NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image of a massive smog bank smothering huge portions of China today. This blanket of pollution has been hovering over the country for over a week now, exacerbated by cool air and smoke from fires.

From Portrait of a Polluted Land

~American forces led by Indiana Territory Governor William Henry Harrison defeated the forces of Shawnee leader Tecumseh's growing American Indian confederation at the Battle of Tippecanoe near present-day Battle Ground, Indiana.

~A FB friend has a son in the Army. He's not stationed at Ft Hood, but his wife his. She's okay. This is part of what I said.

"This thing is a Tragedy AND a Disaster. Of course, Hasan is being portrayed in certain quarters as a 'Jihadi' when it seems he had in fact become profoundly unstable and tried a variation of 'suicide by cop'.

That someone so damaged was about to be deployed into a combat zone - as a commissioned officer no less - underscores, to me at least, what Barry McCaffery said three years back; "The wheels are coming off the military'.

I'm neither a pacifist or anti-military by any means. I'm actually a military historian by nature and inclination. And it is clear to me that these two wars are killing us in more ways than we can ever cope with.

And I personally cannot see any way to end them that will not also be a Tragedy AND a Disaster. *sigh*"

..okay, here's a cat macro..

Longcat: Cosmology

...no, really..

Mistress,
Clear My Eyes,
Quiet My Thoughts,
Strengthen My Heart,
Guide My Blade,
Blessed Be.

Mistress,
Clear My Eyes,
Quiet My Thoughts,
Strengthen My Heart,
Guide My Blade,
Blessed Be.

Actually, it feels like I could improve the Furies illustration.

I’ve printed a portion of it out in cyan and have been practicing inking on it. A lot of the line weights are too slight and too similar. I can make the piece a whole hell of a lot more dynamic by going over some of the lines again, and I think I can make them feel more confident and less shaky in the process.

And if I really screw up, I can always use white-out!

Edit: Damn it! Well, I didn’t ruin it. I did make it better, and I’ll be scanning it later (probably tomorrow). But, it appears that part of my control problem is that the pen bleeds on the paper I’m using for the final illustration! It doesn’t, however, bleed on the practice paper. Double damn it.

The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation

In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, My Paper Chase, Harold Evans recounts how The Sunday Times unmasked Kim Philby, the most notorious spy of the Cold War.

The smooth, well-dressed British “minor” civil servant Kim Philby is known now as the most notorious spy of modern times. But he wasn’t unmasked for what he was until The Sunday Times of London penetrated the official secrecy and old boys’ network that had for years covered up his treachery and his crimes. What follows is an abridged extract from the autobiography of The Sunday Times editor, Harold Evans’ My Paper Chase, published this week by Little, Brown. Harry Evans is married to Daily Beast founder and Editor-in-chief Tina Brown.

Immediately when we started asking questions in 1967 we were warned off. We found it odd that senior officials who told us Philby was of no importance were alarmed when we persisted. I was told, “You must stop your inquiries. There is the most monstrous danger here. You will be helping the enemy.” With every door slammed in our face, and the ever-present threat of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, we had to engage in a frustratingly tedious process of assembling, assessing, and verifying tiny scraps of information from hundreds of interviews with denizens of a closed world whose stock-in-trade is deceit. We learned that he’d been a crack shot, regarded as the James Bond in the operations of the subverting the Nazis in occupied France. But of his other secret work we for quite a time learned nothing.