Oops is also a bouncer term

Dana DiFilippo has an article at Philly.com about excessive zeal among local bouncers:

It started as a problem with the bill. "Your credit card doesn't work," the beefy bartender barked at Jim Bruno, a kid from the suburbs who'd come to the Field House bar in Center City for a Halloween party. No problem, Dean Bowser (photo) thought, as he headed to Bruno's side to bail out his buddy. Bowser reached to retrieve his friend's credit card and offer his own; and that's when everything went wrong.
The bartender, believing that Bowser was throwing a punch at him, leaped over the bar and toppled Bowser to the floor. Bouncers swarmed him from behind. Bowser, confused by the sudden chaos, didn't know then that they were bouncers. Within seconds, he was off his feet and being rushed toward the door. A bouncer hurled him through the bar's glass-and-wood doors with such force that one of his sneakers flew off his foot into the street. Sprawled on the sidewalk, he felt his arm tingling. Horror overtook confusion when he glanced down. "There was a huge chunk just gone. Blood was pouring out. I thought I was losing my arm," said Bowser, whose forearm had been flayed open from the underside of his elbow halfway to his wrist. Dizzy, he sagged against a parked car.
"Get off the car!" a bouncer shouted. It was the first time, he said, since he reached for his wallet, that any bar employee had said anything to him.
In the booze business, anyone can be a bouncer, at least in Pennsylvania. Getting a job as a bar doorman is no more complicated or regulated than landing a job at a Wawa. But, unlike bouncers, Wawa clerks aren't likely to send you to the hospital with a nearly severed arm, or kill you. Two bouncers at a Southwest Philadelphia strip club are awaiting trial for their roles in a 2009 beating that left a customer from Delaware County dead. "Bars hire guys who just look big and buff, rather than people with a personality, people who can handle themselves by communicating rather than immediately getting physical," said Bowser, 25, of Chalfont, Bucks County, whose 2008 brush with Field House bouncers left him with a jagged scar and a reluctance to revisit Philadelphia's social scene.
They don't get paid very much money, either. While pay can vary depending on how classy a club is, bouncers typically make about $30,000 a year in Philadelphia. But some states, recognizing the powder keg that alcohol, groups of male strangers, and low-paid burly bouncers can create, have beefed up screening and training requirements for bouncers. The issue has gotten little attention here, despite headline-grabbing incidents such as the strip-club death.
International studies show the need for increased regulation. A 2010 government study in Australia, for example, found that bouncers are responsible for one in eight assaults in pubs and clubs. And in more than two-thirds of violent incidents involving bar bouncers in Toronto, Canada, the bouncers either enhanced the likelihood of violence, or downright caused it through gratuitous aggression, harassment of patrons, and provocative behavior, according to a 1998 study in the Journal of Drug Issues.
Some bouncers also rely on steroids to build muscles, experts say. But steroids can increase aggression, loosen users' impulse control and lead to "roid rage," so that interactions between steroid-bulked bouncers and cranky customers are more likely to end violently, said Geoff Gibbs, a former bouncer from California.
Bouncers who go bonkers have been a boon for lawyers. Hospitality experts say that civil liability resulting from the use of force in nightclubs and restaurants is the highest preventable loss in the industry.
Russell Kolins, who owned a nightclub in New Jersey for ten years, now makes a living as a security expert and legal consultant who testifies in liquor and negligent-security liability cases. "Every venue is as different as a fingerprint, so no one size fits all in terms of club security," Kolins said. "But there are standards that should be upheld by all establishments, from the responsible management of alcohol to great communication skills and a knowledge of what the law is and your establishment's policies are." Keeping chaos at bay starts with stringent screening, said Kolins and other security experts.
"I'm not saying big, burly guys aren't needed, because you might have big, burly patrons," Gibbs said. "But when you have an applicant bragging about his martial-arts and military experience, or trying to show he has the skills to fight, that shouldn't be at the top of the list," Gibbs added. "Defusing a situation calmly in a professional manner and providing good customer service are key. You want your customer happy because then, chances are, you won't have any problems."
Bowser doesn't remember the ambulance ride to the hospital. He does remember the haste with which Thomas Jefferson University Hospital doctors moved to stop his arm, which looked like pulverized meat on a butcher's block, from bleeding. His blood-pressure dipped so low, he said, they feared he'd go into cardiac arrest. Two weeks after his injury, he had to have skin-stretching surgery to assist with healing. Six months ago, he had plastic surgery to remove excess scar tissue.
He sued the bar, the bartender, and two bouncers, a term the Field House shuns in favor of "goodwill ambassadors", to recover his medical expenses, lost wages, and damages from "premises liability (because the door didn't have shatterproof glass), assault and battery, and false imprisonment." He made a $545,000 settlement demand, according to court documents. The case ended in a confidential settlement in February.
But attorney Michael L. Saile Jr., who represented Bowser, remains unsatisfied. Bouncers, he said, are charged with preserving peace in a potentially volatile environment, and should face more stringent screening and training. "When you're dealing with public safety, you should have procedures like police have procedures," Saile said. "If you're going to put your hands on somebody, you better know what you're doing. They didn't even ask Dean what happened, or say, 'Will you please leave?' That's unacceptable."
Field House owner Brian Harrington said he couldn't comment in detail on Bowser's case because of confidentiality requirements. But he said that he was satisfied with how his security staff handled Bowser that night. "I don't believe they acted outside of their scope and responsibility," Harrington said. "We were prepared to vigorously defend ourselves in this suit, but our insurance company decided to settle. We would still tell you that we did nothing wrong." He added: "We have a comprehensive training program for every position in all of our establishments, including security."
What's undisputed is that an argument erupted over the $150 bar tab that Bowser, his friend Bruno, and Bowser's brother had amassed. First, Bruno waited at the bar for ten minutes to pay; when a bartender finally ran his card, it didn't work. As Bruno and the bartender argued whether his card or the machine that was faulty, Bowser approached and grabbed Bruno's card.
The bartender snatched it back, and later testified in deposition that Bowser tried to punch him. He tackled Bowser to help bouncers restrain him, he testified. Bowser admitted that he struggled against the bouncers, but only because he didn't know they were bouncers.
In a nineteen-page report, Kolins found that the bartender and bouncers didn't follow the Field House's written policies, which require bouncers to alert a manager about a disgruntled patron, and which forbid any "hold, maneuver, grasp, or technique that would inflict grievous harm."
Attorney Joseph D. Deal, who represented the bar, bartender and two "goodwill ambassadors" in Bowser's suit, countered that Bowser's aggression allowed no time for staffers to politely introduce themselves, talk him down, and involve a manager. "His arm went through the window as a result of his struggling as he was being escorted out, not because he was thrown through the window," Deal said.
But Bowser remains unconvinced. "I have a scar that I'm going to have for the rest of my life, and it's not like I got it for doing something heroic or unavoidable," Bowser said. "It's not like I went surfing and got bit by a shark. It's something that shouldn't have happened, something that could have been resolved in so many other ways."

Oops is now a legislative term

David Gambacorta has an article at Philly.com about a legislator out of control:

A Philly cop pulled over a motorist who was driving in the wrong direction on a one-way street in Germantown shortly after midnight Sunday. To the cop's surprise, the driver turned out to be state Representative Cherelle Parker. Also surprising: Her breath smelled like alcohol, police said.
Parker, 38, failed a Breathalyzer test after she was pulled over on Baynton Street near Price and was arrested on charges of driving under the influence, said Officer Tanya Little, a police spokeswoman. Parker was released after a preliminary arraignment and is due in court again on 1 June.
The lawmaker, who represents parts of Mount Airy, Chestnut Hill, and Roxborough, could not be reached by phone last night. She instead released a statement through her attorney, Joseph Kelly: "Miss Parker regrets putting herself in this position," he said. "She'll address these allegations at the appropriate time."
Parker won her seat during a special election in 2005 to replace then-state Representative LeAnna Washington, who was elected to the state Senate. Parker's election was briefly marred by controvsery; the Committee of Seventy accused Parker of violating state election code by entering polling places and buying lunch for workers. The good-government group later admitted that it had made a mistake, and that Parker had done nothing wrong.
Before becoming a state representative, Parker worked for years as an aide to City Councilwoman Marian Tasco.

It's a different world out there

Rico says his friend Doug sends along this admonishment:

You should cooperate with airport security because, given the picture, you can understand why they want our cell phones put through the x-ray machine. If you get asked to test your cell phone at the airport, the reason is that cell phone guns have arrived. Beneath the digital phone face is a .22 caliber handgun capable of firing four rounds in rapid succession, using the standard keypad. Law enforcement officials in Europe were stunned by the discovery of these deadly decoys. Only when you have one in your hand do you realize that they are heavier than a regular cell phone.
Be patient; if security asks to look at your cell phone, or to turn it on to show that it works, they have a good reason. Welcome to our new world!

Magazines you won't see anytime soon

Rico says the old saying is true: Jews don't hunt (or fish)

Unless, of course, it's enemies of Israel, then it's always open season...

Too many hands, but who cares?

Rico says his friend Doug sends along this one about life lesson hard-won:

Each year I am hired to go to Washington, DC, with the eighth grade class from Clinton, Wisconsin, where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I greatly enjoy visiting our nation's capitol, and each year I take some special memories back with me. This fall's trip was especially memorable.
On the last night of our trip, we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial. This memorial is the largest bronze statue in the world, and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history: that of the six brave soldiers raising the American flag at the top of a rocky hill on the island of Iwo Jima during World War Two.
Over one hundred students and chaperones piled off the buses and headed towards the memorial. I noticed a solitary figure at the base of the statue, and as I got closer he asked: "Where are you guys from?" I told him that we were from Wisconsin. He said: "Hey, I'm a cheesehead, too! Come gather around, Cheese heads, and I will tell you a story.
(The man was James Bradley, who just happened to be in Washington, DC, to speak at the memorial the following day. He was there that night to say goodnight to his dad, who had passed away. He was just about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us, and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington, DC, but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night.)
When all had gathered around, he began to speak:

My name is James Bradley and I'm from Antigo, Wisconsin. My dad is on that statue, and I wrote a book called 'Flags of Our Fathers'. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me.
Six boys raised the flag. The first guy putting the pole in the ground is Harlon Block. Harlon was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps with all the senior members of his football team.. They were off to play another type of game. A game called 'War.' But it didn't turn out to be a game. Harlon, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don't say that to gross you out, I say that because there are people who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You guys need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old - and it was so hard that the ones who did make it home never even would talk to their families about it.
You see this next guy? That's Rene Gagnon from New Hampshire. If you took Rene's helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of that helmet, you would find a photograph of his girlfriend that Rene put in there for protection, because he was scared. He was eighteen years old. It was just boys who won the battle of Iwo Jima. Boys. Not old men.
The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau, was Sergeant Mike Strank.. Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. They called him the 'old man' because he was so old. He was already 24. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn't say, 'Let's go kill some Japanese' or 'Let's die for our country' He knew he was talking to little boys.. Instead he would say, 'You do what I say, and I'll get you home to your mothers.'
The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona . Ira Hayes was one of them who lived to walk off Iwo Jima . He went into the White House with my dad. President Truman told him, 'You're a hero' He told reporters, 'How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?'
So you take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 of you hit the beach, but only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes. He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes carried the pain home with him and eventually died dead drunk, face down, drowned in a very shallow puddle, at the age of 32.
The next guy, going around the statue, is Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky . A fun-lovin' hillbilly boy. His best friend, who is now seventy, told me: 'Yeah, you know, we took two cows up on the porch of the Hilltop General Store. Then we strung wire across the stairs so the cows couldn't get down. Then we fed them Epsom salts. Those cows crapped all night.' Yes, he was a fun-lovin' hillbilly boy. Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of nineteen. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother's farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night and into the morning. Those neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.
The next guy, as we continue to go around the statue, is my dad, John Bradley, from Antigo, Wisconsin, where I was raised. My dad lived until 1994, but he would never give interviews. When Walter Cronkite's producers or The New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say 'No, I'm sorry, sir, my dad's not here. He is in Canada fishing. No, there is no phone there, sir. No, we don't know when he is coming back.' My dad never fished or even went to Canada. Usually, he was sitting there right at the table, eating his Campbell's soup. But we had to tell the press that he was out fishing. He didn't want to talk to the press.
'You see, like Ira Hayes, my dad didn't see himself as a hero. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes, 'cause they are in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. He was a medic. John Bradley from Wisconsin was a combat caregiver. On Iwo Jima he probably held over two hundred boys as they died. And when boys died on Iwo Jima, they writhed and screamed, without any medication or help with the pain.
When I was a little boy, my third grade teacher told me that my dad was a hero. When I went home and told my dad that, he looked at me and said, 'I want you always to remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. Did not come back.'
So that's the story about six nice young boys.. Three died on Iwo Jima , and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7,000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. My voice is giving out, so I will end here. Thank you for your time.'
Suddenly, the monument wasn't just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did indeed have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero for the reasons most people would believe, but a hero nonetheless.
We need to remember that God created this vast and glorious world for us to live in, freely, but also at great sacrifice
Let us never forget from the Revolutionary War to the current War on Terrorism and all the wars in-between, that sacrifice was made for our freedom...please pray for our troops.

One thing I learned while on tour with my eighth grade students in DC that is not mentioned here is that, if you look at the statue very closely and count the number of 'hands' raising the flag, there are thirteen. When the man who made the statue was asked why there were thirteen, he simply said the thirteenth hand was the hand of God.

Clueless

Friendly's apparently doesn't get out much, or it chooses to ignore the popular meaning of 'Happy Ending', which brings new meaning to the notion of "want whipped cream on that sundae?"

Black history for the day

Rico says his friend Esha sends along this lamentable piece of history:

With the Kentucky Derby run on the first Saturday in May, it seems an appropriate time to consider why black jockeys, who once dominated the sport of horse racing, are no longer in the running. A researcher in Washington, D.C., has uncovered evidence, contained in a turn-of-the-century newspaper article, explaining how black riders were systematically "unionized" out of the sport.
Black jockeys won 15 of the first 28 of America's most important horse races at Churchill Downs. In fact, every rider on the track at the inaugural Kentucky Derby in 1875 was black, except one. That race was won by a former slave, Oliver Lewis.
Yet black jockeys mysteriously began to disappear near the turn of the century, and today they are practically nonexistent. There have been varying explanations for this vanishing act. The discovery of a historic document sheds new light on exactly what happened.
There was a time when riding a racehorse was almost exclusively a black occupation. It began with plantation owners using lightweight slave boys to race their horses against rival owners. Some slaves were tied to horses to keep them from falling off, resulting in injury and sometimes death.
The history of thoroughbred horse racing in America is rich with the legacy of black jockeys. These colorful characters included Kentucky Derby winners like Willie Simms, who introduced the short stirrup to the profession; Isaac Murphy, the Derby's first three-time winner; and Jimmy Winkfield, who finished all four Derbies he rode in the money, winning twice. Others, like Babe Hurd, Soup Perkins, Alonzo Clayton, Erskine Henderson, and Billy Walker, were also Derby winners. And they were young, many still in their teens. Murphy turned pro at fourteen. Clayton won the Derby at fifteen. Winkfield won his first Kentucky Derby at nineteen.
Black jockeys were the first sports heroes in post-Civil War America. They were brash, sometimes arrogant, youngsters whose exploits and private lives were detailed in the daily press. At work they wore bright racing silks, fitted jodhpur britches, and smart leather riding boots. At play they were the toast of the town, tooling around in fancy carriages with the finest women. They built fabulous homes for their parents. They were represented by agents, who negotiated lucrative contracts with horse owners. Small wonder that today's athletes are called jocks.
Black jockeys could afford all the luxuries of life in the fast lane. They were highly skilled, well-paid professional athletes. With the jockeys riding each mount for a fee plus a percentage of the winning purse, it was not unusual for a black jockey to make well over $20,000 a year. In 1900 the average yearly income for a family of four was $1,200. In an era before personal income taxes, Murphy and Simms earned about $300,000 apiece in their short careers, the equivalent of about $15 million today.
Money is what ultimately led to the demise of black jockeys, according to researcher Kenneth Whisenton, a retired sociology and business librarian from the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library and Howard University's Founders Library in Washington, D.C. He says: "Black jockeys did not just vanish from horse racing; they were banished. As the thoroughbred horse-racing industry grew in America, so did the size of the winning purses and the prosperity of black jockeys. Less talented and envious white riders conspired to get in on the take."
Whisenton has uncovered a New York Times article from 1900 with the headline Negro Jockeys Shut Out: Combination of White Riders to Bar Them From the Turf. The article begins: "The decline of the negro jockey has been so apparent since the season of 1900 opened, that even the casual racegoer has had an opportunity to comment upon it.
"The public generally accepted the theory that the old-time favorites of African blood had outgrown their skill, and really were out of date because of their inability to ride up to their form of past years," the article continues. "Racing men know better. As a matter of fact, the negro jockey is down and out, not because he could no longer ride, but because of a quietly formed combination to shut him out."
The article explains just how the union took hold and became an effective means of depriving black jockeys of their incomes: "...white riders have organized to draw the color line. In this they are said to be upheld and advised by certain horse owners and turfmen who have great influence in racing affairs. Rumor even went so far as to state that The Jockey Club approved the plan, tacitly and unofficially."
Whisenton says: "If that isn't the very definition of institutional racism at its ugliest, I don't know what is. Remember, this was a time when the Jim Crow era began to take hold." The Times describes how white riders enforced their ban on black jockeys through sabotage and subterfuge: "The negro riders got mounts at first, but then failed to win races. Somehow or other, they met with all sorts of accidents and interference in their races." It goes on: "The means employed to shut out the black riders are said to be that whenever one of the proscribed jockeys participates in a race there is concerted action by all the white boys to bring about the defeat of the horse ridden by the negro." The singular ill luck of black riders "...serves to remind possible employers that owners who expect to win races would only put up white jockeys. "
Whisenton is passionate as he reads aloud from the document he found: "'Whether white jockeys devised the plan of a 'union' on their own behalf or whether they were advised by others has never come to light. None of them will even admit there is such an organized scheme. Whatever its strength and however formed, it appears to have been completely successful up to date. In the meantime, it has been a singularly rare occurrence that a negro jockey has had a mount. In the meantime, the stars of the pigskin saddle have stood down and watched comparative newcomers monopolize the riding.'"
Willie Simms went begging for mounts at tracks in New York state, only to be denied. Alonzo Clayton was arrested shortly before post time at Aqueduct Race Track, falsely accused of trying to fix a race. A near-riot broke out, as barred black jockeys fought with white riders in Chicago. The black jockeys who remained in racing were reduced to exercise riders, hot walkers, and stable hands, raking horse manure from barns. The once unsurpassable Clayton passed away at 41, a bellboy at a Los Angeles hotel, in 1917.
The white-jockey union movement started in the North and worked its way through the Midwest and then the South. For that reason, Winkfield was still able to ride and win the 1901 Derby in Kentucky. In 1902 he became the last black jockey to win the Derby. He ran his last Derby in 1903, placing second, before Churchill Downs, too, succumbed to the pressure of the union.
A few black jockeys left the States for Europe, where they extended their careers. Winkfield was the most successful, winning every major race on the continent, including Russia's Moscow Derby, France's Prix du Président de la République and Germany's Grosser Preis von Baden.
Winkfield made and lost several fortunes. In Russia he lived in the Moscow National Hotel, owned a skating rink and held four percent of Russian railroad stock. He developed a fondness for caviar at breakfast and chauffeur-driven Duesenberg cars. Legend had it, if you were an American tourist and bet on a race that he did not win, you simply brought your betting ticket stubs to the hotel dining room, where he would buy them back.
Winkfield's escapades included narrow escapes during the Russian Revolution and the Nazi invasion of Paris during World War Two. He survived and prospered until the ripe old age of 93. He died quietly at his horse-breeding farm at Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, in 1974.

And your little dog, too!*

Gardiner Harris has an article in The New York Times about the dog (not the one in the photo) who helped hunt Osama bin Laden:

The identities of all eighty members of the American commando team who thundered into Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden are the subject of intense speculation, but perhaps none more so than the only member with four legs.
Little is known about what may be the nation’s most courageous dog. Even its breed is the subject of great interest, although it was most likely a German shepherd or a Belgian Malinois, military sources say. But its use in the raid reflects the military’s growing dependence on dogs in wars in which improvised explosive devices have caused two-thirds of all casualties. Dogs have proved far better than people or machines at quickly finding bombs.
General David H. Petraeus, commander of United States forces in Afghanistan, said last year that the military needed more dogs. “The capability they bring to the fight cannot be replicated by man or machine,” he said.
Major William Roberts, commander of the Defense Department’s Military Working Dog Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, said the dog on the raid could have checked the compound for explosives, and even sniffed door handles to see if they were booby-trapped. Given that Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a narrow, dark hole beneath a mud shack in Iraq, the SEAL team might have brought the dog in case Bin Laden had had a secret room built into his compound. “Dogs are very good at detecting people inside of a building,” Major Roberts said. Another use may have been to catch anyone escaping the compound in the first moments of the raid. A shepherd or a Malinois runs twice as fast as a human.
Technical Sergeant Kelly A. Mylott, kennel master at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, called dogs ideal for getting someone who is running away without having to shoot them. “When the dogs go after a suspect, they’re trained to bite and hold them,” Sergeant Mylott said. Some dogs are big enough that, when they leap on a suspect, the person tends to drop to the ground, Sergeant Mylott said. Others bite arms or legs. “Different dogs do different things,” she said. “But whatever they do, it’s very difficult for that person to go any further.”
Finally, dogs can be used to pacify an unruly group of people, particularly in the Middle East. “There is a cultural aversion to dogs in some of these countries, where few of them are used as pets,” Major Roberts said. “Dogs can be very intimidating in that situation.”
Sergeant Mylott said that dogs got people’s attention in ways that weapons sometimes did not. “Dogs can be an amazing psychological deterrent,” she said.
There are six hundred dogs serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that number is expected to grow substantially over the next year, according to Ensign Brynn Olson of the United States Central Command. Particularly popular with the troops are the growing number of Labrador retrievers who wander off-leash a hundred yards or more in front of patrols to ensure the safety of the route. A Silver Star, one of the military's highest awards, was awarded posthumously in 2009 to a dog named Remco, after he charged an insurgent’s hide-out in Afghanistan.
The training of dogs in Navy SEAL teams and other Special Operations units is shrouded in secrecy. Major Wes Ticer, a spokesman for United States Special Operations Command, said the dogs’ primary functions “are finding explosives and conducting searches and patrols. Dogs are relied upon,” he said, “to provide early warning for potential hazards, many times, saving the lives of the Special Operations Forces with whom they operate.”
Last year, the SEALs bought four waterproof tactical vests for their dogs that featured infrared and night-vision cameras so that handlers— holding a three-inch monitor from as far as a thousand yards away— could immediately see what the dogs were seeing. The vests, which come in coyote tan and camouflage, let handlers communicate with the dogs with a speaker, and the four together cost more than $86,000. Navy SEAL teams have trained to parachute from great heights and deploy out of helicopters with dogs.
The military uses a variety of breeds, but by far the most common are the German shepherd and the Belgian Malinois, which “have the best overall combination of keen sense of smell, endurance, speed, strength, courage, intelligence, and adaptability to almost any climatic condition,” according to a fact sheet from the military working dog unit.
Suzanne Belger, president of the American Belgian Malinois Club, said she was hoping the dog was one of her breed “and that it did its job and came home safe”. But Laura Gilbert, corresponding secretary for the German Shepherd Dog Club of America, said she was sure the dog was her breed “because we’re the best”.

*Rico says the post title, of course, is from the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz...

The all-star team

Elisabeth Bumiller has an article in The New York Times about the SEALs who hit bin Laden:

There were 79 people on the assault team that killed Osama bin Laden, but in the end, the success of the mission turned on some two dozen men who landed inside the Qaeda leader’s compound, made their way to his bedroom and shot him at close range, all while knowing that the President of the United States was watching them from Washington.
The men, hailed as heroes across the country, will march in no parades. They serve in what is unofficially called SEAL Team 6, a unit so secretive that the White House and the Defense Department do not directly acknowledge its existence. Its members have hunted down war criminals in Bosnia, fought in some of the bloodiest battles in Afghanistan, and shot three Somali pirates dead on a bobbing lifeboat during the rescue of an American hostage in 2009.
The raid in Pakistan has, nonetheless, put a spotlight on a unit that has been involved in some of the American military’s most dangerous missions of recent decades.
Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the SEAL commandos went into the mission with only a sixty to eighty percent certainty that Bin Laden was in the compound. Mr. Panetta said the commandos made the “split-second decision” to shoot him— the unarmed al-Qaeda founder had a rifle within reach, an American official said— when they found him in his third-floor bedroom.
There was no debate among former SEAL members that whoever had shot Bin Laden had done the right thing. “It’s dark; there’s been a lot of bullets flying around, a lot of bodies dropping; your mission is to capture or kill Bin Laden; who knows what he’s got tucked in his shirt?” said Don Shipley, 49, a former SEAL member who runs Extreme SEAL Experience, a private training school in Chesapeake, Virginia. Mr. Shipley was reacting to earlier Obama administration accounts of an extended firefight at the compound, but administration officials revised the narrative, saying that the only shots fired came at the beginning of the raid, from a courier. “It happens in an absolute blink of an eye for these guys,” Mr. Shipley said. “And there’s that target in front of you. Second chances cost lives.”
Lalo Roberti, 27, a former SEAL member who teaches at Mr. Shipley’s school and took part in a gruesome rescue mission in Afghanistan in 2005, concurred: “For us to take a shot, it has to be bad,” Mr. Roberti said. “Especially for the ‘6’ guys.”
Inside the Navy, there are regular unclassified SEAL members, organized into Teams 1 to 5 and 7 to 10. Then there is Seal Team 6, the elite of the elite, or, as Mr. Roberti put it, “the all-star team.”
Former SEAL members said this week that the unit— officially renamed the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU— was chosen for the bloody Bin Laden raid, the most high-profile operation in the history of the Seals, because of the group’s skills in using lethal force intelligently in complex, ambiguous conditions.
All SEAL members face years of brutal preparation, including a notorious six months of basic underwater demolition training in Coronado, California. During “hell week,” recruits get a total of four hours of sleep during five and a half days of nonstop running, swimming in the cold surf and rolling in mud. About eighty percent of the candidates do not make it; at least one has died.
For those who succeed, more training and then deployments follow. After several years on regular SEAL teams, Team 6 candidates are taught to parachute from 30,000 feet with oxygen masks and gain control of a hijacked cruise liner at sea. Of those SEAL members, about half make it.
Ryan Zinke, 49, a former member of SEAL Team 6 who is now a Republican state legislator in Montana, said members of Team 6 had a certain personality: “I would say cocky, arrogant.”
SEALs — the term stands for Sea-Air-Land teams — were created by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 as a way to expand unconventional warfare.
SEAL Team 6 came later as a reaction to the botched mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, when the Pentagon saw the need for what became today’s Special Operations Command, with a special Navy unit focused on counterterrorism.
SEAL Team 6 has historically specialized in war on the seas, but in the decade since the attacks of 11 September 2001, it has increasingly fought on land in Iraq and Afghanistan.Its size is classified, but Team 6 is thought to have doubled to nearly three hundred since then. Over all, there are now about 3,000 active-duty SEAL members, split between odd-numbered teams in Coronado and even-numbered teams in Virginia Beach.
Team 6, which is based in an area separate from all the others, at the Dam Neck Annex of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, has many members in their mid-thirties, a decade or more older than the twenty-year-olds who populate the military. “I used to call it the old man’s club,” Mr. Zinke said.
Reflecting the growing importance of special operations and guerrilla-type warfare, SEAL members have risen since the 11 September attacks to higher levels of prominence within the military.
The officer who designed and oversaw the Bin Laden raid, Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, is a Seal member who is soon to take over leadership of the military’s Special Operations Command from Admiral Eric T. Olson, also a SEAL member. The Pentagon announced that Vice Admiral Robert S. Harward Jr., another SEAL member, would become deputy commander of United States Central Command, making him the second-highest-ranking American officer for the Middle East.
Eric Greitens, a former SEAL member who has written a book about his experiences, The Heart and the Fist, said that SEAL members were misunderstood as the nation’s deadliest commandos.
Although the gruesome descriptions of the pictures of Bin Laden with a bullet in his head would appear to underscore that reputation, and help to explain why President Obama decided not to release them, Mr. Greitens called SEAL members “creative” commandos who knew “to bring back as much intelligence as they possibly could.”
The cache the SEAL team recovered from the Bin Laden compound included more than one hundred storage devices— DVDs, thumb drives, and computer discs— as well as five computers and ten computer hard drives.
Despite the mission’s success, former SEALs acknowledged the precariousness of the raid and the degree of luck involved. “If that thing had gone bad, the conversation you and I would be having would be completely different,” Mr. Shipley said. “There’s only two ways to go in these operations — zero or hero.”

Rico says that The New York Times has the stupid habit of not making SEAL an acronym, but spelling it 'Seals', even in the same article where they explain its derivation... (Rico, of course, fixed all that for them.)

Hiding in plain sight, as if

Rico says they're gonna have to remake Hide in Plain Sight, this time about Osama bin Laden. But Carlotta Gall has an article in The New York Times about the real thing:

The Pakistani military has taken charge of investigations into the circumstances that allowed Osama bin Laden to reside quietly in a three-story house on the edge of Abbottabad, officials said. Military intelligence investigators returned to the house on Wednesday, and spent most of the day working inside the compound, while the army and the police barred journalists and others from approaching the area.
The intelligence agencies have detained at least eleven people for questioning, including an immediate neighbor who once worked with the family and the construction manager who built the house, Pakistani news organizations reported. They have also taken into custody the bodies of four people killed when an American Navy SEAL team made an air assault on the house.
Three women and nine children found in the house after the raid are also in the custody of the intelligence services, Pakistani security officials said. At least two are related to Bin Laden, one security official said: a twelve- or thirteen-year-old daughter and his wife, who was shot in the leg but has received hospital care and is out of danger.
The national daily newspaper The News published a photograph that it said was the photo page of the passport of Bin Laden’s wife. The passport was from the Republic of Yemen, and pictured a woman in a black head scarf named Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, born 29 March 1987, making her 24 years old, about thirty years younger than Bin Laden. Asked about the validity of the passport, the security official said he could not confirm whether it was connected to anyone detained after the raid.
Officials are still investigating the identity of the four people whose bodies were found inside the compound after the SEAL team departed with Bin Laden’s body. The bodies included two brothers and a son of Bin Laden, the security official said. American officials have said the fourth person killed was a woman, while the Pakistani official said the fourth was an unknown man.
The two brothers were known as Arshad Khan, the owner of the house, and Tareq Khan. Neighbors say they were either brothers or cousins. Preliminary investigations have made officials suspect that these were not their real names and that they were living under fake identities. Arshad Khan was carrying an old, noncomputerized Pakistani national identity card, which said he was from Khat Kuruna, a village in Tangi district, near Charsadda in northwestern Pakistan. Yet officials have found that there is no record of an Arshad Khan in Khat Kuruna.
Pakistan introduced computerized identity cards a few years ago to cut down on the production of fraudulent identity cards, many of them bought by Afghan refugees, among others.
American officials said that Arshad Khan was the local alias of the trusted courier who led them to Bin Laden, and who was known inside al-Qaeda as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. They describe him as a Pakistani who was brought up in Kuwait, hence the suffix to his name, and say that he was a close protégé of two senior figures in al-Qaeda, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi, who were both arrested in Pakistani cities before being handed over to United States custody.
The men and the compound do seem to have on occasion drawn the attention of intelligence agencies. Both Afghan and Pakistani officials have said they had pointed out the compound as one of interest to CIA officials in previous years. Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, told the BBC that officials had indicated it as suspicious in 2009, and as a possible hide-out for Bin Laden, although there were “millions” of other suspected locations.
An Afghan intelligence official told Agence-France Presse that Afghan intelligence pinpointed the compound last August, but that officials thought a senior Taliban commander, Maulavi Abdul Kabir, was living there. “The house that Osama bin Laden was killed in was pinpointed for the first time by Afghan intelligence,” the official told the news agency, which said the official declined to be named because of the delicacy of the issue. Afghan agents living in an old refugee camp in the nearby town of Haripur carried out surveillance of the house, he said, and that Afghan intelligence’s information about the house “was shared with the Americans and they showed lots of interest,” but that Afghan spies had not been involved in the subsequent investigations or operation, the news agency reported.

Bad farming practices, then and now

Rico says that, having seen Sea of Grass just last night, this editorial in The New York Times is highly resonant:

To an untrained eye, the fields of Iowa have a reassuring solidity. You cannot tell that the state has lost half its topsoil in the past century. According to a new report from the Environmental Working Group, Iowa’s soil is washing away at rates far higher than anyone realized.
For Iowa— and other Corn Belt states facing similar problems— this means an increasing loss of fertility that has to be replaced chemically. It marks a failure of stewardship, since these soils will have to feed future generations. And every particle that washes away causes problems downstream, including sedimentation— which can increase the risk of flooding— and the alarming dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the result of runoff of the chemical fertilizers farmers apply to make up for lost fertility.
The Agriculture Department says that a “sustainable” rate of topsoil loss for most of Iowa is five tons per acre per year, and the actual average soil erosion is just over five tons. But using Iowa State University statistics and an aerial survey, the Environmental Working Group concluded that average annual soil loss in much of Iowa is double the federal government’s estimates. This pace of erosion is caused partly by an increasing number of intense storms. As the report says, it has been exacerbated by a fundamental bias in federal farm policy and supports. In the dozen years before 2009, Iowa received nearly $17 billion in subsidies that fostered high-intensity farming and less than $3 billion to support conservation. In the recent budget battles, conservation programs were the hardest-hit farm programs.
Meanwhile, the race to profit from high crop prices, especially corn for ethanol, and the sobering jump in the cost of rented land in Iowa, means that there is an intense push to create greater yield on more acreage and less incentive than ever to practice sound soil conservation.
This is all the more tragic because the techniques for conserving soil are well understood. It requires planting buffer zones between fields and rivers and contour strips on sloping fields and planting regimes that keep crop cover on the soil by rotating between three and four crops, not just soybeans and corn. It also requires comprehensive conservation regulations and enforcement and, above all, facing the fact that erosion is not nature or bad farmers at work. It is the legacy of bad agricultural policy.

History for the day

On 5 May 1961, astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. became America's first space traveler, making a fifteen-minute suborbital flight in a capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

On a lighter note, the Man Cave (and not Osama's)

Ginia Bellafante has an article in The New York Times about housing, manly-version:

If Bravo is the network devoted to baroque expressions of coastal affluence, TLC exists as its spirit cousin and opposition: a cable channel committed to the ostensibly bizarre habits of non-elites. Producers take us from Pennsylvania to Arkansas to Utah, and to other places that are neither West Hollywood nor East Hampton, to uncover overbreeders (19 Kids and Counting, Kate Plus 8), polygamists (Sister Wives), addicts of household flotsam (Hoarding: Buried Alive) and the strange people who submit their young children to spray tans (Toddlers & Tiaras). Bravo ridicules the world of the well to do; TLC, instead, implicitly makes fun of the idea that those hoping to avoid encounters with creepiness or bad taste are safe beyond the realm of four-ply cashmere.
Spouse vs. House is TLC’s latest reality series, a real-estate Pygmalion that attempts to correct for the design lapses of average couples who have not yet seen fit to appoint their kitchens with energy-efficient stainless-steel appliances. The show is meant to chart the course of marital negotiation but, at its heart, it feels compelled to explore the ineptness of middle-class husbands to absorb the aesthetic and behavioral lessons of the upper classes.
In each episode the series submits a couple in an undistinguished house to a makeover agenda. Man and wife are separated for three weeks as the husband is entrusted to renovate three rooms with a $25,000 budget. The husbands do the work themselves, demolishing walls and laying tile. While all this is going on, the wife, exiled to the company of the Southern California decorator Ryan Brown, creates a mock version of her dream space under his tutelage. The goal is to see how closely (or not) the visions of the partners are synchronized.
As Mr. Brown instructs in the virtues of damask wallpaper and whimsical picture framing, the slacker husbands pursue childish fantasies. Early on we meet Justin Anderson, who conceives of his whole renovation in terms of his in-house bar, the countertop of which is made of bottle caps. He spends the first $45 of his budget on beer, avails himself of breaks in the tight project schedule to play video games and, in one shot, is shown applying deodorant. This is a universe in which men are reduced to meathead clichés, obsessed with speakers and televisions in every room. “He knows she is expecting some adult elements,” a voice-over tells us of one couple, “like furniture.”
Oddly, though, in only one of the three episodes that TLC made available for advance viewing did a couple experience the kind of teary, alienating discord that has afflicted men and women retooling their living quarters since the days of cave painting in Lascaux. In the others, husbands, given an eleventh-hour viewing of their wives’ shelter-magazine inspirations, concede in ways large and small to more feminine re-imaginings of the interiors in contention.
But drama, of course, isn’t mined from appeasement. This is a series that desperately needs high-volume rows over coffee table finishes and mutual realizations of incompatibility that are followed by mandated arbitration in the aisles of Lowe’s. Give me the threat of divorce by fabric swatch...

Oops is now a SpecOps word

Mark Landler and Helene Cooper have an article in The New York Times about the death of Bin Laden:

Osama bin Laden was not carrying a weapon when he was killed by American troops in a fortified house in Pakistan, the White House said, as it revised its initial account of the nighttime raid. Members of a Navy SEAL team burst in on Bin Laden in the compound where he was hiding and shot him in a room on an upper floor, after a fierce gun battle with other operatives of al-Qaeda on the first floor.
Bin Laden’s wife, who was with him in the room, “rushed the U.S. assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed,” said the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, reading from the brief account provided by the Defense Department. “Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed.”
Mr. Carney said that Bin Laden’s lack of a weapon did not mean he was ready to surrender, and he and other officials reiterated that this was a violent scene, that there was heavy fire from others in the house, and that the commandos did not know whether the occupants were wearing suicide belts or other explosives.
Still, the account diverged in some ways from one given by the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan. He had said Bin Laden was “engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in,” adding, “whether or not he got off any rounds, I frankly don’t know.” Mr. Brennan also said then that Bin Laden used his wife as a “human shield.” But officials now say that the death of another woman in the crossfire on another floor led them to draw that false conclusion.
White House officials said the discrepancies resulted from their haste to provide details about a chaotic, fast-moving military operation to an intensely interested American public. As more of the assault team’s 79 members were debriefed, and their accounts were crosschecked with those of other team members, there were bound to be changes in the account, these officials said. But the episode also reveals the pressures as the White House, intent on telling a dramatic story about a successful operation, sought to manage a 24-hour news media ravenous for immediate and vivid details. Even as Mr. Brennan was giving his account, other officials began clarifying parts of the story for reporters.
One issue officials were wrestling with was whether to release a photo of Bin Laden’s body.
Several experts on the rules of engagement in combat said that in a raid on a target as dangerous as Bin Laden, the Navy SEAL team would be justified to open fire at the slightest commotion when they burst into a room. “If he were surrendering, or knocked out and unconscious on the ground, that would raise serious questions," said John B. Bellinger III, legal counsel at the National Security Council and State Department in the Bush administration.“But this is a guy who’s extremely dangerous,” he said. “If he’s nodding at someone in the hall, or rushing to the bookcase or you think he’s wearing a suicide vest, you’re on solid ground to kill him.”
Other experts noted that the members of the Navy SEALs faced difficult conditions, moving through dim rooms under gunfire, and needing to make a split-second judgment about whether Bin Laden posed a threat. “They say he was unarmed now, but did the SEALs know he was unarmed?” said Scott L. Silliman, an expert on wartime legal doctrine at Duke University Law School. “It was in the dark. They were wearing goggles.”
At the United Nations, questions arose about the killing. The organization’s senior human rights official, Navi Pillay, called for more details. While noting that Bin Laden was a dangerous man, she said any operation against him should have been done legally.
During the briefing, Mr. Brennan said President Obama put a premium on protecting the commandos in the operation, saying that “we were not going to give Bin Laden or any of his cohorts the opportunity to carry out lethal fire on our forces.” None were harmed, though there was a tense moment when one of the two helicopters suffered a mechanical failure and was destroyed by the commandos.
Despite expecting Bin Laden to put up a fight, Mr. Brennan said the assault team had made contingency plans for capturing, rather than killing him. “If we had the opportunity to take Bin Laden alive, if he didn’t present any threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that,” he said. Still, Mr. Brennan was eager to draw larger lessons from what he said was Bin Laden’s use of his wife as a shield. “Here is Bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield,” he said. “I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”
Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with NBC News that the troops’ orders were to kill Bin Laden. “But it was also, as part of their rules of engagement, if he suddenly put up his hands and offered to be captured, then they would have the opportunity, obviously, to capture him,” he said.
Some of the confusion in the accounts of the raid stemmed from the difference in time zones. Bin Laden had actually been killed early Monday by Pakistan time, not late on Sunday as had been initially reported. Meanwhile, the White House continued to grapple with the question of whether to release the photo of the dead Bin Laden, or other documentary evidence. Administration officials said that they are trying to determine whether the visceral desire among Americans and some skeptics to see proof outweighs the potential that such images might further inflame Bin Laden’s disciples.
The photo, taken after Bin Laden was killed, clearly identifies the al-Qaeda leader, according to one official who has viewed it. “It looks like him, covered in blood with a hole in his head,” the official said. White House officials say they are still deciding what to do, although one official said that they were leaning toward releasing the photo. Mr. Panetta told NBC News that he did not think “there was any question that ultimately a photograph would be presented to the public.”

Rico says that, unless it was faked, he posted a photo of the dead Osame a couple of days ago...

Torture ain't nice, but it works

Scott Shane and Charlie Savage have an article in The New York Times about the use of torture:

Did brutal interrogations produce the crucial intelligence that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden? As intelligence officials disclosed the trail of evidence that led to the compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden was hiding, a chorus of Bush administration officials claimed vindication for their policy of “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding.
Among them was John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who wrote secret legal memorandums justifying brutal interrogations. “President Obama can take credit, rightfully, for the success today,” Mr. Yoo wrote in National Review, “but he owes it to the tough decisions taken by the Bush administration.”
But a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out. One detainee who apparently was subjected to some tough treatment provided a crucial description of the courier, according to current and former officials briefed on the interrogations. But two prisoners who underwent some of the harshest treatment, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, repeatedly misled their interrogators about the courier’s identity.
The discussion of what led to Bin Laden’s demise has revived a national debate about torture that raged during the Bush years. The former president and many conservatives argued for years that force was necessary to persuade al-Qaeda operatives to talk. Human rights advocates, and Mr. Obama as he campaigned for office, said the tactics were torture, betraying American principles for little or nothing of value.
Glenn L. Carle, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002, said in a phone interview that coercive techniques “didn’t provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information.” He said that while some of his colleagues defended the measures, “everyone was deeply concerned and most felt it was un-American and did not work.”
Obama administration officials, intent on celebrating the successful raid, have tried to avoid reigniting a partisan battle over torture. “The bottom line is this: if we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003,” said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. “It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound, and reach a judgment that Bin Laden was likely to be living there.”
From the moment the first al-Qaeda suspects were captured, interrogators at both the military’s prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the CIA’s secret prisons were focused on identifying al-Qaeda members who served as couriers.
“We knew that it was likely that if we were ever to get Osama bin Laden, it would be because we somehow came upon somebody closely associated with him that he trusted,” said Charles D. Stimson, the top Pentagon official on detainee affairs from 2004 to 2007.
In 2002 and 2003, interrogators first heard about an al-Qaeda courier who used the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, but his name was just one tidbit in heaps of uncorroborated claims.
After the capture in March 2003 of Mr. Mohammed, the chief planner of the 11 September 2001, attacks, he was subjected to the most harrowing set of the so-called enhanced measures, which included slamming prisoners into walls, shackling them in stress positions, and keeping them awake for as long as 180 hours. Like two other prisoners, he was subjected to waterboarding.
According to an American official familiar with his interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was first asked about Mr. Kuwaiti in the fall of 2003, months after the waterboarding. He acknowledged having known him but said the courier was “retired” and of little significance.
In 2004, however, an al-Qaeda operative named Hassan Ghul, captured in Iraq, gave a different account of Mr. Kuwaiti, according to the American official. Mr. Ghul told interrogators that Mr. Kuwaiti was a trusted courier who was close to Bin Laden, as well as to Mr. Mohammed and to Abu Faraj al-Libi, who had become the operational chief of al-Qaeda after Mr. Mohammed’s capture.
Mr. Kuwaiti, Mr. Ghul added, had not been seen in some time, which analysts thought was a possible indication that the courier was hiding out with Bin Laden.
al-QaedaThe details of Mr. Ghul’s treatment are unclear, though the CIA says he was not waterboarded. The CIA asked the Justice Department to authorize other harsh methods for use on him, but it is unclear which were used. One official recalled that Mr. Ghul was “quite cooperative”, saying that rough treatment, if any, would have been brief.
Armed with Mr. Ghul’s account of the courier’s significance, interrogators asked Mr. Mohammed again about Mr. Kuwaiti. He stuck to his story, according to the official.
After Mr. Libi was captured in May 2005 and turned over to the CIA, he too was asked. He denied knowing Mr. Kuwaiti and gave a different name for Bin Laden’s courier, whom he called Maulawi Jan. CIA analysts would never find such a person and eventually concluded that the name was Mr. Libi’s invention, the official recalled.
Again, the CIA has said Mr. Libi was not waterboarded, and details of his treatment are not known. But anticipating his interrogation, the agency pressured the Justice Department days after his capture for a new set of legal memorandums justifying the most brutal methods.
Because Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Libi had both steered interrogators away from Mr. Kuwaiti, CIA officials concluded that they must be protecting him for an important reason.
“Think about circles of information; there’s an inner circle they would protect with their lives,” said an American official who was briefed on the CIA analysis. “The crown jewels of al-Qaeda were the whereabouts of Bin Laden and his operational security.”
The accumulating intelligence about Mr. Kuwaiti persuaded CIA officials to stay on his trail, leading to the discovery of his real name, which American officials have not disclosed, and whereabouts. He, in turn, unwittingly led the agency to Bin Laden’s lair, where Mr. Kuwaiti and his brother were among those who died in the raid.
Before a day had passed, the torture debate had flared. The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Representative Peter T. King, Republican from New York, told Fox News that the success of the hunt for Bin Laden was due to waterboarding. The next morning, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said just as flatly that “none of it came as a result of harsh interrogation practices”.

Rico says if you're waterboarded 183 times, how effective is the 184th time gonna be? While unpleasant, surely, by then you gotta have figured out you're not gonna die...

Land as art

Randy Kennedy has an article in The New York Times about art in the West:

Native son Buddy Holly aside, the small city of Lubbock, Texas, on the tableland of the southern Great Plains, has never had a lot to recommend it, culturally or aesthetically. When Coronado passed through the area in the sixteenth century, he described an acute sense of European disorientation as his men struggled to plot a course across a place “with no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea”.
These days a few landmarks rise above the flatness: water towers, radio antennae, lonely-looking trees. Mostly, though, there is still “a lot of land, but nowhere to go,” as the artist Donald Judd observed of West Texas. So there may be few better bases of operation for an unusual academic program that has taken root here under the guidance of a Harvard-trained architecture professor at Texas Tech University, in which scholars study and make art in places about as far away from museums and galleries— and from bathrooms, decent beds, and air-conditioning— as is possible within the continental United States.
Called Land Arts of the American West, the classes take place in a pair of heavy-duty Ford vans, or wherever the vans and the camping gear they carry end up stopping during a seven-thousand-mile, two-month drive that a handful of participants— mostly architecture graduate and undergraduate students, but also artists, art historians, and students recruited from other disciplines— make throughout the West.
The tangible result of the trip is an annual exhibition of art, writing, and other documentary material about the journey. But the heart of the program exists out on the road, where it has found common ground with a growing number of idiosyncratic, environment-focused art initiatives like it that have sprung up in the West over the last several years: quasi collectives like the Center for Land Use Interpretation, based in Los Angeles; the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno; and in San Francisco, the For-Site Foundation, which describes itself as “art about place” and conducts a residency program in the Sierra, Nevada foothills outside the gold-mining town of Nevada City, California.
The Lubbock program is directed by Chris Taylor, who helped develop the concept, along with an artist named Bill Gilbert, who has run an initiative with the same name and similar concerns at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, since 2000. Mr. Taylor moved his program two years ago from the University of Texas, Austin, to Texas Tech, which puts him and his students at the eastern edge of a huge swath of territory— southwestern Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada— that he has made his classroom.
Many of the stops along the trip are expected, the legacies of the land-art and Earthworks movement, which transplanted the idea of sculpture to the country’s trackless open spaces beginning in the 1960s: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, offshore at the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point, Utah; Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in western New Mexico; Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in northwestern Utah; Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, two deep trenches cut into the edge of a mesa in the Nevada desert.
But other stops, some requiring close observation of the odometer in places so remote that GPS is of little use, suggest a kind of Addams Family sightseeing vacation, with an itinerary drawn up by Rachel Carson and Howard Zinn with help from Foucault and the Marquis de Sade. Students have spent time near one of the world’s largest open-pit uranium mines, now inactive, on the Laguna Pueblo reservation west of Albuquerque. They have camped on a desolate patch of New Mexico desert land called Cabinetlandia, owned by the art magazine Cabinet, wedged between an active rail line and screaming traffic on Interstate 10, where there is little more in the way of amenities than a mailbox and a filing-cabinet community “library” embedded in a concrete-and-soil wall.
“It might be one of the worst places on the face of the earth to try to inhabit, to try to be stationary while everything else is only there for a moment, moving through at high speed,” recalled Meredith James, a New York sculptor and video artist who participated in the field trip in 2009, when she was a graduate art student at Yale. The campers that year tried to reimagine the roar from the highway as the roar of the surf, and they set up beach chairs along the road. But after only a couple of days on the land, they became so encrusted with dirt and grime that they had to drive to nearby Deming, New Mexico and wash themselves in the sinks of a coin-operated laundry.
The program operates on a shoestring budget of about $30,000, provided by participants’ fees and some money from private donors. Mr. Taylor describes it as a “semester abroad in our own backyard” and said he planned it to try to be as agnostic about the definition of art as the vast landscape itself is. “I define art as anything people have done on the land,” he said, adding that the West is an ideal place for such an approach. (“Arid lands are unable to hold secrets,” Mr. Taylor once wrote.) He added: “I think there are important lessons here that are more than just art history lessons. Not to take anything away from art history, but this is more broadly about how we’ve shaped the land, and how it has shaped us.”
William L. Fox, a writer and the director of the Center for Art + Environment in Reno, Nevada, said he believed that these kinds of wildly interdisciplinary art-making and academic activities might be flourishing in the West because artists see it as a place where boundaries are less rigid, and they can go looking for insights from many fields of knowledge, the way hard sciences have long done. “For me, art is about making metaphors, and to do that you feed on new sources of information,” said Mr. Fox, who has served as a field lecturer for the Lubbock program. “In a sense that’s all artists are doing, the same as scientists: ‘What areas can we poke our noses into that give us new information and show us how to make work in a way we’ve never thought of?’ ”
Rocio Mendoza, an architecture graduate student who traveled with the group in 2010, returned to Lubbock to propose a kind of design idea that at first glance might seem like merely a fantastical conceptual exercise: to erect tens of thousands of small, cheap shelters along the United States’ border with Mexico. But the idea came to her after she walked away from the group one morning in the southern Arizona scrub and ran into two disoriented Mexican men who were crossing illegally into the country and asked her for food. She made a video about the experience, in which she recalled her mother’s stories of being carried across the Rio Grande many years before, seven months pregnant with Ms. Mendoza. “Meeting those two guys,” she says in the video, looking into the camera, “it all suddenly clicked and became personal and political.”

Rico says great art is usually anti-establishment, and building shelters for illegal aliens would certainly qualify...

Making a comeback

Rico says his favorite farm animal is the mule (well, some have said there's a distinct resemblance), and Tess Taylor has an article in The New York Times on the comeback of animals in farming:

On a sunny Sunday just before the vernal equinox, Rich Ciotola set out to clear a pasture strewn with fallen wood. The just-thawed field was spongy, with grass sprouting under tangled branches. Late March and early April are farm-prep time in the Berkshires, time to gear up for the growing season. But while many farms were oiling and gassing up tractors, Mr. Ciotola was setting out to prepare a pasture using a tool so old it seems almost revolutionary: a team of oxen.
Standing just inside the paddock at Moon in the Pond Farm, where he works, he put a rope around Lucas and Larson, his pair of Brown Swiss steers. He led them to the twenty-pound maple yoke he had bought secondhand from another ox farmer, hoisted it over their necks, and led them trundling through the fence so they could begin hauling fallen logs.
Mr. Ciotola is one of a number of small farmers who are turning or, rather, returning to animal labor to help with farming. Before the humble ox was relegated to the role of historical re-enactor, driven by men in period garb for child-friendly festivals like pioneer days, it was a central beast of burden. After the Civil War, many farms switched from oxen to horses. Although Amish and Mennonite communities continue to use horses, by World War Two most draft animals had been supplanted by machines that allowed for ever-faster production on bigger fields.
Now, as diesel prices skyrocket, some farmers who have rejected many of the past century’s advances in agriculture have found a renewed logic in draft power. Partisans argue that animals can be cheaper to board and feed than any tractor. They also run on the ultimate renewable resource: grass.
“Ox don’t need spare parts, and they don’t run on fossil fuels,” Mr. Ciotola said. Animals are literally lighter on the land than machines. “A tractor would have left ruts a foot deep in this road,” Mr. Ciotola noted. In contrast, oxen or horses aerate the soil with their hooves as they go, preserving its fertile microbial layers. And as an added benefit, animals leave behind free fertilizer.
David Fisher, whose Natural Roots Community Supported Agriculture program in Conway, Mass., sells vegetables grown exclusively with horsepower, said he is getting record numbers of applicants for his apprentice program. “There’s an incredible hunger for this kind of education,” he said.
Mr. Fisher discovered farming with horses more than a decade ago as an intern on a farm in Blue Hill, Me. It stuck. “Using animals is just really appealing to the senses,” he said, adding that he found it philosophically appealing as well. “There’s a deep environmental crisis right now, and live power is also about creating an alternative to petroleum. Grass is a solar powered resource — and you don’t need manufacturing plants or an engineering degree to make a horse go.”
Drew Conroy, a professor of applied animal science at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, who is known in draft-power circles as “the ox guru”, notes that horses and even mules are seeing a comeback. Each animal has its niche. “Ox are cheap and easy to train but they’re essentially bovine, which is to say, smart but slow,” he said. Horses are faster, more spirited, trickier to train and more expensive to buy and to keep. Professor Conroy notes that mules are better suited to Southern weather. “In the heat, an ox will just stop,” he said.
Even their most ardent supporters concede that draft animals are likely to remain minor features of the rural landscape. For starters, they are cost effective only on small farms. They are also time intensive, performing well only when they can be worked every day, and becoming temperamental when neglected.
On Mr. Ciotola’s first day out with his oxen, he had to struggle with the fact that the long winter had left them rusty. At one point they pulled over and came to a full stop in the bushes. He walked in front of them and tapped them gently. “They’ve been cooped up all winter, so they get restless,” he said. Indeed, getting Lucas and Larson to go is a much more involved process than turning a key, and even at top speed they are far slower than a tractor. They plod, and Mr. Ciotola must plod along with them.
“You still have to walk nine miles for every planted acre,” said Dick Roosenberg, the founder of Tillers International, a 430-acre farm learning center in Scotts, Michigan. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Mr. Roosenberg helped farmers who practiced hand cultivation in third world countries learn about oxen. Eventually, he also taught ox techniques to interpreters at historic communities like Plimouth Plantation. But now Mr. Roosenberg’s plowing workshops fill with a new demographic: farmers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and even Alaska who hope to use animal power in their fields. Last year, about 320 signed up. “It’s suddenly not just historic replication, it’s reinvention,” he said. “A new generation wants to do this again, now.”
Oxen are also cheap, at least compared to a tractor, and can work for ten to fourteen years. Since the dairy industry relies on keeping cows pregnant so they lactate, millions of baby bulls are born each year. A pair of calves start at $150 and range up to $1,500, depending on their breed and how much training they have.
Some dairies even give their young males away. Mr. Ciotola got Lucas and Larson, now two-and-a-half years old, as wobbly-kneed babies from a nearby raw-milk dairy, bartering for them with his own labor. “I just had to buy or make the yokes and cart,” he said.
Farmers who want to learn the old art of draft power sometimes find their education in odd places. Dominic Palumbo, Moon in the Pond’s owner and chief farmer, learned to plow with an oxen team by way of an intern from Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which replicates an 18th-century Shaker community. Mr. Ciotola first learned to work his team from Mr. Palumbo, then later refined his skills by studying a DVD called Training Oxen, made in 2003 by Dr. Conroy. The film is something of a cult classic in the draft-power community, and in sections covering topics from “the yoke” to “stall etiquette,” the movie pictures Dr. Conroy and his partner, Tim Huppe, working with New Hampshire farmers who raise oxen from their cute baby phases through their slightly belligerent adolescence. It also features each of Mr. Huppe’s four daughters leading her own team around the farm.
Interest in ox-farming became so strong that, in 2005, Dr. Conroy and Mr. Huppe began hosting three-day workshops at Sanborn Mills Farm in Loudon, New Hampshire. At first they were surprised to find themselves emerging as minor celebrities on the draft-power circuit. After all, they had learned ox-pulling as teenagers in 4-H clubs at a time when the activity was mostly seen in shows. “It used to be kind of a cultural thing, a county fair thing,” Dr. Conroy said.
But Mr. Huppe, who sells yokes, oxbows, carts, goads, and other gear at his store, BerryBrook Ox Supply, in Farmington, New Hampshire, said his clientele is changing. “It used to be fifteen percent small farmers,” he said. “Now the farmers are more like sixty percent.” About his workshops, Mr. Huppe said: “I feel like the Johnny Appleseed of oxen.”
As draft power spreads, a seven-thousand-year-old technology is being looked at in different ways.. Some young farmers are developing a hybrid practice, using oxen to supplement, rather than replace, tractors. Some use them just to log and plow, while others have their teams haul machines with engines. Even this can be energy efficient. “If you use animals to pull a motorized hay-baler,” Mr. Roosenberg said, “you can bale hay pretty fast with about one-third the gas.”
Mr. Ciotola, who does not yet own his own land but who makes his living doing jobs at Moon in the Pond and other Berkshire farms, does have a lightweight tractor, a 1949 Farmall Cub that is particularly suited to small acreages. Some of its accessories— the manure spreader, stone rake, and disc harrow— can also be fitted to the ox-drawn forecart he bought from Mr. Huppe’s store.
As the spring morning passed, he continued breaking his team into their third season, walking alongside Lucas’s left side, talking softly. About three hours in, after Lucas pulled into the bushes, Mr. Ciotola turned to head out for one more load, and Lucas pulled back toward the paddock. Mr. Ciotola decided to let him go. “Lucas is always the troublemaker,” he noted, patting the blond steer. “He’s been restless all winter, but then he gets stubborn.” For Mr. Ciotola, the most challenging aspect of working with his oxen is finding the time it takes to break them in. “The best pairs need to get worked every day, and that’s hard for me because I have to do other work during the winters,” he said.
Even though Lucas and Larson now stand five feet tall and weigh fifteen hundred pounds each, they are not yet fully grown. Over the next two years, they will each gain five hundred pounds and grow two feet. At that point, they will easily be able to pull four thousand pounds. Mr. Ciotola wants to have them in prime shape for logging, plowing, and haying. After this season’s first expedition, they stood calmly in the dung-scented paddock, rolling their eyes and flicking their tails as Mr. Ciotola brushed them. Larson ambled off to eat some hay. “Even when it’s tough with them, it’s better than spending a day with a tractor,” he said. Then again, there was that time when he nearly took a horn to the groin. “A tractor doesn’t do that either,” he said.

Ballots rather than bullets

Thomas Friedman has a column in The New York Times about the death of Osama bin Laden:

There is only one good thing about the fact that Osama bin Laden survived for nearly ten years after the mass murder at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that he organized. And that is that he lived long enough to see so many young Arabs repudiate his ideology. He lived long enough to see Arabs from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen to Syria rise up peacefully to gain the dignity, justice, and self-rule that Bin Laden claimed could be obtained only by murderous violence and a return to puritanical Islam.
We did our part. We killed Bin Laden with a bullet. Now the Arab and Muslim people have a chance to do their part, to kill Bin Ladenism with a ballot, that is, with real elections, with real constitutions, real political parties and real progressive politics.
Yes, the bad guys have been dealt a blow across the Arab world in the last few months; not only al-Qaeda, but the whole rogues’ gallery of dictators, whose soft bigotry of low expectations for their people had kept the Arab world behind. The question now, though, is: can the forces of decency get organized, elected and start building a different Arab future? That is the most important question. Everything else is noise.
To understand that challenge we need to recall, again, where Bin Ladenism came from. It emerged from a devil’s bargain between oil-consuming countries and Arab dictators. We all— Europe, America, India, China— treated the Arab world as a collection of big gas stations, and all of us sent the same basic message to the petro-dictators: keep the oil flowing, the prices low, don’t bother Israel too much, and you can treat your people however you like, out back, where we won’t look. Bin Laden and his followers were a product of all the pathologies that were allowed to grow in the dark out back— crippling deficits of freedom, women’s empowerment and education across the Arab world.
These deficits nurtured a profound sense of humiliation among Arabs at how far behind they had fallen, a profound hunger to control their own futures and a pervasive sense of injustice in their daily lives. That is what is most striking about the Arab uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia in particular. They were almost apolitical. They were not about any ideology. They were propelled by the most basic human longings for dignity, justice and to control one’s own life. Remember, one of the first things Egyptians did was attack their own police stations, the instruments of regime injustice. And since millions of Arabs share these longings for dignity, justice, and freedom, these revolutions are not going to go away.
For decades, though, the Arab leaders were very adept at taking all that anger brewing out back and redirecting it onto the United States and Israel. Yes, Israel’s own behavior at times fed the Arab sense of humiliation and powerlessness, but it was not the primary cause. No matter. While the Chinese autocrats said to their people: “We’ll take away your freedom and, in return, we’ll give you a steadily rising education and standard of living,” the Arab autocrats said: “We’ll take away your freedom and give you the Arab-Israel conflict.”
This was the toxic “out back” from which Bin Laden emerged. A twisted psychopath and false messiah, he preached that only through violence — only by destroying these Arab regimes and their American backers— could the Arab people end their humiliation, restore justice and build some mythical uncorrupted caliphate.
Very few Arabs actively supported Bin Laden, but he initially drew significant passive support for his fist in the face of America, the Arab regimes and Israel. But as al-Qaeda was put on the run, and spent most of its energies killing other Muslims who didn’t toe its line, even its passive support melted away (except for the demented leadership of Hamas).
In that void, with no hope of anyone else riding to their rescue, it seems, in the totally unpredictable way these things happen, that the Arab publics in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere shucked off their fears and decided that they themselves would change what was going on out back by taking over what was going on out front.
And, most impressively, they decided to do it under the banner of one word that you hear most often today among Syrian rebels: Silmiyyah. It means peaceful. “We will do this peacefully.” It is just the opposite of Bin Ladenism. It is Arabs saying in their own way: We don’t want to be martyrs for Bin Laden or pawns for Mubarak, Assad, Gaddafi, Ben Ali, and all the rest. We want to be “citizens”. Not all do, of course. Some prefer more religious identities and sectarian ones. This is where the struggle will be.
We cannot predict the outcome. All we can hope for is that this time there really will be a struggle of ideas, and that, in a region where extremists go all the way and moderates tend to just go away, this time will be different. The moderates will be as passionate and committed as the extremists. If that happens, both Bin Laden and Bin Ladenism will be resting at the bottom of the ocean.

A rabbi on gubs

Rico says his friend Mild Bill sends along this 'Jew-to-Jew' letter about gub control (which will surely piss off those, whether Jewish or not, who don't believe in gub ownership):

An open letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg from Rabbi Dovid Bendory, Rabbinic Director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

Dear Mayor Bloomberg:
I am an Orthodox rabbi who lives in New Jersey but works in New York City . Approximately half of my waking life is lived under your laws and jurisdiction. Like everyone who lives or works in New York City , I have the right, even the obligation, to confront some of your policies regarding so-called "gun control".
Why do I place the phrase "gun control" in quotes? Because this innocuous-sounding phrase, this expression that sounds like common sense, is in reality a dangerous bit of semantic trickery.
"Gun control" actually (and historically) means letting government, whether benign or ruthlessly evil, disarm certain sectors of society and allow others to remain armed. It means letting the government know where every gun owner lives and the number and types of firearms that he or she owns. It means putting the authority to decide who has the right to defend him or herself with a firearm into the hands of a government bureaucrat.
The honest definition of "gun control" is actually "victim disarmament". Because the person with the gun will always control the person without the gun. Without the personal firearm as an "equalizer", the stronger will always control the weaker.
Mr. Bloomberg, our Jewish tradition tells us that righteous self-defense is not only permissible but an obligation: "If a murderer comes for you, strike him down first." (Talmud Sanhedrin 72a)
In your own New York City , hand guns are illegal for all practical purposes, yet the murderers, drug dealers, gangs, and other criminal predators in your City manage to acquire them nonetheless. How do you expect civilians to defend themselves against those who would harm them if we cannot use the most practical tool at our disposal: the handgun? You tell us to "Dial 911". And then wait ten minutes or more for police rescue?
It deeply troubles me that I, along with millions of others who live and work in your city, are on your "disarmed" list. Mr. Mayor, this is not only immoral, it goes against the fundamental precepts of Judaism that you and I both honor.
The Torah teaches: "Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor. (Leviticus 19:16), which Rashi explains means that one who is able to help another escape harm and fails to do so is held culpable in the Heavenly Court for the harm he failed to prevent. You, Mr. Mayor, by disarming your citizens, place them in harms way every day.
Jews are commanded by God to value all human life. How can you, a religiously committed Jew, say you truly value human life? Every second you stand as Mayor you advocate laws that strip millions and millions of people in your city completely defenseless in the face of the criminal predators who roam your streets.
Mr. Mayor, your citizen disarmament is an act of hypocrisy. Unlike nearly all the rest of us, everywhere you go you are surrounded by official armed guards, police escorts, and your highly trained personal private bodyguards. Mr. Mayor, is your life worth more than the lives of your fellow citizens? Or are we mere "subjects" in your eyes?
As Jews, Mr. Mayor, we believe that all life is precious, not just the lives of our leaders. Have you ever, in your time as Mayor, walked the streets of New York City alone and unarmed? I am nearly certain you would have to answer "no" to this question. Therefore I must further ask you: how, in clear conscience, do you require the rest of us to do so? Would you willingly live under this prejudicial burden? Can you recognize and admit the arrogant hypocrisy this attitude displays?
Additionally, you are no doubt aware that the Jewish people have been at the wrong end of the gun barrel for far too long. America is one of the few countries in the world where Jews are entitled to embrace firearms as the most practical means of our own self-defense. And you would strip us of the right to defend ourselves? With all due respect, Mr. Mayor, this is shameful.
Mayor Bloomberg, have you studied Jewish history? Are you aware that the Nazis disarmed Jews prior to Kristallnacht and that those same Nazi gun laws are the foundation of the U.S. Gun Control Act of 1968? Are you aware that Senator Thomas Dodd asked the Library of Congress to translate the Nazi Gun Control Laws into English for him, and that he incorporated language from these laws into the Gun Control Act of 1968 that he authored? How can it be that you, a Jew, are enforcing Nazi-inspired laws?
Tyrants like Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao pioneered the bloody trail of "gun control" in the Twentieth Century. Why do you so thoughtlessly, in effect, mimic the insidious actions of these monsters?
This apparent elitism on your part makes your recent publicity stunt in Arizona even more cynical. You sent NYPD agents all the way across the country to purchase guns, but yet you can't deploy enough police to protect your own residents? And if you expose your city's residents via such a manpower diversion, how do you justify denying these residents the right to protect themselves with a firearm?
Mr. Mayor, do you need a rabbi to tell you that your actions are wrong and immoral?
This nation's Bill of Rights is a sacrosanct public trust. You are a public servant. You swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. As you blatantly disregard the Second Amendment, the actual "guardian" of all the rest of the Bill of Rights, I must ask you: Did you knowingly lie when you took your oath of office?

Sincerely,

Rabbi Dovid Bendory
Rabbinic Director
Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

Rabbi Bendory is an NRA Certified Firearms Instructor.

History for the day

On 4 May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on anti-war protesters at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding nine others.