James Fallows

Which the critics and reviewers, with their fancy emphasis on "plot" and "casting," might not encourage you to do. But this is what my wife and I unexpectedly ended up doing last night after trawling through the TiVo to see what movies it had hauled in.

Reason One: This movie humanizes the TSA. It had to happen sometime.

Reason Two: The dramatic payoff, which I can reveal without spoiler danger, occurs when a previously downcast and disrespected character demonstrates his overall success in life (plus success with the girls) by becoming ... a Cirrus SR-22 pilot!

Good to see a movie that is so true-to-life in depicting the markers of suaveness and accomplishment.
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Bonus reason to see the movie: the very edgy Krysten Ritter, best known as the doomed consort of Aaron Paul/Jesse in Breaking Bad, returns as the sarcastic, put-down-look-that-could-shoot-a-Predator-drone-out-of-the-sky friend of the leading lady.

Bonus proof that the She's Out of My League guy figured out exactly the right way to demonstrate his omni-directional appeal and sophistication: Angelina Jolie flies this plane too. So there.

 

Taylor Branch is known to the world as author of the monumental "America in the King Years" trilogy. He's additionally known to Atlantic readers for his definitive cover story "The Shame of College Sports" in late 2011. He is additionally known to me as my immediate predecessor as a writer and editor at The Washington Monthly in the early 1970s. I was just out of graduate school and looking for a job, and he was leaving the job and headed to Texas to work with a young aspiring politico from Arkansas [yes, Yale law student Bill Clinton] on the McGovern campaign there.

This afternoon I had an opportunity to interview Taylor Branch at the Aspen Institute's offices in Washington on his new book The King Years, as part of Aspen's Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series. This was about as interesting an hour-plus as I can remember spending. The video of the session is below. When you have some time to listen to Taylor's full account, I think you will be glad to have done so. If you want to feel both better and worse, contrast the way you hear Taylor discuss the currents and contradictions in America's politics with the way you usually hear them presented by practitioners and analysts today. Better, because of the context he adds; worse, because of what is normally left out.



If you can hear only a little bit of this, listen to the first 10-minute discussion, in which Taylor Branch explains why he thinks we should be kicking off a series of week-by-week observations of the 50th anniversary of fateful moments of 1963. Here is the YouTube link as well.

Thanks to many people who have written in about the small-plane crash on Tuesday night near the airport in Danbury, Connecticut (KDXR for you aviation people). This gets my attention because the plane that went down was the same Cirrus model whose design and business concepts I've often written about (book, article, different book) and that I now fly.*

It got attention in the non-flying world because the crash ended up in a "save." The most famous feature of the Cirrus line of aircraft -- which are now the most popular small propeller planes in the world**, from a company founded in Duluth, Minnesota that is now owned by the Chinese state aerospace corporation -- is the parachute for the whole plane. These are designed to save everyone on board (up to four people) when the alternative is a crash. Here is how the parachute looked in test deployments -- bringing the whole plane down more or less level to the ground.




Now, here is a post-crash picture on Tuesday night in Danbury.



It's not entirely clear why the plane is pointing nose-downward. Perhaps the parachute was deployed late, so that its "risers" that level out the descent did not have time to deploy fully? (Here is a diagram, from my book Free Flight, of what happens with the risers in the few seconds it takes the chute to deploy fully. Read it from right to left.) Perhaps the plane got hung up on something near the ground? Whatever the reason, the cockpit and cabin were intact, the pilot and passengers were unharmed, and all aboard walked away.

Why did the plane crash at all? For one reason or another, the plane's engine apparently stopped running a few miles short of the Danbury airport. A mechanical failure of some sort? Simply running out of gas, or "fuel starvation," which is statistically the most common cause of small-plane engine failures? All this will be sorted out eventually. The Cirrus has a very sophisticated systems-monitoring device that would presumably survive this crash and that records second-by-second measurements of most flight variables.

For the moment the reaction in pilot-land is "the penalty for bad luck or mistakes should not be death." The consequences of engine failure, at night, over wooded terrain would usually be quite grim. Or, as a local fire official put it to WTNH:

A parachute safety system deployed to help bring the plane down slowly. Airport officials say the pilot reported engine problems 5 miles out and when they were 2 miles out they pulled the parachute.

"They were nervous 'cause it just happened but other than that it was just like a normal accident. They were upset that the plane had crashed but they were fine," said Asst. Chief Steve Williams. "The airplane's designed for this. The company that designs this airplane sells this parachute as a safety item and obviously it worked. 3 people are walking around with no injuries because of the parachute system."

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If you don't have time to watch all 30 minutes of the "G+ Hangout" that ended an hour ago, about the current pollution emergency in China, I strongly recommend that you watch at least the last 10 minutes. Here's the background:

This broadcast is part of a weekly series on events in China, run by Fons Tuinstra, whom I knew in Beijing. The main guest is Richard Brubaker, who lives in Shanghai and teaches at a well known business school there. The topic is the recent spate of historically bad air-pollution readings in many Chinese cities, especially Beijing. The whole discussion is important and interesting, and here are some of the early highlights:

• Time 9:20+ how ordinary Chinese citizens are affected by the emergency
• 11:15+ why the respective geographies of Beijing and Shanghai usually make problems worse in Beijing (which like LA sits in a bowl where air gets trapped), but why Shanghai is suddenly "catching up" and in a worst-ever situation for air quality;
  
• 12:15+ why parents of small children must constantly worry about air quality, along with food safety
• 13:00-15:00+ why not only foreigners but increasing numbers of young Chinese say they are thinking of leaving the country to escape the air, water, and food problems.
  

That's just the buildup. What I really want you to watch is ....



... the last ten minutes of the broadcast, starting around time 20:00. Very matter-of-factly Brubaker lays out the basic realities of China's environmental/economic/social/political conundrum:

• that its pollution and other environmental strains are the direct result of rapidly bringing hundreds of millions of peasants into urban, electrified, motorized life;
• that China's economic and political stability depends on continuing to bring hundreds of millions more people off the farm and into the cities;
• that China's practices and standards in city planning, transport, architecture, etc are still so inefficient enough that, even with its all-out clean-up efforts, its growth is disproportionately polluting. In Europe, North America, Japan, etc each 1% increase in GDP means an increase of less than 1% in energy and resource use, emissions, etc. For China, each 1% increment means an increase of more than 1% in environmental burden. And, the most important part for Western readers:
• this cannot go on. Brubaker makes a point ignored in virtually every breezy prediction of the inevitable Chinese future: that environmental constraints are the most urgent of several limits affecting the famed "Chinese growth model," and because of them it is far from obvious that China will ever "overtake" the United States or anyone else.

None of this is "new," but it is useful to have it all put together so concisely. I respond so strongly to this point because it's a central argument of my recent book and other dispatches for the Atlantic. Also Brubaker explains why it's "true," but meaningless, that every industrializing country has gone through its own stage of hellish rape-of-the-land-and-air. I grew up in the Southern California of the terrible-smog era of the 1960s, and have described what that bodes for possible improvements in Beijing. (Part one, two, and three.) Alexis Madrigal recently compared China's problems to those of Pittsburgh at its worst.

Brubaker's point, which I agree with, is: the comparisons don't matter. China's scale and speed are so different that its environmental problems constitute a unique emergency, for its own people and for the world.

Happy New Year!

I'm not that one man -- I'm the one who has been passing along various warnings about possible vulnerabilities in the Java programming language.

But for the record, here's another side of the story, from a long-time programming veteran in Canada the UK named John Spragge. He lays out one version on his site but sent this elaboration. At the end he points out that even he has disabled Java on his own browser -- but he wants to defend the honor of Java in a broader sense. Emphasis added:

•  In a neighbourhood afflicted by a string of burglaries, the headlines do not read: Locks Fail in Leaside. Every story about an "exploit" should, at least in passing, lay the blame where it belongs: with people who take advantage of that security flaw to harm or extort other people. Yes, I do mean every single story, every single web log post. I do expect journalists to continually remind us, and themselves, that we have a choice about living in the network version of Hobbes's war of all against all.
  
  
•  On the subject of war: the governments that have evidently decided to take their conflicts into our living rooms, work places, children's schools, power plants and hospitals by making it "cyber war" do not answer to some mysterious force from outer space. They answer to us. We can demand general disarmament. Whether or not we choose to do this, I expect the people now hounding Oracle for "security flaws" to at least mention the truth in passing. Government preparations to make war on the net don't threaten us because of Java; they threaten us because of the choices many of our own governments make.
  
  
• Every day, I encounter downloads of applications from publishers that don't provide a digital signature and expect me to run their products in native mode, on the bare metal in my computer. Like most users, I make the best of this: I scan every file I load or download with two virus scanners, one of which keeps demanding that I uninstall the other. In this environment, the idea that Java stands out as a particular threat, particularly one so severe it requires government coercion, doesn't pass the laugh test.

I have a simple plea: let us not lose sight of the many innovations of Java.

Working with Java, I and many other programmers first encountered an integrated approach to coding and documentation through JavaDoc. Java offered the first and still some of the best facilities to integrate a flexible programming language and the W3C xml language. 

Above all, Java integrated the language and support routines, and in the process instituted and enforced coding standards. Languages such as c and c++ have no rules and standards for identifiers: Java does. That alone adds considerably to a priceless asset: any reasonably skilled programmer who knows Java conventions can read a Java application source and have a pretty good chance of understanding it. With c or c++ or some other language that does not provide a common naming scheme, a programmer must work harder to do the same thing. Java designers also added considerably to its readability by eliminating the requirement for headers, that fragmented the sources of c and c++ into headers and regular files, the simple rational structure of packages, classes and interfaces, and the rule that every public class should have its own source file, and that file should have the name of the class it contains. These simple intuitive rules, coded into the structure of the Java language, did a huge amount to propagate good program design practise....

I should emphasize that my plea for perspective does NOT mean I ask people to disregard the practical advice to disable Java applet containers on web clients. Implementation of Java applets on Firefox and other web browsers does probably present a security risk. Users should certainly download the latest patches, and if the web sites they use do not require Java applets (the ones I use don't) they should disable Java on the browser (I do). Unfortunately, the attacks on this remarkable programming language have gone way beyond this simple wisdom and turned into a vendetta, which risks ignoring a great many significant accomplishments.

Another perspective on Java here, thanks to reader EG.

Thanks to Brian Glucroft, based in China, for this screenshot of CNN.com's coverage of Hillary Clinton's testimony about Benghazi:



"Testy," "fiery," "tearful" for the secretary of state. Good thing for all of us that this hot emotional mess is not in a position of responsibility! And meanwhile Michelle Obama "rolls eyes" at the speaker of the House.

It's such a relief, but of course a surprise, to hear that the Obama girls are "mature." Apologies in advance if I've been snookered and this is actually a shot from The Onion.

A little more than a year ago I mentioned the case of Shoshana Hebshi, a young American woman who lives in Ohio, is married, and has twin sons. Hebshi was born in California to a Jewish mother and a father originally from Saudi Arabia.

On September 11, 2011, she took a Frontier Airlines flight from San Francisco through Denver to Detroit. You can read her whole account of what happened once she got to Detroit, but this is the summary: After the plane landed, it parked for a while without going to the normal gate. Then heavily armed security forces came onto the plane and came to the row where Hebshi was sitting. They handcuffed her and the other two people in that row. The three passengers were marched off, searched, detained,  and interrogated as possible terror threats. On what grounds? The two men sitting next to Hebshi, whom she didn't know and who didn't know each other, were dark-skinned South Asians, and another passenger or a member of the crew became suspicious of them. As Hebshi said in her initial post:

Someone on the plane had reported that the three of us in row 12 were conducting suspicious activity. What is the likelihood that two Indian men who didn't know each other and a dark-skinned woman of Arab/Jewish heritage would be on the same flight from Denver to Detroit? Was that suspicion enough? Even considering that we didn't say a word to each other until it became clear there were cops following our plane? Perhaps it was two Indian man going to the bathroom in succession?

The FBI's attitude at the time was, Better safe than sorry. According to the AP:

Detroit [FBI] spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said ultimately authorities determined there was no real threat.

"Due to the anniversary of Sept. 11, all precautions were taken, and any slight inconsistency was taken seriously," Berchtold said. "The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.

Today the ACLU filed a complaint against Frontier Airlines, the local airport authorities, and various FBI, TSA, CBP, and other federal agents for abusing Hebshi's rights. You can read the ACLU's news release here, and the formal complaint in PDF here. Samples from the complaint:

 2. An American citizen born in California, Ms. Hebshi was arrested and detained because of her ethnicity and her seat assignment: she has an Arab last name and was seated next to two men of South Asian origin, who each allegedly used the lavatory for ten to twenty minutes during the flight.  Ms. Hebshi did not know these men, nor did she speak with them or leave her seat at any time before landing in Detroit.

 
3. Although Frontier Airlines never suggested that Ms. Hebshi had engaged in any suspicious behavior, Frontier Airlines staff provided her name to federal and state authorities when reporting the allegedly suspicious conduct of the men seated next to her on the plane.... 

5. During her several hours in detention, Ms. Hebshi was subjected to an invasive and humiliating strip search, which required her to strip naked, bend over, and cough.

6. Ms. Hebshi, by her attorneys, now challenges the discriminatory conduct of Frontier Airlines, which identified her as a "suspicious" passenger based on her ethnicity, race or national origin, resulting in her arrest and detention.

From the press-release category of the inbox just now. Previously in the "Glamorous Life" series here (which includes earlier links).

This image has nothing to do with the message below, but you will see the thematic resonance.

tip: The Obama Erotica Fan Fiction Novel Available for Review -- to James

From:  Dxxxxxx
  Xxxxxx Public Relations
  Phone: xxx-xxx-xxxx
  Email: xxx

Sent on 01/22/13
----------------------

tip: The Obama Erotica Fan Fiction Novel Available for Review
Definitely Not Authorized by the President of the United States

tip: Presidential Porn? 

Barack and Michelle Obama Star in This Erotic, Romtanic Novel
[------].com Will Make the Book Available for Free

BARACK AND MICHELLE OBAMA STAR IN THIS EROTIC FAN FICTION NOVEL

I just wanted to put this in front of you to gauge your interest and to give you a heads-up. We are going to announce the world's first fan fiction novel about the President of the United States of America to the public next week.

Here's a brief description of the novel and the full book will be made available in 7 days online, at no charge.

WARNING:
Here's a brief description of the story line:

"Drawn into the ancient Hawaiian spiritual world and into the exploration of their own deepest and most forbidden desires, will our leading couple be able to resist the guesthouse games that lay in store for them or help to finally lay a spirit to rest?"

The full book is available via PDF and I can email it to you immediately, based on your interest:

WARNING! [This book] contains explicit sex scenes, graphic language and the leading characters are in sex scenes with others.

"Alone in their isolated beachfront guesthouse in the tropical paradise of Kailua, Hawaii, The Obamas are enjoying a holiday of a lifetime. But an unexplained visit from a ghost needing help sees our couple drawn into the ancient Hawaiian spiritual world and into the exploration of their own deepest and most forbidden desires.

Whilst searching for clues to understand who this mysterious girl is that begs for the couple's help, they uncover a number of rooms equipped to fulfill every type of erotic fantasy imaginable at the remote guesthouse they are staying at. But will our couple be able to resist the quest for sexual pleasure to help put the spirit to rest and bring about justice for a seventy year old tragedy? Or will they drown in the tides of history and their own passions?"

On reading it through after hearing it, this is another carefully crafted speech. More so, I would say, than Obama's first inaugural address. But these two parts got my attention the instant I heard them:

1) Lash and sword. This inaugural address, like nearly all previous ones, began with an emphasis on the importance of democratic transfer-of-power. For instance, the first words of JFK's address in 1961 were, "We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom." But Obama introduced the familiar theme with this twist:

Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of [our founding] words with the realities of our time.  [Note: this preceding sentence is the one-sentence summary of the speech as a whole.] For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob.  They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed. 
 
And for more than two hundred years, we have. 
 
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free.  We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

I like the precise logical concision of contrasting "self-evident" with "self-executing" truths. But "blood drawn by the lash" is an impressive and confident touch. It was of course an allusion to a closing passage in what is generally considered history's only great second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln's in 1865 (right):

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Half-slave, half-free was an allusion to another of Lincoln's most famous addresses, his "House Divided" speech from his campaign for the Senate in 1858. (And Lincoln's phrase "house divided" was his own allusion to the Book of Mark.) 
 
2) Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall. I thought the allusion in this passage was eloquent on many levels:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths -- that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

The rhetorical and argumentative purpose of the speech as a whole was to connect what Obama considers the right next steps for America -- doing more things "together," making sure that everyone has an equal chance, tying each generation's interests to its predecessors' and its successors' -- with the precepts and ideals of the founders, rather than having them be seen as excesses of the modern welfare state. 

This was the most sustainedly "progressive" statement Barack Obama has made in his decade on the national stage.

I was expecting an anodyne tone-poem about healing national wounds, surmounting partisanship, and so on. As has often been the case, Obama confounded expectations -- mine, at least. Four years ago, when people were expecting a barn-burner, the newly inaugurated president Obama gave a deliberately downbeat, sober-toned presentation about the long challenges ahead. Now -- well, it's almost as if he has won re-election and knows he will never have to run again and hears the clock ticking on his last chance to use the power of the presidency on the causes he cares about. If anyone were wondering whether Obama wanted to lower expectations for his second term ... no, he apparently does not.

For background, please see these three past items: first (illustrated at right), second, and third. They compare the play and headlines of stories in three major papers -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal -- and together suggest what was to me a surprising conclusion. Namely, that the WSJ's news coverage, which for decades has seemed independent from the Journal's editorial pages, is increasingly conforming with the editorial line. My China-beat buddies will recognize the term "harmonization" for this reining-in of unauthorized views.

If you haven't yet seen Sophie Schmidt's chronicle of her recent high-level visit to North Korea, by all means check it out. It's full of atmospheric photos like this one (from her site) and acute observations.



Part of what she reports reminds me very much of China back in the early days of its opening up. Eg:

I can't express how cold it was... The cold was compounded by the fact that none of the buildings we visited were heated, which meant hour-long tours in cavernous, 30-degree indoor environments. It is quite extraordinary to have the Honored Guest Experience in such conditions: they're proudly showing you their latest technology or best library, and you can see your breath.

Part of it is like nothing most of us have ever seen or experienced before. Schmidt, who is in her 20s, made the trip in the company of her father Eric, of Google, and former ambassador/governor Bill Richardson. Very much worth reading.
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Routine disclosure: my wife and I first met the Schmidts when Sophie was a young girl, and we've been in touch and have followed her accomplishments since then. But this will be interesting to anyone.

This morning's assortment, on the kitchen table. The NYT, the WaPo, and the WSJ all have page-one reports about the House Republicans' decision not to force an all-out fight on the next extension of the federal debt ceiling. The Post's story is on the bottom of its front page, which is why you don't see its masthead.

This morning I was on the "Domestic News Roundup" hour of the Diane Rehm Show, on WAMU in Washington. The topics naturally started with the latest gun-safety proposals and went on through Chuck Hagel, the economy, the Dreamliner, and so on. 

This panel, and the rest of the media nearly always misses two points that are critical.  

      - Daily gun deaths [not the big massacres] are the real killer.  

      - The shooters are most likely to be either pissed off and jealous or perfectly rational with a heavily distorted value system, not mentally ill.  And mental health experts state whenever they can that it is very hard to determine which patients will become violent. Most will not, and that is certain.

The neglected mental health workers are glad to hear that they can get some attention and funding ... and the NRA is glad to put the blame on, of all things, lack of government funding for mental health.

Here in tea party country, my cousin, the local outspoken liberal, is afraid to write to the paper about guns.  Me, too.  We are rightfully afraid of being shot.  After all, the gun nuts don't have to be mentally ill to pull the trigger, just pissed off, and Limbaugh and Beck have that service covered.

This is an opportunity to mention again Dina Rasor's powerful article about the toll of the "daily gun deaths" as opposed to the too-frequent but not-quite-daily newsmaking mass killings. Previous discussion of it here.

Good news from our friends at TSA: they are getting rid of the hated (by me) Rapiscan "backscatter" screening machines like the one shown at right. These are the scanners in which you stand between two big, opaque boxes, raise your hands, and have X-rays shot at your body. The systems measure the "backscatter" radiation that reflects back from hard and soft surfaces on your body and clothing. Radiation in such backscatter systems is much weaker than medical X-rays, which are of course meant to go right through your body. Still, it is ionizing radiation, which is guilty until proven innocent in terms of possible health effects. 

(Please see update below.) The Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" is a beautiful airplane in some serious trouble right now. You should read our Megan Garber's look at the news yesterday. But also please check Patrick Smith's overview yesterday at his Ask the Pilot site. (Smith has re-launched the site in expanded-and-even-better form after its departure from its previous home at Salon. Here's Smith's earlier take on what is nice about the Dreamliner; and here's my snapshot of the plane's interior, showing the headroom and so on, from its demo visit to National Airport in DC last spring.)



Smith makes the point that repeated battery fires in the 787, and the subsequent grounding of the fleet by the FAA and other airlines and authorities around the world, are obviously terrible news for Boeing. But so far the defect appears to be specific and correctable -- a problem with the lithium-ion batteries Boeing has chosen for the plane --  rather than some mysterious, unbounded threat that could undo the 787 project as a whole. For a fascinating book about how one such mysterious problem destroyed an entire aircraft project and ultimately much of a national aircraft industry, see Sam Howe Verhovek's Jet Age, about the British Comet airplane that pioneered the commercial jetliner industry before its came to grief. Patrick Smith explains why the 787's current predicament seems different:

This is a huge and costly black eye for Boeing and its customers. But it could be a lot worse... The grounding came preemptively, before anybody was seriously hurt or killed. It's also helpful that the problem, as we understand it thus far, is eminently fixable. Burning batteries are serious, but this isn't a structural defect that'll wind up costing billions.

Leading up to the 787′s launch, all of the talk was focused on the uniqueness of plane's carbon-fiber construction. Any serious failure on that front could have doomed the entire 787 project to failure, and possibly dragged all of Boeing down with it. But to this point, composites have been a nonexistent issue. These other problems are nothing by comparison, and a year from now I suspect all of this will be forgotten.

In addition to the carbon-fiber issue, the other "fundamental" question about the Dreamliner has been whether Boeing erred in outsourcing so much of the plane's manufacturing and design. Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times went into this in depth in a celebrated article two years ago; I also address it in China Airborne. Even Boeing officials now concede that the company farmed out too much of the crucial work of making the plane. Thus it exposed itself to unexpected delays, problems in matching up parts and systems produced by different suppliers, design decisions that were out of its immediate control, and other challenges

These are exactly the limits-to-outsourcing that Charles Fishman discussed in his recent cover story. If you'd like to read a fascinating, dissident inside-Boeing account of these decisions and early warnings of their consequences, see this PDF of a 2001 presentation by Dr. L.J. Hart Smith, which I also discuss in my book and whose cover page is shown below.


UPDATE For informed comment on the battery problems and what the episode reveals about Boeing's relationship with the FAA and with its own union employees, see this Leeham News dispatch. 

As I mentioned two days ago, tech people I take seriously are themselves taking seriously the threat of computers being hacked through a vulnerability in Java code. For the record, some updated info:

A few days ago I mentioned the glider pilot in South Carolina who was handcuffed, arrested, held overnight in a cell, questioned by the FBI and DHS, and finally released after 24 hours all for doing something (a) that was completely legal and (b) that he had no reason to believe was not legal. I offered this as one more entry in the ongoing chronicles of the security state: I'm very well aware that this and much worse has happened to a lot of people, and that the novelty in this case was that the "possible terrorist" was a septuagenarian white man from the professional class.

Readers weigh in. First:

Shocking -- and yet another event that further convinces me that the sort of Big Brother we're facing is more like Terry Gilliam's Brazil [right] than the ominous near-omniscience of 1984, Minority Report etc.

From Michael Ham:

I think it's worth pointing out that that the aggressive (and to my mind, egregious) actions of DHS and the FBI are perfectly legal--indeed, they could have locked the pilot up indefinitely in a prison (a secret prison, if they chose) with no access to lawyers or due process.

That's allowable if they suspect him of terrorist inclinations, thanks to the PATRIOT Act, which the Senate recently continued with no discussion at all. In fact, it would be perfectly legal for Obama to have him killed on suspicion (a "signature strike"). Once dead, since he's an adult male, the Obama administration would identify him as a militant: any adult male killed in a drone strike is ipso facto a militant--this is explicitly in accordance with the doctrine of the Obama Administration.

When I say "perfectly legal", I mean that Obama does it and it cannot be considered in court (just as the US kidnappings and torture of innocent people cannot be considered in court), because the Obama Administration uses the state-secrets loophole to keep these things out of court: no recourse for injured parties.

From Mark Huddleston, the president of the University of New Hampshire:

Thanks for spreading the word on this nonsense to the non-aviation community.

I used to fly out of Delaware, and, post-9/11, worried about being shot down for inadvertently trespassing on the (admittedly well charted) new no-go areas around the Chesapeake, my once-favorite VFR  meandering area. I basically quit flying VFR. This is the (il)logical extension.

From a reader in California:

First, did the local officials understand how gliders function?  You know, using thermals to get lift which requires them to circle.  Also, a cursory inspection of the glider would show nothing dangerous and I doubt crashing into the plant would do anything more than disintegrate the glider without endangering the plant.

Second, is it legal to refuse to release someone in custody until they sign a promissory note not to sue?  On it's face, that appears to be an admission of wrongful arrest (or what ever the legal term is as I'm not a lawyer).

Finally, I assume he didn't have a gun with him or there would be hell to pay for abridging his 2nd amendment rights.  Just kidding!

From Lee Harrison of the University of Albany:

I'm a sailplane pilot ... got my privates in gliders in 1971, didn't get a power ticket till '73.  I like flying sailplanes more than I like flying power, and I own a Ka-6 (antique wooden and fabric sailplane from the early 60s, nothing like competitive today, still safe and fun to fly). [Ka-6 photo at right.]

You can bet this story has gone through the soaring community like wild-fire.... There must be some sort of acknowledgement that this was nuts, some sort of progress on it not happening again.

The idea that someone would use a sailplane to attack a nuclear plant is NUTS!  And the idea that someone intending to attack a plant would circle over it is nutty too...  For the record, I keep my sailplane at Saratoga Airport (5B2) where there is vigorous soaring activity, and the Navy's Milton training reactors are about 5 miles SW.  We fly over those reactors all the time; indeed when they are operating they often generate useful and reliable lift.  And there's never been a problem, they are entirely blase' about it

In Europe, particularly the low countries (Belgium, Holland, northwest Germany) it's completely routine for sailplanes to use the updrafts from power plants, nuclear or fossil, and nobody worries about it.  ... Scariest damn flight I've made as a passenger was riding in a Duo-Discus (high-performance two-seater) with an ace Belgian soaring pilot as he set out insouciantly on a jaunt -- with a cloud base at about 1 km, crappy erratic lift, and over thickly settled land with damn few places I'd have wanted to try to land that sailplane.   He knew exactly where all the power plants were, knew we could use one later in the afternoon to get that last lift to get home .. and did.

Ta-Nehisi Coates beat me to the punch* in quoting the magazine's official statement on the "sponsored content" advertorial from the Church of Scientology that was on our site for about 12 hours yesterday. Because it's important, here's that statement in full:

We screwed up. It shouldn't have taken a wave of constructive criticism -- but it has -- to alert us that we've made a mistake, possibly several mistakes. We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way.  It's safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand. In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out.  We remain committed to and enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising, but acknowledge--sheepishly--that we got ahead of ourselves.  We are sorry, and we're working very hard to put things right.  

That ad was a mistake in both concept and execution. I am sorry that we ran it in the first place, which we and others will always remember as an error; but I think the quick response and forthright statement reflect the best parts of the magazine's tradition. I am saying all of this as a loyal and long-time Atlantic employee but as an observer of rather than participant in this recent drama. (That is, I had nothing to do with any part of this: the origin of the ad, the decision to pull it, or the drafting of this statement.) Every person and every institution makes mistakes. We've recognized, admitted, and tried to correct this one, and we'll do our best to learn from it.
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* On the other hand, I'm on an actual airline flight as I type and post this. My rare escape from United reminds me that other airlines offer Gogo-in-flight.