Christopher Hitchens, reliably thoughtful and provocative, had this reaction to the new airline requirements — reported in the New York Times after last week’s thwarted bombing — which say that “passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps.”

Yes, that ought to do it. It’s also incredibly, nay, almost diabolically clever of our guardians to let it be known what the precise time limit will be. Oh, and by the way, any passenger courageous or resourceful enough to stand up and fight back will also have broken the brave new law.

For some years after 9/11, passengers were forbidden to get up and use the lavatory on the Washington-New York shuttle. Zero tolerance! I suppose it must eventually have occurred to somebody that this ban would not deter a person who was willing to die, so the rule was scrapped. But now the principle has been revisited for international flights. For many years after the explosion of the TWA plane over Long Island (a disaster that was later found to have nothing at all to do with international religious nihilism), you could not board an aircraft without being asked whether you had packed your own bags and had them under your control at all times. These two questions are the very ones to which a would-be hijacker or bomber would honestly and logically have to answer “yes.” But answering “yes” to both was a condition of being allowed on the plane!

Too many of our airline safety procedures have the same Achilles heel as our gun control procedures — which is to say, they only deter the law-abiding. Just as it’s folly to think any criminal bothers to obtain his weapons through legal channels, it’s likewise foolish to believe any suicide bomber, after waking up from a long nap on an overseas flight only to find himself in the stay-seated hour, would say to himself: “Damn! Missed my chance.”

Every once in a while, a window opens into the mindset of politicians and the people who cover them. In recent days, both WTVD television and the News & Observer reported on a Christmas party hosted by Gov. Beverly Perdue at the governor’s mansion. The party was held for convicted felons — many of them killers — who perform maintenance around the mansion. Both news outlets made the same claim about the party’s funding (a talking point presumably supplied by Perdue’s staff). As the N&O reported:

The event didn’t cost taxpayers anything. During the year, the mansion is available for private receptions and fees from those events paid for the party.

Excuse me, but taxpayers own the governor’s mansion. Any revenue generated by private functions held there likewise belongs to taxpayers. In fact, we did pay for the prisoner party. That was our money. How does two separate teams of journalists not grasp this fundamental fact?

Stewart Brand — author of “The Whole Earth Catalog” and creator of the term “ecopragmatist” (of which he clearly is one) — had a piece in the New York Times a few days ago in which he identified four distinctly different attitudes toward climate change. I encourage you to read the piece, but here’s a quick summary of his classifications:

Denialists: There is absolutely, positively no human cause behind whatever warming has occurred (if there’s even warming at all).

Skeptics: OK, there might be some warming, but the science isn’t nailed down tight, other factors have been given short shrift, and there’s a whole lot of scare-mongering going on.

Warners: The climate is changing and we’re headed for eventual disaster if something isn’t done right now.

Calamatists: Mother Nature is going to kill us all, and we deserve it because humans are loathsome, greedy and self-indulgent.

Feel free to declare where you belong on this scale. I’ll go first. I’m a skeptic who errs on the side of the warners. The more I read about the assumptions and models that support Climate Theology (and there’s been a lot to read lately), the more skeptical I become. Science, like journalism, is supposed to be obsessed with truth — no matter how uncomfortable it may be, how much research funding it endangers or how many political beliefs it imperils. What we know now that we didn’t know a month ago is that key members of the climate-science community are done pretending that contrary scientific judgments have any place in their deliberations. To them, climate science is settled and from this point it’s just a political argument. Problem is, history is rich with moments when science was “settled” and disbelievers were considered to be a political problem. Things tended to not end well for them, as you may recall. Does the name Galileo ring a bell?

Still, the fact that we continue to debate the science is a good sign. And because my faith in modern research is greater than my belief that some of it has been corrupted, I give the warners the benefit of the doubt. It would surely be a good thing to stop the increase in carbon emissions, and reduce it if we can. Just don’t blow those carbon emissions up my skirt. I really hate that.