Facts don’t have to be warm and friendly to keep you alive.

One of science's biggest challenges is separating an experiment from its surroundings. When measuring the energy of a chemical reaction, one has to completely isolate the experiment from its surroundings. Doing so might only require running the reaction in a thick container of Styrofoam so that no energy comes into or goes out of the reaction chamber. A very expensive accelerator (CERN) in Europe had electrical noise, and they couldn’t understand why. For a prize of a bottle of champagne, they challenged their scientists to find a solution. A fellow looked at a local train schedule and determined that a train that ran near the facility perfectly accounted for the timing of the unwanted noise.

With our Flydubai plane, we have a perfectly isolated “community”. The numbers keep changing, but apparently there were around 180 people on the plane. Most were Israelis, which no doubt includes Jews, Arab Muslims and Arab Christians. Few Emiratis visit Israel, but we’ll assume that cabin crew and security included some UAE citizens. There were the two ostensibly white Christian backup pilots who landed the plane. All of the people listed above wanted to live. Each expected to arrive in Tel Aviv and continue with his or her life. And then there was the Omani Muslim pilot. As President Trump mentioned, we still don’t know if he was a terrorist or a “whack job”. If he was a terrorist, and that’s where I would place my bet, then we have the case of one guy who wanted to die and take with him 179 other people who wanted to live. And this is the problem of Islam in the West.

An interesting clause in the Abraham Accords is that any pilots flying between Israel and other countries must come from states that recognize both Israel and the Arab country source/destination. By those rules, the Omani pilot should have been disqualified........

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