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Yeah. I think one of the things is, is that - I talked to the Bad Plus(ph) recently. They came into town. See, I started a radio program here in Denver called "The Jazz Odyssey." To be honest, what I do is I play your kind of music, and I play music of the Bad Plus. I'll even play stuff of Jon Hassell and even get me even further out to maybe people of more what we would call mainstream and playing it all on one radio show. But I see a connectivity just because of the time that we live in versus simply a genre. And so what I've done is I'm just bringing it to the people and just letting them decide what they want to call it, but it's in our hearts, we're playing jazz (unintelligible) should it matter if it's called jazz. |
In some circumstances, they can. And in some experiments that were reported in the 1980s - I think the experiments that you're referring to might have been the ones carried out by a scientist named Robin Baker, who was trying to ascertain whether or not human beings - like homing pigeons and sea turtles and a variety of other animals - had kind of a magnetic sense.
And so in some experiments, he argued that he could show that people led off into the woods or led on a long and tortuous bus ride, when released were able to point to north. But the - overall, I'd say that the evidence that people can actually do that well is equivocal at best. I think that there are just as many studies that show that we're really not very good at pointing out the cardinal directions. |
Mr. Terkel, I recently saw Martin Scorsese's film about Bob Dylan. I don't know if you saw it, but it made a huge impression on me. I saw Bob Dylan in a way that I never had before. He was interviewed now in his present life, and I found the way he spoke and the things he was saying to be so--I don't know--out there, just so different from any kind of conventional artist that I'd ever heard. And I want you, if you could, to go back to the interviews that you took with him and talk a little bit of your impression when you met him. |
And I've talked to women who said, well, of course, you know, that's why would they be happy? Those are the jobs we're happy to escape now.
So it's not like, you know, trading apples for apples here. It's really kind of a switching of roles, and nobody knows where it's going. And then meanwhile, you have different categories of guys. Some of them are just giving up and they're saying men in their 20s and 30s tell me, you know, I know I'll never - in this economy, I look at the future, I know I'll never be able to support a family. I'm not even sure I can hole my own in a relationship. So I'm just going to check out and play video games. |
It has changed very substantially. About half the students graduating from law school are women. The same is true in the medical profession. But there are still a lot - there still is significant disproportionality if you look at the big partners in law firms.
There's relatively - a fewer number of those are women compared to in other professions. But actually, interestingly, I just wrote a speech about this for a medical group, for the American College of Surgeons, and it was interesting to find that in some ways medicine does better than some other professions because - at least in surgery, it's piecework. You get paid for what you do. |
Hi, good morning. I think this situation is going to be much harder, much more difficult. Israel lost great chance, as well as the U.S. to make peace prior to this incident. The public is extremely angry how the people in Gaza were totally destroyed a couple of years ago. I think also - well, this is fact, the United States never acted as a fair broker. And also, truly, truly, the ruling elite in Israel and the support in America, APAC and the rest of them, do not really want any peace.
So it's going to be terrible. It's going to be really, really bad. And I think at the end, you know, the Palestinian - our people have been there for thousands of years. They're going to continue. I think the chance of Israel's survival has dimmed a great deal. Those people are... |
Well, that almost is the biggest story of the day or at least the most closely watched race of the day. One, it's the only one where a Democrat was running against the Republican. Everything else was primaries. But two, this is one of the races, even though it was a two-to-one Democratic majority, it's culturally conservative, the kind of district Republicans say they can win, and if they do win it, they take control of Congress, the House, back in November.
But they were unable to do it. This is the one that John Murtha had for 36 years. The Democratic candidate there, Mark Critz, was very adept in the fact first of all, he said I would have voted against the health care bill. I would vote against abortion rights. I would vote against gun control. |
If you have questions about what Vietnam today is like or why, we'd like to hear from you. And if you've been there recently or if you have family there, what do you think of the way it's changing? Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255, and our e-mail address is talk@npr.org.
Our first guest is Dana Sachs. She is the author of The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam, and she's traveled frequently to Vietnam since 1990. She joins us now from member station WHQR in Wilmington, North Carolina. Good to have you with us, Dana. |
We wish the generals were gone, he says, but there's nothing we can really do about it. They are strong and we are afraid. They don't care about the people at all, all they care about, he says, is staying in power.
The military's decision to go ahead with its May 10th referendum on the new constitution in areas not affected by the storm, is perhaps the most stunning example of the general's indifference to the suffering of their people. The generals call the new constitution part of their road map to democracy, critics call it a sham, designed to cement the military's hold on power for several more decades. Either way, the vote was the lead item on the evening newscast. In fact it was about the only story on the evening news. |
Deep in our solar system, a new era of space exploration is unfolding. Beneath the thick ice of Europa, in the vapor plumes on Enceladus, and within the methane lakes of Titan, astrobiologists are on the hunt for extraterrestrial life. We’ve honed in on these three moons because each is an ‘ocean world,’ an environment that contains a liquid ocean– and liquid can support the formation of life. Living organisms have to be able to grow, reproduce, and feed themselves, among other things. All of those functions require the formation of complex molecules from more basic components. Liquids such as water allow chemical compounds to remain in suspension instead of sinking under the force of gravity. This enables them to interact frequently in a 3-dimensional space and, in the right conditions, go through chemical reactions that lead to the formation of living matter. That alone isn’t enough; the small but complex biomolecules that we’re familiar with are sensitive to temperature— too hot or cold, and they won’t mix. Liquid water has an additional advantage in that it’s relatively temperature-stable, meaning it can insulate molecules against large shifts in heat. On Earth, these and other conditions in aquatic environments may have supported the emergence of life billions of years ago. Tantalizingly, the same could be true in other parts of our solar system, like these three icy moons. Europa, which is a moon of Jupiter, is probably the most intriguing ocean world. Beneath a surface layer of ice thicker than Mount Everest, there exists a liquid ocean as much as 100 kilometers deep. Astrobiologists think this hidden ocean could harbor life. Thanks to the Galileo probe, we can deduce that its potential salt content is similar to that of some lakes on Earth. But most of its characteristics will be a mystery until we can explore it further. Like Jupiter, Saturn also has moons that might have the right conditions for life. For instance– Enceladus is a tiny ball of ice that’s small enough to nestle within the surface area of the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly to Europa, it likely contains an ocean deep under the ice. But Enceladus also has geysers that frequently vent water vapor and tiny ice grains into space. Astrobiologists are curious about whether these geysers are connected to the ocean below. They hope to send a probe to test whether the geysers’ plumes of vapor contain life-enabling material from that hidden sea. Although it’s the best known substance for nurturing life, water isn’t necessarily the only medium that can support living things. Take Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, which has a thick nitrogen atmosphere containing methane and many other organic molecules. Its clouds condense and rain onto Titan’s surface, sustaining lakes and seas full of liquid methane. This compound’s particular chemistry means it’s not as supportive a medium as water. But, paired with the high quantities of organic material that also rain down from the sky, these bodies of liquid methane could possibly support unfamiliar life forms. So what might indicate that life exists on these or other worlds? If it is out there, astrobiologists speculate that it would be microscopic, comparable to the bacteria we have on earth. This would make it difficult to directly observe from a great distance, so astrobiologists seek clues called biosignatures. Those may be cells, fossils, or mineral traces left behind by living things. And finding any biosignatures will be challenging for many reasons. One of the biggest concerns is to make sure we sterilize our probes extremely thoroughly. Otherwise we could accidentally contaminate ocean worlds with Earth’s own bacteria, which could destroy alien life. Titan, Enceladus, and Europa are just three of possibly many ocean worlds that we could explore. We already know of several other candidates in our solar system, including Jupiter’s moons Callisto and Ganymede, Neptune’s Triton, and even Pluto. If there’s this much potential for life to exist in our own tiny solar system, what unimagined secrets might the rest of the universe contain? |
Earlier on his trip, Mike Pompeo was in Cairo, where he said in a speech that the U.S. is committed to defeating ISIS. The very next day, the Pentagon announced it was beginning a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, troops that had been fighting ISIS. This is just the latest in a string of mixed messages coming from this administration on foreign policy, from Syria to North Korea to Afghanistan to Iran.
We wanted to get a diplomat's perspective on how to handle inconsistencies from a superpower. And so we've turned to Nabil Fahmy. He is a former Egyptian foreign minister and was ambassador to the United States from 1999 to 2008. Ambassador Fahmy joins us now from Cairo. Welcome to the program. |
I think they have shown, first of all, that it is possible to do a lot, so long as that opportunity is provided; so long as equal opportunity is there in the workplace; so long as there is a commitment to enforcing civil rights laws to ensure that people are paid on an equal basis with whites; to make sure that they are granted the same opportunities to purchase homes; that they do not have to pay extra rent because they are not white. Those are the kinds of things that they have actually benefited from in ways that previous generations did not.
It wasn't until 1968, that the majority of African-Americans even became eligible for social security, because the majority of African-Americans, were agricultural workers and domestics. That is a huge change in occupations that has now enabled a lot of people to justifiably go after jobs that they are able to do--good jobs that they are able to do--and to expect good wages and decent treatment; and to be able to spend their money in the same ways that other people do. |
There's a big question about whether it's a good idea. I mean, the previous caller talked about Wal-Mart. You think of GM or Procter & Gamble, these huge companies probably need large banks. The other big issue is it's a big world out there. I think London would love it if we broke up our banks because then anyone who wants to be a big bank would just instantly become a British bank. The same could be said for, I don't know, Singapore, Dubai, other places around the world.
So I think whether or not it's a good idea, it's an absolute nonstarter. If it were a good idea, though, you'd want to ask, well, who gets to decide what the right size is? How do you determine that? What incentives would that create in the banks, you know, to evade that kind of law? I think it's a very problematic area, although it certainly would end some of our problems. |
Okay, the two scenarios would be different because the person with a little bit of money - and say look, I need, you know, I need to make some money. I only have a little bit, and I heard it takes money to make money so the little - the first one's a little of bit, it's like, you know, how do you start? You can start investing, you know, a little bit at a time. I tell people always to go on, you know, like sharebuilder.com, you know, or call a mutual fund company, call the 800 number. You know, it's okay to put away $25 a month, $50 a month. It adds up over the long term, and it does. So first of all, a little bit of money - or they can also start an investment club and pull their money together with other individuals. Well, that's the person with a little bit of money.
The person who is say, okay, I have to retire - a got a large lump sum of money but I'm not sure if it's going to last me for the rest of my life. So what am I going to do? The worst thing I want to do is, okay, I'm 60 now, I have these large lump sum and then by the time I'm 70, you know, it's gone. And then I have to go back to work, and that is a true scenario on a lot of people's lives because I've spent my money. |
I have - I had an editor who told me, she said - she would say, this book ends awfully abruptly. I said, I know, but it's over. And she'd say, well, could you let it just kind of slide along for a while, you know, add a few pages and see if you can just keep things going just for a bit? And so I would add three pages and then cut two of the pages that were already in the book. And it would still be somewhat abrupt, but when it's over, it's over. You know, why, you're not going to see everybody grinning and then Lassie barks. |
So I'm just going to have to let you guys go. Thank you so much. And we've been talking with the controversial former Los Angeles Superior Court judge Kevin Ross, who blogs at "Three Brothers and a Sister." He also hosts the Kevin Ross show on BlogTalkRadio. He was here with me at our NPR West studios. Brandon Whitney of the blog "Homeland Colors." He was at our headquarters in Washington, D.C. And Danielle Belton, who runs the blogs "Black Snob" and the "Secret Council of American Negroes." She was at member station KWMU in St. Louis, Missouri. And you can find links to their blogs and ours at nprnewsandnotes.org. You can also speak your mind in our on-going series. |
Almost no impact whatsoever. Look, Barack Obama has been in the state numerous times. He just appointed a state director. He has broad support in the state. I think, again, this race is totally wide-open despite all of the early polls out there and what you're hearing from the pundits. Look, these candidates, especially the top-tier candidates, must go in there and try to set the stage for the rest of the summer.
I also believe this is an opportunity for what I call the second-tier candidates - Joe Biden of Delaware, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, and of course Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico - to also make an opportunity to make a case for their candidacies and to really talk about the issues that they care about. Iraq will be a very important issue. But I also think health care - John Edwards is the only candidate running with a plan. Also, his plan includes raising taxes, especially on the wealthiest one percent of Americans. |
Well, it's certainly not a problem throughout Oakland, but there are certain impacted neighborhoods that are dealing with having an inordinate amount of corner stores that sell processed packaged foods low in nutrients, and lots of alcohol and cigarettes, and that don't have grocery stores. West Oakland, California, is a community that has close to 30,000 residents, and they have 53 liquor stores and not one single grocery store. And this is something that we see in impacted communities throughout the United States. But thankfully we have organizations like Growing Power and the Peoples' Grocery working in west Oakland who are working to address these issues and bring more healthy foods into the communities. |
Well, in fact, that's one of the reasons why I guess I'm a skeptic. Maybe I'm ultrasensitive, but, as you know, I've spent a lot of time over the last year trying to argue that there is a difference between science and religion, and we should not change the way we teach science in schools. And so I do worry when people say things like, `The theory is so beautiful that it must be true.' Well, that's fine for them to believe. It may be what drives their work. And, certainly, science--if you're going to spend 20 years of your life working on something, you probably have to, at some level, hope it's right. But what will inevitably make you a scientist and not a prophet, I guess, is that, even if you've believed it for 20 years, the minute an experiment comes along and shows your ideas are wrong, you should be willing to throw it out.
And that--and so I understand that people have a great, vested interest, and they really find it fascinating and the mathematical discoveries are tantalizing, and so it's perfectly reasonable. When I work on something, you know, I can--a new idea, I obviously have to have faith in it at some level, so there is a faith in science. But you have to allow that faith to confront reality, and that's what makes science different than religion. |
Recently, alarm bells went off when one of Maliki's coalition partners in the Iraqi National Alliance turned against the prime minister. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr threatened to join a new coalition with Iraqiya and the Kurds and force a vote of no confidence in the prime minister. Baghdad analyst Ahmad al-Abyadh says Maliki has made a host of political enemies. The Kurds are convinced he's ready to attack them as soon as the Americans deliver promised F-16 fighter jets to the Iraqi air force. The Sadrists are convinced he's planning to evict them from the ruling coalition, and Abyadh believes another Shiite group in Maliki's bloc, known by the acronym ISKI, could be wavering. |
Nothing he had ever painted had given him such a feeling of pride and accomplishment. It lasted all day, through the plucking, the gutting, the tedious picking of pinfeathers, and into the last light as he sat with his aching back, pulling primary feathers from the wing tips with a pair of pliers. At last, he laid the bird into a washtub of icy brine, weighted down with a rock, and went to bed. Before daylight on Thanksgiving morning, he poured off the brine, dried the turkey, rubbed a paste of butter and rosemary under the skin, and salted the cavity. He drove the turkey to the church oven through the gray, bitter, cold dawn. For the first hours he sat by the stove as the turkey roasted, dozing off over church bulletins. Half in a dream, he imagined his arrival on Albert Goodenough's doorstep that afternoon. It would be like a Norman Rockwell painting - the eager scrubbed faces of children, the old dog curled up by the woodstove. Albert Goodenough's face wreathed in admiration. The light would catch a sheen on the turkey's breast and glint off the edge of the white ironstone platter.
But where was that special antique ironstone platter? The turkey still had an hour to go. He drove home through a light snow to Tibbets Road. When he got back, the whole town smelled like a squash casserole. There were no cars, but rows of carts were trundling back and forth across Church Street between Beth Page and St. John's. In the church parking lot, men and women were stacking Styrofoam containers into the backs of vans and trucks. The kitchen of Beth Page Church was full of people wearing aprons and rubber gloves. Overflow, a woman called out to him. It must be the flood. We have never had a turnout like this for a community Thanksgiving. People have brought food all the way from Blover(ph). Alice, she called, here's a new volunteer. Do you need a loader or a server? And there she stood in the middle of the church kitchen, his Airfoods friend, with a white paper hat on her head, holding a great knife with a carbon steel blade. Happy Thanksgiving, she said. Are you here to help? I've come for my turkey, he said. Your turkey was in this oven, she said. My oven wasn't big enough, he said. Her shoulders slumped and her eyes grew wide. We served that turkey, she said. I thought it was a community Thanksgiving turkey. I think it went to Adamant. |
That is exactly what we are going to see. He will tweak it. He'll change it, you know, from day to day, from week to week, depending on where things are in Congress at any given moment or depending on what he's hearing from the opposition that he feels he needs to counter.
He was pretty quiet on this issue in August and that was when we saw, you know, all the talk of death panels and a government takeover of health care really starting to gain some currency, not just with his hardcore opponents, but with people who are just undecided about all of this. So what we're going to see in the fall, summer is over, vacation is over. We're going to see him working it really hard in many different ways. |
I think that A, Pelosi will pass the bill, I think that they're going to put in more cost controls that these blue dog Democrats want. The problem is people love to talk about cost controls, but they don't actually want to ask anything of anyone. And I think that if the minute you say well, we want to take away this service or we want to limit doctors' payments that way, some of the same members of Congress who say we've got to control costs say well you can't take it away from my hospital or my doctor. It's very difficult. |
So Steve, we'll get to know that family. Now, let me take you to another family in Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C. There's a 24-year-old named Nicholas. He's living at home. He was exploring this career in the arts. But when his grandfather - who's in his 80s - started really suffering from dementia and moved in, Nicholas has been thinking about trying to find a career that'll make him more money so he can help out with the family. And everything is so fragile under this roof.
Nicholas had a friend staying over one night and when his grandfather, who has dementia, woke up and saw this unfamiliar face, it just threw the whole day off. |
And I'm Steve Inskeep. And those, by the way, are our real names. We clarify that as we begin a report about news stories written under fake names.
Newspapers in Chicago, Houston and San Francisco are among those that acknowledge they published dozens of items under fake bylines, as they're called. The public radio program THIS AMERICAN LIFE first disclosed the items were not even written by reporters on the staffs of the papers. They were written by employees of what is a kind of news outsourcing firm called Journatic. NPR's David Folkenflik reports on what this episode says about the newspaper business. |
Right. Well, I think the whole argument about the women's vote was never just about reproductive rights. Equal pay is a big part of it. And so are the economic issues because women voters historically have shown a real concern for, you know, pocketbook issues, education issues and safety net issues. What's really striking is that if the Democrats do hold on, women candidates are going to play a big role. When you see Michelle Nunn putting up a real fight in Georgia that the Republicans didn't expect, Kay Hagan looks like, at the moment, she's going to hold North Carolina. And then you've got Mary Landrieu being, you know, a central figure and Jeanne Shaheen. Women are going to play a central part in whether the Democrats win or lose this election. |
And this is of course the largest use of land in the U.S. - that is, cow pasture - 654 million acres, plus the feed for the livestock, which is 127.4 million acres. And then of course there is the paper that the Happy Meal box is made out of. That is the second largest use of land in the U.S. - unprotected forest. That's 538.6 million acres. Wheat for the bun - 21.5 million acres. Also in the box - the fries. A million acres of potatoes are grown in the U.S.
But also, private land ownership, which is also on the rise. Most of the top landowners in the U.S. are cattle ranchers and oil barons. So if we add all of these things up together, that is roughly 1.5 billion acres of land of the 1.9 billion available all wrapped up in this Happy Meal. |
Yeah, well to be honest with you, I would probably think you are a person who needs to go to the emergency department. You know, we divide people in three basic categories, five total. Those that are really acutely sick and injured need to go straight to the back. There's the ones where it's kind of more minor, and you see more fast tracks developing as flow measures to try to offload those from the main ER.
And the third one is people like yourself who come in, who really are kind of in the middle there somewhere and, you know, it could be just a little bit of a flu, but it could have been appendicitis, it could have been more. So for those patients, you probably stay a little bit longer because you needed to have a full evaluation, and that takes a little bit longer to do. |
The world's greatest players have something in common. As children they considered the soccer ball a wonderful toy and they wanted to play with it whenever they could. That's because their early exposure to soccer was pure play. The Peles, Meradonas and Renaldo's developed their skills without adults looking over their shoulders, stifling their creative impulses or critiquing their mistakes.
In the United States, youth soccer comes with a dominating adult presence and 60 percent of kids quit the sport by the time they're 12-years-old. The thing is you don't have to teach soccer, the game is the best teacher for young players. |
When I was a kid, I was, like many of you in this room, very much fascinated by Star Wars, and what fascinated me the most is this notion of the Force, this energy that connects all people and all objects and allows you to feel people that you can't even see. And I remember many nights, I would be sitting at home, just, like, concentrating and focusing, trying to feel the Force, and I didn't feel anything, don't worry. (Laughter) And later in life, I became a scientist. I joined the MIT faculty and started working on wireless signals. These are things like Wi-Fi or cellular systems, and I did a lot of work in that domain. But then, again, this Force thing kept nagging me, and at some point, I was just like, "Wait a minute, these wireless signals — they are like the Force." So if you think about it, wireless signals, they travel through space, they go through obstacles and walls and occlusions, and some of them, they reflect off our bodies, because our bodies are full of water, and some of these minute reflections, they come back. And if, just if, I had a device that can just sense these minute reflections, then I would be able to feel people that I cannot see. So I started working with my students on building such a device, and I want to show you some of our early results. So here, you see my student standing, and here is our device. And we are going to put the device in the other office, behind the wall, and we are going to monitor him as he moves. This red dot is tracking him using wireless signals. And as you can see, the red dot is tracking his movements very accurately, purely based on how his body interacts with the surrounding wireless signals. Pretty accurate, isn't it? He has no wearables, nothing. (Applause) Now you might be wondering, how is it possible that we can sense people and track them, without any wearables, through walls, and the easiest analogy to think about is radar. I'm sure many of you have seen this picture. You transmit a wireless signal to the sky, it reflects off some airplane, comes back to you, and you start detecting these airplanes. But if it were just radar, then we would have this 50 years ago. So it's not just radar. There are two key differences. So the first difference, of course — you can't, like radar, just blast wireless power at somebody. You're going to fry them like if they were in a microwave. Don't do that. So it means that you have to be able to deal with very weak signals, and that means that your device has to be very sensitive. The second difference is that, unlike the sky, where it's empty — if you are lucky, there is one airplane that you can catch there. Like, look at the room and look how many objects and people there are. So in indoor environments, the signal not only reflects off the person, if reflects off the person, off the floor, the ceiling, off other people around, and you get very complex reflections where the same signal reflects off me and then off you, and then off the ceiling, then off the floor. And you have to make sense of that mess. But we were lucky. We were coming at the right time. So two things helped us. The first thing is radiotechnologies have evolved a lot, and over the last decade, radio technology became much more powerful, so we were able to build very sensitive radios that can sense weak and minute RF signals. The second thing: machine learning. So you keep hearing about machine learning and there was a revolution of machine learning recently, in deep learning, and that allowed us to build machine-learning models that can understand wireless signals and interpret them so they would know what happened in the environment. So if you think of it, the radio is like the ear of our device and the machine learning is like the brain, and together, they have a very powerful device. So what else can we sense about people using wireless signals? Sleep. Sleep, actually, is something very dear to my heart, because my sleep is a disaster. (Laughter) So one thing is when you start working on some physiological signal and you discover that yours sucks. (Laughter) So you can see why we can capture sleep, because the person walks and the device sees him as he walks to bed, when he stops tossing around in bed, when he steps out of bed, and that measure of sleep is what people call actigraphy. It's based on motion. But it turned out that we can actually get sleep at a much more important level. We can understand the change in the brain waves that occur during sleep. So, many of you probably know that as we go to sleep, our brainwaves change and we enter different stages: awake, light sleep, deep sleep and REM, or rapid eye movement. These stages are of course related to sleep disorders, but they are also related to various diseases. So for example, disturbances in REM are associated with depression. Disturbances in deep sleep are associated with Alzheimer's. So if you want to get sleep staging, today, you will send the person to the hospital, they put all of these electrodes on their head, and they ask them to sleep like that. (Laughter) It's not really a happy experience. So what if I tell you that I can do the same thing but without any of these electrodes on the person's body? So here is our device, transmitting very low power wireless signal, analyzes the reflections using AI and spits out the sleep stages throughout the night. So we know, for example, when this person is dreaming. Not just that ... we can even get your breathing while you are sitting like that, and without touching you. So he is sitting and reading and this is his inhales, exhales. We asked him to hold his breath, and you see the signal staying at a steady level because he exhaled. He did not inhale. And I want to zoom in on the signal. And this is the same signal as before. These are the inhales, these are the exhales. And you see these blips on the signal? These are not noise. They are his heartbeats. And you can see them beat by beat. So I want to stop here for a moment and show you a live demo. Zach is going to help me with the demo, and we're going to use the device to monitor Zach's breathing. So this white box that you see here is the device, and Zach is turning it on ... and let's see whether he breathes well. So we're going to do exactly what we did in the video with the other guy, so the wireless signal is going through, it's touching Zach's body, and it's reflecting back to the device, and we want to monitor his breathing, his inhale-exhale motion. So we see the inhales, exhales — so see, these ups and downs are Zach breathing. Inhaling, exhaling. (Applause) So, he can breathe. (Laughter) Zach, can you hold your breath, please? OK, so now he's holding his breath, so you see the signal stays at a steady level, and these are his heartbeats. Beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. (Applause) OK, Zach, you can breathe again. (Laughter) We don't want accidents here. (Laughter) OK, thank you. (Applause) So as you can see, we have this device that can monitor so many physiological signals for you, and what is really interesting about this device is that it does all this without any wearables, without asking the person to change his behavior or to wear anything or charge anything special. And that got doctors very excited, because doctors, they always want to know more information about their patients, particularly at home, and this is particularly true in chronic diseases, like pulmonary diseases, like COPD, or heart failure or Alzheimer's and even depression. All of these chronic diseases are very important. In fact — perhaps you know — two-thirds of the cost of health care in the US is due to chronic diseases. But what is really interesting about chronic diseases is that when the person, for example, has a problem that leads to the hospital and the emergency room, this problem doesn't happen overnight. Actually, things happen gradually. So if we can monitor chronic disease patients in their home, we can detect changes in their breathing, heartbeat, mobility, sleep — and we can detect emergencies before they occur and have the doctor intervene earlier so that we can avoid hospitalization. And indeed, today we are working with multiple doctors in different disease categories. So I'm really excited because we have deployed the device with many patients. We have deployed the device with patients that have COPD, which is a pulmonary disease, patients that have Alzheimer's, patients that have depression and anxiety and people that have Parkinson's. And we are working with the doctors on improving their life, understanding the disease better. So when I started, I told you that I'm really fascinated with Star Wars and the Force in Star Wars, and indeed, I'm still very much fascinated, even now, as a grown-up, with Star Wars, waiting for the next movie. But I'm very fascinated now and excited about this new Force of wireless signals, and the potential of changing health care with this new force. One of the patients with whom we deployed is actually my aunt. She has heart failure, and I'm sure many of you guys in the audience have parents, grandparents, loved ones who have chronic diseases. So I want you to imagine with me a future where in every home that has a chronic disease patient, there is a device like this device sitting in the background and just monitoring passively sleep, breathing, the health of this chronic disease patient, and before an emergency occurs, it would detect the degradation in the physiological signal and alert the doctor so that we can avoid hospitalization. This can change health care as we know it today, improve how we understand chronic diseases and also save many lives. Thank you. (Applause) Helen Walters: Dina, thank you so much. Thank you too, Zach. So glad you're breathing. So Dina, this is amazing. The positive applications are incredible. What is the framework, though, like the ethical framework around this? What are you doing to prevent this technology from being used for other, perhaps less positive types of applications? Dina Katabi: Yeah, this is a very important question, of course, like, what about misuse, or what about, I guess you could say, about the Dark Side of the Force? HW: Right, right. (Laughter) DK: So we actually have technologies that prevent people from trying to use this device to monitor somebody without their consent. Because the device understands space, it will ask you to prove, by doing certain movements, that you have access to the space and you are the person who you are asking the device to monitor. So technology-wise, we have technology that we integrate to prevent misuse, but also, I think there is a role for policy, like everything else, and hopefully, with the two of them, we can control any misuse. HW: Amazing. Thank you so much. DK: Thank you. (Applause) |
Well, I think it looks very bad. For example, Sweden, that has had no activity whatever in Iraq, has taken 9,000 refugees in 2006. Why is it that a country that has been neutral with respect to this has done so much more than we have? And we're a multi-cultural country. I live in California. My goodness, if you ever want to see a multi-cultural place it's in coastal California. We have the ability to absorb people from other countries with different views. We have loads of them in California and we do all up and down the East Coast as well. |
The caller from San Antonio, for instance, mentioned that it took about a year and a half before they saw any significant improvement with -in his friend. So while it really is - it would have been great if we can see all the changes within a week or two. That is not the reality.
Our - many of our patients take very small steps. We do not expect big changes in a week or two, even after their discharge from rehabilitation, which may last as long as three to four weeks. Once they're discharged, we tell them that this is not the end of the recovery. Recovery will take place over a long period of time. |
Well, the prosecution slimmed their case down. They received a bunch of criticism after the mistrial that the case was too convoluted, that it was too long. It took six months to try. They were criticized for focusing on all the salacious details of what the defendants spent their money on, you know, the $6,000 shower curtain and so on. So they pared all that down, and I think they brought in one of their crack fraud prosecutors who--he just did a very good job of laying out the case. And he basically gave the jury, I would say, several credit hours' worth of an MBA... |
Well, it's going to be difficult because of the cost of so many things that the - our president is calling for. We're going to have to make a lot of painful political decisions. But we are confident that - we wish really we could persuade the Republicans. But we are confident that we'll have enough votes in the House to reach the number of votes that we need to pass the president's budget. And a lot of it has to do with the president's dreams and aspirations. And the things that we will have to be able to sell our colleagues as to how important it's going to be with the ever overwhelming expenses of the recovery package that we concern ourselves with the future of our kids and our children's children. |
Disgusted with the poverty, the crime, the corruption that categorized Newark, Corey Booker made headlines four years ago when he tried to take on the Sharpe James regime in Newark and lost. Booker was just inaugurated as mayor. Rather than let the first campaign dissuade him, he ran again. And this time not only did he win, but his entire slate of city council candidates also won, erasing the last political vestiges of Sharpe James' regime.
The Post could have also talked about the types of innovative solutions that Booker proposed to solve them. Recently, the Washington Post ran a cover story on Booker. In choosing their angle, the Post could have focused on the hurdles that Booker faces. Newark is one of the poorest cities in the country with high dropout rates, high crime rates, high unemployment rates, and high rates of illness. |
When I read that the country was left 70 percent female, and when I learned that women were working together hand in hand, Hutu and Tutsi, to do things they had never done in their lives, to learn to read, to build schools for their children, to start businesses, I was very impressed. And when I went and I meet the survivors, I was even more inspired. Before the genocide, boys outnumbered girls in school by 9 to 1. Today, they're in school in equal numbers. Women were barely five percent of the government. Today, they are almost 50 percent of the Parliament, which is the highest in the world. So, there have been significant strides, and both personally and politically, women have changed their country. And it just become more than a film to both of us. We didn't dream at the beginning that it would receive an Academy Award. But all of this attention is just shining more light on this really deserving story. |
I've said the same thing. It's not at all damaging. This is reality. As I said in Iraq, when I was the commander there, you dont end an industrial strength insurgency by killing or capturing all the bad guys. You have to kill, capture, or turn the bad guys, and that means reintegration and reconciliation. In the case of Iraq, we reconciled with tens of thousands. It was, in Iraq, a major decision. We were actually going to sit down with individuals who had our blood on their hands and talk about reconciliation. Again, you're not going to kill or capture your way. Military action is absolutely necessary, but it is not sufficient. |
Yeah, and that's something - I'm glad you used the transcend race (laughter) carefully or cautiously. This is something I've been giving a lot of thought to over the last few weeks as I've been hearing from people in response to the podcast. And what's at once inspiring about Oprah's story is also I think something that we have to be really careful about. And that's using a singular story as an example of success or the ability to, like you said, transcend race or anything else.
We can't look at her narrative as being one that's easily translatable across the spectrum. It was a single story. But there is something about her and her authenticity that allowed white America to see her not as Oprah Winfrey the African-American talk show host but simply by the end of it as just Oprah. People felt like they were on a first-name basis with her. What that is I haven't quite figured out yet, but there's something about her. |
Although Buck kept losing his appeals in the Texas courts, by 2000, an appeal based on Quijano's similar testimony in another case made it to the Supreme Court. While the case was pending, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn formally admitted that the state had denied the defendant his constitutional right to be sentenced without regard to the color of his skin and that the psychologist's references to race seriously undermined the fairness, integrity and reputation of the judicial process.
Importantly, Cornyn also announced his office had identified six other capital cases in which the defendant was sentenced to die after similar racial claims by Quijano. In three of the cases, including Buck's, Quijano was put on the witness stand by the defense. And in three, he was put on by the prosecution. Cornyn promised that all would be treated the same way and that his office would not object if the inmates sought a new sentencing hearing. |
To an unusual degree among the great philosophers, G W F Hegel’s influence has waxed and waned. At his death in 1831, he was the reigning voice in German philosophy. His followers, however, soon split into opposed camps: the Right Hegelians, a conservative and religious group, and the Left Hegelians, a socially radical group including Karl Marx. Amid their squabbles, Hegel’s star began to fade in Germany. But in the late 19th century, it once again rose to prominence in the rest of Europe and in the United States. Certain strains of 20th-century Continental philosophy were deeply marked by his influence, such as French existentialism and the Frankfurt school of critical theory. But 20th-century Anglophone philosophy reacted strongly against the neo-Hegelian thought that dominated the universities at the end of the 19th century. In English-speaking lands (including the US), Hegel has lived under a cloud for the past century: his writing too dense, his ideas too abstract, his politics as well as his theology too suspect. His works have been treated with derision in mainstream Anglophone philosophy, and excluded from the canon that trained philosophers need to master. The logjam that blocked English-language Hegel studies, however, is finally crumbling, and a number of Americans are leading the way. Again, Hegel’s star rises. It isn’t outlandish to suggest that the new openness to Hegel marks an important inflection point in US philosophy. Hegel’s reception in the US has long been complicated. In the mid-to-late 19th century, he was widely read and respected. There were several well-established groups, often heavy with German immigrants, dedicated to Hegel study, such as the Ohio and the St Louis Hegelians. There were prominent Hegelian Idealists in the universities, notably Josiah Royce at Harvard and G Watts Cunningham at Cornell. And, perhaps most important, several Pragmatists, especially Charles S Peirce and John Dewey, were influenced by Hegel. (William James was not a Hegel fan.) Then the reaction set in. It started in England, with Bertrand Russell and G E Moore’s revolt against the British Idealists, but the Americans picked up the banner and then doubled down on the rejection of Hegel with the infusion of logical positivists escaping Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Portrait of G W F Hegel (1831) by Jakob Schlesinger at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photo courtesy Marcel Molina Jr/FlickrAnglophone philosophy turned against Hegel for several reasons. His philosophy was seen as the epitome of a grand metaphysical system purporting to lay out a priori the fundamental structure of reality, which turned out to be mental, or in Hegel’s vocabulary, spiritual – something like a world soul, or (even worse), a Spinozistic, pantheistic God. Thus, not only was Hegel’s system grandiose metaphysics, it was grandiose theology as well. Hegel also defended a holism that conflicted with the atomism (and the foundationalistic theory of knowledge) that comes naturally with empiricism and which seemed to be a lesson taught by modern science. Hegel’s philosophy opposed the antimetaphysical, atomistic, foundationalist and empiricist bent of Anglophone philosophy, which was also increasingly secular in orientation. At a slightly less abstract level, Anglophone philosophy had become enamoured of the developments in logic initiated by George Boole, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Investigations into logic, generalised into the philosophy of language, became first philosophy in Anglophone lands. From this perspective, Hegel’s logic (arguably the heart of his philosophy) was either terribly retrograde or, in all its talk about dialectic, hardly intelligible. And last, the obscurity of Hegel’s writing made rejecting Hegelian philosophy all the easier. After all, who could tell what he was actually saying? The renaissance in Hegel appreciation that has bloomed in the past few decades in the US responds to most of these complaints. It has been led by Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, and Ken Westphal. Most recently, Robert B Brandom’s massive volume on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), called A Spirit of Trust (2019), has gone beyond Hegel interpretation to elaborate a philosophy that, while still rooted in the philosophy of language, also reclaims Hegel as a (maybe even the) seminal forebear. The initial move by Pippin and Pinkard, writing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, was to argue for a ‘non-metaphysical’ reading of Hegel. Such a reading sees Hegel’s philosophy as an extension and radicalisation of Immanuel Kant’s; it emphasises the respects in which Hegel, like Kant, is critical of the rationalistic metaphysics that believes the fundamental truths governing the world can be known a priori through reason alone. Hegel, they say, is not investigating some supersensible reality. He is instead investigating the categories we use to think about and act within the world. Spirit is not some transcendent entity above and beyond the world. Neither is it simply identical to the material world. Rather, Spirit is identified with the social world and, especially, the normative structures that constitute human social interactions and, especially, human rationality. Such normative structures are necessarily embodied in material conditions and activities, but they cannot simply be identified with naturalistically (ie, non-normatively) described activities of material bodies. Take chess as an example of a normative structure. An action such as making a chess move cannot simply be identified with a particular motion in space, because chess moves first need not require any particular motion, since one can play chess not only with different kinds of chess pieces, but without any pieces at all, and, second, it must be performed by agents following widely recognised and historically developed rules. Hegel’s story about the development of Spirit is a story about the evolution of the normative structures both realised in and governing human social structures and interactions – structures that make rational thought possible. Semantic theory is key to the revival of Hegelian thought This view of Hegel’s project addresses the supposed metaphysical grandiosity of the Hegelian system: it is not a knowledge of some otherworldly entity or realm, but an attempt to organise the knowledge (both theoretical and practical) accrued over history concerning the sensible and social world in which we live. Nor is the Hegelian system aprioristic: Hegel explicitly allows for the ongoing historical development of the categorial scheme in terms of which the world is to be articulated. That is, while Kant thought that the categorial scheme that structures thought is fixed and immutable – simply given to us – Hegel recognised that human thought has been developing and refining itself over time, not just by the accrual of new particular facts, but also by reorganising them in new ways and developing new methods for revealing, even creating, new kinds of facts. There is room in the dialectical development of our categories to accommodate empirical discoveries that lead to new ways of thinking, such as the development of Newtonian mechanics. The historical consciousness in Hegel’s philosophy is an attractive point for many who find the ahistorical approach of mainstream Anglophone philosophy blindered. Any real revival of Hegelian thought among Anglophone analysts, however, would need to overcome the atomistic foundationalism that originally inspired analysis. That is where Wilfrid Sellars, who did not identify as at all Hegelian, enters the tale. Sellars is an interesting figure. He thought of himself as an analytic philosopher: together with Herbert Feigl, originally a member of the Vienna Circle, he compiled the first canonical textbook of analytic philosophy and in 1950 founded Philosophical Studies, the first English-language journal explicitly devoted to analytic philosophy. But Sellars was widely read in both historical and contemporary philosophy, in Continental as well as in Anglophone philosophy. He simply did not draw the boundaries that many ‘analytic’ philosophers drew. Prior to Sellars, ‘analytic’ philosophers took the idea of ‘analysis’ dead seriously: they sought to isolate the fundamental ‘atoms’ of which our knowledge and experience – indeed, the world itself – were composed, and then to show how the structures of knowledge, experience and the world resulted from construction in accordance with the rules of modern logic. They sought to update a basically empiricist philosophy that derives ultimately from the work of David Hume and John Stuart Mill. Recognising this empiricist bent of Anglophone philosophy, Sellars sought to move it to a more sophisticated Kantian stage that does justice to the fact that the representationality (or intentionality) that underlies all knowledge and experience is never atomistic, but always systematic, and always subject to norms, to standards of correctness. Sellars attacked atomism and foundationalism in his essay ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (1956). Despite its length, this turns out to be just the outline of a rich, complex revision of mainstream epistemology and philosophy of mind in mid-20th-century Anglophone philosophy. It presciently foreshadowed many of the developments in the late 20th century. One important dimension of Sellars’s view was a semantic theory that differed just enough from the then-dominant theories to enable Sellars’s followers to begin to make sense of Hegel’s logic, a major step towards resuscitating Hegelian philosophy. Brandom’s contribution to the recent ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretation of Hegel is that semantic theory is key to the revival of Hegelian thought, so let’s examine it closely. The analytic tradition relied on what seemed to be a straightforward conception of semantics. Whereas syntax concerns intralinguistic relations (wellformedness, rules for composition of legal strings of the language), semantics – the discipline concerned with specifying the content of linguistic expressions – concerns the relation between language and the world. But Sellars denies that semantics requires a basic word-world relation at all. Rather, the content of a linguistic expression – and also the content of a concept or a thought – is a matter of the proper inferential relations it bears to other expressions or thoughts. So semantics is primarily a matter of word-word relations, instead of word-world. In explicating this ‘inferentialist’ theory of meaning, Sellars extends the notion of inference to cover not just the formally valid inferences explored in formal logic – inferences that depend only on the syntactic structure of the sentences involved, and, thus, inferences in which the non-logical words are irrelevant to the validity of the inference – but also material inferences. Material inferences are inferences whose validity is not guaranteed by the syntax of the sentences alone. For example, the inference from ‘The ball is red’ to ‘The ball is coloured’ is not formally valid, but it is a perfectly good inference. In Sellars’s view, semantics is not all about intralinguistic connections, for our responses to the world around us, called language-entry transitions (or observation reports), and the way we act on our stated intentions and desires, called language-exit transitions, are also important elements in the constitution of meaning. How one interacts with the world (and with other people) is important for interpreting one’s beliefs and desires. The result is that the content of a word or sentence, and equally the content of a concept or thought, is determined by its position within a complex linguistic economy that includes observation reports, inferences, various speech acts, etc, all responsive to norms of proper usage. This is a holistic and non-foundationalistic semantics, for there are no expressions whose content is determined independently of other expressions in the system. Sellars’s younger colleague Brandom picked up this thread of Sellars’s thought and brought to the fore the fact that our concepts have histories, stories about how they came to have the connections that make them the concepts they are. Brandom then used this view of semantics to interpret Hegel’s conception of dialectic. Brandom includes not only material connections between concepts, but also material exclusions: what a concept excludes or is materially incompatible with is no less significant for its content than what it entails or is entailed by. Colours cannot have mass, for instance; a fish cannot be warm-blooded. Such incompatibilities help interpret the notion of determinate negation that Hegel makes much of. According to Brandom, writing in A Spirit of Trust: As a matter of deep pragmatist semantic principle, the only way to understand the content of a determinate concept, [Hegel] thinks, is by rationally reconstructing an expressively progressive history of the process of determining it.This is as true for our categorial concepts – the concepts by which we organise our arsenal of first-order concepts – as it is of those first-order concepts, which apply directly to objects, events, etc. For instance, in ‘The tennis ball is yellow’, ‘tennis’, ‘ball’ and ‘yellow’ are all first-order concepts applied to a particular object. Categorial concepts classify other concepts into conceptual kinds, as in ‘Yellow is a visual quality; ball is a geometric shape.’ There are various kinds of qualities – visual, tactile, etc – and various kinds of shape properties – sphere, cube, torus. Brandom thus fleshes out Sellars’s original semantic vision in ways that connect directly to Hegel’s thought. Let’s now unpack what Brandom means by ‘rationally reconstructing an expressively progressive history’ of the determination of a concept. Understanding a determinate concept requires a ‘rational reconstruction’ of its history The content of a concept is determined by its position in the network of inferential relations and real-world applications in which it plays a role. It is not the job of philosophers to determine the contents of most first-order, empirical concepts, such as ‘magenta’ or ‘elephant’. The philosopher’s job does concern determining the contents of categorial concepts, those high-level ideas that organise the bevy of lower-order, empirical concepts: what makes something a cause or a substance. The contents of the subjective concepts we employ in coping with the world around us are not fixed and immutable. There are several sources of change in such concepts. Experience is one important source: the European concept of swans changed when black swans were discovered in Australia. Empirical science can amplify such changes: we now possess a far more refined concept of, say, water or matter than our predecessors hundreds of years ago. Normally, experience induces change in our first-order empirical concepts, but categorial conceptions can also be influenced. The history of enquiry is thus a story in which our conceptions of causation and material objecthood have also changed. For that matter, empirical investigations are not the only sources of conceptual change, for developments in religion and the arts, in politics and philosophical reflection also influence the changing profiles of our concepts. Equality of the sexes is now regularly acknowledged in the West, though not as regularly practised – a significant change from earlier eras. One problem, however, is that not all conceptual change is for the good. For instance, there are now compelling arguments that the concept of race is a relatively late addition to the conceptual arsenal of Western culture and by no means a salutary one. It enabled arbitrary and invidious distinctions among people, and supported the unjust oppression of a large number of humans. Yet it is also an important concept in understanding current social structures and practices; we cannot simply cease to use it anymore. This is why Brandom (speaking for Hegel) thinks that understanding a determinate concept requires a ‘rational reconstruction’ of its history. Such a rational reconstruction is a reasoned and evidence-based story about how and why the concept came to have the role, the inferential connections, that it does. In many cases, that story will provide a justification for the continued use and development of a concept. In some cases, it might limit the realm of application or even undermine our entitlement to continue using a concept, pushing its development in a very different direction. Sometimes it will justify abandoning the concept altogether and assigning it a purely historical role, as happened with phlogiston. Concepts to be retained and developed will have an ‘expressively progressive history’. Those we (ought to) abandon or limit, such as phlogiston or race, will not. An expressively progressive history will be one that exhibits the use of the concept, over the course of its history, to be ever better, to be a steadily improving (though perhaps not without occasional setbacks) expression of the concept as it is in reality. Dictionary definitions are, therefore, terrible ways to determine the content of a concept; at best they are a mere snapshot of the current state of things. A true determination of a concept’s content would be an historical account exhibiting how the concept came to have its current role in our behavioural economy. The same applies to explicating the content of a principle. Of course, not every concept or principle ends up revealing aspects of the truth, and thus not every explication of them will end up vindicating the concept or principle. At any point in history, some concepts will be in jeopardy, not clearly supported by an expressively progressive history. Items like the concept of phlogiston or the principle of white supremacy will be so explicated that their lack of vindication is exhibited. In explaining his vision of how concepts unfold dialectically, Brandom exploits an analogy to judicial reasoning in common law. The concepts and principles of common law have never been explicitly and precisely formulated. In fact, they could not be finally, once and for all, settled, for they could not be specified in sufficient detail to apply without further judgment given the details of the cases. That is, they are necessarily subject to adaptation and refinement in response to new or changing conditions. Each judge renders an opinion on a particular case in the light of the recorded facts of the case and the established precedents. The kicker is that a judge can decide that some previous cases were wrongly decided, that some precedents are more probative than others. That judgment, in turn, might be overturned. There is no limit or end point where everything is finally settled, no ultimate judge. Humanity’s attempts to discover the truth and do what’s right are to be seen as engaged in a similar, ongoing back-and-forth among the players. The procedures of common law move towards justice insofar as the judges are sincerely dedicated to ‘getting it right’, uncorrupted by personal, political or religious considerations, even as we recognise that there are no ideally objective judges. The societal process that Brandom models on common law can hope to move further and further towards the truth only to the extent that the contributors are sincerely (and rationally) striving in good faith to achieve truth and foster human flourishing. Society can achieve its ideal state only if a compassionate, forgiving spirit of trust pervades and prevails among its agents. Hegel’s dialectic is not so much an abstruse philosophical methodology as it is an idealisation of the process by which imperfectly rational, finite thinkers reach for stable, enduring truths. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom tells us that Hegel’s philosophy includes a semantics that is morally edifying. For properly understanding the conditions of having determinate thoughts and intentions, of binding ourselves by determinately contentful conceptual norms in judgment and action, turns out to commit us to adopting to one another practical recognitive attitudes of a particular kind: forgiveness, confession, and trust … A proper understanding of ourselves as discursive creatures obliges us to institute a community in which reciprocal recognition takes the form of forgiving recollection: a community bound by and built on trust.Brandom’s approach shares much with that of the ‘non-metaphysical’ Hegelians, but there are some significant metaphysical commitments hidden within it. Notice that, for Brandom, ‘concept’ and ‘principle’ are ambiguous: there is (a series of) human or subjective concepts-of-x, mental representations specifiable to particular times, places and cultural communities, and then there is the concept, the objective concept-of-x, the full truth, the ideal towards which the series of particular human concepts aims. Brandom is committed to the (subjective) reality of the particular, embodied, localised concepts-and-principles operating in people’s minds and to the (objective) reality of concepts-and-principles that are, in some perfectly good sense, ‘out there’ in the world, independent of any thinkers. Brandom takes concepts and principles to have both a subjective and an objective reality – in that regard, like Plato. However, the objective reality of concepts and principles, according to Brandom, is not to be found in some supersensible reality known only by pure, intuitive reason – in that regard, like Aristotle. Brandom takes it that concepts are embedded in the forms of things themselves. He thinks that the objective, sensible world is ‘always already in a conceptual (and so, ultimately, thinkable, intelligible) shape that it does not owe to any activity by the thinking subjects to whom it is in principle intelligible’. If it is raining, we ought to think things outside will be wet. If it is raining, then, necessarily, things outside will be wet Thinking through these claims takes us a bit deeper into Brandom’s theory. The inferential connections that are constitutive of the content of a concept are modal connections, what is necessarily connected to a concept and what is merely possibly connected to it. Perhaps there are other modalities as well, such as what is probably or typically connected, what ought to be connected and what ought not to be connected. Traditionally, empiricists, following Hume’s example, tend to be very sceptical about the objective existence of such modal connections, since they are not available directly from sensible experience. Brandom’s rationalism sees no reason to doubt the objective reality of modal properties and relations ‘out there’ in the world. Indeed, Brandom goes further than endorsing a straightforward modal realism. While objective concepts are embodied in and determined by the alethic modal properties and relations among the objects of the world (what is necessarily or possibly connected to what), he also believes that our subjective concepts are embodied in and determined by the deontic modal properties and relations among our concepts of the objects of the world (what one ought to think, or is permitted to think, given what else one thinks). Our epistemic goal is to bring into correspondence the deontic properties and relations among our thoughts (for instance, if we think it is raining, then we ought also to think that things outside will be wet) with the alethic properties and relations among the objects of our thought (namely, if it is raining, then, necessarily, things outside will be wet). To the extent that the (deontic) modal patterns in our thoughts reflect the actual (alethic) modal connections among the things we’re thinking about, we have grasped the truth. Notice that the correspondence can go only so far: subjective concepts are changeable, subject to further and further determination as they approximate ever more closely the objective concept they are intended to capture. The objective concept (for instance, what causation in the world really is) is not, we assume, subject to change: it is the stable ideal at which the series of subjective concepts of causation aims. Hegel is an idealist, not in the sense that he thinks the world consists only of mental states; he is an idealist because both subjectivities and objectivity itself are constituted by the rich modal relations, respectively deontic and alethic, among the items of these realms. He is an idealist because the structure of being and the structure of thought are the same, albeit in different ‘keys’ (alethic vs deontic). There is, of course, significant resistance to Brandom’s reading of Hegel, especially among those who emphasise the religious or spiritual dimension of Hegel’s thought. Brandom’s interpretation of Hegel’s God is deflationary: God the Father is the sensuously clothed image of the norm-governed community synthesised by reciprocal recognitive attitudes (having the structure of trust) among self-conscious individuals.Brandom also has difficulty explaining (away?) Hegel’s pronouncements about the teleology of world and the end of history, aspects of Hegel’s system that Brandom barely mentions. Hegel’s revival in English-speaking lands started with social and ethical philosophy, where Hegel’s recognition of the essential sociality of humankind was an important corrective to the almost solipsistic individualism of enlightenment liberalism. The antimetaphysical readings of Hegel broke down further barriers to contemporary understanding by showing that Hegel need not be read as reviving an obsolete rationalistic onto-theology. Brandom’s work, in turn, demonstrates that reading Hegel can contribute to a deeper understanding in the area long central to Anglophone ‘analytic’ philosophy: the philosophy of language. By finding an ‘edifying semantics’ in Hegel, Brandom has positioned Hegel at the very heart of Anglophone philosophy. Hegel is one of the greatest philosophers. As much as I sympathise with the non-metaphysical readings of Hegel, I do not believe one can ignore the onto-theology implicit in so much of his writing. Any historically accurate interpretation of Hegel must take that into account. But it is not what I find most inspiring about Hegel. What I value most in Hegel is his tremendous insight into the structure of philosophical problems. His dialectic, which so often poses a problem for interpreters, is, to my mind, fuelled by the insistence that no concept stands alone. The dialectic is the search for the broader context within which some target concept – whether it be a highly abstract and general concept such as being or a concept with a more specific application such as sense-certainty, work of art, or legal person – can best play its role in capturing the reality we live within. The target concept can only do its job well in the company of other concepts, which, in turn, lead us on to still others. These are not relations captured in formal logic. Time and again, when I turn to Hegel’s treatment of some philosophic topic, illumination emerges from his (admittedly often obscure) discussion. Unravelling his turgid prose turns out to be worth the effort, affording us glimpses of how things ‘hang together’ that others miss. |
I just had a comment that, you know, former Senator Mitchell says that it was kind of playing politics, but I kind of disagree because I can see this as a very detrimental visit based on a policy we're trying to establish in Syria; and not to mention the fact that Ms. Pelosi went over and offered almost a deal to Syria based on Israel's participation, which turned out to be completely fraudulent. So I think there's a little more involved here than politics, and I would say the same thing if this were the Clinton administration and a Republican senator going over and making the same faux pas. |
McCain is actually kind of the flipside of this. McCain is very specific on the spending he'll cut. He's the only candidate willing to take on what many see as one of the biggest boondoggles that Congress involves itself in, which is the farm subsidies. But he doesn't get too excited about tax cuts. McCain voted against President Bush's tax cuts, although he's become a convert and now says he wants to extend them past 2010.
I talked to a lot of fiscal conservatives this week, sort of saying who excites you. And the truth is none of these guys are exciting them. They all have real problems. The only guy who has, on the Republican side, who has some radical new ideas is, I would say, Mike Huckabee. His ideas really are out there. |
Well, the pair of twos are a little bit more ominous than that. I think as Bob and Joe have pointed out, the North Koreans have a nuclear weapons program. Whether or not they have nuclear weapons is conjecture, but they certainly and most probably have produced plutonium, and whether we want that spreading around in non-state actors, in this case, terrorist hands, or even in North Korean hands is a question that we've all asked, and the answer is fundamentally, `No, we don't,' and now we're going to do something about it. You know, the bottom line is, is how much is it worth? And I think that at the end of the day, that the countries involved have settled on an answer, and the answer is in the ballpark of what we're talking about; if we can get North Korea out of the nuclear weapons business and shut them down in a verifiable way in which we hope will be once and for all, it will be well worth the effort. |
You're listening to Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Can you heard of the bacterio-clock? Yeah, can't get one for the holidays. How about bactricity maybe a baccum-cleaner? Well, you haven't heard of that? Well, they have one thing in common. They are all synthetic biology projects that whiz kid undergraduates have dreamt up for the 2008 International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, the iGEM. The idea is to use a tool box of biological parts like different snippets of DNA, for example. To build a machine that operates inside living cells, inside bacteria, inside yeast. And using this approach, students are making cellular biofuel factories, they're devising organic sensors, even solving simple calculations with bacterial computers.
In five years, the program has grown from just a few teams to over 80 and the budding scientists this year hail from four continents and they are on their way to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology right now, to show off their creations in the 2008 International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, the iGEM, and that's what we're going to be talking about. If you'd like to join us, our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK, also we're now tweeting. Twittering, you know what that is? You can - if you want to send us a tweet, if you don't know how to do that. Here's how you do it. Just write the @ sign followed by scifritter, that's our address, scifritter. Your name @ sign scifritter, and we'll get a tweet from you. Also in Second Life, you can join the folks over there in Science Friday Island. |
Well, they're going to let it actually fail, Robert. I mean, that's the point of having the government step in and take over, and we have laws on the books for how you unwind a bank. The thing is you do do euthanasia, and that's what we're talking about here. I mean, Mr. Shelby, Senator Shelby is exaggerating to say we just let them collapse. We didn't even just let IndyMac collapse. But you definitely want to get them on a path where they don't get walking around zombie-like, passing out bad loans and burning through taxpayer money.
: Kenneth Rogoff, you were on John McCain's team of advisors last year, and yesterday he said this about the Obama administration: I don't think they've made the hard decision, and that is to let these banks fail. Has he got it right? |
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. While Syria is the crisis of the moment in the Middle East, Iran looms as an even more difficult challenge in the months ahead. And these two issues are not unconnected. Iran remains the most important ally of President Assad in Damascus, and the survival of his regime is critical to Iran's larger struggle with its Arab rivals.
But the issue that may trigger conflict is Iran's nuclear program. While diplomacy inches ahead, Iran's centrifuges continue to enrich uranium, and both the United States and Israel say time is not unlimited. A recent report undersigned by a number of former officials argues that sanctions may have become counterproductive. Others think it's time or nearly time to consider a military strike. |
Yes, hello. Thank you for taking my call. I had spent a good period of time in a number of different mental institutions as a patient. And when you were speaking earlier about your own willpower to get better, I found that it was extremely difficult to be an advocate for yourself because of the number of medications that you were on. Frequently, you would start medications as soon as you got there, and the doctors would come to see you early in the morning, and many of these had such a severe sedative effect that it was very hard to be articulate.
And most of these things - by the time you left, because of the insurance companies and the number of days you could stay, you really weren't able to get anything working by the time you left. And so, you were sort of in a limbo. And really, I think the difference between those of us who made it out and those of us that we kind of called "lifers" were really that there was someone on the outside who was willing to be an advocate for them, because you were rendered so helpless by these medications. |
...no such party, no third party candidate, except for when the Republicans, when the Whigs died and Republicans came in, has actually won the presidency.
However, I would say that Bloomberg - if he really wants to commit the resources, he's going to basically look at, he's going to look at the blue states and he's going to basically say those are - that's where he is - that's where it's easiest for him to get out his message, to get - to pour lots and lots of money in there and challenge a Democratic candidate who may not be the most popular, and then start picking off select red states. |
Yes, this is one of the great mysteries of - in the barbecue world there's something call the stall. When you cook a large piece of meat like a pork shoulder or a beef brisket, and you watch the temperature go up, you'll see the temperature rise and rise and rise, and then at a certain point it stalls out, it stops rising. And it'll stay plateaued for a period of hours - two hours, even four hours in some cases - and then it will rise again.
And if you look on the Internet, you'll will find that there are literally thousands of page with people arguing about the stall, presenting one theory or another theory, and so as part of the research for the book, we decided to say let's figure out what the barbecue stall is about. |
Scott, this may be very hard to believe, but behind me in the hotel pool are more than 100 Lebanese people, families sunbathing and swimming. They're trying to live as normal a life as possible here. And they have a remarkable capability to compartmentalize the threats and dangers facing them. I guess it's a holdover from the civil war.
This, even though the southern part of the city, which is within sight here just a few miles away, was bombed as early as this morning. That said, life is getting harder here. There are long lines at the gas stations, there are fuel shortages, and gas is being rationed. |
Well, you know, yes and no. When you can perceive the drought coming, getting rid of cattle before everybody else is is somewhat of an advantage. We're a ranch management company, so we - our company itself doesn't own the cattle or the land. We manage those assets for the owners. And uh - so it was definitely a tough decision on their part.
Mostly the cattle that we didn't bring in were yearling cattle that we would've taken in just through the green, growing grass season for four or five months in the summer. So those yearling cattle that would have come on to our places for 120, 130 days, instead of coming on to grass, they went straight to a feedlot. So the owners of those cows had to make that decision to forego the cheaper gain on grass and take them straight to the feedlot. |
Yeah, it's - I think it differs country by country. The research that I think you're referring to was conducted by a psychologist in The Netherlands, who had a group of young men from Spain, Germany and the Netherlands. He posed a scenario to them. He said, what if somebody rudely knocked you off your feet and he turns toward you and sees that he's knocked you off your feet but he gives no sign that he's sorry and you really furious at the guy. What would you say to the man? And he essentially asked 192 young men from Spain, Germany and Netherlands to respond to that kind of situation.
And obviously the vast majority of them came up with fairly unprintable things that they would say in a situation like that. But what the psychologist was trying to find was whether there were patterns to the insults and he found that there actually were patterns to the insults, that in different countries different things matter, that among the Dutch, accusing someone of being infected with a disease was sort of the most potent thing. In other places, it was - it had to do with body parts and in other cases it had to do with other things. So, different countries tend to draw on different motifs in their insults, which is, of course, very interesting. |
Well, I'm not the world's greatest marketer. You know, even though I've had successful films, and I've had some experience. But I was - when I initially undertook the movie, you know, this is made on a smaller budget. It was a labor of love. People didn't get their normal salaries and that sort of thing. It really was an exciting, creative opportunity that a lot of people wanted to get involved in. And I think because we were able to make it for a modest price, we sort of assumed, you know, this is essentially for people who know something about this are interested in it, and have maybe lived through it. But I started screening the movie out of interest and curiosity to various college groups, not just cinema students, but journalism majors, political science majors.
And I found that they were equally fascinated by the story. They're caught up in the drama of it because it's well-written, it's well-acted and you know, and it doesn't depend on history. It illuminates, but the drama is really about - is about, you know, these characters and what they're going through. And, that in and of itself is entertaining the way, you know, a great courtroom thriller can be entertaining. But, I was really excited to see, I think how surprised and really entertained, you know, younger audiences were by the movie. But I still feel like it's a word-of-mouth movie. I mean, they can market it, and I like the trailer too. I think it's great. And, you know, - but it is the kind of movie that people are frankly going to have to see and talk about in order for it to gain a wider audience. |
Yeah, I learned that bottled water in itself isn't the worst thing in the world. I mean, after I looked at it, and I looked at this carbon footprint, I looked at the plastics issue, the waste, the litter, the privatization. I mean the - a huge issue of whether companies can come in, and take water away and make money off of it. But - so it isn't the worst thing in the world. But you know, it's better to buy water than to buy a soda, of course. But the big message in the book is that if our political leaders continue to underfund and ignore the nation's water infrastructure, and the public continues to flee municipal supplies for private, these systems are going to degrade to the point where only people who can afford to buy good water, are going to have it. |
And you do write that President Trump and other politicians have sold the American people and perhaps the British people on a much dimmer view of the state of things. You write Trump convinced voters that our country is going to hell. Despite the industrial output record, Trump convinced voters that we don't make things anymore. Despite the glittering numbers, Trump convinced voters that the economy is always bad - down, down, down. Despite the urban comebacks of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., Trump convinced voters that American cities have no education, they have no jobs and so on. So if everything is so great, then why is this idea that you call declinism so alluring for so many people? |
And the other part that was mentioned about turnout, you know, this is, in our minds, a pretty high-profile race. We're paying a lot of attention to it. We're talking about. But there's - the turnout may be, in terms of dollars spent per vote, is maybe very low because a lot of Republicans are not going to vote for Sanford just because of the problems with the ethical issues.
And Colbert Busch's campaign really has not done a lot to excite the base, particularly trying to find out what is it that she's - her appeal to the African-American community, which is, you know, central to the Democratic vote in that district. So... |
People who probably won't be shown live during the regular broadcast are the nominees and winners for best film editing, sound mixing, production design, sound editing, makeup and hairstyling. They're known in Hollywood as the below-the-line people, the technical crew who work on film after film year after year and drive from the San Fernando Valley while it's still dark to start work by dawn on cold film sets or in airless editing rooms. Designers don't compete to dress them for their big, perhaps only, night at the Oscars.
The folks below the line are the artisans and craftspeople that make a movie speak and sparkle. I've enjoyed seeing the folks below the line take their place on Oscar broadcasts alongside Spielberg, Chadwick Boseman and Meryl Streep. You'd think one night a year, Hollywood could find the time to acclaim them for the magic that would be impossible without them. |
So you mentioned Hurricane Rita that devastated Texas years ago. Also, I mean, there are these inevitable comparisons - and we should be careful with them - but there are still comparisons being drawn to Hurricane Katrina for a lot of reasons, right? It was a devastating storm on the Gulf. So many people displaced - so many lost their lives. We don't have that situation yet in Texas. But there were so many people who fled to Houston from the Gulf, from New Orleans, from Katrina. I mean, are you hearing people draw those comparisons where you're at, Debbie and Jeff? |
Traditional election year issues like gas prices, the economy, even healthcare are not dominating factors in this race. The Iraq War is. And that's why the Connecticut race is being closely watched by strategists in both parties. They're trying to determine how important the war will be for voters in November and in 2008.
Today, we'll step back from Connecticut and look at how the Iraq War is affecting voters across the country. Is it a top issue for most Americans? Is it more energizing for Democrats than Republicans or independents? Will domestic concerns prove to be a bigger deciding factor for most American voters? |
I noted at the beginning of the show that you had commented that this was a disconnect between the Vatican and the American people. And I'd actually reverse that. I see it as a disconnect between my fellow American Catholics and the Vatican. A lot of my conversations with fellow Catholics indicate that they really don't understand church teaching and the doctrine and the reason behind the doctrine.
And I keep thinking, well, if they understood what the church was teaching, they'd make better choices in their own personal lives, and they could keep that between them and their priests. But I do expect my church leaders to - how would you phrase it - toe the party line. If they're going to officially represent the church, they need to represent the official church teaching, and they need to be able to understand it well enough to be able to explain it when people question them why the church teaches what it does. |
That's right. We've got a great family drama. I mean, it's better than "Dallas." It's - you've got a triptych of Kim Jong Un, the youngest son, 26 or 27 or 28, his sister, Kim Kyong Hui, who is Kim Jong Il's closest confidant. And those of us who've been watching North Korea for a long time are very interested in her. Kim Jong Il and his younger sister Kim Kyong Hui lost their mother at a young age, and these two are very close. This is probably the closest person in the world to Kim Jong Il.
Her husband, Jang Song Thaek, is probably the most powerful person in North Korea after Kim Jong Il, maybe more powerful than Kim Jong Il. He has a big family. He has sons and brothers who control a lot of the military. They control the DMZ and they control Pyongyang. So I think what happened is that Kim Jong Il was trying to make this powerful sister and brother-in-law regents for his son, shoring up, you know, their goodwill to protect the young man. But it's really getting kind of interesting. |
Last year at TED we aimed to try to clarify the overwhelming complexity and richness that we experience at the conference in a project called Big Viz. And the Big Viz is a collection of 650 sketches that were made by two visual artists. David Sibbet from The Grove, and Kevin Richards, from Autodesk, made 650 sketches that strive to capture the essence of each presenter's ideas. And the consensus was: it really worked. These sketches brought to life the key ideas, the portraits, the magic moments that we all experienced last year. This year we were thinking, "Why does it work?" What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations, that create meaning? And this is an important question to ask and answer because the more we understand how the brain creates meaning, the better we can communicate, and, I also think, the better we can think and collaborate together. So this year we're going to visualize how the brain visualizes. Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is, but instead, creates a series of mental models through a collection of "Ah-ha moments," or moments of discovery, through various processes. The processing, of course, begins with the eyes. Light enters, hits the back of the retina, and is circulated, most of which is streamed to the very back of the brain, at the primary visual cortex. And primary visual cortex sees just simple geometry, just the simplest of shapes. But it also acts like a kind of relay station that re-radiates and redirects information to many other parts of the brain. As many as 30 other parts that selectively make more sense, create more meaning through the kind of "Ah-ha" experiences. We're only going to talk about three of them. So the first one is called the ventral stream. It's on this side of the brain. And this is the part of the brain that will recognize what something is. It's the "what" detector. Look at a hand. Look at a remote control. Chair. Book. So that's the part of the brain that is activated when you give a word to something. A second part of the brain is called the dorsal stream. And what it does is locates the object in physical body space. So if you look around the stage here you'll create a kind of mental map of the stage. And if you closed your eyes you'd be able to mentally navigate it. You'd be activating the dorsal stream if you did that. The third part that I'd like to talk about is the limbic system. And this is deep inside of the brain. It's very old, evolutionarily. And it's the part that feels. It's the kind of gut center, where you see an image and you go, "Oh! I have a strong or emotional reaction to whatever I'm seeing." So the combination of these processing centers help us make meaning in very different ways. So what can we learn about this? How can we apply this insight? Well, again, the schematic view is that the eye visually interrogates what we look at. The brain processes this in parallel, the figments of information asking a whole bunch of questions to create a unified mental model. So, for example, when you look at this image a good graphic invites the eye to dart around, to selectively create a visual logic. So the act of engaging, and looking at the image creates the meaning. It's the selective logic. Now we've augmented this and spatialized this information. Many of you may remember the magic wall that we built in conjunction with Perceptive Pixel where we quite literally create an infinite wall. And so we can compare and contrast the big ideas. So the act of engaging and creating interactive imagery enriches meaning. It activates a different part of the brain. And then the limbic system is activated when we see motion, when we see color, and there are primary shapes and pattern detectors that we've heard about before. So the point of this is what? We make meaning by seeing, by an act of visual interrogation. The lessons for us are three-fold. First, use images to clarify what we're trying to communicate. Secondly make those images interactive so that we engage much more fully. And the third is to augment memory by creating a visual persistence. These are techniques that can be used to be — that can be applied in a wide range of problem solving. So the low-tech version looks like this. And, by the way, this is the way in which we develop and formulate strategy within Autodesk, in some of our organizations and some of our divisions. What we literally do is have the teams draw out the entire strategic plan on one giant wall. And it's very powerful because everyone gets to see everything else. There's always a room, always a place to be able to make sense of all of the components in the strategic plan. This is a time-lapse view of it. You can ask the question, "Who's the boss?" You'll be able to figure that out. (Laughter) So the act of collectively and collaboratively building the image transforms the collaboration. No Powerpoint is used in two days. But instead the entire team creates a shared mental model that they can all agree on and move forward on. And this can be enhanced and augmented with some emerging digital technology. And this is our great unveiling for today. And this is an emerging set of technologies that use large-screen displays with intelligent calculation in the background to make the invisible visible. Here what we can do is look at sustainability, quite literally. So a team can actually look at all the key components that heat the structure and make choices and then see the end result that is visualized on this screen. So making images meaningful has three components. The first again, is making ideas clear by visualizing them. Secondly, making them interactive. And then thirdly, making them persistent. And I believe that these three principles can be applied to solving some of the very tough problems that we face in the world today. Thanks so much. (Applause) |
Marcia Harris(ph) of San Francisco recalled a former employer in Indianapolis. I worked for an engineer named Ralph Pisswater. When I left to get another job, I worked up the nerve to ask him why he hadn't changed his name. He said, when I was kid my father wouldn't let me. And after I grew up I was damned if I would. And it's not all bad. Nobody forgets my name or loses my reservation or asks me how to spell it.
We have to ask you how to spell your name and how to pronounce it. To send your comments, go to npr.org and click on Contact Us. Please tell us where you live. You can also reach me on Twitter, nprscottsimon, all one word on Twitter. You can correspond with our WEEKEND EDITION editors and producers at NPR WEEKEND. |
I'm never going to say it's permanent. I think American soybean farmers spend a lot of time in countries in Asia, and especially in China, building those relationships. And those - the relationships that we have on the ground are going to be there. But the permanent negative side effects come in because China is now looking at other places where they can source their beans. So they're spending time with South America - you know, a strong competitor to North American farmers. And so China is looking to enhance those relationships, which I think could have a negative effect for a ways down the road. |
I think we all have good reason to be worried. In terms of the educational expansion in China and India that he spoke of, don't forget that in the 1960s, China had no education. During the Cultural Revolution, schools were closed. But from the 1970s on, they've had a massive expansion of basic education. Nine years of basic education are now universal throughout China.
By the year 2012, 12 years of education will be universal. That means that within, say, five to seven years, China will be graduating a higher proportion of students from high school than we do. And, of course, they have millions more students. |
I'm just really wondering, you know, what will it take for the U.N. to work faster in situations like this? And, you know, I think the biggest problem with the U.N. responding to this sort of a situation is it's sitting on bureaucracy. I mean, hundreds of people have died in Sudan already. There is no need to wait any longer. That's the problem with the African conflict, is that people who have the authority to help these situations get resolved, wait too long. You know, it's like almost calling an ambulance and they say well, we'll be there next week. You know, the sooner they react to these conflicts, the less likely hundreds or thousands of people are going to die. But it's just too slow. I don't know how the appropriations work on there. I just was wondering if somebody can tell me, why is it when it comes to African or other global conflicts, the U.N. barely responds or just takes forever responding to these conflicts? |
In 1989, Cambridge University Press announced the publication of a new, three-volume book series: The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. The first volume – edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, and dedicated to logic and the philosophy of language – contained 15 medieval texts, of which 15 were composed by Christian authors. The second volume in the series, this time focusing on ethics and political philosophy, appeared in 2000. Seventeen of the 17 texts included in this collection – edited by Arthur S McGrade, John Kilcullen and Matthew Kempshall – were authored by Christian writers. Late-medieval Jewish or Islamic texts on ethics or politics? Not in our school. The third volume of the series, this one dedicated to mind and knowledge, and edited by Robert Pasnau, appeared in 2002. It contained 12 texts, of which 12 were Christian. No Islamic or Jewish sources made the cut. Due to the success of the first three volumes, the press decided to expand the series by two more, devoted, respectively, to metaphysics and to philosophical theology. It would not be rash to predict that neither volume will include any works by Islamic or Jewish authors. In all likelihood, a reader of this series would get the impression that there simply were no Islamic or Jewish philosophers in late-medieval times (or, at least, no Jewish or Islamic philosophers who wrote on logic, philosophy of language, ethics, politics, or philosophy of mind, or whose works deserve any attention). But perhaps we are jumping to conclusions. Perhaps it was the unavailability of competent translators of medieval philosophical texts in Arabic and Hebrew that accounts for this strict exclusion of such works. If that were the case, then we might, of course, wish to enquire about the reasons for the absence of competent translators. But, for all I can tell, the issue of availability of translators from Arabic and Hebrew had nothing to do with the exclusion of Jewish and Islamic works in this series. If this omission were merely a technical matter, it would be easy for the editors to accommodate such difficulty by retitling the series ‘The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Christian Philosophical Texts’ (my emphasis). This would seem to be a simple matter of ‘truth in advertising’. And, yet, they did not make this simple qualification. Why did the editors of The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts not adopt a title that would specify that the series was restricted to Christian texts? Presumably, the specification would make the series look much more parochial – as it indeed is – being a set of anthologies devoted to a specific religious tradition. In attempting to present the Christian tradition as the only game in town in late medieval philosophy, the editors of the series apparently thought they were representing universal philosophical discourse (rather than that of a particular religious tradition), and thus the exclusion of Islamic and Jewish works became a device for asserting the universality of Christianity. An alternative explanation for the exclusion of medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy might be that the series editors were simply unaware of the exclusionary, distorting and discriminatory nature of their editorial policy: they may have innocently assumed that medieval philosophy is just Christian philosophy. Ascribing conceptual blindness of such a vast scope to highly competent scholars seems to me barely credible, and yet we cannot absolutely rule it out since such blindness is indeed a common mark of activity dominated by ideology. Before we discuss what readers of the Cambridge volumes are missing, let me make one brief observation. Current Anglo-American philosophy is seriously (and rightly) engaged with the question of how to rectify the historical exclusion of various groups from the philosophical tradition. The neglect of medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy from the historiography of medieval philosophy is only partly like the exclusion of other groups, however. There is a crucial irony to this particular exclusion. Medieval philosophical culture, despite all its problems, was significantly multicultural; Islamic, Jewish, and Christian authors frequently engaged with each other’s work, sometimes even collaborating. It is only we, today, who are creating a purely Christian narrative that excludes Jewish and Islamic authors from the philosophical discourse. But what do we, as readers and scholars, miss out on if we neglect medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy? I will speak to the case of Jewish philosophy, but the same ideas (though with edifying variations and divergences) apply to Islamic philosophy. Medieval Jewish philosophy engages with arguments related to its two main textual sources: Aristotelian philosophy, and classical Jewish works (the Talmud, midrash, and Scripture). So far, this characterisation is not that different from medieval Christian philosophy. However, on a closer look, the differences abound. Judaism was a small, marginal and dispersed religious minority in the Middle Ages. These characteristics played a role in determining the features of its philosophical discourse. Partly due to its far-flung social distribution, and partly due to its stress on performance of religious commandments (ie, actions) rather than beliefs, rabbinic Judaism never developed a set system of binding dogma. There were attempts to create such a system – the most famous of which was Maimonides’s enumeration of his Thirteen Principles of Faith – but without exception such attempts were colossal failures. As a result, on many issues of theological and philosophical significance, the views of medieval Jewish philosophers were all over the place. Some claimed that God has no physical features, while others viewed God as encompassing all of space within himself (or even as having a body); some viewed God as having no personal features whatsoever, while others ascribed to God feelings, such as regret, love, and even guilt. Does this variety of perspectives reflect a principled commitment to tolerance of diversity? Not necessarily. A certain degree of tolerance was required for the sheer survival of Jewish communities: the price of a harsh policy against dissent would have been the loss of members of the community and, for such a small community, such a loss would be a heavy price to pay. Medieval Jewish philosophy was, above all, deeply informed by the literary persona of a single author: Moses Maimonides (1135-1204). Maimonides was not only the greatest medieval Jewish philosopher but also one of the greatest rabbinic authorities of all time. His Mishneh Torah is still widely considered one of the two most authoritative codifications of Rabbinic law. And yet, paradoxically, Maimonides was also considered by many Jews to be one of the greatest heretics of their religion. Maimonides privileged daring, unorthodox philosophical positions, denying that God has any personality Although Maimonides was quite loyal to the teachings of Aristotle, he took far bolder positions on theological issues. Thus, for example, in his philosophical masterpiece, the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides argued that, if unbiased philosophical enquiry led to belief in the eternity of the world, rather than in the Biblical account of creation, one should not shy away from affirming philosophical truth just because it conflicts with Scripture. He pointed out that there are many more passages in Scripture that ascribe corporeality to God than passages that support creation ex nihilo. Resolutely advocating a radical reinterpretation of all such passages to make them conform to the philosophical view that God is incorporeal, Maimonides claimed that we should likewise reinterpret all Biblical passages referring to creation to imply that the world is eternal, if that was the more tenable philosophical view. On several key religious issues, Maimonides also privileged daring and unorthodox philosophical positions, denying that God has any personality (can a non-person be a lawgiver?), as well as naturalising the notion of divine providence (so that ‘reward’ is just the natural result of conducting ones’ life rationally and properly). He deflated the miraculousness of divine miracles, and carefully crafted a denial of personal immortality. The first reactions to Maimonides’s claims were quite volatile, but his supporters were also numerous among the rabbinic strata. And when some of his opponents announced a ban on studying philosophy for anyone under the age of 25, Maimonides’s proponents responded by announcing a counter-ban on those who disallow the study of philosophy. Maimonides’s followers were numerous among medieval Jewish philosophers and, within a short period of time after his death, one can already speak about a Maimonidean school – or rather, schools – of philosophy, distinguished from each other by the degree of boldness in their pursuit of the philosophical truth, regardless of its agreement with common religious beliefs and norms. Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) and the audacious rationalist philosopher Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) were two of the latest representatives of this school of radical Maimonideanism. Both were willing to pay a significant personal price for the sake of maintaining their intellectual and philosophical integrity. The radical Maimonideans were not atheists. In fact, the very opposite is true: they were motivated by a genuine zeal for a true conception of God, a conception that is free and clean from the widely prevalent anthropomorphic portrayal of God among both the masses and a significant share of the rabbinic elite. In this context, Maimonides himself would occasionally refer derogatorily to ‘Hamon ha-Rabbanim’, literally, the rabbinic multitude, or, if you wish, the rabbinic hoi polloi, though his rabbinic qualifications were far more impressive than the vast majority of these ‘commoners’. The Janus-faced reputation of Maimonides and his thought persisted in conflicted attitudes during the early modern period. In the 18th century, Rabbi Jacob Emden (the rabbinic consultant of Moses Mendelssohn, the leader of the Jewish Enlightenment movement) proposed that perhaps there were two authors named Moses Maimonides, for one could not possibly comprehend how the illustrious author of the celebrated rabbinic code, the Mishneh Torah, could also pen the horrible philosophical assertions found in the Guide of the Perplexed. A similarly ambivalent response is reflected in a common practice among early modern central-European rabbis who wished to study Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed. A 16th-century document issued in Prague contains a detailed list of the suspicious, heretical opinions one can find in the Guide. Any rabbinic scholar of the time who wished to study the book was required to review this list of opinions and to confess, on the one hand, not to believe in any of these heretical opinions while, on the other hand, promising not to impute any of them to Maimonides, the great Talmudist. Thomas Aquinas’s writings demonstrate sustained interest in the views of non-Christian writers In many ways, Maimonides was a Mediterranean thinker, as Sarah Stroumsa puts it in her fascinating study. This characterisation is apt not only in terms of his actual biography (he was born in Córdoba, Spain, emigrated to North Africa, then Palestine, and eventually settled in Fustat, Egypt), nor even in terms of his correspondence (which ranged from Provence in the west, to Yemen and Baghdad in the east) but, even more so, in terms of the community of philosophers with whom he was conversing. His two favourite philosophers were Aristotle and al-Farabi (for the most part, Maimonides had little appreciation for his Jewish philosophical predecessors). Indeed, Maimonides bluntly asks his readers to avoid evaluating views according to our social disposition or our categorisation of the speaker who expresses them. ‘Hear the truth from whoever spoke it’ became a slogan of this attitude of Maimonides. Judging opinions according to their veracity, rather than the social milieu of the speaker, is a recommendation that is still very much advisable today. Maimonides was not at all unique among medieval philosophers in ascribing much importance to the philosophical views of thinkers who were not his co-religionist. Thomas Aquinas’s writings demonstrate sustained interest in the views of Maimonides, Avicenna and other non-Christian writers, and Aquinas’s discussion of these writers is respectful and serious. We should not disregard the significant religious violence that was not uncommon in the later Middle Ages. Still, there is something quite impressive in the manner in which medieval Christian, Islamic and Jewish philosophers read the works of each other, frequently disagreeing, but not that rarely also taking inspiration from the writing of thinkers belonging to other religions. Let me return to the riddle of Maimonides. What happens to a culture whose greatest religious scholar is also its greatest heretic? This question has bothered scholars of Maimonides, of medieval Jewish philosophy, and of rabbinics for a very long time, and we are still far from having a satisfying answer to the question. It is clear, however, that many standard assumptions are suddenly called into question by virtue of the centrality of such a thinker. ‘If Maimonides could assert x, why may not I?’ The only way to embark on such questioning of our assumptions, prompted by past philosophical insight, is by studying the actual works of the philosophers whose insights move us. Many such gems of philosophical wisdom are contained in medieval and early modern Jewish and Islamic philosophical works. And there are many. But to study this corpus of philosophical literature, we must first acknowledge its very existence. And this is something that present-day assumptions about the scope and study of philosophy’s past have lamentably obscured. |
I originally came in on evolution, but global warming is just as good because I think it presents the same types of problem, and I see the problem is we aren't properly educating students. You know, religion teaches stuff as fact, and unfortunately in science classes we do the same thing. I mean, science is a process, and you go through stuff. So I mean, you know, we believe in evolutionary theory because there is absolutely nothing else that will fit, so if you're talking about going through ideas--providing the ideas that would make sense if we taught how science is done right and why we accept certain theories as being the best we have. And the reason I'm stressing the best we have is because, for instance, Newtonian mechanics and quantum theories are very exact. String theory is highly speculative. Evolution and global warming are somewhere in the middle, yet they're all lumped together as theories and so people naturally come along and say, `Hey, well, it's just a theory.' You know, that's one part of it.
You know, but you know, the media have a lot to do with it. You know, for instance, since we're talking about global warming, on the issue of global warming as far as I can tell there's a very short, concise, scientific definition. It's pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so that it heats the Earth. Now I'm not going to argue--it's obviously that there's climate change. There's glaciers melting, you know, there's longer summers. Insects are coming out earlier in the spring. There's all sorts of things to indicate climate change. But there isn't a whole lot of evidence to show even though we're dumping tons of, you know, greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that the atmosphere is warming at all. John Christy and Roy Spencer for years, you know, have been refuting all of the things that have come along. Now they until, I think, last May were who Nature used to vet the science on it. So I mean, you know, unless scientists are using different definitions, which never gets to the public, that's part of what's causing the confusion. |
Well, I think it's not a norm. You always have your occasions, once in a while, that somebody breaks the rules. And when they do that, obviously, and we find out about it, and we investigate - and we take action because, you know, first of all, it's designed for your safety and the safety of others, and of course you don't want to compromise the mission. So all of those - three factors are the basic premise behind it.
And you know, so if it happens - again, it doesn't happen as a norm; you're always going to have a renegade or two, or people tend to find themselves, come together, and they form a clique, perhaps. And they do engage in such activity. And it's a matter of time before they get caught. |
Yeah. And as Professor DeLong said, this problem is already happening, and there's more than a million Americans ages 75 years of age and older who are in the work force still; another 1.4 million who are ages 70 to 74; 2.7 million who are ages 65 to 69. So you're seeing, as the work force ages, at the same time 3.5 million baby boomers have left the work force in 2001, every single day, the oldest, most experienced people who still have that long-term career path, they're leaving. And what you're seeing is that the workplace revolution that we thought was about the late '90s about magical business models--the real workplace revolution is about an environment where business is going to be very lean and flexible, and the premium is going to be: Recruit better people, get them up to speed faster, get more work and better work out of every person.
How you manage a short-term transactional employment relationship is very different, and you see this in health care already, where nurse managers are forced to hire temporary nurses. They're forced to go back and hire their retired nurses. They're scrambling to fill these gaps, and where maybe the gap is growing the fastest is what we call the midlevel leadership gap. The bench strength for leadership in organizations is really a huge problem. There's a dearth of bench strength for leadership. And as organizations try to figure out how to adapt, it's precisely--as Professor DeLong said, they're already scrambling to recruit. They're--and if they use their old systems of getting people up to speed and they use their old systems for managing, what they find is that they lose people inside of a couple of years. They get no return on their training investment. So they need to find a much more high-intensity approach to recruiting and training and managing people so that they get more work out of them more quickly. |
Well, Rachel, the White House is alarmed at what they call the ongoing crisis at the border. What bugs Trump is that asylum officers let most applicants enter the U.S. and wait here for months or years for their day in immigration court. That's created a backlog of nearly a million cases today. And yet they point to the fact that 8 out of 10 people who ask for asylum are ultimately denied because they don't meet the definition of fleeing persecution. Immigrant advocates countered that these people are fleeing genuinely dangerous circumstances in their home countries and they deserve due process and refuge. |
Right. Well, President Moon has been very careful. His official line has been very firm and very clear, which is, this is not anything that's related to North Korea. If there is a drawdown in troops, it will be for different reasons. But you do have an adviser to the president saying in more than one occasion in the last couple of weeks that if there is peace on the Korean peninsula, we may have to reconsider the need for U.S. troops. There are 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea right now, and North Korea doesn't like their presence there.
What's interesting, of course, as you point out, is that President Trump also has questioned the wisdom of having them there. He's the first president to really push for this since Jimmy Carter, and Jimmy Carter pushed for this for very different reasons. But he backed off after a little while because his generals and his advisers convinced him it wasn't as wise a plan as he had thought. |
And, you know, it's hard to cram these extraordinary lives into sometimes just 45 seconds, and one of the people I had to do that for was Rosa Guy. And she was a leading author of young adult fiction, primarily in the 1970s and the late '60s and early '80s. And she's one of the people who really introduced a lot of very topical issues to young adult.
She wrote about class and race and immigration and sexuality at a moment when people weren't really doing that so often in young adult fiction. And her own backstory is amazing. It's like something out of a fairy tale almost. She was born in Trinidad, came to Harlem when she was seven years old to join her family, who preceded her there, and things completely fell apart. |
This is the main reason. Our transmitter was hit last October. It was the whole station. But we managed to fix everything except for the transmitter. Now we work with a rented transmitter, which is less powerful. And to be able to get advertisement and commercials, and to be able to get our projects funded, we need to cover a larger area. And the plan is to expand to cover all Iraq. And we want to be heard in other Arab countries.
We are broadcasting, for the time being, in three languages: Kurdish, Arabic and English. And we don't mind adding Farsi to it and get ourselves heard in Iran. |
Well, look, a law does not change people's dangerous behavior, enforcement does. So you have to have good laws. This study is flawed. And the reason it's flawed is because, last year, only 18 states had passed laws. This year, we're up to 30 states. We need good enforcement. We need to get law enforcement to do what they're doing in Syracuse and Hartford and Washington, D.C. Sit on street corners, pull people over, write them $100 ticket. That will change bad behavior. Good laws, but good enforcement. That study is flawed because it doesn't talk about the enforcement part of it. |
But this approach risks turning radiation exposure into disease-of-the-week material. So directors came up with horror flicks with irradiated zombies; more serious pictures with grey landscapes that looked not at all like the lush greenery that's now around Chernobyl. Cautionary? Sure. But as news reports on Japan's crippled reactors remind us, not quite real.
For real, nobody has ever gotten it righter than director Stanley Kramer did way back in 1959. He was adapting Neville Shute's novel "On the Beach" about a clutch of survivors in Australia about a year after World War III. Nuclear blasts and radiation had wiped out all animal life in the Northern Hemisphere. But Kramer didn't show any carnage. He just had submarine Commander Gregory Peck let us know that wind currents were now wafting south. |
Well, Robert, if the G-20 leaders aren't sighing, this at least gives them a chance to catch their breath. President Obama described the election results as something that create a positive prospect that now Greece can form a government, and then work with the other countries in Europe on a plan to both address the long-term debts in Greece, but in a way that's not so draconian the Greek people can't succeed and prosper.
That may be the president's hint that Europe needs to relax the terms of the Greek austerity agreement. But in a bigger sense, whatever happened in Greece, the real issue facing Europe is how to stabilize its banking system, how to keep interest rates from spiraling upwards in places like Spain, and most importantly how to foster more economic growth. |
If it doesn't work anymore would be a good sign. If it starts dropping calls consistently, it's a good sign. But seriously, anytime really is a good time to start--if your habits change, if your lifestyle changes, if your income changes. Maybe it's time for you to take another look at the plan that you currently have. So many people, Farai, are still wasting money because they have not upgraded. The companies aren't telling you, `Hey, did you know your plan decreased by $10 and offers you now an extra 500 minutes?' They're keeping you on the old plan unless you make some type of active move to make that update and make that change. |
Well, there are lots of reasons why the unemployment rates stay high. For one thing, sometimes a disabled person just can't afford to take a job. The new income they get might disqualify them from getting government-sponsored health insurance, and a job might not provide that health care that they need. The new health law should help with this.
But the biggest problem may simply be bias that still exists from employers. That's certainly what Lenny Keppel thought he faced. By the way, critics of the ADA have suggested that employers are afraid to hire somebody with a disability because they're afraid it's going to cost a lot of money to make this accommodation, but there was a federal study that showed that most accommodations cost very little. The average cost is $200, and one out of five costs nothing at all. |
I think they would be willing to, but it seemed to me that they felt they didn't have to. The only one who bothered to hang around for the questioning of the witnesses was big John Cornyn from Texas and he mixed it up with them for 10 minutes or so, but he got out of there too. More of them were over at the joint session watching Britain's Gordon Brown speak. So, I think if they felt that there were a real threat there, they'd be giving the Democrats a tough time on this, but they seem to be making the calculation that everybody's getting a bit bored of - as Arlen Specter said today - looking backward. |
Well, I think the main thing is just sort of lack of resources. It's not exactly that we don't know how to do better in terms of food safety, but nobody wants to pay for it. So, you know, the taxpayer or the Congress supposedly representing the taxpayers don't want to pay for it. The retailers, according to people we quote in the story, don't want to pay for it.
So - but anyway, over the last 20 or 30 years, the resources available for the Food Department of the FDA just did not keep up with the growth of the economy and growth of food consumption generally, and the - about 20 years ago, in the '90s, companies like Wal-Mart started saying, hey, well, why don't we just fill the vacuum ourselves. |
The virtual fence pilot project covers 28 miles of the border, south of Tucson. The GAO's Richard Stana detailed the problems before Congress yesterday. He explained that Boeing got nearly $21 million to design the pilot, which is called Project 28.
Mr. RICHARD M. STANA (Director, Homeland Security and Justice Issues, U.S. Government Accountability Office): It involves cameras, radars, sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles, and of course computer equipment that ties all these things together. When they first put a bid in on the Project 28, Boeing wanted to design it in such a way that they pulled off-the-shelf components together and thereby, they thought, lowering the risk of failure. Well, the components turned out to be okay, but integrating all the components with the software proved to be a much greater challenge than perhaps they had figured on. |
Many people have opinions about the effect of guns on society. Not many people have facts. There's a shortage of research, and a big reason is a provision in federal law sponsored by a man who now regrets it. He's an ex-congressman, Jay Dickey. His law ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention never to fund research that could be seen as advocacy for gun control. Since the 1990s, that provision has commonly stopped any gun studies because researchers don't want to risk losing federal money, and that is what Jay Dickey regrets. The Arkansas politician and owner of two shotguns says he just wanted the CDC to follow a simple rule. |
From all the people that I've talked to, they were saying it would be a decade at least. And, of course, it's always a question of how much money you want to put into this, and China is--you know, its economy has been booming, and the Chinese military is flush with cash for the first time in its modern, you know, existence. So that's an open question. I suppose it's always possible in military matters, when you're talking about a known technology, that you can rush things ahead if you put more money into it. But most people say it'll probably be a decade to be able to figure out how to do that.
And then the second part of this is even if they can make it actually float and it's a working piece of machinery, to figure out just operationally how to use it and how to use it effectively is a very big step. Apparently it took the Russians something like 20 years from the time they actually got a carrier, but to be able to effectively integrate it into the rest of their navy. |
Well, you'd think it would, but you know, this is news that the market was already expecting. So, it's pretty much already baked into the numbers, as they say. Also, with the stimulus, it's not clear whether and how quickly things are going to help us claw out of this recession. And you know, let's be honest; there's lots of other bad news to offset the good. There was word that the Bank of America's chairman, Ken Lewis, is being questioned over the very troubled accusation of Merrill Lynch, and there's this spectacle of the feds chasing down Allan Stanford, the Texas businessman suspected of carrying out a Ponzi scheme. So, you know, those are sideshows, in a way, but they also don't inspire confidence. |
I just, coincidentally, I'm an old reporter, and I covered that one, as well, which was in 1993 outside of Waco. And there's general parallels, but, as you can see from the outcome, the parallels ended very quickly. The authorities here acted a lot more astutely. Apparently, they didn't charge in, in a cattlecar full of commandos, and they managed to serve the search warrants without anyone getting hurt or shot. Once again, I think a lot of credit goes to the local sheriff. The parallels beyond that are general, but they're not certain. I mean, you had two so-called sects. There was issues of child abuse or alleged child abuse in each incident. Just how it, obviously, unfolded in an entirely different way. You had 160 die in Waco. That was a federal action, which a lot of people are quick to point out in Texas, and this was a state action. |
From the studios of NPR West, this is Day to Day. I'm Alex Cohen. Coming up, a banking system in crisis, record-high unemployment levels - how should the new president deal with the troubled economy? We hear a few suggestions.
But first, today President Obama signed executive orders to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison by the end of this year, fulfilling one of his campaign promises. The move raises plenty of questions about how the U.S. will deal with suspected terrorists. To help us sort through some of them, we're joined now by Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor for Slate.com. Dahlia, there are nearly 250 detainees still at Guantanamo. So what will happen to them now? |
Well, at this point, Egypt will not even utter the word bomb. They continue to talk about an in-flight breakup. They say there was a sound on the cockpit voice recorder that they're analyzing. Meanwhile, other countries, as you said, are more comfortable with the idea that this was a bomb. They're saying that it looks like it was probably done by the self-declared Islamic State, that there is a possibility that someone at the airport may have helped get that bomb on a plane. Again, everybody's saying the evidence isn't a hundred percent conclusive. But this is more and more what it's looking like, based on the investigation and intelligence. |
Yes. That's "The Book of Air and Shadows," and if that appeals to people, they also might want look for "The Grave Tattoo" by Val McDermid, who usually writes these gritty Scottish crime novels, but this is a similar book based on the true facts that the great poet William Wordsworth and the famous mutineer Fletcher Christian, who was the leader of the mutineers of the bounty. Went to the same school and were connected by the family, and she sort of imagines a scholar who finds out that they actually met and that Wordsworth wrote a lost poem about Fletcher Christian. |
And just as troubling to some is the corporate response. Toy company RC2 has only issued a brief statement, saying its own thorough investigation identified the lead paint and it has implemented a corrective action plan. But RC2 officials refused interview requests, so we couldn't ask why it took nearly two and a half years to discover the lead paint and what the corrective action plan entails.
HIT Entertainment, the British media company that owns the Thomas name and licensed it to RC2, only added a brief statement late Thursday, saying we appreciate our customers' concerns and we are working with RC2 to ensure that customers are informed and that all affected products are recalled swiftly. |
Well, I have a state of hypervigilance always, because I travel in the Middle East for work. So I'm always looking for packages without people attached to them. I went to an open-air event for Barack Obama in a public park, and I was just constantly surveilling the people around me and ready to immediately report or act on something that I see.
And I'm sort of caught between appreciating our freedom to assemble without surveillance and also being appalled at our lack of security because I see so much more security in the Middle East and Europe, around public events. |
We talk about close relationships, but we talk about a warm person, but that warm person is the same body temperature, 98.6 Fahrenheit, you know, as the rest of us, and not any warmer or colder. And yet we talk about people in these - with these physical terms so easily and fluently and we all know what each other means. I mean, it's something very natural. And I think this reflects something in other people like George Lakoff, especially, for many years, a philosopher at Berkeley, has, for many years, argued that these reflect some connection or architecture of our mind... |
Well, I think that - yes and no. I mean, when I was growing up - and I grew up in Puerto Rico - and we have the same situation in, you know, in Puerto Rican culture, in Puerto Rican society, and in Latino culture, in general. And there is, you know, at least from my perspective, an oversexualization of girls at a very, very young age in Latino culture.
And, you know, but this is interesting. I mean, I went to a Catholic school for 12 years. And I actually got reproductive health education in school. My children are going to public school here in the United States and they will not get that. And so, you know, so you have a generations of children in this country who are, you know - and the kind of education that I got, I got from a point view, not only of, you know, of self-respect and of protection, but also biology. I mean, simple biology class where you learn about what mitosis and meiosis is. And in order for that to happen, there has to be sex. |
Reporters Tom Lasseter and Matthew Schofield traveled to 11 countries to interview 66 former detainees, a story that was no small challenge to report or to edit. Matthew Schofield, and McClatchy foreign editor, Roy Gutman, join us in just a moment to tell us how they got that story. Later in the hour, the painful price of China's modernization in a trip up the Yangtze.
But first, getting to know the detainees and how they got that story. If you have questions about how McClatchy tracked down these men, what they asked them once they found them, and how they checked on what they were told, our phone number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our blog. That's at npr.org/blogofthenation. Roy Gutman is with us here at the Newseum. He is McClatchy's foreign editor, and thanks very much for being with us. |
I have done a lot of films where the characters do come to America or London or to the Western part. See, Indian fantasies are very real. I say this to everyone: Our fantasies are about earning a good living, having maybe a car - not two - getting an education for your kids. Our fantasies are not about getting the president of the country to sit in a rocket and go and break a meteor. Our fantasies are very real.
As a matter of fact, everyone turns around and tells me your films are so fantastic. And I find the Western cinema very fantastic. I mean, you've got aliens. And you've got things we don't know about. And we believe them. |
He'd sit around in the pool halls and stuff and then, you know, he would talk about what a person looked like. And he was always telling the mamma jokes. And, you know, a guy could be angry with him one minute. By the time he finished the joke, you know, they were no longer angry with him. But basic--it was really a lot of frustration and oppression that he was feeling inside from seeing his mother and his aunts in brothels, you know, and being teased all the time about that. And so, he turned the real tragic things into comedy for himself. |
We're going to start with reactions to the U.S. airstrikes on that Syrian air base two days ago. That was in response to a chemical weapons attack. It was the first time the U.S. has directly targeted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime after years of civil war there. The Assad regime has repeatedly been accused of atrocities but has denied it. We've heard quite a bit of reaction in recent days from lawmakers in the U.S.
So we thought we'd try to get a sense of how people in other parts of the world are reacting. Later this hour, we'll also hear from a Syrian-American activist who's been lobbying for years to get the U.S. more involved in the conflict. But we'll start with Al-Jazeera's Washington bureau chief Abderrahim Foukara. Abderrahim, thanks so much for joining us once again. |
From NPR News, this is ALL THING CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish. If you enjoy travel, you might consider running for the White House. Just today, President Obama is visiting not one, not two, not three - but four states, and then flying home in time for bed. On his schedule: rallies in Florida, Virginia and Ohio; and a trip to Chicago, to cast his vote - for himself, of course.
Early voting is one message the president has been pushing on a two-day, whirlwind trip across the country. NPR's Scott Horsley is along for the ride. Hi there, Scott. You holding up OK? |
Malaysia Airlines has released the manifest of passengers who were on that plane that crashed in Eastern Ukraine. We know that many of them were bound for the world's largest AIDS conference in Australia. At the opening of the conference yesterday there was a moment of silence to remember those who had died. Diane Anderson-Minshall is the editor-in-chief of HIV Plus Magazine and asked her about one of the most prominent AIDS researchers who was killed, Dutch scientist Joep Lange.
>>ANDERSON-MINSHALL: He's an inspiration to legions in the HIV community and so his is a great loss. One of the most important things that he did was he was a very early proponent of a combination antiretroviral medication which we now know is really the key to keeping HIV, you know, undetectable and manageable among people and so he is one of those people - probably like the top five researchers in the world - and he's responsible really for bringing down the number of HIV-infected babies in the world. |
He did, and - but it does raise the question - it's the question, of course, that Republicans have been asking about Mitt Romney for the last several months, and is he conservative enough, can they embrace him and - or are they still just looking? And right now it's just so tight in Florida.
Up till about a week ago, I was among the many who thought, OK, in the end, Romney's going to pull it out, but I'll tell you: He is in a world of trouble right now in Florida. He may hang on, but Gingrich is really surging in the polls. |
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