority of the airline fatalities happen during takeoff or landing, the risk is even more concentrated during these procedures. Something I sometimes think about as the pilot rotates.

I'm particularly disturbed by Gonzales using as an anology the interception of communications during historical wars. In traditional war, you have an enemy country or region. You have very strong probable cause that a communication from your country to an enemy country may be of interest to the war effort. But it is very self limiting form of surveillance - only certain counties and only for the duration of the war.

But in the war on terror, any country or place could have a terrorist. So basically any communication from the USA to anywhere MAY contain information of interest. And there can be no official end to a "war" on terror, where peace can be declared. So this reasoning leads to totally open-ended surveillance that is totally different from traditional wartime intercepts.

I went to a Christmas midnight mass at a high Episcopal church the other year. They used so much incense that I was still coughing the next day.

So he's not just anti-Catholic, but also anti-high-Episcopal.

Providing info to Israel about war supplies will not cause Israel to expand the war to Syria and Iran. Israel has its own intelligence services which are rumored to be quite good. Sooner or later they would be able to document the supply routes. Our intelligence is just faster, allowing Israel to act on the information before the weapons are used, rather than after.

The neocons in the administration have hatched a lot of plots. But this isn't one of them.

The polls have been estimating that if Lieberman drops out of the Democratic party and runs as an independent, he will have a strong chance of winning. A large percentage of Connecticut is independent, and he is expected to win most of these votes even if he drops out of the Party. As well as a considerable number of Rebulican votes.

So yeah, he's in big trouble as a Democrat. We've know that for months. But he's not in trouble at all as an independent.

What about the Israeli method?

It is basically a 3-part approach. A physical approach to ensure that everybody boarding can be assoicated with their luggage ( so nobody can sneak a bag into the plane's luggage compartment or cabin); a human who interviews people before they board, looking for those who are acting unusual or who have trouble answering his questions ( what's you destination?, are you carrying anything dangerous?, etc.); and sky marshals.

The human interviewer is trained to identify people acting strangely - somebody dressed in a heavy coat in the summer, for instance. They also do sophisticated profiling, and are also trained in detecting deception when questioning a passenger.

Their system is apparently very effective. I don't think an Israeli airliner has ever been hijacked.

I'm sure there are false alarms, maybe a person is just a nervous flyer or by chance fits a suspicious profile. So they get their luggage closely inspected and have a background check done.

But the level of inconvenience of this system is very low, probably less then our current "taking you shoes off" approach.

Even if the document consists largely of material that doesn't need to be classified, it's a lot easier to just classify the whole thing. That way there is no worry about inadvertantly letting out classified information. My guess is that it takes a good bit of work to go through a document and redact out stuff that is classified.

So I don't think it is classified just for political reasons.

What I fear is being out of my seat when unexpected turbulence hits. This started about 18 years ago when the L1011 I was riding in hit moderate turbulence while I was walking to the head. Normally, the L1011s were very cushy rides - something about wing flex.

But in this case I found myself suddenly about 4 feet up in the air looking down on the other passengers. I could see people's drinks floating in the air above their cups! Then the plane "caught" and I was slammed down to the deck. I was uninjured, but I think my feet were flattened a bit - they hurt for the rest of the day. A flight attendent was slighly injuried when she fell on her cart.

Since then, I always try to stay in my seat and keep my belt fastened!

I'm not quite sure what the point of this is. Check and you'll find that the White House had fancy receptions even during the dark days of WW2.