I couldn’t figure out what the heck was wrong with him. Now I know. Sadly, I see no sign that Skiba’s death is going to wake him up. If anything, it has deepened his brainwashing.

There is no escape short of their own, personal death for a lot of these people.

I’ve been flying large, pressurized airliners for 38 years. During that time I’ve checked out on a half dozen different types and they all have some things in common regarding the way they handle cabin air.

The first thing is that all the air is tapped from the engine compresser stages. At that point it is extremely hot and guaranteed sterile. It is cooled to a usable temperature and then distributed to the cabin.

In the cabin, the flow of air is mostly from top to bottom. It flows out of ducts above your head next to the skin and flows into return ducts by your feet, also by the skin. From there, it flows to the rear of the airplane under the floor.

At the rear of the plane, in older models it is exhausted overboard. In newer models, about half of it is exhausted and the rest is recirculated after passing through virus-class filters. So, all the air circulating in this way is either sterile to begin with, or has passed through filters that are supposed to be better than any typical face mask.

The one other source of cabin air is from the gasper vents over the seats. These are the small eyeball vents that you can open or close and swivel around if you want. This air is not recirculated. It comes directly from engine packs in its own separate ductwork. It is therefore the most sterile source of air since it is never mixed with recirculated air.

The way the system works, 100 percent of the air in the cabin is changed every two to four minutes, depending on how old the airliner is. Older ones change air faster.

Obviously, sitting close to someone who is coughing or sneezing without a mask is a hazard no matter what. But someone several rows from you is unlikely to give you the virus-at least not in flight. The greater hazard will be during boarding or deplaning.

So, my personal strategy:

-Take a window seat to take advantage of the way cabin air circulates.
-Use the gasper vent to blow sterile air just in front of your face, or to create an air curtain between you and a close neighbor.
-Avoid standing in the aisles during boarding and deplaning.
-Wear a mask as much as possible.

For those of you who will be flying during this time, I hope you find this information helpful.

The people I work with tend to be very conservative politically. I discourage political talk on my flight deck because politics distracts from our job there and that is not ok. But every once in a while they just can’t help themselves and blurt something out. Something that they obviously feel is such a universal truth and so self evident that it isn’t “really” political. It is ALWAYS one of the following things:

1. Government doesn’t work. It is a scam that only enriches politicians.

2. Obama and anyone named Clinton are proven criminals. Everyone knows this. The Government protects them.

These folks aren’t crazy. They are highly trained, highly skilled, highly experienced and highly professional. They are screened for delusions and personality disorders before they ever get to work with me. But they believe these two things just as surely as they believe in gravity.

These two beliefs explain why they do not care if Trump lies. It explains why they don’t care if he committed crimes. It explains why they don’t believe anything the MSM has to say about Trump. They are believers. They are brainwashed.

I first started noticing signs of this 20 years ago and figured that when Clinton was never charged with anything other than lying about sex, they would incorporate that. Or that when Hillary was never found to have done anything wrong after years of investigation, they would incorporate that. Or that when the ACA gave millions of people access to health insurance and slowed the runaway rise in medical costs, they would incorporate that. I was wrong.

Instead, what these events did was to further convince them that their fundamental beliefs are true.

These folks, and just about anyone who still identifies as Republican, are beyond reaching. There is quite literally nothing that will change their belief in the two “facts”' above that define their political reality. It won’t happen when Trump is impeached. It won’t happen when the 2020 election is disputed, and it won’t happen when Trump starts jailing his political opponents. The process of making their political beliefs bulletproof has been successful and it is complete.

And from where I sit, this process has indoctrinated more people than we think. We have a big problem in this country. And it is getting worse.

It's really great that you put all of this information together for us lefties to look at 10 years after the fact. DU will be all atwitter for DAYS while we marvel at the lies and outright crimes that were committed so that a cabal of court appointed neocon freaks could try out their deranged ideas on the people of Iraq. Oh, and to make a shitload of money for GE, too.

Your front page today is filled with hundreds of fascinating stories of great importance to us all, like what it's like to poop in a bag on a cruise ship, or the crisis of Michelle Obama's bangs. These things are important and define us as a nation. But in all of those stories, not a single mention or link to 'Hubris'. Funny, that. Of course, it would be too much to expect the other news corporations to mention anything about a broadcast of such major importance by a competitor and sure enough, there's not a whisper about it on any of their pages.

Oh, if only MSNBC had had a top rated show back in 2002 and 2003 with a powerful host with a huge reputation in the TV business who could have put out this information to a wide audience when it might have mattered. You know, a show to act as a counterweight to Chris Matthews' constant longing for the bulge in the crotch of our chief executive.

Oh, that's right. You DID have a show like that. Hosted by Phil Donahue. It was your number one show. It had higher ratings than Matthews' war masturbation fantasy hour. But Donahue didn't buy the lies and the sales campaign for the war. He pointed out the stinking bullshit funnel that that was being shoved down our throats. And he did this on his widely watched show.

Until you fired him. Your number one show's host. On February 25, 2003. Because he was speaking too much truth to too many people and was becoming a threat to the success of our big fun rush to war.

On second thought, fuck you, MSNBC.