The self-portraits of Bryan Lewis Saunders

From his website:

After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of the self.  So I devised another experiment where everyday I took a different drug and drew myself under the influence.  Within weeks I became lethargic and suffered mild brain damage.  I am still conducting this experiment but over greater lapses of time.

 

Arctic Defrost Dumping Snow on U.S. and Europe

From Common Dreams:

The world's northern freezer is on rapid defrost as large volumes of warm water are pouring into the Arctic Ocean, speeding the melt of sea ice, according to a new study.

The world's northern freezer is on rapid defrost as large volumes of warm water are pouring into the Arctic Ocean, speeding the melt of sea ice, according to a new study. (NASA Goddard Photo)

Surface temperatures in parts of the Arctic have been 21 degrees C above normal for more than a month in recent weeks."Boats were still in the water during the first week of January," said David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada, referring to southern Baffin Island, some 2,000 km north of Montreal. This is a region that receives just four or five hours of weak sunlight during the long winter. Temperatures normally range from -25 to -35 degrees C but were above zero on some days in January.
"It's impossible for many people in parts of the eastern Arctic to safely get on the ice to hunt much-needed food for their families - for the second winter in a row," Phillips said in a report.
The warming and melting of the Arctic is happening much faster than expected and new data reveals that huge volumes of warmer water from the North Atlantic are now flowing into and warming up the Arctic Ocean, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science.
"In the past hundred years the waters in the Fram Strait have warmed about two degrees C," says co-author Thomas Marchitto, of Colorado University's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
The Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard (Spitsbergen) is the major connection between the Arctic Ocean and the world ocean. An international team of researchers analysed marine sediments and found that temperatures of the northward inflowing Atlantic water varied by just a few tenths of a degree Celsius during the past 2,000 years. However, in the last hundred years temperatures have shot up by two degrees C.
"What's happening here is very unusual compared to the last 2,000 years," Marchitto told IPS.
Climate change is believed to be behind this warmer water because over 90 percent of additional heat trapped in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas is going into the oceans, he said.
"The accelerated decrease of the Arctic sea ice cover and the warming of ocean and atmosphere in the Arctic, as measured during the past decades, are in part related to an increased heat transfer from the Atlantic," said co-author Robert Spielhagen, a palaeoceanographer at the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany.
Sea ice has declined dramatically during the short Arctic summers in recent years, with some experts now projecting that the ice cover will be essentially gone in as little as five years. Just a few years ago, no one thought a summer ice-free Arctic could happen before 2060.
The warming Arctic and melting sea ice is a planetary-scale change since the Arctic Ocean covers 14 million sq km, an area almost as big as Russia. The Arctic and Antarctic polar regions are key drivers of Earth's weather and climate. The rapid defrosting of the Arctic has already altered the climate system, researchers now agree.
IPS previously broke the story revealing that the snow and cold in the eastern United States and Europe during the winter of 2009-10 was likely the result of the loss of Arctic sea ice. The same thing has happened this year.
As more and more sea ice melts, there is more open water to absorb the summer sun's heat. A day of 24-hour summer sun in the Arctic puts more heat on the surface of the ocean than a day in the tropics, James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States told IPS.
That extra heat in the ocean is gradually released into the lower atmosphere from October to January as the region slowly re-freezes months later than normal. This is a fundamental change - a large part of the Arctic Ocean is radiating heat instead of being cold and ice-covered. That has disrupted wind circulation patterns in the northern hemisphere, reported Overland and other researchers at the International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference in Norway last June.
The result: the Arctic stays warm and mid-latitude regions become colder and receive more snow for much of the winter. Last December was the coldest south Florida has experienced in more than a century of record-keeping.
Most of Britain suffered through its coldest December ever. Up in the Arctic, Coral Harbour on the northwest corner of Hudson Bay was above zero degrees C for two days in early January for the first time in history. Much of the eastern Arctic centred around Baffin Island averaged +21C above normal between Dec. 17 and Jan. 15 this year.
This looks to be the new normal since Arctic experts agree the melting sea ice is now locked into a death spiral.
"In future, cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception" in the eastern United States and Europe, Overland previously told IPS.
This week the U.S. northeast suffered through its sixth major snowstorm this winter, breaking all snowfall records.

Egyptian Activists' Action Plan: Translated

From The Atlantic:

Egyptian activists have been circulating a kind of primer to Friday's planned protest. We were sent the plan by two separate sources and have decided to publish excerpts here, with translations  into English. Over Twitter, we connected with a translator, who translated the document with exceptional speed.

What follows are side-by-side translations of nine pages from the 26-page pamphlet. They were translated over the last hour and pasted up in Photoshop to give you an idea of what's in the protest plan. While the plan itself contains specifics about what protesters might do, these excerpts show how one might equip oneself for clashes with riot police. Egyptian security forces have repeatedly beaten protesters as the level of violent repression of demonstrations has ratcheted upwards. For more context on the pamphlet itself, the Guardian UK ran a summary of it earlier today.

As you'll read, the creators of the pamphlet explicitly asked that the pamphlet not be distributed on Twitter or Facebook, only through email or other contacts. We're publishing this piece of ephemera because we think it's a fascinating part of the historical record of what may end up becoming a very historic day for Egypt.

The pages included are 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 13, 22, and 26. You can click to (roughly) double the size of the images.

Bob Sinclar - Kiss My Eyes & Tennessee

Mashups by FAROFF

DJ FAROFF produces some of my favorite mash-ups.



Of course, being a huge Beatles fan, it's hard not to love what FAROFF does with their songs.



And, if you like Bob Marley and The Beatles, then you have to love this one.



Remember the Fatboy Slim video with Christopher Walken?

See more of his work at DJFAROFF.com

"Red Hot" Nuclear-Waste Train Glows in Infrared

From National Geographic:

Railroad cars carrying some 123 tons of nuclear waste glow red-hot in an infrared picture taken in Valognes (map), France, in November and released by Greenpeace International as part of an antinuclear-power campaign that included arranging protests that delayed the train's progress.
The train is hauling a so-called CASTOR convoy, named after the type of container carried: Cask for Storage and Transport Of Radioactive material. These trademarked casks have been used since 1995 to transport nuclear waste from German power plants to France for reprocessing, then back to Germany for storage.
"High-level waste is in fact hot," said nuclear energy and proliferation expert Matthew Bunn. "It doesn’t mean anything in particular in terms of how dangerous it is."

Best of L.A. Architecture

From My Modern Met:

Taking a cinematic approach, Brian Parillo finds incredible amounts of character in Los Angeles. Shooting at abstract angles, he directs our eyes to captivating geometric shapes. When he shoots up from the ground and into the sky, he gives us a sense of scale, showing us just how magnificent modern architecture can be.

Born and raised in Connecticut, Brian now resides in Los Angeles. He makes beautiful Southern California his backdrop, drawing inspiration from music, pop art, and architecture.

Caltech Researchers Develop Strongest-Known Metal Alloy

From Current:

Caltech researchers say they’ve developed a new metal alloy that is stronger than any other metal known to science.

Nature Materials, a scientific journal, says the new alloy combines palladium, a small fraction of silver, and a mixture of other metalloids has shown through tests to have a combination of strength and toughness at a level not previously seen in any other material.

The metal’s molecules are not crystallized, like other metals, but are locked into what scientists call a glass-like fluid, but the material does not shatter like common glass.

“Our study demonstrates for the first time that this class of materials, the metallic glasses, has the capacity to become the toughest and strongest ever known,” said senior Caltech research fellow Marios Demetriou. The new discovery is “pushing the envelope of damage tolerance accessible to a structural metal.”

The discovery was made by a team of researchers that included William Johnson, the Caltech Ruben F. and Donna Mettler Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, and their Caltech colleagues.

Demetriou said the alloy could soon be used in biomedical implants, such as dental implants or in other structural applications like automotive or aerospace components, adding that the alloy is “prohibitively expensive. The cost is much too high for any large-scale, widespread use.”

He said scientists must determine what gives this alloy its unique damage tolerance, and how that can be replicated with alloys containing less-expensive precious metals.

In Nuclear Silos, Death Wears a Snuggie

From Wired:

At a small United States Air Force installation in eastern Wyoming, I’m sitting at an electronic console, ready to unleash nuclear hell. In front of me is a strange amalgamation of ’60s-era flip switches and modern digital display screens. It’s the control console for launching an intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM.
On an archaic display screen in the center of the console, three large letters blink in rapid succession. “EAM inbound,” says my deputy commander and the second member of the launch crew. An emergency-action message is on its way, maybe from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, maybe from the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, maybe even from the president. We both mechanically pull down our code books, thick binders swollen with pages of alpha-numeric sequences, and swiftly decipher the message.
After nearly four years of pulling ICBM-alert duty, this process is instinctive. I deliberately recite the encrypted characters to ensure my deputy is on the same page, literally and figuratively, as six short characters can effectively communicate a wealth of information through the use of special decoding binders. “Charlie, Echo, Seven, Quebec, Golf, Bravo, six characters ending in Bravo.” My partner concurs, scribbling in his code book.
“Crowd pleaser,” he adds without emotion, referring to a war plan that mandates immediate release of our entire flight of nuclear missiles, 10 in all.
Of course, this is just a training scenario. The coded orders are a simulation. The console is a mockup of the real thing, stowed away in a larger hanger and serviced seven days a week by a small staff of Boeing contractors.
If this were a real event, I’d be buried in a steel cocoon 100 feet underground. I’d have shed my standard-issue flight suit and boots. Instead, I’d be wearing sweats, fleece-lined slippers and, naturally, my indispensable, royal blue Snuggie.
America and her nuclear warriors have an odd relationship. For decades, missileers (as we’re known in the military) have quietly performed their duties, custodians of a dying breed of weapon. But American citizens have no real connection with the shadowy operators who stand the old posts of the Cold War, despite the fact that they spend up to $8 billion a year to maintain our country’s nuclear deterrent. The truth is the job is an awesome responsibility, but it’s deeply weird.
Back in the air-conditioned simulator, my deputy and I carefully, but quickly, walk through a precisely choreographed preparation sequence. Unlock codes provided by the president allow us to enable the missiles for launch, a function similar to the safety switch of a gun. At this moment, the safety is off.
Several times during the process, we verify that the orders are authentic and formatted properly, and that they originate from the appropriate command authorities. Both of us keep a sharp eye out for a “termination message,” a quick stand-down notification that would cancel our attack orders. None comes.
We finish our sequence in less than a minute, leaving 30 seconds to spare before initiating our practice launch. It feels like an eternity. My deputy stares at his keyboard, while my eyes are locked on a large red clock above our heads. The clock is set to Greenwich Mean Time (“Zulu time” in missile parlance), and is checked against the Navy’s atomic clock twice a day for accuracy down to the millisecond.
At 10 seconds out, we place our hands on a series of launch switches. Contrary to popular myth, there is no red button. Four launch switches means it takes four hands to launch — it’s one of many safety mechanisms built into the system as a means of preventing unauthorized execution of missiles by a lone individual. At five seconds out, I start my countdown, commanding a final “3, 2, 1 — execute.”
We turn our keys, and watch as the control screen flashes with missile-launch notifications. Some fly immediately, some with a delay to prevent nuclear fratricide when the bombs approach their targets in 20 to 30 minutes.

The Ultimate Enemy: Boredom

In four years on nuclear-alert duty, I ran through an infinite number of attack sequences and fought countless virtual nuclear wars. I knew how to target my missiles within minutes and launch them within seconds. The process was rigorous, thorough and fully governed by a checklist that was, to our knowledge, without defect. The room for human error was minimal.
But that training was about as exciting as the job got, a blessing considering the mission. Being a missileer means that your worst enemy is boredom. No battlefield heroism, no medals to be won. The duty is seen today as a dull anachronism.
Old hats, the squadron commanders who pulled nuclear alert during the sunset of the Cold War, spin tales of the good old days over sweaty mugs of beer at base officer clubs. The harsh mediocrity of missile duty is demanding enough to extract an emotional and physical toll, but cushy enough that missileers are too ashamed to acknowledge any misery. Missileers get warm sheets and hot food; Marines sleep in the mud.
For the missileers of the 9/11 generation, relevancy — a dwindling commodity in a dwindling community — is a vicarious experience. During the Cold War, they had real-time intelligence briefings, screaming klaxons and a force three times larger than the current inventory. Today there’s Facebook and PowerPoint.
The missile field is attached to Wyoming’s FE Warren Air Force Base, one of three such fields nationwide. It’s approximately the size of Rhode Island.
When the deep silos for the ICBMs and underground alert facilities were dug in the 1960s, military planners spaced each site several miles apart as a survivability feature. The distance ensured a perverse tit-for-tat approach to nuclear game theory, born of the outdated mutually assured destruction epoch but sophisticated enough in its simplicity. An attack would require one nuke to kill one nuke. It meant a two-hour drive from base to the alert facility, a winding journey through America’s high plains.
During a typical four-year tour, missileers spend more than a year separated from their families and work an average of 25 days a month on alert or in training. In the good old days, the oncoming alert force would show up at 0800 for a five-minute pre-deployment briefing. Thanks to Microsoft’s growing influence in the U.S. military, that five-minute weather and maintenance brief has ballooned into an hour-long PowerPoint extravaganza.
“Alerts” are something of a misnomer, another cultural handle better suited the Cold War. Two officers seal themselves behind a 4-ton blast door, in a small capsule similar in size to an 18-wheeler’s freight rig, for a 24-hour period. Remaining alert is the real challenge.
I’ve spent long, quiet hours with lights dimmed — reading, monitoring the status of the missiles, watching DVDs (Lost and Entourage were favorites), and fighting a growing sense of boredom, containment and isolation.

My First Nuclear “Strike”

One way to fend off those symptoms is humor. Early in my tour, I was startled out of the rack by a playful commander who had triggered the fire alarm, cut the lights and figured out how to make the capsule sway back and forth on the heavy chains that anchored it to the ceiling. My training told me that these conditions were indications of a nuclear strike.
To my colleague’s eternal amusement, I sprinted around the capsule in a pair of polka-dotted boxer shorts trying to simultaneously restore command over the system and nurse the banged head that happened when I was jolted from a pleasant sleep.
Though tedious, missile duty is not without perks. The uniform regulations are relaxed, though not by design. Once the blast door thuds shut and a crew is free from the prying eyes of the public or enlisted personnel topside, out come the pajamas and hooded sweatshirts.

In a favorite missileer uniform patch (right), the Grim Reaper sits at an ICBM console, dressed in bunny slippers. In the real world, death wears a campus T-shirt, JCrew bottoms and the ubiquitous Snuggie. The silly blanket-robe hybrid is suited to the missile force, keeping an officer toasty while allowing him to interact with the weapons console unobstructed.
Missileers learn that on alert, comfort is as important as humor. One enterprising fellow liked to string a hammock between the two command chairs and stretch out for his long shifts at the console. Videogame systems are forbidden, a rule that was mocked until it got out that wireless Nintendo Wii controllers could cause the system to detect a false electromagnetic pulse attack and shut down.
I used to imagine that I’d have some sort of stiff-upper-lip moment should I receive “the order,” where I’d shed the Snuggie and slippers, zip up my flight suit, and make imperial references about “going out proper.”
Though the USSR is gone, the assignment still has a kamikaze feel to it, left over from the Cold War, when a launch meant instant Soviet counter-battery fire. You resign yourself to the fact that you sit 100 feet underground while bombs that crater down to 200 feet are headed in your direction. It doesn’t make for much peace of mind.
Isolation often gives way to reflection, and missile duty brings out strange conundrums.
Missile training fosters an unquestioning, automation mentality. I was trained to be a cog in the machine: Orders were orders, and a lawful command from the president was not subject to debate or dissonance.
Every missileer is carefully screened for mental aptitude and stability, yet they’re evaluated for their readiness to unleash hell.
Though I never doubted that I would execute a launch order without question, other misgivings occasionally surfaced. We arrested a group of Catholic nuns staging a peaceful protest on one of our launch facilities a few years back. For a missileer who is a practicing Catholic, such a situation brings up questions: If women who have committed themselves to the Word of God feel so strongly about the immorality of nuclear weapons that they’re willing to be confined for their convictions, what kind of Christian am I to sit at the launch switch? How do you resolve a conflict between duty to your God and duty to your country? Who wins, faith or flag?
That a capacity for great violence sustains great peace is one of the genuine paradoxes of our time, and I wrestled with that from time to time. The human factor is the system’s greatest vulnerability, something I unwittingly contributed to whenever I engaged in high-minded navel gazing.
But these philosophical battles were not ours to fight — even in the quiet solitude of an archaic outpost, fighting yesterday’s war.

Fame Through Assassination: A Secret Service Study

From NPR:


It's well known that in March 1981, John Hinckley attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. What is not well known is that several years later, the life of  President Reagan and the life of his vice president, George H.W. Bush, were threatened again — in fact, not just once.

Enlarge John F. Urwiller/AP Joseph Corbett (center), who was convicted of killing millionaire Adolph Coors III, is led to the Jefferson County courthouse in Golden, Colo., in 1961.

John F. Urwiller/AP

"In the space of 18 months, four situations came to the attention of the Secret Service," says Robert Fein, who in the mid-1980s worked with the Secret Service as a psychologist. In two of these incidents, he says, people with weapons and an intent to kill appeared at public events. In the two other incidents, the would-be assassins were intercepted before the events. Ultimately, all four cases were prosecuted. Two were convicted, and two were sent to psychiatric facilities, Fein says, though the government didn't exactly advertise it.
"These were not stories that hit the news, but they were situations that caused great concern for protectors," he says. "So after these incidents, the Secret Service leadership got together and said, 'We really would like to know more about the behaviors of these people.' "
Creation Of A Study
So Fein and Secret Service agent Bryan Vossekuil undertook the most extensive study of assassins and would-be assassins ever done.
In the Secret Service Exception Case Study Project, they identified 83 people who had completed assassinations or made assassination attempts since 1949 — some cases known to the public, some not — and collected every document they could find. Fein and Vossekuil also went to visit many of these people in jail.
Fein says they went with a very particular pitch: "We'd say, 'We're here because we're in the business of trying to protect people and prevent these kinds of attacks. You are one of the few experts because you've engaged in this behavior. We would like to talk to you to understand your perspectives, your life.' "
Most said they'd be very glad to talk, Fein recalls.
The researchers asked prisoners how they chose targets, how they prepared. They inquired about their motives, every intimate detail of their process. After they asked these questions, they combined the answers with other sources and analyzed the information. In 1999, they published their results in The Journal of Forensic Sciences.
Nonpolitical Killers
The insights of this study are interesting to review in light of the Arizona shooting, though obviously we still don't know that much about Jared Loughner, the suspect in the attack, or his motives. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that according to Fein and Vossekuil, assassinations of political figures were almost never for political reasons.
"It was very, very rare for the primary motive to be political, though there were a number of attackers who appeared to clothe their motives with some political rhetoric," Fein says.
What emerges from the study is that rather than being politically motivated, many of the assassins and would-be assassins simply felt invisible. In the year before their attacks, most struggled with acute reversals and disappointment in their lives, which, the paper argues, was the true motive. They didn't want to see themselves as nonentities.
"They experienced failure after failure after failure, and decided that rather than being a 'nobody,' they wanted to be a 'somebody,' " Fein says.
They chose political targets, then, because political targets were a sure way to transform this situation: They would be known.
Murderers Searching For A Cause
"If the objective is notoriety or fame, that's the most efficient instrumental mechanism by which to achieve that. I don't mean to be flip about that, but a public official is likely to bring them a substantial amount of recognition instantly, without having to achieve something," says Randy Borum, a professor at the University of South Florida who worked on the study.
And one thing Borum and Fein say about choosing a political figure — as opposed to choosing a show-business celebrity — is that the would-be assassins are able to associate themselves with a broader political movement or goal. That allows them to see themselves as not such a bad person. In this way, Borum says, assassins are basically murderers in search of a cause.
"People make decisions to act, and then from that, construct for themselves and potentially for others a narrative about why that is OK, or what the rationale would be, or how this could be justified," Borum says. "It's sort of a reverse pattern from what we would typically think."
This can be seen very clearly, Borum says, from the way many of the assassins in the study chose their targets. Though occasionally they would fixate on a single person who represented a clear political position, many just went from target to target to target.
"About half of the assassins in this study had multiple targets or what sometimes are referred to as directions of interest, throughout the course of deliberating about an attack," he says.
For example, there was one guy who was fixated on his governor until he heard that the vice president was coming to his area.
"He said he had read enough to know that there hadn't been anybody who had attempted to assassinate a sitting vice president," Borum says.
So he made the vice president his target. He told the researchers he thought he'd get more attention from historians. "He said in the books on assassination, there might even be a whole chapter on him," Borum recalls.
Changed Perceptions
Another assumption people make about assassins is that they're insane — people completely divorced from reality. But this study — to a degree — rejects that idea as too simplistic. Yes, the authors write, many of the people were experiencing or had experienced serious mental health issues: 44 percent had a history of depression, 43 percent a history of delusional ideas, 21 percent heard voices. But, as Fein points out, the way these people sought to address what they saw as their main problems — anonymity and failure — wasn't inherently crazy.
"There's nothing crazy about thinking that if I attacked the president or a major public official, I would get a lot of attention. I would get a lot of attention. My goal was notoriety," Fein says. "That's why I bought the weapon."
And most of the assassins and would-be assassins weren't totally disorganized by mental illness, either.
"They were quite organized," Fein says. "Because one has to be organized — at least to some extent — to attack a public official."
Last Saturday morning at a Safeway in Tuscon, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords became the latest public servant caught in the cross hairs of an attacker's gun. This study suggests the attempt may have been driven by very powerful and personal motives.

Hero Pilot Pulls Out the Stops to Help Grandpa Reach Funeral: 2011's Most Heartwarming Travel Story?

From Time:

The most important trips aren't about getting somewhere. They're about getting to someone. (via Elliott.org)

But in an age of mounting airline fees, reduced in-flight services, uncomfortable security pat-downs and multi-day delays caused by erupting volcanoes, it's easy to forget that.
Amid the cries of "I've already paid for my hotel!" and "You need to get me to Atlanta!" anger and inconvenience frequently blind us to the fact that travel is ultimately about people. We also forget that airline employees—bound by big company rules and regulations—get frustrated, too.
Enter Nancy, whose travel triumph, tempered by a great deal of sadness, has turned an unnamed Southwest Airlines pilot into an online hero.

Nancy reads a blog by Christopher Elliott, a consumer advocate and journalist, and wrote to him about her husband's recent ordeal traveling on flights from Los Angeles to Tucson to Denver. Their situation makes complaints about leg room look downright petty.
"Last night, my husband and I got the tragic news that our three-year-old grandson in Denver had been murdered by our daughter's live-in boyfriend," she wrote. "He is being taken off life support tonight at 9 o'clock and his parents have opted for organ donation, which will take place immediately. Over 25 people will receive his gift tonight and many lives will be saved."
So early in the morning, after what must have been a torturous night's sleep, Nancy and her husband arranged for him to fly from Los Angeles, where he was traveling for work, to Tuscon, where he would step off one plane and immediately onto another one headed to Denver. "The ticketing agent was holding back tears throughout the call," Nancy wrote. "I'm actually her step-mother and it's much more important for my husband to be there than for me to be there."
Mourning the loss of his child's child, and no doubt worrying about his grieving daughter, he was likely in no state to travel. Airport stress only compounded his despair. He arrived at LAX two hours before his scheduled flight time, but quickly realized that delays at baggage check and security would keep him from making the flight.

According to Nancy, he struggled to hold back tears as he pleaded with TSA and Southwest Airlines staff to fast-track him through the lines that were moving like molasses. Even though missing his flight could mean missing a final chance to see his grandson, no one seemed to care.
Too much was at stake to simply roll over and cry. When he finally cleared security—several minutes after his flight's planned departure—he grabbed his computer bag, shoes and belt, and ran to his terminal wearing only his socks. The pilot and the gate agent were waiting for him.
“Are you Mark? We held the plane for you and we're so sorry about the loss of your grandson,” the pilot reportedly said. “They can't go anywhere without me and I wasn't going anywhere without you. Now relax. We'll get you there. And again, I'm so sorry.”
It's hard to overestimate the courage of the pilot's decision. The flight, which ultimately departed 12 minutes late, likely had hundreds of passengers rolling their eyes in contempt. And given that any delay has knock-on effects for passengers at the destination airport, his decision placed Southwest at risk of facing the wrath of travelers, and more than a few demands for compensation.
Elliott, who brought the story to the blogosphere's attention, approached Southwest about the story, half expecting the airline to be outraged by a pilot's refusal to push the on-time departure.
Instead, they told him they were "proud" of their pilot, a man who clearly understands that taking a child off life support has consequences that run deeper than a flight taking off late. As Nancy wrote: "My husband was able to take his first deep breath of the day." Hopefully, over time, his daughter can do the same.

Now, If You'll Excuse Me...

25 Tons of Bombs Wipe Afghan Town Off Map

From Wired:

An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else.
But it’s the latest indication that Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency icon, is prosecuting a frustrating war with surprising levels of violence. Some observers already fear a backlash brewing in the area.
Paula Broadwell, a West Point graduate and Petraeus biographer, described the destruction of Tarok Kolache in a guest post for Tom Ricks’ Foreign Policy blog. Or, at least, she described its aftermath: Nothing remains of Tarok Kolache after Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, made a fateful decision in October.
His men had come under relentless assault from homemade bombs emanating from the village, where a Taliban “intimidation campaign [chased] the villagers out” to create a staging ground for attacking the task force. With multiple U.S. amputations the result of the Taliban hold over Tarok Kolache, Flynn’s men were “terrified to go back into the pomegranate orchards to continue clearing [the area]; it seemed like certain death.”
After two failed attempts at clearing the village resulted in U.S and Afghan casualties, Flynn’s response was to take the village out. He ordered a mine-clearing line charge, using rocket-propelled explosives to create a path into the center of Tarok Kolache.
And that was for starters, Broadwell writes. Airstrikes from A-10s and B-1s combined with powerful ground-launched rockets on Oct. 6 to batter the village with “49,200 lbs. of ordnance” — which she writes, resulted in “NO CIVCAS,” meaning no civilians dead.
It seems difficult to understand how Broadwell or the 1-320th can be so confident they didn’t accidentally kill civilians after subjecting Tarok Kolache to nearly 25 tons worth of bombs and rockets. The rockets alone have a blast radius of about 50 meters [164 feet], so the potential for hitting bystanders is high with every strike.
As she clarified in a debate on her Facebook wall, “In the commander’s assessment, the deserted village was not worth clearing. If you lost several KIA and you might feel the same.” But without entering Tarok Kolache to clear it, how could U.S. or Afghan forces know it was completely devoid of civilians?
As Broadwell tells it, the villagers understood that the United States needed to destroy their homes — except when they don’t. One villager “in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition.”
An adviser to Hamid Karzai said that the 1-320th “caused unreasonable damage to homes and orchards and displaced a number of people.” Flynn has held “reconstruction shuras” with the villagers and begun compensating villagers for their property losses, but so far the reconstruction has barely begun, three months after the destruction.
“Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts,” Broadwell wrote on Facebook, “but that is why the BUILD story is important here.”

Broadwell writes that the operation is ultimately a success, quoting Flynn as saying “As of today, more of the local population talks to us and the government than talk to the Taliban.” That appears to be good enough for higher command. Petraeus, having visited the village and allowing Flynn to personally approve reconstruction projects worth up to $1 million, told his commanders in the south to “take a similar approach to what 1-320th was doing on a grander scale as it applies to the districts north of Arghandab.”
We’ve reached out to Petraeus’ staff to get a fuller sense of what the commander of the war actually thinks about the destruction of Tarok Kolache, and will have a forthcoming post on precisely that. But Petraeus has waged a far more violent, intense fight than many expected.
Air strikes, curtailed under Gen. Stanley McChrystal, are at their highest levels since the invasion. Tanks have moved into Helmand Province, rockets batter Taliban positions in Kandahar, and throughout the east and the south Special Operations Forces conduct intense raiding operations. Petraeus rebuked Karzai when the Afghan leader urged an end to the raids.
According to Erica Gaston, an Afghanistan-based researcher with the Open Society Institute, the level of property destruction at Tarok Kolache is “extreme” compared to other operations, so it doesn’t appear as if wiping out villages is standard procedure. The area is a “virtual no-go by civilian means because of the security concerns,” limiting the ability of analysts, including Gaston, to independently assess what happened.
But from what she hears, destroying Tarok Kolache — in order, apparently, to rebuild it — has meant jeopardizing whatever buy-in  local Afghans gave U.S. troops for fighting the Taliban in the Arghandab, which has been the scene of fierce fighting for months.
And that’s precisely because it’s not standard procedure for U.S.-led troops to destroy whole villages. “But for this, I think [NATO] would have started to get some credit for improved conduct,” Gaston e-mails. “Some Kandahar elders (and I stress ’some,’ not ‘all’ or even ‘most’) who had initially opposed the Kandahar operations — due largely to fears that it would become another Marjah — were in the last few months expressing more appreciation for ISAF conduct during these operations, saying they had driven out the Taliban and shown restraint in not harming civilians.”
Perhaps that popular goodwill would have dried up anyway, Gaston continues, but “I think this property destruction has likely reset the clock on any nascent positive impressions.”
It’s also not like the coalition has an overflow of goodwill in the Arghandab. Last year, Army researchers warned that the locals there trust the Taliban more than Karzai.
And it’s where the infamous rogue “Kill Team” from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division allegedly murdered at least three Afghans in late 2009 and early 2010. The commander of the 5th Strykers, unaware of what the “Kill Team” was doing, was none too keen on the restraint urged on him by McChrystal.
For reasons like that, Josh Foust writes, not every Afghan automatically believes the U.S. military has benign intentions.
And it’s worth remembering why counterinsurgency even took hold in Afghanistan among military theorists in the first place. Although counterinsurgency has always been a violent affair, the theory holds that popular sentiment will ultimately determine who wins in a guerrilla war, something that many in uniform thought was vindicated by the Iraq surge — which imposes restrictions on how to use force.
Popular Afghan dissatisfaction was the reason that McChrystal and his predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, rolled back the air strikes. McChrystal’s men ultimately thought his restraint went too far. But if Tarok Kolache is to become a new model for the military in Afghanistan, then it’s quite an irony for Petraeus, the military’s chief counterinsurgency theorist-practitioner, to swing the pendulum in the direction of decimating whole villages.

Elusive Forger, Giving but Never Stealing

From The New York Times:

His real name is Mark A. Landis, and he is a lifelong painter and former gallery owner. But when he paid a visit to the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, La., last September, he seemed more like a character sprung from a Southern Gothic novel.
He arrived in a big red Cadillac and introduced himself as Father Arthur Scott. Mark Tullos Jr., the museum’s director, remembers that he was dressed “in black slacks, a black jacket, a black shirt with the clerical collar and he was wearing a Jesuit pin on his lapel.” Partly because he was a man of the cloth and partly because he was bearing a generous gift — a small painting by the American Impressionist Charles Courtney Curran, which he said he wanted to donate in memory of his mother, a Lafayette native — it was difficult not to take him at his word, Mr. Tullos said.
The painting, unframed and wrapped in cellophane, looked like the real thing, with a faded label on the verso from a long-defunct gallery in Manhattan. Father Scott offered to pay for a good frame and hinted that more paintings and perhaps some money might come the museum’s way from his family. But when the Hilliard’s director of development chatted with Father Scott about the church and his acquaintances in deeply Roman Catholic southern Louisiana, the man grew nervous. “He said, ‘Well, I travel a lot,’ ” Mr. Tullos recalled. “ ‘I go and solve problems for the church.’ ”
Mr. Landis — often under his own name, though more recently as Father Scott or as a collector named Steven Gardiner — has indeed done a lot of traveling over the past two decades, but not for the church. He has been one of the most prolific forgers American museums have encountered in years, writing, calling and presenting himself at their doors, where he tells well-concocted stories about his family’s collection and donates small, expertly faked works, sometimes in honor of nonexistent relatives.
Unlike most forgers, he does not seem to be in it for the money, but for a kind of satisfaction at seeing his works accepted as authentic. He takes nothing more in return for them than an occasional lunch or a few tchotchkes from the gift shop. He turns down tax write-off forms, and it’s unclear whether he has broken any laws. But his activities have nonetheless cost museums, which have had to pay for analysis of the works, for research to figure out if more of his fakes are hiding in their collections and for legal advice. (The Hilliard said it discovered the forgery within hours, using a microscope to find a printed template beneath the paint.)
In the weeks since an article in The Art Newspaper first revealed the scope of the forgeries, museums and their lawyers have been trying to locate Mr. Landis, who was never easy to find in the first place because he often provided bogus addresses and phone numbers. But now he seems to have disappeared altogether. His last known attempt to pass off a forgery occurred in mid-November, when he presented himself, again as Father Arthur Scott, at the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, bearing a French Academic drawing.
“It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever come across,” said Matthew Leininger, the director of museum services at the Cincinnati Art Museum, who first met Mr. Landis in 2007 when Mr. Leininger was the registrar at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and Mr. Landis offered to donate several works under his own name.
In the years since, Mr. Leininger has appointed himself as a kind of Javert to Mr. Landis’s Valjean. He maintains a database of all known contacts with Mr. Landis, sightings of him and works he has copied. (He tends to favor lesser-known artists but occasionally tries his hand at a Picasso, a Watteau or a Daumier.) Mr. Leininger circulates by e-mail a picture taken of Mr. Landis in 2008 by the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, and he uses a dry-erase marker to update a laminated map in his office.
The first donation Mr. Leininger has been able to find was to the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1987. He has charted Mr. Landis’s travels to 19 states and his contacts, either in person or by phone or letter, with more than 40 museums since then, including large institutions like the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Not all of the museums have accepted Mr. Landis’s donations, but many have, and some have displayed them as authentic works. While some examine donations as a matter of course, others did so only after growing suspicious of Mr. Landis. The St. Louis University Museum of Art still lists his donations on its Web site but describes them as in the “manner of” Stanislas Lepine and Paul Signac, not as works by the artists.