A strange interstellar wind blows through our solar system
Interstellar winds appear to have changed direction, and scientists aren't certain why. (NASA/Goddard/Adler/University of Chicago/Wesleyan University / September 6, 2013)
By Monte Morin LA TIMES
When it comes to studying the region of interstellar space just beyond our solar system, nothing seems to work quite the way scientists imagined.
Take Voyager 1 for example. The spacecraft has confounded and delighted researchers for several years with unexpected observations of magnetic field and cosmic ray activity at the gateway to interstellar space.
Indeed, scientists disagree over whether Voyager 1 is still in the solar system.
Now, new research published in the journal Science suggests that the interstellar winds that gust through our heliosphere -- the vast bubble of magnetism that surrounds the sun and planets -- has changed direction over the last 40 years.
After comparing data gathered by 11 spacecraft between 1972 and 2011, researchers concluded that interstellar winds have changed direction by 4 to 9 degrees, upending long-held beliefs that the gusts were eternally steady.
"This result is really stunning," said Dave McComas, study coauthor and principal investigator for NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft.
"Previously we thought the very local interstellar medium was very constant, but these results show just how dynamic the solar system's interaction is," McComas said in a statement.
Our heliosphere, which is inflated like a balloon by the sun's solar winds, deflects powerful cosmic rays, much the way the earth's magnetic field shields us from much of the sun's radiation.
But the heliosphere doesn't block everything. Certain uncharged particles from interstellar space, such helium atoms, can enter and be tracked by spacecraft.
The heliosphere is currently moving through a vast interstellar cloud that is formally called the "local interstellar cloud" but has also been dubbed the "local fluff."
The heliosphere is currently at the inside edge of the cloud, which is moving in a different direction. The two are moving past each other at a speed of 50,000 miles per hour, and it's this motion that results in interstellar atoms "blowing" through the heliosphere and past earth.
It remains unclear to scientists exactly why the interstellar wind would change direction.
"it was very surprising to find that changes in the interstellar flow show up on such short time scales because interstellar clouds are astronomically large," said study coauthor Eberhard Mobius, a University of New Hampshire physics professor and principal scientist for the IBEX mission.
"This finding may teach us about the dynamics at the edges of these clouds," Mobius said in a statement. "While clouds in the sky may drift along slowly, the edges often are quite fuzzy and dynamic. What we see could be the expression of such behavior."
The next couple of weeks will be full of surprises, twists and turns, as this country debates in its Congress and media and living rooms whether to launch another war in the Middle East. But I think it’s fair to offer a preliminary assessment of where the wind is blowing. Obama’s case for war is disintegrating fast. And his insistence on a new war – against much of the world and 60 percent of Americans – is easily his biggest misjudgment since taking office. His options now are not whether to go to war or not, but simply whether he has the strength and sense to stand down and save his second term before it is too late.
Here’s what we know now for sure already: even if the president were somehow to get a majority in House and Senate for entering into Syria’s vortex of sectarian violence, it will be a profoundly divided one. The 10-7 vote in the most elite body – the Senate Foreign Relations committee – is an awful omen. To make matters worse, there is currently a clear national majority against war in the polls and the signs from the Congress suggest a nail-biter at best for the president. Under these circumstances, no president of any party has any right or standing to take this country to war. He is not a dictator. He is a president. Wars are extremely hazardous exercises with unknown consequences that require fortitude and constancy from the public paying for them. Even with huge initial public support for war, as we discovered in the nightmare years of Bush-Cheney, that can quickly turn to ashes, as reality emerges. To go to war like this would be an act of extreme presidential irresponsibility.
And on one thing, McCain is right. To launch strikes to make a point is not a military or political strategy. It will likely strengthen Assad as he brazenly withstands an attack from the “super-power” and it would not stop him using chemical weapons again to prove his triumph. We either lose face by not striking now or we will lose face by not striking later again and again – after the initial campaign has subsided and Assad uses chemical weapons again. McCain’s response, as always, is to jump into the fight with guns blazing and undertake a grueling mission for regime change. Let him make that case if he wants – it is as coherent as it is quite mad. It’s as mad as picking a former half-term delusional governor as his vice-president. There is a reason he lost the election to Obama. So why is Obama now ceding foreign policy to this hot-headed buffoon?
The only conceivable way to truly punish Assad and assert international norms would be to get a UN Resolution authorizing it. That is, by definition, the venue for the enforcement of international norms. The US Congress cannot speak for China or Russia, Germany or Britain. And in Britain’s case, the people – through their representatives – have spoken for themselves. That means that, if we go through the proper route, nothing will be done. But that is the world’s responsibility, not ours’. And we are not the world.
The US has no vital interests at stake in the outcome of a brutal struggle between Sunni Jihadists and Alawite thugs. None. Increasingly, as we gain energy independence, we will be able to leave that region to its own insane devices. Our only true interest is Saudi oil. And they will keep selling it whatever happens. Israel is a burden and certainly not an asset in our foreign policy. The obsession with the Middle East is increasingly a deranged one. Taking it upon ourselves to ensure that international norms of decency are enforced in that hell-hole is an act of both hubris and delusion. We can wish democrats and secularists well. But we can control nothing of their struggle, as the last few years have definitively shown. And when we try, we create as many problems as we may solve. Look at Libya.
My own fervent hope is that this is the moment when the people of America stand up and tell their president no.
I support and admire this president and understand that this impulsive, foolish, reckless decision was motivated by deep and justified moral concern. But the proposal is so riddled with danger, so ineffective in any tangible way (even if it succeeds!), and so divorced from the broader reality of an America beset by a deep fiscal crisis, a huge new experiment in universal healthcare, and a potential landmark change in immigration reform, that it simply must not be allowed to happen.
We can stop it. And if Obama is as smart as we all think he is, he should respond to Congress’s refusal to support him by acquiescing to their request. That would damage him some more – but that damage has been done already. It pales compared with the damage caused by prosecuting an unwinnable war while forfeiting much of your domestic agenda.
This is not about Obama. It’s about America, and America’s pressing needs at home. It’s also about re-balancing the presidency away from imperialism. If a president proposes a war and gets a vote in Congress and loses, then we have truly made a first, proud step in reining in the too-powerful executive branch and its intelligence, surveillance and military complex.
In other words, much good can still come from this.
If Congress turns Obama down – as it should – Obama can still go to the UN and present evidence again and again of what Assad is doing. Putin is then put on the defensive, as he should be. You haven’t abandoned the core position against the use of chemical arms, and you have repeatedly urged the UN to do something. Isn’t that kind of thing what Samantha Power longs for? Make her use her post to cajole, embarrass, and shame Russia and China in their easy enabling of these vile weapons. Regain the initiative. And set a UN path to control Iran’s WMD program as well.
Obama once said his model in foreign policy was George H W Bush. And that president, in the first Gulf War, offers a sterling example of how the US should act: not as a bully or a leader, but a cajoler, a facilitator and, with strong domestic and international support, enabler of resistance to these tin-pot Arab lunatics. Obama, in a very rare moment, panicked. What he needs to do now is take a deep breath, and let the people of this country have their say.
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Russian Pole-Vaulter Backs Scrutinized Law
By DAVID HERSZENHORN and CHRISTOPHER CLAREY NY TIMES
MOSCOW — The intensifying debate over a new Russian law that has been criticized in the West as antigay moved into the realm of global sports on Thursday when one of Russia’s most prominent athletes publicly backed the measure even as competitors from other nations at the world track and field championships here criticized it.
Yelena Isinbayeva, the world champion pole-vaulter and the biggest star in Russian track and field, said she supported the new law, which bans “propaganda on nontraditional sexual relationships,” and she urged athletes to respect Russia’s views on sexuality.
The law, signed by President Vladimir V. Putin in June, has set off calls for protests at the Winter Olympics next year in Sochi, and even some demands for a boycott of the Games. While Mr. Putin and other supporters say the law is meant to protect children and does not discriminate against gays, critics say it is clearly intended to suppress homosexuality and could be used as a pretext to arrest anyone who appears to support gay rights.
The debate over the law has loomed over the track and field championships being held at Luzhniki Stadium here. The American runner Nick Symmonds on Tuesday dedicated his silver medal in the 800-meter race to gay friends, and several Swedish athletes, including the high-jumper Emma Green Tregaro, painted their nails in rainbow colors as a sign of solidarity with gay people.
Isinbayeva, who won her third world title on Tuesday and has drawn the biggest crowds this week, described such criticism as disrespectful. “It’s unrespectful to our country,” she said at a news conference on Thursday. “It’s unrespectful to our citizens because we are Russians. Maybe we are different than European people, than other people from different lands. We have our law, which everyone has to respect.”
She also described the legislation as reflecting the legitimate social and cultural views of Russia. “It’s my opinion also,” she said. “If we all to promote, you know to do all this stuff on the street, we are very afraid about our nation, because we consider ourselves like normal, standard people. We just live boys with women, and women with boys.”
She added, “It comes from history.”
Isinbayeva’s comments seemed certain to further inflame a debate that has led to boycotts of Russian vodka by gay bars in Western Europe and North America, and comparisons of the Winter Games in Sochi to the Summer Games in Nazi Germany in 1936.
Symmonds replied on Thursday: “It blows my mind that such a young, well-traveled, well-educated woman would be so behind the times. She said ‘normal, standard people’ in Russia? Guess what: a lot of these people with Russian citizenship are normal, standard homosexuals. They deserve rights too.”
Nick Davies, a spokesman for the I.A.A.F., track and field’s governing body, sought to avoid taking sides. “The I.A.A.F. constitution underlines our commitment to the principle of nondiscrimination in terms of religious, political or sexual orientation,” Davies said in a statement. “Allied to this is our belief in free expression as a basic human right, which means we must respect the opinions of both Green Tregaro and Isinbayeva.”
The widening worldwide controversy over the propaganda law has prompted officials from the International Olympic Committee and from FIFA, which chose Russia as host of the 2018 World Cup, to demand clarifications from the Kremlin about the law, and assurances that gay athletes and fans will not face any mistreatment.
This week, protesters held a candlelight vigil outside the Russian Consulate in Montreal, and an American gay rights group, Athlete Ally, sought to step up pressure on the I.O.C. on Thursday by demanding that Madrid be chosen as the site of the 2020 Summer Olympics because of Spain’s record on protecting gay rights.
Critics have said that the anti-propaganda law amounts to government-sanctioned homophobia and is out of sync with Russia’s push to host major international events. In response, some Russian officials noted that homosexuality is not illegal here, unlike in Qatar, host of the 2022 World Cup, or Dubai, which is competing with Russia for World Expo 2020.
Defenders of the law have also accused the West of hypocrisy, noting that Britain adopted a law nearly identical to the Russian legislation in 1987 and that the United States has its own history of legislation restricting gay rights, including the Defense of Marriage Act, which only this year was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
Isinbayeva’s comments immediately made her the law’s most prominent defender, but opinion polls have shown that she is hardly alone, with some 88 percent of the Russian public supporting it. Her call for respect of Russia’s sovereign rights put her squarely in the camp of Mr. Putin, who often makes the same demand in many different contexts.
“When we arrive to different cultures, we try to follow their rules,” Isinbayeva said on Thursday. “We are not trying to set our rules over there. We just try to be respectable. And also we ask everyone to be respectful to our place, to our culture, to our people.”
Isinbayeva, who has said she plans to stop competing, at least temporarily, because she wants to start a family, received her gold medal at a ceremony on Thursday night. She sang Russia’s national anthem, teared up, and kissed her medal, and then continued singing. As the song ended, she wiped her eyes.
At the news conference earlier in the day, she urged that politics not mar the Sochi games. “I’d like that people not combine the Olympic movement with such problems as nontraditional relationships or something else,” she said. “These are two different things. They do not have to mix.”
Other athletes, however, said they felt compelled to speak out against the Russian legislation. Symmonds, in a statement after his second-place finish in the 800-meter race, said, “As much as I can speak out about it, I believe that all humans deserve equality as however God made them.”
Kevin Borlee, a relay runner from Belgium, praised Green Tregaro for the statement she made by painting her nails. “What’s sure is that if Emma does this and shows this to the world in a sport like ours where many people are watching it can open the eyes of many people in Russia,” Borlee said. “I think it’s something that is strong in their culture here, and I think it was a very good idea Emma had.”
He said that Isinbayeva very likely felt an obligation to stand up for Russia. “She’s from here,” he said. “There are pressures and perhaps she doesn’t want to put distance between herself and the ideas of her country.”
Matthew Hughes, a Canadian steeplechaser, said that athletes should feel free to express their political views and be open about their sexual orientation. “I think it’s good for athletes that if they have a real strong opinion to voice it; I don’t think they should feeling coming into these games that they have to hide anything.”
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
"Dusty" Andrew Sullivan's beloved pet was put to rest on 5 August 2013
Aug 5 2013 @ 6:42pm
Surprised by Grief
We spent the morning on the beach, Dusty and I. These last few days, this
usually aloof and independent mischief-maker leaned into me. She sat on the
sand, her body pressed against my leg, then allowing me to hold her longer than
usual in my arms before she’d squirm and wriggle away. Aaron took her to their
favorite breakfast take-out spot and ordered the egg-and-bacon burger she had
lusted after but never eaten before. Today, it was all hers. But something she
would have swallowed in one breath not so long ago, she looked at, nibbled, and
let drop. Only strands of bacon tempted her and then, a chocolate chip cookie.
No hesitation there.
Our usual vet was on vacation so we took Dusty to another animal
hospital, where they were extremely kind. We waited a little outside, which is
when Aaron took the above photo. Dusty was shivering a little and panting, but
much less agitated than she usually is near a vet. Inside she was given a
sedative as I cradled her in my arms. She relaxed as I petted and held her to my
face, her tongue suddenly lolling out as the muscles all sagged. There was no
reluctance any more. She gave up her fiercely guarded independence to me, in
the end, and it touched me so deeply. She was ornery and feisty and selfish
usually – only rarely letting her guard down. But now it was fully down; and
she let me take care of her one last time.
This was not like waiting for someone to die; it was a positive act to
end a life – out of mercy and kindness, to be sure – but nonetheless a positive
act to end a life so intensely dear to me for a decade and a half. That’s still
sinking in. The power of it. But as we laid her on the table for the final
injection, she appeared as serene as she has ever been. I crouched down to look
in her cloudy eyes and talk to her, and suddenly, her little head jolted a
little, and it was over.
I couldn’t leave her. But equally the sight of her inert and lifeless –
for some reason the tongue hanging far out of her mouth disfigured her for me –
was too much to bear. I kissed her and stroked her, buried my face in her
shoulders, and Aaron wept over her. And then we walked home, hand in hand. As
we reached the front door, we could hear Eddy howling inside.
I don’t know how to thank all of you for your emails over the last 24
hours – as well as the
thread that helped me understand this whole thing better, as this loomed in
the future. Her bed is still there; and the bowl; and the diapers – pointless
now. I hung her collar up on the wall and looked out at the bay. The room is
strange. She has been in it every day for fifteen and a half years, waiting for
me.
Now, I wait, emptied, for her.
Aug 6 2013 @ 11:14pm
It’s
not as if I have any excuse (you warned me plenty of times) but I’m shocked by
how wrecked I am right now. Patrick, Chris and Jessie, thank God, have been
holding down the fort on the Dish, because otherwise I’m not sure I could think
about much else right now. How can the emotions be this strong? She was a dog,
after all, not a spouse or a parent.
And yet, today, as I found myself coming undone again and again, I
realized that living with another being in the same room for 15 and a half
years – even if she was just a mischievous, noisy, disobedient, charming,
food-obsessed beagle – adds up to a lot of life together. I will never have a
child, and she was the closest I’ll likely get. And she was well into her teens
when she died.
She was with me before the Dish; before my last boyfriend, Andy; before I
met Aaron. She came from the same breeder as the beagle my friend Patrick got
as he faced down AIDS at the end of his life. I guess she was one way to keep
him in my life, so it was fitting that his ex-boyfriend drove me to the farm in
Maryland to get her. I was going to get a boy and call him Orwell (poseur
alert) but there were only girls left by the time we got there. I didn’t know
what I was doing but this tiny little brown-faced creature ambled over to me
and licked the bottom of my pants. She chose me. On the ride home, I realized I
hadn’t thought for a second what to call a girl dog, and then Dusty Springfield
came on the radio.
My friends couldn’t believe I’d get a dog or, frankly, be able to look
after one. I was such a bachelor, a loner, a workaholic writer and gay-marriage
activist with relationships that ended almost as quickly as they had begun. I
thought getting a dog would help me become less self-centered. And of course it
did. It has to. Suddenly you are responsible for another being that
needs feeding and medicine and walking twice a day. That had to budge even me
out of my narcissism and work-mania.
But I also got her as the first positive step in my life after the
depression I sank into after my viral load went to zero in 1997. I know it
sounds completely strange, but the knowledge of my likely survival sent me into
the pit of despair. I understand now it was some kind of survivor guilt, and,
after so much loss, I had to go through it. I wrote
my way out of the bleakness in the end – as usual. But this irrepressible
little dog also pulled me feistily out.
She was entirely herself – and gleefully untrainable. I spent a large part
of our first years together chasing her around bushes and trees and under
wharfs, trying to grab something out of her mouth. She’d find a disgusting
rotten fish way underneath a rotting pier, wedge herself in there, eat as much
as she felt like and then roll around in ecstasy as I, red-faced, bellowed from
the closest vantage point I could get. There was the year that giant tuna
carcass washed up on the sand and I lost her for a split second and nearly lost
my mind looking for her until I realized she was inside the carcass,
rendering herself so stinky it was worse than when she got skunked. But the
smile on her face as she trotted right out was unforgettable. It was the same,
proud, beaming face that appeared from under a bush in Meridian Hill Park covered
in human diarrhea, left by a homeless person. Score!
Good times: the countless occasions she peed in the apartment, always
under my blogging chair, driving me to distraction; her one giant chocolate
orgasm, when she devoured two boxes of Godiva chocolates left on the floor by a
visiting friend, ate every one while we were out at dinner, and then forced me
to chase her around the apartment when I got home, as she puked viscous
chocolate goo over everything, until I slipped in it too. Yes, she survived.
The rug? Not so much.
She was also, it has to be said, always emitting noise. She had a classic
howl, and when the two of us lived in a tiny box at the end of a wharf, she
would bay instinctively at every person and every dog she saw come near. It’s
cute at first. But after a while, she drove most of my neighbors completely
potty. I tried the citronella collar, but she found a way to howl that stayed
just below the volume that triggered the spray. Howling was what she did. There
was no way on earth I was going to stop it.
But there was one exception to this rule. In my bachelor days, I’d stay
out late in Ptown, trying to get laid, and often getting to sleep only in the
early hours. I installed some floor-to-ceiling window blinds to block out the
blinding sun over the water – so I could sleep late (this was before the blog).
Dusty – usually so loud and restless – would wait patiently for me to wake up,
and wedge herself between the bottom of the fabric of the blind and the glass
in the window. That way, she kept an eye on all the various threats, while
basking in the heat and light of the morning. And until the minute I stirred,
despite all the coming and going around her, she uttered not a peep. In her
entire life, she never woke me up. This is the deal, she seemed to tell me. You
feed and walk me and house me on a beach all summer long, and I’ll let you
sleep in.
It was a deal. She never broke her part of it; and I just finished mine.
(Photo montage by Aaron Tone.)
Friday, August 02, 2013
Read This Book to Understand Lee Harvey Oswald
One book explains Lee Harvey Oswald’s motivations in assassinating John F. Kennedy better than any other—and it’s been out of print for decades. Joseph Finder salutes the careful reporting of Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s ‘Marina and Lee,’ and why there isn’t a conspiracy in sight.
(Page 1 of 3)
Shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, in November 1963, a Gallup poll found that 52 percent of the American public believed that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was part of a conspiracy. In the 50 years since, that figure has climbed closer to 80 percent.
You can understand why. It’s painful to accept that an American president was cut down by one small, half-crazy guy with a mail-order rifle who could easily have been stopped in any of a dozen different small ways—but wasn’t. No wonder Norman Mailer called the assassination “the largest mountain of mystery in the twentieth century ... a black hole in space absorbing great funds of energy and never providing a satisfactory answer.”
The key word here is “satisfactory.” The simple explanation—that Oswald acted alone—was unpalatable. The enormity of the crime didn’t fit the insignificance of the criminal. Far easier to imagine Oswald as a “cat’s paw” of a much larger scheme, engineered by invisible but all-powerful forces.
Lee Harvey Oswald is led by authorities at the Dallas police station following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 23, 1963. (AP)
There’s something deeply consoling about conspiracy. As a writer of suspense fiction for whom conspiracy is a stock in trade, I know the gratifications of a world in which everything means something, everything adds up, everything is under the control of some grand human intention. We like to think that things happen for a reason, and that large things happen for large reasons.
All this bureaucratic caution had a paradoxical effect, however. The Oswald who emerged from the Warren Commission report’s 26 volumes was a blank slate. No wonder it was so densely inscribed with our worst suspicions. It didn’t help that Oswald was himself shot dead two days after the assassination, by a nightclub operator named Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. The shooting of the shooter made him loom all the larger in our imagination. As Thomas Powers pointed out, “Lee Harvey Oswald in prison for decade after decade—surfacing in the news whenever parole boards met, but otherwise forgotten, like Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremer, John Hinckley—would have faded back down to size. It is Oswald dead and unexplained that excites suspicion. We needed a good long look in order to forget him.”
That good long look didn’t come until 1977, with the publication of Marina and Lee by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. The timing could not have been worse. It was two years after the ignominious end of the Vietnam War and three years after Watergate. The country had been through two more traumatic assassinations (Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King). We were by then steeped in conspiracy thinking. Our distrust of politicians and government organizations was at fever pitch, shaped in part by the paranoid conspiracy thriller that had come into vogue in Hollywood: The Parallax View and The Conversation and Chinatown in 1974, Three Days of the Condor in 1975, All the President’s Men in 1976.
Marina and Lee offered a deep, nuanced, and spellbinding portrait of Oswald, as seen through the prism of the person who knew him best, his Russian wife, Marina. But it gave us no sensational revelations, no grassy-knoll conspiracy talk. What it offered instead was something far more unsettling: a portal to the life and times of a twisted, small man. The book was widely reviewed but its sales were modest. It wasn’t what the conspiracy-minded American public was in the mood to buy. McMillan’s book forces readers to confront something more vexing than a conspiracy: an absence of conspiracy.
It’s no less suspenseful for all that, in part because of the breathtaking intimacy of its character studies. The author’s gifts of observation are considerable. Yet she was also extraordinarily fortunate in the access that she enjoyed. A few months after the assassination, Oswald’s Russian widow, Marina Prusakova Oswald, was offered a choice of collaborators to write a book about her life with Lee. One was a Russian-born journalist named Isaac Don Levine, who’d written biographies of Lenin and Stalin. But he was mostly interested in talking about politics, and Marina had no patience for that. She wanted to talk about her tempestuous marriage.
“Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F. Kennedy” by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. 672 pages. Steerforth; $23.
The one writer Marina was drawn to was a 36-year-old woman named Priscilla Johnson (later, Priscilla Johnson McMillan), who had a gentle, warm nature and an intriguing background. McMillan had been a friend of John F. Kennedy’s—she had been an aide to him when he was in the Senate, and, pretty and socially connected, was a target of his attentions, though it never led to an affair. She also spoke fluent Russian, which was crucial, since Marina’s facility with English was poor. She understood the idiosyncrasies of Soviet life, having spent several years in Russia as a young reporter.
By a startling coincidence, she had also known Marina’s husband. In November, 1959, as a reporter in Moscow, she had interviewed a 20-year-old ex-Marine at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow named Lee Harvey Oswald, who’d announced he wanted to defect to the Soviet Union.
Marina Oswald and Priscilla Johnson McMillan hit it off immediately. McMillan then signed a contract with Harper & Row for a book about Lee Oswald for which she received an advance of $60,000. Two thirds of that went to Marina. Marina signed a release giving McMillan a free hand to write whatever she wanted.
From July 1964 until the end of the year, McMillan all but moved in with Oswald’s young widow and her two small children in her ranch house outside Dallas. They cooked meals and traveled together. McMillan babysat Marina and Lee’s kids. They traded confidences. The terrible event was less than a year old, and its details were still fresh. This was about as close as we could get to asking questions of Oswald himself.
McMillan had a difficult task. Marina had been over-interviewed. Fearing deportation to the Soviet Union, she had given different versions of her life to the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Warren Commission. She was also wary, ashamed, and overwhelmed with guilt. Was she in some way to blame for his actions? She vacillated between wanting to condemn her late husband and wanting to defend him.
The result of McMillan’s immersive reporting is a full, rounded sense of Oswald’s character. His sense of self swings wildly. At times he regards himself as a world-historical figure destined to change the course of human events; at other times, he’s a cruelly neglected victim. It was a highly volatile combination. He fancied himself a Marxist, lived in rooming houses under aliases and was a furtive, nasty man. He wrote in what he called his “Historic Diary” while singing the theme song to the Gary Cooper Western High Noon (“Although you’re grievin’, I can’t be leavin’/Until I shoot Frank Miller dead”). He was far too angry, unbalanced, and delusional to consent to be the cat’s paw of some gleaming cadre of conspirators. (Only if you haven’t read Marina and Lee can you take Oswald’s famous jailhouse remark—“I’m just a patsy!”—at face value.) He’s a liar, a manipulator, a wife-beater, an odious human being, and finally a pathetic one. We like to think that great men make history. McMillan reminds us that small men do, too.
It’s a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The idea of assassination, McMillan believes, is highly contagious, like an influenza virus, and Oswald was infected not once but on multiple occasions. McMillan was the first to report that, in January 1962, when Oswald was living in Minsk, there was an assassination attempt on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, probably by one of his own bodyguards, at a nearby hunting lodge. Oswald heard about it from a relative of his new wife, Marina Prusakova. The attempt was hushed up; no one outside Russia knew the details until McMillan’s book was published. “If this had happened in America,” Oswald told Marina and her family, “it would have been in all the newspapers, and everyone would be talking about it.”
Seven months before that afternoon at Dealey Plaza, Oswald had tried to assassinate another political figure: the segregationist and right-wing hero Gen. Edwin Walker. Oswald had missed by one inch, and he was emboldened by how easy it had been—and how no one had ever found out. Neither the FBI nor the Dallas police had an inkling he’d tried.
McMillan’s book undermines all the conspiracy theories so successfully because it doesn’t set out to do so. Marina and Lee doesn’t polemicize; it portrays. It’s alive to the small crevices of character—and to the vast and irreducible role of chance.
Even today, half a century after the assassination, the cascade of contingencies McMillan documents is painful to absorb. Oswald had only learned of the route of the president’s motorcade a few days before, she establishes, when it was published in the Dallas newspapers. The shooting was practically a spur-of-the-moment decision. Once he heard that the president’s limousine would be passing right by the building where he worked, he felt that fate had put him there. The president’s limousine looped right under his window. (McMillan’s reconstruction of the day of the assassination, documentary-like yet novelistic, is as pulse-pounding as the finest thriller.)
Would Oswald have shot any politician who passed under his window? Would he have traveled across town to shoot Kennedy if Kennedy hadn’t presented himself, in a slow-moving open-topped limousine, some 88 yards from the Texas Schoolbook Depository? McMillan can’t say for sure, of course, but she doubts it.
And the cascade continues. What if the FBI hadn’t closed its investigation of Oswald—who changed his mind about defecting to the Soviet Union and returned to the U.S. in 1962—once they’d realized he wasn’t a Moscow-directed threat to national security? What if they hadn’t investigated Oswald at all? (McMillan speculates that the FBI’s repeated questioning of Oswald and his wife and their friends may paradoxically have inflated his delusional sense of his own importance and may have even emboldened him to go after the president.) What if Marina had agreed to his repeated pleas that she and their children move back in with him? What if it hadn’t been so easy to buy guns? What if the Secret Service had argued against JFK’s request to take down the protective bubble top of his limo on that nice sunny day?
“The tragedy of the president’s assassination was in its terrible randomness,” McMillan writes. The task of coming to terms with this reality is the challenge that Marina and Lee bodies forth in meticulous, mesmerizing detail. For most Americans, that challenge remains unmet. The reissue of McMillan’s classic book is the perfect occasion to surrender the salve of conspiracy, and take that good, long look. The truth is out there. Just turn the page and start reading.
Copyright Joseph Finder 2013. Reprinted from Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy by permission of Steerforth Press.
Joseph Finder is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous novels including Vanished and most recently, Buried Secrets. Visit his Web site
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Thursday, August 01, 2013
Crowds Return to Las Vegas, but Gamble Less
By ADAM NAGOURNEY NY TIMES
LAS VEGAS — When the last recession battered the nation, the bottom fell out in Las Vegas. One out of every six jobs vanished. Home prices dropped as much as 50 percent. Construction projects stopped in place, and tourist spending on the Las Vegas Strip, the economic driver of this city, went into an alarming slide.
These days, jobs are back, the housing market is bustling and people are moving back. The number of visitors hit a record last year. For anyone seeking evidence that the nation has survived this recession, look no farther than the sidewalks of Las Vegas Boulevard, where people were shoulder to shoulder the other day even as temperatures surged past 110 degrees.
But the recovery in Las Vegas — much like the one lifting the nation — is shaping up as fragile and tentative, stirring concern among economists and many of the region’s biggest boosters. And it is signaling what appears to be a fundamental reordering of the economy in this closely watched part of the country.
More than 39.7 million visitors came here in 2012, a record. But those visitors spent notably less money per trip than during the last upturn — $1,021 per visit last year, compared with $1,318 spent by each of the 39.2 million visitors in 2007, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority — a sobering asterisk that has led many analysts to conclude that this high-rolling city is entering a less prosperous era.
The total revenue from gambling and entertainment other than gambling was $15.3 billion in 2012, $500 million less than was spent in 2007.
“The Strip is absolutely packed, downtown is packed,” said David G. Schwartz, the director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “People are here. But they aren’t spending as much as they used to.”
A shift in the structure of the economy that began about a decade ago appears to have accelerated. Gambling is no longer king. A new influx of tourists, younger and less devoted to gambling, are likelier to open their wallets for extravagantly priced nightclubs and day clubs, which have joined concerts and musical shows, high-end restaurants, luxury shopping and some of the more exotic types of entertainment this city is renowned for offering.
From the Mandarin Oriental Hotel’s 23rd-floor bar the other evening, with its desert views and $18 specialty cocktails, the new building-size digital billboards that loom over the Strip flashed out advertisements not for the slots, but for Tiesto, the D.J. playing at Hakkasan, a 75,000-square-foot nightclub where reserving a table for the night can cost $10,000 and more.
“Gaming went down more than total visitor spending, by a greater percentage,” said Stephen P. A. Brown, the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “The visitors who have come back are here for clubs and shopping. They’re buying swimsuits to go to the day clubs and evening clothes to go to the nightclubs. That’s the big growth.”
“I think what’s going on here is we’re seeing a shift away from Las Vegas as the only gaming destination in the United States to being one of many gaming destinations,” Mr. Brown said. “But it is holding up as a tourist destination.”
In 1984, the city’s sprawling casinos accounted for 59 percent of all the money collected on the Strip. Last year, gambling made up just 36 percent of the revenue. Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, took in $9.4 billion in gambling revenue last year, up from the year before but still far short of the $10.8 billion during the peak year of 2007, according to statistics from the Center for Gaming Research.
Beyond tourism, the baseline statistics of economic growth give reasons for both hope and concern, analysts said. Home prices jumped by 15.3 percent in the Las Vegas metropolitan region this year, according to the Case-Shiller home price index, but still remain 56 percent below their peak in 2007. Jobs grew last year at a rate of 2.6 percent, compared with 1.7 nationally, but that is short of the 3.7 percent average growth rate posted during the boom years of 2001 through 2007.
And there are potential problems ahead. Many analysts here argue that the super-hot housing market amounts, yet again, to a bubble, and are girding for another collapse in prices. Some of the biggest casino owners, including MGM and Caesars Palace, are saddled with debt.
Las Vegas has a long history of reinvigorating itself, of finding new ways to bring in new consumers and to entice them to part with large sums of money. Still, the latest lift provided by the exploding nightclub business is troubling to local officials who view it as little more than a flash in the pan and worry that the city is reaping the temporary benefits of, as one worried Las Vegas executive put it, a “club bubble.”
“I don’t know where these young people get the money for that — it’s just amazing to me,” said Chris Giunchigliani, a member of the county commission in Las Vegas. “Clubbing is always going to be around. But at some point, it’s like how we overbuilt hotel rooms. They’re going to look at the market and start to scale back.”
Considering the trauma this region has endured, it is hard to minimize the psychic lift of the turnaround. For a long while, a drive around Clark County meant a blur of for-sale signs, tracts of half-built housing projects and shuttered businesses. Las Vegas became the very symbol of what went wrong with the economy, starting with the collapse of housing and construction.
But the cranes and workers are back. Construction was bustling the other day on the site of the old Sahara Hotel for a renovation of the SLS Las Vegas, a high-end hotel, on what is now the relatively barren north end of the Strip. Billboards promise new nightclubs, restaurants, luxury shopping and 1,600 rooms. Work, which had left off for a while, has picked up at the site of the Sands Hotel, which was also demolished, and some old casinos have closed to make way for smaller, less gaudy boutique hotels.
Unemployment in Las Vegas was 9.6 percent in April, down from 14.6 two years ago. In 2006, it went as low as 3.8 percent.
“Over all, if you look at any of the statistics, the economy has turned,” said Jeremy A. Aguero, an economic analyst based in Las Vegas. “We are now in the top six states in terms of population immigration. We are at the top of the pack in terms of new job formation.”
Yet even as Mr. Aguero spoke hopefully about the changes statistics were showing, he was careful, he said, not to suggest there had been the kind of turnaround many people were hoping for. “Are we better?” he continued. “Yes. Are we good? No.”
Kevin Bagger, the director of marketing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said that his agency’s latest studies pinpointed the reason for concern. Before the recession, the average consumer coming to Las Vegas put aside $650 to spend on gambling. Now, he said, it is closer to $480.
“People still are cautious with their spending,” he said. “That said, we are thrilled to see people here.”
Mr. Brown of the business and economic research center said he did not expect to see a return to the levels of prosperity of just a few years ago. “The kind of economy that Las Vegas saw in 2006 and 2007?” he said. “We probably won’t see that again.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
How Gay Was Gore Vidal? Daily Beast
Sure he had sex with men, but just try to call him gay to his face. A year after the famous writer’s death his biographer Tim Teeman reveals new details about his balance between studied public ambivalence and his enthusiastic private behavior.
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When I visited Gore Vidal’s home in the Hollywood Hills, five months after his death, one book, left unshelved, jolted me: The Mayor of Castro Street, Randy Shilts’s acclaimed biography of Harvey Milk, the inspirational gay San Francisco city supervisor assassinated in 1978. While Milk and Shilts were openly gay in rougher times, Vidal’s sexuality occupied a more vexed, undeclared place. Like both men Vidal was arguably a gay radical and hero, although he would have hated the plaudit.
Vidal died a year ago today, aged 86, of complications from pneumonia, the culmination of a long, painful decline which had included alcoholism and dementia. His death precipitated a memorable correction in the New York Times, whose obituary initially stated Vidal and Howard Austen, his partner from 1950 to 2003, when Austen died, did not have sex. “According to Mr Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest, they had sex the night they met, but did not sleep together after they began living together. It was not true that they never had sex.”
The New York Times shouldn’t feel embarrassed: this imperious lion of American letters delighted in sowing confusion about his sex life and sexuality. Vidal said he was bisexual, but his family and friends say he was gay. Vidal adamantly believed “gay” referred to a sexual act, not a sexual identity. When I interviewed him in 2009, in his last major newspaper interview for the Times of London, and suggested he could have been America’s first gay president, he replied, witheringly, “No, I would have married and had nine children. I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”
There was the way of Right and Left and easy pieties, and then there was Vidal’s way. He said almost nothing about HIV and AIDS, even though his nephew Hugh, who died of AIDS, begged him to. “Gore didn’t think of himself as a gay guy,” says Vidal’s close friend and now-biographer Jay Parini. “It makes him self-hating. How could he despise gays as much as he did? In my company he always used the term ‘fags.’ He was uncomfortable with being gay. Then again, he was wildly courageous.” Fred Kaplan, who wrote a landmark biography of Vidal, says, “He was not interested in making a difference for gay people, or being an advocate for gay rights. There was no such thing as “straight” or “gay” for him, just the body and sex.”
For most of their lives together, Vidal referred to Austen as his friend. His true love, he claimed, was Jimmie Trimble, a boy he had known at prep school who died fighting at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Vidal slept with Anaïs Nin and enjoyed close friendships with women including Claire Bloom and Joanne Woodward. He and Austen had sex with hustlers, or “trade” as Vidal called the handsome, “straight-acting” young men he liked. Paying for sex appealed to Vidal because it meant with this, as with so much else in his life, he was in control. He was mostly the “top.” In bed as in life, no one was going to screw Gore Vidal.
Vidal loved sex, and gossiping about it: he estimated he had had sex with a thousand men before he was 25. He told his nephew Burr Steers he had successfully pursued and had sex with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood. Steers says, “He also told me Dennis Hopper had a lovely tuft of hair above his ass. He never told me how he knew that.” Another close friend of Vidal's revealed Vidal had asked, when hearing the friend was staying at the legendarily louche Chateau Marmont, "How is the Chateau?", before adding: "Brad Davis [star of Midnight Express and Querelle] was a beautiful boy and I fucked him on the bathroom floor of the Chateau Marmont." Davis, who was HIV-positive, died of a drug overdose in 1991.
In my book, In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master, to be published in November, Vidal’s friends and family talk about not just the sex Vidal had and with whom, but the roots of his complex attitude towards sexuality and love which lay in a fractured upbringing, and why his refusal to be defined was as personal as it was intellectual. He may have been “post-gay” before his time, but Vidal was also of his time—when being “gay” meant being effeminate, an outsider, without power. Vidal did not identify with any of those positions and wasn’t in thrall to the equality movement. He had grown up around power—his much-loved grandfather was a senator—and he coveted his relationship with John and Jackie Kennedy (whom he was related to) before they fell out, he claimed because Bobby Kennedy believed Vidal’s sexuality could become a White House embarrassment.
In bed as in life, no one was going to screw Gore Vidal.
Vidal was defiant, but also cowed, in his sexuality. His resistance to being known as gay was in some ways old-school: he felt it could be used to diminish him, yet he didn’t play the overt heterosexual like the secretly gay or bisexual celebrities of the day, like Cary Grant and Walter Pidgeon. Indeed Vidal was the radical who wrote The City and the Pillar in 1948, one of the first modern novels about homosexuality, which made him famous even though he also felt it led to him being blacklisted and destroyed his chances of a political career. This may seem contradictory, but at different times Vidal was proud of his early success and bitter that it had marked him out somehow. If he wouldn’t define himself, others were not so subtle. In 1968 Vidal was famously called a “queer” on television by the conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley. An interminable legal case unfolded between them, Vidal convinced and genuinely afraid, I discovered, that Buckley had evidence he had had sex with underage boys.
Yet Vidal, while not declaring anything, didn’t hide: he bought a transsexual heroine to life in Myra Breckinridge (1968) and wrote essays against sexual repression and in favor of sexual equality. Weeks after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, the campaign group the Mattachine Society wrote to Vidal asking for financial support, with a bracing opening gambit: “I don’t think it is any secret to anyone that you are gay — most people seem to take it for granted—and it is on this basis that this appeal is being made to you, to help us lend a helping hand to your less fortunate brothers (or should I say ‘sisters’).”
Vidal caroused with Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood and feuded with Truman Capote. He slept with Jack Kerouac at the Chelsea Hotel. His much-cherished years in Rome in the 1960s were a merry sexual circus. He had sex with hustlers in the afternoons, he said, so he could concentrate on conversation with friends in the evening.
One of Vidal’s oldest friends was Scotty Bowers, who had sex with, and procured sex for, celebrities including Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, and Vidal himself. “Gore had a medium-sized cock, seven inches, he looked circumcised but wasn’t,” Bowers recalls. The few times Bowers had sex with Vidal was “pleasant, not mad love.” Vidal was always “on the ball, not bashful or shy, rather aggressive and pushy,” and was “more or less into a quick trick. He did everything sexually: you sucked his cock, he would suck yours, but he preferred to fuck. He was young and hot and sex was rather quick.”
After Austen’s death Vidal cried to one friend he had loved him. This was no “friendship,” but, as I sketch in the book, a deep, enduring relationship. Vidal’s sister Nina Straight remembers her half-brother becoming very upset was when, "sometime in the ‘50s or ‘60s" Vidal lost a tiny picture he carried in his wallet "of Howard as a little boy with bangs and Mary Jane shoes. He was really upset and saying, 'He's the only good person I've ever known’—‘good’ meaning simple, guileless — and he loved the image of that little boy, the basic, innocent dedication and purity.” Vidal’s family and friends view his lifelong devotion to Jimmie Trimble with incredulity, yet Vidal would gaze at Trimble’s portrait most nights before going to bed.
As Vidal grew frailer, Bowers bought men round “to just sit with him.” In December 2011, seven months before he died, Vidal, mind wandering, asked Bowers, “You suppose we could find Bob and bring him over?” “Bob” was Bob Atkinson, a favorite hustler of Vidal’s that Bowers had first set him up with 63 years previously. “Gore liked Bob because he had been in the Navy and he had a cock as big as a baby’s arm,” Bowers recalls.
All that sex, but he never worried about HIV and AIDS? I said to his nephew, Steers. “I think he was quite confident it was something that wouldn’t happen to him,” Steers replied. Because he thought he was at less risk of infection as he liked fucking men rather than being fucked? I asked. Steers laughed. “No. Because he was Gore Vidal.”
Tim Teeman’s “In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master” will be published by Magnus Books in November.
