Subscribe to our newsletter Privacy Policy Success! Your account was created and you’re signed in. Please visit My Account to verify and manage your account. An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link. Support Hyperallergic We’re funded by readers like you! If you value our reviews and news reporting, we need your support more than ever. Please join us as a member today. Already a member? Sign in here. Support Hyperallergic’s independent arts journalism for as little as $8 per month. Become a Member An emaciated man stands alone. He’s naked and in an all-too-white room. The hair on his head has recently been shaved, though his beard is full. The handcuffs shackling his wrists appear oversized for his small frame. A yellow earplug is jammed in only one ear. This photograph is the public’s first, and so far only, look at a War on Terror detainee in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) black site: a secret detention center set up to hold and interrogate prisoners who have not been charged with a crime. It’s a surprising image, stark and overexposed, both in terms of how bright the photograph is and how naked the man is. Someone employed by the CIA took this photograph, though we don’t know who. But we do know why it was taken, and who it is in the frame. His name is Ammar al-Baluchi, a detainee at Guantanamo Bay currently facing capital charges for the 9/11 attacks. This photograph, likely from 2004, is from the period before he was transported to the United States’s offshore penal colony in 2006. Baluchi was one of at least 119 Muslim men held incommunicado by the CIA for years in its global network of clandestine black sites, where he and at least 38 others were repeatedly subject to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a US-government euphemism for torture. Get the latest art news, reviews and opinions from Hyperallergic. Daily Weekly Opportunities From May 2003 to September 2006, Baluchi was secretly shuffled between five black sites, including one in Romania, where this photo is believed to have been taken. (The photo, recently declassified, was provided to me by Baluchi’s lawyers, who added the black band across his midsection to preserve his dignity. I broke the story surrounding the photograph and Baluchi for the Guardian earlier this year.) Whenever any of these Muslim men were moved, CIA protocol dictated that field officers photograph each one, both naked and clothed, “to document his physical condition at the time of transfer.” The image before us isn’t just any photograph. It’s visual evidence of crimes authorized and committed by the United States government, an entry in the annals of self-reported atrocity photography. In all, the CIA took some 14,000 photographs of the agency’s black sites around the world, but we, the public, have never been able to see any of them until now. There are plenty of examples of this macabre genre. Israel produces it . So does Syria’s Bashar al-Assad . As did the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The Nazis . The Soviets . The French . Governments of different political leanings have contributed to this dark archive, uniting the magical technology of the camera with the awesome power of detention and even death. They take pictures of their own crimes and immediately file them away, in an acrobatic technocratic act of simultaneous remembering and forgetting. The question is why. A photograph, presumably, is meant to be seen. These images, on the other hand, were intended to record but almost never to be viewed. They were certainly never meant to be seen by the public. Of course, anyone who has used their phone camera to take a picture of a receipt knows that a photograph doesn’t have only a public function. It can also operate as a trace of memory and documentation of a transaction. Self-reported atrocity photographs, indeed, fulfill the record-keeping needs of a government bureaucracy. The fact that the CIA was using black sites was revealed to the public in 2005, but it was not until 2015 that the photo archive documenting them was exposed. In response to that revelation, a US government official described the photographs as having been “taken for budgetary reasons to document how money was being spent.” Behold the banality of bureaucratic evil. Photography, since its inception, has subjected Muslim men to coercive violence. In 1850, barely a decade after the invention of photography in 1839, French travel writer Maxime Du Camp sojourned with the novelist Gustave Flaubert through Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, and Syria, taking pictures along the way. On the Nile, Du Camp routinely photographed one of the sailors on his steamer, Hajj Ishmael, usually with the latter draped in just a loin cloth. “He was an extremely handsome Nubian,” Du Camp writes in his travelogue . “I sent him climbing up onto the ruins which I wanted to photograph, and that way, I was able to obtain an exact scale of proportions.” The challenge in early photography, with its long exposure times, was to get your subjects to sit still. Du Camp came up with a solution that he proudly described to his friend, the French poet Théophile Gautier. “I finally arrived at the idea of a rather baroque deception that will make you, dear Théophile, understand something about the gullible naiveté of these poor Arabs,” he wrote. “I told him that the copper pipe of my lens jutting out of the camera was a cannon that would burst into shrapnel if he had the misfortune to move while I was pointing it in his direction, a story which immobilized him completely. Persuaded, Hajj Ishmael did not move for more than a minute.” I suppose there’s a reason why we talk about a “photo shoot.” “To photograph people is to violate them,” Susan Sontag writes in On Photography (1977), “by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is sublimated murder — a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” More than any other subgenre, it is self-reported atrocity photography that most closely approximates the murder Sontag describes. During the first two years of Bashar al-Assad’s violent repression of a popular uprising in Syria, a photographer who worked for the military police was assigned the duty of taking pictures of the corpses of civilians the regime killed. The bodies were mostly in military hospitals, often in a severely mutilated state. Initially, each corpse had the person’s name written on it. Eventually, names were replaced with three sets of numbers, the first indicating who the person was, the second pointing to the branch of the intelligence service responsible for the imprisonment, and the third referring to the person’s medical report, stripping them of the final remnants of their humanity. It became immediately clear to the photographer, who is now known by the pseudonym “Caesar,” that these people were being tortured to death. Government higher-ups required his photos as proof that their orders to punish and kill dissidents were being carried out. For two years, he did his work while smuggling copies of over 52,000 of those photos out of the country, before defecting in 2013. His photos have since been displayed around Europe and North America and have been instrumental in proving Assad’s ruthlessness. In Caesar’s photographs, mostly captured with a Nikon Coolpix P50 , the people photographed are already dead. The camera operates as an apparatus of confirmation, the final stage of the government’s killing machine. The Khmer Rouge also systematically documented the atrocities they committed. More than a fifth of the Cambodian population died during its genocidal rule between 1975 and 1979. The Khmer Rouge’s most notorious political prison and torture center Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, was a converted high school in the middle of Phnom Penh, through which more than 14,000 people were shuttled. Fewer than a dozen survived. Each person was photographed upon entry, many by Nhem En, S-21’s chief photographer, who was only 15 years old when the Khmer Rouge sent him to China to study photography. He returned six months later with a Chinese box camera and began working at S-21. What we see in the photographs of S-21 is the sober reality that those brought and photographed here are marked for death, even though, unlike Caesar’s photos, they are still alive when photographed. By capturing the imminence of their demise, the photographer closes in on killing them, not by knife or bullet but by immortalizing them. Death pervades the frame of the living, which makes a photo of Kong Saman , for example, all the more stunning. A child’s tiny, bony arm and hand extend upward, grabbing the woman’s sleeve. We can’t see the child’s face, but the gesture is enough to remind us of the horrifying fact that young life coexists with mechanized death. In both the Syrian and Khmer Rouge examples, the photographers themselves have been identified. That knowledge, along with the change of venue (from hidden government files to art museum or US Congress) and the political purpose of their display, which serves to prove the brutality of the exhibiting state’s enemies, has radically changed our perception and reception of these images. What was once meant as evidence of efficiency has transformed into proof of brutality. If the photographs previously functioned to label enemies who had been exterminated, they now serve as mementos to identify and remember specific victims. The Tuol Sleng photographs gained particular fame after a 1997 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art featuring about 20 images from the archive. The Caesar photos have been exhibited widely, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the European Union Parliament and beyond. But exhibiting the photos in a museum or public hall desensitizes the viewer by making the images feel as if they are fully understood objects, either as historical artifacts or works of art, quite unlike the Baluchi photograph, which remains opaque. None of this extra knowledge is brought to this now 20-year-old photograph of Ammar al-Baluchi. We don’t know who took the picture, and it hasn’t been exhibited in any galleries or political halls of power. All we know is that this is but one of 14,000 photos, that Baluchi was tortured by the CIA, and that no one in the US government has ever been held accountable for the torture program it put into place following the 9/11 attacks. Self-reported atrocity photography, however, transcends government bureaucracy, in the same way that photography is more than simply a visual record. Like all images of its kind, the Baluchi photo records a massive imbalance of power: He is naked before the photographer’s lens and helpless before the machine of the state. Despite this disparity, Baluchi looks straight through the lens with a defiant, wounded, and all-too-human expression. With that gaze, he manages to resist his own soft murder. Despite his shrunken size and condition, he fills the photograph with life and presence. While his body appears defeated, his face looks ready to free himself of the photograph by force of will alone. And that may be the greatest surprise of all. The irony behind this image is that, while it is Baluchi in the frame, it is the nameless photographer, and the apparatus of power behind him, who remain in hiding. We hope you enjoyed this article! Before you keep reading, please consider supporting Hyperallergic ’s journalism during a time when independent, critical reporting is increasingly scarce. Unlike many in the art world, we are not beholden to large corporations or billionaires. Our journalism is funded by readers like you , ensuring integrity and independence in our coverage. We strive to offer trustworthy perspectives on everything from art history to contemporary art. We spotlight artist-led social movements, uncover overlooked stories, and challenge established norms to make art more inclusive and accessible. With your support, we can continue to provide global coverage without the elitism often found in art journalism. If you can, please join us as a member today . Millions rely on Hyperallergic for free, reliable information. By becoming a member, you help keep our journalism free, independent, and accessible to all. Thank you for reading. Share Copied to clipboard Mail Bluesky Threads LinkedIn FacebookMadison Metals Announces $2.0 Million Non-Brokered Private Placement
When it comes to creating Christmas spirit , Macaulay Culkin is always thirsty for more. To make the season bright for their sons—3-year-old Dakota and his 2-year-old brother whose name hasn't been shared—Culkin and fiancée Brenda Song "go all out at Christmas in our house," the actor admitted in an exclusive interview with E! News. "Because right now they're at the magic age where they believe and we want to nurture that belief." So the Home Alone star cooks up the holiday ham and together they string up the lights and lean hard into playing Santa. Speaking of... "I told them that I'm at Santa's workshop fixing toys, because that's what I do for them at home," Culkin shared of how he explained the two weeks he'd be away screening his holiday classic for fans across the United States. "I'm so good that Santa Claus called me up to the North Pole. They're totally fine with that." Particularly if he can put in a good word with the big guy. Eldest son Dakota "wants a Spider-Man truck, he wants a truck from New York City and he wants more presents," Culkin detailed. "And my youngest heard exactly what he said. He goes, 'I want a garbage truck. I want garbage bins and I want more presents.' It's like they're wishing for more wishes. I'm like, ' You guys are certainly my sons .'" Other than his handyman work, Culkin's chief holiday responsiblity is stuffing the stockings that were hung by the chimney with care. "I guess the best word would be maestro, maybe master, of stockings," the 44-year-old shared. "I nail the stockings every year. I'm just about to get on top of my stocking game as we speak." The key, he explained, is having enough varied interests that Amazon knows where your head is at before you even log on. He knows he's done his best work when Song, 36, is like, "'Where'd you get that?'" he shared of picking out treasures like a Zoltar fortune-telling machine similar to the one featured in Big . "It was like, 'I don't even know. I think it's from Switzerland?' It's because I have such kooky taste, that my recommendations do half the work for me." And this year he has another ace up his sleeve, thanks to the work he did with Uber Eats to advertise their Holiday Hub, which on Dec. 7 will be offering a troupe of on-demand Uber Carolers for those in New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami, and Washington, D.C., in addition to delivering last-minute gifts or even trees. "I think I have it in my contract that they have to send carolers to my house," he joked. "So I'm calling the neighbors. 'Everyone come by, I got some free carolers courtesy of Uber Eats.'" Not that he didn't work for his highly nutritious microwavable macaroni and cheese supper, filming an ad chock full of "wink and nods" to his time spent as Home Alone 's intrepid elementary schooler Kevin . While he was never trying to make his appearance in the 1990 and 1992 films disappear, "It was a bit burdensome," he acknowledged. But after becoming a father he sees his kids in all the children who find joy in watching "the little guy getting one over on the bad guys." Nowadays, he said, "I'm embracing it and at the same time, I guess the best way to put it is taking the piss out of it, too, having fun with it. It's very rare when you have something that encompasses an important day and I'm a part of that. It's more fun to embrace it than to fight it." So, yes, Home Alone is basically required viewing in the Culkin-Song household . "Oh, heck yeah! Are you kidding me?" he responded when asked if his toddlers had seen his work . Dakota actually "think he's Kevin," Culkin shared. "I'm like, 'Do you remember going down the stairs on the sled?' He's like, ‘Mmhmm, yep. Sure do.' I'm like, ‘Do you remember when he had yellow hair?' And he's like, ‘Uh-huh, yep.'" Though the preschooler's favorite bit is the same as his dad's. "You know when the Wet Bandits show up and I pretend there's a party there?" Culkin recounted. "There's a Michael Jordan thing on the train set and there's music playing and I'm doing the whole thing with the strings moving the mannequins. Originally, I was supposed to play the piano and things like that. It was way over complicated and they pretty much just said, 'Hey, we're going to tie some strings to you. Be a goof.' I'm like, 'You're in my wheelhouse now.'" He already had fond memories of filming that scene when he watched with a then-18-month-old Dakota. "He got up and just started doing the googly dance thing," Culkin recalled, referencing the moment when his character swings his fists up and down. "And so I got up and started doing the dance with him. I already enjoyed doing it, but now it means something else." And when his kids realize it's actually Dad that was eating junk and watching rubbish, said Culkin, "It's gonna blow their minds." 'Tis the season to enjoy another viewing of the holiday classic. So we're going to give you to the count of 10 to get your ugly, yella, no-good keister onto your couch for another viewing. But first, we're reading through all of the film's private stuff below. You better not come out and pound us! 1. John Hughes ' creation was born from his own parental anxiety. In an oral history compiled for Chicago Magazine in 2015, his son, James Hughes , revealed the legendary filmmaker jotted the idea down in a notebook on Aug. 8, 1989 just ahead of the family's first trip to Europe. "Two weeks later, after returning home," James wrote, "he revisited the premise: What if one of the kids had been accidentally left behind?" Inspired, the creator of The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink crafted the initial draft in just nine days "capped by an eight-hour, 44-page dash to the finale," he shared. "Before finishing, he'd expressed concerns in the marginalia of his journal that he was working too slowly." 2. Macaulay Culkin is not among those who consider his star-making flick appointment viewing at the holidays. "I can't watch it the same way other people do," he explained to Ellen DeGeneres in 2018 of changing the channel when the blockbuster comes on his TV. Though in certain situations, he has made an exception. "You get like a new girlfriend and she's flipping through the channels and then there's Home Alone and she's like, 'Ehh, you wanna watch it?'" he described on The Tonight Show that same year. "I have indulged that and most of the time I'm just muttering my lines under my breath." It's a bit strange, he allowed, but "Whatever gets her motor running, I guess." Perhaps that was part of his motivation for reprising his gig for a must-watch 2018 Google ad that shows what Kevin would be like as a technologically-equipped adult? 3. Or quipping "Hey @Disney, call me!" when news broke in 2019 that the studio was planning to reimagine the '90s classic. The result: Home Sweet Home Alone . 4. The film may have had a whole different look if Chevy Chase wasn't kind of a jerk. Director Chris Columbus was set to helm the comic's 1989 hit National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation , he shared with Chicago Magazine , but when he and Chase went out for an initial get-to-know-each-other dinner, "To be completely honest, Chevy treated me like dirt." A second outing didn't fare much better and soon Columbus found himself calling producer Hughes and bowing out of the project. "About two weeks later, I got two scripts at my in-laws' house in River Forest," Columbus recalled. "One was Home Alone , with a note from John asking if I wanted to direct. I thought, Wow, this guy is really supporting me when no one else in Hollywood was going to. John was my savior." 5. Though the picture came this close to not getting made at all. Due to a budget dispute between Warner Bros. and the production team, the film was put up for grabs. That's when Joe Roth , chairman at 20th Century Fox at the time, had lunch with Hughes' agent and discovered they were squabbling over $700,000. "He told me Home Alone was costing $14.7 million and Warners would only pay $14 million," remembered Roth. "I said, 'What's the idea?' He told me. I said, 'OK, if you can get it out of there, I'll make it.' Seemed like a no-brainer. Didn't cost much. I didn't have a Thanksgiving movie. I liked the idea. I loved the people involved." Good call: The film went on to gross more than $476 million. 6. Culkin pretty much had the lead role in the bag. Having directed him the previous year in Uncle Buck with John Candy , Hughes was certain the then-9-year-old was their guy, "but I owed it to myself as director to see other child actors," explained Columbus. "John said, 'OK, take your time, do what you need to do.'" More than 200 auditions later, Columbus saw Culkin "and you immediately knew this was the kid. I knew subconsciously that John knew that was going to happen, but it was really sweet of him to give me that sort of freedom." 7. Inept burglars Marv ( Daniel Stern ) and Harry ( Joe Pesci ) bonded long before becoming the Wet Bandits. "Everyone assumed we were thrown together for the first time on Home Alone , but we'd made each other giggle on the set in another movie years before that we were both cut out of: I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can ," Stern shared with Chicago . "We played people in a mental institution. Joe walked around all the time with this rolled-up tube of architectural drawings. That was his character. And during one of the takes, there's a Ping-Pong table in the middle of the room, and Joe takes his tube of paper and puts it up to his nose and snorts the line of Ping-Pong balls. I fell on the floor laughing. I became his friend right then." 8. And Stern reallllly wanted this part. "The script struck a chord in me. I hadn't gotten a chance to express that kind of physical comedy since I was a kid," he explained. "I thought, I can hit a f--king home run with this. I went to an audition for Chris. I wanted it so bad. When I left, I thought, I could do that better. It was the only time in my life I called and said, 'Can I come back?' Chris told me later he was already gonna cast me, but he saw me audition again." 9. Off-camera Pesci and Stern were not the murderous big horse's asses they were made out to be. "I'm a big softy when it comes to kids and I loved hanging out with Mac," Stern admitted in a 2015 Christmas Eve Reddit session . When shooting the film's 1992 follow-up, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York , his son Henry (now a state senator in California!) and daughters Sophie and Ella "visited me much more than on the first one... and we all had a great time taking Mac to Central Park, playing tag and catch. In any way, I think my character was much more of a softy than Joe's." Makes sense considering reports that Pesci purposely avoided Culkin on set so he'd be more terrified of his character. 10. But the stunts were all too real, including the still-to-this-day-creepy tarantula to the face. Despite the ick factor, Stern said it was one of his favorites to shoot. "Not only was it really fun and funny to do but it was a personal challenge to overcome my fear of having something that ICKY and deadly crawling on my face," he wrote. "It was even freakier because I had to do that scream, which meant my mouth was wide open too—and I was afraid the little bastard might take a detour down my throat!" No wonder he said his bellow "came from a place in my soul that I've never before touched and never hope to again!" 11. The stunt guys got the brunt of it, though. "Literally, three or four times while shooting Home Alone and Home Alone 2 , I thought those guys were dead," Columbus admitted to Chicago . "There was no CGI. It was kind of terrifying to watch. Only after they got up and came to the monitor to watch playback did we actually laugh." Agreed Stern, "The stuntmen were the unsung heroes of the show. Whenever people tell me moments they like, I say, 'Oh, that was Leon [ Delaney ].'" 12. The sound team truly flexed the muscles with each pratfall, relying on a frozen roast beef to double as the sound of a body slamming onto the ground and a soldering iron on chicken skin to imitate flesh burning. 13. Somehow, though, it was Culkin who ended up with a scar. "In the first Home Alone , they hung me up on a coat hook, and Pesci says, 'I'm gonna bite all your fingers off, one at a time,'" he recalled in a 2004 interview with website Rule Forty Two. "And during one of the rehearsals, he bit me, and it broke the skin." 14. Chris Farley almost counted the flick as his film debut. Actor Ken Hudson Campbell , who nabbed the role of the church Santa, recalled seeing the comic legend at his audition. "Apparently, he was out all night and had just been dropped off after a night of shenanigans, shall we say," Campbell recounted of the early call. "Chris went first. It didn't go very well. He walked in and walked right out. I felt I went in and hit what I wanted to hit. A few weeks later, I got the call." 15. Other near-misses include Robert De Niro and Jon Lovitz , who both turned down the role of Harry, and Kelsey Grammer , who passed on Uncle Frank. Look what you did, you little jerks! 16. The owners of the famed Winnetka, Ill. house—some 16 miles outside of Chicago—actually lived there during filming. Though production rented Cynthia and John Abendshien an apartment for what they said would be a four- or five-week shoot, the location manager "explained that, under the contract, if they needed to knock down a wall when we weren't home, they could do it," Cynthia told Chicago . "So she told us it was best if we remained on the premises." For five-and-a-half months, the family of three holed up in their four-room master bedroom suite. "We put a hot plate up there to cook," said John. "We didn't have to cook that much, because we had full access to the food truck that the crew used, which our daughter, who was 6 at the time, loved." Fortunately most of the house-destroying interiors were shot at a local high school that was closed down for the shoot. 17. Residents of the North Shore neighborhood have grown used to the fans that drive down their suburban street to gawp at the $1.585 million Georgian stunner. "Most people who live on the street love it, and think it's a lot of fun," longtime local Ann Smith told the Chicago Tribune in 2019. "It was a big deal having the movie filmed here, and it's still a big deal. Any time I'm walking by that house, I see someone out in front, taking pictures." 18. Call it the ones where Friends ' producers thought they could pull one over on viewers. In 2016, an eagle-eyed fan at 22 Vision uncovered a connection between the holiday flick and the beloved NBC comedy— splicing together footage that proved Monica and Chandler's new house in the New York City suburbs was actually the McCallister's giant Illinois pad. 19. Chicago weather pulled through in the stretch. To create the snowy look of the film, the crew relied on snow machines and semi trucks filled with shaved ice. But when they captured the moment Kate McCallister ( Catherine O'Hara ) finally arrived home, "It was gorgeous, real snow," recalled location manager Jacolyn Bucksbaum . "The biggest snowstorm in years, and it was Valentine's Day. Mother Nature really helped us out with that one." 20. The family's mad dash to their Paris flight was actually captured on location at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. "We had to move fast," Columbus shared. "We only had two or three takes of the entire family running down the terminal. That was nail-biting." 21. Of course ad-libbing was encouraged on set. There's a reason John Candy was a fixture in '80s and '90s fare, after all. On set for just a day to shoot his bit part as Polka King Gus Polinski ("He did it as a favor to John," noted Columbus), "I swear we worked for 21 hours straight, improvising," said O'Hara. "Candy would start a bit. John Hughes would start a bit, and Candy would pick up on it, and we would just go with it. It was all in the moment. We'd start a ridiculous conversation and go as far as we could. Chris told me later how we couldn't use most of it. He laughed and said, 'You're supposed to be looking for your kid, and you're just having a good time with these guys in a truck.'" 22. Candy wasn't the only quick thinker. Culkin reportedly came up with his threat to Marv and Harry: "Do you guys give up or are you thirsty for more?" 23. Little known fact about Buzz's girlfriend (woof): She was actually the art director's son made up to look like an unattractive young girl, actor Devin Ratray revealed to Yahoo! : "The producers decided that it would be a little bit unkind to put a girl in that role of just being funny-looking." 24. The snippets of the movie within the movie, mock-noir Angels with Filthy Souls , was written entirely by Hughes down to the "Keep the change, ya filthy animal," line. Local actor Ralph Foody was tapped to play the role of a 1940s screen star. "To this day, people are still fooled by Ralph's performance," said Columbus. "They think that's an old movie." And the original script included a fun callback to Angels , with Marv and Harry watching the flick in prison and realizing how completely they'd been duped. 25. Three-plus decades on, the movie still resonates with audiences worldwide. "Anywhere I go, I'm the Home Alone dude," Stern told Chicago . "In 2003, I went to visit troops in Iraq. I was at a base camp, and they wanted to take me into Baghdad, to a jewelry store that they'd secured. They said I could buy earrings for my wife. I was like, 'What? All right.' So we go in these cars into Baghdad, and as I'm walking into the jewelry store, we get surrounded by kids going, 'Marv! Marv!' Like 16 Iraqi kids in the middle of a war zone in Baghdad still recognized me from Home Alone . That movie is everywhere ."Rate Your Favourite Switch Games Of The Year 2024
In a world of great need there are more ways to donate money than ever — how should you give?Falcons feeling the pressure at .500 as Cousins' interceptions put spotlight on downturn for offense
Do you know what jet streams are? No no, these aren’t the streams of jet that you can see when a flight cruises at speed. Don’t confuse it with an ocean current of drifting seawater either. A jet stream is a fast-moving, narrow current of air meandering in the atmosphere. It isn’t unique to Earth, and occurs in the atmosphere of several planets, including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. On Earth, jet streams encircle the globe and are westerly winds, meaning they flow from west to east. They are located near the tropopause, which is the atmospheric boundary demarcating the troposphere and stratosphere – the two lowest layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. While the discovery of jet streams is a story unto itself, the human who first experienced it first-hand had an eventful life himself too. This was American aviation pioneer Wiley Post, a record-breaking flyer who inspired a generation of aviators. Born in 1898, a teenaged Post found his life’s calling during a county fair in Oklahoma in 1913. His first view of an aircraft was enough for him to realise what he wanted to do with the rest of his life – fly! One-eyed Wiley In the years that followed, he mastered the classes at an aviation school, learnt radio technology while training to be a pilot during World War I (the war ended before he completed his training), before going to work on an oil rig. The unsteady work made him turn to other means, which led him to being jailed for armed robbery before being paroled. Wiley Post posing directly in front of the nose of his Winnie Mae . | Photo Credit: Frank Griggs (Smithsonian Institution) / flickr Returning to the oil fields, Post lost his left eye in an oil field accident in 1926, but even the partial loss of vision wouldn’t prevent him from doing what he wanted to. Instead, he used part of the settlement money to buy his first aeroplane and he was soon about to make his claims to fame. Around the World in Eight Days After winning an air race from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1930, he partnered with Australian navigator Harold Gatty to fly around the world in the Lockheed Vega 5-C aircraft named Winnie Mae . They covered a distance of over 24,000 km in a record time of 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes from June 23 to July 1, 1931. Later the same year, their account of the trip was published as Around the World in Eight Days . The memorial at Wiley Post’s grave calls him the “Father of modern aviation” | Photo Credit: Wesley Fryer / flickr Two years later, Post was at it again, this time on his own. Aboard his Winnie Mae , Post shattered his own record as he completed the first solo flight around the world on July 22, 1933 after flying for 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. He demonstrated significant aviation technologies during this flight, including two new aeronautical devices – radio direction finder and an autopilot Having completed a couple around the world flights, Post next set his sights on altitude. As his Winnie Mae wasn’t pressurised, he designed and created a pressurised suit flight – a precursor to what astronauts wear today. Not officially recognised By December 1934, he was ready to make his attempt to set a new altitude world record. On December 7, Post bettered the then existing record, having reached an altitude of over 50,000 feet. His record, however, wasn’t officially recognised as the two mechanical barographs aboard his aircraft didn’t agree within the prescribed margin required for validation of an altitude claim. This flight, however, enabled Post to become the first human to experience jet stream personally. For someone who lived and breathed flying and who experienced immense joy and fame by flying, Post also met his end in a flying accident. Flying aboard a hybrid floatplane along with his friend and humorist Will Rogers in 1935, Post lost control of the craft as it was aerodynamically unstable, killing both on board. His flying career didn’t last long, but he had established himself as one of the most colourful characters in the early years of aviation by then. The discovery of jet streams has four different stories to it. Tying them together is this mysterious, invisible force of nature. 1883 Krakatoa explosion While the first indications of such a phenomenon were proposed from the start of the 19th Century, it was likely first noticed during the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, one of the most catastrophic volcanic explosions in history. The deadly eruption spewed hundreds of tons of volcanic ash and toxic fumes into the air, to heights as high as 80 km. This meant that they were caught by jet streams. As a result, they were spread far and wide, spreading throughout our planet. The Earth’s overall temperature dipped by 0.4°C in the year following the eruption as we experienced a volcanic winter. Oishi’s 1920s discovery Wasaburo Oishi was a Japanese meteorologist and founder of Japan’s first upper-air observatory. Focussing on the happenings of the upper atmosphere, Oishi suspected that strong, extremely fast-moving air currents existed. From a site near Mount Fuji, Oishi launched a number of weather balloons to prove his theory right as the high-altitude currents pushed his balloons east. He published his findings, describing them as a strong wind in the upper air. Oishi’s discovery, however, largely remained local to Japan and was mostly unheard of in the rest of the world. In case you are wondering why it panned out this way, despite Oishi publishing his findings, there’s a rather peculiar story to go along with it. An enthusiastic Esperanto speaker, Oishi published much of his findings in this language – an artificial language devised in 1887 aiming to be a universal second language and an international medium of communication. As not many shared his passion for this language, his works remained mostly unknown until decades later. The fact that it remained unknown to the larger world did, however, help Japan during World War II. They utilised jet streams to launch attacks on the U.S., with the balloon bombing of Oregon in 1945 being a prime example. The six people who died as a result of this bombing are the only known fatality in the continental U.S. during WWII as a direct result of enemy action. Post’s 1934 experience Did you know that many credit Wiley Post as the discoverer of jet streams? We know that isn’t the case, especially after what you’ve just read about Oishi in particular. What we can say for certain, however, is that Post was the first to experience it first-hand. Wiley Post’s first pressure helmet. | Photo Credit: Craigboy / Wikimedia Commons Following his successful around the world flights, Post got to work on high-altitude flights, aiming to be where no human had been before. Understanding the need for a pressurised suit, he designed what he called the “Man From Mars” pressurised flight suit. Along with technical assistance from B.F. Goodrich Company, Post created a suit that seemed like a cross between early scuba diving equipment and a knight’s armour. It included a tall cylindrical helmet along with leather gloves and boots. Even though Post didn’t officially break the altitude record, this flight enabled him to experience the presence of a fast-moving stream of air. This, we now know, was a jet stream. Seilkopf’s stream You’d think it wasn’t possible to “discover” the jet stream again, but it was exactly that which happened in 1939. This time, it was German meteorologist Heinrich Seilkopf who rediscovered the phenomenon. In addition to describing the phenomenon, Seilkopf coined the term Strahlströmung to refer to it. Strahlströmung literally means jet currents, and the name jet stream was soon born. The years following World War II have helped us better understand jet streams and the important role that they play in the functioning of the Earth’s atmospheric circulation. Published - December 07, 2024 11:53 pm IST Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit Rising up to the challenge In School
Thomas uses big drives and putts to hold lead in BahamasAston Villa march on in Champions League after beating RB LeipzigMINOT — Measure 4, a constitutional amendment to abolish taxes on property values, went down in flames last month, with more than 63% of North Dakotans saying "no." The measure campaign, called End Unfair Property Tax, was organized by former state lawmaker Rick Becker. It failed to win even a single county. The closest the measure got to a majority anywhere in the state was just over 47% of the vote in Ward County. ADVERTISEMENT It lost, I think, not because North Dakotans, who are perpetually aggrieved with their property taxes, are necessarily against change, but because of two factors. The first, and somewhat less important reason, is that the spokesman for the campaign was Becker, a deeply polarizing and unpopular political figure. The second and far more critical issue is that the proposal gave voters no inkling as to what might replace the current property tax regime. Would it be another form of property tax? Would other taxes or fees go up? Could we be assured of efficiently funding local projects and keeping some semblance of local control? In essence, voters needed to know they wouldn't be jumping out of the frying pan of the status quo and into the fires of the unknown. Becker and the Measure 4 campaign couldn't deliver any convincing assurances. So Measure 4 flopped, but we're about to have a significant debate about property tax reform during the coming legislative session. And you know what? Even though Measure 4 was a very bad idea, some of the ideas its supporters are kicking around are worth taking seriously. A reader forwarded to me the minutes from the last of the Measure 4 committee's meetings, which was held Nov. 19 in Minot. In addition to closing out the books on their campaign, the committee discussed what sort of reforms they would and would not support going forward. The things they say they'll support? And what won't the committee members support? ADVERTISEMENT I'm impressed, given what an astoundingly bad idea Measure 4 was. I should note that some of the property tax proposals that have been made public are already coalescing around some of these ideas. Rep. Scott Louser, R-Minot, for instance, is proposing legislation that would have the state take over K-12 funding (Louser estimates that this would be a 25% to 50% reduction in property tax bills, depending on where you live), coupled with a cap on taxes that could be rolled over from budget cycle to budget cycle if a governing entity doesn't use its full tax. There will be more proposals — there are already dozens of drafts ready to be filed ahead of the regular session — but what the Measure 4 committee is backing serves as a good framework for what reform should look like. "The things they support are very much in line with things I support," one person who worked on the campaign against Measure 4 told me. Caps, at this point, are a given. State lawmakers have appropriated billions to buy down property taxes, but I'm not sure many North Dakotans can say they've felt the relief. Expect lobbyists for local governing interests to fight hard against them, but every lawmaker I've spoken to since Election Day has indicated to me that caps are all but assured. But the calls for ending foreclosures and reforming tax exemptions? Those are superb ideas and should be central to any property tax package from this legislative session. Property tax foreclosures don't happen very often, but they do happen, and what happens more frequently is that someone who can't afford the property taxes voluntarily sells before reaching the point of foreclosure. Moving to liens provides adequate accountability for failure to pay without the draconian step of foreclosure. Taking a hard look at property tax exemptions, too, is a good idea. We can start with a simple question: Are they actually working? Have they had measurable success? If not, ax them, but even if they can be said to be working, are they worth the cost? Every new property tax exemption narrows the property tax base and puts upward pressure on the bills of every taxpayer who didn't receive an exemption. ADVERTISEMENT Good tax policy consists of taxes that are broad, simple and low. Property taxes in North Dakota have increasingly become narrow, complicated and high. Exemptions are a part of that problem. Again, Measure 4 was a bad idea, and I'm glad it failed, but the committee backing it has some good ideas on how we move forward. They deserve credit for that.
ASP Isotopes Inc. Shareholder Notice: Robbins LLP Reminds Investors of the ASPI Securities Class ActionWhat Are Timothee Chalamet’s Education Qualifications? Dune Star Stuns Internet With Elite Ball Knowledge At College GameDay
Ghana counts ballots after tight presidential race