To Trinity and Beyond (chapter three: The Watchmen)

Previously:

Chapter one: The World Set Free

Chapter two: Szilardeinstein's Monster

- How Superman would end the war
Look magazine, February 17, 1940

 

Hardly a week passes without some dark, sinister event marking the downward movement of Europe, or revealing the intense pressures at work beneath its surface. The Spanish horror broadens and deepens as the days pass. A sense of indefinable uneasiness, alike about external and internal affairs, broods over France. Hitler decrees the doubling in numbers and quality of the German army. Mussolini boasts that he has armed 8,000,000 Italians. The smaller States reflect these fears and preparations in strange and local variants. Everywhere the manufacture of munitions proceeds apace, and science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterhouse inventions. Only unarmed, unthinking Britain nurses the illusion of security.

What is the meaning and effect in this oppressive scene of the Moscow executions? The modern world is becoming very familiar with the spectacle, aforetime deemed atrocious, of the shooting of political opponents. It has become almost an everyday occurrence to read of public men in powerful, historic countries being set against the wall by scores and dozens to face the firing squads. Certainly if ever human tears were rightly lacking upon such occasions, it would be at the fate of the Bolshevist Old Guard. Here are the fathers of the Russian Communist revolution; the architects of the logical Utopia to which, we are assured, the whole world will one day conform; the pioneers of progress to the Left; men whose names and crimes are bywords throughout the world - all put to death by their comrade Stalin, the General Secretary of their party.

Did I say all? - well, all but one. Trotsky still survives...

- Churchill, "Enemies to the Left," Evening Standard, 4 September 1936
(Reprinted in Step By Step)

The signing in Moscow's Kremlin on the night of August 23-24 of the Nazi-Communist "Non-Aggression" Pact was a diplomatic demarche literally world-shattering.

1939: A beady-eyed red

"Few foreigners have met Stalin," Time reported, "none has come to know him well... "When are you going to stop killing people?" asked the impertinent Lady Astor. "When it is no longer necessary," answered Comrade Stalin."

The actual signers were German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Premier-Foreign Commissar Molotov, but Comrade Stalin was there in person to give it his smiling benediction, and no one doubted that it was primarily his doing. By it Germany broke through British-French "encirclement," freed herself from the necessity of fighting on two fronts at the same time. Without the Russian pact, German generals would certainly have been loath to go into military action. With it, World War II began.
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But if, in the jungle that is Europe today, the Man of 1939 gained large slices of territory out of his big deal, he also paid a big price for it. By the one stroke of sanctioning a Nazi war and by the later strokes of becoming a partner of Adolf Hitler in aggression, Joseph Stalin threw out of the window Soviet Russia's meticulously fostered reputation of a peace- loving, treaty-abiding nation. By the ruthless attack on Finland, he not only sacrificed the good will of thousands of people the world over sympathetic to the ideals of Socialism, he matched himself with Adolf Hitler as the world's most hated man.

-Time magazine on Joe Stalin, their Man of the Year for 1939

World War II broke out in September 1939... The USSR-Germany Non Aggression Pact, signed on August 23, 1939, provided for the annexing of Bessarabia by the Soviet Union. However Stalin delayed doing so, as Rumania had an alliance with France. Stalin's hand was freed by the defeat of France by the Nazis in May and June 1940.

Euphrosinia's estate was not far from the city of Soroca. On June 28, 1940 the Russian Army reached the city after crossing the Dniester River from the Ukraine. From there they went on to occupy the whole territory of Bessarabia, which on the 2nd. August became part of the Moldovian Soviet Socialist Republic.

A wave of arrests and repression began immediately...

"Listen to me carefully, girl! I will give a good piece of advice for your good deed, avoid high roads and villages. The NKVD officers are ten a penny there! They are not in the mood to go to the war and they seize everyone to show they are necessary well to the rear! Go at night. It is quieter. And at dawn, as soon as you see a turn dusted with hay or straw go there. There you sleep your fill."

- Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, 'How Much is a Person Worth?, 1964

   Los Alamos ID photo    for Klaus Fuchs

Soviet intelligence had thoroughly penetrated the Manhattan Project... One of the two spies at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, who had fled to England from Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, is well known, because he confessed in 1950 after U.S. military code breakers had cracked enough of the Soviet wartime espionage cable traffic to lay suspicion on him. By then he was chief scientist at Britain's top secret Harwell nuclear center. He was tried and sentenced to fourteen years in prison, the maximum allowable under British law because the Soviet Union was an ally at the time of his spying. He was released after nine to spend the rest of his years, until his death in 1988, doing research unrelated to weaponry at a nuclear institute in East Germany...

In the case of Fuchs, a simple background check would have disclosed his communist connections and the peril of placing him in such a sensitive position at Los Alamos. He had entered the Party while a student at the University of Kiel in the early 1930s and openly participated in leading student strikes and other Communist resistance activities against the Nazis until Hitler came to power in 1933. He then had to flee to England via Paris to escape arrest. The family that sponsored him in Bristol had Communist affiliations and so did the professor at Bristol University, a theoretical physicist named Nevill Mott, who gave him an assistantship there. In England, he had also joined a Communist front organization, the Bristol branch of the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. When the society staged dramatic readings of the purge trials Stalin was conducting in Moscow to liquidate most of the original Bolshevik leaders on spurious charges, Fuchs would take the part of the prosecutor, the notorious Andrei Vyshinsky... As soon as the British put him to work on preliminary atomic bomb research in Birmingham in 1941, he contacted the Soviet embassy in London and volunteered to spy, turning over copies of all his research reports.

- Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009

 

[Many people were] sickened at the elaborate farce of their trial... A few points are vividly illuminated. First, the abnormal behavior of the accused. They all avow their guilt. They descant upon the enormity of their crimes. They applaud the justice of their punishment. Each in his turn recites the words put in his mouth by processes we cannot pretend to define. Evidently in this grisly charade each has been well coached on his part... The odd thing is that such an exhibition should be expected to make a good impression outside Russia...

The second point to notice is that those victims were nearly all Jews. Evidently the Nationalist elements represented by Stalin and the Soviet armies are developing the same prejudices against the Chosen People as are so painfully evident in Germany...

- Churchill, "Enemies to the Left"

King Hunger! The cruelest king of communism...

In autumn the owners register their dogs and they become eligible to get a food ration which is three times more than a child's one.

The hunters had eaten their dogs immediately after getting the "dogs' rations" (4 kilograms of rancid oats for a month), and it was possible to find plenty of dog bones, boiled down but still edible.

I beat those bones small and ate them...

Plumes of smoke whirl here and there. Here flame sparked looking dim in the sun shine... It dawns on me at last, those malnourished, exhausted by hunger kids are burning the crop.

I heard out a lot of explanations but haven't found any justification. ...They most often said, only hunger forces people to work. This is not just stupid, it is criminal. Unfortunately that is what was declared to be fundamental truth!

In response to my request to sell something edible they told that their son had been arrested in 1937, their grandson was in the prison camp and they sent him everything, having only wasty crumbs mixed with garbage. It was worse that the main of those additions were dried and finely chopped cockroaches. Hunger is a merciless dictator and works its will upon. I hoped I would manage to separate crumbs from cockroaches, but alas... I could neither air-separate them in the wind nor wash them away with water. So I had to subdue my disgust and repulsion and consume it all. As a result for a couple of days I wasn't starving...

Men discharged the wastes of the hospital kitchen into the crap-house drain and as soon as they left the crowd of perchers until then making a point like hunting dogs dashed to the drain. They pushed each other off, shoveled fish floats and scale with their hands and greedily consumed. The final of that scene stuck in my memory. Professor Kolchanov is on all fours on low stumbled grass he is vomiting with his whole body shaking... After the vomit spasm is over, he rakes the casting from the ground and consumes it again... "Aha! So you have seen the cream of our intelligentsia!" Poroshin said scoffingly when I told this at work.

- Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya,
'How Much is a Person Worth?, 1964

The USSR is the most inclusive and equalized democracy in the world... [Stalin has nothing like] the autocratic power of the President of the U.S.A., who not only selects his Cabinet, subject merely to approval by a simple majority of the Senate, but is also Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces...

...is it right to suggest that Soviet Communism is a new civilization which will, in spite of the crudities and cruelties inherent in violent revolution and fear of foreign aggression, result in maximizing the wealth of the nation and distributing it among all the inhabitants on the principle of from each man according to his faculty and to each man according to his need?" ... in the U.S.S.R. the principle of socialism is realized: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work." Once this principle has been acted on the human race can progress to the higher level of communism: "from each according to his faculty and to each according to his need."

- Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Truth About Soviet Russia, 1942

As to the unquestionably repressive nature of the regime, Mrs Eardley-Wheatsheaf thought that visitors from more civilized countries ought to keep their heads and to see things in proportion. It was true, as she explained at many subsequent lectures, pursing her lips tightly, perhaps a little venomously, that Soviet officials sometimes disappeared (she accentuated the word "disappeared" to give it its full significance); and naturally she deplored such goings-on, just as she deplored the press censorship and the suppression of all opposition opinion. At the same time she had to admit that, given the peculiar conditions prevailing in Russia, administrative disappearances carried with them certain advantages which she for one was not going to overlook.

- Malcolm Muggeridge, Winter in Moscow, 1934

The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression "tough guy" was the man of 1942.

1942: Uncle Joe

"Joseph Stalin (pronounced Stal-yn) ... worked at his desk 16 to 18 hours a day ... There were new streaks of grey in his hair and new etchings of fatigue in his granite face..."

Within Russia's immense disorderliness, Stalin faced the fundamental problems of providing enough food for the people and improving their lot, through 20th-Century industrial methods. He collectivized the farms and he built Russia into one of the four great industrial powers on earth. How well he succeeded was evident in Russia's world-surprising strength in World War II. Stalin's methods were tough, but they paid off.

The U.S., of all nations, should have been the first to understand Russia. Ignorance of Russia and suspicion of Stalin were two things that prevented it... As Allies fighting the common enemy, the Russians have fought the best fight so far...

-Time magazine on Joe Stalin, their Man of the Year for 1942

"...For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won...."

It is important to realise that the current Russomania is only a symptom of the general weakening of the western liberal tradition. Had the MOI chipped in and definitely vetoed the publication of [Animal Farm], the bulk of the English intelligentsia would have seen nothing disquieting in this. Uncritical loyalty to the USSR happens to be the current orthodoxy, and where the supposed interests of the USSR are involved they are willing to tolerate not only censorship but the deliberate falsification of history. To name one instance - at the death of John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World -- the first-hand account of the early days of the Russian Revolution -- the copyright of the book passed into the hands of the British Communist Party, to whom I believe Reed had bequeathed it. Some years later the British Communists, having destroyed the original edition of the book as completely as they could, issued a garbled version from which they had eliminated mentions of Trotsky and also omitted the introduction written by Lenin. If a radical intelligentsia had still existed in Britain, this act of forgery would have been exposed and denounced in every literary paper in the country. As it was there was little or no protest. To many English intellectuals it seemed quite a natural thing to do. And this tolerance of plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for Russia happens to be fashionable at this moment...

- George Orwell, The Freedom of the Press (an unpublished preface to Animal Farm), 1945

      ...there was no impediment to Hall obtaining explanations for everything he observed. As a physicist, and thus a member of the scientific staff at Los Alamos, he had been issued a white identity badge the day he arrived. "White badgers" were cleared to read all of the laboratory's secret technical reports and attend all the weekly colloquia Robert Oppenheimer organized to discuss ongoing work...

   Los Alamos ID photo    for "Theordore" Hall

If Fuch's entry into the inner circle at Los Alamos reflected a hardening of the arteries in British counterintelligence, Theodore Hall's entrance reflected the incompetence of its American counterpart... His original name was Theodore Alvin Holtzberg, born on October 20, 1925, to a Russian Jewish family on Long Island...

Left-wing radicalism was common among Russian Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of the ferociously anti-Semitic policies of Czar Alexander III, a fanatic reactionary who ruled from 1881 to 1894. With the demise of czarism, Fascism became the opposite pole in this ideological universe after its rise, first in Italy under Benito Mussolini, and then with genuine menace under Adolf Hitler in the 1930s in Germany.

...In Spain the forces of darkness, in the person of General Francisco Franco and his backers, the German and Italian dictators, crushed the life out of the Spanish republic. At home the capitalist system in which Americans had put their faith appeared profoundly flawed... Extreme times breed a willingness in some to accept extreme solutions. Ted Hall was one of those people. Despite his high intelligence and his gift for mathematics and science, he was also naive enough and ignorant enough not to understand the barbarous nature of Stalin's regime...

- Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009

...Cleve Cartmill, a competent writer of middling abilities, published a story describing the workings of the atomic bomb in a 1944 issue of John Campbell's magazine Astounding Science Fiction, fourteen months before the first successful atomic explosion at the Alamogordo testing grounds, thus causing a Federal security agency to investigate both Cartmill and Campbell to see if there had been a leak of top-secret military information...

Someone in Washington happened to read the March, 1944 Astounding. And then the fun began.

On March 8th Arthur Riley, an investigator from the Counter-Intelligence Corps of what was then called the War Department, turned up at Campbell's office and demanded to know the source of the information used in the Cartmill "article." The copy of the agent's report, dated April 13, has Campbell's name carefully whited out, but says that "the editor of this magazine assumed full responsibility for whatever technical disclosures appeared therein..." Campbell asserted, Riley said, that "the subject of Atomic Disintegration was not novel to him, since he had pursued a course in atomic physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1933."

But that wasn't enough to allay the agent's suspicions... in any case, he added, "in the opinion of informed persons the story contains more than just an academic course in atomic physics..."

Campbell provided the Military Intelligence man with Cartmill's address - in Manhattan Beach, California. The link to the top-secret Manhattan Project based in Los Alamos was too obvious to overlook. Riley sent word to the California branch office of Intelligence that Cartmill should be placed under immediate surveillance...

- Robert Silverberg, Reflections: The Cleve Cartmill Affair: One, 2003

When Ted Hall, the sixteen-year-old prodigy, transferred from Queens College to Harvard as a junior in the fall of 1942, of the 3,494 undergraduates at the university, only about a dozen were members of the John Reed Society, the Communist organization on campus. (Reed, a 1910 Harvard graduate, was the grandson of an Oregon capitalist who made a fortune manufacturing pig iron. He turned radical journalist and wrote an inspired eyewitness account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. He died during a typhus epidemic in Russia in 1920 and was buried in the Kremlin wall.) Hall was by chance assigned a room with its chairman and another member and he soon joined. After he and they subsequently moved elsewhere and parted, Hall acquired two new roomates, one of whom was Saville "Savy" Sax, whose Russian Jewish parents had been firm supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution and had passed their Communist convictions on to their son. Although Sax was a literay type with no interest in science, ... their shared politics soon made them comrades. When Hall was recruited during his senior year for war work so secret that the recruiter told Hall he could not tell him what it was ahead of time, Sax suggested that if the project turned out to be some superweapon, Hall ought to let the Russians in on it...

[Hall arrived at Los Alamos] on January 27, 1944, seven months ahead of Fuchs. Again, as with Fuchs, a simple background investigation would have kept him out. But while the Army Counter Intelligence Corps division charged with protecting the security of the Manhattan Project, under the command of Colonel John Lansdale, Jr., strictly controlled entry and exit through the two gates in the fence on either side of the complex, and had agents planted undercover in hotels and bars in Santa Fe and other communities in the area, it did not bother to conduct background checks on inconspicuous types like Hall and many others it allowed inside those gates.

Within less than six months Hall was at the center of research to perfect the implosion method for the plutonium bomb...

- Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009

 

The investigation now turned to the unfortunate Mr. Cartmill...

Military Intelligence began by pressing Cartmill's letter-carrier into service as a secret agent... The chief of police of Cartmill's home town reported that Cartmill had no police record. The FBI had no dossier for him either.
 

Special Agent R.S. Killough now visited Cartmill himself, using a pretext unlikely to arouse suspicion in Cartmill that he was under investigation. In a report dated March 16, Killough described Cartmill as "well educated and nicely dressed," and willing to talk freely about all aspects of his writing career... Killough felt that Cartmill was intelligent enough to have invented the "Deadline" scenario out of existing non-classified materials-especially when Cartmill revealed that in 1927 he had worked for the American Radium Products Company, a job requiring him to study the properties of radioactive elements in detail. The New York Intelligence office still was troubled by the case... The April 11, 1944, Intelligence report on Cartmill also said, darkly but without explanation, "It is also revealed that Cartmill has been receiving letters from Seattle, Washington." Early in May, therefore, Killough went back to Cartmill for a specific discussion of "Deadline."

- Robert Silverberg, Reflections: The Cleve Cartmill Affair: Two, 2003

In [October] 1944 Hall was given leave and returned to his home in New York, where he saw his friend and fellow YCL member Saville Sax. When Hall explained his new job, Sax convinced him to provide the Soviet Union with the developments at Los Alamos.

But neither of them knew how to contact Soviet intelligence... Sax's mother, a member of the Communist Party, was active in Russian War Relief, as was Nicholas Napoli, the president of Artkino Pictures, Inc., which distributed Soviet films in the United States. So Hall and Sax contacted Napoli, who was a good choice - he was a Communist Party member and was himself involved in Soviet espionage.

Sax told his story to Napoli and was sent to Sergei Kournikoff, the military correspondent of the Daily Worker, also a Soviet intelligence agent...

Hall and Sax gave Kournikoff a report on Los Alamos and a list of the key personnel working on the atom bomb project...

- Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors, 2001

Hall and his friend Saville Sax roamed New York City in October 1944, during Hall's leave period from Los Alamos, seeking a contact with Soviet intelligence to convey the data that the physicist had taken from his laboratory. Their information included a valuable list of American and British scientists then working on the atomic project. They managed to make contact with not one but two Soviet operatives, an undercover journalist and a Soviet scientist-consular official...

Also at this "brief encounter," according to a report that Kurnakov wrote the next month and that emerged during my research in the KGB records, Hall also "proposed organizing meetings, if needed, to inform [us] about the progress of . . . practical experiments on explosion [sic] and its control, the [bomb] shell's construction, etc. . . ."

Kurnakov was fascinated but still cautious, possibly fearing that this off-the-street agent might have been planted by the FBI, so he asked Hall: "Do you understand what you are doing? Why do you think it is necessary to disclose U.S. secrets for the sake of the Soviet Union?" Hall responded: "There is no country except for the Soviet Union which could be entrusted with such a terrible thing."

- Allen Weinstein, Bombshell (book review) Los Angeles Times, September, 1997

Armed guards... Wolfhounds drilled on people... All of that to bring a dozen of half-dead perchers to work. It's for sure, the most inefficient labour is the labour of slaves especially when the slave owner is a state. It is not interested in keeping the slaves employable or even alive.

...Both her sons Peter,a tractor driver and Jacob, a teacher, were wounded at war, Peter was wounded into the chest. From hospital he was sent home and died there. Jacob who was wounded in the knee returned home where he was arrested for defeatism. The mother left home her daughters Kete and Milly, 12 and13 years old, collected a pogey from the last crumbs and carried it to Slavgorod. After finding out that he had been already sent away by prison transport she gave the pogey to a soldier and said, "My son is also a soldier. And you have a mother too. Eat this with your mates to his health!" Anna Heintz was then arrested for insinuating that soldiers are hungry...

For some reason I didn't notice exactly when they brought Loginova to the cell. ...something in her eyes betrayed deep-seated black grief... Here is her story.

"My man hasn't returned from the German War. I lived with my son. It was he, poor fellow, whom they drove away at night... Near the end of Advent an old beggar with a bundle knocked on my door. I looked at her and collapsed in a heap... My daughter-in-law dragged herself home from the exile. With a little kid, daughter Nadya ...the daughter-in-law didn't live to see the spring, died after St.Epiphany. I was left with granddaughter Nadyusha.

"...Soon I received a warrant to deliver eggs and wool. I always paid everything. Bought and delivered. Starved, did my utmost. But there was nothing more to take from home for sale and I couldn't pay that delivery, wool and eggs. Tears didn't work, they didn't have pity on the kid too... So they charged me with sabotage, article 58-14, and here I am. That's better! Nothing to grieve at, they sent Nadyusha to an orphanage and me to prison. Here they give a piece of bread every day, 350 gram. And hot water. At home I've not seen bread for a long time! And Nadyusha will get some bread. Let it be bitter but daily. It's better... For her and for me. The only pain is to think she'll never know tenderness. And at first she will forget and then grow to hate her father, mother and me, the old gran. They'll teach her, my own blood, to lionize Stalin and hate her family. It's eating like worms at me..."

- Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya,
'How Much is a Person Worth?, 1964

The two youths were not yet sure they had made the proper contact. In fact, they had, but they continued their search. The next day, Sax went to the Soviet consulate, where he met a Soviet vice consul, Anatoli Yatzkov. Sax gave him a second copy of Hall's report. Yatzkov took over the case, bypassing Kournikoff.

The job of checking out the bona fides of the two young new agents was given to Bernie Chester, the Communist Party USA's liaison with the NKVD, who was also ordered to check out Bluma Sax, Saville's mother...

- Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel,
The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors, 2001

Hall was also drafted into the Army while at Los Alamos, but given his scientific talent he was immediately offered a commission. He accepted and swore the oath of true faith and allegiance to the United States required of all officers. He then returned to Los Alamos and proceeded to break his oath.

- John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, 1999

Sax offered to act as the courier who would travel to New Mexico by bus and train to pick up Hall's reports. Because the mail to and from Los Alamos was censored, the two young men resorted to using Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass for Hall to signal the date, time, and place of the rendezvous. Whitman numbered each of his poems, so it was not difficult for them to set up a book code, one of the oldest forms of encryption. To make certain no one would overhear them, they rented rowboats on the lake in Central Park for discussions to settle these and other important details.

Hall's motive for committing treason was simple. He believed that his duty did not end with being a good physicist, that he also had an obligation to humanity. His Marxist ideas led him to think that the United States might tumble into another depression after the wartime stimulus to the economy ended with the defeat of Germany and Japan. The social and economic turmoil set off by a renewed economic collapse could bring the triumph of Fascism to America, as it had in Germany. If that happened and a Third World War broke out while the United States still had a monopoly on the bomb, Washington would use it to devastate the Soviet Union...

- Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009

...Killough went back to Cartmill for a specific discussion of "Deadline."

This time Cartmill admitted that Campbell had indeed helped him with the scientific background of the story, saying that he had claimed sole responsibility earlier "because of his own pride and prestige"- "he would not admit to the general public that he had extracted, word for word, information conveyed by another person." But he also repeated an earlier assertion that "almost anyone who had read a physics textbook would have the facts available." It was Agent Killough's conclusion that Cartmill "was honest, sincere, and reliable. He made every effort to be cooperative and did not at any time give any impression of evasiveness or reluctance."

And here the great spy quest began to fizzle out.

It was clear by now that Campbell's Astounding had been publishing stories about atomic energy since 1940, beginning with Heinlein's "Blowups Happen," all of them based on widely available material. "Deadline" was just the latest such story. No security leak was involved.
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Lt. Col. Lansdale asked Jack Lockhart of the Office of Censorship to handle the "Deadline" situation. Lockhart, as he told Lansdale on May 15, "spent an unpleasant half hour reading this story which relates the experience of a tailed individual named Ybor on the planet Cathor." He made little sense out of it, but he could see that its "pseudo-scientific discussions" verged on forbidden territory and something needed to be done. To his credit, this sort of censorship made him uncomfortable: "We have always been reluctant to interfere with fictional material because of the impossibility of fettering the mind of man," he said. But, "as much as I tremble over venturing into this field," he got in touch with Campbell and asked him not to publish "additional material relating to subjects involved in our special request of June 28, 1943."

- Robert Silverberg, Reflections: The Cleve Cartmill Affair: One, 2003

Chapter four -

All done!

To Trinity and Beyond (chapter two: Szilardeinstein's Monster)

(Continuing a tale begun here.)

Ike's other warning

January 17, 1961 - in his farewell address President Eisenhower introduces America to the term "military industrial complex." Eisenhower's own military service went from cavalry-era (in Lieutenant Eisenhower's day the sword was literally a weapon of modern war) to the atomic bomb; from an all-but neglected defense budget between the world wars (contemporary arguments were that all real wars were over) to a post-World War Two world in which Arsenal of Democracy was a phrase in which most Americans still felt a reluctant pride.

Know the world as Eisenhower saw it on that day:

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology-global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration.

Have no illusions: his farewell was a caution against an economic system built around monolithic defense, but he also acknowledged there was no return to the policies and attitudes common to the democratic nations in the 1920s and '30s that made a second world war inevitable (and left us woefully unprepared for it). It was a call for balance. Read his words carefully, knowing the history of the intervening years and (anti-defense hysteria aside) it's difficult to claim his warning went unheeded. We don't look back at the weapons (or defense budgets) of 1961 as different from today in the same manner those Americans tuned in to President Eisenhower then would view the world of 1911.

But the balance was achieved. That specific hostile ideology he referenced is still with us, but for the time being, at least, it (and others) aren't immediate military threats - in the three decades after that day we progressed enough to bring about their surrender on that front. Nonetheless (hawkish hysteria aside) when it comes to global military might, we are still cutting edge. Well done, my fellow Americans - let's remain vigilant.

However, Ike issued a second caution that day, one that I'd call forgotten if not for the fact that it never attracted much notice in the first place. "But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise," he said. "I mention two only." The first we're familiar with.

Here's the second:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

"It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

I'm far from convinced we've done well in that regard. Though we put a man on the moon before the '60s were done, it's difficult to think of science and politics today without picturing Al Gore - and that's not a pretty picture. (If someone can offer another example, please do.) I believe much of what we think of as "science" today Eisenhower (and most of his generation, who were born before radio and watching him on TV, who'd also witnessed the eradication of multiple diseases, the electrification of America, and advances from horse-and-buggy to at least one car in every garage - this list could go on...) would have seen as "anti-science" (as I do). And while his bottom line ("public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite") seems dangerously (if sometimes absurdly) real now, I don't think it's the exact danger he foresaw.

Regardless, he was right to warn us on both counts, and we'd be right to heed both warnings. It's not too late to begin paying attention to the other one.

Footnote: While certainly no Jimmy Carter, Ike's farewell was not quite a complete farewell.

"Reality-based community" members collide with reality

Off they went to see Bradley, bringing a petition with 42,000 signatures demanding he be released from solitary confinement. But then...The Guardian:

...the pair were stopped by military police and Hamsher's car impounded after guards found the vehicle's license plates had expired and Hamsher was unable to produce insurance papers.

Quantico spokesman Col. Thomas V. Johnson says the car was towed after the pair could not provide proof of insurance and guards found the vehicle's license plates had expired.

Yup - you don't get on a military installation with expired plates and no proof of insurance. Even the military members and civilians assigned there have to purchase insurance and license plates if they want to drive on base/post. Yes, that rule is enforced at the gate (if an ID check is in progress they'll bust you for an expired ID, too.)

More advice from experience: how you're treated by those fine folks - who deal with the situation every day and have every legal right to do what I've seen described in the above stories is based more on your behavior than most people think. Don't even dream of getting them to "bend the rules" just for you "just this once." The best you can hope for is to be turned around and encouraged to try again after completing steps to make your car "street legal." But if you expect this...

...other results are more likely.

The story of John and Garett

Question from Reason TV: What Happened to the Antiwar Movement?

"They used to be useful idiots," says Glenn Reynolds. "Then they stopped being useful." That's a good short answer. If you'd like an illustration of the point, read on.

Obviously, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the antiwar movement is still around. And it's certainly possible that 2012 - or 2013 - might see its resurgence. But as Reason notes, for now Democrats' involvement in the effort has dropped, and crowds at protests have dwindled. Media interest has vanished, too. All this helps explain why antiwar folks are desperately seeking support from conservative Republicans and Tea Baggers Tea Party people.

How did things get to this point? What follows is an explanation of what happened to the former military component of the anti-war movement. While a very small percentage of the whole, they were arguably the most important. Their participation inoculated other protesters from claims of not supporting the troops; their authentic voices absolved those who were never there, man, from charges of acting in ignorance of what it's really like. (If I recall correctly, the term "ultimate moral authority" was applied.)

Where are they today? I offered up my own short answer last year: they might be up in your attic or down in your cellar right now. (Take a look and come back if you'd like.) That didn't answer the question how the hell did that happen? This post will.

First (although antiwar groups never bothered) you can separate those "antiwar vets" into two groups - complete and total frauds (more here) and authentic veterans. (Some might argue there are degrees of fraud - but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.) Here we're going to examine the careers of two authentic vets - veterans of both the military and the antiwar movement. Their antiwar careers had two decidedly different endings that will serve to answer the question whatever happened to...? for most of the crowd.

We first met them here back in January, 2006 - at that time they were already veterans of "the movement" - Garett Reppenhagen and John Bruhns. Their mission at the time was to stand up at a Town Hall meeting, praise Congressmen Jack Murtha and Jim Moran for their courageous "antiwar" positions, then feed them Democratic Party campaign talking points.

Here's Bruhns, declaring Iraq an illegal and immoral war:

And here's Reppenhagen, speaking for all his wounded veteran brothers at Walter Reed who he says were now questioning the fraudulent war (presumably they would have been there themselves if they could get out of the hospital):

They weren't the only vets participating in denouncing Iraq and praising the pair of Democrats - but you have to wonder what the rest of that audience might have thought if they were told they were witnessing a choreographed event, with at least one veteran brought in all the way from Colorado for the occasion.

Murtha's response to Reppenhagen is particularly odious in hindsight. In January, 2006 the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate, and he was implying that if only the Democrats could take over they could stop the war and investigate exactly who was responsible for the fraud in the first place. By the end of that year they were elected to large majorities in both chambers, but 2007 saw no such "investigation." Instead Democrats gave America one of the most pork-filled defense budgets in history - until the next one. (While few matched Jack Murtha's ability to bring home the war bacon, David Obey, one of the big cash winners in that particular bill, later chastised an "idiot liberal" antiwar Marine mom over the issue.)

But by 2007 - the height of the surge - John and Garett were busy with other projects. They were both part of a Nation magazine article featuring first-hand accounts from Iraq veterans of the horrific atrocities they claimed to have heard about or witnessed while there. Slaughtering children, burning villages, desecrating corpses - The Nation called it "the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these assertions." Add "since John Kerry's pre-Senate days" (or "outside of Jack Murtha or Jim Moran campaign events") and that might be true.

But Reppenhagen and Bruhns were also entered in a big contest. Sponsored by MoveOn.org and VoteVets, "the public" was allowed to vote for their favorite anti-war veteran, and the winner would get to appear in an "antiwar" political ad on TV - produced by none other than Hollywood's Oliver Stone.

Here's Reppenhagen's contest entry...

...but he's an also ran - the winning contestant was John Bruhns:

(If both messages sound familiar, it's because they're largely sticking to the same script they used in the Murtha/Moran video from over a year before.)

Here's the press release announcing the contest winner.

Oliver Stone, Born on the 4th of July's Ron Kovic Unveil TV Ad Critical of Iraq War

LOS ANGELES, May 1 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Oscar-Award winning film-maker and Vietnam War veteran Oliver Stone, Born on the 4th of July's author Ron Kovic (health permitting) and former Army Sgt. John Bruhns will unveil a new TV ad critical of the Iraq War Thursday at 11:30 a.m. at Ocean Screening Room in Santa Monica. All media must RSVP to Alex@Fenton.com.

The ad is sponsored by MoveOn.org Political Action and VoteVets.org. The ad is timed to coincide with President Bush's expected veto of legislation that would bring American troops home from Iraq. Copies of the ad will be made available at the press conference.

The Stone directed ad, which airs nationwide on CNN Thursday, features an impassioned interview with Bruhns as he attacks the administration's treatment of soldiers. Kovic provides voiceover for the ad.

"I feel that my patriotism has been used and exploited," says former US Army Infantry Sergeant Bruhns. "I am very proud of my military service, but I'm very disappointed in the civilian leadership and administration for sending us needlessly into combat."

Bruhn's interview was selected by the public as part of VideoVets: Bring Our Troops Home. The project features 20 video interviews of soldiers and family members critical of the American occupation in Iraq. Over half a million MoveOn members and others watched the videos. The public voted to select one video to be directed by Oliver Stone.

(By then "the movement" might have abandoned their quest for a wounded Iraq veteran, hence Kovic's appearance. And if "Fenton" sounded familiar, it's because the PR firm also appeared here.)

So, there he was - on top of the heap of anti-war vets and assured of a bright future. But there was a problem, and it was a big one. Not only was he a real veteran, John Bruhns actually was anti-war, and that was about to prove a huge embarrassment to his many supporters and sponsors. Within weeks of his big TV debut, Bruhns would go "off the reservation" - and he did it with a confession titled "The anti-war phonies" in the Philadelphia Daily News. (Now gone - but viewable here). Excerpt:

I traded my convictions for "special interest" groups who sometimes seem to be in place simply to smear those who disagree with their political agenda. But the agenda is not anti-war. The war is used by these organizations as ammunition against political foes - primarily Republicans. They are the enemy despite the fact that many Democrats vote the same way.

It was very hard for me to go "off the reservation." I didn't want to face the fact that these anti-war groups had other aims.

We watched as legislation that had no substantial impact on ending the war was debated. There ARE anti-war resolutions still floating out there that call for a real end to the war, but the groups I worked for wouldn't spend one dime to promote legislation considered out of the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Any genuine anti-war message was filtered through media consultants who provide politically correct "talking points" to veterans for them to carry out a phony message that is beneficial to the campaign.

We threatened Republicans with "political extinction" if they didn't change their votes on Iraq. It was a partisan tactic that got us nowhere fast.

When I worked with these organizations, I did nothing to actually stop the war. I only put on a good show that would catch the attention of the media. We focused on America's desire for entertainment rather than the core issue of ending the war.

Our troops are still being killed on a daily basis and the main agenda of these well-financed anti-war groups, I think, is nothing short of the prolonged character assassination of all those who disagree with their message. In my eyes, it's just as bad as those who fight for a continuation of the war, and I'm no longer able to distinguish between the two sides.

I was not honest when I walked away and pursued the "lone wolf" route. Instead I painted a rosy picture of my departure in order to preserve my credibility and longevity within the establishment. This confession is the only way to restore my integrity. So I can go on to continue to fight against the war in Iraq with a clear conscience.

I didn't commit eight years of honorable military service to this country to be an indirect proxy of one political party...

And with that, any chance he had at a future in the "anti-war community" was gone. He was still anti war, and he was still allowed to contribute occasional blog posts at The Huffington Post, but within a few weeks of the Dawn of the Age of Obama he was gone - an unperson.

You won't find Garett Reppenhagen at anti-war rallies these days either, but the former E4/milblogger/"first IVAW active duty member" and "chairperson of the board"/"Vice President of Public Relations for Nobel Prize winning Veterans For America"/"associate director at the Alliance for Security"/who-knows-what-else member's fate was decidedly different than that of the once "more popular" Bruhns. Reppenhagen stayed firmly "on the reservation" (from 2008: Reppenhagen confesses to killing innocent Iraqi's here, and speculates on the future of "GI resistance" here) and the payoff was revealed within a month of Obama's November victory.

From: Garett Reppenhagen
Sent: December 08, 2008
Subject: veterans green jobs alliance

Hello friends,

I have recently become the Program Director for Veterans Green-Jobs Alliance. We are a new veterans organization setting up campuses and educational programs to teach veterans green collar skills such as renewable energy installation, historic building restoration, energy efficiency auditing, environmental conservation and more. The programs will earn veterans college credits and immediate job training that they can apply to one of the fastest growing markets in America.
<...>
We are looking for more allies and any veteran students that might be interested in participating.

If you can forward this out to your network that would be much appreciated. The letter is crafted toward veterans, but this will give you a good idea what VGA is about...

That's from a December '08 issue of the execrable Thomas Barton's communist fraudvet newsletter "GI Special". In reality, "what VGA is all about" is having veterans install insulation in attics and cellars at taxpayer expense.

"We think veterans are uniquely qualified to lead the environmental restoration here at home," said Kirsten Maynard of Veterans Green Jobs. "Not only have they seen environmental destruction across the world; they also have technical skills and other kinds of work skills that allow them to do the really tough work that needs to be done - like go into homes and crawl in the attic and the basement. They've been trained by the military to do it, and they actually feel comfortable being in that kind of environment."

"VGA has just received a generous start-up grant that will cover roughly half of our total expenses for 2009." Reppenhagen wrote. And more was to follow. In addition to your money (stimulus funds - "Veterans Green Jobs has a contract with the Governor's Energy Office to weatherize 1,700 homes in 18 months, leveraging stimulus dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act") Wal Mart gave them 750K to launch an "academy" to train vets how to install that insulation. ("For years, Wal-Mart has been a target of environmentalists who argue that the company's rapid expansion in the last quarter century has destroyed countless trees...") By November, 2010 the group could boast of creating "about 100 jobs." (Or at least "more than 60.")

Mike Flaherty got one of them. Here he is in a New York Times story from August, 2008 - he's protesting the Iraq war at an IVAW-sponsored Rage Against the Machine concert during the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

And here he is in September 2009...

...when he was "among four veterans chosen to attend a town-hall meeting on the green economy as part of a task force hosted by Vice President Joe Biden."

Could that be this one? If so, Reppenhagen offered reassuring words for those who might be annoyed by that bogus "middle class bourgeoisie" emphasis: "I've dedicated myself to the antiwar movement and debated tactics and strategies for the most effective way to end armed conflict," he said at the time, adding that in addition to many other Utopian goals it could achieve, his organization was a great "counter-recruiting" tool. "Veterans Green Jobs provides a realistic alternative to military enlistment," he wrote at warresisters.org. "In these difficult economic times, many service members don't recognize stable opportunities outside of military service that can provide for them and their families." [By way of explaining why the peace movement's "rhetoric often indirectly demonizes our troops."]

They'd been "laying the groundwork for two years," Reppenhagen said in announcing his post-antiwar activist career back in December, 2008. "With the Obama administration already vocally promoting green jobs," he added, "Veterans Green Jobs Alliance is well-positioned to leverage resources" to achieve success.

"Barack Obama and Joe Biden will ensure that more of our veterans can enter the new energy economy. They will create a new 'Green Vet Initiative'" the future President pledged during his campaign. While the effort had some rough patches, Politifact calls that "a Promise Kept."

So if you're really wondering what happened to the antiwar movement, check your attic and your cellar. They've been put away for now (with you paying the storage fees), but the wars continue and they're always available - if the need arises in the future.

SOA on WSJ

Story here.

I've met Jim Hake, he's a squared-away, dedicated guy with an authentic desire to help the troops complete their mission. Spirit of America is all about giving Americans a chance to do something beyond sending beef jerky and wet wipes to the guys and gals on the frontline (something else I encourage). Through SoA you can send them the tools they need to win the kind of war they're in over there. (Our war is a good term for it.)

Here's their web site.

Here's Jim's post on the developments described in the video above.

Here's their blog, where you'll find the latest posts from the guys they've got in Afghanistan now. Check it out, help if you can.

Truth and Tucson (Three)

(A series begun here)

First reports are always wrong - that old adage can't be repeated enough. In a previous installment we examined the role of several military veterans in the Tucson rampage. Those stories were revealed in reports filed several days after Jared Loughner's assault. Initial reports from the day of indicated he'd killed Representative Gabrielle Giffords and several other citizens attending her public appearance at a local supermarket. Reports of her death proved premature, but soon enough they were replaced by the following hasty narrative: An Afghan vet, driven over the edge by Sarah Palin's Tea Party political hate speech, had opened fire with a semiautomatic weapon. He hadn't acted alone, and at least one accomplice was still at large.

"Hasty" is the key word - "opened fire" and "weapon" are the only accurate portions of that description. Most everything you'd need to know to "understand" Jared Loughner was known within hours of the event - and none of it remotely pointed to "politics" - at least as a rational person would define the term, as motive. Still, national media reports the day of (and day after) the event looked less like what could be found with a one-minute Google search (links to Loughner's YouTube page and reviews of the bizarre videos there were also in my inbox within minutes of the first report revealing his name; links to descriptions by his friends of a guy who was anything but a conservative Tea Party military veteran followed shortly thereafter) and more like this example from that evening by the Associated Press:

A gunman nearly unloaded a semiautomatic weapon at a busy supermarket Saturday during a public gathering for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, wounding the Democrat and killing Arizona's chief federal judge and five others in an attempted assassination that left Americans questioning whether divisive politics had pushed the suspect over the edge.
<...>
Giffords, 40, is a moderate Democrat who narrowly won re-election in November against a tea party candidate who sought to throw her from office over her support of the health care law.
<...>
"For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC.
<...>
During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords in November, Republican challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle. Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on his website in military gear holding his automatic weapon and promoting the event.

Add another unstable veteran to the tale. He had nothing to do with it, of course - had that space been used to provide more descriptions of Loughner by his friends, or more details of the contents of his "Internet postings, including some that express convoluted observations about government" that conclusion would be obvious to any rational reader.

Glenn Reynolds - as usual - collected and presented links throughout the day of the shooting (start at the bottom of the page here and work up). "Sadly, I don't think most of them had to "descend" very far," was Reynolds ultimate take on national media outlets' coverage of Tucson. (Another example: CNN's use of a picture of someone else identified as Loughner.) His conclusion: "local media did better."

But unless you were in Tucson - or on the internet - you had no access to that local news. Among those relying on hours of "national news reports" that substituted rabid speculation for factual details was a Tucson resident making his way home from California:

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was leaving a sheriffs convention in Palm Springs, Calif., a week ago Saturday when he got word of a shooting just outside Tucson.

"Seven people shot. That's all we knew," he said.

"I just got angrier and angrier on my way back to Tucson," said Dupnik, a longtime family friend of Giffords' and her parents.

On the six-hour drive back, he heard more details on the radio. That it was at a town-hall meeting outside a supermarket. That U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot point-blank in the head and was clinging to life. That the gunman, young and possibly mentally unstable, kept firing and killing and wounding others before being tackled and disarmed.

He arrived at headquarters and about a half-hour later was standing before reporters to give a briefing. He started speaking about his friend, Giffords, and about his sadness and his shock. Then, he gave voice to his anger.

What Dupnik said next catapulted him into the national spotlight: The killer, he said, might have been influenced by ugly political rhetoric. He called it "vitriol." He blamed radio and television commentators.
<...>
Dupnik, a registered Democrat, has won every election since his first in 1980. In 2008, he won with nearly 65 percent of the vote. His longevity as well as his political skill have made him a de facto leader among Pima County Democrats.

His own imagination might have fueled his fever pitch during that race against time (and evening news deadlines) to get home from his convention - but six hours of unrelenting assurances that Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers were trying to kill him and everyone like him could have contributed to his rage, too. One can almost sympathize with him if, by the end of the long ride, he was imagining Palin herself pointing one of those big Alaska Grizzly Bear guns at him from behind every cactus on the route.

And during those same six hours most every claim regarding Loughner, his background and motives were debunked. The irony that Dupnik was right to blame "radio" for whipping up a frenzy - but had opened fire on the wrong specific target - was lost on the sheriff himself. Delivered before his engine had cooled, his press conference statements came in time to be added as further confirmation to many of those same erroneous day-of-the-shooting reports that inspired him to fire them off in the first place. "When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government - the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," Dupnik declared. "And, unfortunately, Arizona has become sort of the capital, we have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

That assessment might have surprised combat veteran Dr Peter Rhee, who would later state that Tucson was "embarrassing and pathetic" to trauma surgeons "because violence is almost nonexistent... I know everyone in the country thinks World War III is going on in Arizona, but it's probably still the nicest place I can think of to live." (Part of the reason additional surgeons had to be re-routed from Afghanistan for this horrific event.)

Within 24 hours the remaining elements of the bogus narrative that emerged almost before Loughner's victims were on Rhee's operating table were acknowledged as such. Stars and Stripes ran a story debunking Loughner's "military veteran" status - though local news had it the day before. (Four days later Lopez would acknowledge that she'd "...wrongly reiterated some information told to me immediately prior to the interview that the suspect shooter in the Tucson attack was possibly a veteran of the war in Afghanistan." The Washington Post would simply overwrite their original reference to the claim.)

And that same Sunday morning saw Sheriff Dupnik on national TV assuring America that reports of other shooter(s) were also wrong - "There's no doubt [Loughner] acted alone." But even in the clear light of dawn, when it came to the last vitriolic shred of the Tucson shooting myth - the sheriff would bitterly cling to his guns.

More to follow.

Truth and Tucson (Two)

(Continued from here.)

Contrary to first reports, Jared Loughner was not an Afghanistan veteran - in fact, he'd been rejected for military service. But there were several veterans involved at the scene of his crime and the hospital where his victims were treated. Their stories would emerge in the days following the shooting.

Among them, James Eric Fuller, 63, "a naval air veteran [who] drove himself to Northwest Hospital after being shot," Kenneth Veeder, 75, "a retired Vietnam veteran in the Airborne Infantry division of the Army. According to KVOA-TV in Tucson, a bullet grazed Veeder in the leg. He was treated and released from the hospital in one day," and George Morris, 76, a former Marine who took two gunshot wounds, and whose wife Dorothy was killed in the assault.

More:

The Morrises, though Republican, had attended Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's "Congress on Your Corner" event Saturday because they wanted to ask her about something that was on their minds, friends said. When a gunman, identified by police as Jared Lee Loughner, opened fire on the gathering, Giffords was severely wounded.

Royle said he spoke to George Morris in the hospital. "He's hurting - emotionally and physically," Royle said. "He has some pretty good wounds. He's out of intensive care, but he will need some therapy. The bullet wound went through him. He has a broken rib and punctured lung. And he has a bullet in his right leg. He told me when it all happened, he went to fall on his wife to protect her, but she was already gone."

Also present was 74-year-old retired Colonel Bill Badger:

A 74-year-old retired Army colonel who helped disarm and subdue the gunman who went on the shooting rampage here credits his military training for his ability to respond quickly.

Bill Badger said in an interview at University Medical Center that he was wounded and disoriented in Saturday's shooting but still managed to assist three others in holding the suspect down until police arrived.

"I dropped down all the way to the ground, and I lowered my head about 6 inches. I felt this burning, stinging sensation right in the back of my head," he said.

Then the shooting stopped. The gunman had run out of ammunition. Badger said he was disoriented but saw another man hit the gunman over the head with a chair.
<...>
Meanwhile, a woman knocked a second clip of ammunition out of the gunman's hand. Badger said he got the shooter in a choke hold while another man forced his knee into the suspect's neck.

"The guy's face was in the cement, and every time he would move, I would tighten my grip on his throat and this individual would push harder with his knee and all he (the gunman) said was, 'Ow, ow, ow, ow,' " Badger said.

Badger, a military pilot for 26 years, said they held the suspect down for around five minutes until help arrived.

Badger said he had no idea how badly his head was bleeding.

The number of veterans in the crowd might seem surprising at first glance - but it isn't. Though often dismissed as flag-waving suckers (or even perceived as threats - see part one), most of those who've devoted years of their lives to defending the nation simply take a more active (and absolutely non-violent) interest in the political freedoms they've guaranteed. They end up in just about every political party on the American scene, but in this case several ended up in the hospital. Waiting for them there:

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, gunshot wound through her brain, was fortunate enough to be wheeled into the emergency room of a uniquely qualified surgeon: Dr. Peter Rhee, a 24-year military surgeon who has treated "hundreds and hundreds" of battlefield injuries during stints in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rhee, 49, chief of trauma at University Medical Center in Tucson, said his work in the Navy tending to injured soldiers and Marines and teaching the next generation of battlefield medical personnel unquestionably played a role in his ability to treat Giffords and direct care for the 10 other victims who began arriving in his unit Saturday morning.

In 1992, the Navy set up the Navy Trauma Training Center at the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California hospital. The idea was straightforward: Navy doctors would work side by side with civilian doctors as the gunshot victims of L.A.'s street violence came through the hospital. Doctors there were seeing wounds from weapons that once were fired only by soldiers.

Rhee used his experience treating trauma injuries in Los Angeles -- the gunshots wounds, the stabbings, the car crashes -- to prepare military doctors, nurses and other medical personnel for the battlefield.

He described Tucson as "decidedly quieter than his past posts," though according to McClatchy news:

Tucson, Rhee said, was the perfect place for him after his military career, allowing him to teach at the University of Arizona and see regular trauma, in part because of its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border.

"We don't get a madman shooting 20 people but we get mass casualties," he said. "We know we how to handle them."

He also called on other military doctors to help treat Giffords. Dr. Geoffrey Ling, an Army colonel and an expert on brain trauma, was on his way to Afghanistan when he was diverted to Tucson. He and Dr. James Ecklund, a retired Army colonel, assessed the treatments and met with Giffords' family, including her husband, Mark Kelly, an active-duty Navy captain and astronaut.

Still, "Tucson is actually, for a trauma surgeon, very embarrassing and pathetic because violence is almost nonexistent," Dr Rhee said. "I know everyone in the country thinks World War III is going on in Arizona, but it's probably still the nicest place I can think of to live."

A trauma surgeon would know - but others would disagree, including a now-well known sheriff. And while there were many individuals above whose actions are praiseworthy, one - following a series of absurd twists in this tragic tale - would lend credence to expressed early fears that political hate speech can push "some folks over the edge." To understand that completely - or as much as possible - we'll have to return to day one and follow those twists and turns from the beginning.

Part three here.

Truth and Tucson

I was traveling over the weekend of 8-9 January, and listening to a book-on-CD instead of the radio, so I missed out on much of the big news from those days. I was confident that just about anything newsworthy I might be interested in (and a lot of what I wouldn't) would be waiting in my email inbox once I got home, and I wasn't disappointed. That Sunday evening I found a friend had forwarded me (at 2:49 PM Eastern on Saturday) an email alert from Fox News (he'd received at 1:21 PM Eastern). Subject: BREAKING NEWS: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords Fatally Shot. The text was brief "Rep. Gabrielle Giffords dies after being shot in the head during public event in Tucson". Wrong, I thought to myself a day later - but Fox wasn't the only news organization that would soon retract that erroneous report, confirming the old (military) adage first reports are always wrong is still true enough, and that speed of news delivery has no impact whatsoever on accuracy.

The gap between modern expectation of information and reality is reflected in this immediate "on the scene" report from a bakery across the street from the scene of the crime:

Soon after, several customers rushed in and said that Giffords had been shot at the Safeway across the street.

Rivera didn't believe it at first.

Many customers seemed to be in disbelief at the news, Rivera said. Some whipped out cell phones and laptops to scan the internet for news. At one point, a woman yelled that she had just read on CNN that Giffords had died.

For them the answers were literally just a few steps away, but they likely believed they had good reason to not venture out, as (according to multiple news reports) the search for a second gunman continued.

With Giffords dead clinging to life and the second gunman still on the loose, the psycho veteran angle came into play:

Smith: Do you know anything about who this person was? Have you heard a description of this person?

Lopez: I have heard, and I don't know this for a fact, that this person was an Afghan veteran.

A veteran of the war in Afghanistan?

Yes. Um hmm...

The above is an excerpt from Shep Smith's interview with Arizona State Senator Linda Lopez - "at the hospital where doctors and nurses are working to save Arizona citizens' lives at this moment." Lopez revealed the initial report on Gifford's death was wrong, and added details on the bullet's trajectory through her head, indicating remarkable skills of surgeons had kept her alive.

Again, early reports are always wrong, but early reports on horrific and senseless crimes like this one - at least since the days of Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman - invariably raise that psychovet issue. Lopez might not have realized the absurdity of creating multiple new rumor-based myths about this case while debunking the obviously incorrect first, but Smith, if anyone, should have known better. While somewhat more cautious in this example, his interview is reminiscent of an earlier episode when he claimed the murder of Holocaust Museum security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns by 89 year-old James Von Brunn (soon revealed to be a WWII Pacific veteran, journalist and Nazi) proved a DHS report on right-wing groups recruiting combat-trained Iraq and Afghanistan veterans was "prescient." The fury and fallout resulting from speculation and mis-reporting following Von Brunn's attack - like the attack itself, or the initial story of that misguided DHS report - has been mostly expunged from American memory. Like most forgotten history it was soon to be repeated - much louder this time, as Lopez and Smith were about to re-introduce all those themes.

Prior to speculating on Loughner's military service, at Smith's prompting Lopez had offered this guess at a connection to "Tea Party people":

Smith: It would appear that she's been targeted by people for some level of violence more than once. Is this something that was a concern to you and her?

Lopez: "...There's been so much vitriol flung at her by the Tea Party people - you know, her opponent in the election was a Tea Party candidate, and the signs were up around town accusing her of horrible things. You know, when people make these kind of comments it pushes some folks over the edge."

Then, after describing the killer as a possible Tea Party-inspired Afghan veteran, Smith and Lopez concluded by assuring viewers they wouldn't engage in spreading speculation and rumors surrounding the case:

Smith: It's my understanding that this person who did the shooting said something as he was shooting.

Lopez: Yes.

Do you know anything about that?

I don't know anything about that.

You heard that as well though, correct?

Yeah.

An early Washington Post report (since vanished from their web site, but still viewable here) claimed others had accepted or promoted that "veteran" story, too: "The [killer] was identified as Jared Loughner, who appears to have left a trail of Internet postings, including some that express convoluted observations about government. Law enforcement officials said they believed he was a military veteran."

In reality Loughner was an Army reject. The Arizona Daily Star debunked the claim on the day of the shooting - using an (outdated?) journalistic technique called "asking someone who actually knows."

First Sgt. Brian Homme, who oversees Army recruiting in Tucson, said Loughner applied to enlist in December 2008 and was sent to Phoenix to take a test and physical. But "he was found to be unqualified so he never joined the Army," Homme said.

He declined to say why Loughner was rejected, citing confidentiality laws.

Though the Army declines to give details in specific cases, 75% of Americans of age are unfit for military service, so in that regard he's in the majority. By sundown that day in Tucson, most of the speculation regarding Loughner's political ties had also been debunked.

There were actual military veterans involved in this story, including Giffords' husband - and Lopez'. In fact, for a nation with a small percentage of veterans in the population there were (fortunately, in some cases) an amazing number of prior-military folks at the crime scene and at the hospital where this interview took place. One of those vets would ultimately prove that many of Lopez' comments ("when people make these kind of comments it pushes some folks over the edge") were indeed prescient - but most would perform nothing but heroics. The real story of their actions would eventually emerge, but as Jonn Lilyea noted "it's more newsworthy when the shooter is thought to be a veteran than one of the guys who ended the shooting is a veteran."

Part two here...

Dear Tea Party Morons

Can you idiots lend us a hand here? We're trying to stop the Afghan war, and could use your help. I know, you're probably thinking "piss off - we're too busy inciting people to kill our political opponents." And sure, you don't care about other people's kids getting killed in a war, either, but here's something you are probably too ignorant to know: war costs money, lots of it. You people are against the government spending money, right? So unless you want to be labeled hypocrites you might want to start opposing the war with us. We figure that with your numbers and our brains we'll have Barack America out of this tar baby mess in no time.

You might not like that, but also remember Ronald Reagan did that withdrawal thing in Beirut. I mean, you rubes view him as an infallible, God-like, messianic figure, right? (It's okay - we feel the same way about Obama. Except for his warmongering in Afghanistan which he is only doing to appease you.)

Anyhow, hard to argue that Afghanistan isn't about the shittiest mess of a war in history not counting the worse mess your asshole criminal President Bush got us all into in Iraq while ignoring the real central front in the war on terror which, now that we've thought it over, isn't worth the cost, right?

So if you inbred, slackjawed, sister-humping dipshits could take a few minutes off from cleaning your weapons, watching Glenn Beck, listening to Rush Slimebaugh, and checking for new Tweets from Sarah Palin long enough to join us in an important and grown up national conversation about this topic followed by a few street protests we'd appreciate it.

Peace out.
- The Left.

P.S. don't bring guns to the demonstrations. Or any of those shitty home-made signs you people love so much, either. But if any of you want to learn some giant paper-mache puppet making skills let us know.

P.P.S. Did I mention teh hypocrisy? Bloodthirsty hypocrisy, I should add. And if you try this, expect this.

(Previously in the "imaginary but honest letters" category: Dear Abby, September 2009.)

Band of Brothers AFC Divisional Playoff Raffle - Patriots vs Jets

A great opportunity for football fans (and other patriots!)

Entry Deadline: 11:00 AM EST Thursday, January 13, 2011

Drawing Date: Thursday, January 13, 2011

Grand Prize:

* Winner and guest will enjoy 2 tickets to the AFC Divisional Playoff Game at Gillette Stadium where the N.E. Patriots will take on the Jets; (January 16, 2011, Kickoff at 4:30 PM)
* Winner and guest will enjoy 2 pregame field passes to game (Valid only for pregame access to the above referenced game)
* Winner will receive 1 night hotel accommodations at the Renaissance Providence Downtown Hotel (January 16, 2011, single room, double occupancy)
* Winner will receive 2 round trip coach ticket vouchers on Southwest Airlines (Valid for one year from date of issue)
* Winner will receive a $250 allowance for ground transportation and other expenses
* Winner will receive a football autographed by NFL Hall of Fame Guard and Patriots Legend John Hannah
* Winner will receive a photo autographed by New York Jets Quarterback, Mark Sanchez
* Winner will receive a Band of Brothers baseball bat autographed by legendary Easy Company veterans Wild Bill Guarnere and Babe Heffron
* Winner will receive a cash prize in the amount of $605.00 to mitigate the Winner's tax liability that results from winning the raffle. This prize is withheld and paid, on behalf of the Winner, directly to the IRS ($600.00) and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ($105)

Raffle tickets are just $2 each (minimum purchase: 5 tickets) - proceeds go to the Richard Winters Leadership Project. Enter here.

In the company of heroes: Colonel William Bower

Colonel William Bower, the last surviving Doolittle Raid pilot (five other crewmembers still live) has died.

More on the Raid (and the men who flew it) here.

"History"

Fans of Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men, Stan Lee's Superhumans, and a host of other programs can breathe easy: your shows won't pre-empted for this:

A controversial miniseries on the Kennedy family will not air on the History Channel because the completed multimillion dollar project does not fit the "History brand," the network said.

Maybe MTV will pick it up. (After all, they don't do music videos.)

In the company of heroes: Dick Winters

I didn't know him - but I know a few of this type:

When people asked him if he was a hero, he liked to answer the way his World War II buddy, Mike Ranney, did.

"No," Ranney said. "But I served in a company of heroes."
<...>
Following the miniseries, Winters turned down most requests for interviews because he said he didn't want to appear like he was bragging.

Received word over the weekend of the passing of Dick Winters (more here).

There's a project in the works to honor Maj Winters, stories here, here and here. The web site for that effort seems to be unavailable at this time. (I hope because of heavy traffic, will see what I can find out and report back.)

Spent the past week traveling myself, to the funeral of another veteran of the Second World War (and others). A great generation is passing. Should you happen to know one of those who are still with us they might appreciate a moment or two of your time. If you're fortunate they'll use it to tell you stories, the likes of which may not be told much longer.

Update: I'm reliably informed the page for the Dick Winters project is still up - so I'm guessing heavy traffic is the cause of my inability to connect. I'll keep trying. (You should, too.) More details here.

The bestest year in science ever

I'm hoping that title will apply to this coming year - but it will be hard to top 2010. Here's one reason why.

Remember this?

In Iceland a volcano erupts - embedded in a massive smoke cloud, ash and other particulate matter are flung skyward. An impressive sight if you can get close enough to view it...

Maybe not - it's been over eight months since the most powerful volcano in world history erupted, and lots of other things have happened since. So if you forgot that story don't feel too bad. Besides, thanks to the hard work of government officials armed with science we were all kept safe. Although they can't stop volcanoes from erupting they can - and did - ensure we were all kept safe from the danger. If they hadn't acted fast thousands of people might have died, and then you would have recognized that picture - taken from an aircraft flying nearby - for sure.

I wrote a little bit about it when it was happening, but because it was science - and had big words like "particulate" in it - it might have been too complicated for a lot of people to understand. ("Complicated" is a big word for "hard" or "difficult" or "very tricky." Lots of stuff that governments do is complicated, which is why most people can't really understand it.) When I was in the Air Force I did meteorology stuff. That's a big word for "weather science" which is very complicated. I am not a real scientist myself, I did "operations" which is only applied science. And I sure wasn't perfect - sometimes it didn't rain when I said it would, and vice-versa! But even though I am not a scientist myself I think I can explain things in such a way that it will be obvious to everyone what sorts of wonderful things governments can do for us with science.

I will start my story with a brief look back at the bad old days before we had science. Back in those olden times people thought the earth was flat, and that if they went too far away from land in their boats they would fall off the edge, which would be a horrible fate. Also they thought there were dragons and sea monsters who would get them. Crazy, right? But as people started to understand science more they realized that wasn't really true. So they went farther out in their boats, and found other lands and cultures. And some of those people they found didn't have good science yet, but they had volcanoes, and they would sacrifice virgins to the volcano gods.

Well, that's enough talk about the bad old days. I just wanted to point out that now we have science and don't have to live in fear anymore. Not only can we travel all over the globe via air, land and sea, we have launched rockets into outer space thanks to science. It is amazing when you think about it, isn't it? Here is a picture that shows what the earth looks like from a satellite in outer space orbit.

US Air Force infrared satellite imagery, 18 April 2010

You don't have to pay attention to that writing. And if you don't have maps such as many people who are U.S. Americans, don't worry. This is a map that shows a far away land called Europe. That is where they have castles. But it is not make-believe, it is a real place, I got to live there once, and I have seen it. The volcano is exploding on the island in the upper left part of the map. It is called Iceland.

"They should call it Volcano Island instead," you might say. Maybe so.

This picture is from a time when all flying was stopped in Europe because of all the smoke and ash from that volcano. "I don't see all the smoke and ash from the volcano," you might say. "Just a little bit maybe around Iceland. Or is that just a regular cloud?"

That is where science is very useful. Here is another picture. It is from a few days earlier. It is a very pretty picture except for the volcano death cloud in it. It is in the top part of the picture, headed straight for Europe!

This looks like a regular picture like you could take with the camera you got for Christmas, but it is really a very complicated image that you might not understand unless you are a scientist. Scientists create this image using science to "allow extraction of additional information that the human eye fails to capture with its receptors for red, green and blue." Here are some other examples you can look at.

"Some of those are just crazy colored!" You might say. Yes, but you can make them any color you want. In the picture above they made the water look a pretty blue, the land look a lush green (except for the rocky brown edges) the clouds look fluffy white like bunny tails, and the deadly streak of death from the volcano is brown. That helped people understand it better.

Not only could they "see" it, the scientists were also able to use their weather forecasting computer models to predict what the ash cloud would do next. Here is what they discovered. (You can ignore the complicated writing under the video. The pictures are what matters.)

It was when the scientists showed this to the government officials that the government officials acted swiftly to save us all. They leaped into action and shut down all the airplane flying in Europe before the deadly cloud of death descended. Some people were upset by that, but newspapers and television were very helpful explaining to people why they were in danger from an ash cloud that was invisible to the human eyes.

A plane passing through a cloud of volcanic ash can suffer damage from nose to tailfin. The ash can sandblast the plane's windshield, hampering visibility. The particles can block fuel nozzles and air intakes for the instruments that detect airspeed. They can also contaminate the oil system and electronics.

Bob McDonald, host of CBC's Quirks & Quarks, notes the sharp particles in the ash are so abrasive they are capable of stripping the paint off the exterior of a plane. Also, when pulled into the plane's ventilation system, ash poses a health threat to passengers, says McDonald.

"Airplanes draw air in from the outside to keep everybody on the inside healthy and happy," said McDonald. "And so then the gases that would be in the cloud would also get inside the plane and people would start breathing it."

But the most serious threat is to the engines.

"Jet engines are like giant vacuum cleaners. If they're in a volcanic ash cloud, they're just sucking in all that ash and that damages the engines," said Tom Murray, director of the Volcano Science Center at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which oversees five volcano observatories in the U.S.

The ash can melt or vaporize in the engine's combustion chamber, said Michael Fabian of Embry Riddle Aeronautical University's campus in Prescott, Ariz.

The molten ash can then coat the turbine blades like spray paint, disturbing the normal air flow and possibly causing the engines to shut down, said Fabian.

The ash can also interfere with the engine's thermostat, causing the computer system to think the engine is running cooler than it is. The computer would then automatially inject more fuel into the engine, causing it to overheat and shut down.

Even worse, Ash is especially dangerous because the particles can't be seen on weather radar and at night, they're invisible to pilots.

Such dangerous and costly encounters between aircraft and volcanic ash can happen because ash clouds are difficult to distinguish from ordinary clouds, both visually and on radar.

But guess what? In spite of the horrific danger of airplanes crashing like a ball of fire into your house and killing everyone the airlines all wanted to ignore the scientists and television reporters and government officials and just send people to their deaths - because they were losing money! They claimed they were losing 200 million dollars every day, and lots of other industries were suffering, too. But those are just estimates, not science. They couldn't even agree on how much money they were supposedly losing! But they were still getting angry about the ash cloud that had spread over all of Europe that they couldn't see with their red/green/blue-only eyes! They couldn't even imagine it being there because money, money and money was all they could think about.

"Why didn't the authorities show them another multi-spectral image showing the death cloud over all of Europe?" You might ask. That is an excellent question that shows you are a good critical thinker. The answer is that while I'm sure they could have, by then they were very, very busy trying to solve this problem before the money-grubbing airline idiots sacrificed someone to the volcano gods. And by then the volcano ash cloud of death had spread even farther and was threatening Asia and North America, too! Look at it!

Composite map of the volcanic ash cloud spanning 14-25 April 2010, based on data by the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre's website (Met Office, UK).

"Met Office" is where the weather forecasters work... "Now wait a minute," you might say, "I've got some more questions..."

"Be quiet! I would be forced to respond. "No one ever got to be a great scientist by asking questions! You learn by listening!"

"I was just going to ask where Europe was on that map," you might reply. "That's just it!" I would say. "It is gone! It is under the part of the cloud so black it would block out the sun!"

And you will be amazed at what these anti-science airlines did next.

Dutch and German airlines carried out test flights over Europe on Saturday and said their planes appeared undamaged by a volcanic ash cloud that has forced airports to close across the continent.

Dutch airline KLM said if further examinations showed its test flight to have been successful, it hoped to fly seven planes back from Germany to Amsterdam on Sunday and get permission to restart partially its operations.

Germany's Lufthansa said it flew 10 planes to Frankfurt from Munich, mostly flying at a 'visual level' of 3,000 meters while also testing conditions through to a height of 8,000 meters, company spokesman Aage Duenhaupt said.

"All airplanes have been inspected on arrival in Frankfurt but there was no damage to the cockpit windows or fuselage and no impact on the engines," Duenhaupt added.

"OMG!" You might say. I know, right? Things were getting out of control! Fortunately other governments found some courageous military pilots who were willing to risk everything for the truth.

Images taken inside one Hornet engine with a fibroscope camera indicated that the heat of the engine -- around 1,000 degrees Celcius -- had melted the ash inside the engine, blocking ventilation channels.

"Blockages of ventilation channels caused by melting ash lead engine components to overheat and material to weaken," it said, adding this could fracture rotating engine parts.

In the worst case, the weakening of component materials could cause "parts to detach and the engine to be destroyed," it said.

A huge cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland has spread over large part of Europe, shutting airports and forcing the cancellation of thousands of flights.

That is incredible science, and incredible courage. As the evidence from the fibroscope camera revealed, those pilots were lucky to be alive. "Where were they flying?" you might ask. But it doesn't matter - as the story points out the huge cloud was was over large parts of Europe. And here's more:

Glass build-up from Iceland's volcanic eruption has been found in an engine of a NATO F-16 fighter plane, a U.S. official said on Monday, underlining the dangers to aircraft of flying through the ash cloud.

The official did not say which nation's aircraft had been affected, where it happened or when, but it was the second air force to report problems from the ash cloud -- Finland, not a NATO member, reported similar problems on Friday.

Wait," you might ask, "is this the first volcano eruption in the history of the world?" But that question is so ridiculously anti-science I won't even answer it.

You would think that would make the Germans and Dutch shut up and quit trying to get people killed, but by this point in time flying had been shut down for days, no one had seen a speck of ash in Europe - on the ground or in the air, and the airlines were claiming to have lost billions of dollars, and other industries all over the world claimed they were suffering, too. But it was obvious to anyone who understood science that they were just trying to use fear and ignorance to get their way (meaning get their money!), and that flying would mean a horrific fiery death in flames and twisted wreckage to anyone foolish enough to attempt it, and perhaps innocent people on the ground, too.

Then people in England were subjected to a horrifying sight - 'German planes are flying over London again': Lufthansa aircraft spotted in UK airspace... as British jets remain grounded - it was like 1940 all over again!

But while the Germans enjoyed mastery of the skies over England, frustrated and grounded British Airways staff at Heathrow and Gatwick were left to look enviously up as their rivals flew above them.
<...>
'German planes are flying over London again,' said a Lufthansa spokesman.

'We are using a corridor over England and flying very high - above 20,000ft - to keep above the ash cloud.'

One of the first was a Lufthansa Boeing 747 Jumbo jet with a thin white vapour trail in its wake through clear blue skies.
<...>
One irritated BA insider confessed: 'Yes, there are lots of German and European aircraft flying through our airspace at the moment. But we're not allowed to.'

It's like the Germans decided "to hell with this - we just don't care!" and recklessly went off without even waiting as long as they said they would after their so-called "test flights"! Most of us can only imagine what horror the people in England experienced if they saw those planes screaming through the blue skies and the invisible death cloud, knowing science had proven that any minute they might come crashing right down on their heads. (It had to have been as terrifying as the Aztecs seeing men in armor riding horses getting off boats!) Then, to make matters worse, the volcano erupted some more!

The Met Office itself said strong high-altitude winds were blowing the new cloud towards the UK more quickly than the one which followed the first eruption.

But then, just when things were looking their worst - a miracle happened!

Haha - I'm just kidding. There's no such thing as a "miracle." What happened was science. The governments announced that scientists had gotten much better at figuring out where the invisible ash cloud was and wasn't, and that they could now identify "corridors" where it would be safe for flying.

Ash that had drifted over the North Sea from the volcano in southern Iceland was being pushed back over Britain today by shifty north winds, Icelandic scientists told the Associated Press, but Eurocontrol said it coordinated with meteorologists from across the continent to establish safe flying zones...

There was still danger though. In fact, at almost the same time the RAF would ground some aircraft again to check for ash.

"These are very high-performance jets so they are just being extra-cautious," a spokesman said, adding operational flying would continue.
<...>
The regulator said there had been "only a very few reports from airlines and, of these, all related to visual sightings". A spokesman said: "There have been no reports of damage to aircraft", stressing that military engines were very different to those on civilian planes.

"Now hold on a minute," you might shout, "that's a load of bullshit. What kind of moron do you think I am? If military plane engines aren't at all like civilian planes, why didn't they say so in the earlier story? And there's no way "scientists" could identify "corridors" through "invisible ash clouds" when winds are constantly blowing! And this wasn't the first volcano in the history of the world, it's just the first one that shut down all flying on an entire continent 1,000 miles away. This isn't science at all, it's just another example of what happens when a bunch of incompetent, dipsy-doodle dipshits are put in charge of..."

But I would stop you. "Read this," I would say calmly with just a hint of triumph.

"No, you can't, heretic!" I would say once that puzzled look came over your face. "It is written in the language of science, which you don't even understand. That might as well be Latin to you."

Fortunately you have government officials who can interpret these sorts of things for you, and will always do what's best to keep you heathy and happy, safe and sound. (I know you wouldn't really say such silly things though. In fact, you can print out that equation - that's the big word for it - to keep handy to use yourself when you meet a global warming denialist or some other anti-science wacko and need to put them in their place.)

It's good form to close an essay as you began it. So, back in those olden times people thought the earth was flat, and that if they went too far away from land in their boats they would fall off the edge, which would be a horrible fate. Also they thought there were dragons and sea monsters who would get them. Crazy, right?

Now we have science.

Postscript: back during the global volcano crisis there were many anti-science bloggers writing about it. One of them was Seablogger, who wrote very well but denied the scientific evidence and used something we used to call "common sense" to dismiss the efforts of our government authorities who only acted in our best interest based on the latest scientific evidence. Sadly, not long after that he died of cancer.

That is very sad. In the year ahead government science will be very hard-focused on stopping industrialists from destroying the world with global warming, about which the science is settled. But I hope that after that's taken care of the governments will have the scientists cure cancer. That would be excellent, too.