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Michael, help us understand this. Earlier there were reports that as many as five hijackers had been let away in handcuffs. Who were the other people who had let away in handcuffs then? Mr. O'BOYLE: Well, it appears that the Mexican police were just quite, you know, perhaps, a bit over zealous in making sure they weren't letting anyone who could have been connected to this hijacking getaway. Again, there's only one person involved. Some of the people were just other passengers in first class that there may have been some doubt whether they were actually connected to the hijacking or not. One of the people who's initially detained was a Mexican lawyer who was quite unhappy about being handcuffs then paraded in front of Mexican television.
That's right. He won, and he certainly has the votes in the House, and he only needs a small number of Republicans in the Senate. But even before he started working on the stimulus package, he told his Democratic allies that he wanted to get big margins, if he could, with a lot of Republican support. Why does he need that? Well, one is, he campaigned on the notion of building bridges and changing politics in Washington. But he also - he's got a lot of tough legislation coming down the road. If he gets into a confrontational fight with Republicans right off the bat on something that the public is behind and that everybody agrees needs to be done, this rescue package, then it doesn't portend well for the rest of the fights he's going to have coming down the lane.
Well - and that conversation of course is very difficult to have, as Marcelo points out, when you still have a war raging. And we're in a very chaotic environment. I think that this proposal, it needs to be respected as a proposal that's coming from the Iraqi government, but it really needs to be examined closely. You know, how do you implement something like this in this environment? And how do you decide, a key part of the amnesty proposal is how do you - you're going to decide who has committed a terrorist act. And if you have not been proven to have committed a terrorist act, then you will be given amnesty. I don't know how you do that in this kind of environment.
And he said to me he, he says, Clarence, I thought that you were my radical. I said, what do you mean by that? I said I thought you were--I said, well, I think I am your radical. He said what is this on the one hand and on the other hand? He said, I'm a minister of the gospel, and as a minister of gospel, I don't segregate my moral concerns. Either the war is right or it's wrong. It's not a little bit right and a little bit wrong. So you may not agree with I'm going to say, and I appreciate all the support and advice you've given me--you, Stanley, and Bayard, and Harry Wachtel, Andy, and so forth. But you have to understand, I have to speak my conscience.
It's April 1, but this is no joke. It's time for our annual Twitter poetry call out. In honor of National Poetry Month, we are inviting you to tweet us your poems with the hashtag #NPRpoetry. And here's a haiku to kick it off (reading) replies on Twitter of poems to consider here on ATC. OK. You know Liz Baker wrote that. Anyhow, we issued the invitation last week to get the creative juices flowing, and we'll share one of our favorites in just a minute. But first, here's a quick recap of what we're looking for. We really do want a single tweet. That means 140 characters or less. We've been captivated by a few submissions only to realize that the tweet is actually a stanza of a longer poem. We'll let it slide this week because we're just getting started, but, please, we are looking for your original poems that are complete in one tweet.
I'm afraid we're losing your cell phone, Jeff. Are you OK? Are you doing OK? I think we've lost him, and I apologize. We certainly hope Jeff is doing OK, and can understand his anguish. This is an email we have from Isaac in St. Paul, Minnesota: I'm an attorney for a police union in Minnesota. I was also living in New York City at the time of the Amadou Diallo shooting, which was widely portrayed as an example of trigger-happy cops. Now that I've worked with police for several years, I have a much better appreciation for the dangers they face and the split-second decisions they have to make.
Conservators also need to get rid of paint that was applied in earlier restorations and then replace it with colors that match sometimes centuries-old originals and do it so that future conservators have an easier time when their turn comes. So I guess Ann Hoenigswald was right not to let me play Monet that day. But these professional conservators get to do it every day, going from one century, one style to another for future art lovers. A few years ago, Ann had a Mary Cassatt - 19th-century American - on one easel and an El Greco - 16th century, Spain. El Greco was on another easel. The juxtaposition made Ann philosophical and something else.
One of the things I noticed with the President, he is going to the smaller communities, and no disrespect to Martinsville, but he is going to the smaller communities in the state, both here and in North Carolina. That's one of the big surprises. I thought when this campaign started in Indiana, Bill Clinton would be doing - reaching out to the African-American community. I think the Clinton campaign is not having him do that. They're having him concentrate on Democrats and Independents in where the majority of Hoosiers live, and that is in our smaller cities and towns all throughout the state. The one odd thing about Indianapolis that makes Indiana unique, even though Indianapolis is the largest city, the majority of the state lives outside of what I call the beltway. And so this election is going to be decided by, you know, ordinary Hoosiers out in our cities and towns and rural areas and places that have been hurting.
So, you know, there are a lot of good things that happened, but I had a major nervous breakdown and I ended up on disability, and it's okay. But I don't miss it. But it was a part of my life that when I was going to graduate school, I needed to pay for school, too. I heard that earlier, somebody called. I had to pay for school, too. And so I needed a job, and that job - they were very flexible with me, and they liked me because I would go on long trips and I could be - I could stay up for about 40 hours at a time.
Even when it's set in the past or the future, a good movie tries to tell us something important about the way we live now. The Motion Picture Academy likes to think of itself as doing important things and this year's Oscar nominees show it. For Best Picture, this year's big cartoon style epics King Kong, Harry Potter, Star Wars didn't even make the cut. The five that did were clearly for grown ups, real grown ups. This is the year for independent renegade movies that entertain but also challenge us with questions, big questions. Capote asked us how ethical a reporter should be even with two mass murders. Munich asked us how far we can behave like terrorists in order to fight terrorists. Good Night and Good Luck shows how TV can bring down a demagogue when it isn't creating them. Broke Back Mountain asked whether a cowboy can find true love and still keep his wife. But my personal favorite is Crash, a movie that asks the Rodney Kinq question, can we all get along?
I should think so, and he lived in a very good part of London, so he lived a very privileged life. But of course, there are certain mosques in London, in Great Britain, that the British authorities fear are radicalizing the youth. A lot of them have been in, actually, northern Britain, and it's been more the Asian British, the Pakistanis and so on (unintelligible) as opposed to Nigerians. But it's not clear where this young man worshipped, which mosque or which mosques he was part of in Britain, and whether it was there that he decided to follow the path that he has, that has led him, now, to be arrested and accused of trying to blow off the Northwest airliner.
Aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space, architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine that delights and disturbs the senses. Our work is across media. The work comes in all shapes and sizes. It's small and large. This is an ashtray, a water glass. From urban planning and master planning to theater and all sorts of stuff. The thing that all the work has in common is that it challenges the assumptions about conventions of space. And these are everyday conventions, conventions that are so obvious that we are blinded by their familiarity. And I've assembled a sampling of work that all share a kind of productive nihilism that's used in the service of creating a particular special effect. And that is something like nothing, or something next to nothing. It's done through a form of subtraction or obstruction or interference in a world that we naturally sleepwalk through. This is an image that won us a competition for an exhibition pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel, near Geneva. And we wanted to use the water not only as a context, but as a primary building material. We wanted to make an architecture of atmosphere. So, no walls, no roof, no purpose — just a mass of atomized water, a big cloud. And this proposal was a reaction to the over-saturation of emergent technologies in recent national and world expositions, which feeds, or has been feeding, our insatiable appetite for visual stimulation with an ever greater digital virtuosity. High definition, in our opinion, has become the new orthodoxy. And we ask the question, can we use technology, high technology, to make an expo pavilion that's decidedly low definition, that also challenges the conventions of space and skin, and rethinks our dependence on vision? So this is how we sought to do it. Water's pumped from the lake and is filtered and shot as a fine mist through an array of high-pressure fog nozzles, 35,000 of them. And a weather station is on the structure. It reads the shifting conditions of temperature, humidity, wind direction, wind speed, dew point, and it processes this data in a central computer that calibrates the degree of water pressure and distribution of water throughout. And it's a responsive system that's trained on actual weather. So, this is just in construction, and there's a tensegrity structure. It's about 300 feet wide, the size of a football field, and it sits on just four very delicate columns. These are the fog nozzles, the interface, and basically the system is kind of reading the real weather, and producing kind of semi-artificial and real weather. So, we're very interested in creating weather. I don't know why. Now, here we go, one side, the outside and then from the inside of the space you can see what the quality of the space was. Unlike entering any normal space, entering Blur is like stepping into a habitable medium. It's formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, purposeless and dimensionless. All references are erased, leaving only an optical whiteout and white noise of the pulsing nozzles. So, this is an exhibition pavilion where there is absolutely nothing to see and nothing to do. And we pride ourselves — it's a spectacular anti-spectacle in which all the conventions of spectacle are turned on their head. So, the audience is dispersed, focused attention and dramatic build-up and climax are all replaced by a kind of attenuated attention that's sustained by a sense of apprehension caused by the fog. And this is very much like how the Victorian novel used fog in this way. So here the world is put out of focus, while our visual dependence is put into focus. The public, you know, once disoriented can actually ascend to the angel deck above and then just come down under those lips into the water bar. So, all the waters of the world are served there, so we thought that, you know, after being at the water and moving through the water and breathing the water, you could also drink this building. And so it is sort of a theme, but it goes a little bit, you know, deeper than that. We really wanted to bring out our absolute dependence on this master sense, and maybe share our kind of sensibility with our other senses. You know, when we did this project it was a kind of tough sell, because the Swiss said, "Well, why are we going to spend, you know, 10 million dollars producing an effect that we already have in natural abundance that we hate?" And, you know, we thought — well, we tried to convince them. And in the end, you know, they adapted this as a national icon that came to represent Swiss doubt, which we — you know, it was kind of a meaning machine that everybody kind of laid on their own meanings off of. Anyway, it's a temporary structure that was ultimately destroyed, and so it's now a memory of an apparition, actually, but it continues to live in edible form. And this is the highest honor to be bestowed upon an architect in Switzerland — to have a chocolate bar. Anyway, moving along. So in the '80s and '90s, we were mostly known for independent work, such as installation artist, architect, commissioned projects by museums and non-for-profit organizations. And we did a lot of media work, also a lot of experimental theater projects. In 2003, the Whitney mounted a retrospective of our work that featured a lot of this work from the '80s and '90s. However, the work itself resisted the very nature of a retrospective, and this is just some of the stuff that was in the show. This was a piece on tourism in the United States. This is "Soft Sell" for 42nd Street. This was something done at the Cartier Foundation. "Master/Slave" at the MOMA, the project series, a piece called "Parasite." And so there were many, many of these kinds of projects. Anyway, they gave us the whole fourth floor, and, you know, the problem of the retrospective was something we were very uncomfortable with. It's a kind of invention of the museum that's supposed to bring a kind of cohesive understanding to the public of a body of work. And our work doesn't really resolve itself into a body in any way at all. And one of the recurring themes, by the way, that in the work was a kind of hostility toward the museum itself, and asking about the conventions of the museum, like the wall, the white wall. So, what you see here is basically a plan of many installations that were put there. And we actually had to install white walls to separate these pieces, which didn't belong together. But these white walls became a kind of target and weapon at the same time. We used the wall to partition the 13 installations of the project and produce a kind of acoustic and visual separation. And what you see is — actually, the red dotted line shows the track of this performing element, which was a new piece that created — that we created for the — which was a robotic drill, basically, that went all the way around, cruised the museum, went all around the walls and did a lot of damage. So, the drill was mounted on this robotic arm. We worked with, by the way, Honeybee Robotics. This is the brain. Honeybee Robotics designed the Mars Driller, and it was really very much fun to work with them. They weren't doing their primary work, which was for the government, while they were helping us with this. In any case, the way it works is that an intelligent navigator basically maps the entire surface of these walls. So, unfolded it's about 300 linear feet. And it randomly generates points within a three-dimensional matrix. It selects a point, it guides the drill to that point, it pierces the dry wall, leaving a half-inch hole before traveling to the next location. Initially these holes were lone blemishes, and as the exhibition continued the walls became increasingly perforated. So eventually holes on both sides of the wall aligned, opening views from gallery to gallery. Clusters of holes randomly opened up sections of wall. And so this was a three-month performance piece in which the wall was made into kind of an increasingly unstable element. And also the acoustic separation was destroyed. Also the visual separation. And there was also this constant background groan, which was very annoying. And this is one of the blackout spaces where there's a video piece that became totally not useful. So rather than securing a neutral background for the artworks on display, the wall now actively competed for attention. And this acoustical nuisance and visual nuisance basically exposed the discomfort of the work to this encompassing nature of the retrospective. It was really great when it started to break up all of the curatorial text. Moving along to a project that we finished about a year ago. It's the ICA — the Institute of Contemporary Art — in Boston, which is on the waterfront. And there's not enough time to really introduce the building, but I'll simply say that the building negotiates between this outwardly focused nature of the site — you know, it's a really great waterfront site in Boston — and this contradictory other desire to have an inwardly focused museum. So, the nature of the building is that it looks at looking — I mean that's its primary objective, both its program and its architectural conceit. The building incorporates the site, but it dispenses it in very small doses in the way that the museum is choreographed. So, you come in and you're basically squeezed by the theater, by the belly of the theater, into this very compressed space where the view is turned off. Then you come up in this glass elevator right near the curtain wall. This elevator's about the size of a New York City studio apartment. And then, this is a view going up, and then you could come into the theater, which can actually deny the view or open it up and become a backdrop. And many musicians choose to use the theater glass walls totally open. The view is denied in the galleries where we receive just natural light, and then exposed again in the north gallery with a panoramic view. The original intention of this space, which was unfortunately never realized, was to use lenticular glass which allowed only a kind of perpendicular view out. In this very narrow space that connects east and west galleries the intention was really to not get a climax, but to have the view stalk you, so the view would open up as you walked from one end to the other. This was eliminated because the view was too good, and the mayor said, "No, we just want this open." The architect lost here. But culminating — and that's where this hooks into the theme of my little talk — is this Mediatheque, which is suspended from the cantilevered portion of the building. So this is an 80-foot cantilever — it's quite substantial. So, it's already sticking out into space enough, and then from that is this, is this small area called the Mediatheque. The Mediatheque has something like 16 stations where the public can get onto the server and look at digital artworks or also curated artworks off the web. And this was really a kind of very important part of this building, and here is a point where architecture — this is like technology-free — architecture is only a framing device, it only edits the harbor view, the industrial harbor just through its walls, its floors and its ceiling, to only expose the water itself, the texture of water, much like a hypnotic effect created by electronic snow or a lava lamp or something like that. And here is where we really felt that there was a great convergence of the technological and the natural in the project. But there is just no information, it's just — it's just hypnosis. Moving along to Lincoln Center. These are the guys that did the project in the first place, 50 years ago. We're taking over now, doing work that ranges in scale from small-scale repairs to major renovations and major facility expansions. But we're doing it with a lot less testosterone. This is the extent of the work that's to be completed by 2010. And for the purposes of this talk, I wanted to isolate just a part of a project that's even a part of a project that touches a little bit on this theme of architectural special effects, and it happens to be our current obsession, and it plays a little bit with the purging and adding of distraction. It's Alice Tully Hall, and it's tucked under the Juilliard Building and descends several levels under the street. So, this is the entrance to Tully Hall as it used to be, before the renovation, which we just started. And we asked ourselves, why couldn't it be exhibitionistic, like the Met, or like some of the other buildings at Lincoln Center? And one of the things that we were asked to do was give it a street identity, expand the lobbies and make it visually accessible. And this building, which is just naturally hermetic, we stripped. We basically did a striptease, architectural striptease, where we're framing with this kind of canopy — the underside of three levels of expansion of Juilliard, about 45,000 square feet — cutting it to the angle of Broadway, and then exposing, using that canopy to frame Tully Hall. Before and after shot. (Applause) Wait a minute, it's just in that state, we have a long way to go. But what I wanted to do was take a couple of seconds that I have left to just talk about the hall itself, which is kind of where we're really doing a massive amount of work. So, the hall is a multi-purpose hall. The clients have asked us to produce a great chamber music hall. Now, that's really tough to do with a hall that has 1,100 seats. Chamber and the notion of chamber has to do with salons and small-scale performances. They asked us to bring an intimacy. How do you bring an intimacy into a hall? Intimacy for us means a lot of different things. It means acoustic intimacy and it means visual intimacy. One thing is that the subway is running and rumbling right under the hall. Another thing that could be fixed is the shape of the hall. It's like a coffin, it basically sends all the sound, like a gutter-ball effect, down the aisles. The walls are made of absorptive surface, half absorptive, half reflective, which is not very good for concert sound. This is Avery Fisher Hall, but the notion of junk — visual junk — was very, very important to us, to get rid of visual noise. Because we can't eliminate a single seat, the architecture is restricted to 18 inches. So it's a very, very thin architecture. First we do a kind of partial box and box separation, to take away the distraction of the subway noise. Next we wrap the entire hall — almost like this Olivetti keyboard — with a material, with a wood material that basically covers all the surfaces: wall, ceiling, floor, stage, steps, everything, boxes. But it's acoustically engineered to focus the sound into the house and back to the stage. And here's an acoustic shelf. Looking up the hall. Just a section of the stage. Just everything is lined, it incorporates — every single thing that you could possibly imagine is tucked into this high-performance skin. But one more added feature. So now that we've stripped the hall of all visual distraction, everything that prevents this intimacy which is supposed to connect the house, the audience, with the performers, we add one little detail, one piece of architectural excess, a special effect: lighting. We very strongly believe that the theatrics of a concert hall is as much in the space of intermission and the space of arrival as it is when the concert starts. So what we wanted to do was produce this effect, this lighting effect, which made us have to bioengineer the wood walls. And what it entails is the use of resin, of this very thick resin with a veneer of the same kind of wood that's used throughout the hall, in a kind of seamless continuity that wraps the hall in light, like a belt of light: rather than separating, like a proscenium would separate the audience from performers, it connects audience with players. And this is a mockup that is in Salt Lake City that gives you a sense of what this is going to look like in full-scale. And this is a guy from Salt Lake City, this is what they look like out there. (Laughter) And for us, I mean it's really kind of a very strange thing, but the moments in the hall that the buzz kind of dies down when the audience is waiting for the performance to begin, very similar to the parting of curtains or the raising of a chandelier, the walls will just exude this glow, temporarily stealing attention from the stage. And this is Tully in construction now. I have no ending to say, except that I'm a couple of minutes over. Thank you very much. (Applause)
You know, I think there is a semblance of civil war. I think--I got back from Iraq a few weeks ago, and my sense there is when you look at the forces aligned, the competing agendas, the level of violence, it does feel like a civil war to a certain degree. I don't think it's a full-fledged conflict at this point, but it's definitely there on the ground, and I think the Iraqis are more and more, you know, confronting the fact that that is the case. What strikes me, though, is I think we often see Iraq as this--as a constellation of Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, and I think it is that at one level. But perhaps more pitched are the rivalries within the communities. When you look at southern Iraq, you're talking about rival militias that are competing for influence and power in places like Basra. When you look at western Iraq, there's very deep divisions between Sunni Arab insurgents and foreigners and other groups in there. And it's--we have to be careful not to underestimate, I think, the differences between even the Shi--the Kurdish parties in northern Iraq, who are ostensibly under--in an alliance.
Papermaking giant Kimberly Clark started Midwest Air about two decades ago to help its employees get direct flights to customers. Today, Midwest has 55 planes and offers 140 daily flights from Milwaukee. As other hubs have done for their hometowns, Midwest has created jobs, made air travel more convenient, and even helped pay for a convention center that bears its name. But what seems to evoke the most pride in Milwaukee is the fact that Midwest is homegrown. Before 9/11 plunged the industry into economic turmoil, Midwest's perks were legendary, including fine dining on china and complementary champagne. Today, it offers wide leather seats and cookies baked on board.
It is. I think one of the most interesting figures--I'm not sure where that particular poll, but I know of a BBC poll just taken recently which shows over 70 percent of Iraqis remain incredibly optimistic about the situation, and they--while they think things are very bad at the moment, and especially security is on their minds, they remain optimistic. That, I think, is the single most important poll or statistic to watch. Somehow or another, people have managed, in spite of all the terrible things that have happened, in spite of all the anarchy and chaos of Baghdad and Iraq at the moment, to retain this sense that their lives are going to get better. In their--so to speak, in their deeper instincts, they feel that 30 years of dictatorship there's going to be some chaos, some anarchy after 30 years of dictatorship, and in normal conversation with Iraqis you always get this sense, `Look, we always knew it was going to be messy.' But--and that has held up for a very, very long period of time. There's a lot of hope to be found there. The public--the problem again, I say, is not in the public at large. They have remarkable resilience. They have shown great support for the democratic project in general, while critical--while being very critical of the American--of many actions that the United States did inside Iraq, that both of those things have held ...(unintelligible). Again, the politicians have let them down.
For many, many years, the CIA had a high time penetrating the Soviet Union and especially trying to divine what was going on in the minds of its leaders. A lot of people said the CIA had absolutely no idea what was going on. But the Tolkachev case opens a window on a different kind of spying that was very valuable to the U.S. military 'cause the big question about the Soviets in the middle of the Cold War were capabilities. What could they do, and what were their intentions? And Tolkachev provided blueprints, documents, plans that showed not only the current capabilities of Soviet aviation and radars, but also showed what was being planned for 10 years ahead. And this was a windfall because they could see what the Soviets were going to do, how their radars worked, how their planes communicated with each other and develop countermeasures 10 years ahead.
And that wasn't an idle turn of phrase. In a private conversation with young Argentines, whom he asked to meet with, the AP reported him as saying: What is it that I expect as a consequence of World Youth Day? I want a mess. We knew that in Rio, there would be great disorder, but I want trouble in the dioceses. I want to see the church get closer to the people. I want to get rid of clericalism, the mundane, this closing ourselves off within ourselves, in our parishes, schools and structures. It's a big departure from the message of his two predecessors, Benedict XVI and John Paul II.
No, this is different from Social Security. It's a very good question. That it's not a pay-as-you-go system. We actually have more than $40 billion in assets that we manage, and those assets are available to pay out benefits, and last year, for example, we paid about $3 1/2 billion in benefit payments to more than 500,000 workers or retirees who had participated in pension plans that we assumed responsibility for. So we do have a large pool of assets, and that pool of assets is growing. And unfortunately, it's growing for all the wrong reasons, because we take the assets in in plans that we terminate, and at the same time, unfortunately, we take in additional liabilities, and those liabilities are much greater than those assets that we take in. In the United case, I believe there are about $7 billion of assets in their pension plan. The problem is there are almost $17 billion in liabilities.
Yeah. Let me talk about this because I have paid great attention to the word control over the past three years. When Steve and I wrote the original article and then we wrote the book, we went to great lengths not to use the word control for exactly the reason that the woman caller just said. I do think it connotes anti-Semitism. But if you look carefully at the debate about anti-Semitism today both in the United States and in Europe, I think that what you see is that the old-fashioned kind of anti-Semitism is kind of gone by the boards. And the new anti-Semitism - and that's a phrase that's frequently used by organizations that are fighting anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States - the new anti-Semitism has a lot more to do with Israel than it has to do with criticizing Jews. People who criticize Israel and equate Israeli behavior with Nazi behavior is seen as the main problem today. People who talk about the Israel lobby and argue that it is a powerful interest group in the United States that influences policy towards the Middle East, are oftentimes labeled as anti-Semitism.
Yes. I'm Bill Frazer. I'm on the Board of Governors of Los Alamos and Livermore Laboratories, and you in the intelligence community and Homeland Security make good use of research that's done there. But I have a criticism and I want to ask you if you agree what you would do about it. You're not investing in the basic research of the future. You're taking gadgets off the shelf that have been developed in the past and not investing in the basic research and in the infrastructure which will make the detectors of pathogens, the detectors of nuclear radiation that are improved in the future. You're not investing in the future. If you agree, I'd like to know...
Well, he's certainly outside the mainstream of the Republican members of Congress because he often has a vote and he'll be the one naysayer. But Matt Bai is making a good point. There's a lot of dissatisfaction and anger out there. And I think - I don't know if Ron Paul has moved closer to the mainstream. I think the Republican Party and many of its adherents have moved more to the Ron Paul point of view, that the war - think of Iraq, Afghanistan. Were the loss of lives worth the cost, you know, that we paid for it? So I don't know if that's a majority Republican view, and I think, as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum say, it is outside the mainstream. But there are a lot of voters, Democrats and Republicans, who are coming around to that point of view. And that's why we talk about this a lot, but the thought of Ron Paul running as a third party Libertarian candidate if he doesn't get the nomination is a possibility, and I think he could make a big difference in November if he does choose that course.
And our last headline takes us to Jena, Louisiana. Racial tension is high in the small, mostly white, rural town. It's where six black teens have been charged with the beating of a white classmate. Last week, one of the teens, 17-year-old Mychal Bell was convicted of two felonies for his role in the beating. Last fall, one black high school student in Jena sat down under a tree on his high school campus. The tree was usually a hangout for a group of white students. The next day, three white nooses dangled from the tree. Shortly after, the black students in the Jena 6 case organized a protest. The white students were suspended, but not formally charged with wrongdoing.
This hour, we're going to take a look at heath care in the U.S., help you understand what the issues are; what are the pros and cons and price tags of the different approaches. Plus, we're going to spend an enormous amount of money on health care more per person than most industrialized nations - how can we get more for our dollar and bring more of the uninsured into the system? For example, why does the VAD, Veterans Administration, pay 60 percent less per drugs than the Medicare system? What's going on here? And why are doctors prevented from carrying out preventive medicine that might cost more money upfront but pay bigger savings in care later on?
Back when I was a kid, the mere mention of an audition for The Supremes would have conjured up visions of Diana Ross and the Motown sound. Nowadays I think of Senate confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. That's what Judge Samuel Alito is thinking these days, too. He faces a Washington version of "American Idol" on January 9, the Senate Judiciary Committee. Watch for Republicans to greet his song-and-dance routine warmly, like Paula Abdul on a nice night, and watch for Democrats to be about as warm and nurturing as Simon Cowell on a cold day in January. Alito, remember, is filling the seat currently occupied by Sandra Day O'Connor, the high court's first woman. As a moderate swing voter on hot-button issues like abortion and affirmative action, she was just about the best deal liberals and moderates could expect from a conservative president. Alito, by contrast, has Democrats worried. As a young Justice Department lawyer, he argued against abortion's constitutionality. He offered strategies to overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion. As a judge, he was once overruled by the Supreme Court after upholding a Pennsylvania law that required married women to inform their husbands before having an abortion. But like any good stealth candidate, Alito's record is mixed. As a judge, he sided with advocates of abortion rights in three other cases. In another timely topic, he once argued that attorney generals who illegally eavesdrop on American citizens should be immune from civil suits, but his wiretap memo does not actually defend eavesdropping without a warrant. It mainly deals with the question of whether government officials can be sued for damages when they make a mistake.
What China's critics say is that this whole thing is a smokescreen for the repression of a Muslim minority in northwest China called the Uighurs, and a repression of their legitimate demands for political autonomy in their own land. And they say that China has executed and jailed thousands of Uighurs for essentially non-violent political reasons. But I think we should also add that while there are a lot of skeptics in the West, countries like Russia and the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia and also countries in the Middle East that are worried about Islamic separatists have essentially supported China's war on terror in its own territories.
Columbia Gulf Transmission operates the pipeline. It said shifting earth caused the 2012 accident but hasn't said what caused the one recently. The company denied requests for an interview but in written statements said it continually monitors the pipeline and exceeds federal safety requirements. There are over 300,000 miles of natural gas pipelines in the U.S. NPR reviewed accident data and found they're generally safe. Still, on average, there are roughly 90 failures a year that the government considers significant. So we looked at who oversees these pipelines. It's a government agency that you've probably never heard of, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which employs about 100 inspectors. Damon Hill's a spokesman for the agency.
And amazingly enough, Scientific American devoted four issues, there was a four part series on one of these ectoplasm producing mediums. It was taken very, very seriously by the scientific community in the 1920s. The Sorbonne did an investigation of a woman named Eva C. It was kind of mind blowing because when you look at the photographs, it's just - you look at it and you say my God, that's just gauze. It's cheese cloth. Come on, guys. But people fell for it because what you needed to understand how these women were doing it was you needed a magician. You needed - for example, Harry Houdini got involved in debunking one of the very famous mediums because no one else - they would search them. You know, they would search their clothing before the séance, actually did cavity searches. I mean, this was very thorough. And the mediums would still, they'd go in their cabinet, the curtain would open. Tada, there's the ectoplasm. They thought how are they doing it?
Well, Prague is the gateway to Eastern Europe and understandably, it's got more tourism now I think than Salzburg, and it's come with a big price. But Krakow, in the historic capital of Poland is considered the one of the new Pragues. And of course, Croatia is very popular now. I was just in Bosnia and most (unintelligible) just wonderful. I've had so much fun, by the way, writing my blog and reporting on all of this. And it's fun to go places that a little offbeat, whether it's Morocco or Bosnia or (unintelligible) as Katrina was talking about and get away from the tourist crowd and closer to the people, and there you'll find your dollar stretching two or three times as far as it would in the more famous touristy places in the West.
They were. There was - several hundred people turned out. They had jumbo screens in the rotunda. They were - one of them was SCOTUSblog, and the other one was on CNN. And so they were cheering as they slowly understood what everything that was being written SCOTUSblog meant. But yeah, there was a lot of - I'd just describe it as a combination of excitement, relief and even a little disappointment: the excitement of course that both DOMA and Prop 8 were struck down, relief that they weren't upheld, and a little disappointment voiced by some people that they never got to the merits of the Prop 8 case, that it was struck down on sort of a procedural question of standing. But nonetheless, it looks like same-sex marriage will be legal in California fairly soon, and people are happy about that, at least the ones who voted against Prop 8.
There is now a red alert for all flights from Britain to the U.S. - that is a red alert from the Department of Homeland Security. Which means that there simply the highest amount of scrutiny possible, that there is an attack anticipated on those flights, and of course the people who are boarding those flights are not allowed to take any carry-on luggage whatsoever, a few exceptions, I think, you know, Kleenex or a key, but even many of those items are being inspected extremely carefully. And those restrictions have extended on a lesser level to all commercial flights within the United States. There is an orange alert that's slightly lower for all commercial flights in the U.S., which means that extra scrutiny will be devoted to all airline passengers, all luggage traveling today and probably for several days, Alex.
Absolutely. You know, a lot people think about chess as being very mathematical or technical. But I've always thought of the study of chess as a study of numbers to leave numbers. You do this incredibly enhanced mathematical, technical work and ultimately you transcend it, and those numbers become intuitively understood, and you're experiencing chess as the sense of flow. And tai chi is very much technique to leave technique. You leave the technique behind and your feeling is very similar in terms of flow. And then the psychological connection between competitors becomes - what takes over. And what I found is that in both arts, at the highest end, what will determine success is whether or not you're expressing yourself truly through the art you do. If someone's - someone has an inorganic relationship to their art, it's going to come under big pressure.
It - for me personally, it's been an interesting journey. I write a lot. I speak a lot. And I spend time talking to offenders, and I will pull them to the side and tell them to get their lives right because I take that personally because, you know, the offenders as well as the victims look like me. So I have an interest in them getting their lives together because I really don't want to see them back in the courtroom. I want to see them get their lives on the right path. Yes, it's difficult because people do accuse you of - oh, you know, you're just part of the man and this and that. But again...
It can, and in particular, if you're going to try and issue a bond, right, you might go to a bunch of rating agencies and see who gives you the best rating and go with that, right? But you know, there is a potential problems anyway you want to do this. Imagine, I, the person, buying it pay the rating agency. Well, then there is an incentive for them to rate it artificially low, the other way around, so that I can buy it for cheap from you. I mean, this is why the world leaders can say, look, we've made real progress. They can stand on a stage and get a photo taken, but it could be very hard to work out exactly how to implement these things in way that's going to make a real difference.
The easy way, of course, for the Democrats would be, and this is probably President Obama's fondest hope, is for the House Democrats to just go along with the Senate bill, pass it and boom, it gets it done. But the House Democrats have serious reservations about a lot of things in the Senate bill, mostly the lack of public option, the higher taxes. There's - the pro-choice Democrats in the House don't like the Stupak Amendment, and they say they will not vote for it if it is included. The pro-life House Democrats say if you strip the Stupak Amendment out of the House version, they won't vote for that.
That's kind of the norm nationwide is that you give officers time to see a psychologist and really make sure you're OK because it's interesting, one of your earlier callers kind of talked about this was I talked to a cop who was involved in a - in combat in Vietnam, and he was later involved in police shootings. And he said that, you know, in combat it's - not that it's not traumatic, but that you don't - you often don't know who you're shooting. You don't know anything about that person. But if you're a police officer, you're going to find out everything there is to know about that guy through the, well, usually through the press and through your own - your department's investigation. You'll know that that person had a family, had loved ones, was loved by someone and it's - in my interviews with officers they - a lot of them really struggled with that.
The advances that have taken place in astronomy, cosmology and biology, in the last 10 years, are really extraordinary — to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine. But there was something else that I've noticed as those changes were taking place, as people were starting to find out that hmm ... yeah, there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. The science writers and editors — I shouldn't say science writers, I should say people who write about science — and editors would sit down over a couple of beers, after a hard day of work, and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works. And they would inevitably end up in what I thought was a very bizarre place, which is ways the world could end very suddenly. And that's what I want to talk about today. (Laughter) Ah, you laugh, you fools. (Laughter) (Voice: Can we finish up a little early?) (Laughter) Yeah, we need the time! Stephen Petranek: At first, it all seemed a little fantastical to me, but after challenging a lot of these ideas, I began to take a lot of them seriously. And then September 11 happened, and I thought, ah, God, I can't go to the TED conference and talk about how the world is going to end. Nobody wants to hear that. Not after this! And that got me into a discussion with some other people, other scientists, about maybe some other subjects, and one of the guys I talked to, who was a neuroscientist, said, "You know, I think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up," and reminds me of Michael's talk yesterday and his mother saying you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem. So, we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow, and lo and behold, we found them. Which leads me to a videotape of a President Bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago. Can we run that, Andrew? President George W. Bush: Whatever it costs to defend our security, and whatever it costs to defend our freedom, we must pay it. SP: I agree with the president. He wants two trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year, a two-trillion-dollar federal budget, which will land us back into deficit spending real fast. But terrorists aren't the only threat we face. There are really serious calamities staring us in the eye that we're in the same kind of denial about that we were about terrorism, and what could've happened on September 11. I would propose, therefore, that if we took 10 billion dollars from that 2.13 trillion dollar budget — which is two one hundredths of that budget — and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems I'm going to talk to you about, the vast majority could be solved, and the rest we could deal with. So, I hope you find this both fascinating — I'm fascinated by this kind of stuff, I gotta admit — to me these are Richard's cockroaches. But I also hope, because I think the people in this room can literally change the world, I hope you take some of this stuff away with you, and when you have an opportunity to be influential, that you try to get some heavy-duty money spent on some of these ideas. So let's start. Number 10: we lose the will to survive. We live in an incredible age of modern medicine. We are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago. People around the world are getting better medicine — but mentally, we're falling apart. The World Health Organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed. And the World Health Organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced. Soon, genetic breakthroughs and even better medicine are going to allow us to think of 100 as a normal lifespan. A female child born tomorrow, on average — median — will live to age 83. Our life longevity is going up almost a year for every year that passes. Now the problem with all of this, getting older, is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide. So, what are the solutions? We don't really have mental health insurance in this country, and it's — (Applause) — it's really a crime. Something like 98 percent of all people with depression, and I mean really severe depression — I have a friend with stunningly severe depression — this is a curable disease, with present medicine and present technology. But it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills. Pills alone don't do it, especially in clinically depressed people. You ought to be able to go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and put down your 10-dollar copay, and get treated, just like you do when you got a cut on your arm. It's ridiculous. Secondly, drug companies are not going to develop really sophisticated psychoactive drugs. We know that most mental illnesses have a biological component that can be dealt with. And we know just an amazing amount more about the brain now than we did 10 years ago. We need a pump-push from the federal government, through NIH and National Science — NSF — and places like that to start helping the drug companies develop some advanced psychoactive drugs. Moving on. Number nine — don't laugh — aliens invade Earth. Ten years ago, you couldn't have found an astronomer — well, very few astronomers — in the world who would've told you that there are any planets anywhere outside our solar system. 1995, we found three. The count now is up to 80 — we're finding about two or three a month. All of the ones we've found, by the way, are in this little, teeny, tiny corner where we live, in the Milky Way. There must be millions of planets in the Milky Way, and as Carl Sagan insisted for many years, and was laughed at for it, there must be billions and billions in the universe. In a few years, NASA is going to launch four or five telescopes out to Jupiter, where there's less dust, and start looking for Earth-like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect. It's becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and probably fairly close to us, is a fairly remote idea. And the chance that some of it isn't more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea. Remember, we've only been an advanced civilization — an industrial civilization, if you would — for 200 years. Although every time I go to Pompeii, I'm amazed that they had the equivalent of a McDonald's on every street corner, too. So, I don't know how much civilization really has progressed since AD 79, but there's a great likelihood. I really believe this, and I don't believe in aliens, and I don't believe there are any aliens on the Earth or anything like that. But there's a likelihood that we will confront a civilization that is more intelligent than our own. Now, what will happen? What if they come to, you know, suck up our oceans for the hydrogen? And swat us away like flies, the way we swat away flies when we go into the rainforest and start logging it. We can look at our own history. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill said, "Advanced Western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization." If the aliens come visiting, we're the primitive civilization. So, what are the solutions to this? (Laughter) Thank God you can all read! It may seem ridiculous, but we have a really lousy history of anticipating things like this and actually being prepared for them. How much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species? Secondly — and you're going to hear more from me about this — we have to become an outward-looking, space-faring nation. We have got to develop the idea that the Earth doesn't last forever, our sun doesn't last forever. If we want humanity to last forever, we have to colonize the Milky Way. And that is not something that is beyond comprehension at this point. (Applause) It'll also help us a lot, if we meet an advanced civilization along the way, if we're trying to be an advanced civilization. Number eight — (Voice: Steve, that's what I'm doing after TED.) (Laughter) (Applause) SP: You've got it! You've got the job. Number eight: the ecosystem collapses. Last July, in Science, the journal Science, 19 oceanographers published a very, very unusual article. It wasn't really a research report; it was a screed. They said, we've been looking at the oceans for a long time now, and we want to tell you they're not in trouble, they're near collapse. Many other ecosystems on Earth are in real, real danger. We're living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000. We have lost 25 percent of the unique species in Hawaii in the last 20 years. California is expected to lose 25 percent of its species in the next 40 years. Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree. You cut down that tree, the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem. There's really a tree like that out there. That's really what it comes to. And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere. So, what do we do about this? What are the solutions? There is some modeling of ecosystems going on now. The problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly, that we don't know they're really in trouble until it's almost too late. We need to know earlier that they're getting in trouble, and we need to be able to pump possible solutions into models. And with the kind of computing power we have now, there is, as I say, some of this going on, but it needs money. National Science Foundation needs to say — you know, almost all the money that's spent on science in this country comes from the federal government, one way or another. And they get to prioritize, you know? There are people at the National Science Foundation who get to say, this is the most important thing. This is one of the things they ought to be thinking more about. Secondly, we need to create huge biodiversity reserves on the planet, and start moving them around. There's been an experiment for the last four or five years on the Georges Bank, or the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. It's a no-take fishing zone. They can't fish there for a radius of 200 miles. And an amazing thing has happened: almost all the fish have come back, and they're reproducing like crazy. We're going to have to start doing this around the globe. We're going to have to have no-take zones. We're going to have to say, no more logging in the Amazon for 20 years. Let it recover, before we start logging again. (Applause) Number seven: particle accelerator mishap. You all remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? One of the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire and set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. A lot of very sober-minded physicists, believe it or not, have had exactly the same thought. This spring — there's a collider at Brookhaven, on Long Island — this spring, it's going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes. They are expecting to create little, tiny black holes. They expect them to evaporate. (Laughter) I hope they're right. (Laughter) Other collider experiments — there's one that's going to take place next summer at CERN — have the possibility of creating something called strangelets, which are kind of like antimatter. Whenever they hit other matter, they destroy it and obliterate it. Most physicists say that the accelerators we have now are not really powerful enough to create black holes and strangelets that we need to worry about, and they're probably right. But, all around the world, in Japan, in Canada, there's talk about this, of reviving this in the United States. We shut one down that was going to be big. But there's talk of building very big accelerators. What can we do about this? What are the solutions? We've got the fox watching the henhouse here. We need to — we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics, but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what's going on with these experiments. Secondly, we have a natural laboratory surrounding the Earth. We have an electromagnetic field around the Earth, and it's constantly bombarded by high-energy particles, like protons. And in my opinion, we don't spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what's safe to do on Earth. Number six: biotech disaster. It's one of my favorite ones, because we've done several stories on Bt corn. Bt corn is a corn that creates its own pesticide to kill a corn borer. You may of heard of it — heard it called StarLink, especially when all those taco shells were taken out of the supermarkets about a year and a half ago. This stuff was supposed to only be feed for animals in the United States, and it got into the human food supply, and somebody should've figured out that it would get in the human food supply very easily. But the thing that's alarming is a couple of months ago, in Mexico, where Bt corn and all genetically altered corn is totally illegal, they found Bt corn genes in wild corn plants. Now, corn originated, we think, in Mexico. This is the genetic biodiversity storehouse of corn. This brings back a skepticism that has gone away recently, that superweeds and superpests could spread around the world, from biotechnology, that literally could destroy the world's food supply in very short order. So, what do we do about that? We treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants. It's that simple. This is an amazingly unregulated field. When the StarLink disaster happened, there was a battle between the EPA and the FDA over who really had authority, and over what parts of this, and they didn't get it straightened out for months. That's kind of crazy. Number five, one of my favorites: reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. Believe it or not, this happens every few hundred thousand years, and has happened many times in our history. North Pole goes to the South, South Pole goes to the North, and vice versa. But what happens, as this occurs, is that we lose our magnetic field around the Earth over the period of about 100 years, and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun, that this field protects us from, are — well, basically, we're gonna fry. (Laughter) (Voice: Steve, I have some additional hats downstairs.) SP: So, what can we do about this? Oh, by the way, we're overdue. It's been 780,000 years since this happened. So, it should have happened about 480,000 years ago. Oh, and here's one other thing. Scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about five percent. So, maybe we're in the throes of it. One of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the Earth is, is that we have — you know, we don't have good weather data from 60 years ago, much less data on things like the ozone layer. So, there's a fairly simple solution to this. There's going to be a lot of cheap rocketry that's going to come online in about six or seven years that gets us into the low atmosphere very cheaply. You know, we can make ozone from car tailpipes. It's not hard: it's just three oxygen atoms. If you brought the entire ozone layer down to the surface of the Earth, it would be the thickness of two pennies, at 14 pounds per square inch. You don't need that much up there. We need to learn how to repair and replenish the Earth's ozone layer. (Applause) Number four: giant solar flares. Solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the Sun that bombard the Earth with high-speed subatomic particles. So far, our atmosphere has done, and our magnetic field has done pretty well protecting us from this. Occasionally, we get a flare from the Sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth, and electricity. But the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our Sun, and they've found that a number of them, when they're about the age of our Sun, brighten by a factor of as much as 20. Doesn't last for very long. And they think these are super-flares, millions of times more powerful than any flares we've had from our Sun so far. Obviously, we don't want one of those. (Laughter) There's a flip side to it. In studying stars like our Sun, we've found that they go through periods of diminishment, when their total amount of energy that's expelled from them goes down by maybe one percent. One percent doesn't sound like a lot, but it would cause one hell of an ice age here. So, what can we do about this? (Laughter) Start terraforming Mars. This is one of my favorite subjects. I wrote a story about this in Life magazine in 1993. This is rocket science, but it's not hard rocket science. Everything that we need to make an atmosphere on Mars, and to make a livable planet on Mars, is probably there. And you just, literally, have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of Mars and spit out the oxygen. The problem is it takes 300 years to terraform Mars, minimum. Really more like 500 years to do it right. There's no reason why we shouldn't start now. (Laughter) Number three — isn't this stuff cool? (Laughter) A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time, the germs sure get the upper hand. In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people. That was back when the population was around 100 million people. The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans. AIDS is coming back. Ebola seems to be rearing its head with much too much frequency, and old diseases like cholera are becoming resistant to antibiotics. We've all learned what — the kind of panic that can occur when an old disease rears its head, like anthrax. The worst possibility is that a very simple germ, like staph, for which we have one antibiotic that still works, mutates. And we know staph can do amazing things. A staph cell can be next to a muscle cell in your body and borrow genes from it when antibiotics come, and change and mutate. The danger is that some germ like staph will be — will mutate into something that's really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it. That's happened before. About 12,000 years ago, there was a massive wave of mammal extinctions in the Americas, and that is thought to have been a virulent disease. So, what can we do about it? It is nuts. We give antibiotics — (Applause) — every cow, every lamb, every chicken, they get antibiotics every day, all. You know, you go to a restaurant, you eat fish, I got news for you, it's all farmed. You know, you gotta ask when you go to a restaurant if it's a wild fish, cause they're not going to tell you. We're giving away the code. This is like being at war and giving somebody your secret code. We're telling the germs out there how to fight us. We gotta fix that. We gotta outlaw that right away. Secondly, our public health system, as we saw with anthrax, is a real disaster. We have a real, major outbreak of disease in the United States, we are not prepared to cope with it. Now, there is money in the federal budget, next year, to build up the public health service. But I don't think to any extent that it really needs to be done. Number two — my favorite — we meet a rogue black hole. You know, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, really, you walk into an astronomy convention, and you say, "You know, there's probably a black hole at the center of every galaxy," and they're going to hoot you off the stage. And now, if you went into one of those conventions and you said, "Well, I don't think black holes are out there," they'd hoot you off the stage. Our comprehension of the way the universe works is really — has just gained unbelievably in recent years. We think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the Milky Way alone, our galaxy. And these stars have compressed down to maybe something like 12, 15 miles wide, and they are black holes. And they are gobbling up everything around them, including light, which is why we can't see them. Most of them should be in orbit around something. But galaxies are very violent places, and things can be spun out of orbit. And also, space is incredibly vast. So even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit, the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote. But it only has to get close, about a billion miles away, one of these things. About a billion miles away, here's what happens to Earth's orbit: it becomes elliptical instead of circular. And for three months out of the year, the surface temperatures go up to 150 to 180. For three months out of the year, they go to 50 below zero. That won't work too well. What can we do about this? And this is my scariest. (Laughter) I don't have a good answer for this one. Again, we gotta think about being a colonizing race. And finally, number one: biggest danger to life as we know it, I think, a really big asteroid heads for Earth. The important thing to remember here — this is not a question of if, this is a question of when, and how big. In 1908, just a 200-foot piece of a comet exploded over Siberia and flattened forests for maybe 100 miles. It had the effect of about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Astronomers estimate that little asteroids like that come about every hundred years. In 1989, a large asteroid passed 400,000 miles away from Earth. Nothing to worry about, right? It passed directly through Earth's orbit. We were in that that spot six hours earlier. A small asteroid, say a half mile wide, would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up — Carl Sagan's nuclear winter thing. An asteroid five miles wide causes major extinctions. We think the one that got the dinosaurs was about five miles wide. Where are they? There's something called the Kuiper belt, which — some people think Pluto's not a planet, that's where Pluto is, it's in the Kuiper belt. There's also something a little farther out, called the Oort cloud. There are about 100,000 balls of ice and rock — comets, really — out there, that are 50 miles in diameter or more, and they regularly take a little spin, in towards the Sun and pass reasonably close to us. Of more concern, I think, is the asteroids that exist between Mars and Jupiter. The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey told us last fall — they're making the first map of the universe, three-dimensional map of the universe — that there are probably 700,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that are a half a mile big or bigger. So you say, yeah, well, what are really the chances of this happening? Andrew, can you put that chart up? This is a chart that Dr. Clark Chapman at the Southwest Research Institute presented to Congress a few years ago. You'll notice that the chance of an asteroid-slash-comet impact killing you is about one in 20,000, according to the work they've done. Now look at the one right below that. Passenger aircraft crash, one in 20,000. We spend an awful lot of money trying to be sure that we don't die in airplane accidents, and we're not spending hardly anything on this. And yet, this is completely preventable. We finally have, just in the last year, the technology to stop this cold. Could we have the solutions? NASA's spending three million dollars a year, three million bucks — that is like pocket change — to search for asteroids. Because we can actually figure out every asteroid that's out there, and if it might hit Earth, and when it might hit Earth. And they're trying to do that. But it's going to take them 10 years, at spending three million dollars a year, and even then, they claim they'll only have about 80 percent of them catalogued. Comets are a tougher act. We don't really have the technology to predict comet trajectories, or when one with our name on it might arrive. But we would have lots of time, if we see it coming. We really need a dedicated observatory. You'll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of, amateur astronomers? That's because nobody's looking for them, except amateurs. We need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets. Part two of the solutions: we need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid, or alter its trajectory. Now, a year ago, we did an amazing thing. We sent a probe out to this asteroid belt, called NEAR, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. And these guys orbited a 30 — or no, about a 22-mile long asteroid called Eros. And then, of course, you know, they pulled one of those sneaky NASA things, where they had extra batteries and extra gas aboard and everything, and then, at the last minute, they landed. When the mission was over, they actually landed on the thing. We have landed a rocket ship on an asteroid. It's not a big deal. Now, the trouble with just sending a bomb out for this thing is that you don't have anything to push against in space, because there's no air. A nuclear explosion is just as hot, but we don't really have anything big enough to melt a 22-mile long asteroid, or vaporize it, would be more like it. But we can learn to land on these asteroids that have our name on them and put something like a small ion propulsion motor on it, which would gently, slowly, after a period of time, push it into a different trajectory, which, if we've done our math right, would keep it from hitting Earth. This is just a matter of finding 'em, going there, and doing something about it. I know your head is spinning from all this stuff. Yikes! So many big threats! The thing, I think, to remember, is September 11. We don't want to get caught flat-footed again. We know about this stuff. Science has the power to predict the future in many cases now. Knowledge is power. The worst thing we can do is say, jeez, I got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid. (Laughter) That's a mistake that could literally cost us our future. Thank you.
So, you know, Helena not only is a homeowner now, but she was really transformed by her experience saving with EARN. And we operate an internal research institute at EARN that studies the cognitive side of this in addition to the pure economic outcomes. And one of the things that we find is that there is some science behind this transformation. People build the practice of saving, which gives them an increased sense of control over their lives and leads to much longer-term financial capability where they make better choices and have a different vision of the future for themselves and for their kids. And if you look at some of the data that's emerging now on wealth, this really matters. Saving is something that seems old fashioned. And in a world of innovation and trying to change the world, you often look for the bold new ideas. But saving happens to be something which the Pew Charitable Trust, for instance, and their data on economic mobility, they find that it's one of the greatest predictors of people leaving the bottom 20 percent of the economy. And at EARN since 2002, we've had thousands of people who, when they begin with us, are earning under $20,000 a year who have saved over $5 million of their own money since then and invested millions of this in college degrees, in small businesses and in homes.
Do our brains contain a limited amount of willpower? If you're on a diet, is it harder to keep your emotions in check? If you're studying for an exam, will you backslide on the diet? In an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang argued that willpower is a limited resource best applied to one behavior at a time. So, has your willpower been tested lately? Did you have to prioritize one area and abandon another? Call us with your story: 800-989-8255. You can also e-mail us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation.
And here's an e-mail from Philip(ph) in Bay Shore in New York. The office would close an hour early on Fridays in the summer. I was told to go to happy hour at the local bar. If I didn't, I'd have to work the extra hour, which is what I did. I worked the extra hour. Next Monday, I was put under great pressure to go. It made things very awkward for a long time until I made a stand and refused. Since then, I left and started my own business. This clearly felt like a sort of harassment. And, Tory Johnson, is that the - is that an appropriate reaction?
One of my first jobs was to knock on a door and get a photograph from the parents who had lost their son in the fighting in World War II. And I'll never forget walking up and down the street. I did not want to knock on that door. I just simply didn't want to embarrass them, prey on their grief by saying your son's been killed, give me a photograph. And finally, I had to sack myself, knowing that if I went back to the office - I'd just started - I would be sacked. And I knocked on the door and they said, oh, come in, lad. Have a cup of tea. You want a photograph of Steve?
Well, Senator McCain specifically wants to repeal the tax cut for higher income Americans, because he strongly does believe that when you cut taxes obviously you spur economic growth. He also wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. These are the tax cuts that were passed by the U.S. House and Senate back in 2001, they are scheduled to retire or expire in 2012. Senator McCain also wants to eliminate the AMT, which is the Alternative Minimum Tax, he also wants a free zone discretionary spending, and he also wants a gas tax holiday, which many Americans want. Simply in that means basically is that you cut the federal tax cut between now and perhaps maybe until Labor Day, which thus in the process will give people a little bit more breathing room, as relates to paying a high gas prices at the pump.
That's right. In some sense, we knew that because we knew about dark energy. And I think it's a question of what we mean by empty - does empty mean no matter, or does it mean nothing? Because even if there is no actual matter, there can be energy present. There can be essentially charge present. And that's actually what's going on with the Higgs field. It's a very abstract concept. It's funny one of the most difficult things when writing the first book was describing this Higgs mechanism because it is so abstract, because it doesn't involve actual particles. But nonetheless, in the presence of a Higgs field, which is basically something that permeates the universe, it's there everywhere, and it's effectively something like a charge. And particles have to travel through that charge-like stuff, and when it does, they acquire their masses. You might say why didn't they have masses right from the beginning, and that's because it actually would be inconsistent. You would make nonsensical predictions, like probabilities of interactions greater than one.
Right. And actually, we shouldn't be too concerned about acetone. It's a relatively benign chemical as chemicals go. But other products include nonenal and decanal. Those are higher molecular weight aldehydes with nine and ten carbons, respectively. And at higher concentrations, they're irritants. They irritate our mucous membranes. They can make our eyes itch or our throat scratchy. One of the compounds we identified was nonenal, an unsaturated aldehyde that has a very low odor threshold. It's odor threshold is two parts per trillion. And we well exceeded the odor threshold when we had the ozone reacting with the passengers in the plane and it's an unpleasant smell. The Japanese have described the smell of nonenal as the smell of an old man.
We know that every time this report comes out, the same thing happens. We label China and other countries as the major human rights violators, and then the Chinese are the ones who always come back with the report saying we are. They go behind the scenes to try to soften any response because they don't want any sanctions, and they know we have power, and they don't want their economy affected; but they're quite right in what they say about the United States. We did engage in torture and everybody knows what has happened, and we do have race discrimination. I argued when I was in the Civil Rights Convention that we ought to do a report on the United States every year and release it at the same time that the International Human Rights report was released so that we undercut criticisms and we could examine ourselves and say what we were doing wrong in one big report and put it out. There was a lot of support for that in the State Department, but there was a lot of opposition to the whole idea. So, in a sense, the Chinese are just taking advantage of our hypocrisy, that's what they're doing.
Well, possibly a third option. I mean, you could do a behavioral assessment on each dog and make a judgment about some dogs that might be capable of rehabilitation. But that would be a pretty onerous task and it would be costly. The dogs might be warehoused for an awfully long time. They'd probably be isolated because, again, these are dogs that have been bred and trained for aggression toward other dogs. They will attempt to kill other dogs. So they can't be in a group setting. It just raises, you know, major questions about their future welfare and the welfare of other animals around them.
U.S. senator is good work if you could get it. Usually need a million dollars in the bank and it's not like you can apply online, unless you live in Wyoming. Go to the Republican Party Web site and you'll find a brief application. You'll be asked to list community service and education. And there is a space that reads: Registered Republican? Colon. Presumably the answers can range from yes to darn tootin'. Among the names being floated for this job is Second Lady Lynn Cheney. Now, since the vice president breaks all pies in the Senate, that could make for interesting dinner conversation at the Naval Observatory. However, Wyoming lawyer Tim Stubson, a Republican Party insider, says the Cheney rumors are all propagated by outsiders.
Well, you told Democratic senators last week that the White House would not pay ransom, I think, are the words that were used to congressional Republicans. In other words, you wouldn't agree to concessions in exchange for raising the debt limit. But I want to ask you about that because back in 2011, the White House did agree to big spending cuts as part of a deal that did lift the debt ceiling. So I wonder if now, looking back, you would say that was a mistake, to tie the two things together, that it now sets a precedent. If you did it then, why not do it now?
Captain Beefheart, perhaps the greatest Rock & Roll musician of all time. And a sort of evil, I think evil genius in his own right, certainly a genius. And he and his Magic Band produced some of the most amazing music of the '60s, '70s and '80s. It's a kind of thing where it's in the book, I suspect zero percent of my - of the children reading it will have any idea who Captain Beefheart is. But it's a funny name. And so I think they'll enjoy that. And then maybe they'll on the Internet. They'll look him up, they'll listen to some music and they'll be horribly disappointed.
Listen, I say more power to them, the Democrats. You know, I think you don't have to agree with things that are being said. I disagree strongly with almost all of it, but to welcome things that excite people about public affairs and bring people out to vote. So I give him credit and I think Senator Obama deserves most of that credit. But months from now when it's a binary choice, I think that there's an opening that I was not sure would be there for any Republican in a year when by many, many, for many reasons we might have been without much a chance. So no predictions here but I think this is going to be a lot more competitive race than it might have been given a different Republican nominee and perhaps a more moderate Democratic nominee.
Yeah, you got to get rid of it right away. On of the best things they can say about an athlete is that he has a short memory. If things aren't going well, you got to get a completely different mindset. You got to forget what just happened. I remember when they would hit a homerun off of me is Seattle at Sick's Stadium, when I pitched for the Seattle Pilots. I would watch the ball go into the center field seats, and then I would see Mt. Ranier, and I'd say, hey, look at Mt. Ranier. Boy, that's a beautiful...
Let me just jump in on that. You know, I'm glad that Dr. Barrett brought that up because Dr. Salzman seemed to imply that what you had was largely driven by the home environment. That is true. That, in fact, there's a lot - it may be a lot be may be a lot harder if you, in fact, don't know about these kinds of careers, that you have other kinds of social and cultural issues that you're trying to address at the same time. But in many cases, you're talking about policies that school systems are putting into place or not, that of - that are driving a lot of the things that you are seeing. For example, the distribution of highly qualified teachers, those are decisions that school systems are making that lead to lesser qualified individuals being disproportionately assigned to teach the students with the greatest challenge.
Advocates of gay marriage hit a couple of speed bumps this past week. In California, the First District Court of Appeal heard arguments about whether excluding same-sex couples from marriage violates the state constitution. The court has 90 days to issue a ruling. And in what some gay marriage supporters see as a victory, and what some opponents see as a cop out, lawmakers in Massachusetts postponed a vote on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex unions of any kind. They'll revisit the matter after Election Day. Today, we have the second of two conversations about gay marriage and where activists may go from here. Last week we spoke with a supporter of same-sex marriage. We'll now hear from the opposing side.
Sure, Flora. To put this in context, about a year ago, a study was published in Science by Dr. Gary Landreth and colleagues at Case Western University in Cleveland that really shocked the field, to a certain extent, with respect to there may be drugs out there that are used for other purposes that could have actions against the underlying biology of Alzheimer's disease. And they were studying a drug called Bexarotene, which likely resulted from what's called high-throughput screening, where people will put a bunch of compounds that are on the market - other drugs, compounds that are available for other purposes - through a screening process looking for any hits at an assay that may be relevant for Alzheimer's disease.
"He told me joining Boko Haram meant a direct route to heaven," says Umar, "so anybody living with them in the forest would surely go to paradise, so come and join them." Umar escaped from captivity with another teen bride after they hatched a plan to run away while collecting firewood for cooking. She says, "I have lost so much. I've lost my virginity. I've lost my friends. I missed my parents and family. And which man will marry a girl who was once with Boko Haram, albeit against her will?" she asks. "I have been cheated, and I will never forget what I've been through." Then there's the name calling.
Oh, absolutely. In fact, I was writing the words down - we're all in this together - as Elizabeth was saying them. The report makes clear that this is a global problem. The cooperation of many different kinds is required, that the deployment of resources in the developing world assisted by the industrialized world is essential. It would be very hard for a country to opt out of this process as the momentum gets going. I don't think any country really wants to be a spoiler. And so I'm pretty confident that when the world is underway, big countries like China and India are going to be playing as forcefully as any other. After all, this is a major new way of having economic activity in jobs, in investments of all sorts. This is going to be something that's going to preoccupy us for a long time. And we'll be doing these activities, whether it's capturing carbon and putting it below ground or building efficient transport systems in cities, we'll be doing this in a major way across the world. And there will be lots of business opportunities, lots of business competition. I can't see any country that has any aspirations to being part of the leadership of the world of passing this by.
Well, as you're pointing out - and this has been growing for a long time - a number of MPs, particularly senior members of her Conservative Party, want her out. There's talk possibly of the threat of Cabinet resignations to force her to leave and maybe an offer that would run like this, Lulu. In exchange for the prime minister giving a date when she would step down, maybe get enough votes to pass her Brexit plan. Honestly though, that seems unlikely because it's so unpopular, and it's lost by such huge margins. And the bottom line, I think, is many, many MPs no longer have much faith in her leading her party or the country.
Well, this research has been around for at least 10 years now, and some researchers did have some limited success in doing this as much as 10 years ago, but the success was limited. The stronger and most common form of A they were completely unsuccessful with, and they needed large quantities of a rather inefficient enzyme. What this new research does is that they have found very efficient enzymes that can be used in very small quantities and also used at conditions that won't damage the red cells in any way so that they'll be in perfect condition for transfusion.
Well, the portraits are two big examples. There was one he bought for $20,000, one he bought for $10,000. He also bought a Tim Tebow signed football helmet for $12,000 that we don't know where that is. But it belongs to Trump. These things - if the foundation buys them, he has to use them for a charitable purpose. So we're trying to think of - what could be a charitable purpose for a giant picture of himself or a Tim Tebow helmet? The big-ticket items, ones that really stand out, are these two payments, one for $100,000, one for $158,000 where, basically, his clubs had gotten into legal trouble. And as a condition of settling their lawsuits, the business has said - OK, I'm going to donate money to a particular charity. Is what Trump did was take the money out of his charity, the Trump Foundation, and use it to pay off those obligations that his businesses had incurred?
Republican's don't actually think that. That's what Democrats think Republicans say. Listen, I guess a few things. First, Obama's stuck at about 40 percent approval on the economy. He's been stuck there for about a year. We can have an argument about the stimulus package, and I would certainly grant that it did ameliorate the hurt of the recession. Not a lot has happened in Washington in the last four or five years for the economy or ill. So I don't think really the economy really has much - or Washington has much to do with the job cycle right now. The things that Obama is touting in these speeches are things like fracking which really has had a tremendous effect, both on the production of energy and both on attracting manufacturing jobs. But fracking is not something the Obama administration has particularly endorsed. I think politically, the rule is if the real upsurge doesn't happen four or five months before an election, it doesn't really get noticed on election day. And so I think it's unlikely to have a big positive effect on Democratic candidates.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Rebecca Roberts in Washington. Neal Conan is away this week. There's some positive news on the economic front: Fewer people filed for unemployment in July than analysts predicted. More people are buying cars, spurred on by the government's Cash for Clunkers program, and home sales are rising. There's also, well, less positive news. In July, 360,000 homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, more people declared personal bankruptcy, and to the disappointment of retailers around the country, many Americans are still watching their wallets. So what to make of this economic split personality? Does the good news signal the recession's easing, or does the bad news mean recovery is still a ways off? We'll hear two view this hour.
Well, you know, I mean, I guess one of the most poignant moments really was when the athletes from a unified Korea walked into the stadium together. You know? It was just - I mean, it was really striking. They walked in together. They were under a unified flag. All of their jackets just said Korea. The flag bearer was a woman who was a bobsledder, and it was also being held - a bobsledder from the South - and then it was also being held by a hockey player from the North. And they were holding it jointly. So it was really - it was a really touching sort of moment. You know, the U.S. team walked in. Flag-bearer Erin Hamlin was holding it. You know, she's the luger from upstate New York. She won a bronze in Sochi, was the first American to win an individual medal in that sport. You know, we should say that the athletes from Russia also was pretty interesting. You know, the country was banned from the Games, but individual athletes were allowed to participate if they passed a heightened doping screening. You know, they walked in under the Olympic flag, not the Russian flag.
Yeah, well, we have not had that incident occur, though, you know, these individuals that are here in - already in the country, that they know this law is up here, I think it is going to prohibit them from contacting because they're going to be afraid they're going to be deported back. But what we need is we need people to go ahead and call us, and then we can make a determination of what we're going to do if it should come out that we determined that they're not U.S. citizens, though we cannot investigate further on another - on that issue because of the call.
This is WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. After five days of grueling talks, negotiators for Iran and six world powers signed the first agreement in nearly a decade to restrict Iran's nuclear program. The deal will effectively halt Iran's nuclear progress for half a year, setting the stage for even more difficult talks on a longer-range agreement. Critics are already calling the plan insufficient and dangerous, but President Obama says it will, quote, "cut off Iran's most likely paths to a bomb." NPR's Peter Kenyon is in Geneva, covering the talks. He joins us now. Good morning, Peter.
All right. Daniel, thanks very much for the call. And thank you to both our guests, Matt Gallagher, you just heard. His book is "Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War," former captain, U.S. Army. Gary Solis also with us, adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University. His book is "The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War." They both joined us here in Studio 3A. When we come back, the Opinion Page and the second civil war. Clarence Page will join us. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
Well, one of the dirty little secrets in Washington in particular is, is that government officials, in particular, hold this information hostage, if you will, in exchange only for promises of anonymity. You'll see stories - and I think what the caller is referring to is an increase in stories where, you know, a senior government official said such and such. But those are briefings. They're background briefings where reporters - you'll have a whole room full of reporters who will be told that you can only use this information if you promise that you won't name this particular government official. So a lot of this is orchestrated by the government. That's the dirty little secret.
Beginning with the Paleolithic era, Armstrong documents the evolution of theology right up to today. From the Indian Aryans, Confucius and the Old Testament, she moves on to Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine. It's a whirlwind tour of philosophy. Pit stops are made along the way to explain the authorship of the Torah, the Holy Trinity, the etymology of the word faith. Virtually every great prophet, poet and scientist makes an appearance: Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Muhammad, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, right up to Derrida. It's an exhaustive but lucid work. Reading "The Case for God," I felt smarter. How could I not? It's so much about so much. Yet it's not without flaw. Theology, after all, hasn't been shaped by ideas alone. Political and economic concerns have always influenced doctrine. Yet Armstrong never acknowledges this. She presents religious thought as unfolding in a pristine, intellectual bubble, as a dance between mythos and rationality only. This is a sinful omission.
This summer I was back in Ohio for a family wedding, and when I was there, there was a meet and greet with Anna and Elsa from "Frozen." Not the Anna and Elsa from "Frozen," as this was not a Disney-sanctioned event. These two entrepreneurs had a business of running princess parties. Your kid is turning five? They'll come sing some songs, sprinkle some fairy dust, it's great. And they were not about to miss out on the opportunity that was the phenomenon and that was "Frozen." So they get hired by a local toy store, kids come in on a Saturday morning, buy some Disney swag, get their picture taken with the princesses, call it a day. It's like Santa Claus without the seasonal restrictions. (Laughter) And my three-and-a-half-year-old niece Samantha was in the thick of it. She could care less that these two women were signing posters and coloring books as Snow Queen and Princess Ana with one N to avoid copyright lawsuits. (Laughter) According to my niece and the 200-plus kids in the parking lot that day, this was the Anna and Elsa from "Frozen." It is a blazing hot Saturday morning in August in Ohio. We get there at 10 o'clock, the scheduled start time, and we are handed number 59. By 11 o'clock they had called numbers 21 through 25; this was going to be a while, and there is no amount of free face painting or temporary tattoos that could prevent the meltdowns that were occurring outside of the store. (Laughter) So, by 12:30 we get called: "56 to 63, please." And as we walk in, it is a scene I can only describe you as saying it looked like Norway threw up. (Laughter) There were cardboard cut-out snowflakes covering the floor, glitter on every flat surface, and icicles all over the walls. And as we stood in line in an attempt to give my niece a better vantage point than the backside of the mother of number 58, I put her up on my shoulders, and she was instantly riveted by the sight of the princesses. And as we moved forward, her excitement only grew, and as we finally got to the front of the line, and number 58 unfurled her poster to be signed by the princesses, I could literally feel the excitement running through her body. And let's be honest, at that point, I was pretty excited too. (Laughter) I mean, the Scandinavian decadence was mesmerizing. (Laughter) So we get to the front of the line, and the haggard clerk turns to my niece and says, "Hi, honey. You're next! Do you want to get down, or you're going to stay on your dad's shoulders for the picture?' (Laughter) And I was, for a lack of a better word, frozen. (Laughter) It's amazing that in an unexpected instant we are faced with the question, who am I? Am I an aunt? Or am I an advocate? Millions of people have seen my video about how to have a hard conversation, and there one was, right in front of me. At the same time, there's nothing more important to me than the kids in my life, so I found myself in a situation that we so often find ourselves in, torn between two things, two impossible choices. Would I be an advocate? Would I take my niece off my shoulders and turn to the clerk and explain to her that I was in fact her aunt, not her father, and that she should be more careful and not to jump to gender conclusions based on haircuts and shoulder rides — (Laughter) — and while doing that, miss out on what was, to this point, the greatest moment of my niece's life. Or would I be an aunt? Would I brush off that comment, take a million pictures, and not be distracted for an instant from the pure joy of that moment, and by doing that, walk out with the shame that comes up for not standing up for myself, especially in front of my niece. Who was I? Which one was more important? Which role was more worth it? Was I an aunt? Or was I an advocate? And I had a split second to decide. We are taught right now that we are living in a world of constant and increasing polarity. It's so black and white, so us and them, so right and wrong. There is no middle, there is no gray, just polarity. Polarity is a state in which two ideas or opinions are completely opposite from each other; a diametrical opposition. Which side are you on? Are you unequivocally and without question antiwar, pro-choice, anti-death penalty, pro-gun regulation, proponent of open borders and pro-union? Or, are you absolutely and uncompromisingly pro-war, pro-life, pro-death penalty, a believer that the Second Amendment is absolute, anti-immigrant and pro-business? It's all or none, you're with us or against us. That is polarity. The problem with polarity and absolutes is that it eliminates the individuality of our human experience and that makes it contradictory to our human nature. But if we are pulled in these two directions, but it's not really where we exist — polarity is not our actual reality — where do we go from there? What's at the other end of that spectrum? I don't think it's an unattainable, harmonious utopia, I think the opposite of polarity is duality. Duality is a state of having two parts, but not in diametrical opposition, in simultaneous existence. Don't think it's possible? Here are the people I know: I know Catholics who are pro-choice, and feminists who wear hijabs, and veterans who are antiwar, and NRA members who think I should be able to get married. Those are the people I know, those are my friends and family, that is the majority of our society, that is you, that is me. (Applause) Duality is the ability to hold both things. But the question is: Can we own our duality? Can we have the courage to hold both things? I work at a restaurant in town, I became really good friends with the busser. I was a server and we had a great relationship, we had a really great time together. Her Spanish was great because she was from Mexico. (Laughter) That line actually went the other way. Her English was limited, but significantly better than my Spanish. But we were united by our similarities, not separated by our differences. And we were close, even though we came from very different worlds. She was from Mexico, she left her family behind so she could come here and afford them a better life back home. She was a devout conservative Catholic, a believer in traditional family values, stereotypical roles of men and women, and I was, well, me. (Laughter) But the things that bonded us were when she asked about my girlfriend, or she shared pictures that she had from her family back home. Those were the things that brought us together. So one day, we were in the back, scarfing down food as quickly as we could, gathered around a small table, during a very rare lull, and a new guy from the kitchen came over — who happened to be her cousin — and sat down with all the bravado and machismo that his 20-year-old body could hold. (Laughter) And he said to her, [in Spanish] "Does Ash have a boyfriend?" And she said, [in Spanish] "No, she has a girlfriend." And he said, [in Spanish] "A girlfriend?!?" And she set down her fork, and locked eyes with him, and said, [in Spanish] "Yes, a girlfriend. That is all." And his smug smile quickly dropped to one of maternal respect, grabbed his plate, walked off, went back to work. She never made eye contact with me. She left, did the same thing — it was a 10-second conversation, such a short interaction. And on paper, she had so much more in common with him: language, culture, history, family, her community was her lifeline here, but her moral compass trumped all of that. And a little bit later, they were joking around in the kitchen in Spanish, that had nothing to do with me, and that is duality. She didn't have to choose some P.C. stance on gayness over her heritage. She didn't have to choose her family over our friendship. It wasn't Jesus or Ash. (Laughter) (Applause) Her individual morality was so strongly rooted that she had the courage to hold both things. Our moral integrity is our responsibility and we must be prepared to defend it even when it's not convenient. That's what it means to be an ally, and if you're going to be an ally, you have to be an active ally: Ask questions, act when you hear something inappropriate, actually engage. I had a family friend who for years used to call my girlfriend my lover. Really? Lover? So overly sexual, so '70s gay porn. (Laughter) But she was trying, and she asked. She could have called her my friend, or my "friend," or my "special friend" — (Laughter) — or even worse, just not asked at all. Believe me, we would rather have you ask. I would rather have her say lover, than say nothing at all. People often say to me, "Well, Ash, I don't care. I don't see race or religion or sexuality. It doesn't matter to me. I don't see it." But I think the opposite of homophobia and racism and xenophobia is not love, it's apathy. If you don't see my gayness, then you don't see me. If it doesn't matter to you who I sleep with, then you cannot imagine what it feels like when I walk down the street late at night holding her hand, and approach a group of people and have to make the decision if I should hang on to it or if I should I drop it when all I want to do is squeeze it tighter. And the small victory I feel when I make it by and don't have to let go. And the incredible cowardice and disappointment I feel when I drop it. If you do not see that struggle that is unique to my human experience because I am gay, then you don't see me. If you are going to be an ally, I need you to see me. As individuals, as allies, as humans, we need to be able to hold both things: both the good and the bad, the easy and the hard. You don't learn how to hold two things just from the fluff, you learn it from the grit. And what if duality is just the first step? What if through compassion and empathy and human interaction we are able to learn to hold two things? And if we can hold two things, we can hold four, and if we can hold four, we can hold eight, and if we can hold eight, we can hold hundreds. We are complex individuals, swirls of contradiction. You are all holding so many things right now. What can you do to hold just a few more? So, back to Toledo, Ohio. I'm at the front of the line, niece on my shoulders, the frazzled clerk calls me Dad. Have you ever been mistaken for the wrong gender? Not even that. Have you ever been called something you are not? Here's what it feels like for me: I am instantly an internal storm of contrasting emotions. I break out into a sweat that is a combination of rage and humiliation, I feel like the entire store is staring at me, and I simultaneously feel invisible. I want to explode in a tirade of fury, and I want to crawl under a rock. And top all of that off with the frustration that I'm wearing an out-of-character tight-fitting purple t-shirt, so this whole store can see my boobs, to make sure this exact same thing doesn't happen. (Laughter) But, despite my best efforts to be seen as the gender I am, it still happens. And I hope with every ounce of my body that no one heard — not my sister, not my girlfriend, and certainly not my niece. I am accustomed to this familiar hurt, but I will do whatever I need to do to protect the people I love from it. But then I take my niece off my shoulders, and she runs to Elsa and Anna — the thing she's been waiting so long for — and all that stuff goes away. All that matters is the smile on her face. And as the 30 seconds we waited two and a half hours for comes to a close we gather up our things, and I lock eyes with the clerk again; and she gives me an apologetic smile and mouths, "I am so sorry!" (Laughter) And her humanity, her willingness to admit her mistake disarms me immediately, then I give her a: "It's okay, it happens. But thanks." And I realize in that moment that I don't have to be either an aunt or an advocate, I can be both. I can live in duality, and I can hold two things. And if I can hold two things in that environment, I can hold so many more things. As my girlfriend and my niece hold hands and skip out the front of the door, I turn to my sister and say, "Was it worth it?" And she said, "Are you kidding me? Did you see the look on her face? This was the greatest day of her life!" (Laughter) "It was worth the two and a half hours in the heat, it was worth the overpriced coloring book that we already had a copy of." (Laughter) "It was even worth you getting called Dad." (Laughter) And for the first time ever in my life, it actually was. Thank you, Boulder. Have a good night. (Applause)
The new CBS crime drama "Person of Interest" tells the story of two men who prevent crimes before they can be committed. Excuse me. They find out about the crimes by looking at data gathered by intelligence surveillance designed to catch terrorists. The series was picked up by CBS after the network says it tested better than any other series in recent memory. The show's producer is J.J. Abrams, creator of the hit show "Lost," and Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote "The Dark Knight." He created that series and also produces it. Both men have brought their knowledge of suspense and crime to the meaty subject of privacy and surveillance. But in a time of rapid advancement of technology and heightened terrorist suspicion, it's unclear to some where the line of fiction ends and where reality begins.
This morning a tiny fly was, true to its name and nature, flying about in the vicinity of my desk. It really was very tiny – a fruit fly, I’d guess. At one point it landed in front of me. I brushed it aside and it resumed flitting about in its patternless path. Then it landed again, and again I aimed to brush it aside. But this time, my aim was off. It was probably a matter of only a millimetre or so, but my finger landed, not next to the fly, but on it, and so what was meant to be a brushing motion became instead a squidging motion. The fly was so small that it didn’t offer the least resistance to the pressure of my finger. Compliantly, it transformed itself into a dark smudge. Not a gory or bloody smudge; not one with the least detail or variation – not to my naked eye, anyway. Just a small, uniform, rather faint mark. Now, I’m not a biologist, but I know that a fly is an animal, and more specifically, an insect. As such, it has (or had) wings, legs, eyes, antenna and a host of internal organs. Those parts are in turn made of cells, each one of which is hugely complex. And in those cells, among many other things, are – or were – the fly’s genes, which in turn embody an astonishing intricacy and an ancient, multi-million-year history, while in the fly’s gut would have been countless bacteria with their own genes, their own goals. Worlds within worlds, now squidged together into a single dark smudge that I am already finding it hard to pinpoint among the scratches and coffee rings. A history of life spread out before me, if only I were able to read it. At this point, I guess that readers will be dividing into two parties. One party, probably the majority, will be thinking, ‘Get over it, it’s a fly.’ This, it seems to me, is a very reasonable position. Flies die in large numbers all the time – some, indeed, at my hand, whether I intend it or not (and I sometimes do). And in the summer evenings, when I sit on our terrace and watch swifts in their spectacle of swooping and screeching, this beautiful display is, of course, at the same time an orgy of insect death. The other party of readers, probably the minority, will be horrified at my casual killing of this delicate life-form. They will be appalled at the waste and stupidity of my carelessness. To them, I must be an oaf; at best ignorant, at worst malevolent. And this, it seems to me, is also a very reasonable position. Even though I habitually write – sometimes about complex subjects – it is certain that with one mistimed finger-swipe I destroyed complexity and beauty many orders of magnitude greater than any I will ever create. Thus it seems to me quite reasonable to think that the death of the fly is entirely insignificant and that it is at the same time a kind of catastrophe. To entertain such contradictions is always uncomfortable, but in this case the dissonance echoes far and wide, bouncing off countless other decisions about what to buy, what to eat – what to kill; highlighting the inconsistencies in our philosophies, our attempts to make sense of our place in the world and our relations to our co‑inhabitants on Earth. The reality is that we do not know what to think about death: not that of a fly, or of a dog or a pig, or of ourselves. Which is a problem, because nature is a streamers-and-all, non-stop, cork-popping party of death. For example, I regularly take my children to a large park with a series of ponds, where in spring we look for frogspawn. This gelatinous broth is a mass of life in the making. Each batch contains many hundreds, even thousands of eggs. The next time we visit, the pond will be full of tadpoles, like a page covered in punctuation marks. But the time after that, there will be many fewer; and the next time we will have to look hard for those metamorphosing mini-frogs, as tiny as keychain toys, some still with their tadpole tails. Those we find are the few survivors, whose numbers will be thinned still more before any get as far as restarting the cycle with their own spawn. The Way of the Frog is to get Death so full at the feast that a few can slip past while he slumbers. This party of death is, of course, at the same time a cork-popping party of life. For all the tadpoles that perish, some still make it to become frogs, and have been doing so for at least 200 million years. Those that don’t are the stuff of life for countless other creatures, from the littlest insect larvae to grand old storks. Indeed, frogs are regarded as a keystone species, which means that the death of their multitudinous offspring, along with the death that they themselves deal out, is crucial to the flourishing of the community of life. In the language of ecology, life and death are obligate symbionts, each wholly dependent on the other. We too are built on a bedrock of old men’s bones. Our evolution to Homo sapiens is a product of the endless winnowing out of the unfit and the unfortunate. If some australopithecine apeman or woman had stumbled across the elixir of life, it is very unlikely that you or I would exist. It is worth bowing our heads for a moment to all our ancestors whose passing away made our lives possible. I was drawn to imagine the great finger coming to squish me, my little life flashing before my bulging, compound eyes But here we are – and many people would like it to stay that way. That tadpoles are fodder for pond-life is as natural as the leaves falling on the water in autumn; that flies get squidged is as ordinary as apples rotting in the orchard. One’s own death, on the other hand, seems most unnatural. It seems rather an error and an outrage; a cosmic crime; a reason to raise one’s fist and rebel against the regime that ordered this slaughter of innocents. But here we are – guests at the party of life and death. We know we must exit along with the flies and the tadpoles. But we would rather not think about it. And that, perhaps, is the problem with my dead fly. When I squidged it, I summoned the Reaper to my desk. If only briefly, I caught his eye. If I had turned away fast enough, the fly’s death would have remained as insignificant as those of its invisible brothers and sisters caught by the swifts. But I was drawn instead inside its tiny head, drawn to imagine the great finger coming to squish me, my little life flashing before my bulging, compound eyes. Through a lapse in my indifference, I was drawn into the catastrophe, drawn to make its death my death. Veganism, like the Indian religion Jainism and other movements that preach a very purist strain of non-violence to other beings, seems to me a response to this one side of our contradictory perception of mortality – its catastrophic nature. Such movements take seriously the catastrophe that is every single death of every single sentient creature, whether fly, rat, frog or human. And so they say: not by my hands, not on my watch, not if I can help it. They are anti-death movements, whose followers go to great lengths not to squash flies or mosquitoes, let alone have big fat pigs killed on their behalf. This horror at the death of other creatures is intimately bound up with horror at the prospect of one’s own demise. Flies come and go in countless masses, mostly beyond my sight and care. But when something happens that causes me to empathise, to become the fly, then its death becomes terrible. As the poet William Blake realised when he, too, carelessly squashed an insect: Am not IA fly like thee?Or art not thouA man like me?Some clever research from the field of social psychology has demonstrated a close association in our minds between animals, animal products, bodilyness generally and our own mortality. The upshot is that these things give off a whiff of the Reaper that colours our response to them. The studies are part of a body of work known as ‘terror management theory’, which holds that our world views largely function to help us manage the terror of death. That means all world views: in the case of religions such as Christianity with their promise of eternal life, the link is very obvious, but secular belief systems have their death-defence-mechanisms too, often closely paralleling the religious ones. For example, just as Christians believe they will be resurrected by God, those who subscribe to cryonics – being frozen upon death – believe they will be resurrected by scientists. Veganism and, to a slightly lesser extent, vegetarianism both follow this pattern, as modern secular parallels of Jainism. Their response to the terror of mortality is to attempt to create a zone of non-death, a zone from which the Reaper has been entirely banished, visiting neither flies, nor rats, nor us. In Jainism, the death-denial element is explicit: your ultimate reward for keeping your hands unbloodied is to become godlike. In veganism, it is only implicit, but nonetheless the religious or ritualistic elements are present: such as in the actions of a friend of mine who, when deciding to become vegan, threw out the half-finished pack of butter in her fridge. What animals were helped by this act, what suffering allayed? None, of course. But it at least banished death from her toast. I said that seeing each death as a catastrophe seems a perfectly reasonable response, and veganism and Jainism are its logical extensions. They attempt to resolve the paradox by denying the other side, which says that the death of a creature is at the same time insignificant, natural and inevitable. However, as reasonable as it is to take the catastrophe of death seriously, to ignore the other side of the paradox altogether leads us only into fantasy. It is the fantasy of a day when (in the words of the Old Testament) ‘the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the goat’. It imagines a world in which the catastrophe of mortality has triumphed over its insignificance. ‘Then,’ as St Paul wrote, ‘shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory”’, and we all might live happily ever after, flies and all. Just because nature is a cork-popping party of death does not mean that death is right or good But it is a fantasy. We cannot do away with death without doing away with life. In the Natural History Museum in my adopted home of Berlin, there is a glass cabinet in which a lion looks into the eyes of a zebra. They are just a few feet away from each other, with no barrier between them, but this lion will nonetheless never claw at this zebra’s flanks, nor break its neck nor tear out its bowels. They seem instead quite comfortable in each others’ presence, like old acquaintances, reminiscing perhaps about the warm savannah sun. The threat of imminent, violent death has been banished. And that, of course, is because they are filled with cold metal and wood shavings, instead of the hot blood that made them once alive and mortal enemies. No, we cannot do away with death without doing away with life. And this applies equally to the animals in our charge. The vegan friend who threw away the butter also once said to me that she did not want animals to die because of her. But of course, before they die for her (or you or me), they live. Whether they live well is a very important, but nonetheless separate, question. Caring and campaigning about animal welfare is noble and worthwhile. But abolishing such animals altogether is saying: because I am horrified that they must die, I will not let them live. It is a well-known fallacy to extrapolate from what is to what ought to be. Just because nature is a cork-popping party of death does not mean that death is right or good. Just because all flies die, this does not mean that my fly deserved what it got when I squidged it. But on the other hand, nature does set limits to what is possible, and perhaps even thinkable. Nature will not tolerate an end to these cycles; it will not tolerate life without death. There is an equal and opposite alternative to veganism’s insistence on the momentousness of each death, and its ensuing death-denial. We can instead assert death’s insignificance. Whereas in the first approach, each life acquires infinite value such that we dare not let it end, in the second approach, we strip each life of its value so that its end is a matter only of indifference. This approach, of course, is nihilism. Perhaps death’s relentless reaping should make us question the existence of higher meaning. But who thought there was such a thing anyway? There is a long tradition of seeing in the omnipresence of death the negation of all meaning, hope and value. It was what the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson meant when in 1849 he described Nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’. He laments that she is ‘so careless of the single life’, then, on considering fossils, how she is so careless of whole species. She cries: ‘I care for nothing, all shall go’, and Tennyson concludes: ‘O life as futile, then, as frail!’ But just as the first attempt to escape the paradox becomes an attempt to deny the undeniable, so does this one. The fact of death does not destroy meaning: indeed, as we pass through the heat of life we cannot help but produce meaning, like a popcorn machine produces popcorn. This is what living things do: they imbue the world with significance and value; for an organism there is always better or worse, relevant or irrelevant; there is always something to do. This is what differentiates us from the rock that is indifferent to being pummelled to sand by the sea. Perhaps, as Tennyson believed, death’s relentless reaping should lead us to question the existence of some higher meaning – one above, beyond or external to us. But whoever thought there was such a thing anyway? Not the frogs and tadpoles. And not me – yet I’m not therefore tempted to despair, at least not while a good dinner is waiting. Because life is so teeming with intentions and meanings, the death of each creature really is a catastrophe. But we must live with it anyway: as we saw, the alternative is the most desperate and convoluted of denials. Once when on holiday as a child, I remember my father wielding some insecticide spray against a column of ants invading our rented chalet. Thinking this looked like a fun thing to do, I took the spray-can outside to the ant’s nest and went on the offensive. To my surprise, my father came out and told me to stop. I had no business killing them all like that, he said. I was confused: my dad was a sausage-eating, fly-swotting man, who had grown up on a farm, and had himself just moments before brandished the same spray-can. But I was also relieved. I was glad that he thought it wrong; I was glad that he thought the death of an ant not only insignificant, but at the very same time a catastrophe. from the viewpoint of the gods, the deaths of us and the flies are equal in their insignificance He did not explain exactly why he thought my ant-hunting was wrong. He did not try to rationalise the apparent contradiction in his own actions with a grand theory. Though if he had been pushed, he might have said: we cannot stop Death from going about his business; and we oughtn’t pretend that sparing the ants (or the flies or the butter) will keep him from our door; but we need not rush to be his foot soldiers either. Those hoping that I would resolve this paradox might now be getting a little anxious, as we are reaching the penultimate paragraph with no solution in sight. But it should be clear by now that I do not believe there is a solution. I believe that the death of the fly was both insignificant and a kind of catastrophe. And I believe that about the deaths of frogs and pigs too, and about my own death, and yours. This, as Shakespeare knew, is the source of tragedy: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,’ said the much-suffering Gloucester in King Lear. The boys are wanton because the death of any creature, even a fly, is a catastrophe; but at the very same time, from the viewpoint of the gods, the deaths of us and the flies are equal in their insignificance. Philosophers academic and amateur – which is to say, pretty much all of us – prefer to think that paradoxes must have solutions, that they are somehow just the wrong way of looking at things, or a muddle of grammar and syntax. But not this one. It is, as far as I can see, part of the nature of things. To take both sides seriously and to seek some way to live with them is part of what it is to be human; part of what it means to be a guest at the party of life and death.
We don't have a problem with the government doing what is necessary to protect us. I think every American agrees with that basic premise. What frightened and scared a lot of people is the fact that the government did it by bypassing the legal safeguards that had been set up to make sure that no illegal activities were taking place, meaning the FISA court. The fact that the current administration felt it necessary to go around the legal safeguards, I think, probably scared people about what it was that the government was doing and how it was doing it. And why it couldn't operate within the legal frameworks that currently exist.
Yeah. That's exactly right. And this book - I mean, this is an interesting book because it's about half - a kind of an essay to that effect, oh get a grip on yourself, you know? Images of individual brains don't really tell us that next year's trend is pink Cadillacs. And half footnote, it's almost as many pages - it's like a wonderful book for a geek-loving - well, what she really mean by that? You kind of think you've got this fabulous back section in which she goes through study after study and, you know, article after article in which she says, does this really make sense? And she, you know, she'll take case studies. You probably remember Andrea Yates, the woman who had postpartum depression...
I mean full and complete disclosure. I said in my piece, the words total transparency should be a redundancy except a lot of people use transparent and don't really mean it. I mean that what's bad about lobbyists is that people don't know who's paying them, and how much money they've given to the politician and most importantly, what are they asking the politician to do? The politician should want that information publicly available so that when he votes one way or the other, he can say it's not because of causation, because I received a campaign donation which would be a crime, it's because of correlation meaning that's the way I think as a matter of conscience. The fact that I got a campaign donation is simply a fact side-by-side with what I did for the right reasons. Politicians are unfairly accused of just because they took a campaign donation, they can't vote their conscience in case their conscience is the same as the donors' request and that's really where the bad rap comes in. A lot of lobbyists contribute money to politicians and a lot of politicians take it. That doesn't mean that the politician doesn't do the right thing. But we need full disclosure, take the mystery out of the process and I think, then, the bad rap goes away.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you see it with Tea Party leaders like Jim DeMint threatening to go third party. Sarah Palin recently saying that if the GOP doesn't learn its lesson, it may be time to contemplate third party. So you're going to have a huge influx of Republican congressmen who are very conservative when it comes to matters of budget and tax cuts. And you're going to have some tension between the leadership, not only on spending issues, the next chairman - likely chairman, I should say, of the House Appropriations Committee, Jerry Lewis of California, the Republican, is known as a big spender. He's going to take a lot of heat from Tea Partiers.
Well, there's growing concern among investigators that the Russians used Facebook as a platform - after all it's so influential, you know, over, you know, I guess, two billion users monthly to use that to disrupt the election and to influence voters in significant ways by microtargeting them with specific kinds of messages, including the ones you just alluded to, the questions are raising anxieties about Muslims, about Black Lives Matters and the like. This, you know, latest video of contrition announcing certain kinds of reforms that actually may include some pretty decent ones from Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, comes on the heels of revelation also in The Washington Post that President Obama just after the November election said, hey, man, this is serious. You guys are going to have to take a look at this. You guys are going to have to take some responsibility for the diffusion of fake news and of other kinds of misleading information that just whips around your site. And he said - Zuckerberg reportedly replied, this is complicated and, you know, it's not clear that we really have that kind of influence on people, which is a surprising message given how Facebook makes its vast fortunes off the ability of advertisers to microtarget people and presumably get them to do things desired by the advertisers. At that time, Zuckerberg was saying, you know, maybe in advertising, politics - we don't have that kind of influence. Now you're hearing a different message. They're trying to cooperate to some degree with investigators on the Hill and on some of these reforms.
I mean, I think it's a smart one. Everybody has to make their own decision about whether or not to go on Fox. It commands a huge market share of the audience, so I see wanting to do it. But I think what Elizabeth and Kamala are doing is really important. That doesn't mean you write off red states. That doesn't mean you write off Republican crowds. But Fox News under Trump has become something other than just a conservative media outlet. And I think it's fair to recognize that and question whether they should have a role in who we choose as our nominee.
Yeah. It made a good story. There was, in fact, a divorce proceeding under way in Vienna. She heard that Mayer, of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, was scouting for actors and actresses. She went to see him in London. He wasn't willing to offer her a very good deal. She said no and walked out, having great confidence in herself. Found out that he was going to sail back to the United States, and bought passage. And once she was aboard, she found a way to make him long for her, let's say. After all, she was an actress. And before the ship landed in New York, she had a much, much better contract - the equivalent of about $3,000 a week for seven years. And within a year, with the appearance of her in the film "Algiers" opposite Charles Boyer, she was a superstar.
I - Mr. Koppel was - sent me some DVDs in advance. I've already seen them. I know what's in all the segments. But hundreds of millions of people have escaped poverty in China over the last 30 years. And the number remaining, of course, is still very large, and you could argue about what the standard should be. And even those that have escaped the official poverty level are living at levels that are very difficult, I think, for people who live in North America to really understand. But I do think they've made substantial progress. This has been a growth pattern that virtually everybody has benefited from. Inequality is increasing. That's why we have the rise of a car culture. There are a few people that have enough money to buy cars now, and they're growing. But even people at the bottom of the income distribution, the poorest people, have seen their lives improved dramatically over the last 30 years.
Well, of course. But, you know, we've already had so much information is available either free or for a very low cost only because of the rise of the Internet. You can go out and buy or acquire for free a Social Security number, bank statements, all kinds of information. So the stuff is already there. I think the thing that concerns me is that we in some ways just sort of to take the government's word for it. As Michael points out, there is not enough regulation here. There's not enough independent oversight. Dick Cheney was on a talk show the other day saying, you know, we had the right to do this. This is not illegal. And if you don't like us, sue us. Well that's really - that's not really a very comforting response to a government that really does not have much in the way of control. You don't know whether or not this information is being acquired for legitimate reasons, and you're not going to know because, as Glenn points out, they'll say it's because of a terrorist threat or they'll say that they may have averted some terrorist threat by acquiring these records. But because they can't talk about the specifics of that, all you know is that they're catching tax cheaters, and all you know is they're catching people who didn't pay their parking tickets. And it doesn't create any confidence.
You know, it is not just a minor thing. Republicans have been dying to try to say that this thing was always going to be about local issues and local incumbents and local this, but it's pretty clear that - I've seen some other polls that show this - that, you know, two-thirds of voters believe they're going to be going into the voting booth thinking about national issues, not local issues. This thing is about Iraq. And I think what happened is - this month, the death toll in Iraq, which went over 100 soldiers - really crystallized things on Iraq in a negative way with the voting public.
I actually think the responsibility is a common one. You see, the problem is that, actually, we reacted too late. We - it took too long a time that we reacted, and we left the problems to some single nations. And we now should try to get a solution on the whole community of the Schengen Area to solve this problems because we can't leave those people on the sea. We must bring them to the country, and we must help those people, but I think it should be regulated. And actually, this coming in from the refugees is not more regulated, it's not controlled, and that's a big problem.
Okay. Well, we've been talking about a family of fats that are pretty widely considered to be bad for you. And now, I'd to introduce, sort of welcome to the program someone with a good perspective or an interesting perspective on the a whole other class of fats and whether maybe it's their absence rather than the presence of something else is part of the problem. So joining me now is Susan Allport. She's a science writer in New York City at New York State. And her new book is The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and what we can do to replace them. She joins us today from NPR's New York bureau. And welcome to Science Friday.
Susan Lipkins is in private practice in New York state. She says trends like dances, for example, can spread with near immediate speed. Now because of the Internet, we see that worldwide cultures are changing at warp speed. So that everywhere - not just the United States - kids and people are doing things and the culture - or the ability, that desire to do that and repeat and enhance it goes so quickly that we can't even keep track of it. Add to that a teenager's need to separate from parents and other authority figures often by imitating their peers and then exaggerating.
Oh, gosh, in this month - you know, we had an interesting - we asked people if they'd ever learned a lesson the hard way. This is a story I love because if you ask people if they just have good advice, they don't know what to tell you, but if you say, have you ever learned a lesson the hard way, they know. And people learned something really great. When they went into a hotel and there was a hole burned into the bedspread, and they didn't say anything because they didn't do it, whatever, they didn't say anything. And when they checked out, the hotel charged them for it. And so their lesson for all of us is if you see something wrong with your room, make a point of it right away or you might end up getting burned, literally.
So they have come up with a really crafty solution. So right now drugmakers have said we're not going to comply with this. We're going to do something else. We're going to include a weblink in our ads that says if you are curious about price, go here. And they argue that because they have that, they have the ability to then include a lot more context. So when you go to these websites, for example, it'll say I have Medicare, I have commercial insurance, I'm uninsured. And it'll give you a breakdown of what the prices are for each one. So...
I used to have a twangy guitar riff as the ringtone for Hank, a holdover from the days when we were lovers and he delighted me with music and a soft, southern-inflected singing voice. We didn’t talk often since I’d distanced myself from him after he returned to the kind of heavy drinking that had landed him in rehab shortly before I met him in 1993. More than just emotional distance: I had let loose my life in Cleveland and moved to Portland, Oregon, a return to the delicious proximity of family and the coast where I was born. But Hank and I were still friendly, so my only qualm about answering when my phone suddenly twanged on Southeast Belmont was that talking on your phone while driving is illegal here. So I put my phone on speaker and held it to my chest, out of sight. He was down south visiting his family for his birthday. He had gone fishing that day with his old friend Reggie, and they’d had a wonderful time. ‘I’m having the most wonderful time of my life!’ he told me, his exuberance vibrating against my breastbone. ‘Reggie was wonderful and the fishing was wonderful and everything – everything was just wonderful!’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘That good?’ ‘Wonderful! And you, I’ve been meaning to tell you. You’re wonderful, too. You really are.’ It was a surprising and suspicious pile-up of wonderfulness, so I pulled over to text his sister and ask how he was doing. She and I had become conjoined worriers, keeping each other posted on how he sounded over the phone, cataloguing the twisted ankles and scraped elbows and shattered headlights that suggested daily drinking, even when he claimed otherwise. ‘Let me call you later,’ she texted back. It turned out that his visit had been about as destructive as one of the hurricanes that periodically rages through their city. He trashed his stepmother’s house with dirty clothes and dirty dishes and his dishevelled self, passed out in a chair. He smoked inside her house – an infraction almost as shocking as taking a piss in one of the neighbourhood churches. When the family gathered for his birthday, he cursed and argued at the table and was so unlike himself that everyone reeled away from him in dismay. And he announced that he might not leave for a few weeks, even though he was due back at work on Tuesday. He was having a good time and work be damned! This from a man who loved his job, showing up with Clydesdale diligence even during his worst drinking days, hiding his red eyes behind sunglasses. That was the first signal that he was unravelling, seized by a mania that would shatter every mooring to the life he had built over 58 years. Within six months, he would lose his job and blow his retirement savings on fancy guitars, $400 shirts from Saks (no more 75-per-cent-off sales at Macy’s!), and catering for parties no one attended. He would alienate friends and agitate neighbours and, battered by the storm in his brain, sway on the precipice of homelessness. It was the worst natural disaster I’d ever witnessed, an act of God, but with no Federal Emergency Management Agency and no clear path to help. Everyone who loves someone with mental illness seems to chart a solitary course, navigating the outback and dragging the afflicted along. We pray someone will help us, but discover laws and a health care system impeding meaningful treatment. The care we find is too sparse to make a difference, too slow to keep them from destroying their lives. Only love binds us to their crisis because pulling someone back from a psychiatric death spiral could mean dropping your plans – your own work, your own friends, your own life – to stand vigilant watch and advocate on their behalf. On the day of my daughter’s wedding seven years ago, a Hank of a different hue rose before dawn to fish. He was there when my daughter arrived at the end of a dock near the house where we were staying. She wanted to write a toast to her new husband as she watched the sunlight tip over the mountains and across the lake. They kept an easy silence as the waves and swallows and occasional fish – far from his eager hook – went about their quiet business. She told me later that it was hard to think of anyone who would have been a better companion than Hank at that moment. Sweet, calm, kind, reliably at peace with the sunrise and the water and other simple things. We counted on him for this. I met Hank when I was still bruised from the end of a marriage to a very different kind of man. Not a bad guy at all – we’re still very friendly – but marriages don’t end in the midst of good times, and I was nearly incapacitated by grief at the end of ours. I met my husband when I was 18 and, amid all the other glorious attractions, I fell in love with his family. They were a vivid and volatile crowd that loved to argue politics. Their constant roar of opinion was an exciting contrast to my family of origin, of whom a rather caustic elderly neighbour once said, when several of us paid her a visit years after we moved away: ‘Ah, the Ohlsons. Always so nice! Always so polite! Always saying the right thing!’ My 18-year-old self thought that niceness was terribly boring, but my marriage racked up so many years of conflict that I lost enthusiasm for sparring. I didn’t quite realise that I wanted a man as peaceful and sweet as my father, but I found someone like that, in Hank. A friend who worked with him introduced us. She warned me in advance that Hank had just gone through his own ‘marital carnage’ (my phrase, not hers, one of my favourites from the play Hurlyburly) and had recently emerged from three inpatient weeks of treatment for alcoholism, but that he was a really, really nice man. According to Alcoholics Anonymous – he was attending AA meetings daily when we met – he shouldn’t have got into a serious relationship with anyone until after a year of sobriety, but we dismissed that as needless orthodoxy and fell in love. I look back and wonder if those falling-in-love brain chemicals cloaked the darker Hank that would emerge I remember my own brain state back then. How driving across town to Hank’s apartment seemed like a mythic journey. How fevered I was, even just sitting together at the shoe store to try on sneakers, our arms brushing as we bent to tie the laces, whispering while the salesman went off to search for sizes. We were amazed that we could feel this way again, and I actually began to long for a time when I’d be able to think about something else. Now I look back and wonder if those falling-in-love brain chemicals cloaked the darker Hank that would emerge. I recently asked my friend Ceci McDonnell about this. She’s a therapist back in Cleveland whom I emailed after that first phone call, asking for help figuring out what was going on and how to get Hank services. I called her again to get some help thinking through this piece. ‘Yeah, the chemistry of falling in love is not unlike mania,’ she said. ‘There’s the same urgency and intensity and that might have postponed his depression.’ If someone is on the bipolar spectrum, alternating cycles of mania and depression wrack the body and brain. ‘We know they can throw themselves into something to prevent crashing. But there’s an inevitability to the cycles.’ At first, I had no idea that Hank was on any sort of spectrum. For the first four years, he was a sunny presence. During my marriage, I had kept my own moods strictly policed. My husband was moody and spectacular – he had played a role in a local production of Hurlyburly – and I became the dull rock that kept the moving pieces of our family life from flying away. But Hank was ever calm, ever positive. He glowed with a golden optimism. Because of him, I took new risks with my career, and my life grew bigger. My own moods began to leap in more magnanimous arcs. And when I arced into darkness, Hank was a great comfort. This is a little creepy, but I sometimes had this image of myself tucked safely inside his chest, foetus-sized, next to his big heart. I wonder sometimes if I was too greedy with that comfort. Then he started to struggle with depression. There were some disturbing things going on in his life – cutbacks at work, family problems – and he seemed to lose what I thought of as his effortless effervescence. He was always a big TV watcher – a source of some strife between us – and became someone who spent all his non-work hours on a couch with a clicker in his hand. It seemed obvious that this ceaseless electronic parade was a drug of some kind, and it wasn’t an effective one. I made the kind of irritating noises that people make when they don’t understand another’s depression. Take a walk! Take a class! Let’s do something fun! He became hypomanic, although I didn’t use such an alarming clinical term to describe it. Annoying is the word I used The bleakness improved and then it got bad again and then it improved and then it got bad again – it’s hard to remember now how many cycles there were and how he emerged again with his sunniness restored. Difficult as his depressions were, none were life-destroying, as the mania has been. I probably would have described them as funks. So when I look back now, I search for examples of irrational exuberance that might have foreshadowed the mania. All I can remember is the month he took an antidepressant that was being frequently advertised and prescribed as a tool to help people quit smoking. He became hypomanic, although I didn’t use such an alarming clinical term to describe it. Annoying is the word I used. He was chipmunk cheerful, talking fast and zipping from one project to another and so free with happy bromides that I couldn’t be in the same room with him. When we went to our couples book club, everyone gaped as he yakked on and on about the book, the meal, his day at work, the weather, whatever. I was relieved when he tossed the pills in the trash. But not long after that – or was it before? – he began taking antidepressants regularly. When Hank had his manic break – when it became obvious that something alarming and new was happening – it was hard for other people to realise that it was a manic break. They hadn’t been privy to his depressions, as I had, and whoever heard of someone becoming bipolar in their late 50s? It’s an unusual presentation, said people such as my therapist friend McDonnell and others, since most people present with bipolar when they’re in their teens or 20s. But it can happen, especially when someone has a close relative with bipolar disease. And Hank did. One therapist suggested (asking me not to quote her, since she hadn’t met Hank and this was just conjecture) that Hank had perhaps flipped into mania because of the antidepressants. She said that when someone has an underlying and undiagnosed bipolar condition, medicating just the depressions can have that effect. Wow, I thought. A few weeks later, I was sitting at breakfast with a new OkCupid date, a scientist and a sweet guy who told me – over two buttermilk pancakes and three strips of bacon – that he lost his lab and job and marriage because of a similar late-onset mania. His doctors weren’t sure why it had happened, but one theory was that antidepressants had flipped him over. ‘I can tell by the look on your face that this is a deal-breaker,’ he sighed. Yet the connection between antidepressant use and mania is less clear than he’d suggested. According to Gary Sachs, the founding director of the Bipolar Clinic and Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, studies have associated a slightly higher flip rate with only one antidepressant, Effexor. As for the others, he told me: ‘There may well be a small risk.’ For reasons unknown, Hank and the OkCupid guy are medical outliers, with the shitty luck of being interesting cases. While I don’t wish a lifetime of bipolar illness on anyone, I wonder if the people who develop this illness young are better equipped to deal with it. The onset often comes when they’re still within their family’s grip, when they are surrounded by people who consider it their job to watch over them, and they have years to become scholars of this flaw in their brain. As they mature and make new connections, the people who love them are alert for symptoms and quick with intervention. Sachs told me that some people suspect Mark Twain might have had an undiagnosed bipolar illness. He and his wife developed an elaborate signalling system for those times when his moods veered dangerously out of control, for instance at a dinner party. One signal to shut up, another to get up and leave the room – and he heeded them, because he had spent decades with the disease. ‘She was like the tail on his kite,’ Sachs told me. ‘People with these conditions are always looking at the world through their current mood. But if they have good supports, they can do extremely well.’ Hank never got the chance to build up the kind of supports he needed in his crisis. It took all of us too long to figure out what was going on and where to turn. A few days after that first phone call, Hank flew back to Cleveland. I begged him to call one of the therapists or doctors that he’d seen in the past few years. He had met with most of them only once or twice, but there was a psychiatric nurse with whom he had something approaching a therapeutic relationship: she knew him from the outpatient alcoholism programme he’d attended when he and I were still together, and I think he had been in touch with her after he was hospitalised for a series of panic attacks. But he wouldn’t call her. He wouldn’t go to the hospital. He was fine. He was better than he had ever been in his life! Why hadn’t he ever realised how good life could be! He agreed that he needed to sleep – he hadn’t slept in days – and promised he would nap immediately, as soon as he hung up the phone. When I called later that day and he didn’t answer, I hoped he was still sleeping. Instead, he was off at the Apple store, buying laptops and iPads and accessories for his TV. He spent $10,000 in an hour or two, a lot for a man with a modest income and, aside from his retirement account, no savings. Hank sauntered out of police headquarters in the exquisite coat and hat a stylish French banker might wear That was the first time we – my daughter and I in Portland, friends back in Cleveland, Hank’s mostly far-flung family – noticed the crazy spending, although it had begun before. He went to Pottery Barn and bought new dishes and wine glasses and linens and piles of artful baubles to entertain the many guests he was sure were going to come to his parties. He paid the tab for rooms full of strangers at restaurants and offered to take a neighbour’s children shopping and let them pick out whatever they wanted. He emptied out Home Depot’s woodworking department and piled up boxes in his basement for a new career making fancy garden trellises. He bought high-end guitars and displayed them on stands in his living room, poised like a choir ready to sing. He decided his real career opportunity lay in starting a band and opening a recording studio in his apartment, so he started inviting other musicians to join in and left the woodworking equipment to moulder in his basement. He called a drummer friend, who said he didn’t want to drag his drums up the stairs to Hank’s apartment to rehearse, so Hank added a $10,000 drum kit to the collection. He displayed a heretofore unnoticed fine eye for clothing and filled his closet with couture. Months later, he called a mutual friend in the middle of the night to come pick him up at jail, where he’d been held after the umpteenth noise complaint from his neighbours. What most stunned our friend was the sight of Hank sauntering out of police headquarters in the kind of exquisite coat and hat that a very stylish French banker might wear. The afternoon he was released from one of the many psychiatric hospitals or psych units or detox centres that held him from one to 10 days in the six months that followed that first phone call – never long enough for him to stabilise – he bought a fully loaded Toyota Avalon. How did he pay for this stuff? He was on disability leave for a few months, receiving some sort of paycheck and building up debt. When he lost his job, he drained his 401k. When he ran out of cash, he sold some of his new stuff to buy cigarettes and food. I chastised him for all this spending, but I was a carping Cassandra to his whirligig Bacchus. He was incredulous that none of us understood how wonderful his life was. When he called to regale me with the details of his Pottery Barn purchases, I dutifully began to tell him how deluded this was, but he interrupted me. ‘Darling, stop worrying! I have plenty of money! I have all the money I need.’ ‘I guess you must have won the lottery,’ I said. ‘That’s right!’ he answered, jubilant that I finally got it. ‘I won the fucking lottery!’ I was, in fact, a tiny bit… jealous isn’t quite the word – but I could see how much fun it would be to blow all my retirement savings on everything I wanted, right now. When pulled to the surface, that unconscious thought disturbed me because I had done something like that when I moved from Cleveland to Portland. Aside from a few pieces of furniture inherited from my mother-in-law and an illuminated globe that had been in my parents’ house when I was a kid, I wanted my Portland domesticity to look completely different from my Cleveland life. I sold or gave away all my old stuff and prowled eBay for earthenware plates and brightly hued Swedish cookware and barware with images of fanciful chickens, all from the 1950s and ’60s. I hired a contractor to fix up my new little house in Portland and a landscaper to make a stone patio and garden. I didn’t spend all my retirement savings, but I spent more than is probably wise and must now be more careful about money than I ever have been. At the time, all that spending felt… wonderful. Yet my spending was different from Hank’s. People with bipolar disorder, said Hilary Blumberg, director of the Mood Disorders Research Program at the Yale School of Medicine, lack balance in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain right behind our foreheads that, among other things, regulates emotions and impulses. That part of the brain works a bit like a see-saw, with positive emotions generated on the left and negative emotions on the right – resembling the cartoon images of someone pelted with opposing advice from the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. In a manic state, the positive emotions from the left side of the prefrontal cortex exhort ‘Do it, do it, do it!’ and overwhelm the right side’s ‘Bad idea! Bad idea!’ Or, as Blumberg put it more carefully: ‘If there is less activity in the right hemisphere, the positive emotions of the left hemisphere may become more prominent relative to negative emotions.’ Hank’s left prefrontal cortex was king of the mountain for six months. His family and friends and I fretted and conferred after that first alarming weekend down south. Finally, one of his children called the police and a friend convinced the cops that he might be suicidal and they took him to the emergency room. And truly, we were worried about this, because how could flying this high not trigger a dizzying fall? How could sweet, mild, taciturn Hank abide the loud and extravagant Hank who had taken over? But he was held only for a day that first time. Then another day the next time. Then 72 hours. Then five days. Then a week. Then 10 days. Each time, a social worker or nurse would call me – he always gave them my phone number – and promise they’d get him sorted out. Then I’d hear he had been released, long before the three or more weeks that it takes for the medications to work, when I knew from his phone calls that he was still manic and delusional. I called one of the social workers after he had been released, which was pointless – it’s not as if she was going to hunt him down and bring him back. And anyway, he was off buying a car. Who knew what to do? The new Hank was social, out and about, always at a table or bar, wandering the streets knocking on doors, walking into friends’ homes unannounced. It was clear that this Hank was different – brightly aggressive, clueless to their discomfort, unfurling skeins of wild talk that they didn’t know how to take. Was his band really going to perform at Playhouse Square, and was he really talking about a contract with Tommy Emmanuel’s manager? Had he really bought that great house which had been empty so long and was he really building a recording studio inside? His delusions were so convincing it was hard for his friends to understand what was real. And since he was still drinking, it was hard for them to figure out if what they were seeing was extreme alcoholism or something else. I was sure from that first phone call that it was something else, a manifestation of brain sickness distinct from alcoholism, and I felt a spray of fury every time someone said that he would eventually hit bottom and realise he had to take responsibility for his behaviour – as if this was something a 12-step programme could cure. ‘That’s an old-time Alcoholics Anonymous idea,’ Ceci McDonnell told me. ‘And I get it: most people need discomfort before they want to change. But when you have bipolar illness, there is no bottom because the illness is so distorting. If someone is delusional — meaning they have fixed irrational beliefs – the intensity of those beliefs remains strong even as things keep getting worse.’ some of the same brain areas affected by bipolar disorder are also affected by substance abuse Some of us thought Hank’s excessive drinking caused the mania, but many experts now think it’s the other way around: that people with bipolar illness drink to self-medicate against the fearsome swings of their psyche. In any case, there is a connection between the two afflictions. In one study, the US National Comorbidity Survey found that people with mania were up to nine times more likely than the general population to have an additional lifetime disorder of drug or alcohol dependence. Blumberg tells me that some of the same brain areas affected by bipolar disorder are also affected by substance abuse: ‘It is possible that there are genes that are involved in the development of the prefrontal cortex that lead to vulnerability for both bipolar disorder and substance abuse, and that that is why the two co-occur for some individuals.’ No matter the cause, getting someone treatment for mental illness is agonisingly tough in a health care system where long-term, therapeutic relationships have been trashed. ‘To help someone with these disorders, a therapist must know them well and have an ongoing connection, and that rarely happens any more,’ McDonnell told me. In addition, privacy laws passed in the mid-1990s are often so rigidly interpreted by health care institutions that families aren’t told what’s going on. When families aren’t sure what the diagnosis or treatment plan is, it’s hard for them to help, try as they will. Patient rights laws have also placed the burden for making medical decisions on the person least capable of making them – the person with the mental illness. If you have a problem with your heart or your kidney, you yourself are highly motivated to take care of it. I have several loved ones who didn’t want to become experts in breast cancer, but became crack researchers and advocates for their own care after they were diagnosed. Hank didn’t think he needed treatment. He thought he was wonderful! And because of patient rights laws, no one could force treatment on him without a court order. ‘These patients have the legal right to refuse treatment, but they’re not in their right minds,’ McDonnell said. Not so fast, the Virginia psychologist Russ Federman told me when I complained to him about patient rights. ‘Just because someone is delusional doesn’t mean they are dangerous or can’t manage themselves on a day-to-day basis,’ he said. ‘They may not be able to live very effectively in society, but the distance between being moderately symptomatic and being manic or even psychotic is not very far. Protecting the rights of individuals and protecting individuals from the adverse impact of their psychopathology is a delicate balancing act.’ Imagine, Federman said, someone else who feels like spending all his money. This imaginary person is not mentally ill, but has accumulated assets and lived prudently and suddenly decides that he’s tired of being prudent. ‘That person has the right to spend all his money. From a legal perspective, it’s not easy to differentiate between your friend and that hypothetical person.’ But I could differentiate. I sometimes felt the only moral response was for me to get on a plane and go back to Cleveland and hunker down among the empty boxes in his apartment and make sure he got treatment – to bang on doors and stand in hallways and make someone take care of him. Or set him up in my spare bedroom in Portland and watch over him. I blurted this out to my daughter one day and she said: ‘Are you sure you want to do that, Mom? That would be a huge responsibility.’ And the answer was no. I wasn’t willing to give up my life for him, and that’s what it would have meant. ‘you need at least 50 beds for a population of 100,000. In 2008, England had 62 beds per 100,000. The US only had 14 beds per 100,000’ Even if we could revise the patient rights and other well-intentioned laws to be more helpful to people with mental illness, there is still a fundamental flaw in the system. There are not enough hospital beds for the mentally ill and especially not enough public hospital beds, since people with mental illness have often blown through their resources and can’t get private care. ‘The rule of thumb is that you need at least 50 beds for a population of 100,000 people,’ said Doris Fuller, the executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Virginia. ‘In 2008, England had 62 beds per 100,000 people. The United States only had 14 beds per 100,000. And that’s the same number of beds that America had in 1850, which is when we decided to treat mental illness as a disease.’ Instead of funding our hospital system to care for mentally ill patients, we let our police and jails take care of them. As Nicholas Kristof illustrated in his New York Times column on 8 February this year, America’s largest mental health facility is a Chicago jail. And it’s not as if Chicago is special. ‘Nationwide in America, more than three times as many mentally ill people are housed in prisons and jails as in hospitals,’ Kristof wrote. In the sixth month of Hank’s mania, despair began to knife through. He’d call me weeping, asking why I had not come to his party, asking why no one ever came to his parties. He started to panic about money, because even though he was working on three lawsuits that were sure to make him a multimillionaire – and me, too, and my daughter, all of us would be millionaires! – he needed money right now. He was furious when I wouldn’t come to Cleveland and deposit some funds into his checking account. His calls finally became so frequent and angry that I turned off my phone. He was in what’s called a ‘mixed state’, in which mania and depression flicker in rapid succession. This is when the risk of suicide peaks. That’s when he got lucky; the system kicked in. My daughter found a county mental health crisis centre, and I called them over and over. They went to his apartment twice, then told me they were working on a plan – not that they could tell me what it was, because of privacy laws, but it was a relief to hear. Next thing we knew, he had been court-ordered into treatment for three weeks. He called me often from the phone in the hallway. After about two weeks, he began to sound like himself again – no rage or elation. But he was surprised anyone thought he belonged there. Group therapy was minimal. He wanted to feel the weather. He wanted to go outside. It wasn’t the suite of healing therapies I wished for him. I know people with money go to places with gardens and unharried staff and healthy food. But at least he wasn’t alone in his apartment, his delusions blooming and then exploding, the hunks of cheese marbleising on the table and the wine uncorked. ‘I’m starting from scratch. I have no job, I have no money, I have nowhere to live, and I’m a fucking idiot’ And then suddenly, he was out before the three weeks were over. He sounded dazed and sombre, and everyone around the country who had been following his progress rejoiced. His kindest of landlords planned to delay eviction and let him move out at a less-frantic pace. His children planned to help him sort through and sell his purchases. Other relatives were helping him with funds, though he worried a paycheck wouldn’t come soon enough to prevent his car from being repossessed. ‘I have nothing,’ he told me. ‘I’m starting from scratch. I have no job, I have no money, I have nowhere to live, and I’m a fucking idiot.’ I assured him that he wasn’t an idiot, he had just been sick in his brain and had made some terrible decisions. I tried to shine up some optimism, but really, if I were in his place I’d drink myself senseless to block out the terror of this piper he would soon have to pay. I had wanted to reach through the phone and shake the people at the many treatment centres who told me they were releasing him because he wasn’t a danger to himself. Wasn’t the wreck he’d made of his life dangerous enough? Within hours of his release, he was drinking. Within a week, he had called the suicide hotline and was admitted to another psychiatric unit. This time, Hank didn’t hector the staff to let him go. Finally, he had seen the bleak landscape carved by his mania, knew this was now his country, and wanted the help of many steadying hands before trying to make his way. Note: Hank’s name and some identifying details have been changed to protect his privacy.
Answer, I would say one drop, okay, that puts it within Federal jurisdiction, but then grant the permit. What you call drains and ditches though are often significant channels of water that feed into tributaries. Congress has been regulating tributaries since 1899, said Clement, and if you say now that it can't, then you'd be saying that it's perfectly okay to dump toxins into them. Other solutions, he said, have been tried and failed. This case, he told the court has real world consequences. If you narrow the scope of the law, Minnesota and Michigan, for instance, are not going to regulate development in their states out of fear of pollution in Mississippi and that, he said makes this an inherently Federal problem.
A few words about how I got started, and it has a lot to do with happiness, actually. When I was a very young child, I was extremely introverted and very much to myself. And, kind of as a way of surviving, I would go into my own very personal space, and I would make things. I would make things for people as a way of, you know, giving, showing them my love. I would go into these private places, and I would put my ideas and my passions into objects — and sort of learning how to speak with my hands. So, the whole activity of working with my hands and creating objects is very much connected with not only the idea realm, but also with very much the feeling realm. And the ideas are very disparate. I'm going to show you many different kinds of pieces, and there's no real connection between one or the other, except that they sort of come out of my brain, and they're all different sort of thoughts that are triggered by looking at life, and seeing nature and seeing objects, and just having kind of playful random thoughts about things. When I was a child, I started to explore motion. I fell in love with the way things moved, so I started to explore motion by making little flipbooks. And this is one that I did, probably like when I was around seventh grade, and I remember when I was doing this, I was thinking about that little rock there, and the pathway of the vehicles as they would fly through the air, and how the characters — (Laughter) — would come shooting out of the car, so, on my mind, I was thinking about the trajectory of the vehicles. And of course, when you're a little kid, there's always destruction. So, it has to end with this — (Laughter) — gratuitous violence. (Laughter) So that was how I first started to explore the way things moved, and expressed it. Now, when I went to college, I found myself making fairly complicated, fragile machines. And this really came about from having many different kinds of interests. When I was in high school, I loved to program computers, so I sort of liked the logical flow of events. I was also very interested in perhaps going into surgery and becoming a surgeon, because it meant working with my hands in a very focused, intense way. So, I started taking art courses, and I found a way to make sculpture that brought together my love for being very precise with my hands, with coming up with different kinds of logical flows of energy through a system. And also, working with wire — everything that I did was both a visual and a mechanical engineering decision at the same time. So, I was able to sort of exercise all of that. Now, this kind of machine is as close as I can get to painting. And it's full of many little trivial end points, like there's a little foot here that just drags around in circles and it doesn't really mean anything. It's really just for the sort of joy of its own triviality. The connection I have with engineering is the same as any other engineer, in that I love to solve problems. I love to figure things out, but the end result of what I'm doing is really completely ambiguous. (Laughter) That's pretty ambiguous. (Laughter) The next piece that is going to come up is an example of a kind of machine that is fairly complex. I gave myself the problem. Since I'm always liking to solve problems, I gave myself the problem of turning a crank in one direction, and solving all of the mechanical problems for getting this little man to walk back and forth. So, when I started this, I didn't have an overall plan for the machine, but I did have a sense of the gesture, and a sense of the shape and how it would occupy space. And then it was a matter of starting from one point and sort of building to that final point. That little gear there switches back and forth to change direction. And that's a little found object. So a lot of the pieces that I've made, they involve found objects. And it really — it's almost like doing visual puns all the time. When I see objects, I imagine them in motion. I imagine what can be said with them. This next one here, "Machine with Wishbone," it came about from playing with this wishbone after dinner. You know, they say, never play with your food — but I always play with things. So, I had this wishbone, and I thought, it's kind of like a cowboy who's been on his horse for too long. (Laughter) And I started to make him walk across the table, and I thought, "Oh, I can make a little machine that will do that." So, I made this device, linked it up, and the wishbone walks. And because the wishbone is bone — it's animal — it's sort of a point where I think we can enter into it. And that's the whole piece. (Laughter) That's about that big. (Applause) This kind of work is also very much like puppetry, where the found object is, in a sense, the puppet, and I'm the puppeteer at first, because I'm playing with an object. But then I make the machine, which is sort of the stand-in for me, and it is able to achieve the action that I want. The next piece I'll show you is a much more conceptual thought, and it's a little piece called "Cory's Yellow Chair." I had this image in my mind, when I saw my son's little chair, and I saw it explode up and out. And — so the way I saw this in my mind at first, was that the pieces would explode up and out with infinite speed, and the pieces would move far out, and then they would begin to be pulled back with a kind of a gravitational feel, to the point where they would approach infinite speed back to the center. And they would coalesce for just a moment, so you could perceive that there was a chair there. For me, it's kind of a feeling about the fleetingness of the present moment, and I wanted to express that. Now, the machine is — in this case, it's a real approximation of that, because obviously you can't move physical matter infinitely with infinite speed and have it stop instantaneously. This whole thing is about four feet wide, and the chair itself is only about a few inches. (Applause) Now, this is a funny sort of conceptual thing, and yesterday we were talking about Danny Hillis' "10,000 Year Clock." So, we have a motor here on the left, and it goes through a gear train. There are 12 pairs of 50:1 reductions, so that means that the final speed of that gear on the end is so slow that it would take two trillion years to turn once. So I've invented it in concrete, because it doesn't really matter. (Laughter) Because it could run all the time. (Laughter) Now, a completely different thought. I'm always imagining myself in different situations. I'm imagining myself as a machine. What would I love? I would love to be bathed in oil. (Laughter) So, this machine does nothing but just bathe itself in oil. (Laughter) (Applause) And it's really, just sort of — for me, it was just really about the lusciousness of oil. (Laughter) And then, I got a call from a friend who wanted to have a show of erotic art, and I didn't have any pieces. But when she suggested to be in the show, this piece came to mind. So, it's sort of related, but you can see it's much more overtly erotic. And this one I call "Machine with Grease." It's just continually ejaculating, and it's — (Laughter) — this is a happy machine, I'll tell you. (Laughter) It's definitely happy. From an engineering point of view, this is just a little four-bar linkage. And then again, this is a found object, a little fan that I found. And I thought, what about the gesture of opening the fan, and how simply could I state something. And, in a case like this, I'm trying to make something which is clear but also not suggestive of any particular kind of animal or plant. For me, the process is very important, because I'm inventing machines, but I'm also inventing tools to make machines, and the whole thing is all sort of wrapped up from the beginning. So this is a little wire-bending tool. After many years of bending gears with a pair of pliers, I made that tool, and then I made this other tool for sort of centering gears very quickly — sort of developing my own little world of technology. My life completely changed when I found a spot welder. (Laughter) And that was that tool. It completely changed what I could do. Now here, I'm going to do a very poor job of silver soldering. This is not the way they teach you to silver solder when you're in school. I just like, throw it in. I mean, real jewelers put little bits of solder in. So, that's a finished gear. When I moved to Boston, I joined a group called the World Sculpture Racing Society. (Laughter) And the idea, their premise was that we wanted to show pieces of sculpture on the street, and there'd be no subjective decision about what was the best. It would be — whatever came across the finish line first would be the winner. (Laughter) So I made — this is my first racing sculpture, and I thought, "Oh, I'm going to make a cart, and I'm going to have it — I'm going to have my hand writing 'faster,' so as I run down the street, the cart's going to talk to me and it's going to go, 'Faster, faster!' " So, that's what it does. (Laughter) But then in the end, what I decided was every time you finish writing the word, I would stop and I would give the card to somebody on the side of the road. So I would never win the race because I'm always stopping. But I had a lot of fun. (Applause) Now, I only have two and a half minutes — I'm going to play this. This is a piece that, for me, is in some ways the most complete kind of piece. Because when I was a kid, I also played a lot of guitar. And when I had this thought, I was imagining that I would make — I would have a whole machine theater evening, where I would — you would have an audience, the curtain would open, and you'd be entertained by machines on stage. So, I imagined a very simple gestural dance that would be between a machine and just a very simple chair, and ... When I'm making these pieces, I'm always trying to find a point where I'm saying something very clearly and it's very simple, but also at the same time it's very ambiguous. And I think there's a point between simplicity and ambiguity which can allow a viewer to perhaps take something from it. And that leads me to the thought that all of these pieces start off in my own mind, in my heart, and I do my best at finding ways to express them with materials, and it always feels really crude. It's always a struggle, but somehow I manage to sort of get this thought out into an object, and then it's there, OK. It means nothing at all. The object itself just means nothing. Once it's perceived, and someone brings it into their own mind, then there's a cycle that has been completed. And to me, that's the most important thing because, ever since being a kid, I've wanted to communicate my passion and love. And that means the complete cycle of coming from inside, out to the physical, to someone perceiving it. So I'll just let this chair come down. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
(Unintelligible) They took women who were scheduled to be induced a week later. This is right at the very end of pregnancy. They knew they weren't going to allow them to go any longer. So if they didn't have the baby in that last week, they would be induced. And then they divided them into two groups. In one group they just gave the usual counseling. In another group they encouraged them to have sex as much as they could; actually, as much as they wanted. And they assured both groups that it was safe. Then they stood back and watched to see what happened.
Sure. Well, there's a few commercial airlines that still fly into Mogadishu. And when you land, you can see the crumpled fuselage of a plane that was shot down a few years ago. That's kind of your welcome to Mogadishu site. You step off the plane. It's a little chaotic. There's lots of armed men milling about inside the airport, outside the airport. You're given a form to fill out, an immigration form that asks for name, address, birth date and caliber of weapon. As soon as you step out on the streets, it's like incredibly ruined place, with just about every building is riddled with bullet holes. And the whole city is like that. It's still standing but crumbling and full of bullet holes. There's been some repairs lately, some new construction, some people beginning to build new homes and businesses, but very small scale stuff. And the whole country is like that. It's been totally neglected for the past 20 years.
You know, Tony, you got to attest to - I mean, the reality is that Eli have gotten here a lot quicker than his brother. I mean, it's taken Eli four years, four years, to get to the Super Bowl. I mean, Payton was almost -it seemed like a lifetime and every year he lost to New England. He lost - oh can he do it? Does it show where his younger brother got here four years? And I think that if he wins this quickly, I don't know if this will put him at that stature of Payton for two reasons. A, Payton is much more - he's much more gregarious, he's much more extroverted, he carries himself in a different way; Eli is very, very, very low key, very self-assuming. I mean, he could be in your studio right now and you might not even know it, you know?
Well, I think you have to do it by concentrating real attention at people. The Africa bureau of the State Department is the smallest in the department. It covers 48 countries. It doesn't have the strength and depth to handle three major conflicts. Second, you have to cross the bridge between the bureaucratics of Africa and the bureaucratics of the Middle East because Middle Eastern countries are heavily involved in two of those crises, Sudan and Somalia. So we need a new peace structure to deal with it, and we need to work very much with these African countries and the surrounding countries to deal with those. So you need a high level, intensive, well-staffed, well-directed peace process, and we haven't put that together in any of these three crises so far.
So families will be able to hook up their high-definition television sets and their stereos through the Xbox. It will be possible to store music and movies on its 20-gigabyte hard drive. But more importantly, from Microsoft's point of view, it will connect to PCs in the home and with much bigger hard drives where music, movies and pictures are stored. It's part of Microsoft's vision for the home, says P.J. McNealy, an analyst at American Technology Research. Mr. P.J. McNEALY (Analyst, American Technology Research): Microsoft's looking for a way to extend their value proposition around the house. In other words, they're trying to get into the living room here. And so the Xbox 360 is a continuation of their efforts to make the PC the center of the home and other devices around the home, like the Xbox 360, be an extension for that PC into the living room and on to the TV.
These incidents of school shootings are very - or relatively isolated incidents. But yeah, the key is to not give more guns. It's to take the guns out. If this kid had - you know, if these children had been armed with, say, knives or something like that, they wouldn't have been able to cause all this mayhem because people would have been able to jump on them instead of just fleeing away, running away. So no, that's not the solution. And I actually - the mayors going up against these illegal guns, I applaud it. One of the opponents in this story, for some reason, says it's political grandstanding. Well everything in politics is grandstanding and it's all political. But no, actually I applaud this effort and I hope that it's successful - far more than Representative Lasee.
You know, what was really striking about both of these incidents was how bad United's initial response on social media was. After this leggings incident, these teenage girls being denied permission to board because they were wearing leggings, the first response that came from an official United outlet was that they're allowed to deny passengers travel based on inappropriate clothing, which obviously wasn't answering people's problems, people's deep issues with that incident. They later had a more thorough explanation, but it was hours. And by that point, the story had gone viral. Here too, the first response from United was to say that a customer was refusing to leave his seat and not responding whatsoever to the violence in the videos that obviously has fueled the outrage and led to some people to call for a boycott of the airline.
That's Dan Geschwind, a professor of neurogenetics at UCLA. He says researchers can't tell if a patient had schizophrenia or bipolar by looking at a brain or even a piece of tissue under a microscope. That's why psychiatric disorders are diagnosed by how the patient behaves. But recent advances in genetics have allowed the scientists to pinpoint the patterns of gene expression in the brain that are linked to these disorders. They measured RNA in 700 tissue samples from the brains of people with autism, schizophrenia, bipolar, major depression and alcoholism. RNA can show which genes are turned on and off and the tissue. The findings were published in Science.
Yeah, it was worth it. I was doing video too and, you know, at the time people were making $8.00 a month there and my video cameras worth a lifetime income. So after that, the video camera didn't come out much. But yeah, it was worth it, it was just, you know, it was just impossible to tell where the danger was coming from there because everybody loved Americans and they all wanted to take you home and give you food and vodka and the shirts off their back. And you couldn't really tell, you know, the really bad guys from just the average people and it made it very difficult.
One hundred thousand people, you heard it in the tape. That's what 100,000 people sounds like, like a college football game or something. And Jacki, I don't know, if people have been to St. Louis, obviously they know of the Gateway Arch. Senator Obama spoke right underneath that arch. And as we look to the left, toward the city, there's a huge open space that spreads all the way to the Old Courthouse, the Old Dred Scott Courthouse. It was full of people. The police tell us 90,000 in there and another 10,000 kind of on the outskirts of the perimeter of the event.
Well, I think you put your finger on something very important. If we can get people to pay attention to their health early--and I'll give you a good example. We have an explosion, an epidemic of obesity and diabetes among the young. We now have children as young as 12, 13 and 14 who are getting Type 2, what used to be called adult-onset diabetes, which historically people didn't get until they were in their 50s or 60s. And this has happened for two practical reasons: We eat too much and we exercise too little. So as a prevention measure, I urge every single state to require physical education five days a week for K through 12. The amount we will save off of young people not becoming diabetic will dwarf any possible cost of that kind of program. That would be an early--that would be a prevention program. We work with Dr. Andy von Eschenbach, the director of The National Cancer Institute, who has very courageously put on his Web site at The National Cancer Institute that we could eliminate cancer as a cause of death by 2015. That's 10 years from this year, but the only way you can do that is to have very early detection so that we can catch the cancer when it first starts, eliminate it or control it and basically turn cancer into something which we can either cure or we can turn into a chronic disease. I think this is possible, but it's a very different approach requiring much more of involvement from you, the listener, and also requiring that you and your doctor realize you're a team over a lifetime, they're not just there for an emergency room visit when the crisis is so bad you can't avoid it.
...I'm fighting against blandness in our language as well and we - sometimes, we can overdo politeness to the point where we take away a lot of effective words or language. So even the N word you mentioned earlier, how do you refer to Dick Gregory's autobiography, you know, which used that in its title? Richard Pryor, his first hit album used that as a title. But in 2004, the rapper Nas tried to use that word to title his CD, and Warner Brothers wouldn't let him do it because Wal-Mart wouldn't sell it, right? And so you get censorship in the commercial marketplace as well. So this says a lot about our society. I think it's sort of a marker each year as to where we stand with our sensibilities.
Yes. Airfares domestically, generally, are about 15 percent below what they were in July of 2008. They're certainly, on average, nowhere near enough to give the airlines much hope of a profit this summer or this year. And you got to bear in mind that summer is the time when airlines make money. Summer is sort of like the weeks right after Thanksgiving is to retailers. You lose money all year, you make your money during that brief period. Even if you see profitable months this summer, it's nowhere near enough to makeup for the losses they had during the winter and spring. It's nowhere near enough to makeup for the losses that they will have towards the end of the year. And bear in mind that one of the mainstays of domestic travel had been international travel. You know, Delta was probably making a very small amount of breaking even on flights from Atlanta to Des Moines. But making real money on flights from Atlanta to Shanghai, Atlanta to Africa, the international market has fallen off dramatically. So, you no longer have the cross-subsidy of overseas flights picking up the slack from domestic flights. Delta alone was looking at a $250 million hit to revenues in the third quarter.

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