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Paul Marquis
Web Master
One Hell Of A Bang Interview with Paul Tibbets
Today is Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of a bomb so powerful that it would come to threaten the existence of the human race Only two such devices have ever been used, but now, a decade after the end of the cold war, the world faces new dangers of nuclear attack - from India, Pakistan, Iraq, al-Qaida, and even the US. Launching a special investigation into nuclear weapons, Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay on its mission to Japan, tells Studs Terkel why he has no regrets - and why he wouldn't hesitate to use it again
Studs Terkel: We're seated here, two old gaffers. Me and Paul Tibbets, 89 years old, brigadier-general retired, in his home town of Columbus, Ohio, where has lived for many years.
Paul Tibbets: Hey, you've got to correct that. I'm only 87. You said 89.
ST: I know. See, I'm 90. So I got you beat by three years. Now we've had a nice lunch, you and I and your companion. I noticed as we sat in that restaurant, people passed by. They didn't know who you were. But once upon a time, you flew a plane called the Enola Gay over the city of Hiroshima, in Japan, on a Sunday morning - August 6 1945 - and a bomb fell. It was the atomic bomb, the first ever. And that particular moment changed the whole world around. You were the pilot of that plane.
PT: Yes, I was the pilot.
ST: And the Enola Gay was named after...
PT: My mother. She was Enola Gay Haggard before she married my dad, and my dad never supported me with the flying - he hated airplanes and motorcycles. When I told them I was going to leave college and go fly planes in the army air corps, my dad said, "Well, I've sent you through school, bought you automobiles, given you money to run around with the girls, but from here on, you're on your own. If you want to go kill yourself, go ahead, I don't give a damn." Then Mom just quietly said, "Paul, if you want to go fly airplanes, you're going to be all right." And that was that.
ST: Where was that?
PT: Well, that was Miami, Florida. My dad had been in the real estate business down there for years, and at that time he was retired. And I was going to school at Gainesville, Florida, but I had to leave after two years and go to Cincinnati because Florida had no medical school.
ST: You were thinking of being a doctor?
PT: I didn't think that, my father thought it. He said, "You're going to be a doctor," and I just nodded my head and that was it. And I started out that way; but about a year before, I was able to get into an airplane, fly it - I soloed - and I knew then that I had to go fly airplanes.
ST: Now by 1944 you were a pilot - a test pilot on the programme to develop the B-29 bomber. When did you get word that you had a special assignment?
PT: One day [in September 1944] I'm running a test on a B-29, I land, a man meets me. He says he just got a call from General Uzal Ent [commander of the second air force] at Colorado Springs, he wants me in his office the next morning at nine o'clock. He said, "Bring your clothing - your B4 bag - because you're not coming back." Well, I didn't know what it was and didn't pay any attention to it - it was just another assignment.
I got to Colorado Springs the next morning perfectly on time. A man named Lansdale met me, walked me to General Ent's office and closed the door behind me. With him was a man wearing a blue suit, a US Navy captain - that was William Parsons, who flew with me to Hiroshima - and Dr Norman Ramsey, Columbia University professor in nuclear physics. And Norman said: "OK, we've got what we call the Manhattan Project. What we're doing is trying to develop an atomic bomb. We've gotten to the point now where we can't go much further till we have airplanes to work with."
He gave me an explanation which probably lasted 45, 50 minutes, and they left. General Ent looked at me and said, "The other day, General Arnold [commander general of the army air corps] offered me three names." Both of the others were full colonels; I was lieutenant-colonel. He said that when General Arnold asked which of them could do this atomic weapons deal, he replied without hesitation, "Paul Tibbets is the man to do it." I said, "Well, thank you, sir." Then he laid out what was going on and it was up to me now to put together an organisation and train them to drop atomic weapons on both Europe and the Pacific - Tokyo.
ST: Interesting that they would have dropped it on Europe as well. We didn't know that.
PT: My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem - you couldn't drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other. And so he said, "I don't know what to tell you, but I know you happen to have B-29s to start with. I've got a squadron in training in Nebraska - they have the best record so far of anybody we've got. I want you to go visit them, look at them, talk to them, do whatever you want. If they don't suit you, we'll get you some more." He said: "There's nobody could tell you what you have to do b! ecause nobody knows. If we can do anything to help you, ask me." I said thank you very much. He said, "Paul, be careful how you treat this responsibility, because if you're successful you'll probably be called a hero. And if you're unsuccessful, you might wind up in prison."
ST: Did you know the power of an atomic bomb? Were you told about that?
PT: No, I didn't know anything at that time. But I knew how to put an organisation together. He said, "Go take a look at the bases, and call me back and tell me which one you want." I wanted to get back to Grand Island Nebraska, that's where my wife and two kids were, where my laundry was done and all that stuff. But I thought, "Well, I'll go to Wendover [army airfield, in Utah] first and see what they've got." As I came in over the hills I saw it was a beautiful spot. It had been a final staging place for units that were going through combat crew training, and the guys ahead of me were the last P-47 fighter outfit. This lieutenant-colonel in charge said, "We've just been advised to stop here and I don't know what you want to do... but if it has anything to do with this base it's the most perfect base I've ever been on. You've got full machine shops, everybody's qualified, they know what they want to do. It's a good place."
ST: And now you chose your own crew.
PT: Well, I had mentally done it before that. I knew right away I was going to get Tom Ferebee [the Enola Gay's bombardier] and Theodore "Dutch" van Kirk [navigator] and Wyatt Duzenbury [flight engineer].
ST: Guys you had flown with in Europe?
PT: Yeah.
ST: And now you're training. And you're also talking to physicists like Robert Oppenheimer [senior scientist on the Manhattan project].
PT: I think I went to Los Alamos [the Manhattan project HQ] three times, an! d e ach time I got to see Dr Oppenheimer working in his own environment. Later, thinking about it, here's a young man, a brilliant person. And he's a chain smoker and he drinks cocktails. And he hates fat men. And General Leslie Groves [the general in charge of the Manhattan project], he's a fat man, and he hates people who smoke and drink. The two of them are the first, original odd couple.
ST: They had a feud, Groves and Oppenheimer?
PT: Yeah, but neither one of them showed it. Each one of them had a job to do.
ST: Did Oppenheimer tell you about the destructive nature of the bomb?
PT: No.
ST: How did you know about that?
PT: From Dr Ramsey. He said the only thing we can tell you about it is, it's going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. I'd never seen 1lb of TNT blow up. I'd never heard of anybody who'd seen 100lbs of TNT blow up. All I felt was that this was gonna be one hell of a big bang.
ST: Twenty thousand tons - that's equivalent to how many planes full of bombs?
PT: Well, I think the two bombs that we used [at Hiroshima and Nagasaki] had more power than all the bombs the air force had used during the war on Europe.
ST: So Ramsey told you about the possibilities.
PT: Even though it was still theory, whatever those guys told me, that's what happened. So I was ready to say I wanted to go to war, but I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it. I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb. But what should we do this time? He said, "You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there."! He sai d I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave. I said, "Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics. What is tangency in this case?" He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. "Turn 159 degrees as fast as you can and you'll be able to put yourself the greatest distance from where the bomb exploded."
ST: How many seconds did you have to make that turn?
PT: I had dropped enough practice bombs to realize that the charges would blow around 1,500ft in the air, so I would have 40 to 42 seconds to turn 159 degrees. I went back to Wendover as quick as I could and took the airplane up. I got myself to 25,000ft, and I practiced turning, steeper, steeper, steeper and I got it where I could pull it round in 40 seconds. The tail was shaking dramatically and I was afraid of it breaking off, but I didn't quit. That was my goal. And I practiced and practiced until, without even thinking about it, I coul! d do it in between 40 and 42, all the time. So, when that day came...
ST: You got the go-ahead on August 5.
PT: Yeah. We were in Tinian [the US island base in the Pacific] at the time we got the OK. They had sent this Norwegian to the weather station out on Guam [the US's westernmost territory] and I had a copy of his report. We said that, based on his forecast, the sixth day of August would be the best day that we could get over Honshu [the island on which Hiroshima stands]. So we did everything that had to be done to get the crews ready to go: airplane loaded, crews briefed, all of the things checked that you have to check before you can fly over enemy territory.
General Groves had a brigadier-general who was connected back to Washington DC by a special teletype machine. He stayed close to that thing all the time, notifying people back there, all by code, that we were preparing these airpl! anes to go any time after midnight on the sixth. And that's the way it worked out. We were ready to go at about four o'clock in the afternoon on the fifth and we got word from the president that we were free to go: "Use 'em as you wish." They give you a time you're supposed to drop your bomb on target and that was 9.15 in the morning , but that was Tinian time, one hour later than Japanese time. I told Dutch, "You figure it out what time we have to start after midnight to be over the target at 9am."
ST: That'd be Sunday morning.
PT: Well, we got going down the runway at right about 2:15am and we took off, we met our rendezvous guys, we made our flight up to what we call the initial point, that would be a geographic position that you could not mistake. Well, of course we had the best one in the world with the rivers and bridges and that big shrine. There was no mistaking what it was.
ST: So you had to have the right navigator to get it on the button.
PT: The airplane has a bomb sight connected to the autopilot and the bombardier puts figures in there for where he wants to be when he drops the weapon, and that's transmitted to the airplane. We always took into account what would happen if we had a failure and the bomb bay doors didn't open: we had a manual release put in each airplane so it was right down by the bombardier and he could pull on that. And the guys in the airplanes that followed us to drop the instruments needed to know when it was going to go. We were told not to use the radio, but, hell, I had to. I told them I would say, "One minute out," "Thirty seconds out," "Twenty seconds" and "Ten" and then I'd count, "Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four seconds", which would give them a time to drop their cargo. They knew what was going on because they knew where we were. And that's exactly the way it! worked , it was absolutely perfect.
After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, "You know what we're doing today?" They said, "Well, yeah, we're going on a bombing mission." I said, "Yeah, we're going on a bombing mission, but it's a little bit special." My tail gunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, "Colonel, we wouldn't be playing with atoms today, would we?" I said, "Bob, you've got it just exactly right." So I went back up in the front end and I told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, in turn. I said, "OK, this is an atom bomb we're dropping." They listened intently but I didn't see any change in their faces or anything else. Those guys were no idiots. We'd been fiddling round with the most peculiar-shaped things we'd ever seen.
So we're coming down. We get to that point where I say "one second" and by the time I'd got that! second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000lbs had come out of the front. I'm in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I've ever seen in my life. It was just great.
I tell people I tasted it. "Well," they say, "what do you mean?" When I was a child, if you had a cavity in your tooth the dentist put some mixture of some cotton or whatever it was and lead into your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I learned that if I had a spoon of ice-cream and touched one of those teeth I got this electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it. And I knew right away what it was.
OK, we're all going. We had been briefed to stay off the radios: "Don't say a damn word, w! hat we do is we make this turn, we're going to get out of here as fast as we can." I want to get out over the sea of Japan because I know they can't find me over there. With that done we're home free. Then Tom Ferebee has to fill out his bombardier's report and Dutch, the navigator, has to fill out a log. Tom is working on his log and says, "Dutch, what time were we over the target?" And Dutch says, "Nine-fifteen plus 15 seconds." Ferebee says: "What lousy navigating. Fifteen seconds off!"
ST: Did you hear an explosion?
PT: Oh yeah. The shockwave was coming up at us after we turned. And the tail gunner said, "Here it comes." About the time he said that, we got this kick in the ass. I had accelerometers installed in all airplanes to record the magnitude of the bomb. It hit us with two and a half G. Next day, when we got figures from the scientists on what they had learned from all the things, they said, "When that bomb exploded, your airplane was 10 and half miles away from it."
ST: Did you see that mushroom cloud?
PT: You see all kinds of mushroom clouds, but they were made with different types of bombs. The Hiroshima bomb did not make a mushroom. It was what I call a stringer. It just came up. It was black as hell, and it had light and colours and white in it and grey colour in it and the top was like a folded-up Christmas tree.
ST: Do you have any idea what happened down below?
PT: Pandemonium! I think it's best stated by one of the historians, who said: "In one micro-second, the city of Hiroshima didn't exist."
ST: You came back, and you visited President Truman.
PT: We're talking 1948 now. I'm back in the Pentagon and I get notice from the chief of staff, Carl Spaatz, the first chief of staff of the air force. When we got to General Spaatz's office, Genera l Doolittle was there, and a colonel named Dave Shillen. Spaatz said, "Gentlemen, I just got word from the president he wants us to go over to his office immediately." On the way over, Doolittle and Spaatz were doing some talking; I wasn't saying very much. When we got out of the car we were escorted right quick to the Oval Office. There was a black man there who always took care of Truman's needs and he said, "General Spaatz, will you please be facing the desk?" And now, facing the desk, Spaatz is on the right, Doolittle and Shillen. Of course, militarily speaking, that's the correct order: because Spaatz is senior, Doolittle has to sit to his left.
Then I was taken by this man and put in the chair that was right beside the president's desk, beside his left hand. Anyway, we got a cup of coffee and we got most of it consumed when Truman walked in and everybody stood on their feet. He said, "Sit down, please," and he had a big smile on his face and he said, "General Spaatz, I want to congratulate you on being first chief of the air force," because it was no longer the air corps. Spaatz said, "Thank you, sir, it's a great honour and I appreciate it." And he said to Doolittle: "That was a magnificent thing you pulled flying off of that carrier," and Doolittle said, "All in a day's work, Mr President." And he looked at Dave Shillen and said, "Colonel Shillen, I want to congratulate you on having the foresight to recognise the potential in aerial refuelling. We're gonna need it bad some day." And he said thank you very much.
Then he looked at me for 10 seconds and he didn't say anything. And when he finally did, he said, "What do you think?" I said, "Mr President, I think I did what I was told." He slapped his hand on the table and said: "You're damn right you did, and I'm the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time abo! ut it, refer them to me."
ST: Anybody ever give you a hard time?
PT: Nobody gave me a hard time.
ST: Do you ever have any second thoughts about the bomb?
PT: Second thoughts? No. Studs, look. Number one, I got into the air corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. That's what I believe in and that's what I work for. Number two, I'd had so much experience with airplanes... I'd had jobs where there was no particular direction about how you do it and then of course I put this thing together with my own thoughts on how it should be because when I got the directive I was to be self-supporting at all times.
On the way to the target I was thinking: I can't think of any mistakes I've made. Maybe I did make a mistake: maybe I was too damned assured. At 29 years of age I was so shot in the ass with confidence I didn't think there was anything I couldn't do. O! f course, that applied to airplanes and people. So, no, I had no problem with it. I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we'd be doing that I thought, yes, we're going to kill a lot of people, but by God we're going to save a lot of lives. We won't have to invade [Japan].
ST: Why did they drop the second one, the Bockscar [bomb] on Nagasaki?
PT: Unknown to anybody else - I knew it, but nobody else knew - there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, "You got another one of those damn things?" I said, "Yessir." He said, "Where is it?" I said, "Over in Utah." He said, "Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it. " I said, "Yessir." I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over.
ST: What did General LeMay have in mind with the third one?
PT: Nobody knows.
ST: One big question. Since September 11, what are your thoughts? People talk about nukes, the hydrogen bomb.
PT: Let's put it this way. I don't know any more about these terrorists than you do, I know nothing. When they bombed the Trade Centre I couldn't believe what was going on. We've fought many enemies at different times. But we knew who they were and where they were. These people, we don't know who they are or where they are. That's the point that bothers me. Because they're gonna strike again, I'll put money on it. And it's going to be damned dramatic. But they're gonna do it in their own sw! eet tim e. We've got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn't waste five seconds on them.
ST: What about the bomb? Einstein said the world has changed since the atom was split.
PT: That's right. It has changed.
ST: And Oppenheimer knew that.
PT: Oppenheimer is dead. He did something for the world and people don't understand. And it is a free world.
ST: One last thing, when you hear people say, "Let's nuke 'em," "Let's nuke these people," what do you think?
PT: Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I had the choice. I'd wipe 'em out. You're gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: "You've killed so many civilians." That's their tough luck for being there.
ST: By the way, I forgot to say Enola Gay was originally called number 82. How did your mother feel about having her name on it?
PT: Well, I can only tell you what my dad said. My mother never changed her expression very much about anything, whether it was serious or light, but when she'd get tickled, her stomach would jiggle. My dad said to me that when the telephone in Miami rang, my mother was quiet first. Then, when it was announced on the radio, he said: "You should have seen the old gal's belly jiggle on that one"
Further information on the Enola Gay can be found at http://www.theenolagay.com/.


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An international team of researchers has reconstructed the common ancestor of placental mammals—an extremely diverse group including animals ranging from rodents to whales to humans—using the world's largest dataset of both genetic and physical traits. In research to be published in the journal Science, the scientists reveal that, contradictory to a commonly held theory, placental mammals did not diversify into their present-day lineages until after the extinction event that eliminated non-avian dinosaurs, and about 70 percent of all species on Earth, some 65 million years ago. This finding, and the visualization of the placental ancestor—a small, insect-eating animal— was made with the help of a powerful cloud-based and publicly accessible database called MorphoBank. The Science article is the result of a multi-year collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation's Assembling the Tree of Life program.
"Analysis of this massive dataset shows that placental mammals did not originate during the Mesozoic," said lead author Maureen O'Leary, an associate professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences in the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. "Species like rodents and primates did not share the Earth with non-avian dinosaurs but arose from a common ancestor—a small, insect-eating, scampering animal—shortly after the dinosaurs' demise."
There are two major types of data for building evolutionary trees of life: phenomic data, observational traits such as anatomy and behavior; and genomic data encoded by DNA. Some scholars have argued that integration of both is necessary for robust tree-building because examining only one type of data (genomic or phenomic) leaves out significant information. The evolutionary history of placental mammals, for example, has been interpreted in very different ways depending on the data analyzed. One leading analysis based on genomic data alone predicted that a number of placental mammal lineages existed in the Late Cretaceous and survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene (KPg) extinction. Other analyses place the start of placental mammals near this boundary, and still others set their origin after this event.
"There are over 5,100 living placental species and they exhibit enormous diversity, varying greatly in size, locomotor ability, and brain size," said Nancy Simmons, paper author and a curator in the Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History. "Given this diversity, it's of great interest to know when and how this clade first began evolving and diversifying."
The new study combines genomic and phenomic data in a simultaneous analysis for a more complete picture of the tree of life.
"Despite the considerable contributions of DNA sequence data to the study of species relationships, phenomic data have a major role in the direct reconstruction of trees," said author Michael Novacek, senior vice president, provost for science, and a curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. "Such data include features preserved in fossils where DNA recovery may be impossible. The mammalian record is notably enriched with well-preserved fossils, and we don't want to build trees without using the direct evidence that these fossils contribute."
"Discovering the tree of life is like piecing together a crime scene—it is a story that happened in the past that you can't repeat," O'Leary said. "Just like with a crime scene, the new tools of DNA add important information, but so do other physical clues like a body or, in the scientific realm, fossils, and anatomy. Combining all the evidence produces the most informed reconstruction of a past event."
The tree of life produced in this study shows that placental mammals arose rapidly after the KPg extinction, with the original ancestor speciating 200,000-400,000 years after the event.
"This is about 36 million years later than the prediction based on purely genetic data," said Marcelo Weksler, an author and research associate in the Museum's Department of Mammalogy who is now at the Museu Nacional-UFRJ in Brazil.
The finding also contradicts a genomics-based model called the "Cretaceous-Terrestrial Revolution" that argues that the impetus for placental mammal speciation was the fragmentation of supercontinent Gondwana during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, millions of years earlier than the KPg event.
"The new tree indicates that the fragmentation of Gondwana came well before the origin of placental mammals and is an unrelated event," said John Wible, paper author and curator of mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
As part of the study, researchers used MorphoBank, an initiative funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with additional support from Stony Brook University, the American Museum of Natural History, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to record phenomic traits for 86 placental mammal species, of which 40 were fossil species. The resulting dataset has more than 4,500 traits detailing characteristics such as the presence or absence of wings, teeth, and certain bones, type of hair cover, and structures found in the brain, as well as over 12,000 supporting images, all publicly available online. The dataset is an order of magnitude (10 times) larger than what has previously been used for studies of mammal relationships. Because phenomic datasets are built on physical objects like fossils that are limited in number and take time to excavate, prepare, and analyze, evolutionary trees based on anatomy usually don't exceed several hundred traits. Large-scale collection of such data for tree-building is now being called "phylophenomics."
"Cyberinfrastructure for organizing molecular biology has historically outstripped infrastructure for phenomic data, but new technologies like MorphoBank allow scientists working with phenomic data to produce larger and more complex projects and to enrich these databases with images, references, and comments," said Andrea Cirranello, paper author and a postdoctoral research associate at Stony Brook University and the Museum.
The team reconstructed the anatomy of the placental common ancestor by mapping traits onto the tree most strongly supported by the combined phenomic and genomic data and comparing the features in placental mammals with those seen in their closest relatives. This method, known as optimization, allowed the researchers to determine what features first appeared in the common ancestor of placental mammals and also what traits were retained unchanged from more distant ancestors. The researchers conclude that the common ancestor had features such as a two-horned uterus, a brain with a convoluted cerebral cortex, and a placenta in which the maternal blood came in close contact with the membranes surrounding the fetus, as in humans.
In addition, the study reveals that a branch of the placental mammal tree called Afrotheria (because these animals—which range from elephants to aardvarks—live in Africa today) did not originate on that continent but rather in the Americas.
"Determining how these animals first made it to Africa is now an important research question along with many others that can be addressed using MorphoBank and the phylophenomic tree produced in this study," said author Fernando Perini, a former postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History who is now a professor at the Minas Gerais Federal University in Brazil.
Added author Mary Silcox, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough: "This project is not exhaustive, but exposes a way forward to collect data on other phenomic systems and other species."
Funding for this study was provided by NSF grants 0743309, 0827993, 0629959, 0629836, and 0629811.
Other authors involved in this study include:
American Museum of Natural History
John Flynn
Andres Giallombardo
Norberto Giannini (and National University of Tucumánn, Argentina)
Suzann Goldberg
Jin Meng
Paul Velazco
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Zhe-Xi Luo (now at University of Chicago)
Michelle Spaulding (and American Museum of Natural History)
Florida Museum of Natural History
Jonathan Bloch
Zachary Randall
Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (China)
Xijun Ni
University of Louisville
Guillermo Rougier
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Timothy Gaudin
Western University of Health Sciences
Brian Kraatz (and American Museum of Natural History)
Yale University, Peabody Museum of Natural History
Eric Sargis
The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, is one of the world's preeminent scientific, educational, and cultural institutions. The Museum encompasses 45 permanent exhibition halls, including the Rose Center for Earth and Space and the Hayden Planetarium, as well as galleries for temporary exhibitions. It is home to the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial, New York State's official memorial to its 33rd governor and the nation's 26th president, and a tribute to Roosevelt's enduring legacy of conservation. The Museum's five active research divisions and three cross-disciplinary centers support 200 scientists, whose work draws on a world-class permanent collection of more than 32 million specimens and artifacts, including specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, as well as one of the largest natural history libraries in the Western Hemisphere. Through its Richard Gilder Graduate School, it is the only American museum authorized to grant the Ph.D. degree. In 2012, the Museum began offering a pilot Master of Arts in Teaching with a specialization in earth science. Approximately 5 million visitors from around the world came to the Museum last year, and its exhibitions and Space Shows can be seen in venues on five continents. The Museum's website and collection of apps for mobile devices extend its collections, exhibitions, and educational programs to millions more beyond its walls. Visit amnh.org for more information.

subset: commoncrawl


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Todays Reading:: Ephesians 6:1-4
Although today's sermon is based on 1 Thessalonians 2:10-12, pastor referenced other significant bible passages listed below. Simply highlight with your mouse to read.
1 Thessalonians 2:1-12,, 1 Timothy 1:2, Titus 1:4, 1 Thessalonians 2:10, Philippians 3:17, 1 Thessalonians 2:11, Acts 28:14, Ephesians 6:4, 1 Thessalonians 2:7-8, Colossians 3:21, Proverbs 23:7, 1 Thessalonians 2:12, Matthew 6:33,
What does 1 Thessalonians Chapter 2 signify?
The apostle reminds the Thessalonians of his preaching and behaviour. (1-12) And of their receiving the gospel as the word of God. (13-16) His joy on their account. (17-20)1-6 The apostle had no wordly design in his preaching. Suffering in a good cause should sharpen holy resolution. The gospel of Christ at first met with much opposition; and it was preached with contention, with striving in preaching, and against opposition. And as the matter of the apostle's exhortation was true and pure, the manner of his speaking was without guile. The gospel of Christ is designed for mortifying corrupt affections, and that men may be brought under the power of faith. This is the great motive to sincerity, to consider that God not only sees all we do, but knows our thoughts afar off, and searches the heart. And it is from this God who trieth our hearts, that we must receive our reward. The evidences of the apostle's sincerity were, that he avoided flattery and covetousness. He avoided ambition and vain-glory.
7-12 Mildness and tenderness greatly recommend religion, and are most conformable to God's gracious dealing with sinners, in and by the gospel. This is the way to win people. We should not only be faithful to our calling as Christians, but in our particular callings and relations. Our great gospel privilege is, that God has called us to his kingdom and glory. The great gospel duty is, that we walk worthy of God. We should live as becomes those called with such a high and holy calling. Our great business is to honour, serve, and please God, and to seek to be worthy of him.
13-16 We should receive the word of God with affections suitable to its holiness, wisdom, truth, and goodness. The words of men are frail and perishing, like themselves, and sometimes false, foolish, and fickle; but God's word is holy, wise, just, and faithful. Let us receive and regard it accordingly. The word wrought in them, to make them examples to others in faith and good works, and in patience under sufferings, and in trials for the sake of the gospel. Murder and persecution are hateful to God, and no zeal for any thing in religion can excuse it. Nothing tends more to any person or people's filling up the measure of their sins, than opposing the gospel, and hindering the salvation of souls. The pure gospel of Christ is abhorred by many, and the faithful preaching of it is hindered in many ways. But those who forbid the preaching it to sinners, to men dead in sin, do not by this please God. Those have cruel hearts, and are enemies to the glory of God, and to the salvation of his people, who deny them the Bible.
17-20 This world is not a place where we are to be always, or long together. In heaven holy souls shall meet, and never part more. And though the apostle could not come to them yet, and thought he might never be able to come, yet our Lord Jesus Christ will come; nothing shall hinder that. May God give faithful ministers to all who serve him with their spirit in the gospel of his Son, and send them to all who are in darkness
Commentary by Matthew Henry, 1710.


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text: We love our crazy cat ladies around here, and 77-year-old Italian artist Luciana Matalon certainly fits the bill, as she adored her 15-year-old kitty so much, that when Sky died, Matalon placed a full-page ad in national newspaper Corriere della Sera. The ad featured a poem she'd written about the fabulous feline — lines like "Listen to the great silence of the universe/The world is extinguished." Matalon also added: "I will soon be with you." And: "We'll never leave each other ever again." The ad may have cost a lot (it's unclear how much) but Matalon is quoted as saying, "My profound feelings are beyond financial measure."


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After 'Dancing,' no more reality TV for Alley
LOS ANGELES, CA The 60-year-old actress said Tuesday that her time on "Dancing" has motivated her to return to acting with new focus and determination. She said learning to dance on the hit show "re-inspired me with all the things that I've had great success with already and sort of got complacent about." Alley plans to take on a movie role next month. She's also looking for a new TV series and is considering Broadway. She confessed she was sad she and partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy didn't win "Dancing." Characterizing herself as "not the average cupcake," she said her partner deserved kudos for making the oldest and heaviest contestant this season into a championship dancer.
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text:
The Fountainhead, part 1, chapter 6
After losing their last chance at a big commission, Henry Cameron and Howard Roark both know that the end is in sight. Finally, the day they've been dreading arrives:
In February of 1925 Henry Cameron retired from practice.
For a year, he had known that the day would come. He had not spoken of it to Roark, but they both knew and went on, expecting nothing save to go on as long as it was still possible. A few commissions had dribbled into their office in the past year, country cottages, garages, remodeling of old buildings. They took anything. But the drops stopped. The pipes were dry. The water had been turned off by a society to whom Cameron had never paid his bill.
That is a very strange metaphor for Ayn Rand to use.
It's not inaccurate – just the opposite. That's why it's strange. You would think Rand's opinion would be that society owes a debt to him and won't acknowledge it. Instead, she seems to be saying that Cameron deserved to go out of business because he won't do the work people want him to do – which, as we've seen earlier, is true. It's as if the author is siding against her own main characters.
With their business running on fumes, the two of them stubbornly hold out for as long as they can, until one day Cameron collapses in the office. A doctor is called, who says that he'll die if he isn't confined to bed rest. Cameron stoically accepts this, asking only that Roark close down the office and burn all his papers. Emotionless as always, Roark complies:
That evening, Roark went to Cameron's closed office. He did not turn on the lights. He made a fire in the Franklin heater in Cameron's room, and emptied drawer after drawer into the fire, not looking down at them. The papers rustled dryly in the silence, a thin odor of mold rose through the dark room, and the fire hissed, crackling, leaping in bright streaks….
There were drawings of Cameron's famous buildings and of buildings unbuilt; there were blueprints with the thin white lines that were girders still standing somewhere; there were contracts with famous signatures; and at times, from out of the red glow, there flashed a sum of seven figures written on yellowed paper, flashed and went down, in a thin burst of sparks.
Cameron himself is carted off on a stretcher, delivered to the care of his only surviving relative:
A sister of Cameron's appeared from somewhere in New Jersey. She was a meek little old lady with white hair, trembling hands and a face one could never remember, quiet, resigned and gently hopeless. She had a meager little income and she assumed the responsibility of taking her brother to her home in New Jersey; she had never been married and had no one else in the world; she was neither glad nor sorry of the burden; she had lost all capacity for emotion many years ago.
As far as I know, this is the only place in any of her books where Ayn Rand addresses the question of what should happen to a heroic creator when he's too old or ill to keep working. It never comes up in Atlas Shrugged, whose protagonists are only shown in the prime of their lives.
This is a very relevant question, given that all her heroes work brutal hours and devote themselves utterly to their jobs, spurning family and friends, rest and recreation. No one can keep that up forever. Literary characters can be made of iron and shrug it off, but the reality is that constant stress exacts a toll on your health. So, again, what happens to those who define their lives by work, when they can no longer work?
You'd think an ubermensch like Henry Cameron would be allowed to sail off into the sunset, spending his golden years in a comfortable retirement home where he could reminisce about the glory days and mentor up-and-coming young architects. Instead, despite those seven-figure contracts Roark burned, it seems that Cameron has no savings and made no provision for his own future. All that lies ahead for him in his twilight years are sickness and destitution. For readers whom she presumably hopes will pattern their lives after her protagonists, this is a less-than-encouraging message. (It sure is too bad they didn't have Social Security then!)
Granted, Rand has plot reasons for wanting Cameron to be a tragic, broken figure, so that Roark can "avenge" him by becoming successful. But still, doesn't something about this sit wrong? He doesn't have his own money or his own home to go to; he's dependent on family to support and nurse him. Isn't that like… you know… mooching?
You'd think a real Randian hero would willingly die in the gutter rather than accept charity like this. Does this mean that Cameron wasn't so great a man after all, if he's reduced to sponging off others? Or is Rand admitting that dependence is a fate that awaits all of us?
On the day of his departure Cameron handed to Roark a letter he had written in the night, written painfully, an old drawing board on his knees, a pillow propping his back. The letter was addressed to a prominent architect; it was Roark's introduction to a job. Roark read it and, looking at Cameron, not at his own hands, tore the letter across, folded the pieces and tore it again.
"No," said Roark. "You're not going to ask them for anything. Don't worry about me."
Wait – what – why?
Why is Roark so opposed to having Cameron write a reference for him? That's the one valuable thing he got from his time there: a glowing recommendation from an architect who was a giant in his field. In an earlier chapter, Cameron said to Roark, "They may laugh at me in their luncheon speeches, but they steal from me when it suits them, and they know that I know a good draftsman when I see one."
I can only assume this is an expression of Rand's belief that her heroes have to do it all themselves – that they have to make their way in the world purely on the strength of their own talent, without relying on personal connections or other underhanded political tricks. But a reference letter isn't nepotism! A good report from your last boss is evidence of your achievements and your work ethic, no different than showing off a photo of a building you designed.
This is further evidence that, for all she idolized business and capitalism, Rand didn't know that much about it. This may be the most inadvertently realistic part of the book. The heroes are ignorant of, or flatly reject, standard business practices like advertising and references. They think they should always get their own way and be exempt from every rule. Then, when they fail to achieve overnight success, they treat this as some mystifying symptom of human evil, when in reality it's exactly the response we should expect.
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