His book deals with two “derangements”, Christian Evangelism and the Truthers of 9/11. As for Christian Evangelism it is no different from Orthodox Judiasm or other religions. God is a matter of faith, not fact and will always be so. Some religions get dangerous when they derive their strength from converting heathens, like it or not.

Truthers are another matter. Their concerns may be checked against external facts, but Mr. Taibbi apparently did not do so. This is not to say many Truther arguments are not both absurd and unnecessary. “Loose Change” the Truther documentary by two twenty somethings (Google “Loose Change” for the link) contains things to ponder and things which make no sense.

I think my differences with Mr. Taibbi are products of our age difference. He was born in 1970 which means he missed Kennedy’s assassination. I was thirty five then, three years younger than Taibbi is today. I became what was then called an assassination buff, reading just about everything I could on the subject. I concluded, like more than fifty percent of Americans that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy; that Oswald was not the lone killer and in fact probably had nothing to do with the killing.

The Warren Commission’s counsel was a guy named Arlen Spector, now Repub Senator from PA, who created a single bullet theory, that one bullet wounded John Connelly, who sat next to Kennedy and then killed or wounded Kennedy. He needed the single bullet theory because a guy named Zapruder filmed the entire assassination with his 8mm movie camera which provided strict time limits for everything. Connelly insisted to the day he died that Kennedy was hit first. He felt Kennedy thrown back and then an instant later he was hit. At the time I served on our Town’s Board of Finance with a Republican lady whose husband was a ballistics expert for Remington Arms. According to her, her husband said the single bullet, recovered in almost pristine condition in Parkland Hospital, could not have been the bullet that wounded Kennedy and Connelly because any lead bullet would have been seriously deformed passing through flesh and hitting bone. Then there was Jack Ruby, a low level gangster, who killed Oswald supposedly because he wanted to spare the widow Kennedy the trauma of testifying at a trial. Ruby loan sharked and ran women from his cheezy night club. His career choice stretches his alleged empathy to the breaking point. I am, therefore, more inclined to see conspiracy in high places then those who did not experience Kennedy’s killing. I think our country’s decline began with that assassination. Bye-bye Miss America Pie.

Anyhow on the matter of cell phones on airplanes, Nonplussed at #184 provides a link to an apparently scholarly article on why Barbara Olsen most likely did not contact her husband by cell phone. It has lots of footnotes and seems authoritative, but I have no idea if it is correct. The article says technology permitting use of cell phones at high altitudes did not come in until 2004. It was these sort of questions I thought Mr. Taibbi could answer. Apparently he knows no more about it than I do.

One more point about feeding trolls. It seems a “troll” is someone who opposed the conventional wisdom as expressed in the comments on this blog. It is not a good position for a liberal blog to take.

What a great tonic after the endless Friday the 13th downer. Bravo Jane, Matt, Christy and all you fabulous commmenting firedogs!