All of the increased airport security (and more likely, fear of irate passengers) has apparently dissuaded the Arabs (and little old swedish ladies, and six-year-old kids) from hijacking any more airplanes.

How the mighty have fallen–instead of driving an aircraft full of Jet-A into skyscrapers at six hundred miles an hour, they’ve been reduced to driving barges into bridges at five miles an hour.

The accident occured when Joe Dedmon, the 61-year-old pilot of a towboat pushing two barges side-by-side, apparently blacked out at the helm, said Joel Henderson, a spokesman for Magnolia Marine Transport Co., which owns the boat.

“Blacked out at the helm,” eh?

Sounds mighty suspicious to me.

Do they mean “chloraformed at the helm by Islamic scuba divers”?

Hmmmmm….?

Dedmon appears to have passed out for about two minutes and was unable to steer the barges through the river channel under the bridge, Henderson said. Nobody was on hand to take the helm from him.

Well, of course not, they slipped back into the river after they diverted the barge…

[slowly extracting tongue from cheek]

John Magaw at the FAA says that pilots can’t have guns–they have to “focus on flying their airplanes.”

This is an ignorant statement.

Airplanes require very little focus–for the most part, they fly themselves. It’s not like driving a car. The pilot is only there in case something goes wrong. One of the things that can go wrong is a hijacker attempting to break into a cockpit, and if that’s happening, that’s where the pilot’s focus needs to be (particularly since, HELLO! MAGAW? he has a co-pilot), and he should be given every tool needed to defend that cockpit.

But of course, it’s to be expected that Mr. Magaw would be ignorant of this issue–he has no experience whatsoever with aviation. He’s apparently never piloted as much as a hang glider, let alone an airliner, yet he presumes to know more about the pilots’ job than they do.

But of course, since one of his stints was at BATF, he probable thinks the world would be a better place if people didn’t have guns (except for law enforcement types like him).

And here’s the stupid statement that Mineta made when he appointed him.

“If I could have designed an individual for this job, it would have been John Magaw.”

Gee, Norm, don’t you think it might have been useful for him to know a little something about, well, transportation?

Rich Lowry, over at The Corner, says that a pilot performing violent maneuvers to thwart hijackers would result in massive liability suits because it “could conceivably cause some sort of actionable injury to everyone on the plane.”

Well, no. Not that I think that this is a great anti-hijacking strategy, but only the ones who are not in their seats, or who ignore the standard pre-flight instructions to wear your belt while seated, would be injured. It’s rare for a belted passenger to be injured due to turbulence or sudden maneuvers in an aircraft.

Over in his letters section, Andrew Sullivan publishes a letter from one of his readers that makes a point that I like to harp on as well–the limited applicability of the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.”

This is a legal concept, and not one that’s meant to apply to discourse. It applies to the court of law, not the court of public opinion.

And not to beat up any more on the ex-football player…(ah, heck, why not? He deserves it)…just because OJ was found innocent by a jury of questionable mental acuity doesn’t mean that we are required to believe him innocent. It only relieves him of a visit to prison–it doesn’t entitle him to being absolved in the mind of the public, who does understand DNA, and the concept that some possibly tainted evidence doesn’t entitle one to throw out the whole evidentiary baby with the dirty bathwater.

As the letter writer points out, this weird notion that everyone is supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law was used to great effect by Clinton apologists to illegitimately shut down his critics. Despite all of the evidence shredding, the amnesia under oath, the lying to diaries, the friends and associates indicted and convicted, we were not supposed to criticize the Big He, because he was “presumed innocent.”

To shut down speculation on Mr. Clinton’s, or more recently, Mr. Condit’s possible guilt because they are “presumed innocent” is to remove one of the tools by which wrongdoing is punished when the courts do not, can not or even, in some cases, should not act–public opprobrium. And to use such a tactic as a tool to quiet political opponents is, if not the last one, a refuge for a scoundrel.

That rascal Reynolds has already scooped me, and written my Fox column for tomorrow (and more) at TechCentralStation.

Now I have to come up with something else. Or at least a different angle.

Someday, someone is going to have to sit down and write a book about the screwups and coverups at the FBI.

And when it’s all put together in one place, everyone will wonder why we don’t, in P. J. O’Rourke’s memorable phrase about farm policy, “just take the agency out behind the barn and kill it.”

In a post last week, amidst a lot of discussion of evolution, Orrin Judd made the mistaken claim that evolution is not a falsifiable theory (in the Popperian sense), and that (even more bizarrely and egregiously) defenders of it thought that this strengthened it.

On a related note, he also added to his list of questions about evolution a twelfth one: What would it take to persuade me that evolution was not the best theory to explain life? What evidence, to me, would disprove it? I told him that it was a good question, and that I’d ponder it.

Well, I did ponder it, and here is my response.

First of all, the theory is certainly falsifiable (again, in the theoretical Popperian formulation). If I were coming to the problem fresh, with no data, and someone proposed the theory of evolution to me, I would ask things like:

Does all life seem to be related at some level?

Is there a mechanism by which small changes can occur in reproduction?

Does this mechanism allow beneficial changes?

Can these changes in turn be passed on to the offspring?

Is there sufficient time for such changes to result in the variety of phenotypes that we see today?

There are other questions that could be asked as well, but a “No” answer to any of the above would constitute a falsification of the theory. Thus the theory is indeed falsifiable, as any useful scientific theory must be.

The problem is not that the theory isn’t falsifiable, but that people opposed to evolution imagine that the answer to some or all of the above questions is “No,” and that the theory is indeed false.

But to answer Orrin’s question, at this point, knowing the overwhelming nature of the existing evidentiary record, no, I can’t imagine any new evidence that would change my mind at this point. Any anomalies are viewed as that, and an explanation for them is to be looked for within the prevailing theory.

And lest you think me close minded, consider an analogy. An ex-football player’s wife is brutally murdered, with a friend. All of the evidence points to his guilt, including the DNA evidence. There is little/no evidence that points to anyone else’s guilt. Had I been on the jury that decided that case, it would have at least hung. I might have even persuaded a different verdict, but that’s unlikely, because I’m sure that the jury had members who were a) predisposed to acquit regardless of the evidence and/or b) incapable of critical thinking and logic, as evidenced by post-trial interviews with them.

But for me to believe that ex-football player innocent, I would have to accept the following (which was in fact the defense strategy):

“I know that some of the evidence looks bad for my client, but he was framed. And I can show that some of the evidence is faulty, therefore you should throw all of it out as suspect. I don’t have an alternate theory as to who did the murders, but that’s not my job–I’m just showing that there’s insufficient evidence to prove that my client did it. Someone else did it–no one knows who–it doesn’t matter. And that someone else, or some other someone else, also planted evidence to make it look like my client did it. It might be the most logical conclusion to believe that my client did it, but that would be wrong–the real conclusion is that it is a plot to confuse, and it just looks like he did it. Therefore you shouldn’t believe the evidence.”

Is this a compelling argument? It was to some of the jury members. And it apparently is to people who don’t want to believe that life could evolve as a random, undirected process.

The only way that I could believe that OJ Simpson is innocent at this point would be for someone else to come forward, admit to the crime, and explain how he planted all of the abundant evidence that indicated Orenthal’s guilt.

The equivalent for evolution, I guess, would be for God (or whoever) to reveal himself to me in some clear, unambiguous, and convincing fashion, and to tell me that he planted the evidence. At which point, of course, science goes right out the window.

But absent that, the evidence compels me to believe that OJ Simpson murdered his wife (as it did a later jury in the civil suit), and the evidence compels me to believe that evolution is as valid a theory as is universal gravitation.

Sci Am has a short article on NASA’s budgetary woes. There’s nothing new here, though to people who’ve been reading my blog regularly. It’s basically a recitation of the facts. Mostly, it just seems like a cheap excuse to use the title…

[Thanks to Mike O’Ronain for the link tip]

The Mirror says that there’s a grafitti war going on between US and British troops in Afghanistan.

I hope it’s not as bad as the article makes it sound.

I found one sample a little odd, though.

“We don’t have a fake monarchy, we don’t have an empire, we don’t obsess over stupid Royals. PS, Prince Charles is a f****** w*****, and all his sons are drug-addicted t**ts.”

My best guess is that the first word is the “f” word with an “ing” at the end. I can’t think of a word for the second one, except “wanker,” which isn’t an insult that a Yank would normally use (but a Brit would). Nor, if my guess is right for the third word, and the missing letters are “w” and “a,” is that one. I wonder if someone is framing us? Or if they’re using Britishisms to be more insulting?

Either way, it’s dismaying and disappointing.

Here’s the official NASA press release. There’s a lot more detail in it as to exactly how the ice was detected (instrumentation,etc.).

No announcement of a manned mission to Mars, though, and I don’t expect one any time soon.