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Most of them have. They were arrested in the days after the coup, but some defendants are being tried in absentia. And the most famous among them is Fethullah Gulen. He's a Muslim cleric from Turkey who lives in the U.S. now and has followers around the world. And he used to be close with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now the Turkish president. But the two had a falling out years ago. And the president now accuses Gulen of infiltrating the Turkish state with his followers and masterminding last year's coup plot. He's accused of doing all of this, by the way, from his home in Pennsylvania. He's lived in the U.S. for nearly 20 years. He's an elderly man in his late 70s. Gulen denies any role. Turkey wants the U.S. to extradite him, but that has not happened.
Well, in 2008, you know, we noticed that the candidates for president really weren't talking about science issues at all. Coming out of the Bush administration, a lot of scientists were frustrated by the way that science had taken a backseat to policy positions that were determined by other factors. And one time in particular, in January, we noticed that about 2,975 questions had been asked the candidates for president by the top five TV news anchors. And out of those 2,975 questions, six mentioned the words climate change or global warming, which was arguably - no matter which side you feel about it - a large policy position that they should have been talking about.
You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY. I am Ira Flatow. We're talking this hour about energy conservation and energy efficiency. And as I mentioned earlier, missing from the president's energy speech recently was any mention of mandating better fuel efficiency for autos and trucks--in other words, more or higher miles per gallon. The last time this issue came up in Congress, even Democrats like Senator Carl Levin from the auto-producing state of Michigan did not vote in favor of them. They come up every once in a while. Miles-per-gallon standards are a hot potato in Congress because they effect a wide variety of campaign financers from influential unionized auto employees on the assembly line to oil producers and refiners. But that has not stopped some influential lawmakers from trying to raise these standards, and one of them joining me now is Sherwood Boehlert. He's a Republican representative from New York, 24th District, and chairman of the House Science Committee. He offered an amendment to the Energy Policy Act that's currently moving through Congress, calling for a rise in CAFE standards. And the amendment would have raised the average gas miles from 25 miles per gallon today to 33 miles per gallon by 2015, and it failed in the House, to be passed in the House, 254-to-177.
And the challenge, I think, to get ahead of this problem, which is when the oil runs out, so will the food right now, is that we need to resolarize the food system. I mean, as you well understand, but a lot of people forget, you know, every calorie we eat is the product of photosynthesis. Food is the original solar technology. So, you know, we can grow food without lots of fossil fuel. Nature grows a huge amounts of bio mass without any fossil fuel. So the challenge is, how do you ring the fossil fuel out of the food system at every step, and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunlight?
Because even if - you know, it's just - it's shocking that CBS would take a chance with it. It's a very risky move. I think it's shocking because it's a show that even with the ratings down is still a top-ten show, still anchors their Thursday-night lineup, which is the most important night of television for ad revenue. So they're really taking a big chance here, and as far as reaction on the racial matters, I think that, you know - the problem is that they're playing with fire. I think - you know, I'm not saying this is going to be a disaster, because I really do think you have to take a wait-and-see approach. There have been instances where - with black - there was a show on FX earlier this year called Black. White. where they had white people - basically made them up to look black and had them live as African-American for a few days.
This is--this really is a political creature that was developed because Congress didn't have enough money as they wanted to do this benefit. They really wanted to get people to join the program, so they wanted to give a fairly rich benefit at the bottom, where most people's average drug costs were, and they really wanted to help people with very high drug costs, which is the catastrophic benefit. And what they discovered is that if they did both of those things, they were going to have a gap in the middle, and that's what they've left. So this is what's called the standard benefit, which--you pay a $250 deductible, you get 75 percent of your drug costs covered until you get up to $2,250. Then, if you go on to spend $3,600 of your own money--so that's the 250 plus the 25 percent plus your own money--you basically get to $5,100 worth of drugs--then the plan kicks back in and it pays 95 percent of the rest of your drugs. Now I see you rolling your eyes. What's even worse is that many of the plans--in fact, I believe most of the plans that are being offered--don't have that standard benefit. They--there was a rule that they could offer anything they wanted as long as it was, quote, unquote, "actuarially equivalent" to that standard benefit. So a lot of them have lower deductibles and/or higher premiums, different co-pays. They have some coverage in what we call that gap, the doughnut hole. Sometimes they just have coverage for generic drugs in the doughnut hole, sometimes they have full coverage in the doughnut hole, so it's really--the landscape, I think, is much different than people anticipated.
It's not a case of a woman, you know, a college-educated woman making more than her husband because of their professional choices. It's more a case of husband loses his job, wife doesn't lose her job. And all of a sudden, as we know, unfortunately in marriages, often the income translates into power, which is something we should really think about and something the circumstances, I think, are forcing families to face: Who has the power? I urge couples - and I'm recently married myself, and one thing I think it's really important to do is to talk about money when times are good and when things are stable and try to establish a real partnership where it's not his money and her money, but it's our money.
Well, ready or not, the future isn't what it used to be. And people will find it very costly to get to work, particularly if they are living in suburbia or exurbia, as a lot of people are--unless the jobs move out to exurbia. So you're going to have to carpool. You're going to have to pay more in terms of the price of fuel for your homes. People who live in co-ops and things like that will pay more through surcharges. We'll pay more in airplane tickets--they will skyrocket. It's going to be very costly, this cost, all because we haven't developed alternatives to oil, yet.
I guess the anger with me at this point is that I doubt if the Supreme Court is going to help, and they probably will throw it back, and I think it probably will be considered a single entity. But I guess I'm so angry at the little guy always getting it in the long run. And for the NFL to determine that they're going to give the sales to Reebok and raise the price from $19 to $30 is just, once again, the little people are getting, you know, are getting it in the long run again. And I think, you know, it might come down to - since we cannot depend on the Supreme Court to help us that we're going to have to help ourselves and maybe not buy the product until they lower it back down to a reasonable price, you know. And I guess I'm just so frustrated. Nowadays, you're seeing more and more how the rich are getting richer out of stuff - off the backs of us little people, and it just angers me, I think.
And it's interesting that on some of these historically black colleges - just to take your point a little bit further, Mary - you find a lot of white students too, certainly not just white faculty and staff. But on some of these black colleges they're practically - some of them there may be as many as 40 percent and maybe they've even tipped over to 51 percent in terms of white students. And so when you look at that, and then you look at the white colleges, and you see still the struggle as certainly as it relates around affirmative action. We've seen these major court cases that relates to affirmative action on predominantly white colleges and the faculty, the staff, you know, you sometimes have to sit back and wonder what - you know, is this the way it was supposed to play out.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama said we need to focus more on cybersecurity. That point was driven home this week by a report released by Mandiant, an American security firm, which claims a unit of the Chinese military has been carrying out extensive cyber-espionage against the U.S. since 2006. And it goes beyond stealing corporate secrets. The report says agencies that control critical infrastructure, everything from power grids to hydro, have been targeted by Chinese hackers. Is China engaged in cyberwarfare against the U.S.? And if it is, why are we so surprised? Doesn't the U.S. do it, don't - doesn't everybody do it?
For at least one historian, last week's killings in El Paso, Texas, have echoes of another violent time in that state. In the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of ethnic Mexicans disappeared or were killed amid tensions between ranchers on each side of the border. Professor Trinidad Gonzales of South Texas College has researched an especially brutal period. It's known as La Matanza, or the massacre. He was struck by something he read in the testimony of a Texas Ranger of that time. According to the Ranger, Gonzales said then-Governor James Ferguson offered pardons to Texas lawmen for their involvement in the atrocities if they would drive Texans of Mexican descent from the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
Hi, it's Ken Rudin here. I've been in California since Friday, talking to a lot of voters and things like that. And many people I've talked to said, yes, Barbara Boxer is arrogant, and we've had enough of Barbara Boxer. But their argument I've heard about you is that you're -like you're too - what they say is you're too reflexively conservative for a state like California. Now, we know that California does elect Republicans. We saw it with Pete Wilson. We saw it with Schwarzenegger and things like that. But they said that your views on abortion, which is pretty much to the right of the - seemingly right of the mainstream in California, is more conservative than they would like.
Just a few months ago, nobody saw this coming. Prosser was expected to coast to victory and preserve what is by many measures a 4-to-3 conservative majority on the court. The race changed practically overnight after Governor Scott Walker introduced his proposal to curb collective bargaining rights for public workers. Thousands of protesters looking for a channel to direct their anger at the governor found an outlet with this campaign. They carried prosecutor Kloppenburg on their shoulders. Meanwhile, outside groups dumped a record $3.5 million into TV ads. Kloppenburg issued a statement declaring victory this afternoon, based on her 204 vote lead projected by the Associated Press. But the AP did not plan to call the race, saying it was too close.
The most remarkable play of this college football season may have already occurred. Last Saturday, in the first quarter of the game between the North Texas Mean Green and the Arkansas Razorbacks, Keegan Brewer, a punt returner for North Texas, drifted back to catch a kick on the 10-yard line. He was surrounded by Razorbacks. Keegan Brewer caught the ball and stayed in place as players do after they signal for what's called a fair catch. That's a rule by which they can catch the ball and not be hit - can't even be touched - and the play is whistled dead. Keegan Brewer stood in place, the ball locked in his arms, looking almost serene. His Mean Green teammates began to drift toward the sidelines. So the Arkansas Razorbacks deployed around him began to drift away, too. Keegan Brewer later told reporters that one Razorback actually asked him, why aren't they blowing the whistle?
Well, it is. In the Army, one of the - one of the numbers that they put out there is that in the prime age group of recruits, 17 to 24 years old, seven in 10 are ineligible. Half of them are taken out for moral, mental, or medical reasons. Either they have too many run-ins with the law, they've had some past psychiatric treatment in their history, or they have any number of medical issues from obesity to a heart murmur that rules them out. Some others have too many dependents. There's also disclosed homosexuals, people who score too low on the Army aptitude test, and those who are interested and - excuse me - who are qualified to serve but they don't have any interest. They're in college, or they just have gone a different direction in their life.
No, not really. Actually, lunar eclipses are more common, though actually a little less frequent than total solar eclipses. To see a total eclipse of the sun, for example, you have to be in a specific spot at a specific moment when a narrow track of the moon's shadow passes you by. That's why for any one singular spot on the Earth to see a total eclipse of the sun, you may have to wait as long as 300 or 400 years. But a lunar eclipse, because it's visible, whenever it does occur, to half of the Earth, is more commonly observed.
And Betty Bishop in California wrote that she's tired of all the hype surrounding baby boomers. `I think the most irritating thing about being a boomer,' she said, `is the way that the media tries to lump us all together. We're a huge generation and a very diverse one, and the labeling is annoying. They've tracked us from birth, through childhood, adolescence, college, into the work force and now into retirement. We've been polled on every subject from the war in Vietnam to potato chips, the cars we drive and our views on abortion. Our opinions and quirks have published and discussed ad nauseam. Maybe,' she concluded, `they will let us die in private.' Well, you can send us an e-mail with your questions and comments. That's the best way to reach us. The address: totn@npr.org. Be sure to tell us where you're writing from and give us some help on how to pronounce your name.
Now, here is the good news, Walter. None of those things are possible. The good news is as well we now actually can stop bad advertisers to do some bad stuff. And one of the industries I'm attacking big way is the tobacco industry, which, in fact now, we've proven that from the Buyology study, is running and using subliminal advertising, which were banned in 1957. That means that you are affected by subconscious signals around you every day. If you go into London pubs, for example, they're actually placing small, red tiles in the bathrooms, and they're doing that, funded by the tobacco companies, to make you want to smoke more at a subconscious level. That is what we're discovering right now. So, I think it's not just for the worse; actually, it's for the better in some cases, too.
I just want to jump in on this because here in Detroit Reverend Wright got a hundred thousand people who came out to see him at the NAACP dinner. That hundred thousand people and the comments that they made were not covered to the same degree that this was covered. I think this is a reflection of a real problem which I see when you talk about the media. We have to talk about, you know, certain corporate media and what they're biases are and what they wanted to achieve and how they projected the story. I think, you know, Dan Rather said it at a discussion at the National Press Club the other day. He said, we're looking at views as opposed to news. And essentially, that's what they did, and essentially, Reverend Wright, whom I respect a whole lot, essentially became a caricaturistic fall guy for this whole situation. And I just think it's a - it was a reflection of what...
I wish I could say that the idea was mine. But it was actually the idea of my editor at HarperCollins Children. And she said, you know, I've got this idea. Would you be interested in writing a novel for kids and setting it in the world of professional football, where, I know, she had read from my bio that I had played in the NFL. And I said, I love the idea. She said, do you think you could? I said, you know, coincidentally, my wife, Illyssa, and I have five kids. And I read to my kids every night before they go to bed. And so I really have a fondness for the genre. And I was thrilled to set a story about kids in that world of professional football.
Well, I still don't think, Neal, that that's any reason to be nostalgic for the Cold War and the so-called bipolar world. Remember that what we were worried about what was then was global thermonuclear holocaust, and while we got some serious problems, including ones having to do with nuclear weapons, it is, bottom line, I think, a safer world than it was when the United States and the Soviet Union were at daggers point. Going to Bill's question, I don't quite accept the premise that we have no leverage with Iran. Iran is a complicated country. It is not just Ahmadinejad, who is as wacky as he is dangerous, there's no question about that. But I think he is so wacky and dangerous that he has even made of his own conservative clerics nervous and has perhaps been reigned in a little bit. And Iran has also got a fairly vigorous and quite young population, and I think it's straining against the constraints of theocractic rule, and that's an argument for trying to find ways of engaging with them over time, which doesn't mean making deals with unacceptable people like Ahmadinejad, but it does mean engaging with the government.
I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you've thrown our budget a little out of whack because we've spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico. And that's fine. We've saved a lot of lives. If you look at the - every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died and you look at what happened here with really a storm that was just totally overpowering - nobody's ever seen anything like this. What is your death count as this moment, 17?
Okay. Good luck with that, everyone. When you have the answer, go to our website, NPR.org/puzzle and click on the Submit Your Answer link, only one entry per person, please. Our deadline is next Thursday at 3 P.M. Eastern Time. Please include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time and we'll call if youre the winner. And you'll get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster, Will Shortz. Will, it was a pleasure. And do not fear, Liane will be back in the puzzle seat next week, so all will be well in the world.
The age of digital television might be sooner than you think. And you know what? Depending on how you use your TV, it might become the world's biggest paperweight. By early 2009, a federal law requires that all full power broadcast television stations - that is the one you can get with your rabbit ear antennas - start broadcasting only in digital format. And this could have a big impact on how and on what you watch TV. Also say, you're looking for a job and then your personal information gets spread across the Net. That happened to some members of monster.com. To explain this and more, we've got tech expert Mario Armstrong. Hey, Mario.
Well, the short answer is they're not quite sure what happened. But rail officials are saying this accident that took place in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the train was crossing through there to Bihar, a state - a neighboring state - was likely caused by what they call rail fracture. And they speculated with winter setting in, colder air causes these rails to contract, and that produces fractures. But, you know, poor maintenance can also cause fractures, and a severe fracture can actually derail a train because the tracks start to separate. A railway manager told the local media that he had personally inspected this track a month ago. But, David, this train was also described as packed, extraordinarily so, possibly overcapacity; reportedly, 1,200 people on board. And of course the danger for that is when you're trying to extract these people from the carriages is just that much more difficult to get them out of what are these mangled hulks of metal now.
In terms of the way it's all put together, you know, the major producing countries, like the United States, which provides 50 percent of all food aid around the world, contribute food in a variety of different forms. Much of the food assistance that comes from the United States comes from farmers in the American Middle West in the form of grain supplies. And that grain, particularly in years when there is surplus supply, is shipped by the American grain shipping companies to points around the world as part of a whole program on food aid that's coordinated by the United States government. What happened would be that food aid would arrive in ports, be managed by the United Nations agencies at the point of arrival, and then begin to find its way into the country through non-governmental organizations working in that country as well as food distribution programs of the national government. So in a particular case like Afghanistan during the five-year famine in Afghanistan, Mercy Corps, for example, might be assigned a particular province to deliver food aid. Oxfam might be assigned another province. CARE might be assigned another province. And we would all rely on the World Food Program to deliver the large stocks to us. And, if you will, they're the arteries in the system, and we're the capillaries.
A friend introduced me. He worked with me as a driver in 2010, and we came by car to this village in the middle of this humped, convex desert in northern Afghanistan where nothing grows. The only water source in the village is two diseased wells. People live extremely poor - one of the poorest villages I visited in Afghanistan where poverty is predominant - and very basic living. And it also is a village of carpet weavers. So what pierced me was the friction between violence, between extreme poverty and between this unspeakable beauty. So I wanted to come back and stay as long as it would take to weave a carpet.
I believe that to be the case, but I must tell you we're not going to allow the dialogue to die in the House of Representatives. In fact, I believe that members of Congress are increasingly becoming more involved on issues as it relates to poverty. Hurricane Katrina exposed the massive poverty that we have in our country. It is a crisis. We have now five million more people living in poverty, 37 million, that's since 2000. Twelve million children live in poverty, it's outrageous. And when you look at the disproportionate rates of poverty as it relates to communities and people of color, the poverty rates with the African-American community are nearly 25% and the Latino community nearly 23%. Eight percent of white Americans live in poverty. And so the debate must move forward, you know, we need leadership, we need accountability, and we've got to establish some priorities. And that's why I introduced these bills, to really begin to focus the debate in the House of Representatives on these very crucial areas that I (unintelligible).
Well, I think it - you know, I think would benefit growth. I think if you simplify the rates, if you brought down the rates, if you brought the corporate rate down to 20, if you allowed repatriation of profits, those are the colonels of a growth agenda. And we do have to increase growth overall, and that would be good for the country. Would I change a lot - of course. But as a starting place, if we wanted to - if we lived in a normal country with a sane political system, this could be a starting place for a bipartisan reform that would simplify the rates, repatriate the profits and do something to boost growth in a revenue-neutral way.
Dialogue gives a story color, makes it exciting and moves it forward. Romeo: O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied? Juliet: What satisfaction canst thou have tonight? Romeo: The exchange of thy love's faithful vows for mine. Without dialogue: (cricket sounds) So what goes into writing effective dialogue? Well, there are social skills: making friends, solving conflicts, being pleasant and polite. We won't be using any of those today. Instead, we'll be working on — let's call them "anti-social skills." If you're a writer, you may already have a few of these. The first is eavesdropping. If you're riding a bus and hear an interesting conversation, you could write it all down. Of course, when you write fiction, you're not describing real people, you're making up characters. But sometimes the words you overhear can give you ideas. "I did not," says one person. "I saw you," the other replies. Who might be saying those words? Maybe it's two kids in a class, and the boy thinks the girl pushed him. Maybe it's a couple, but one of them is a vampire, and the woman vampire saw the man flirting with a zombie. Or maybe not. Maybe the characters are a teenager and his mother, and they're supposed to be vegetarians, but the mother saw him eating a burger. So let's say you've decided on some characters. This is anti-social skill number two: start pretending they're real. What are they like? Where are they from? What music do they listen to? Spend some time with them. If you're on a bus, think about what they might be doing if they were there too. Would they talk on the phone, listen to music, draw pictures, sleep? What we say depends on who we are. An older person might speak differently than a younger person. Someone from the south might speak differently than someone from the north. Once you know your characters, you can figure out how they talk. At this stage, it's helpful to use anti-social skill number three: muttering to yourself. When you speak your character's words, you can hear whether they sound natural, and fix them if necessary. Remember, most people are usually pretty informal when they speak. They use simple language and contractions. So, "Do not attempt to lie to me" sounds more natural as "Don't try to lie to me." Also keep it short. People tend to speak in short bursts, not lengthy speeches. And let the dialogue do the work. Ask yourself: do I really need that adverb? For instance, "'Your money or your life,' she said threateningly." Here, "threateningly" is redundant, so you can get rid of it. But if the words and the actions don't match, an adverb can be helpful. "'Your money or your life,' she said lovingly." So, to recap: First, eavesdrop. Next, pretend imaginary people are real. Finally, mutter to yourself, and write it all down. You already have everything you need. This is fictional dialogue, or "How to Hear Voices in Your Head."
Pence wanted to talk as his boss, President Trump, prepares for a summit with North Korea's leader. The U.S. wants North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. If North Korea agreed, the next question would be - how? Well, Richard Lugar worked with a Democratic counterpart, Sam Nunn of Georgia, to pass what was called the Nunn-Lugar Act. After the Cold War, it provided ways to remove nuclear weapons from former Soviet republics. This week, the vice president brought Nunn and Lugar to the White House, where they met with Pence and then with President Trump. The two ex-senators told us that it would be hard to get North Korea to dismantle its program all at once.
Those sudden swerves are what Dybek does best. Soon we're in a car with this woman on a night drive to Iowa. The relationship gets explored further and further, and finally she observes, the backseat of a car at night on a country road, adultery has a disconcerting way of turning adults back into teenagers. Dybek has a way of turning adults back into previous versions of themselves, too. But what I'll remember about this book isn't what happens necessarily or who it happens to. Instead it's the moments that rise up out of Chicago or out of the flames, a little alarming, a little wonderful. If you want to see how Dybek works on a more micro level, the publisher is also releasing a volume called "Ecstatic Cahoots" which includes 50 stories, most of them very short. In fact the first one, "Mysterioso," which is just a dialogue between two people, is so short that I can read the whole thing right now. (Reading) You're going to leave your watch on? You're leaving on your cross?
Today in Washington, President Trump and Vice President Pence laid a wreath at the memorial for Martin Luther King Jr. The president also issued a proclamation urging all Americans to recommit themselves to the late civil rights leader's dream of equality and justice for all. Federal offices are closed today in honor of Dr. King. And of course many government offices were already closed for weeks because of a political standoff. The president is demanding that Congress approve money for his border wall. Congressional Democrats have been unwilling to do that. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now with the latest on the shutdown. Welcome, Scott.
The first thing is is that I don't know for a fact who was involved in this attack. Secondly, I do know that there is a person of interest that they do want to talk to, and he is a member of our patrol. He is also a member of the NYPD auxiliary force, and we all know who he is. He is a nice kid that lives in the neighborhood. If in fact he was involved in this situation, then he should be punished if there was a crime committed. The Crown Heights Shmira clearly does not condone violence of any sort, to anyone. We are only the eyes and ears for the police, we act as a passive patrol, and we have been doing so for 40 years. We have hundreds of members that volunteer in patrolling the streets, or responding to our hotline to all sorts of domestic situations, and emergencies. We assist with the police in many situations. And proof that we work within the confines of the law is that there are no statistics of Shmira being arrested everyday for getting into all sorts of activity that might be breaking the law. We don't do that, and the police don't have, can tell you that, that no, they don't arrest Shmira members. We are out on the streets, in the midst of trouble every day of the week. And we have been doing that for 40 years. Here is one incident, that's an ugly incident, where a Jew is being charged for hitting a black boy and that has to be addressed not in the media, it should be addressed in the courts of New York, and each side should have their day in court and resolve the issue. And whoever committed the crime, whether it's a black boy, or whether is a Jewish boy, that person must be punished, clearly.
Sure. There's a lot of research that touches on all those things. First, keep in mind that, you know, the science behind this is - it's hard genetic science. It's hard behavioral science. And in that sense, we all come with essentially the same software preloaded. But layered on top of that - in human beings, as opposed to in other animals - there's a whole suite of other factors in play. There's compassion and there's anger and there's tenderness and there's resentment. And there are all the other things that can confound the underlying rules. So there are plenty of exceptions to these rules, which is why it doesn't surprise me that by no means does every birth order - or birth order of traits consistent across families. In terms of finding that kind of kinship in step-siblings, that's very common, and a very healthy compensation that - that people come up with. Only children, for example, will tend to find sibling kinship in their cousins.
If you were to jump into any random spot in the ocean, you would probably see something like this. Empty of large animals. Because we have taken them out of the water faster than they can reproduce. Today I want to propose a strategy to save ocean life, and the solution has a lot to do with economics. In 1999, a little place called Cabo Pulmo in Mexico was an underwater desert. The fishermen were so upset not having enough fish to catch that they did something that no one expected. Instead of spending more time at sea, trying to catch the few fish left, they stopped fishing completely. They created a national park in the sea. A no-take marine reserve. When we returned, 10 years later, this is what we saw. What had been an underwater barren was now a kaleidoscope of life and color. We saw it back to pristine in only 10 years. Including the return of the large predators, like the groupers, the sharks, the jacks. And those visionary fishermen are making much more money now, from tourism. Now, when we can align economic needs with conservation, miracles can happen. And we have seen similar recoveries all over the world. I spent 20 years studying human impacts in the ocean. But when I saw firsthand the regeneration of places like Cabo Pulmo, that gave me hope. So I decided to quit my job as a university professor to dedicate my life to save more ocean places like this. In the last 10 years, our team at National Geographic Pristine Seas has explored, surveyed and documented some of the wildest places left in the ocean and worked with governments to protect them. These are all now protected, covering a total area half the size of Canada. (Applause) These places are the Yellowstones and the Serengetis of the sea. These are places where you jump in the water and are immediately surrounded by sharks. (Laughter) And this is good, because the sharks are a good indicator of the health of the ecosystem. These places are time machines that take us to the ocean of 1,000 years ago. But they also show us what the future ocean could be like. Because the ocean has extraordinary regenerative power, we have seen great recovery in just a few years. We just need to protect many more places at risk so they can become wild and full of life again. But today, only two percent of the ocean is fully protected from fishing and other activities. And that's not enough. Studies suggest that we need at least 30 percent of the ocean under protection not just to save marine life, but to save us, too. Because the ocean gives us more than half of the oxygen we breathe, food, it absorbs much of the carbon pollution that we throw in the atmosphere. We need a healthy ocean to survive. Now, is there a way to accelerate ocean protection? I think so. And it involves us looking at the high seas. Now, what are the high seas? Now coastal countries have authority over 200 nautical miles from shore. Everything beyond those areas are called the high seas. In dark blue on this map. No country owns the high seas, no country is responsible for them, but they all are, so it's a little like the Wild West. And there are two main types of fishing in the high seas. At the bottom and near the surface. Bottom trawling is the most destructive practice in the world. Super trawlers, the largest fishing vessels in the ocean, have nets so large that they can hold a dozen 747 jets. These huge nets destroy everything in their paths — including deep corals that grow on sea mounds, which can be thousands of years old. And fishing near the surface targets mostly species that migrate between the high seas and country's waters, like tuna and sharks. And many of these species are threatened because of too much fishing and bad management. Now, who fishes in the high seas? Until now, it was difficult to know exactly, because countries have been very secretive about the long-distance fishing. But now, satellite technology allows us to track individual boats. This is a game-changer. And this is the first time we are presenting the data that you are going to see. I'm going to show you the tracks of two boats over the course of a year, using a satellite automated identification system. This is a long-liner, fishing around the southern coast of Africa. After a few months fishing there, the boat goes to Japan to resupply, and shortly after, here it is, fishing around Madagascar. This is a Russian trawler fishing, probably, for cod, in Russian waters, and then across the high seas of the north Atlantic. Thanks to Global Fishing Watch, we have been able to track over 3,600 boats from more than 20 countries, fishing in the high seas. They use satellite positioning and machine-learning technology to automatically identify if a boat is just sailing or fishing, which are the white spots here. So with an international group of colleagues, we decided to investigate not only who fishes in the high seas, but who benefits from it. My colleague, Juan Mayorga, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has produced detailed maps of fishing effort, which means how much time and fuel is spent fishing in every pixel in the ocean. We have a map for every country. China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Spain alone account for almost 80 percent of the fishing in the high seas. When we put all of the countries together, this is what we get. Because we know the identity of every boat in the database, we know its size, its tonnage, the power of its engines, how many crew are on board. With this information, we can calculate fuel costs, labor costs, etc. So for the first time, we have been able to map the costs of fishing in the high seas. The darker the red, the higher the costs. Thanks to our colleagues at the University of British Columbia, we know how much every country is actually fishing. And we know the price of the fish as it comes off the vessel. Combined with the data on effort, we have been able to map the revenue of fishing the high seas. The darker the blue, the higher the revenue. We have costs, and we have revenue. So for the first time, we have been able to map the profitability of fishing in the high seas. Now I'm going to show you a map. Red colors mean we are losing money by fishing in that part of the ocean. Blue colors mean it's profitable. Here it is. It seems mostly profitable. But there are two more factors we have to take into account. First, recent investigations reveal the use of forced labor, or slave labor, in high seas fishing. Companies use it to cut costs, to generate profits. And second, every year, governments subsidize high seas fishing with more than four billion dollars. Let's go back to the map of profits. If we assume fair wages, which means not slave labor, and we remove the subsidies from our calculation, the map turns into this. Fishing is truly profitable in only half of the high seas fishing grounds. In fact, on aggregate, subsidies are four times larger than the profits. So we have five countries doing most of the fishing in the high seas and the economics are dependent on huge government subsidies, and for some countries, on human rights violations. What this economic analysis reveals, is that practically the entire high seas fishing proposition is misguided. What sane government would subsidize an industry anchored in exploitation and fundamentally destructive? And not so profitable, anyway. So, why don't we close all of the high seas to fishing? Let's create a giant high seas reserve, two-thirds of the ocean. A modeling study from — (Applause) A modeling study from colleagues at UC Santa Barbara, suggests that such reserve would help migratory species like tuna recover in the high seas. And part of that increased abundance would spill over into the countries' waters, helping to replenish them. That would also increase the catch in these waters, and so would the profits, because the cost of fishing would be lowered. And the ecological benefits would be huge, because these species of large predators, like tuna and sharks, are key to the health of the entire ecosystem. Therefore, protecting the high seas would have ecological, economic and social benefits. But the truth is that most fishing companies don't care about the environment. But they would make more money by not fishing in the high seas. And this would not affect our ability to feed our growing population, because the high seas provide only five percent of the global marine catch, because the high seas are not as productive as near-shore waters. And most of the catch of the high seas is sold as upscale food items, like tuna sashimi or shark fin soup. The high seas catch does not contribute to global food security. So how are we going to do it? How are we going to protect the high seas? As we speak, negotiators at the United Nations are beginning discussions on a new agreement to do just that. But this cannot happen behind closed doors. This is our greatest opportunity. And we all should ensure that our countries will support the protection of the high seas and get rid of subsidies to industrial fishing. In 2016, 24 countries and the European Union agreed to protect the Ross Sea, the wildest places in Antarctica, full of wildlife like killer whales, leopard seals, penguins. And this included fishing nations, like China, Japan, Spain, Russia. But they decided that protecting such a unique environment would be worth more than exploiting it for relatively little benefit. And this is exactly the type of cooperation and willingness to set aside differences that we are going to need. We can do it again. If 20 years from now, our children were to jump into any random spot in the ocean, what would they see? A barren landscape, like much of our seas today, or an abundance of life, our legacy to the future? Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
I actually host - I'm really interested in the topic that you are discussing. I've actually talked about this with my friend. I personally really enjoy watching like video podcasts that you find online, even more so than I -I don't even really watch broadcast television anymore, mainly because I think its pretty homogenized, pretty boring, and in many cases pretty stupid. And I find that the amateur homemade video podcasts and videos that you find online, most of them are - can be very dumb but every once in a while you'll find one that's very clever, very witty. And I really enjoy watching them.
And there's this complacency that seems to erode AIDS programs. And it's happening in high-income countries like the United States and throughout Europe, too, where, if you let up, if you let down your guard and you don't pay as much attention to this epidemic, within two or three years, the infections start to creep up. One more thing that we're seeing that is disturbing and we don't completely understand is, we now, in fact for the last 12 years, have had a very cheap and simple way to protect a newborn infant from becoming infected. It costs about $1. It's essentially a dose of medicine for the mother when she delivers her baby and a dose of the medicine for the baby within 48 hours of being born. When this was -these studies were released, and this knowledge became well known, we naturally assumed that this would be a service that we could provide all over the world far more easily than providing treatment. And that has not been the case.
Well, the whole point of this 14 day goal was to get a handle on this problem. The issue of long waits at the VA is a decade old at least. And the former secretary - now former secretary of the VA, Eric Shinseki - he tried to put a metric on it, and he set this target of let's try to see people within 14 days, but the goal, according to this VA audit, was impossible to meet. So instead of trying to meet the goal, some VA hospital officials just thought as an incentive to change the numbers so that they could say they were seeing people within 14 days and get their annual performance bonuses, and that's basically the scandal. The VA scrapped that goal so there's no longer a reason to cheat. They also canceled all the bonuses for the Veterans Health Administration this year.
The political topic here in recent weeks has been House Bill 2, the new law mandating people use the bathroom that aligns with the sex listed on their birth certificate. The Justice Department wrote the governor last week warning that House Bill 2 discriminates against people who are transgender and violates the Civil Rights Act. Such a violation could threaten billions of dollars in federal funding. State lawmakers have vowed not to take action by today's deadline, meaning the Justice Department could file its own suit or join a federal challenge filed in March. As for consequences at the ballot box this November, McCrory snuck out a service door on Saturday as reporters chased after him. GOP Congressman Mark Meadows did chat with the media and give his take.
That's right. And one of the weird things is that there's a professor at the University of North Carolina, his name is Charles Courtemanche, who has linked obesity to the price of gas. Now, certainly, there are a lot of things that go into obesity, the kind of food - people eat, the kind of things they do in their spare time. But also the price of gas has played a role. As the price of gas stayed low over most of the past 30 years - you know, it just really blew up in the last eight years -people move further and further away, and our lives became more car-centric.
And at that time, when I began talking to the trigger pullers in the war on terror, essentially infantrymen in the Army and Marine Corps, I became distressfully aware that the ones who were actually doing the fighting and the dying in the terror war were not always as well prepared as they could have been. So the next logical question was where does all that money go? At that time I think a typical Department of Defense annual budget was around $450 billion. And you didn't have to look very long before you realize that it's going for extremely complex, sophisticated - read expensive - systems such as stealth aircraft and next-generation submarines which, let's face it, are largely irrelevant to what we're doing today.
No. I know for a fact that that is not so. I mean, I would for a close friend or my sister. I would not expect them to pay me anything. I would do it because I can help somebody in that way. But actually in Sweden, where I'm from, there's a long line of couples waiting for donors because they don't offer any compensation, so they don't do it there. Nobody wants to donate. So they have actually a case which proves that people don't it if there is no money involved because there's not enough women who want to do it for free.
Just to back and fill a little bit. Evidently, shortly after 9/11, the president issued an executive order authorizing this kind of program. Exactly what the program is, it's a little unclear. But this kind of program, when it came to light in reports from The New York Times and USA Today, what, last December and January. At that point, he then went to the court to get some authorization and then finally at the Congress to get this new bill. Given that long and lengthy preamble, Shane Harris, fill us in. Is this an admission that what happened previously was illegal?
Well, that exact objection, that's what Travis Tygart, who's the president of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, put in a letter to Eric Holder that the site Velonews got a hold of. So, arguing to the Attorney General Travis Tygart, acknowledged it's understandable that the government would have some reluctance to spend public dollars in another sports case. He's obviously talking about the Barry Bonds prosecution, which did not go well for the government; the Roger Clemens prosecution, which totally failed in terms of getting a conviction. But as Tygart says, the essential fact of doping is no longer an issue in this case. And while the federal government dropped its case against Armstrong, its criminal case, Tygart's arguing that Lance Armstrong himself is admitting to doping. We're not arguing a did he or didn't he issue.
Well, both sides, before they met on Saturday, essentially floated trial balloons about issues that they would like to see addressed. The United States clearly wants - is clearly concerned about two things. One is Iran's continuing enrichment of uranium to the level of 20 percent U-235. This is a significant step toward highly enriched uranium, and the United States wants to see that capped and stopped and then some kind of ultimate dispensation for this arranged between the West and Iran. Iran clearly wants the economic sanctions that it is now suffering under removed or lightened at least as a confidence-building measure early on in this process. And it doesn't look like there was any substantive discussion of those issues. That's going to come up very quickly, however, in May when the two sides meet again in Baghdad.
Well, it's not that nobody read it, but, for example, there are one or two newspapers in Moscow which are really opposition newspapers and which print articles which are critical of the government. They're just very low circulation, I mean, in 100,000 instead of a million. He keeps very - the Kremlin keeps very close control of television and of other real mass media, of media which may reach millions of people, but allows smaller dissent - you know, groups like Pussy Riot had been saying anti-Putin things for many years with nobody really paying any attention to them or caring about them. And the dangerous thing about this story is that, finally, one of the little, somewhat obscure avant-garde groups got into, you know, is now a part of the mainstream media and is part of the kind of mainstream news that Russians may see. And that's what the Kremlin has been trying to avoid for many years.
Well we all know the World Wide Web has absolutely transformed publishing, broadcasting, commerce and social connectivity, but where did it all come from? And I'll quote three people: Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee. So let's just run through these guys. This is Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush was the U.S. government's chief scientific adviser during the war. And in 1945, he published an article in a magazine called Atlantic Monthly. And the article was called "As We May Think." And what Vannevar Bush was saying was the way we use information is broken. We don't work in terms of libraries and catalog systems and so forth. The brain works by association. With one item in its thought, it snaps instantly to the next item. And the way information is structured is totally incapable of keeping up with this process. And so he suggested a machine, and he called it the memex. And the memex would link information, one piece of information to a related piece of information and so forth. Now this was in 1945. A computer in those days was something the secret services used to use for code breaking. And nobody knew anything about it. So this was before the computer was invented. And he proposed this machine called the memex. And he had a platform where you linked information to other information, and then you could call it up at will. So spinning forward, one of the guys who read this article was a guy called Doug Engelbart, and he was a U.S. Air Force officer. And he was reading it in their library in the Far East. And he was so inspired by this article, it kind of directed the rest of his life. And by the mid-60s, he was able to put this into action when he worked at the Stanford Research Lab in California. He built a system. The system was designed to augment human intelligence, it was called. And in a premonition of today's world of cloud computing and softwares of service, his system was called NLS for oN-Line System. And this is Doug Engelbart. He was giving a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968. What he showed — he sat on a stage like this, and he demonstrated this system. He had his head mic like I've got. And he works this system. And you can see, he's working between documents and graphics and so forth. And he's driving it all with this platform here, with a five-finger keyboard and the world's first computer mouse, which he specially designed in order to do this system. So this is where the mouse came from as well. So this is Doug Engelbart. The trouble with Doug Engelbart's system was that the computers in those days cost several million pounds. So for a personal computer, a few million pounds was like having a personal jet plane; it wasn't really very practical. But spin on to the 80s when personal computers did arrive, then there was room for this kind of system on personal computers. And my company, OWL built a system called Guide for the Apple Macintosh. And we delivered the world's first hypertext system. And this began to get a head of steam. Apple introduced a thing called HyperCard, and they made a bit of a fuss about it. They had a 12-page supplement in the Wall Street Journal the day it launched. The magazines started to cover it. Byte magazine and Communications at the ACM had special issues covering hypertext. We developed a PC version of this product as well as the Macintosh version. And our PC version became quite mature. These are some examples of this system in action in the late 80s. You were able to deliver documents, were able to do it over networks. We developed a system such that it had a markup language based on html. We called it hml: hypertext markup language. And the system was capable of doing very, very large documentation systems over computer networks. So I took this system to a trade show in Versailles near Paris in late November 1990. And I was approached by a nice young man called Tim Berners-Lee who said, "Are you Ian Ritchie?" and I said, "Yeah." And he said, "I need to talk to you." And he told me about his proposed system called the World Wide Web. And I thought, well, that's got a pretentious name, especially since the whole system ran on his computer in his office. But he was completely convinced that his World Wide Web would take over the world one day. And he tried to persuade me to write the browser for it, because his system didn't have any graphics or fonts or layout or anything; it was just plain text. I thought, well, you know, interesting, but a guy from CERN, he's not going to do this. So we didn't do it. In the next couple of years, the hypertext community didn't recognize him either. In 1992, his paper was rejected for the Hypertext Conference. In 1993, there was a table at the conference in Seattle, and a guy called Marc Andreessen was demonstrating his little browser for the World Wide Web. And I saw it, and I thought, yep, that's it. And the very next year, in 1994, we had the conference here in Edinburgh, and I had no opposition in having Tim Berners-Lee as the keynote speaker. So that puts me in pretty illustrious company. There was a guy called Dick Rowe who was at Decca Records and turned down The Beatles. There was a guy called Gary Kildall who went flying his plane when IBM came looking for an operating system for the IBM PC, and he wasn't there, so they went back to see Bill Gates. And the 12 publishers who turned down J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, I guess. On the other hand, there's Marc Andreessen who wrote the world's first browser for the World Wide Web. And according to Fortune magazine, he's worth 700 million dollars. But is he happy? (Laughter) (Applause)
I rented a home for the month in Camaiore, a little town on a hilltop in the province of Lucca in Tuscany. Walking about beautiful cobblestone streets and I noticed on a side street a long line outside a bakery. When I got to the window and looked in, I noticed something bright green. It's so surprising because the Italians don't generally use food coloring, but it was so green. What kind of a green (unintelligible). I walked in. And I said, what is that? And she looked at me as if, don't you know? Then she explained it's torta co'bischeri agli spinaci, a sweet spinach pie. So I kept asking her, excuse me, this is dessert? (Foreign language spoken) Yes, of course, yes. And it was so strange to imagine spinach for dessert.
Well there's a lot of people that theorize about this. Not a lot of research has been done. A lot of people are trying to figure that out. But what we can suppose is is that girls tend to be more likely to be the victims of sexual abuse or other domestic violence. And so what some have postulated is that, you know, the things that a girl did to keep her safe when she was in the community no longer work once you're locked up - so running away from a sexual abuse situation, skipping school to feel safe. So all that's left is fight. Or, more likely, the juvenile justice system doesn't know what to do. They don't want to release the girl back to the home that may be part of what got her there to begin with.
So, we're very excited to start working with one of my clinician collaborators who is very interested in looking at circulating tumor cells. So those are cells that have broken up from a primary tumor and that's the thing that actually goes around and spread the tumor to other locations in the body. So, being able to actually track and measure that is very important to him. And we think that within, you know, maybe not within the next 10 years, but 15 or 20 years from now, we can start to actually have a device that do the analysis and look for all these rogue cells in the bloodstream itself that we would - the device would be implanted into a person. And this will be very useful for them because they can then track continuously for the presence of these rogue cells.
No. I'm going to make it quick. We found those - we found a piece of skull unlike any I had ever seen before. The local people said it was a different kind of deer that only grew to be about two feet tall with tiny little antlers no more than an inch tall, and large fangs. I brought the skull back with some pieces of hair that I found, and genetically it proved to be the most - it was a completely new species and it was genetically the most primitive deer known in the entire world. So I went back next - the next year to that site and started paying hunters not to kill the deer, which they were doing, but to - but I would pay them double if they brought it to me alive. And I had started having hunters bring me this live tiny deer and it turned out to be a living fossil. It's a no known living deer is a frugavore - eats fruits. This deer is a solitary deer species that eats only fruits and has large fangs and tiny antlers. This was a throwback. It was kind of the missing link between extinct species and living species.
They could. One thing Rosenstein said is that every once in a while one of these people who've been indicted by the United States will travel to a third country that has an agreement that enables them to be arrested and extradited. So what the United States has basically done is restricted how these guys can travel in places - for example, in Western Europe - where they might actually come into the power of Interpol or some allied government. The other thing that Rosenstein said is evidence in indictments is sufficient for the Treasury Department to impose sanctions. That's what happened with indictment earlier this year. So now the Treasury Department if it wants to can take the material from these court documents and sanction the financial activities of these Russians who've been identified.
Some say that history begins with writing; we say that history begins with clothing. In the beginning, there was clothing made from skins that early humans removed from animals, processed, and then tailored to fit the human body; this technique is still used in the Arctic. Next came textiles. The first weavers would weave textiles in the shape of animal hides or raise the nap of the fabric’s surface to mimic the appearance of fur, making the fabric warmer and more comfortable. The shift from skin clothing to textiles is recorded in our earliest literature, such as in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, where Enkidu, a wild man living on the Mesopotamian steppe, is transformed into a civilised being by the priestess Shamhat through sex, food and clothing. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all begin their accounts of their origins with a dressing scene. A naked Adam and Eve, eating from the forbidden tree, must flee the Garden of Eden. They clothe themselves and undertake a new way of life based on agriculture and animal husbandry. The earliest textile imprints in clay are some 30,000 years old, much older than agriculture, pottery or metallurgy. Persian Carpet Dealer on the Street (1888) by Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910). Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons In the 21st century, the Silk Roads have re-emerged as the catch-all name for a highly politicised infrastructure project across Asia. The name Silk Roads comes from the origin and spread of sericulture – the practice of making silk fibres – in which Chinese women have played a special role. The discovery of silk fibres is attributed to the Empress Ling Shih, known as Lei Zhu. Legend says a silk cocoon fell into her cup and began to unravel in the hot tea water while she sat under a mulberry tree. Another legend tells that it was a Chinese princess who brought sericulture out of China to the Kingdom of Khotan by hiding silkworm eggs in her hair when she was sent to marry the Khotanese king. In Modern Chinese, sī (絲, ‘silk, thread, string’) is commonly reconstructed as Middle Chinese *si. Linguists believe that the word journied via nomadic tribes in western China who also adapted the Mongolian word sirkeg (‘silk fabric’) and the Manchu sirge or sirhe (‘silk thread, silk floss from a cocoon’). The Greek noun sērikón and Latin sēricum come from the same Chinese root. The English word silk, Old Norse silki and Scandinavian silke – transferred into Finnish and Karelian as silkki, Lithuanian šilkas, and Old Russian šĭlkŭ – all have the same origin in Chinese. It took approximately one millennium for the word ‘silk’ to travel from China to northern Europe via Central Asia and Iran: 10,000 kilometres in 1,000 years. In ancient Asia, silk was valuable and coveted, even by the powerful. It is said that in the year 1 BCE, China paid off invaders from the north with 30,000 bolts of silk, 7,680 kg of silk floss and 370 pieces of clothing. Among the less powerful, textiles possessed even greater value. We know from 3rd- and 4th-century Kroraina kingdom legal documents (from Chinese Turkistan, present-day Xinjiang province) that the theft of ‘two jackets’ could occasion a crime and that ‘two belts’ were significant enough to appear in wills. Silk became the symbol of an extravagance and decadence The classical Greek and Roman world thought of India as the site of great textiles and garments. The Romans marvelled at Indian saffron (Crocus indicus), a precious spice and dye plant yielding a bright yellow. Indigo was among the most valuable commodities traded from Asia. Diocletian’s Edict of Maximum Prices of 301 CE tells us that one Roman pound of raw silk cost the same as nine years’ wages of a smith. In Rome, silk became the symbol of an extravagance and decadence that some saw as corrupt and anti-Roman. Cleopatra was also said to wear quite inappropriate clothing of Chinese origin, revealing her breasts and therefore also her vanity, and indicating loose morals and greed. The Roman emperor Elagabalus was described contemptuously by his contemporary Herodian, who wrote that the ruler refused to wear traditional Roman clothes because they were made of inferior textiles. Only silk ‘met with his approval’. The Roman poet Horace dismissed women who wore silk, arguing that its lightness meant that ‘you may see her, almost as if naked … you may measure her whole form with your eye.’ Wall painting of two young Roman women wearing fine translucent fabric. Roman, 1-75 CE. Gift of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman. Photo by J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles The technology behind silk had long been a historical puzzle. The recent archaeological discovery of a 2nd-century BCE Han dynasty burial chamber of a woman in Chengdu has now solved it. Her grave contained a miniature weaving workshop with wooden models of doll-sized weavers operating pattern looms with an integrated multi-shaft mechanism and a treadle and pedal to power the loom. Europeans wouldn’t devise the treadle loom, which enhances power, precision and efficiency, for another millennium. Chengdu loom model (digital reconstruction). Photo courtesy China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province This technology, known as weft-faced compound tabby, also emerged in the border city of Dura-Europos in Syria and in Masada in Israel, dating to the 70s CE. We can, however, be confident that the technique known as taqueté was first woven with wool fibre in the Levant. From there, it spread east, and the Persians and others turned it into a weft-faced compound twill called samite. Samites became the most expensive and prestigious commodity on the western Silk Roads right up until the Arab conquests. They were highly valued international commodities, traded all the way to Scandinavia. Fragments of silk samite from fabric no 1 from Oseberg, as drawn by Sofie Krafft. Photo by Ann Christine Eek. © Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, Norway In Norway in 834 CE, two women were buried in the large Oseberg Viking ship, loaded with silk textiles, including more than 110 silk samite pieces cut into narrow, decorative strips. Most of the Oseberg silk strips are of Central Asian origin and they were probably several generations old when they were buried. The old Norse sagas speak of exquisite fabrics that were perhaps samites, even calling them guðvefr, literally ‘God-woven’. These samite strips could have come to Scandinavia via close contact with the Rus communities settled along the Russian rivers, who could negotiate favourable conditions of trade with Byzantium. We know from historical sources that if a Rus merchant lost a slave in Greek territory, he would be entitled to compensation in the form of two pieces of silk. However, Byzantia also set a maximum purchase allowance for the Rus, and the maximum price for silk was 50 bezants. These silks that the Rus were trading in Byzantium, and then again with the Scandinavians, came from the Syrian cities of Antioch, Aleppo and Damascus. Most early medieval silks in Europe are Byzantine, not Chinese. The Scandinavians also exported fur products to Asia that fuelled luxury consumption in Byzantium and eastwards, including coats, but also trimmings for hats and boots, and hems for kaftans and collars. The combination of fur and silk remained popular in prestige clothing to the Renaissance kings of Europe, and still exists in royal ermine robes. Under the Muslim dynasties of the Umayyads (661-750), the Abbasids (750-1258), the Ilkhanids (1256-1335) and the Mamluks (1250-1517), diplomatic clothing gifts evolved into robes of honour. In Arabic, these are called khilʿa or tashrīf, and they are precious garments that a ruler would bestow upon his elites. They would then wear them to show loyalty. Silk gift-giving worked in both directions, it seems, and a caliph might receive hundreds of garments from one of his subjects. A huge textile industry, private as well as royal, flourished in Baghdad in the 9th to 10th centuries, employing at least 4,000 people in silk and cotton manufacturing alone. Precious dyes, such as kermes from Armenia, offered opportunities for exclusive designs of bright-red fabric. Early Islamic scholars praise Central Asia not only for its silk but also for its wool, linen, fur and especially fine cotton. The 10th century also saw the spread of Islam, and the advance of trade networks lead to a renaissance in West African weaving and textile production. The Rules and Regulations of the Abbasid Court state that, in the year 977 CE, the wealthy Adud al-Dawla sent the caliph gifts of 500 garments in a full range of qualities, from the finest to the coarsest – an excellent example of ‘silken diplomacy’. The Abbasid dynasty invested in palace textile workshops producing sophisticated patterns and techniques, such as the renowned tirāz. Originally a Persian loan-word, the term tirāz eventually became used for exquisite decorated or embroidered fabrics with in-woven inscriptions of the name of the ruler or praising Allah. The silk tapestry roundel unites symbolic and aesthetic concepts from both the Islamic and Chinese realms The purpose of tirāz textiles, at least to begin with, may have been a form of tax or tribute that was paid by provinces in Central Asia to honour new rulers when they took power. The term also came to be the name for a workshop where such exquisite fabrics with inscriptions were produced. The author Ibn Khaldūn, who wrote in the 14th century, dedicated a whole chapter to tirāz textiles in his book Muqaddimah: Royal garments are embroidered with such a tirāz, in order to increase the prestige of the ruler or the person of lower rank who wears such a garment, or in order to increase the prestige of those whom the ruler distinguishes by bestowing upon them his own garment … A 14th-century silk and metal-thread slit tapestry roundel. At its centre, an elegant ruler is seated on his throne, clad in a blue and gold robe or kaftan girded by a golden belt. He has a beard and a Persian-style crown, and is flanked by two seated noblemen, both wearing kaftans; on the right side is a Mongol prince or general, under whose foot is a blue tortoise, a typical Chinese symbol of longevity and endurance. Behind the throned ruler stand two guards wearing the same helmet-like hats. The medallion is decorated with an outer band of good wishes woven in Arabic golden letters, and inner bands of animals and imaginary creatures. Photo by Pernille Klemp, courtesy of David’s Collection, Copenhagen/Wikimedia Commons The Abbasid rule ended in 1258 when Baghdad was conquered by the Mongols under the command of Hulegu, a grandson of Chinggis Khan. Hulegu took the title of Il-Khan to signal that he was subordinate to the Great Mongol Khans of China. One of his successors is portrayed in a silk tapestry roundel, uniting symbolic and aesthetic concepts from both the Islamic and Chinese realms (see image above). The depicted figures – Mongols, Persians and Arabs – manifest the union of ethnic and political groups in an idealised image of the Pax Mongolica. The technical features of this tapestry, made using a gold thread with a cotton core, suggest it may have been made in a cotton-growing region yet woven by Chinese weavers. The Mongols are famous for many things; it is less well known that they were great patrons of arts, crafts and textiles. The Ilkhanid dynasty ruled for some generations until it collapsed around 1335. European imports of silks from China and Central Asia rose steadily in the Middle Ages. In 1099, after the capture of Jerusalem by the knights of the First Crusade, they increased again. The creation of Christian states in the Holy Land opened new trade routes, which facilitated the rise of the Italian city-states. The westward expansion of the Mongol Empire under Chinggis Khan and his successors also helped augment the power of these Italian trading centres. Great quantities of raw silk coming into Italy helped stimulate creative and technological progress in Europe, generating new techniques and patterns as well as new technologies. The lampas or woven fabrics especially fuelled innovation in patterning and the introduction of the treadle loom in medieval Europe. While China was an important source of silk and other goods, South Asia had long been part of exchange networks linking the Indian Ocean world with the Gulf, Africa, Europe, and South-East and East Asia. Economic and political shocks from the 14th century led to surging prices for silk in European markets. The value of silk thread per ounce approached the price of gold. In the early 15th century, the Chinese white mulberry (Morus alba) began to be successfully cultivated in Europe, in particular in Lombardy in Italy. We should not think of European silk cultivation and silk weaving only as a short business venture or a mere adjunct to Chinese or Asian dominance. Italy remained a leading global producer over several centuries, first of silk fabrics and then of silk threads, maintaining its position as the world’s second largest exporter of silk threads after China into the 1930s. To this day, Italian capacity and expertise in silk production survives. The most famous legend tells of two monks who smuggled silkworm eggs to Europe New silk institutions also emerged. In Valencia in Spain, between 1482 and 1533, the ‘Silk Exchange’ was erected to regulate and promote the city’s trade. It served as a financial centre, a courthouse for arbitration to solve commercial conflicts, and a prison for defaulting silk merchants. The Hall of Columns in the Lonja de la Seda or ‘Silk Exchange’ in Valencia, built 1482-1533. A UNESCO World Heritage Site of cultural significance, its impressive pillars are shaped like z-spun threads. Photo Trevor Huxham/Flickr Many legends arose around silk, primarily because of its value, with the technology of sericulture and silk production jealously guarded in China for millennia. Perhaps the most famous legend tells of two monks who smuggled silkworm eggs to Europe, thus breaking the production monopoly and revealing how silk was made. In the second half of the 17th century, Paris became the centre of European textile production, design and technique. This included the emergence of a luxury shopping environment of boutiques and fashion houses. Fashion magazines such as Le Mercure galant reported on style and new trends from the royal court. The largest Parisian fashion houses, such as the Gaultier family business, supplied the wardrobes of the royal family and the nobility, and held shares in the French East India Company. King Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert invested in fashion and textile production as an important innovative sector to showcase France’s greatness. Illegal imports of foreign textiles and luxury copies posed a challenge for French trade and domestic production. French consumers had a large desire for foreign textiles, and colourful, cheap fabrics flooded the market. Illicit products from Asia arrived via trading posts in the Philippines and Mexico, putting pressure on European fabrics and fashionable goods in terms of price and quality. King Louis XIV of France and his grandson, Philip V of Spain, sent Jean de Monségur, an industrial and commercial spy, on a mission to Mexico City to collect intelligence on the legal and illegal trade between India, China and Europe. His detailed intelligence report addressed the trade in textiles, clothing and fashion. With great concern, he wrote: [T]he Chinese have got hold of our patterns and designs, which they have utilised well and can today produce quality goods, although not everything that comes from over there can match the European standard … The times are over when one could assume that the Chinese are clumsy, without talent or trade talent, or that their goods are not in demand.Monségur also noted that Chinese silks were highly competitive because of their lower prices. In Mexico, even commoners wore Chinese silk clothing. When the victorious Mongols conquered new land, they selected artisans, especially weavers, and saved their lives because they were crucial to the expanding empire’s needs and ambitions. These skilled craftspeople were then ordered to settle where the empire needed them, hence the large-scale forced movements of textile workers within the Mongol Empire. Beginning in the 15th century, the colonisation of the Americas brought about the largest forced textile labour movement in history. It forcibly displaced some 13 million people, transporting them from West Africa to the Caribbean and North America. Coerced labour was central in the establishment and development of a textile industry heavily dependent on cotton and indigo. Even today, cotton harvesting is very labour intensive: every year from September to October, millions of workers pick cotton in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, India, the United States and China. Cotton pledges have been signed by textile and fashion companies committed to banning forced labour in the cotton harvests, yet the massive need for labour and the low price of cotton are obstacles to these efforts. ‘Christmas greetings from the Danish West Indies’: postcard from the cotton plantation Bettys Hope on the island of Saint Croix, a Danish colony until 1917 and today part of the US Virgin Islands. Courtesy of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen Some 60 per cent of the 40 million people employed by the garment industry today are in the Asia-Pacific region. Working conditions and pay levels are often poor, in part because of the pressure to lower production costs. Implications for the health and safety of workers are often terrible: for example, when the poorly constructed Rana Plaza complex in Bangladesh collapsed in 2013, more than 1,100 garment workers lost their lives. Everyone knows that clothing can symbolise power, legacy, glory, as well as ethnic or national identity and aspirations. In male power-dressing, we observe over time how clothing emphasises the ruler’s head, shoulders and torso, and a belt highlights bodily strength. Jewellery, weapons and other royal insignia serve as garnish. The choice of simple clothes, preferred by many Left-wing leaders, also projects meanings – and the source of their power. The last emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), dressed in a deep-blue silk robe. Photo by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons Among the elite in many parts of Eurasia, Western dress practices became symbolic of a progressive mindset. In the late 17th century, Peter the Great imposed Western clothing on the civil administration of Russia. In Meiji-era Japan, the ruler and his family adopted full Western attire. The Japanese emperor would wear the sebiro, the Japanese term for ‘suit’ derived from Savile Row, the London street that was home to the finest gentlemen’s tailors. Emperor Meiji in 1873, dressed in Western military parade uniform and with an admiral’s hat. Photo by Uchida Kuichi (内田九一) (1844-75). Albumen silver print from glass negative with applied colour. Courtesy of The Met Museum, New York In the early 20th century, clothing became so accessible and cheap that rulers could demand that their subjects dress in a certain way and adapt their clothing to the ruler’s politics. They wanted the general population to mirror the rulers’ values, political beliefs and ambitions. For example, in 1925, the Greek dictator Theodoros Pangalos imposed a law stipulating that women’s dresses should not rise more than 30 cm from the ground. The same year, Ataturk’s Hat Law was passed in Turkey, another historical example of clothing regulations being used as a political instrument to orient, redress or change the mentality of an entire society. Wearing a Western hat and abandoning the traditional Ottoman and Islamic headgear of the turban and fez became a political act of adherence to the Kemalist republic. Men’s headgear became a potent symbol of ideology, and the ‘wrong’ hat was penalised with fines and, occasionally, even with capital punishment. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Winston Churchill wears a civilian double-breasted wool coat, Franklin D Roosevelt, a civilian suit under a cape with tresses and a fur collar, and Stalin, a double-breasted Soviet uniform whose design mirrors both earlier Tsarist and 20th-century European uniforms. A Persian carpet from western Iran forms a connection between them all. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia In the 20th century, military uniform design and cut followed those of the country’s allies and ambitions. We can see this in the military uniforms used across Eurasia during the Cold War, with a ‘communist’ style in countries allied with the Soviet Union or China, versus the ‘capitalist’ NATO styles used by the West’s allies. Throughout the world, rulers have tried to control people by regulating their clothing It is notable that textile metaphors gained currency to represent both the reign of the Cold War, with its ‘Iron Curtain’, and the period’s historic end in 1989, with the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia. The expressions play on both the softness of fabric (velvet) and its capacity to cover and conceal (curtain). In popular culture, it was denim and blue jeans that caught the imagination of young people in the East, as symbols of youth and of political and moral freedom. The name ‘denim’ comes from the French city of Nîmes in Occitanie, a major producer of blue dye from woad (Isatis tinctoria) and synonymous with workers’ blue cotton cloth. The word ‘jeans’ connects to the French name of Gênes and the Italian city of Genova, from where such coarse fabrics were exported. Throughout history, and throughout the world, rulers have tried to control people by regulating their clothing. Regulations can be prescriptive or proscriptive, and carry gendered and social meanings and ramifications. Dress codes – from the military to school uniforms – indicate political and social alignment, to visually express unity, loyalty and adherence. Meanwhile, bans, prohibitions or censure of the dress practices of certain individuals or groups aim to exclude. When the Chinese emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty, took the throne in 1368, he banned the former regime’s style of clothing, branding it ‘barbaric’, and ordered a return to the clothing style of the Han dynasty. Clothing regulations can be social or legal, and across Eurasia many have attempted to regulate how people dress to enforce an ideal, or to protect national production from foreign imports. Sumptuary laws (from Latin sumptus, meaning ‘expense’) could regulate both manufacturing and trade, as well as national moral economies that would influence consumption patterns and values. They represented social, gendered and racial hierarchies, and expressed them visually. Many regulated the use of jewellery and the practices surrounding feasts or funerals. The main objective was always directed at dress practices, with greater significance given to fabrics, fibres, weave and decoration than to cuts and tailoring. In Lima, Peru – in Spanish colonial America – sumptuary laws stipulated that women of African or mixed African and European descent were prohibited from wearing woollen cloth, silks or lace – though forbidden luxury fabrics often simply reappeared as cheaper copies, and trade labels were faked. Fabric merchant in Samarkand, photographed between 1905 and 1915 by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. The merchant’s goods include striped silks, printed cotton, wool fabrics, and carpets. He wears a white turban and a silk kaftan adorned with Chinese-inspired floral motifs. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress As globalisation intensified, it brought about technological breakthroughs in transport, communication and trade, through which dress has become more standardised, with many rich and diverse clothing cultures of the world diminished. Fortunately, the early 20th-century photographers Albert Kahn and Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii captured the clothing of many glorious local traditions of Central Asia. Today, we can see some of these local costumes only in tourist shows and museums. Not surprisingly, we know much more about the textiles and clothing of the elite than about the attire of ordinary people on the Silk Roads. Archaeology can help. The Chehrābād tunic belonged to a salt-mine worker, perhaps trapped and killed when the mine collapsed around 400 CE. It was woven of monochrome cotton cut and sewn into a knee-length tunic with long sleeves. Perhaps the tailor knew the body size of the worker or about his hard toil in the salt mines, since gussets were inserted in the armpit areas and at the hips to provide him with greater freedom of movement. Weaving mistakes occur in many places, as if woven in a hurry, or maybe because this was, after all, a work outfit. The history of textile production has always been linked to cheap labour. Shepherding, sericulture, and cotton and flax cultivation require many hands, time, constant tending, efficiency, and standardised tools and techniques. The mechanisation of the clothing industry and of textile production therefore produced dramatic change. Richard Arkwright’s inventions in the 18th century were put into industrial-scale production when the English entrepreneur introduced the spinning frame, adapted it to use waterpower, and patented a rotary carding engine. Arkwright’s achievement was to combine power, machinery, semi-skilled labour and a new raw material, cotton, to create mass-produced yarn. European ladies wore fashionable, soft pashmina shawls with Iranian and Central Asian paisley patterns The French city of Lyon took advantage of geographical advantages that helped it become the centre of a silk ‘tiger economy’. The hill of Croix-Rousse housed factories, with every street filled with the clamorous sounds of mechanical looms. With its 30,000 canuts (the nickname for Lyon’s silk workers), this industrious district turned Lyon into a major hub for textile production, especially silk-weaving, providing garments for the royal court and the nobility of Europe. In the social world of the rising 18th- and 19th-century Western bourgeoisie, we find many products of the Silk Roads, both in textiles and designs. Ladies wore fashionable, soft pashmina shawls with Iranian and Central Asian paisley patterns – a style that had travelled from representing the bonds between Britain and its empire in Asia. Young and fashionable women in European royal families would inspire others to wear these colourful soft shawls as a new accessory. One of the most iconic ‘influencers’ was Empress Joséphine of France who integrated pashmina fabrics and paisley patterns into her wardrobe. Portrait of Empress Joséphine (c1808-9) by Antoine-Jean Gros. Courtesy of the Musée Masséna, Nice/Wikipedia Women of the Spanish Empire would wear the mantón de Manila, also known as the Spanish shawl, which takes its name from Manila in the Philippines, from where it was traded eastwards over the Pacific into the Spanish Empire of the Americas. Originally, it was a silk garment adorned with embroidery, and woven in Southern China, which was traded from the late 16th century via Manila and the Spanish-American colonies, then further into Europe via Spain. Russian girls in a rural area 500 km north of Moscow, photographed by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii in 1909. Industrially woven, colourful printed fabrics were accessible even in remote villages, and likely used, re-used, sewn and mended. At this time, dyes were chemically bonded and developed from the industrial competition between Germany, France and the UK in the race to patent new synthetic dyes. Courtesy of the Library of Congress In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith wrote that trade was not only mutually beneficial to trade partners but to society as a whole. To illustrate his argument, he explored the competitive advantages of cloth compared with wheat. Textile production was to Smith a sign of economic dynamism. It was only following the French Revolution that clothing regulations were abolished and the nation’s citizens could dress as they wished: ‘Everyone is free to wear whatever clothing and accessories of his sex that he finds pleasing.’ However, the very same decree stipulated the obligation to visibly wear the cocarde knot of red, white and blue ribbons, emblematic of the French Revolution. It was implicitly asserted that clothing should be gender-appropriate and respect earlier dress regulations. Two Germans with particular textile histories would revolutionise the political landscape of the 19th century. Friedrich Engels was the scion of the family behind the cotton company Baumwollspinnerei Ermen &amp; Engels in western Germany, and he settled in the English city of Manchester, a leading centre for global cotton trade and manufacture. Karl Marx was greatly influenced by his close friend Engels and by the textile industry in particular. In Das Kapital (1867), Marx illustrated his arguments about the working classes by referring to the Lumpenproletariat – or the ‘proletariat of rags’ – and by using the example of an overcoat as an allegory for the measure of labour, resources, technology and the uneven rewards of capitalism. ‘Drilling and training for the revolution, spinning and weaving for the people’: Chinese poster, 1974. Courtesy of the Landsberger Collection/chineseposters.net In the 20th century, political transformations and new economic conditions and ideologies have negatively impacted artisanal weaving and other kinds of traditional crafts globally. Much intangible textile craft culture has been lost; new technologies have made handicrafts obsolete or very expensive; urbanisation has standardised fashion; and people no longer want to carry out what is seen as tedious textile work. The word ‘text’ comes from Latin texere (‘to weave’), and a text – morphologically and etymologically – indicates a woven entity. We can therefore say that history starts not with writing but with clothing. Before history, there was nudity, at least in the Abrahamic tradition; clothing thus marks the beginning of history and society. The representation of nudity as part of a wild and pre-civilised life mirrors the European colonial perspective of the naked human as ‘wild’. Across the world today, there are two main ways to dress: gendered into male and female, and stylistically into clothing tailored to fit the body, or draped/wrapped around it like the Roman toga or the Indian sari. Fitted clothing dominates globally, especially after the Second World War, with blue jeans and T-shirts now ubiquitous across all continents. Today, a T-shirt on sale in any shop around the world is the result of a finely meshed web of global collaboration, trade and politics. From cotton fields in Texas or Turkmenistan, to spinning mills in China, garment factories in Southeast Asia, printers in the West, and second-hand clothing markets in Africa, a T-shirt travels thousands of kilometres around the world in its lifetime. On average, a Swede purchases nine T-shirts annually, and even if they are made to last 25 to 30 washes, consumers tend to discard them before. Greenpeace found that Europeans and North Americans, on average, hold on to their clothes for only three years. Some garments last only for one season, either because they fall out of fashion, or because the quality of the fabric, tailoring and stitching is so poor that the clothes simply fall apart. This is the impact of fast fashion that has taken hold since the beginning of the 21st century: for millennia, clothing had always been expensive, worth repairing and maintaining, and made to last. Along with the acceleration of consumption came falling prices and an ever-narrowing margin for profit. The fast-fashion business model requires seamless global trade, inexpensive long-distance transportation, cheap flexible labour and plentiful natural resources. That equation is changing in a world that is warming and where trade barriers are coming up. The future of fabrics, textiles and clothing is bound up in the great themes of the present – and the future. This Essay is based on the chapter ‘The World Wide Web’ by Marie-Louise Nosch, Feng Zhao and Peter Frankopan, from the UNESCO report Textiles and Clothing Along the Silk Roads (2022) edited by Feng Zhao and Marie-Louise Nosch.
Well, these protests were already planned, and was there any sort of particular message? And I'm wondering if, of course, the WikiLeaks revelations have changed what they're talking about. S. SANDERS: Yeah, you know, everyone here today was talking about those leaked emails. Twenty thousand DNC emails were leaked by WikiLeaks. They showed party higher-ups conspiring, basically, to hurt Bernie Sanders in the primary process. They wanted to spread the word that his campaign was messy and not organized. There was one official who even suggested that the party should claim that Sanders was an atheist to hurt him with votes in the South. Sanders has said that he is not an atheist, he is Jewish. And I talked with folks here today who said that they were mad about this, but it wasn't a surprise for them. But one guy I talked to, Billy Taylor, he said that this means that the party itself should go.
Well, the Bulgarians, who haven't traditionally had a close relationship with the Russians, aren't - I don't know if they long for it, but they don't worry about it. But significant numbers of the Czechs, significant numbers of the Poles and the Hungarians say the influence of Russia is not a good thing on our country. And when you look at the Russians themselves, you see a real rise in nationalism. The percentage of people who say it's natural for Russia to have an empire was only 37 percent in 1991. It's 47 percent now. The percentage of Russians who say it's a great misfortune that the Soviet Union no longer exists is now as high as 58 percent, despite free markets and all of that.
I think that's an important question, Neal, and it's becoming increasingly important as hospitals compete with one another for our business as patients. And I have to say, there are some reasons some of us can't choose a hospital. As you point out, if you find yourself in the back of an ambulance, you're probably not too concerned about hospital choice. Other people are constrained either by their physician's admitting privileges, so does my doctor admit patients to the hospital I'm interested in? And the third issue would be, does my insurance cover care at the hospital I'm interested in? But for many of us, even when - with those provisos we still have some choice about what hospital to receive our care at. And if you just went by what you see on the billboards as you drive around town, you might conclude that you have multiple top 100 or even number one hospitals in your area, and the choice between them can be quite bewildering.
Yes. There was a--for a relatively short time period prior to the 9/11 attacks, there was this program called Able Danger, which used computers and something called link analysis and other techniques. It's still not clear exactly all the different subjects that they were perhaps looking at, but it does appear clear that some of it involved looking at alleged al-Qaeda members and other alleged members of terrorist groups. The core accusation here is actually not particularly from the congressman but from one currently suspended military official who have alleged that they remember seeing a chart with Mohamed Atta's face and name on it. There's a total of five people--the Pentagon did an investigation. They found five people out of about 80 who had worked on this project who claimed to have some recollection of this. The problem here is that there's absolutely no documentary evidence to back this up.
Well, in this study it was kind of interesting. They took three sets of patients and one set got acupuncture following the Chinese rules of exactly where you put the needle, precisely where you put the needles to treat this problem. Another group of people got the same needles but they were put in places that were definitely wrong. They were absolutely incorrect. And then a third group of people got no needling at all, although all of them had access, all three groups had access to all the physical therapy and all the anti-inflammatory medications that they wanted or needed.
There's no question that he's a hard-line conservative. He, despite his denials, be listed in the directory of the Federalist Society, which is trying to just take over, hijack the whole legal system and has been for a while. You know, they try to make the argument, `Well, he was doing what he was supposed to do as an employee,' but there are some things extremely troubling about those talking points which you just mentioned a while ago, and for his non-support of the Voting Rights Act and saying it was gonna be a quota system for electoral politics. You go down and look at his other writing as well, and there are always these kind of disturbing things there, just as people suspected.
Right. So online-only banks and credit unions have gotten sick of people asking those questions. And so the way they've solved for that, they've done one of two things: either they tell you to use any ATM you want on earth, and you just agree to reimburse some, most, or all of your ATM fees each month, or they hook you up with a network of no-name ATMs - i.e., the sort of ATMs that you'll see in a 7-Eleven or a drugstore, not the ones that are inside of a bank branch. And they say you can use these ATMs for free any time you want. And it turns out there are more of those ATMs in those networks than there are bank branches. So theoretically, depending on where you live, that could actually be more convenient for you than being with Bank of America or Chase or Wells Fargo.
Christopher Hitchens in a passage from "Mortality." You can read more from the book in an excerpt at our webpage. That's at npr.org. Our guest today is Carol Blue, Christopher Hitchens' widow and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She wrote the afterword to this last book. And we want to hear from those of you now facing your own mortality. Call and tell us: What have you learned in the process? 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. And we'll start with Eden(ph), Eden with us from Tallahassee.
Hey, Kelly. Kelly, listen I was 24 when I was blacklisted. I was 36 when I got off the blacklist. How much of a life does an actress have in LA past 25? Yes. I was, you know, really scared of having producers know that I was, you know, on my way to 40. And I did everything I could to have them think I was in my 20's. I asked Mayor Yorty to take five years off my driving license. I asked my publicity people to have any mention of my birthday taken off, you know, the radio or when they, you know, congratulate people on birthdays. I had 12 years to make up for.
You're listening to Science Friday on NPR News. I'm Ira Flatow. We were just talking with Dr. Fuchs a little bit about dyslexia, and I feel like I had a dyslexia moment right before the break, talking about Antarctica, when I said there was research that Antarctica was cooling instead of warming, when it's just the opposite because that's what's in a new research paper that's come out this week. It turns out that Antarctica, according to satellite data, is actually warming up instead of cooling. And that's bad for Antarctica skeptics and global warming skeptics, who've always pointed to Antarctica and the data from Antarctica as saying, look, you see? Global warming's not happening. Antarctica is getting colder instead of warming. Well, here to talk about it and how that has been turned on his head is maybe - and no longer a topic of discussion - although I doubt it - is Eric Steig. Dr. Steig is professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences and director of Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Steig.
A combination of problems has collided to create this healthcare crisis. Israel has closed Carney, the main freight crossing into Gaza, more than half the time so far this year, citing security threats. Last month, Palestinian police stopped an attempted car bombing of Carney by militants. The closure has led to the medical shortages and reduced stockpiles. In addition, a special three-year emergency funding program for healthcare from the World Bank ended in December. On top of that, the politically isolated Hamas government is broke and more than a billion dollars in debt with almost no money coming in to run ministries.
Last year, I told you the story, in seven minutes, of Project Orion, which was this very implausible technology that technically could have worked, but it had this one-year political window where it could have happened. So it didn't happen. It was a dream that did not happen. This year I'm going to tell you the story of the birth of digital computing. This was a perfect introduction. And it's a story that did work. It did happen, and the machines are all around us. And it was a technology that was inevitable. If the people I'm going to tell you the story about, if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have. So, it was sort of the right idea at the right time. This is Barricelli's universe. This is the universe we live in now. It's the universe in which these machines are now doing all these things, including changing biology. I'm starting the story with the first atomic bomb at Trinity, which was the Manhattan Project. It was a little bit like TED: it brought a whole lot of very smart people together. And three of the smartest people were Stan Ulam, Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. And it was Von Neumann who said, after the bomb, he was working on something much more important than bombs: he's thinking about computers. So, he wasn't only thinking about them; he built one. This is the machine he built. (Laughter) He built this machine, and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works, with these little bits. And it's an idea that goes way back. The first person to really explain that was Thomas Hobbes, who, in 1651, explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing, and if you want to do artificial thinking and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic. He said you needed addition and subtraction. Leibniz, who came a little bit later — this is 1679 — showed that you didn't even need subtraction. You could do the whole thing with addition. Here, we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that drove the computer revolution. And Leibniz was the first person to really talk about building such a machine. He talked about doing it with marbles, having gates and what we now call shift registers, where you shift the gates, drop the marbles down the tracks. And that's what all these machines are doing, except, instead of doing it with marbles, they're doing it with electrons. And then we jump to Von Neumann, 1945, when he sort of reinvents the whole same thing. And 1945, after the war, the electronics existed to actually try and build such a machine. So June 1945 — actually, the bomb hasn't even been dropped yet — and Von Neumann is putting together all the theory to actually build this thing, which also goes back to Turing, who, before that, gave the idea that you could do all this with a very brainless, little, finite state machine, just reading a tape in and reading a tape out. The other sort of genesis of what Von Neumann did was the difficulty of how you would predict the weather. Lewis Richardson saw how you could do this with a cellular array of people, giving them each a little chunk, and putting it together. Here, we have an electrical model illustrating a mind having a will, but capable of only two ideas. (Laughter) And that's really the simplest computer. It's basically why you need the qubit, because it only has two ideas. And you put lots of those together, you get the essentials of the modern computer: the arithmetic unit, the central control, the memory, the recording medium, the input and the output. But, there's one catch. This is the fatal — you know, we saw it in starting these programs up. The instructions which govern this operation must be given in absolutely exhaustive detail. So, the programming has to be perfect, or it won't work. If you look at the origins of this, the classic history sort of takes it all back to the ENIAC here. But actually, the machine I'm going to tell you about, the Institute for Advanced Study machine, which is way up there, really should be down there. So, I'm trying to revise history, and give some of these guys more credit than they've had. Such a computer would open up universes, which are, at the present, outside the range of any instruments. So it opens up a whole new world, and these people saw it. The guy who was supposed to build this machine was the guy in the middle, Vladimir Zworykin, from RCA. RCA, in probably one of the lousiest business decisions of all time, decided not to go into computers. But the first meetings, November 1945, were at RCA's offices. RCA started this whole thing off, and said, you know, televisions are the future, not computers. The essentials were all there — all the things that make these machines run. Von Neumann, and a logician, and a mathematician from the army put this together. Then, they needed a place to build it. When RCA said no, that's when they decided to build it in Princeton, where Freeman works at the Institute. That's where I grew up as a kid. That's me, that's my sister Esther, who's talked to you before, so we both go back to the birth of this thing. That's Freeman, a long time ago, and that was me. And this is Von Neumann and Morgenstern, who wrote the "Theory of Games." All these forces came together there, in Princeton. Oppenheimer, who had built the bomb. The machine was actually used mainly for doing bomb calculations. And Julian Bigelow, who took Zworkykin's place as the engineer, to actually figure out, using electronics, how you would build this thing. The whole gang of people who came to work on this, and women in front, who actually did most of the coding, were the first programmers. These were the prototype geeks, the nerds. They didn't fit in at the Institute. This is a letter from the director, concerned about — "especially unfair on the matter of sugar." (Laughter) You can read the text. (Laughter) This is hackers getting in trouble for the first time. (Laughter). These were not theoretical physicists. They were real soldering-gun type guys, and they actually built this thing. And we take it for granted now, that each of these machines has billions of transistors, doing billions of cycles per second without failing. They were using vacuum tubes, very narrow, sloppy techniques to get actually binary behavior out of these radio vacuum tubes. They actually used 6J6, the common radio tube, because they found they were more reliable than the more expensive tubes. And what they did at the Institute was publish every step of the way. Reports were issued, so that this machine was cloned at 15 other places around the world. And it really was. It was the original microprocessor. All the computers now are copies of that machine. The memory was in cathode ray tubes — a whole bunch of spots on the face of the tube — very, very sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances. So, there's 40 of these tubes, like a V-40 engine running the memory. (Laughter) The input and the output was by teletype tape at first. This is a wire drive, using bicycle wheels. This is the archetype of the hard disk that's in your machine now. Then they switched to a magnetic drum. This is modifying IBM equipment, which is the origins of the whole data-processing industry, later at IBM. And this is the beginning of computer graphics. The "Graph'g-Beam Turn On." This next slide, that's the — as far as I know — the first digital bitmap display, 1954. So, Von Neumann was already off in a theoretical cloud, doing abstract sorts of studies of how you could build reliable machines out of unreliable components. Those guys drinking all the tea with sugar in it were writing in their logbooks, trying to get this thing to work, with all these 2,600 vacuum tubes that failed half the time. And that's what I've been doing, this last six months, is going through the logs. "Running time: two minutes. Input, output: 90 minutes." This includes a large amount of human error. So they are always trying to figure out, what's machine error? What's human error? What's code, what's hardware? That's an engineer gazing at tube number 36, trying to figure out why the memory's not in focus. He had to focus the memory — seems OK. So, he had to focus each tube just to get the memory up and running, let alone having, you know, software problems. "No use, went home." (Laughter) "Impossible to follow the damn thing, where's a directory?" So, already, they're complaining about the manuals: "before closing down in disgust ... " "The General Arithmetic: Operating Logs." Burning lots of midnight oil. "MANIAC," which became the acronym for the machine, Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Calculator, "lost its memory." "MANIAC regained its memory, when the power went off." "Machine or human?" "Aha!" So, they figured out it's a code problem. "Found trouble in code, I hope." "Code error, machine not guilty." "Damn it, I can be just as stubborn as this thing." (Laughter) "And the dawn came." So they ran all night. Twenty-four hours a day, this thing was running, mainly running bomb calculations. "Everything up to this point is wasted time." "What's the use? Good night." "Master control off. The hell with it. Way off." (Laughter) "Something's wrong with the air conditioner — smell of burning V-belts in the air." "A short — do not turn the machine on." "IBM machine putting a tar-like substance on the cards. The tar is from the roof." So they really were working under tough conditions. (Laughter) Here, "A mouse has climbed into the blower behind the regulator rack, set blower to vibrating. Result: no more mouse." (Laughter) "Here lies mouse. Born: ?. Died: 4:50 a.m., May 1953." (Laughter) There's an inside joke someone has penciled in: "Here lies Marston Mouse." If you're a mathematician, you get that, because Marston was a mathematician who objected to the computer being there. "Picked a lightning bug off the drum." "Running at two kilocycles." That's two thousand cycles per second — "yes, I'm chicken" — so two kilocycles was slow speed. The high speed was 16 kilocycles. I don't know if you remember a Mac that was 16 Megahertz, that's slow speed. "I have now duplicated both results. How will I know which is right, assuming one result is correct? This now is the third different output. I know when I'm licked." (Laughter) "We've duplicated errors before." "Machine run, fine. Code isn't." "Only happens when the machine is running." And sometimes things are okay. "Machine a thing of beauty, and a joy forever." "Perfect running." "Parting thought: when there's bigger and better errors, we'll have them." So, nobody was supposed to know they were actually designing bombs. They're designing hydrogen bombs. But someone in the logbook, late one night, finally drew a bomb. So, that was the result. It was Mike, the first thermonuclear bomb, in 1952. That was designed on that machine, in the woods behind the Institute. So Von Neumann invited a whole gang of weirdos from all over the world to work on all these problems. Barricelli, he came to do what we now call, really, artificial life, trying to see if, in this artificial universe — he was a viral-geneticist, way, way, way ahead of his time. He's still ahead of some of the stuff that's being done now. Trying to start an artificial genetic system running in the computer. Began — his universe started March 3, '53. So it's almost exactly — it's 50 years ago next Tuesday, I guess. And he saw everything in terms of — he could read the binary code straight off the machine. He had a wonderful rapport. Other people couldn't get the machine running. It always worked for him. Even errors were duplicated. (Laughter) "Dr. Barricelli claims machine is wrong, code is right." So he designed this universe, and ran it. When the bomb people went home, he was allowed in there. He would run that thing all night long, running these things, if anybody remembers Stephen Wolfram, who reinvented this stuff. And he published it. It wasn't locked up and disappeared. It was published in the literature. "If it's that easy to create living organisms, why not create a few yourself?" So, he decided to give it a try, to start this artificial biology going in the machines. And he found all these, sort of — it was like a naturalist coming in and looking at this tiny, 5,000-byte universe, and seeing all these things happening that we see in the outside world, in biology. This is some of the generations of his universe. But they're just going to stay numbers; they're not going to become organisms. They have to have something. You have a genotype and you have to have a phenotype. They have to go out and do something. And he started doing that, started giving these little numerical organisms things they could play with — playing chess with other machines and so on. And they did start to evolve. And he went around the country after that. Every time there was a new, fast machine, he started using it, and saw exactly what's happening now. That the programs, instead of being turned off — when you quit the program, you'd keep running and, basically, all the sorts of things like Windows is doing, running as a multi-cellular organism on many machines, he envisioned all that happening. And he saw that evolution itself was an intelligent process. It wasn't any sort of creator intelligence, but the thing itself was a giant parallel computation that would have some intelligence. And he went out of his way to say that he was not saying this was lifelike, or a new kind of life. It just was another version of the same thing happening. And there's really no difference between what he was doing in the computer and what nature did billions of years ago. And could you do it again now? So, when I went into these archives looking at this stuff, lo and behold, the archivist came up one day, saying, "I think we found another box that had been thrown out." And it was his universe on punch cards. So there it is, 50 years later, sitting there — sort of suspended animation. That's the instructions for running — this is actually the source code for one of those universes, with a note from the engineers saying they're having some problems. "There must be something about this code that you haven't explained yet." And I think that's really the truth. We still don't understand how these very simple instructions can lead to increasing complexity. What's the dividing line between when that is lifelike and when it really is alive? These cards, now, thanks to me showing up, are being saved. And the question is, should we run them or not? You know, could we get them running? Do you want to let it loose on the Internet? These machines would think they — these organisms, if they came back to life now — whether they've died and gone to heaven, there's a universe. My laptop is 10 thousand million times the size of the universe that they lived in when Barricelli quit the project. He was thinking far ahead, to how this would really grow into a new kind of life. And that's what's happening! When Juan Enriquez told us about these 12 trillion bits being transferred back and forth, of all this genomics data going to the proteomics lab, that's what Barricelli imagined: that this digital code in these machines is actually starting to code — it already is coding from nucleic acids. We've been doing that since, you know, since we started PCR and synthesizing small strings of DNA. And real soon, we're actually going to be synthesizing the proteins, and, like Steve showed us, that just opens an entirely new world. It's a world that Von Neumann himself envisioned. This was published after he died: his sort of unfinished notes on self-reproducing machines, what it takes to get the machines sort of jump-started to where they begin to reproduce. It took really three people: Barricelli had the concept of the code as a living thing; Von Neumann saw how you could build the machines — that now, last count, four million of these Von Neumann machines is built every 24 hours; and Julian Bigelow, who died 10 days ago — this is John Markoff's obituary for him — he was the important missing link, the engineer who came in and knew how to put those vacuum tubes together and make it work. And all our computers have, inside them, the copies of the architecture that he had to just design one day, sort of on pencil and paper. And we owe a tremendous credit to that. And he explained, in a very generous way, the spirit that brought all these different people to the Institute for Advanced Study in the '40s to do this project, and make it freely available with no patents, no restrictions, no intellectual property disputes to the rest of the world. That's the last entry in the logbook when the machine was shut down, July 1958. And it's Julian Bigelow who was running it until midnight when the machine was officially turned off. And that's the end. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Algeria has always been involved. It's, in fact, attempted to influence the Tuareg. It's showing itself as the patron of Tuareg interest for many, many years. The Tuareg crisis, by the way, goes back to the 1960s. And it's believed to have engaged indirectly in the affairs of the Tuareg for many, many years. And indeed, in the latest evolution of this crisis, it attempted to split the Tuareg off from the Islamist groups unsuccessfully. So I think one can see that the Algerians are bound to be involved in this. The real question is how they're going to be involved. Will they cooperate with other countries, particularly with France? That's extremely difficult for them or will they try to do something alone, but they're not prepared to engage outside Algeria zone borders? So that presents a real problem for the government in Algiers.
Yeah, they scrapped the meeting after the president of the Philippines, the newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte, used a slur to threaten President Obama. He was just elected a few months ago in a wave of populist fervor and on a promise to clean up drugs in the country. So since his inauguration on June 30, more than 2,000 Filipinos have been rounded up and killed without due process. In several cases, the people who have been victims here have just had the misfortune of being nearby, like a 5-year-old who was killed. The White House said, heading into a possible meeting, that Obama would definitely bring up the human rights abuses inherent in extrajudicial killings. And Rodrigo Duterte gave a press conference essentially lashing out.
We'd like to turn now to a story out of the Middle East, the rift between Qatar and some of its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Along with Egypt, those countries have cut diplomatic ties with Qatar saying it is supporting Islamic extremists which the country's leaders deny. Saudi Arabia has closed its land border and barred flights from Qatar's airline. Now, this could have a serious impact on the country's access to food and other supplies. But we were wondering about the potential impact on what may be the country's most famous export, Al Jazeera, the news channel. The channel which is offered in both English and Arabic is funded by the Qatari royal family, but as part of their break with Qatar, several countries in the region have pulled Al-Jazeera's operating licenses. We wanted to know more about the crisis in general and what role Al Jazeera may play in it specifically.
Ketamine is something they call a dissociative. It kind of interrupts the connection between the mind and the body, which is why you don't feel pain anymore. But it also seems to do a lot of different things in the brain, and that is probably why it is likely to be used with a lot of different psychological problems. So I met a guy who had a lot of problems not too long ago. His name is James. He's an advertising executive in New York. And this guy, he's doing great now. He's married with kids, and he feels really good.
Great. Well, that's a good question. Indeed, most of us believe that the journals that depend on subscriptions would not be hurt by a reduction in the interval to less than six months, even as short as two to three months. There's doubt that says that people look at the journals they subscribe to for a couple of months and after that they just seek the articles by searching in the Internet. So, I think a reduction could safely be made and I think the way to do that is to have people who really have a need for access, healthcare workers and disease advocacy groups and teachers of science in the schools, go to their members of Congress and say, we'd like to see this interval shortened. Ultimately, you can't shorten it to zero without changing the business model because journals do need to have some revenue. Most journals, people are often surprised to learn, do extremely well in the current system. The average profit margin is as much as 30 to 40 percent. So there's no doubt that we can make the whole process somewhat less expensive but we still have to cover costs, so we can't make that - we can't reduce the interval to zero unless we shift to a true open access business model in which authors are paying.
Actually not. And what's so interesting about public opinion since Barr's summary was released is that it hasn't really moved at all. Big chunks of the public still believe the president has not been exonerated despite the fact that he's been repeating that he's been totally and completely exonerated. And that's because so much of the American public is so locked in. Seventy percent of Americans are - either strongly disapprove of Donald Trump or strongly approve of him. It's about, you know, 40 who strongly disapprove, about 29 who strongly approve. It shows you that even though he can dominate the media narrative, he can't always win the argument.
There was some worry the Pentagon might divert funds from military housing for the wall. Pentagon officials have made it clear they will not do this. Still, the issue of substandard housing on bases got new attention this week when military spouses testified before Congress about shocking conditions in their homes. And a new survey showed widespread dissatisfaction with privatized military housing, where 20 to 30 percent of military families live. Reporter Howard Altman with the Tampa Bay Times has been talking to military families at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. They told him some awful stories about housing conditions.
Good questions. On the Pakistan question, if you talk to Afghan officials, senior Afghan officials, they will insist that the reason--or one of the main reasons that we're seeing this resurgence of the Taliban is because they are receiving assistance, are receiving--are being allowed refuge, are receiving weapons from Pakistan. It's a big question. The Pakistanis, of course, deny that this is happening, but undoubtedly there's no way to deny that we are seeing a resurgence of the Taliban more than two years after the Bush administration declared that major combat operations here in Afghanistan are over. They are unable, as you said earlier, to face the United States troops and other coalition troops in stand-up face-to-face battles. They tried that at the beginning of the fighting season which began in March when the snow melted in the passes of the mountains. They suffered some very, very heavy casualties in a number of face-to-face encounters, and began basically adopting these--as you described, these hit-and-run tactics, these guerrilla tactics, terrorist tactics where they are targeting government officials, moderate clerics, civilians suspected of being informers or people who have been cooperating with American or international reconstruction projects, and it's a campaign that has claimed an estimate--more than an estimated 1,000 Afghans, and at this point more than 40, close to 50 American troops since--at least by my count since this upsurge began in March.
We have seen the Afghan security forces backslide from where they were in 2014. So since then, there's been units there that have gone back in to advise the Afghans that are in the Helmand province. And we've seen them achieve some progress with those units of late. And so we're encouraged by what we're seeing right now, the direction that the Afghan security forces in the Helmand province are in. And we think when we get there, by the end of the month, that we're going to be able to build on those successes. And we're seeing - we're seeing some positive signs.
Well, there is no federal statute for domestic terrorism, even though some FBI agents I've talked to would like to see one. In fact, there's something of a political tug of war about the threat posed by domestic terror - white supremacists - versus foreign terror groups like al-Qaida and ISIS. In the Obama years, the Justice Department had a task force for prosecutors on domestic terror. Now Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he gets three FBI briefings a week on terrorism. That includes terrorism from domestic groups. And, believe it or not, just today, authorities have unveiled a new case in Oklahoma. They've charged a man with plotting to plant a huge bomb outside a bank there. The FBI says he referenced the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That bombing killed 168 people - one of the largest terror attacks on American soil ever.
I thought it was so fascinating that he was speaking this past week at the convention exactly 12 years to the day that he burst on to the scene at the 2004 Democratic National Convention with his speech about having a United States of America. And so I think to Mary Kate's point about when he says that's not who we are in America, I think that that's what he's trying to say. He's trying to think in terms of a United States of America, and that's a theme throughout our history, that because we all come from someplace else except for those natives who are here, we have always tried to create an American creed that everyone can espouse and believe in. So I think he was attempting to do that 12 years ago. I think he has been attempting to do that throughout his presidency. But the fact that Donald Trump has come so far indicates that he's not always been successful, but in terms of looking at him over the history of the presidency, I think he will go down in presidential history with the great orators of John Kennedy, of Franklin Roosevelt, of Ronald Reagan and maybe there even some touches of Lincoln. I think he's really lived up to that heritage.
...yeah - allowed to actually go in. And we thought, well, we'll test the skeletal remains, the actual bones and - but then, we thought probably it'd be much better thing to target the teeth, because if we can actually get - actually still any remaining blood within the root cavity of the teeth, we might have a much better chance of actually catching the pathogen within there, because any biochemist or anybody who studies bones knows that, despite the fact that they look quite good coming out of remains, they're actually quite porous. They're like a sponge. And so they always absorb everything, which means that they're highly susceptible to hydrolytic damage, which, of course, is any kind of water. And for molecular structures such as DNA, the last thing you want is moving water back and forth. So these teeth were actually fantastically well preserved. And my graduate student, Kirsti Bos, actually removed the teeth from the skulls, drilled into the actual root cavity, up into the pulp, removed the pulp, and then put the teeth back into the jaws and then reset the jaws in the skull. So that way, we wouldn't actually affect the morphology of the remains.
Yes, it's a big deal. It's a transformative deal. It is a different economy. We're living in the economy we had 20 years ago, 30 years ago. In fact, we - our trade deficit is so big we get in debt, something like five percent of our GDP, I mean, five percent of the money we make a year, deeper in debt to the rest of the world every year. And if you would talk to some economists, say, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, some would have told you that is theoretically impossible, that an economy would have collapsed under the weight of that. It's not unlike, although it's not exactly like, you know, a credit-card debt. If every year you get five percent deeper in debt to the credit cards, that isn't sustainable. And eventually, that has to be paid back.
We've not had direct funding from the legislature to initiate this. We've tried to fold it into the active efforts of our school nurse personnel, and not that a nurse has to do the measurement, but a nurse needs to oversee the accuracy and the validity of the information that we send home. Importantly, schools already screen for vision problems and hearing problems and scoliosis problems, and this is one more health screen that we hope to add to the portfolio because we're in the middle of an epidemic that truly threatens the future health and productivity of the children that we're trying to train to be healthy, working adults in this state.
Republican and Democratic sources tell NPR, however, that Republicans, through back channels to the White House, let it be known that if the Democrats prevail in the November presidential election, the GOP would help get Garland confirmed in the two months before the new president takes office on the theory that Garland is less liberal than anyone they think a President Clinton or Sanders would appoint. The White House, however, will push hard for earlier action, believing that in this case, it's pushing for confirmation now is also good politics. Garland is beloved on his court by conservatives and liberals alike for his collegiality and his insistence that all views are heard and respected. He is enormously respected as well in the rest of the legal community and even by some Republican senators.
So, of course, we always answer yes. We'll do anything we can to protect you. But if I hadn't had kids when I became a teacher, I probably would have felt a little bit more, like, without question. Of course. Of course. But I'm a mom, too. I have two little boys, and I want to get home to them. And I feel like we don't often talk about this expectation of martyrdom - that without question, you're going to be a hero in that situation. And I think what we see in the days coming out from the Parkland shooting is that we see the school resource officer not going into the building. And he's trained. He has a firearm. He didn't go into the building. And we hear the stories about Coach Feis and Scott Beigel and how they laid down their life. But did they expect to? Did they want to? I think it's a very weighty thing. And it - I think it affects teachers greatly.
Yeah. Hi. Yes, I was medevacked from Vietnam when I was a young man and I was yellow, and they admitted me to Walter Reed Army Hospital and the admission diagnosis said hepatitis. And then, after all these tests and everything, they came back, hepatitis was unproven and tests were inconclusive. So all these years, I've been very sick, especially I cannot even have - I can't even have a teaspoon of alcohol. It gets me seriously ill. Anyway, about five years ago, my doctor called me and told me he had good news, kind of, for me, that they found out what's wrong with me. He said, you got hepatitis C. Well, I said, well, what can we do? He said, nothing. And I'm - and basically, I've been untreated. And there are a lot of medicines that I can't even take because they got a little bit of alcohol in them. It gets me seriously sick. So I'm really hopefully about hearing about this new drug. It sounds like now there might be a treatment for it.
No. I think it was not quite that simple. As I understand, she did acknowledge at some point after her conviction that maybe she had made some lapses in judgment, so to speak. Maybe she had made some mistakes and maybe had gone too far. So I think that the sentence was completely fair. You know, Michael talks about a death sentence. Even a couple of years like she's getting, given her condition, her age, her condition, and given the kind of treatment you get in prisons could be easily a tough death sentence. She's not going to be able to practice law again. She's not a threat to society, as the prosecution tried to allege because she - for one reason because she's not going to have access to the legal system and she's not going to be able to do the kinds of things that she did before.
Sure, yeah. I mean, I think one of the trends - I guess if that's the right word - in all of these stories is just how sort of systemic these things are. I mean, it's really not just a matter of one action and one person and another person. It really - you know, one action will have radiating effects. And speaking of NPR, I mean, one of the sort of terms that came up again and again talking about corporations was just the idea of the corporation or the institution or the company or what have you as a family. You know, and a family protects itself. And a family, you know, sort of owes itself, you know, to stay together essentially. But of course that sort of writes out, you know, the individual members of the family sometime who might have a different interest than the interest at large.
I think Colonel Bumgarner thought he could deal with these guys in a sort of man to man way, that they would play along with his rules or with the military's rules, and that if he was good to them, they would be compliant, they would go along. The military really only has the rulebook that it began to develop after World War II, the rulebook of the Geneva Conventions. It hasn't ever stopped to figure out if we're going to hold these people indefinitely, how are we going to do it? How are we going to make them go along with the program? The old setup is really for prisoners who believe in the rules in some sense and who are going to resist or to fight back within those rules. And that's not the case anymore.
Well, in fact, the person who really got this effort started is a gentleman by the name of Chris Nowinski, who is one of co-directors of our center. Chris started the Sports Legacy Institute. He was a Harvard football player who went on to be a professional wrestler in the WWE, and unfortunately a culmination of concussions he had while playing football at Harvard and then also while being a wrestler - even though it looks fake, it's really major hits these wrestlers take, and he had to stop his athletics at that point because he was quite impaired due to the repetitive concussions. He then made it his real-life mission to try to let the world know how important sports-related head trauma is. But if you'll remember the case of Chris Benoit.
This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington, broadcasting today from the new Newseum in Washington D.C., in the night's studios and here are the headlines from some of the stories we're following at NPR News today. And I'm just shuffling my papers here at the Newseum until I get to the right piece. Here it is. The last night of the Primary Campaign - the two presumptive nominees unleashed their first - am not, are so exchange of the general election. Both parties considered the bottom of the ticket and senate races get set in New Jersey and New Mexico it's time for the latest edition of The Political Junkie.
I have - I have both a tween and a teen, so I have a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old. So I'm in the thick of things right now. And I can tell you that first of all there's a very big difference between the 10-year-old and the 13-year-old as far as social network savvy. You know, the 13-year-old's at the point where, you know, she's out there, and she knows everything, whereas the - you know, the 10-year-old is not so aware but is aware because he sees what his sister is involved in, and that's the other - you know, you have second child syndrome, which means that your second child is more likely to be involved in these things earlier. I'm very up front with them. For example when the Newtown situation happened, I did talk to them about it. I wanted them to know it from me and not hear it on the bus.
I'm a believer. I'm a believer in global warming, and my record is good on the subject. But my subject is national security. We have to get off of oil purchased from the enemy. I'm talking about OPEC oil. And let me take you back 100 years to 1912. You're probably thinking that was my birth year. (Laughter) It wasn't. It was 1928. But go back to 1912, 100 years ago, and look at that point what we, our country, was faced with. It's the same energy question that you're looking at today, but it's different sources of fuel. A hundred years ago we were looking at coal, of course, and we were looking at whale oil and we were looking at crude oil. At that point, we were looking for a fuel that was cleaner, it was cheaper, and it wasn't ours though, it was theirs. So at that point, 1912, we selected crude oil over whale oil and some more coal. But as we moved on to the period now, 100 years later, we're back really at another decision point. What is the decision point? It's what we're going to use in the future. So from here, it's pretty clear to me, we would prefer to have cleaner, cheaper, domestic, ours — and we have that, we have that — which is natural gas. So here you are, that the cost of all this to the world is 89 million barrels of oil, give or take a few barrels, every day. And the cost annually is three trillion dollars. And one trillion of that goes to OPEC. That has got to be stopped. Now if you look at the cost of OPEC, it cost seven trillion dollars — on the Milken Institute study last year — seven trillion dollars since 1976, is what we paid for oil from OPEC. Now that includes the cost of military and the cost of the fuel both. But it's the greatest transfer of wealth, from one group to another in the history of mankind. And it continues. Now when you look at where is the transfer of wealth, you can see here that we have the arrows going into the Mid-East and away from us. And with that, we have found ourselves to be the world's policemen. We are policing the world, and how are we doing that? I know the response to this. I would bet there aren't 10 percent of you in the room that know how many aircraft carriers there are in the world. Raise your hand if you think you know. There are 12. One is under construction by the Chinese and the other 11 belong to us. Why do we have 11 aircraft carriers? Do we have a corner on the market? Are we smarter than anybody else? I'm not sure. If you look at where they're located — and on this slide it's the red blobs on there — there are five that are operating in the Mid-East, and the rest of them are in the United States. They just move back to the Mid-East and those come back. So actually most of the 11 we have are tied up in the Mid-East. Why? Why are they in the Mid-East? They're there to control, keep the shipping lanes open and make oil available. And the United States uses about 20 million barrels a day, which is about 25 percent of all the oil used everyday in the world. And we're doing it with four percent of the population. Somehow that doesn't seem right. That's not sustainable. So where do we go from here? Does that continue? Yes, it's going to continue. The slide you're looking at here is 1990 to 2040. Over that period you are going to double your demand. And when you look at what we're using the oil for, 70 percent of it is used for transportation fuel. So when somebody says, "Let's go more nuclear, let's go wind, let's go solar," fine; I'm for anything American, anything American. But if you're going to do anything about the dependency on foreign oil, you have to address transportation. So here we are using 20 million barrels a day — producing eight, importing 12, and from the 12, five comes from OPEC. When you look at the biggest user and the second largest user, we use 20 million barrels and the Chinese use 10. The Chinese have a little bit better plan — or they have a plan; we have no plan. In the history of America, we've never had an energy plan. We don't even realize the resources that we have available to us. If you take the last 10 years and bring forward, you've transferred to OPEC a trillion dollars. If you go forward the next 10 years and cap the price of oil at 100 dollars a barrel, you will pay 2.2 trillion. That's not sustainable either. But the days of cheap oil are over. They're over. They make it very clear to you, the Saudis do, they have to have 94 dollars a barrel to make their social commitments. Now I had people in Washington last week told me, he said, "The Saudis can produce the oil for five dollars a barrel. That has nothing to do with it. It's what they have to pay for is what we are going to pay for oil." There is no free market for oil. The oil is priced off the margin. And the OPEC nations are the ones that price the oil. So where are we headed from here? We're headed to natural gas. Natural gas will do everything we want it to do. It's 130 octane fuel. It's 25 percent cleaner than oil. It's ours, we have an abundance of it. And it does not require a refinery. It comes out of the ground at 130 octane. Run it through the separator and you're ready to use it. It's going to be very simple for us to use. It's going to be simple to accomplish this. You're going to find, and I'll tell you in just a minute, what you're looking for to make it happen. But here you can look at the list. Natural gas will fit all of those. It will replace or be able to be used for that. It's for power generation, transportation, it's peaking fuel, it's all those. Do we have enough natural gas? Look at the bar on the left. It's 24 trillion. It's what we use a year. Go forward and the estimates that you have from the EIA and onto the industry estimates — the industry knows what they're talking about — we've got 4,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that's available to us. How does that translate to barrels of oil equivalent? It would be three times what the Saudis claim they have. And they claim they have 250 billion barrels of oil, which I do not believe. I think it's probably 175 billion barrels. But anyway, whether they say they're right or whatever, we have plenty of natural gas. So I have tried to target on where we use the natural gas. And where I've targeted is on the heavy-duty trucks. There are eight million of them. You take eight million trucks — these are 18-wheelers — and take them to natural gas, reduce carbon by 30 percent, it is cheaper and it will cut our imports three million barrels. So you will cut 60 percent off of OPEC with eight million trucks. There are 250 million vehicles in America. So what you have is natural gas is the bridge fuel, is the way I see it. I don't have to worry about the bridge to where at my age. (Laughter) That's your concern. But when you look at the natural gas we have it could very well be the bridge to natural gas, because you have plenty of natural gas. But as I said, I'm for anything American. Now let me take you — I've been a realist — I went from theorist early to realist. I'm back to theorist again. If you look at the world, you have methane hydrates in the ocean around every continent. And here you can see methane, if that's the way you're going to go, that there's plenty of methane — natural gas is methane, methane and natural gas are interchangeable — but if you decide that you're going to use some methane — and I'm gone, so it's up to you — but we do have plenty of methane hydrates. So I think I've made my point that we have to get on our own resources in America. If we do — it's costing us a billion dollars a day for oil. And yet, we have no energy plan. So there's nothing going on that impresses me in Washington on that plan, other than I'm trying to focus on that eight million 18-wheelers. If we could do that, I think we would take our first step to an energy plan. If we did, we could see that our own resources are easier to use than anybody can imagine. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks for that. So from your point of view, you had this great Pickens Plan that was based on wind energy, and you abandoned it basically because the economics changed. What happened? TBP: I lost 150 million dollars. (Laughter) That'll make you abandon something. No, what happened to us, Chris, is that power, it's priced off the margin. And so the margin is natural gas. And at the time I went into the wind business, natural gas was nine dollars. Today it's two dollars and forty cents. You cannot do a wind deal under six dollars an MCF. CA: So what happened was that, through increased ability to use fracking technology, the calculated reserves of natural gas kind of exploded and the price plummeted, which made wind uncompetitive. In a nutshell that's what happened? TBP: That's what happened. We found out that we could go to the source rock, which were the carboniferous shales in the basins. The first one was Barnett Shale in Texas and then the Marcellus up in the Northeast across New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia; and Haynesville in Louisiana. This stuff is everywhere. We are overwhelmed with natural gas. CA: And now you're a big investor in that and bringing that to market? TBP: Well you say a big investor. It's my life. I'm a geologist, got out of school in '51, and I've been in the industry my entire life. Now I do own stocks. I'm not a big natural gas producer. Somebody the other day said I was the second largest natural gas producer in the United States. Don't I wish. But no, I'm not. I own stocks. But I also am in the fueling business. CA: But natural gas is a fossil fuel. You burn it, you release CO2. So you believe in the threat of climate change. Why doesn't that prospect concern you? TBP: Well you're going to have to use something. What do you have to replace it? (Laughter) CA: No, no. The argument that it's a bridge fuel makes sense, because the amount of CO2 per unit of energy is lower than oil and coal, correct? And so everyone can be at least happy to see a shift from coal or oil to natural gas. But if that's it and that becomes the reason that renewables don't get invested in, then, long-term, we're screwed anyway, right? TBP: Well I'm not ready to give up, but Jim and I talked there as he left, and I said, "How do you feel about natural gas?" And he said, "Well it's a bridge fuel, is what it is." And I said, "Bridge to what? Where are we headed?" See but again, I told you, I don't have to worry with that. You all do. CA: But I don't think that's right, Boone. I think you're a person who believes in your legacy. You've made the money you need. You're one of the few people in a position to really swing the debate. Do you support the idea of some kind of price on carbon? Does that make sense? TBP: I don't like that because it ends up the government is going to run the program. I can tell you it will be a failure. The government is not successful on these things. They just aren't, it's a bad deal. Look at Solyndra, or whatever it was. I mean, that was told to be a bad idea 10 times, they went ahead and did it anyway. But that only blew out 500 million. I think it's closer to a billion. But Chris, I think where we're headed, the long-term, I don't mind going back to nuclear. And I can tell you what the last page of the report that will take them five years to write will be. One, don't build a reformer on a fault. (Laughter) And number two, do not build a reformer on the ocean. And now I think reformers are safe. Move them inland and on very stable ground and build the reformers. There isn't anything wrong with nuke. You're going to have to have energy. There is no question. You can't — okay. CA: One of the questions from the audience is, with fracking and the natural gas process, what about the problem of methane leaking from that, methane being a worse global warming gas than CO2? Is that a concern? TBP: Fracking? What is fracking? CA: Fracking. TBP: I'm teasing. (Laughter) CA: We've got a little bit of accent incompatibility here, you know. TBP: No, let me tell you, I've told you what my age was. I got out of school in '51. I witnessed my first frack job at border Texas in 1953. Fracking came out in '47, and don't believe for a minute when our president gets up there and says the Department of Energy 30 years ago developed fracking. I don't know what in the hell he's talking about. I mean seriously, the Department of Energy did not have anything to do with fracking. The first frack job was in '47. I saw my first one in '53. I've fracked over 3,000 wells in my life. Never had a problem with messing up an aquifer or anything else. Now the largest aquifer in North America is from Midland, Texas to the South Dakota border, across eight states — big aquifer: Ogallala, Triassic age. There had to have been 800,000 wells fracked in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas in that aquifer. There's no problems. I don't understand why the media is focused on Eastern Pennsylvania. CA: All right, so you don't support a carbon tax of any kind or a price on carbon. Your picture then I guess of how the world eventually gets off fossil fuels is through innovation ultimately, that we'll someday make solar and nuclear cost competitive? TBP: Solar and wind, Jim and I agreed on that in 13 seconds. That is, it's going to be a small part, because you can't rely on it. CA: So how does the world get off fossil fuels? TBP: How do we get there? We have so much natural gas, a day will not come where you say, "Well let's don't use that anymore." You'll keep using it. It is the cleanest of all. And if you look at California, they use 2,500 buses. LAMTA have been on natural gas for 25 years. The Ft. Worth T has been on it for 25 years. Why? Air quality was the reason they used natural gas and got away from diesel. Why are all the trash trucks today in Southern California on natural gas? It's because of air quality. I know what you're telling me, and I'm not disagreeing with you. How in the hell can we get off the natural gas at some point? And I say, that is your problem. (Laughter) CA: All right, so it's the bridge fuel. What is at the other end of that bridge is for this audience to figure out. If someone comes to you with a plan that really looks like it might be part of this solution, are you ready to invest in those technologies, even if they aren't maximized for profits, they might be maximized for the future health of the planet? TBP: I lost 150 million on the wind, okay. Yeah, sure, I'm game for it. Because, again, I'm trying to get energy solved for America. And anything American will work for me. CA: Boone, I really, really appreciate you coming here, engaging in this conversation. I think there's a lot of people who will want to engage with you. And that was a real gift you gave this audience. Thank you so much. (TBP: You bet, Chris. Thank you.) (Applause)
Really the most powerful moment was the morning before we topped out. I knew that success was inevitable, and I was there with just Kevin and me, the sun rising and there was this very beautiful moment of just like all your dreams have come true. You've worked towards this thing for so long. The other side is when we topped out, we were surrounded by reporters and all of a sudden I felt like I was being pulled in a million different directions, and it hit me that the pursuit of this thing was actually over. That was hard for me, and it was also sad.
However, imagine someone who's not so adept, who's not so interested in self-defense, who's not a part of the gun culture. He or she or whomever it may be, perhaps it's an elderly person, the last thing they want is the fight that they're in the middle of. And in the middle of the fight, the last thing they want is to be changing magazines, which involves a certain skill. I mean, it's a complex physical movement, and it's very difficult to make it under high-pressure circumstances. For that person, for someone who is not a gifted and a practiced shooter, the high-capacity magazine gives them an additional level of survival in, as I said before, worst-case scenarios.
I really don't think so. You know, I feel like my work has been incredibly diverse. You know, I'm always working on doing different projects in different areas. You know, Belle was one thing a few years ago, but then being able to do something like "Beyond The Lights," which doesn't really explore the issue of race at all. It's more about identity and pop culture and women and misogyny in the music industry, you know, and then to be able to go and do something like "Black Mirror" which is, you know, again, another period of history and, you know, has this sort of sci-fi element to it.
Let me suggest this coming out of--and then congresswoman to pick up, but let me suggest this: Julianne raises an interesting point in terms of disbursement of money. I have received calls this morning already from the NAACP, for instance which wants everyone to know that they're establishing a disaster relief fund. You can go to their Web site, and we'll put it on ours. Bruce Gordon is going down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast on Saturday. The Detroit mayor's office contacted me. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is extending an invitation to victims down there, saying Detroit is opening its arms, and it's going to...
That is the case, Ed. And as Pedro suggested, now the devil will dwell in the details of how precisely moving forward we're going to - for example, deal with the perhaps, up to 5 million people, that under the Senate bill, would really have to either check - leave the country and check in port of entry before re-entering the United States. And including up to about a million people who would have to go back to their countries and apply from overseas. And it's not at all clear how that would be managed. So the good news is that there is more of a broader opportunity here to address immigration systemically, as an issue, rather than the House bill, which would have only introduced new border control measures. So…
That's right. I mean, if you're from the south of Ireland and with a Catholic background, in particular, you have a much more lilting kind of voice compared with the Protestant voice, which tends to be on the whole, somewhat sharper or more resonant in that sort of way. And there are quite specific features, as well, like the way you say the letter H. Do you say it aitch, or do you say it haitch(ph)? If you say it with a huh(ph) at the front, then you're probably going to be a Catholic. If you say it with an aitch, then you're probably going to be a Protestant.
I doubt that. I doubt that. I don't think any one candidate running for president can afford to be a single-issue candidate. And I think certainly health care is a major item which certainly will come up. We just had a report earlier this week talking about the increasing cost of healthcare and how soon it will take like a 20 percent of every dollar spent in this country. So while that will certainly be a key issue, it certainly is not going to be the only issue. And right now it is not the top issue. The top issue is the war in Iraq, and that's certainly going to continue to be the top issue for the duration of this campaign, I'm sure.
Same problems, and you know, I don't know if Edwards had not admitted that he had that affair whether we could have printed that. I mean, we were pursuing the story. We did publish stories that sort of raised questions about, for example, the politics of it, whether he would have - with the latest allegations of National Enquirer - whether he'd be able to be - have a speaking role at the Democratic Convention with all these swirling around them. It was a hard to ignore that story, because it was out there in the blogosphere. Yeah, as you can imagine, his hometown, there was...
It was sort of a funny moment. The president insists he's not worried. And he said, you know, whenever two world leaders get together, there will always be these, you know, warm photo ops in public. But it's certainly a concern and has been among U.S. officials - Maliki's relationship. He's a Shiite and his relationship with the Shiite leadership in Iran, and his relationship with President Ahmadinejad in Iran. So the fact that those two leaders are getting together, Mr. Bush said he's confident that Maliki will put pressure on Iran not to contribute to the violence within Iraq, but I think U.S. officials are very worried about whether Maliki is putting enough pressure on their neighbors.

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