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Well, as usual with Newt Gingrich, it's kind of a mouthful, but let's try and go through it. The Keystone pipeline, now, obviously, that will affect 700,000 barrels of oil. It sounds like a lot, but our daily consumption is many times that. And, of course, it wouldn't have come online even if President Obama had approved it this year, until 2015, so it wouldn't have had very much to do with this year's price of gas. But sure, it would've increased the supply of oil, query whether demand would have matched it anyway. On the offshore thing, you know, there's a lot of - the Gulf of Mexico. I think he has a fair point about the president sort of maybe slow-walking permits in the Gulf. But he can't forget we had massive oil spill in 2010 that, you know, there had to be some response to that. You couldn't just blithely resume business as usual without taking account of that, and there were tradeoffs. There were a lot of businesses and real estate interest and tourism folks along the Gulf Coast who were very badly affected by that. I'm not talking, you know, sort of soft-willed environmental interests. I'm talking about hard economic interests that were at stake as well. So I think Mr. Gingrich's view is a little - of the problem is a little one-sided.
Right. I mean, a lot of these - there are a number of different issues here. Obviously, the one gentleman who has this action against BP, I don't know whether - what the specific details there are. I mean, I think there are two main issues that are going on. First, obviously, if Rev. Jackson feels that he needs to put more pressure on BP to have them at least assess what their diversity goals are and so forth, I think that's fine. I think, though, the other part of this approach where they feel that there's -it's important for Congress to come in and put windfall profits tax on BP and some of these other companies, I just think it's incredibly ill advised. Because, I mean, I think it's just a failure to see how the market actually works. I think it's a failure of seeing how much focus is put into energy exploration and so forth...
Well, I would strongly disagree that the patent office is in any way stifling creativity, but I will tell you, I'm not sure it's bureaucratic. It's - the problem that it's got such a huge backlog. You know, most businesses would be thrilled with backlogs because when they get a backlog they quickly grow, they respond, they hire people. But government agencies don't have that flexibility. And so what's happened is as the value of intellectual property has gone up and as people have realized the value of patents, there's been an explosion of patent applications. And in some categories you now have to wait years - literally two, three years before you can get an action on a patent and it's called pendency. And there are something like half a million patent applications sitting at the patent office waiting to be examined. And I have strongly urged anybody in Washington that will listen to me, senators and congressmen, that if there's any piece of our stimulus package that's going to have big returns for this country, it would be to support the patent office, support the patent system, get them more resources, give them what they need to more quickly and more efficiently start reviewing and issuing high quality patents, because they - by issuing those patents they are creating the opportunity for people to literally create wealth as they solve problems, as they give the world solutions to problems. But I think the patent office is a very - it's an unsung hero of the American culture and the American economy and it needs more support.
That seems to be the case. This really is a stunning tragedy. The reports we have so far are that 96 people died. There were no survivors when this plane carrying the president and presidential delegation was coming in to land at an airstrip in Smolensk, which is a city a few hours to the northwest of Moscow in western Russia. The plane went down just over a mile or so before coming to the runway. As you said, the weather was pretty bad and Russian television has been showing nonstop footage of the crash scene. And the plane was just totally broken apart. I mean, there are pieces of it and the wheels and tail and other pieces of the plane just sort of scattered about in the forests right near this airport.
I have thought about that and I'm glad he brought that question up. The main focus of the story, since it's become national, has been on, you know, what a Hooterville (ph) this makes our town look like. It makes small-town America look silly, and I don't think that's the case. I think that's a very valid point. The actions of Mr. Jakob and the Gerald Police Department are not uncommon. Too often we look the other way when one small portion of anyone's civil rights are violated, and as a nation, we're all made smaller by that. And I think it's time that we insisted that all law enforcement agencies, federal, local, everywhere, re-read the Constitution and really understand what those are, because that Constitution covers everyone, even low-life drug users. They still have civil rights and they need to be upheld.
The forecasting of hurricanes is a science with overlays of intuition boosted by massive technology. The storm surge team in this post-season and preseason has been running big weather systems through the super computers, as many as 15,000 storm simulations. They generate graphics of where the waters going to go, given the intensity of the storm. And they send out CDs so that local emergency directors can see how much water could end up in their front yards. Last August, the oceanographers saw Katrina coming and said this is big. This will be a 25-foot surge of water from the Gulf. Rising water topped by crashing wind-blown waves. The warnings were issued and in a quiet room in Miami, the waiting began.
Yeah, probably. But, you know, it's a lot more than just landscapers that need these kind of level of people here because without the what you would call undocumented workers or illegal immigrants or however you want to term them, without those people, the hotel industry, senior services, you know, like nursing homes, janitorial, hotel industry and landscaping and maintenance, all of us are on the same boat, about needing enough people to fill out our workforce and to fulfill the contracts that we have. And that's a significant amount of our economy. There's a lot of dollars involved in that. So we really need to make sure we have a source of workers.
Well, I'll try and process it. Well, I'd say we - Senator Clinton has no doubt run a more negative campaign. The New York Times editorialized very strongly about that today. State after state, even states she wins, voters think she's running a much more negative campaign. So we've obviously had to respond and counter punch. And I think we've done that effectively and shown Democrats who are looking to the fall that we are not going to sit back and allow swift-boating to occur. I do think there are some benefits to how long this is going on. Both campaigns just built good operations in Pennsylvania. And we certainly got to be known a lot better by voters there. We're going to do the same thing in North Carolina, in Oregon and Montana.
It's possible given the extreme partisan atmosphere of the Senate, but if I were to bet, I'd say he's a lot less likely to run into trouble than, say, the nominee for the United Nations, John Bolton, who had a lot of difficulties stemming from a very boisterous personality. That's not one word that anybody has ever applied to Chris Cox. There might be some difficulties over some of the issues, but given that the securities reform legislation that he championed passed both chambers of Congress by very substantial margins, I think the possibility of opposition is a lot less than it would be, say, for any judicial position.
So I've got something that I'm slightly embarrassed to admit to. At the age of 17, as a creationist, I decided to go to university to study evolution so that I could destroy it. (Laughter) I failed. I failed so spectacularly that I'm now an evolutionary biologist. (Applause) So I'm a paleoanthropologist, I'm a National Geographic Explorer specializing in fossil hunting in caves in unstable, hostile and disputed territories. And we all know that if I was a guy and not a girl, that wouldn't be a job description, that would be a pick-up line. (Laughter) Now, here's the thing. I do not have a death wish. I'm not an adrenaline junkie. I just looked at a map. See, frontline exploratory science does not happen as much in politically unstable territories. This is a map of all the places which the British Foreign Office have declared contain red zones, orange zones or have raised some kind of a threat warning about. Now I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it is a tragedy if we're not doing frontline exploratory science in a huge portion of the planet. And so science has a geography problem. Also, as a paleoanthropologist, guys, this is basically a map of some of the most important places in the human journey. There are almost definitely fascinating fossils to be found here. But are we looking for them? And so as an undergraduate, I was repeatedly told that humans, be they ourselves, homo sapiens, or earlier species, that we left Africa via the Sinai of Egypt. I'm English, as you can probably tell from my accent, but I am actually of Arab heritage, and I always say that I'm very, very Arab on the outside. You know, I can really be passionate. Like, "You're amazing! I love you!" But on the inside, I'm really English, so everybody irritates me. (Laughter) It's true. And the thing is, my family are Arab from Yemen, and I knew that that channel, Bab-el-Mandeb, is not that much of a feat to cross. And I kept asking myself this really simple question: if the ancestors to New World monkeys could somehow cross the Atlantic Ocean, why couldn't humans cross that tiny stretch of water? But the thing is, Yemen, compared to, let's say, Europe, was so understudied that it was something akin to near virgin territory. But that, along with its location, made the sheer potential for discovery so exciting, and I had so many questions. When did we first start using Bab-el-Mandeb? But also, which species of human besides ourselves made it to Yemen? Might we find a species as yet unknown to science? And it turned out, I wasn't the only one who had noticed Yemen's potential. There was actually a few other academics out there. But sadly, due to political instability, they moved out, and so I moved in. And I was looking for caves: caves because caves are the original prime real estate. But also because if you're looking for fossils in that kind of heat, your best bet for fossil preservation is always going to be caves. But then, Yemen took a really sad turn for the worse, and just a few days before I was due to fly out to Yemen, the civil war escalated into a regional conflict, the capital's airport was bombed and Yemen became a no-fly zone. Now, my parents made this decision before I was born: that I would be born British. I had nothing to do with the best decision of my life. And now ... Now the lucky ones in my family have escaped, and the others, the others are being been bombed and send you WhatsApp messages that make you detest your very existence. This war's been going on for four years. It's been going on for over four years, and it has led to a humanitarian crisis. There is a famine there, a man-made famine. That's a man-made famine, so not a natural famine, an entirely man-made famine that the UN has warned could be the worst famine the world has seen in a hundred years. This war has made it clear to me more than ever that no place, no people deserve to get left behind. And so I was joining these other teams, and I was forming new collaborations in other unstable places. But I was desperate to get back into Yemen, because for me, Yemen's really personal. And so I kept trying to think of a project I could do in Yemen that would help highlight what was going on there. And every idea I had just kept failing, or it was just too high-risk, because let's be honest, most of Yemen is just too dangerous for a Western team. But then I was told that Socotra, a Yemeni island, was safe once you got there. In fact, it turned out there was a few local and international academics that were still working there. And that got me really excited, because look at Socotra's proximity to Africa. And yet we have no idea when humans arrived on that island. But Socotra, for those of you who know it, well, let's just say you probably know it for a completely different reason. You probably know it as the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean, because it is one of the most biodiverse places on this earth. But we were also getting information that this incredibly delicate environment and its people were under threat because they were at the frontline of both Middle Eastern politics and climate change. And it slowly dawned on me that Socotra was my Yemen project. And so I wanted to put together a huge multidisciplinary team. We wanted to cross the archipelago on foot, camel and dhow boat to conduct a health check of this place. This has only been attempted once before, and it was in 1999. But the thing is, that is not an easy thing to pull off. And so we desperately needed a recce, and for those of you who aren't familiar with British English, a recce is like a scouting expedition. It's like a reconnaissance. And I often say that a really big expedition without a recce is a bit like a first date without a Facebook stalk. (Laughter) Like, it's doable, but is it wise? (Laughter) There's a few too many knowing laughs in this room. Anyway, so then our recce team thankfully were no strangers to unstable places, which, let's be honest, is kind of important because we were trying to get to a place between Yemen and Somalia, And after calling in what felt like a million favors, including to the deputy governor, we finally found ourselves on the move, albeit on a wooden cement cargo ship sailing through pirate waters in the Indian Ocean with this as a toilet. (Laughter) Can you guys see this? You know how everybody has their worst toilet story? Well, I've never swam with dolphins before. I just went straight to pooping on them. (Laughter) And also, I genuinely discovered that I am genuinely less stressed by pirate waters than I am with a cockroach infestation that was so intense that at one point I went belowdeck, and the floor was black and it was moving. (Audience moans) Yeah, and at night there was three raised platforms to sleep on, but there was only — let's say there was four team members, and the thing is, if you got a raised platform to sleep on, you only had to contend with a few cockroaches during the night, whereas if you got the floor, good luck to you. And so I was the only girl in the team and the whole ship, so I got away without sleeping on the floor. And then, on, like, the fourth or fifth night, Martin Edström looks at me and goes, "Ella, Ella I really believe in equality." (Laughter) So we were sailing on that cement cargo ship for three days, and then we slowly started seeing land. And after three years of failing, I was finally seeing Yemen. And there is no feeling on earth like that start of an expedition. It's this moment where you jump out of a jeep or you look up from a boat and you know that there's this possibility, it's small but it's still there, that you're about to find something that could add to or change our knowledge of who we are and where we come from. There is no feeling like it on earth, and it's a feeling that so many scientists have but rarely in politically unstable places. Because Western scientists are discouraged or all-out barred from working in unstable places. But here's the thing: scientists specialize in the jungle. Scientists work in deep cave systems. Scientists attach themselves to rockets and blow themselves into outer space. But apparently, working in an unstable place is deemed too high-risk. It is completely arbitrary. Who here in this room wasn't brought up on adventure stories? And most of our heroes were actually scientists and academics. Science was about going out into the unknown. It was about truly global exploration, even if there were risks. And so when did it become acceptable to make it difficult for science to happen in unstable places? And look, I'm not saying that all scientists should go off and start working in unstable places. This isn't some gung-ho call. But here's the thing: for those who have done the research, understand security protocol and are trained, stop stopping those who want to. Plus, just because one part of a country is an active war zone doesn't mean the whole country is. I'm not saying we should go into active war zones. But Iraqi Kurdistan looks very different from Fallujah. And actually, a few months after I couldn't get into Yemen, another team adopted me. So Professor Graeme Barker's team were actually working in Iraqi Kurdistan, and they were digging up Shanidar Cave. Now, Shanidar Cave a few decades earlier had unveiled a Neanderthal known as Shanidar 1. Now, for a BBC/PBS TV series we actually brought Shanidar 1 to life, and I want you guys to meet Ned, Ned the Neanderthal. Now here's the coolest thing about Ned. Ned, this guy, you're meeting him before his injuries. See, it turned out that Ned was severely disabled. He was in fact so disabled that there is no way he could have survived without the help of other Neanderthals. And so this was proof that, at least for this population of Neanderthals at this time, Neanderthals were like us, and they sometimes looked after those who couldn't look after themselves. Ned's an Iraqi Neanderthal. So what else are we missing? What incredible scientific discoveries are we not making because we're not looking? And by the way, these places, they deserve narratives of hope, and science and exploration can be a part of that. In fact, I would argue that it can tangibly aid development, and these discoveries become a huge source of local pride. And that brings me to the second reason why science has a geography problem. See, we don't empower local academics, do we? Like, it's not lost on me that in my particular field of paleoanthropology we study human origins, but we have so few diverse scientists. And the thing is, these places are full of students and academics who are desperate to collaborate, and the truth is that for them, they have fewer security issues than us. I think we constantly forget that for them it's not a hostile environment; for them it's home. I'm telling you, research done in unstable places with local collaborators can lead to incredible discoveries, and that is what we are hoping upon hope to do in Socotra. They call Socotra the most alien-looking place on earth, and myself, Leon McCarron, Martin Edström and Rhys Thwaites-Jones could see why. I mean, look at this place. These places, they're not hellholes, they're not write-offs, they're the future frontline of science and exploration. 90 percent of the reptiles on this island, 37 percent of the plant species exist here and nowhere else on earth, and that includes this species of dragon's blood tree, which actually bleeds this red resin. And there's something else. People on Socotra, some of them still live in caves, and that is really exciting, because it means if a cave is prime real estate this century, maybe it was a few thousand years ago. But we need the data to prove it, the fossils, the stone tools, and so our scouting team have teamed up with other scientists, anthropologists and storytellers, international as well as local, like Ahmed Alarqbi, and we are desperate to shed a light on this place before it's too late. And now, now we just somehow need to get back for that really big expedition, because science, science has a geography problem. You guys have been a really lovely audience. Thank you. (Applause)
I think he'd like to. And I think a lot of Democrats in Congress would like that as well. But I think they're facing the reality of perhaps some resistance from the Bush administration. You know, Carlos Gutierrez, the commerce secretary was interviewed today on Fox News and he was very cool to the idea of a new stimulus, saying that the $700 billion rescue plan that the Bush administration has intact should be given some time to work. And so I think that's why you heard today Mr. Obama drawing back a little bit on his plans and sort of making sure expectations are where he wants them to be. Saying that if he can't get something done in a lame duck session, you know, it will be the first action once he becomes president.
Let's just talk about the food landscape. When we last talked, you had just announced that you'd be ending your New York Times column to work on a startup. That turned out to be a job as chief innovation officer at Purple Carrot, a vegan home-delivery service. You've since left that position. But I was wondering how the whole home-delivery-meal-kit thing fits into our country's relationship with food at the moment. You know, just in preparing for our conversation, I realized that there are some - there were like 100 of these companies on the landscape now. So what's your takeaway from your experience with that?
In all, six journalists testified yesterday with more expected today or tomorrow. The journalistic cast was called by the defense, in essence, to prove a negative. All six said they either did not discuss Mrs. Wilson's CIA identity with Libby, or they could not recall having done so. The defense presumably will argue to the jury that if Scooter Libby was part of a plot to leak Valerie Wilson's name, he would have been leaking to any interested reporter. But none of the six reporters yesterday said Libby had told them anything about Mrs. Wilson. In his grand jury testimony though, Libby said he had selected Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, whom he viewed as ideologically sympathetic to talk to about what Vice President Cheney considered a bum rap: the notion that intelligence had been deliberately twisted to justify the war. Libby told the grand jury that, although the president of the United States had personally declassified information for him to discuss with Miller, he did not seek to personally discredit Ambassador Wilson and had not discussed Mrs. Wilson's CIA employment. But Miller contradicted that in her trial testimony and in her notes of her conversations with Libby.
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, I'm Ira Flatow, trying to overcome a bout of laryngitis so see if you can hang in there with me for this program. Our current ideas of the universe say that when the universe was created in the Big Bang, billions of years ago, not only was matter created but so was matter's mirror image, antimatter. One of the great mysteries about the universe is where did all the antimatter go. How come we don't see it anymore? And if you want to see it to study it, we have to create it in the laboratory, but when we do, it only lasts - oh, exists for a fraction of a second, until now.
A vote that was expected today in the House on a funding bill to keep the government open has been delayed. The bill is known as the cromnibus, as in CR for continuing resolution and omnibus as in omnibus spending bill. There's been adamant opposition to the current legislation from both parties. Conservative Republicans wanted to use the bill to push back on the president's executive action on immigration, but they didn't think it pushed back enough. And Democrats were enraged at several policy changes that had been tucked into the 1,600 page spending bill. With us now to talk about the day's drama is NPR Congressional reporter Ailsa Chang, and, Ailsa, things look a little dicey right now. Do we know why House leaders postponed the vote?
In 2013, a team of researchers held a math test. The exam was administered to over 1,100 American adults, and designed, in part, to test their ability to evaluate sets of data. Hidden among these math problems were two almost identical questions. Both problems used the same difficult data set, and each had one objectively correct answer. The first asked about the correlation between rashes and a new skin cream. The second asked about the correlation between crime rates and gun control legislation. Participants with strong math skills were much more likely to get the first question correct. But despite being mathematically identical, the results for the second question looked totally different. Here, math skills weren’t the best predictor of which participants answered correctly. Instead, another variable the researchers had been tracking came into play: political identity. Participants whose political beliefs aligned with a correct interpretation of the data were far more likely to answer the problem right. Even the study’s top mathematicians were 45% more likely to get the second question wrong when the correct answer challenged their political beliefs. What is it about politics that inspires this kind of illogical error? Can someone’s political identity actually affect their ability to process information? The answer lies in a cognitive phenomenon that has become increasingly visible in public life: partisanship. While it’s often invoked in the context of politics, partisanship is more broadly defined as a strong preference or bias towards any particular group or idea. Our political, ethnic, religious, and national identities are all different forms of partisanship. Of course, identifying with social groups is an essential and healthy part of human life. Our sense of self is defined not only by who we are as individuals, but also by the groups we belong to. As a result, we’re strongly motivated to defend our group identities, protecting both our sense of self and our social communities. But this becomes a problem when the group’s beliefs are at odds with reality. Imagine watching your favorite sports team commit a serious foul. You know that’s against the rules, but your fellow fans think it’s totally acceptable. The tension between these two incompatible thoughts is called cognitive dissonance, and most people are driven to resolve this uncomfortable state of limbo. You might start to blame the referee, complain that the other team started it, or even convince yourself there was no foul in the first place. In a case like this, people are often more motivated to maintain a positive relationship with their group than perceive the world accurately. This behavior is especially dangerous in politics. On an individual scale, allegiance to a party allows people to create a political identity and support policies they agree with. But partisan-based cognitive dissonance can lead people to reject evidence that’s inconsistent with the party line or discredits party leaders. And when entire groups of people revise the facts in service of partisan beliefs, it can lead to policies that aren’t grounded in truth or reason. This problem isn’t new— political identities have been around for centuries. But studies show that partisan polarization has increased dramatically in the last few decades. One theory explaining this increase is the trend towards clustering geographically in like-minded communities. Another is the growing tendency to rely on partisan news or social media bubbles. These often act like echo chambers, delivering news and ideas from people with similar views. Fortunately, cognitive scientists have uncovered some strategies for resisting this distortion filter. One is to remember that you’re probably more biased than you think. So when you encounter new information, make a deliberate effort to push through your initial intuition and evaluate it analytically. In your own groups, try to make fact-checking and questioning assumptions a valued part of the culture. Warning people that they might have been presented with misinformation can also help. And when you’re trying to persuade someone else, affirming their values and framing the issue in their language can help make people more receptive. We still have a long way to go before solving the problem of partisanship. But hopefully, these tools can help keep us better informed, and capable of making evidence-based decisions about our shared reality.
And this should have been a banner day for President Trump. The Labor Department reported the lowest unemployment rate in more than 17 years. Trump's historic summit meeting with the leader of North Korea appears to be taking shape. And the president enjoyed a rock-star welcome at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association. All of that was clouded, though, by continued questions surrounding a payoff made on Trump's behalf to porn star on the eve of the 2016 election. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now from the White House to talk about all this. And, Scott, how long you got?
I'd be glad to, I've never in my life, any white person I've know have ever said, any of those things. They chose very carefully two people, they've interviewed many more than those two people. But those are the two clips, obviously, to create controversy. And those are the ones they chose to have on the show. But I've never been around white people that wipe their hands after shaking black people's hands or felt that their neighborhood should not--I live in Los Angeles and it's a very diverse community. And that's the community I have spent my 47 years in.
Our guest, Gene Robinson of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. Youre listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And as we mentioned near the beginning, there are cultural yardsticks that we use to measure this, as well as these legal issues that weve been talking about in votes in various places, referenda, votes by state legislatures, votes by Courts of Appeal, for that matter. As you look at popular culture, do you -there are more and more gay characters on television, it seems, and in the movies. Do you embrace that? Do you accept that? Or - some people would say on the other side, might say with this another cultural imposition from the coasts.
Well, the artisan's life, so we can consider carpentry the life of an artisan, would have been, you know, if we think about a class system, you know, a farmer would have had a better life than an artisan. You know, the artisan class during that time would have been just steps above a destitute class, so a class of people without a home. Yeah, the sense of - the really beautiful image that Mel Gibson gives in his movie of Jesus sort of frolicking and making this, you know, what I - when I see the - when I saw the movie, I said, well, that's the first tall chair that's ever been made. Yeah, that isn't - I don't think that's particularly accurate. I mean, Nazareth itself, you know, your neighbors may have been living in a cave. You know, that's - you know, some people had stone houses, but, you know, the quality of life for an artisan in a tiny town of Nazareth would've been much - the quality of life would've been much worse than - as depicted by Mel Gibson.
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin. We're going to start the program today turning to an ongoing issue that's getting a lot of attention this election year, laws governing voting. Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court left intact a strict voter ID law in Texas, but the court also signaled a willingness to intervene if an appeals court does not rule by mid-summer on a challenge that's still pending. The law is one of the most restrictive in the country and over the last four years has been ruled unconstitutional by three different federal courts. NPR's Wade Goodwyn is here to help us understand the issue. Wade, thanks for joining us.
These documents are from the same source as the 15,000 pages unveiled last week. Today's release covered about 60 documents all written between 1981 and '82. Many of them are memos that Roberts wrote to his boss, Attorney General William French Smith. Throughout the memos Roberts seems to possess an authority beyond his years. He was in his 20s when these papers were written. Attorney General Smith was in his 60s, yet Roberts coached Smith on everything from international diplomacy to interviews with newspaper reporters. The memos show Roberts taking a major role in shaping the public face of the Justice Department, particularly in civil rights issues. Roberts expressed concern about, quote, "the impression created by our critics that the department has turned back the clock on civil rights enforcement." To counteract that impression, Roberts helped organize a sort of PR campaign with his Justice Department colleagues in August of '82. The team developed a plan outlined in a memo that Roberts wrote to the attorney general. The program involved Roberts drafting op-ed pieces for The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. The DOJ would highlight speeches that the attorney general had made on civil rights accomplishments and in addition, quote, "efforts will be made to have the Republican political apparatus disseminate material on our civil rights record."
The insurer has to offer what's known as the essential health benefits, which is a comprehensive set of services that you would find covered in a typical employer-sponsored health insurance product. They also have to cover a percentage of your costs as an enrollee in the plan at different levels to capture how much you would have to pay in the way of deductibles or co-insurance when you actually use services. Then, there's some pricing rules. They can't charge you more because you're sick. They have to offer you coverage regardless of preexisting conditions and there are a number of pricing rules. And finally, they have to collect data and meet certain quality and quality reporting standards. So it's really a four-part obligation to be part of the exchange.
Yeah. That's great. That's great. When you also think about people forming a sense of religion, and again, the messenger of that faith may have had his or her own agenda. What got carried over? What got carried over - and I'm going to ask you this, Renita - from the traditional forms of African worship? And I - let me just give you a story. I was in Zimbabwe not too long ago where I have relatives. And there were all sorts of Christian faith. I mean, it's a very Christian country, but there were some Christian traditions that were very ecstatic where you would see people dancing and twirling, and you know, out in the middle of a field, barefoot, dressed in certain clothes of worship, twirling. You would see other ones where people would be dressed all in white sitting in a field singing. You'd see other places that were traditional western style churches. So, even in Africa, religion has evolved around Christianity. But what got inserted into the African-American worship from the African traditions?
It's a very good question, and it's very difficult to be able to tell because these captures that we do are the weapons that were left behind a lot of times. Sometimes they were forced to leave it because they had to move quickly, you know. A lot of the times, they're able to pick up the best stuff and take it with them. The variety of different calibers tells us that they have a pretty wide range of weaponry, and so it's not simply just a bunch of rebels with AK-47s. They have what could be called professional armies - set of ammunitions.
So, I'll be speaking to you using language ... because I can. This is one these magical abilities that we humans have. We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another. So what I'm doing right now is, I'm making sounds with my mouth as I'm exhaling. I'm making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating air vibrations in the air. Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they're hitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts. I hope. (Laughter) I hope that's happening. So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time. We're able to transmit knowledge across minds. I can put a bizarre new idea in your mind right now. I could say, "Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics." (Laughter) Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven't had that thought before. (Laughter) But now I've just made you think it, through language. Now of course, there isn't just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And all the languages differ from one another in all kinds of ways. Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures — very importantly, different structures. That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think? Now, this is an ancient question. People have been speculating about this question forever. Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, "To have a second language is to have a second soul" — strong statement that language crafts reality. But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say, "What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn't craft reality. These arguments have gone back and forth for thousands of years. But until recently, there hasn't been any data to help us decide either way. Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we've started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question. So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, "Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg." Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit." In fact, the way that you say "hello" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, "Which way are you going?" And the answer should be, "North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?" So imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction. (Laughter) But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn't get past "hello," if you didn't know which way you were going. In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: "Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales." No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well. And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast. (Laughter) Keep your eyes closed. Point. OK, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ... I don't know which way it is myself — (Laughter) You have not been a lot of help. (Laughter) So let's just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group — very distinguished group like you guys — doesn't know which way is which, but in another group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know. (Laughter) There are also really big differences in how people think about time. So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages. And if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right. This has to do with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you might do it going in the opposite direction, from right to left. But how would the Kuuk Thaayorre, this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it? They don't use words like "left" and "right." Let me give you hint. When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right. When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left. When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body. What's the pattern? East to west, right? So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the landscape. So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way. I'm facing this way, time goes this way — very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape. It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time. Here's another really smart human trick. Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there. Well, I bet I know how you'd solve that problem if you solved it. You went, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight." You counted them. You named each one with a number, and the last number you said was the number of penguins. This is a little trick that you're taught to use as kids. You learn the number list and you learn how to apply it. A little linguistic trick. Well, some languages don't do this, because some languages don't have exact number words. They're languages that don't have a word like "seven" or a word like "eight." In fact, people who speak these languages don't count, and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities. So, for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number of ducks, you would be able to do that by counting. But folks who don't have that linguistic trick can't do that. Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum — the visual world. Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, "light" and "dark." And languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors. So, for example, in English, there's a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian, there isn't a single word. Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, "goluboy," and dark blue, "siniy." So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishing these two colors. When we test people's ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They're faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and dark blue. And when you look at people's brains as they're looking at colors — say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue — the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give a surprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark, as if, "Ooh, something has categorically changed," whereas the brains of English speakers, for example, that don't make this categorical distinction, don't give that surprise, because nothing is categorically changing. Languages have all kinds of structural quirks. This is one of my favorites. Lots of languages have grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine. And these genders differ across languages. So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse. Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like? Actually, it turns out that's the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here — "bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish — German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're "strong" or "long," these masculine words. (Laughter) Languages also differ in how they describe events, right? You take an event like this, an accident. In English, it's fine to say, "He broke the vase." In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, "The vase broke," or, "The vase broke itself." If it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it. In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, "I broke my arm." Now, in lots of languages, you couldn't use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm — (Laughter) and you succeeded. If it was an accident, you would use a different construction. Now, this has consequences. So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do. So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, "He did it; he broke the vase." Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more likely to remember that it was an accident. They're more likely to remember the intention. So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony. It also has implications for blame and punishment. So if you take English speakers and I just show you someone breaking a vase, and I say, "He broke the vase," as opposed to "The vase broke," even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch the video, you can watch the crime against the vase, you will punish someone more, you will blame someone more if I just said, "He broke it," as opposed to, "It broke." The language guides our reasoning about events. Now, I've given you a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, and it does so in a variety of ways. So language can have big effects, like we saw with space and time, where people can lay out space and time in completely different coordinate frames from each other. Language can also have really deep effects — that's what we saw with the case of number. Having count words in your language, having number words, opens up the whole world of mathematics. Of course, if you don't count, you can't do algebra, you can't do any of the things that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast, right? This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm. Language can also have really early effects, what we saw in the case of color. These are really simple, basic, perceptual decisions. We make thousands of them all the time, and yet, language is getting in there and fussing even with these tiny little perceptual decisions that we make. Language can have really broad effects. So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at the same time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns. That means language can shape how you're thinking about anything that can be named by a noun. That's a lot of stuff. And finally, I gave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weight to us — ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory. These are important things in our daily lives. Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000 — there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And we can create many more — languages, of course, are living things, things that we can hone and change to suit our needs. The tragic thing is that we're losing so much of this linguistic diversity all the time. We're losing about one language a week, and by some estimates, half of the world's languages will be gone in the next hundred years. And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities. That excludes almost all humans. Right? So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better. I want to leave you with this final thought. I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that's not about how people elsewhere think. It's about how you think. It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think. And that gives you the opportunity to ask, "Why do I think the way that I do?" "How could I think differently?" And also, "What thoughts do I wish to create?" Thank you very much. (Applause)
We think, although we haven't directly tested it, that the 20-minute rule is right, which is if you're going to engage in email, commit to doing 20 minutes of email. And when we propose this, people say email's not worth 20 minutes. My God, email's just such a useless activity. So then ask people to clock how many minutes a day they use email - 100, 200, but in little bits and bleeds. So it turns out you're much more efficient at the email, and more importantly, you're treating your brain better when you get off email if you do one focused email patch every interval for at least 20 minutes.
Well, that's what they got. They put themselves in servitude. They were desperate. They were poor people or people who didn't have enough money to pay for the trip to America. They wanted a new life. They hoped that they would get one in America. And so they signed themselves away, their freedoms away, as indentured servants to pay for their passage. And that would be for anything between three and 11 years, usually. Now most of them, initially, didn't survive more than a couple of years. The first - the average, I think, lifespan of a new indentured servant in the 1620s was probably two years. So these were - they were called at the time free willers because they went of their free will, and so many others didn't go of their free will. They were sent there. They were sent there in chains. They were sentenced to go there. They weren't free at all. Well, nor were these people. So that's the free willers. They are indentured servants.
I want to be. I really do want to be confident. Overton is a nice little town. It deserves a second chance. There are some people in the community that are working very hard to try and reinvigorate the population. They've started a small farmer's market. It only has a couple of people right now, but it's a first step. There's a - where a building burned down, they've created a public space, which is where the farmer's market is. And they have bands that come in on the weekends. So, you know, we have a small group of very active individuals who are trying to get people to believe in their community again.
If they have to. That's very, very rare. They don't want to do that. These are conservation officers, so their job is to keep bears safe. Churchill also has a polar bear jail. These are for bears who keep coming into town, and can't be hazed out of town. And what they do is, they will trap these bears and put them in the polar bear jail - which is just a great big, decommissioned military building. They're given no food. They're given only snow, to drink. And they just go in there, and they wait until the bay freezes up. And when the bay freezes up, these bears can be released, to go back out on the ice. They don't want to be in town. They're just there waiting for the ice to freeze. But if they're a hassle in town - put them in jail, give them a short sentence, and the problem is resolved.
My name is Hugh. I view myself as a conservative Republican. And I have a specific problem with the Ryan-Romney ticket, and that is I've heard absolutely nothing about their - either their foreign policy credentials or their policies. I have no idea where Mr. Ryan stands on that issue. I do not think Mr. Ryan will do himself well in his first trip overseas. And I have always the attitude that you vote for the presidency based on what you think they might do in foreign policy because they have the power of (unintelligible) and start stop wars. And domestic politics, although is important, fundamentally takes care of itself. So I always look for the presidency based on my attitude of where they will be as foreign policy leaders, and I'm terribly concerned that nobody is even addressing that issue.
Well, it's the cable companies who are very much involved in this. And they won an important point - excuse me - they won an important here. Let me explain. Most cable companies claim they make viewers pay extra for the NFL network in order to protect the non-football fans. Those folks would have to pay more for basic service if the NFL was included in basic service. But the NFL network has been arguing all along that it should be part of basic service, even though all those viewers would have to pay more because they say that people want the NFL's all football all the time coverage.
(Imitates fishing cat) That's my impersonation of a fishing cat, which actually sounds more like this. (Prerecorded fishing cat sounds) It's a cat that loves water, loves to fish, and lives in some of the most unique and valuable ecosystems on earth: the wetlands and mangrove forests of South and Southeast Asia. Aren't they fishing awesome? (Laughter) Fishing cats are one of about 40 species of wildcats. Like tigers and lions, only much smaller. They're probably around twice the size of our average domestic cat. In Indonesia, people call them "kucing bakau," which literally translates to "the cat of the mangroves." But I like to call them the tigers of the mangroves. Now, we don't know fishing cats as well as we do tigers, but what we've learned is that these cats can be a flagship species to a globally important ecosystem, and a visual bait attached to a strong line for conservation. Are you hooked yet? (Laughter) Like many endangered species, fishing cats are threatened by habitat loss, mainly because of our international demand for farmed fish and shrimp, and the deforestation of nearly half the historic mangrove cover in South and Southeast Asia. Mangroves, on the other hand, are much more than just habitat to the fishing cat. They are home to a fantastic array of species, like jackals, turtles, shorebirds and otters. (Laughter) Mangroves also prevent soil erosion, and they can be the first line of defense between storm surges, tsunamis and the millions of people who live next to these forests for their day-to-day survival. The fact that puts the icing on the cake — or the earth, I should say — is that mangroves can store upwards of five to ten times more carbon dioxide than tropical forests. So protecting one acre of mangroves may well be like protecting five or more acres of tropical forests. Would you like to eliminate you entire life's carbon footprint? Well, mangroves can offer you one of the best bangs for your conservation buck. Deforestation, extinction and climate change are all global problems that we can solve by giving value to our species and ecosystems and by working together with the local people who live next to them. This is one of three river deltas in coastal South India where communities came together to change the face and potentially, the fate of this planet. In less than a decade, with international support, the state forest departments and the local communities worked together to restore over 20,000 acres of unproductive fish and shrimp farms back into mangroves. About five years ago, guess who we discovered in these restored mangroves? When we shared images of these fishing cats with local people, we were able to build pride among them about a globally revered endangered species and ecosystem in their backyards. We were also able to build trust with some people to help them lead alternative livelihoods. Meet Santosh, a 19-year-old boy who not only became a conservation professional after working with us for just over a year but also went on to involve many local fishermen in helping study and protect fishing cats. Meet Moshi, a tribal poacher, who not only stopped hunting and became our most prized conservationist, but also used his traditional knowledge to educate his entire community to stop hunting fishing cats, otters and the many other threatened species that live in the mangroves in his backyard. Fish and shrimp farmers, like Venkat, are now willing to work with us conservationists to test the sustainable harvest of ecosystem services like crabs, and possibly even honey, from mangroves. Incentives that could get them to protect and plant mangroves where they have been lost. A win-win-win for fishing cats, local people and the global community. These stories show us that we can all be part of a future where fishing cats and the lost mangrove forests are protected and restored by fishermen themselves, creating carbon sinks that can help offset our ecological footprints. So while the fishing cat may be small, I hope that we've been able to help make it a big deal. One that we can all invest in to help sustain our lives on earth a little longer. Or as our friend here would say ... (Prerecorded fishing cat sounds) Thank you. (Applause)
I mean, we don't know whether any bribes were paid here. All we know and all we are reporting on is the state of the investigation. And there are certain parts of that investigation that appear to be curious. For example, an email that Alves sends - which was never acted upon, but suggesting that $300 million be paid in order to settle both a administrative sort of legal dispute that the company was having with the government, as well as outside litigation. That didn't go through. But when you see an email like that, your eyes widen and you wonder how could he be making such a proposal? So there's smoke here and that seems to be what the government is after - is whether there is a fire behind it.
The water still hadn't come up our lawn. So I was like, well, I'm going to cook some stuff in case the lights go out and we don't have food available. So I go outside and look again. My husband dozed off, so I woke him up. I said, John (ph), the neighbors are leaving, and the neighbors across the street from us were leaving because they were still in the house. When they got into the water, the water was at their waist, and I was like, oh, my God. I said, John, we got to go. And he said we're not going to be able to drive the vehicles because the water's too deep, so we packed one bag. The older kids held the babies on their back. I have a 6 and a 7 year old. We walked through the water thinking the water's not going to come up to the house because we never flood. But lo and behold, when my husband came Monday to check the house and the water was still at his side, we had a little over 5 feet of water in the house.
We're talking about lot of money, a fine that would be unprecedented under the Clean Water Act. The federal government today asked for somewhere between 11.7 and 13.7 billion dollars - that's billion with a B. Now, the most BP could be fined under the Clean Water Act is based on how much oil spilled, and that figure is the high-end of that - the 13.7 billion. Now, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier has already found that BP's gross negligence led to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. BP is appealing that decision from the first phase of this trial. But in the meantime, he's hearing testimony this week and for the next few weeks on what kind of penalty he should assess that would both punish BP and serve as a deterrent to another such disaster as this.
Okay. Great. Well, I have memory not so much of the specific song as the whole experience of listening to the countdowns with my mom. We would write down the countdowns every week when I was 10, 11, 12, 13, as many weeks as we could. Now I'm 46 years old and there's a local station playing countdowns from the �70s on Sunday night and I'm as excited at age 46 to listen. And I don't write them down anymore but it just takes me back in time. And I remember the most obscure tidbits would come out. He would tell these stories like the name of Meat Loaf, for example, the performer Meat Loaf is Marvin Lee Aday, and I never would have dreamt of it, thought about it. I just thought it was a weird nickname. You know, and you'd get all this weird information. But he's so gentle and had just a kind, sweet way of telling stories and that was always real engaging and a real treat for me.
And, Ed, you have a whole lot of people that are now beginning to speak out. You have about 179 congresspeople on both sides of the aisle who have put forth legislation that is calling for some kind of modification in this law. You have two-thirds of your states who have passed a resolution, or who will be passing resolutions in their states, talking about the modification of the law. So, Ed, the important point here, it's not just the National Education Association who sees that there needs to be some modification to No Child Left Behind. A hundred and seventy-nine congresspeople, many of whom passed the law, are saying that there needs to be modification.
State law requires the dogs be let out five times a day, but advocates for the racing ban insist that doesn't happen. The two sides also disagree over injuries. Ban advocates emphasize the number and brutality of breaks on the tracks. Industry representatives say the injury rate is low. Last year, Raynham Park hosted just over 5,900 races and reported 91 injuries to the State Racing Commission. Adoption rates and euthanasia are also in dispute. While the debate is foggy with rhetoric, most animal shelters and veterinarians in the state want to end dog racing, but Dr. Bonnie Smith (ph) of Brimfield is on the fence. She worked as a greyhound track vet in Connecticut.
Well, Democrats see several things in their favor if we go over the cliff. First, they think the egg would be on Republican's faces if that happens. Second, Democrats in January will have more members in both the House and the Senate and third, they would also have renewing the expired tax cuts to use as leverage to try to get the debt ceiling limit raised, which they'll have to do early next year and extend other lapsed provisions, such as emergency unemployment insurance that's going to run out and a fix for the alternative minimum tax; and even getting a big stop gap spending bill since the current one is going to run out in March. Republicans think that by not agreeing to any deal on tax cuts now, they would be voting after the first of the year to cut taxes, possibly not for everybody, but that it would be a much easier vote to sell back to their constituents in their districts.
There is the usual day of speeches, of commemoration and memoriam to the students who were killed, and we will dowse the candles at approximately the time of the shootings, around 12:20 or so. And then there are some other activities that are happening - I mean, just a whole host of things. I don't have the schedule in front of me and I didn't memorize it. But it's a day of mourning, a day of celebration at the same time, and a day of looking forward. And not only do we mention the students who were shot here at Kent, but on the 15th of May, you know, students were killed in Jackson State. I remember lying in my bed in the intensive care unit, hearing the story and thinking, oh my, God. What is going on with this country? Are we going crazy or what? And I just couldn't believe it. It was probably one of the lowest periods of my time, coming so shortly after the shootings at Kent State. It didn't make my recovery any easier.
Well, I do think - I mean, the president has said that there is -that he doesn't want us to become a major player in there because he doesn't think that'll help the dissidents. He's more or less said that. I think that what you're going to see is a little bit more outspokenness as this goes on, because it's going to be hard after we've learned how much opposition there is, how fragile this regime - or how much more fragile this regime is than we thought it was. We can't go back exactly to square one, that it can't be put back in the box. So I think you will hear more from the administration over time.
FORMER PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY: Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. For 13 days, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war with neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev backing down. In the end, war was averted in part because Kennedy promised the United States would not lead any more invasions of Cuba. But in the months that followed, Kennedy ordered the CIA to support those exiles who were ready to go back to Cuba and fight on their own.
In advance, so in advance we didn't know it was even plausible. But after the fact, we're going to try to find explanation because we'd like to feed children with the explanations and tell them, oh, it was because there was a mounting tension between Germany and - on one hand - France and Great Britain on the other. But of course you've had a lot of periods of tension that didn't lead to war, you see. So we - by teaching children history, we try to convince them that we understand the world a lot more than we actually do.
Yes, but we're still waiting to find something that's most definitive of the types of things we see in Iceland, and my brain is on Iceland here, but we do see other things that are indicative of volcano-water interaction including these cones, the little phreatic cones that form when they're not from a deep volcanic vent but the lava flow itself has enough heat that interacts with ground water or ice that melts. It makes these little cones called rootless cones. We do see those in Iceland. We do see those very clearly in places. So there's been and - something else that we see that's very interesting, well, I am not going to talk about it because we don't understand it yet, but...
I was living in Ireland during the first Iraq war and was very impressed with Mrs. Thatcher's resolve. This quote has struck with me - stuck with me since 1990. There, Saddam Hussein, a dictator, a man hiding behind the skirts of women and children, what sort of man is that? Thank you to Maggie for showing us what a strong woman looks like. Back in 2011, Meryl Streep brought Margaret Thatcher to the big screen in the biopic "Iron Lady." At the time, author and historian, Amanda Forman, wrote a cover story for Newsweek with the headline "The New Thatcher Era." In that article, she made the argument that Margaret Thatcher was and remains an icon of feminism. Amanda Forman joins us now from her office in New York City. Her latest book is " A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War." Good to have you with us today.
My sense, and this is the reason I use the word art, my sense is that it can be an art. We argue back and forth about what is meant by art and no one seems to agree. But there are two factors that do seem to be important to all of us, and that is that art must be something that's enriching, art must be something that's creative. And I have felt as I have watched people, when I was in my thirties and forties, who have gotten older, and then myself gotten into my fifties, sixties and now seventies, that, my God, these can be the most enriching years of life. We can rediscover ourselves as we get older.
Well, they've lifted until January and February, the new deadlines when the bills funding the government and raising the debt ceiling run out and then we'll be right back where we started from with a possible difference: it's unlikely that the Republicans, despite the enthusiasm of the Tea Party for another go at this, wants to have another shutdown and a possible default. But it's hard to see how the issues of taxes and spending are resolved by then. The conference committee on the budget, which is supposed to try to come up with some kind of compromise by December 13th, is dealing with the exact same grand bargain impasse that we've had for years, which is the president is willing to make entitlement cuts, but in return he wants Republicans to agree to raise revenue by closing tax loopholes. The Republicans say that's a tax increase and they won't do it. The Republicans are willing to give the president some relief from the sequester - those across-the-board cuts that everyone hates - in return for entitlement cuts. So, the tradeoffs are not lined up and they probably won't be by the end of the year.
In the final days of New Hampshire, Jacki, you know, we had the tear-up. Hillary Clinton got teary eyed and a lot of voters in New Hampshire thought that that made a difference for them. But Barack Obama was really moving in the polls until the last couple of days. And then the Clinton campaign really feels like she was able to win over the very latest deciders. And voters said that they were really focusing on the issues as opposed to personality. And I think that's a model that they're hoping to recreate, especially here in Ohio. And if you listen to Hillary Clinton in these speeches, she finishes off by saying, you know, some people vote based on personality. I want you to treat this like a hiring decision. Talk to me about who you want to hire as president, both when it comes to the economy and foreign policies. So if they look back to New Hampshire, they'd love to recreate that in the final days.
Not a whole lot because if they enriched uranium that would give them, if you will, 90 percent of what it is they need to build a nuclear weapon. So it explains why the policy emphasis is not focusing on the line between having nuclear fuel or building a weapon but rather is focusing on either prohibiting them or placing a very low ceiling on the amount of nuclear fuel they would want to have. I think to some extent, Robert, it was a bit of a debating point on his part, essentially saying who are you, the United States, to tell us that we can't do certain things when you yourself have nuclear weapons.
That contrast is what kept O'Brien coming back to the tunnels long after the book was finished. He brings food and clothing to people like Brian and Steve on a regular basis. And the tunnels have become a kind of refuge for him, too, from the city. Mr. O'BRIEN: When work wasn't going all that great or my relationship with my girlfriend wasn't that great, I would just strap on the boots and grab the flashlight and jut walk a tunnel to get away from everything above ground. You know, in some ways, there are certain things about underground Vegas that I prefer to aboveground Vegas.
So essentially, it's because we've designed the car around a typical male body. So the most commonly used car crash test dummy is based on the fiftieth percentile male, and that is too tall and too heavy. It doesn't account for things like the differences between male and female pelvises. Women often don't sit in what's called the standard seating position. They have to sit much further forward in order for their legs to be able to reach the pedals. And we haven't developed a seatbelt to account for pregnancy. So there were basically just all these ways that we have designed a car to ignore female bodies. This isn't a conspiracy. This isn't people wanting women to die. No one wants their mum to get into a car and be in much more danger than they are. So the only way I think you can really explain it is this incredibly pervasive cultural bias that we just don't realize that we're forgetting women. We just don't notice it.
But anyway, to get back to what happened, and these - the president didn't do much about it. He expressed a couple things back there two years ago, two and a half, that we had to do something about this ever-growing debt, and then he got into this budget state where he was blaming it all on President Bush. Finds out when he finally gets re-elected, it doesn't matter who you want to blame it on, it's real, and it doesn't matter who you want to say caused it, it's now everybody's problem because if it should cause our monetary, money system to fall apart, there's no telling how bad off this country could go.
On March 14, this year, I posted this poster on Facebook. This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag. I will try to explain to you about the context of why and when I posted. A few days ago, I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store, and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other, and the owner was explaining to the client that we're going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel. And the client was saying, no, it's 10,000 a day. (Laughter) ("10,000 missiles") This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel. We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now, and we have people, you know, afraid. It's like every year it's the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran. It's like, if we don't act now, it's too late forever, for 10 years now. So at some point it became, you know, to me, I'm a graphic designer, so I made posters about it and I posted the one I just showed you before. Most of the time, I make posters, I post them on Facebook, my friends like it, don't like it, most of the time don't like it, don't share it, don't nothing, and it's another day. So I went to sleep, and that was it for me. And later on in the night, I woke up because I'm always waking up in the night, and I went by the computer and I see all these red dots, you know, on Facebook, which I've never seen before. (Laughter) And I was like, "What's going on?" So I come to the computer and I start looking on, and suddenly I see many people talking to me, most of them I don't know, and a few of them from Iran, which is — What? Because you have to understand, in Israel we don't talk with people from Iran. We don't know people from Iran. It's like, on Facebook, you have friends only from — it's like your neighbors are your friends on Facebook. And now people from Iran are talking to me. So I start answering this girl, and she's telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come, because they don't have a computer, she asked her family to come to see the poster, and they're all sitting in the living room crying. So I'm like, whoa. I ask my wife to come, and I tell her, you have to see that. People are crying, and she came, she read the text, and she started to cry. And everybody's crying now. (Laughter) So I don't know what to do, so my first reflex, as a graphic designer, is, you know, to show everybody what I'd just seen, and people started to see them and to share them, and that's how it started. The day after, when really it became a lot of talking, I said to myself, and my wife said to me, I also want a poster, so this is her. (Laughter) Because it's working, put me in a poster now. But more seriously, I was like, okay, these ones work, but it's not just about me, it's about people from Israel who want to say something. So I'm going to shoot all the people I know, if they want, and I'm going to put them in a poster and I'm going to share them. So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster. And that's how it started. And that's how, really, it's unleashed, because suddenly people from Facebook, friends and others, just understand that they can be part of it. It's not just one dude making one poster, it's — we can be part of it, so they start sending me pictures and ask me, "Make me a poster. Post it. Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too." It became, you know, at some point it was really, really intense. I mean, so many pictures, so I asked friends to come, graphic designers most of them, to make posters with me, because I didn't have the time. It was a huge amount of pictures. So for a few days, that's how my living room was. And we received Israeli posters, Israeli images, but also lots of comments, lots of messages from Iran. And we took these messages and we made posters out of it, because I know people: They don't read, they see images. If it's an image, they may read it. So here are a few of them. ("You are my first Israelian friend. I wish we both get rid of our idiot politicians, anyway nice to see you!") ("I love that blue. I love that star. I love that flag.") This one is really moving for me because it's the story of a girl who has been raised in Iran to walk on an Israeli flag to enter her school every morning, and now that she sees the posters that we're sending, she starts — she said that she changed her mind, and now she loves that blue, she loves that star, and she loves that flag, talking about the Israeli flag, and she wished that we'd meet and come to visit one another, and just a few days after I posted the first poster. The day after, Iranians started to respond with their own posters. They have graphic designers. What? (Laughter) Crazy, crazy. So you can see they are still shy, they don't want to show their faces, but they want to spread the message. They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. So. And now it's communication. It's a two-way story. It's Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other. ("My Israeli Friends. I don't hate you. I don't want War.") This never happened before, and this is two people supposed to be enemies, we're on the verge of a war, and suddenly people on Facebook are starting to say, "I like this guy. I love those guys." And it became really big at some point. And then it became news. Because when you're seeing the Middle East, you see only the bad news. And suddenly, there is something that was happening that was good news. So the guys on the news, they say, "Okay, let's talk about this." And they just came, and it was so much, I remember one day, Michal, she was talking with the journalist, and she was asking him, "Who's gonna see the show?"And he said, "Everybody." So she said, "Everybody in Palestine, in where? Israel? Who is everybody?""Everybody." They said, "Syria?" "Syria." "Lebanon?""Lebanon." At some point, he just said, "40 million people are going to see you today. It's everybody." The Chinese. And we were just at the beginning of the story. Something crazy also happened. Every time a country started talking about it, like Germany, America, wherever, a page on Facebook popped up with the same logo with the same stories, so at the beginning we had "Iran-Loves-Israel," which is an Iranian sitting in Tehran, saying, "Okay, Israel loves Iran? I give you Iran-Loves-Israel." You have Palestine-Loves-Israel. You have Lebanon that just — a few days ago. And this whole list of pages on Facebook dedicated to the same message, to people sending their love, one to each other. The moment I really understood that something was happening, a friend of mine told me, "Google the word 'Israel.'" And those were the first images on those days that popped up from Google when you were typing, "Israel" or "Iran." We really changed how people see the Middle East. Because you're not in the Middle East. You're somewhere over there, and then you want to see the Middle East, so you go on Google and you say, "Israel," and they give you the bad stuff. And for a few days you got those images. Today the Israel-Loves-Iran page is this number, 80,831, and two million people last week went on the page and shared, liked, I don't know, commented on one of the photos. So for five months now, that's what we are doing, me, Michal, a few of my friends, are just making images. We're showing a new reality by just making images because that's how the world perceives us. They see images of us, and they see bad images. So we're working on making good images. End of story. Look at this one. This is the Iran-Loves-Israel page. This is not the Israel-Loves-Iran. This is not my page. This is a guy in Tehran on the day of remembrance of the Israeli fallen soldier putting an image of an Israeli soldier on his page. This is the enemy. What? ("Our heartfelt condolences to the families who lost their dearests in terror attack in Bulgaria") And it's going both ways. It's like, we are showing respect, one to each other. And we're understanding. And you show compassion. And you become friends. And at some point, you become friends on Facebook, and you become friends in life. You can go and travel and meet people. And I was in Munich a few weeks ago. I went there to open an exposition about Iran and I met there with people from the page that told me, "Okay, you're going to be in Europe, I'm coming. I'm coming from France, from Holland, from Germany," of course, and from Israel people came, and we just met there for the first time in real life. I met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time. And we just shake hands, and have a coffee and a nice discussion, and we talk about food and basketball. And that was the end of it. Remember that image from the beginning? At some point we met in real life, and we became friends. And it goes the other way around. Some girl that we met on Facebook never been in Israel, born and raised in Iran, lives in Germany, afraid of Israelis because of what she knows about us, decides after a few months of talking on the Internet with some Israelis to come to Israel, and she gets on the plane and arrives at Ben Gurion and says, "Okay, not that big a deal." So a few weeks ago, the stress is getting higher, so we start this new campaign called "Not ready to die in your war." I mean, it's plus/minus the same message, but we wanted really to add some aggressivity to it. And again, something amazing happened, something that we didn't have on the first wave of the campaign. Now people from Iran, the same ones who were shy at the first campaign and just sent, you know, their foot and half their faces, now they're sending their faces, and they're saying, "Okay, no problem, we're into it. We are with you." Just read where those guys are from. And for every guy from Israel, you've got someone from Iran. Just people sending their pictures. Crazy, yes? So — (Applause) So you may ask yourself, who is this dude? My name is Ronny Edry, and I'm 41, I'm an Israeli, I'm a father of two, I'm a husband, and I'm a graphic designer. I'm teaching graphic design. And I'm not that naive, because a lot of the time I've been asked, many times I've been asked, "Yeah, but, this is really naive, sending flowers over, I mean — " I was in the army. I was in the paratroopers for three years, and I know how it looks from the ground. I know how it can look really bad. So to me, this is the courageous thing to do, to try to reach the other side before it's too late, because when it's going to be too late, it's going to be too late. And sometimes war is inevitable, sometimes, but maybe [with] effort, we can avoid it. Maybe as people, because especially in Israel, we're in a democracy. We have the freedom of speech, and maybe that little thing can change something. And really, we can be our own ambassadors. We can just send a message and hope for the best. So I want to ask Michal, my wife, to come with me on the stage just to make with you one image, because it's all about images. And maybe that image will help us change something. Just raise that. Exactly. And I'm just going to take a picture of it, and I'm just going to post it on Facebook with kind of "Israelis for peace" or something. Oh my God. Don't cry. Thank you guys. (Applause)
Well, the presumption there is that economic stimulus comes from a check that's written from Washington, D.C. - mind you, not from a piggybank there, but, you know, we borrowed 500 billion from the Chinese, we borrowed from Medicare, we borrowed from Social Security, we borrowed from our kids and grandkids. And I think that the fallacy is, one, economic stimulus is not driven by, again, borrowed money out of Washington, D.C. The ultimate in economic stimulus is people getting up and going about their life's work, figuring if they play by the rules, make prudent decisions, they can have a crack at the American dream. And what we're moving toward is, in essence, away from that market-based economy of everybody going out and doing their part as best they can, that kid in the basement creating the product of tomorrow, to instead a politically based economy wherein if you've got the right lobbyist in Washington, D.C., or if you can make enough noise, you get the golden tap by Washington and indeed you get a bailout. And I think that in the long run, that is very much something to worry about, in addition to borrowing's consequence with regard to the dollar, another thing.
(Singing) I come to the garden alone, where the dew is still on the roses. And the voice I hear falling on my ear, the son of God discloses. And he walks with me... I did a Stevie Wonder song, "10 Zillion Light Years Away," because it's one of my favorite songs, spiritually, because it speaks to situations in our world today where people that -- who don't really have a relationship with God are asking in situations, such as Hurricane Katrina, where is God in all this? But if you really have a relationship and understand spirituality, you know that God is inside of you. So, that's one of the reasons why I chose that Stevie Wonder song.
You're right. This is the Galician bagpipe. Now, you know that Spain is not just about flamenco, right? This is music from another part of Spain. It's from Galicia in the northwest corner of Spain. It's music with ancient Celtic roots and modern Spanish energy. And the man behind this tune is none other than the giant of Celtic music, Carlos Nunez. He is the master of Galicia's bagpipes, the gaita, as they are called in Spain. And, man, I have to say this is an incredible tune, not only because of the amazing playing of Carlos Nunez, but because he's bringing north and south together.
The situation here is that a young boy is remembering the disappearance of his mother. There was a day that he and his mother went to a photography shop, and on that day a snow happened to fall. This is quite a rare occurrence in southern Japan and the island of Kyushu, where he grew up. And just within days of that snowfall, his mother disappeared. When I think back on these memories, it was a day I looked at the snow through the window of the rickshaw that marks the crucial turning point when my mother started to disappear into the distance, leaving me all alone. In a sense, my earliest memories are on the far side of that snow. When I think back upon them, I do so through that snowy veil.
It's the fifth time I stand on this shore, the Cuban shore, looking out at that distant horizon, believing, again, that I'm going to make it all the way across that vast, dangerous wilderness of an ocean. Not only have I tried four times, but the greatest swimmers in the world have been trying since 1950, and it's still never been done. The team is proud of our four attempts. It's an expedition of some 30 people. Bonnie is my best friend and head handler, who somehow summons will, that last drop of will within me, when I think it's gone, after many, many hours and days out there. The shark experts are the best in the world — large predators below. The box jellyfish, the deadliest venom in all of the ocean, is in these waters, and I have come close to dying from them on a previous attempt. The conditions themselves, besides the sheer distance of over 100 miles in the open ocean — the currents and whirling eddies and the Gulf Stream itself, the most unpredictable of all of the planet Earth. And by the way — it's amusing to me that journalists and people, before these attempts, often ask me, "Well, are you going to go with any boats or any people or anything?" (Laughter) And I'm thinking, what are they imagining? That I'll just sort of do some celestial navigation — (Laughter) And carry a bowie knife in my mouth, and I'll hunt fish and skin them alive and eat them, and maybe drag a desalinization plant behind me for fresh water. (Laughter) Yes, I have a team. (Laughter) And the team is expert, and the team is courageous, and brimming with innovation and scientific discovery, as is true of any major expedition on the planet. And we've been on a journey. And the debate has raged, hasn't it, since the Greeks, of isn't it what it's all about? Isn't life about the journey, not really the destination? And here we've been on this journey, and the truth is, it's been thrilling. We haven't reached that other shore, and still, our sense of pride and commitment, unwavering commitment. When I turned 60, the dream was still alive from having tried this in my 20s — dreamed it and imagined it. The most famous body of water on the Earth today, I imagine, Cuba to Florida. And it was deep. It was deep in my soul. When I turned 60, it wasn't so much about the athletic accomplishment, it wasn't the ego of "I want to be the first." That's always there and it's undeniable. But it was deeper. It was "how much life is there left?" Let's face it — we're all on a one-way street, aren't we? And what are we going to do? What are we going to do as we go forward, to have no regrets looking back? And all this past year in training, I had that Teddy Roosevelt quote to paraphrase it, floating around in my brain. It says, "You go ahead. You go ahead and sit back in your comfortable chair and you be the critic, you be the observer, while the brave one gets in the ring and engages and gets bloody and gets dirty and fails over and over and over again, but yet isn't afraid and isn't timid and lives life in a bold way." And so of course I want to make it across. It is the goal, and I should be so shallow to say that this year, the destination was even sweeter than the journey. (Laughter) (Applause) But the journey itself was worthwhile taking. And at this point, by this summer, everybody — scientists, sports scientists, endurance experts, neurologists, my own team, Bonnie — said it's impossible. It just simply can't be done, and Bonnie said to me, "But if you're going to take the journey, I'm going to see you through to the end of it, so I'll be there." And now we're there. As we're looking out, kind of a surreal moment before the first stroke, standing on the rocks at Marina Hemingway, the Cuban flag is flying above, all my team is out in their boats, hands up in the air, "We're here! We're here for you!" Bonnie and I look at each other and say, this year, the mantra is — and I've been using it in training — Find a way. You have a dream and you have obstacles in front of you, as we all do. None of us ever get through this life without heartache, without turmoil, and if you believe and you have faith and you can get knocked down and get back up again and you believe in perseverance as a great human quality, you find your way. And Bonnie grabbed my shoulders, and she said, "Let's find our way to Florida." And we started, and for the next 53 hours, it was an intense, unforgettable life experience. The highs were high, the awe — I'm not a religious person, but I'll tell you, to be in the azure blue of the Gulf Stream as if, as you're breathing, you're looking down miles and miles and miles, to feel the majesty of this blue planet we live on — it's awe-inspiring. I have a playlist of about 85 songs, and especially in the middle of the night ... That night, because we use no lights — lights attract jellyfish, lights attract sharks, lights attract baitfish that attract sharks, so we go in the pitch black of the night. You've never seen black this black. You can't see the front of your hand, and the people on the boat, Bonnie and my team on the boat — they just hear the slapping of the arms, and they know where I am, because there's no visual at all. And I'm out there kind of tripping out on my little playlist. (Laughter) I've got tight rubber caps, I don't hear a thing. I've got goggles and I'm turning my head 50 times a minute, and I'm singing ... (Singing) Imagine there's no heaven (Laughter) doo doo doo doo doo It's easy if you try doo doo doo doo doo And I can sing that song a thousand times in a row. (Laughter) Now there's a talent unto itself. (Laughter) (Applause) And each time I get done with, (Singing) Oh, you may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one 222. (Singing) Imagine there's no heaven (Laughter) And when I get through the end of a thousand of John Lennon's "Imagine," I have swum nine hours and 45 minutes ... exactly. (Laughter) And then there are the crises. Of course there are. And the vomiting starts, the seawater — you're not well. You're wearing a jellyfish mask for the ultimate protection. It's difficult to swim in. It's causing abrasions on the inside of the mouth, but the tentacles can't get you. And the hypothermia sets in. The water's 85 degrees, and yet you're losing weight and using calories. And as you come over toward the side of the boat — not allowed to touch it, not allowed to get out, but Bonnie and her team hand me nutrition and ask me how I'm doing, am I all right. I am seeing the Taj Mahal — (Laughter) Over here. I'm in a very different state — (Laughter) And I'm thinking, "Wow! I never thought I'd be running into the Taj Mahal out here. It's gorgeous! I mean, how long did it take them to build that? It's just ... So, uh — wooo — you know? (Laughter) We kind of have a cardinal rule that I'm never told how far it is, because we don't know how far it is. What's going to happen to you between this point and that point? What's going to happen to the weather and the currents and, God forbid, you're stung, when you don't think you could be stung in all this armor. Bonnie made a decision coming into that third morning that I was suffering, and I was hanging on by a thread. And she said, "Come here," and I came close to the boat, and she said, "Look, look out there." And I saw light, because the day is easier than the night, and I thought we were coming into day. I saw a stream of white light along the horizon, and I said, "It's going to be morning soon." And she said, "No, those are the lights of Key West." It was 15 more hours, which for most swimmers would be a long time. (Laughter) (Applause) You have no idea how many 15-hour training swims I had done. So here we go, and I somehow, without a decision, went into no counting of strokes and no singing and no quoting Stephen Hawking on the parameters of the universe. I just went into thinking about this dream, and why and how. As I said, when I turned 60, it wasn't about that concrete "Can you do it?" That's the everyday machinations. That's the discipline, and it's the preparation, and there's a pride in that. But I decided to think, as I went along, about — you know, the phrase usually is, "reaching for the stars." And in my case, it's reaching for the horizon. And when you reach for the horizon, as I've proven, you may not get there. But what a tremendous build of character and spirit that you lay down; what a foundation you lay down in reaching for those horizons. And now, the shore is coming. And there's just a little part of me that's sad. The epic journey is going to be over. So many people come up to me now and say, "What's next?" (Laughter) "We love that!" (Laughter) "That little tracker on the computer? When are you going to do the next one? We can't wait to follow the next one." Well, they were just there for 53 hours, and I was there for years. And so there won't be another epic journey in the ocean. But the point is, and the point was, that every day of our lives is epic. And I'll tell you, when I walked up onto that beach, staggered up onto that beach ... I had so many times, in a very puffed-up ego way, rehearsed what I would say ... (Laughter) on the beach. When Bonnie thought the back of my throat was swelling up, she brought the medical team over to our boat to say, "She's really beginning to have trouble breathing; another 12, 24 hours in the saltwater ..." — the whole thing — I just thought, in my hallucinatory moment, that I heard the word "tracheotomy." (Laughter) Bonnie said to the doctor, "I'm not worried about her not breathing. If she can't talk when she gets to the shore, she's going to be pissed off." (Laughter) But the truth is, all those orations that I had practiced, just to get myself through some training swims as motivation — it wasn't like that. It was a very real moment, with that crowd, with my team. We did it. I didn't do it. We did it. And we'll never forget it. It'll always be part of us. The three things I did sort of blurt out when we got there, was first: Never, ever give up. I live it. What's the phrase from today from Socrates? Audience: To be is to do. Diana Nyad: To be is to do. So I don't stand up and say, "Don't ever give up." I didn't give up. There was action behind these words. The second is: You can chase your dreams at any age; you're never too old. Sixty-four; a thing no one, at any age, any gender, could ever do has done it. And there's no doubt in my mind that I am at the prime of my life today. (Applause) Yeah. (Applause) Thank you. And the third thing I said on that beach was, it looks like the most solitary endeavor in the world, and in many ways, of course, it is. And in other ways, and the most important ways, it's a team. And if you think I'm a badass, you want to meet Bonnie. (Laughter) Bonnie, where are you? Where are you? There's Bonnie Stoll. (Applause) My buddy. (Applause) The Henry David Thoreau quote goes, "When you achieve your dreams, it's not so much what you get as who you have become in achieving them." And yeah, I stand before you now. In the three months since that swim ended, I've sat down with Oprah, and I've been in President Obama's Oval Office; I've been invited to speak in front of esteemed groups such as yourselves; I've signed a wonderful major book contract. All of that's great, and I don't denigrate it. I'm proud of it all, but the truth is, I'm walking around tall because I am that bold, fearless person, and I will be, every day, until it's time for these days to be done. Thank you very much and enjoy the conference. Thank you. Thank you! (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you! Thank you. (Applause) Find a way! (Applause)
Richard Sipe was a Catholic sociologist who studied clerical sexual behavior, and he died just last week. And I think he knew more than just about anybody about celibacy and its breachers within the Catholic church. Anyway, Richard Sipe told me back in 2002 he would advise gay men who felt a call to the priesthood not to accept it at that point not because he was opposed to gay men being priests. He was a progressive. But because he said the culture of sexual exploitation within seminaries, and more generally within the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic clergy, was such that even a young man, a young gay man who went into the seminary intending to be faithful to chastity and to celibacy, he would face so much exploitive pressure from the networks within the seminaries that if he felt just once he would be compromised, and they would use that against him over the course of his priesthood. But what this system does mean is that those who are sexually compromised by having had affairs with women or men turn a blind eye when they see it happening with minors because they themselves are blackmailable.
That's right. It's a reexamination of American history from many vantage points. And what becomes central to it is the burden of the legacy of slavery told through, you know, some multiple voices. What's interesting about that is if you have the job I do, editing the book review, and see all the titles, all the books come in in different areas, including history - I've written a lot of history myself - slavery remains the most pressing question. There are new books right now reexamining, reevaluating slavery. And so what Morrison did was to say, in effect, if you're going to have a truly expansive, inclusive American literature, and if American fiction now as the country begins to feel older - and that's the other element we're getting at - is that America doesn't feel like a youthful country so much anymore as a kind of old empire, or maybe ascending empire or declining empire, nobody knows.
(Music) This is the human test, a test to see if you are a human. Please raise your hand if something applies to you. Are we agreed? Yes? Then let's begin. Have you ever eaten a booger long past your childhood? (Laughter) It's okay, it's safe here. Have you ever made a small, weird sound when you remembered something embarrassing? Have you ever purposely lowercased the first letter of a text in order to come across as sad or disappointed? (Laughter) Okay. Have you ever ended a text with a period as a sign of aggression? Okay. Period. Have you ever laughed or smiled when someone said something shitty to you and then spent the rest of the day wondering why you reacted that way? Yes. Have you ever seemed to lose your airplane ticket a thousand times as you walked from the check-in to the gate? Yes. Have you ever put on a pair of pants and then much later realized that there was a loose sock smushed up against your thigh? (Laughter) Good. Have you ever tried to guess someone else's password so many times that it locked their account? Mmm. Have you ever had a nagging feeling that one day you will be discovered as a fraud? Yes, it's safe here. Have you ever hoped that there was some ability you hadn't discovered yet that you were just naturally great at? Mmm. Have you ever broken something in real life, and then found yourself looking for an "undo" button in real life? Have you ever misplaced your TED badge and then immediately started imagining what a three-day Vancouver vacation might look like? Have you ever marveled at how someone you thought was so ordinary could suddenly become so beautiful? Have you ever stared at your phone smiling like an idiot while texting with someone? Have you ever subsequently texted that person the phrase "I'm staring at the phone smiling like an idiot"? Have you ever been tempted to, and then gave in to the temptation, of looking through someone else's phone? Have you ever had a conversation with yourself and then suddenly realized you're a real asshole to yourself? (Laughter) Has your phone ever run out of battery in the middle of an argument, and it sort of felt like the phone was breaking up with both of you? Have you ever thought that working on an issue between you was futile because it should just be easier than this, or this is supposed to happen just naturally? Have you ever realized that very little, in the long run, just happens naturally? Have you ever woken up blissfully and suddenly been flooded by the awful remembrance that someone had left you? Have you ever lost the ability to imagine a future without a person that no longer was in your life? Have you ever looked back on that event with the sad smile of autumn and the realization that futures will happen regardless? Congratulations. You have now completed the test. You are all human. (Applause)
You know, it's calming here now. Just a little bit of wind remains here in Mobile. But downtown streets are flooded. There is no major structural damage. As you said, this came ashore twice. It kind of crossed that marshy tip of southeast Louisiana that's right at the mouth of the Mississippi River before it then made its major landfall on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. And that sort of dampened its impact. You know, at one point yesterday, authorities were saying that the storm was rapidly intensifying. It was moving faster over the Gulf of Mexico than they thought. And it was likely to be a Category 2 storm. When it actually came ashore, it had maximum sustained winds of about 85 miles per hour, so it was a Category 1 storm. So not as bad as anticipated but still a hurricane striking the Gulf Coast.
Yes, yeah, I'm really excited about it. It's still on my -well, it's in our living room right now, which my wife keeps moving it out of there. But I have this, I just want to see it near me, so I keep moving it back. She hides it in the basement and I bring it back up. But it's about five gallons. And I tasted some on, what's today, Thursday. I tasted some on Sunday and I think it was already up to about 12 percent alcohol. So, I've got about another month. I'm waiting for it to be 20 before I break it out.
Troy, thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it. Again if you're joining us late, earlier this hour, the House of Representatives voted to defeat the Bush-Paulson bailout bill. Just 66 Republicans voted in favor, more than twice as many voted to oppose, 94 Democrats voted to opposed the bill as well. Here's an email on the question we're talking about right now. This is from Bill in Nichols Hill, Oklahoma. She, Palin, is the only one of the four national candidates who has not been part of the gathering financial storm. Don't you think she will surround herself with people knowledgeable when she is in office? Who in the world has all of the answers at their fingertips? And let's see if we can get Salane(ph) on the line. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly?
Well, the atmosphere has changed. I mean, certainly those individuals could have been transferred months ago in terms of the timing, so I think the timing was perhaps part of the just trying to build up the attention on this particular issue. But there's an important point that I think has to be emphasized is that many people feel that these rules will somehow allow someone like these infamous characters to walk out the door if the trial yields a not guilty verdict. But in fact, they can be detained for as long as they represent a threat to this country and to the world. What is the question here is how they can be punished and what means? And in that context, I think it gives more weight to those who argue for a very fair, legitimate proceeding so that there's no question in the mind of anyone that these people are guilty and should be punished.
Well, I'm going to tell you: I think right now it's even below 8.1254 years. So I'm - we're building prototypes, and there's a lot to still do because you need to make sure this can go for years, right, not days. It's got to go for years. We haven't had the time to test for years yet. It's been going for days now with no drop in activity. So those are all the practical concerns of long-term because if you're a commercial buyer, you're a customer, you only use things that are reliable, and that can be the death knell of any technology.
If the military commissions bill is voted on by itself, there's a good chance it'll pass this week and be signed into law. But GOP leaders are also trying to get a bill passed giving Congress's blessing to warrantless wiretapping. And if they try to combine the two bills, it's much less likely they'll get done with this, because there's considerable opposition from Republicans in Congress in both chambers to this NSA surveillance legislation. And it's not clear what the strategy is going to be this week. I think that ultimately GOP leaders may just opt for the military commissions legislation if they can't get both done.
Yeah, you know, I'd periodically check in to see, like, which videos got the most airplay and what sort of comments people had for them and stuff. And the one that got the most air play was the video of that clip, actually, you were just playing. And I was checking one day, probably last maybe January, towards the end of January, and I went to check and see where the hit count was at and the video wasn't there anymore. And, you know, my first thought was like oh, it's just some sort of a URL glitch or something like that. And then I had remembered hearing the story about, you know, Viacom suing YouTube and Google to, you know, remove the 150,000 videos. And I just thought to myself, gee, wouldn't that be funny if that was like one of them.
Well, that's a really good question. I have a colleague, a good colleague by the name of Ray Winbush(ph) who is now at Morgan State operating their Center for Black Studies there, but he used to be at Fisk running the Race Relations Institute, and we were talking about this subject. And he calls the deal that Charles Johnson, who was president in the '40s when the donation was made, a deal with the devil. He compares it to someone being given a brand new Rolls Royce on the condition that they could never drive it, would have to keep it in a warm garage, wash it once a month, wax it four times a year and keep it insured. And it's a wonderful car. It's one of the most, you know, incredible marks every made, but you can't do anything with it and eventually it starts to drain on you. And his position is that when O'Keeffe made this deal, it was really almost like what she was trying to do was irritate the New York art world. Kind of like saying I have the Stieglitz collection, I can do whatever I want with it. In fact I'm going to give it to these black people just so you guys won't have it, just to show you what I can do. And on one hand it's great to have, you know, one of the most valuable collections of the 20th Century. But on the other hand, it's becomes quite, it's become, I wouldn't say an albatross but it's certainly become a hard thing for them to manage.
So imagine the scene. You discover you have unprotected sexual intercourse or a failure of your contraceptive or you're raped and you have to obtain emergency contraception. Right now you have to call a doctor at 2:00 perhaps on a Saturday morning and find a doctor who's willing to prescribe emergency contraception for you; you have to get a prescription from that physician; you have to take it to a pharmacy, find a pharmacy that stocks emergency contraception. Only fewer than 50 percent of pharmacies even in New York City have emergency contraception available. And then you have to get it filled and you have to take the tablet. All of the time, the window of efficacy is closing. That's why it's so important that we have emergency contraception available to people that they can take rapidly. It's not a question of saying it's equally effective when obtained from a physician. It's not, because you can't get to a physician on a Friday or Saturday night.
And, in his speeches back in 1989, he said that the Auschwitz gas chambers didn't exist, that Hitler had protected Jews, rather than been behind the genocide, that he was not in any way directly connected to the Holocaust, and even then, he said the Holocaust as we know it didn't happen. That it was largely a myth. These were the charges that came back to haunt him yesterday in Vienna. He had to answer for them, and his defense, well, first thing he did, he admitted to the charges, he conceded that he had breeched the law. But his lawyer argued that he was a changed man. And, in the years since then, he had actually revised his views on all of these controversial points.
That's right. The administration numbers show that about eight out of ten consumers who are trying to enroll are actually making it all the way through to where they can click enroll. In October, that number was closer to 30 percent, so the experience is smoother overall for people who had tried and hit roadblocks earlier. But we still don't know how the full enrollment picture looks. The administration isn't releasing its next batch of those enrollment figures until probably mid-December. And this actually brings up another issue, Robert, which is the insurance providers are relying on a part of the system you can't see to send them accurate and clear enrollment data. That's called the back end of the system and insurers said they were previously getting blank or duplicate forms, forms with missing information.
On Wednesdays, NPR political editor Ken Rudin joins us to talk politics amid the grief over Senate appointments in New York and Illinois. Senator Russ Feingold joins us in a few minutes to propose a constitutional amendment. Of course, his state tried to choose a senator the old fashioned way and there's still no winner in Minnesota. Tim Geithner joins us to - wins his confirmation. Looks like Eric Holder's is on the way and it looks like politics, as usual, on the stimulus bill. We begin first, as always, with a trivia question. Political Junkie Ken Rudin is here with us in Studio 3A. Hey, Ken.
Right. And the plan is that these dredges are going to come and they're going to go out in the Gulf of Mexico, going to pick up sand. Usually, you know, dredges clear sand from channels. Well, these dredges are going to go out, they're going to pick up sand and they're going to come through a canal that's going to be dug down the center of the island and they will bring their loads of sand and silt from the Gulf of Mexico in and, in marked off areas, they will then deposit those dredge spoils and elevate or raise the island.
Seeing other people who I knew again only as newspaper people, seeing Dr. King, whom I did know because I lived in Atlanta and saw him, sort of an everyday thing, but I don't think I'd ever heard him speak before I heard him speak here. And he was just magnificent, as we know he could be. Meeting Ella Baker, whom I knew nothing at all about and now know that she played a great background role in many of the 20th century's movements, at times when most people never heard of her, and most have never heard of her now - but meeting her and being impressed by her.
OK. I've, you know, been looking for a more professional job, and I have a child with special needs. Now, I do have a Facebook profile, and I understand that that is my choice to do that, but it's to keep in touch with family and friends that I graduated with, you know, a family who lives out of state. And because my daughter has special needs, we're involved in Special Olympics. And I post the pictures, you know, and updates about that, about her. And any potential employer, if they were to see that, could think, well, jeez, is she going to miss a lot of work because she's got a child with special needs?
Well, they don't take effect right away, if they ever do. So that's why this is a warning shot. The White House is planning to release a list of Chinese products that would be subject to the tariff in a couple of weeks, and the details of the investment restrictions are due out at the end of June. So there is a window here for the two sides to reach an agreement. And the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, was already on his way to Beijing for some trade talks this weekend. It's possible these tariff threats are just designed as sort of a negotiating tactic to soften up China for that discussion. But I spoke with Chad Bown at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He says if that's the case, it could backfire.
First of all, there are a lot of good ideas in the plan - infrastructure projects, transportation links, open markets, many things that have been proposed before in other economic plans. But the problem is - there are two problems, really. One is that the United States had a number of assistance programs aimed at supporting all those goals. And President Trump has cancelled all of our assistance to the Palestinian Authority and even to the Palestinian people. So our own credibility to go to others and ask them to invest in something we've divested from is quite in question. But the bigger...
She took me aside and said dear, I want you to know the secret of a happy marriage. Every now and then, it helps to be a little deaf. And with that, she handed me a pair of earplugs. It's advice, says the justice, that served her well not only with her husband Marty Ginsburg, but with her fellow justices. In law school when Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer, she learned that sleep was relatively unnecessary. She had to take care of him, her 2-year-old daughter and do her own studying. Because the daily radiation treatments made Marty too sick to eat during the day, dinner was between midnight and two.
Academics say there are other reasons for these high unemployment rates. There are few African-Americans working in hiring offices and few networks exist in their communities to help them get jobs. It all sets up a disturbing trend. The Economic Policy Institute says the numbers are so bad, the job prospects of white, adult felons are still higher than those of black, teenage men without any criminal record. Also, older workers who have been laid-off from higher paying jobs are now taking the entry-level jobs many black teens apply for. In fact, more people over 55 are working in this recession than were before.
She is widely admired and popular in the West, especially in France. And it's this visibility, she says, that helps keep her out of jail for speaking her mind. But fewer people here listen than she would like. Some find her too strident. Others worry about the political repercussions. But the reality is that the vast majority are simply too busy getting on with their lives. Duong Thu Huong freely admits that most of her books are what she calls `miserable,' but she says that's because her people's fate has been miserable. Her new novel, "No Man's Land," is different. Though dark, there is hope at the end--an inadvertent admission on her part, perhaps, that the government may deserve some credit, after all. Michael Sullivan, NPR News, Hanoi.
Right, you mentioned that there was no desire on the part of South Africa to criticize Zimbabwe. But let me put it to you that, in fact, South Africa - together with the regional body of southern African states known as SADC, this Southern African Development Community - they actually go much further than you are talking about. They express solidarity with the people, with the government and people of Zimbabwe. They did this on the 28th of March, when they met - when the heads of state and government met in Dar es Salaam. And there's another regional body that we - that Zimbabwe belongs to. It's known as COMESA, community for southern and the eastern African countries - 19 countries, they met in Nairobi, and they expressed solidarity with the government and people of Zimbabwe. In fact, they chose President Mugabe as the vice president of COMESA - the president being the host country, President Mwai Kibaki. And decided that next year, the summit will be held in Harare. What greater solidarity - act of solidarity you are talking about.
Professor, I want to make things a little personal for you. You are at Howard University, of course, flagship HBCU in Washington, D.C. Recently, there have been some things that have been coming out, numbers showing that Washington, which also goes by the nickname Chocolate City, could become less than a majority black city because of gentrification. Is there a way to deal with some of these issues in the housing market and still respect people who've been longtime residents and who's had intergenerational families? Or do you think that a place like Washington, D.C., where you're based, is going to see an exodus of people who may not be of means?
Unfortunately, the president had an opportunity to unite our country and to choose a consensus nominee who represented all Americans, but instead, he's chosen a nominee whose record raises perhaps as many questions as it answers about where he stands on critical constitutional and legal issues. We have not expressed, I should remind you, opposition to Judge Roberts' candidacy, but we have said that serious questions have been raised that require a thorough review by the Senate Judiciary Committee. I mean, certainly, we, like I think many Americans, are impressed by the qualifications that Judge Roberts brings to the table as a lawyer, but I think it's also important that we examine a candidate's record and judicial philosophy. I mean, you know, after all, there is no automatic right to a Supreme Court confirmation, and the burden rests with the nominee, even one who was previously confirmed for a lower federal court. And so thorough hearings are required. And that's not a strategy. It's a constitutional imperative.
Well, I think that McCain would probably stay where he is in terms of his elevating, of course, the war and the fight against terrorism. I think he would make a pretty good target for somebody like Barack Obama who wants change. Barack Obama is in this race doing as well as he is because he has had the best record on the opposition to the war in Iraq. So I think that that would be probably the most heated one. I have trouble with the fact that, you know, Hillary Clinton, of course, who has been more moderate on the war would be a stark opposition to a John McCain. So I think that most fun we would have would be between Barack Obama and McCain.
This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. With two cases before the Supreme Court featuring the work of drug-sniffing dogs, we thought we'd talk today about the animals themselves; how they're selected, how they're trained and the legal limits on the work they do. Specifically, though, the two dogs in question are Franky and Aldo. Franky the dog who was walked up to the front porch of a private residence is a kind of rockstar dog. He's a chocolate lab. His record for drug detection is near perfect. Aldo, ah, that's another story. He's a German shepherd who sniffed out ingredients used to make meth stashed in a truck outside Tallahassee, but the Florida Supreme Court threw out the conviction based on his find.
They've certainly enjoyed it. You know, having children around, especially three and a fourth on the way, all the time makes the household a lot louder and a lot messier, but, you know, children also bring a lot of life to a household. You know, if my mother- and father-in-law, who are in their late 50s now, were living in a home on their own, probably it would be a lot quieter and a lot more empty, though. And they certainly - in fact they just returned from a trip to Taiwan, their native land of birth, and the first thing they said when I picked them up at the airport is how much they missed the grandkids, and they can't wait to see the grandkids, and it's all about the grandkids.
This is a major concern of ours, so that's why we, as tribal leaders, are going to have to address this, because, you know, this hurricane just totally destroyed, as I said, you know, New Orleans and our communities. But we've had this happen in some of our other tribal communities in Lafourche and Terrebonne Parish, and every time our communities are hit by these hurricanes, we have people who just come back. We have strong ties to our land. It's not just a piece of property for us. It's our way of life. It's our history. It's our heritage, and we have strong ties. So a lot of our tribal members come back and rebuild, knowing that they might be in harm's way again, but we do have some who choose not to come back. You know, they just move and relocate and start a new life, if you will. And that's our concern is that that may happen in this area.
And besides, there is one very important and maybe ironic thing - Neal, you'll smile now - Russian political elite and Russian business are very much pro-Western, despite of the fact that our relations are so chilly. And that's the irony and that's the paradox. Because on the one hand, Russian political leaders, people in the Kremlin and the around the Kremlin, they would like to be a kind of Roman Abramovich on the personal and corporative level. They want to be integrated into the West - to have their families in the West, to have their banking accounts in American and Western banks. And at the same time, they would like to close Russia for the Western impact. So they want to have it both ways - to be pro-Western and to be anti-American in Russia.
Definitely. And what parents need to know is that even if you are not talking directly to your kids, it's true that old saying, little pitchers have big ears. They're going to pick up stuff, either headlines that they're seeing on the news or if you and your spouse are discussing some of the issues, they're going to be listening in. So you need to be careful about and cognizant of how you're speaking to them and watch you're saying. Another thing is kids will always take you literally. So if you make a statement like, oh, you know, we're going to go broke, or there goes all our money. And they're thinking, oh my gosh, we're going to be in the streets. So you really need to watch what you say, don't use dark humor in these situations, because kids do think in terms of black and white. And very basic information goes a long way.
Starting in the mid 1960s, divers dropped deep into the North Sea to tap into the large oil reserves off the coast of Norway. They worked at staggering depths, sometimes 500 feet beneath the surface for weeks on end. Their homes were small pressurized chambers on the surface. The result was a Norwegian oil boom that brought prosperity to the small Scandinavian nation and health problems for the divers that linger to this day. Now a group of divers is suing the Norwegian government. Bernie Schwerdtfeger spent more than a decade as a diver off the Norwegian coast and elsewhere. He joins us from Grand Isle, Louisiana. Welcome to the program.
And so, you know, if you really want to make an argument that addresses what's been going on in the creationists' heads, you have to look at these kind of macroevolution arguments, these large-scale things. So, you know, one way we did this in the Kitzmiller case was with the immune system. Michael Behe had said there's - the scientific literature has no answers on the evolutionary origin of the immune system. He had said this flat out in 1996 in his book. And so one thing I did as a researchers on the case was I went and looked up all the articles and books that had been published on the evolutionary origin of the immune system, and, in fact, a number of tests had been done and published in journals like Science and Nature, the top journals, that established the main explanation for how the immune system arose.
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY; I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking about China's new supercomputer, the fastest in the world, what it means for American computing power, innovation. Do we have anything that works to rival it? And why do we care? Why do we care that we don't have the fastest computer in the world? We're not the leader in innovation in the world anymore. Well, we'll talk about those issues. My guests are Horst Simon, editor for the Top500. He's also deputy lab director at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, California. Rick Stevens, associate lab director for computing, environment and life science research at Argonne National Lab, that's just outside of Chicago. He's also professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. Welcome, gentlemen, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
I think I've heard the expression, "Candy Crush" is like a slot machine on steroids. They're quite similar. Its solitary, so it's just you and you're interacting with the screen. You're not waiting for other people. It's just pure repetition, pure procedure. And then there's the element of speed. You are just playing in rapid succession. I know with slot machines, you can play 1,200 hands an hour. I'm not sure how many games of "Candy Crush" you can play. But my understanding is that it's even more of a just continuous process where you don't even really distinguish between one spin or game and the next. You're just going, going, going. And that, that really is the last characteristic. The continuity - continuous, steady stream of small, little reinforcements.
You know, people have compared this attack to 9/11. Certainly, there is a same sense of vulnerability, in Nairobi especially. I think, though, it's different than 9/11 in one important way. Look, the death toll - official death toll right now is 67, right? But more than 1,000 people were in that mall. It was a busy Saturday afternoon. And they're still telling their stories of survival. I go to dinner parties, I hear a new Westgate story. So the narrative of this event keeps rolling. The terror keeps rippling outward. And in that way, as a terrorist attack, it was and continues to be very effective.
Oh, they're all three very big. And, you know, there are many countries out there where they might have triple-A from two of these rating agencies but not from all three. The question is, in the financial markets and in the eye of the public, does it matter if you have all three? Is two of three good enough? You know, we're seeing the stock market really spiral. Is it spiraling today because of the S&P downgrade, or is it falling because of the really bad economic data that we've had come out in the last couple weeks, showing that the economy is not growing as quickly as we hoped it would.
Yeah, sure. When--yeah, when Steve Robinson, the space-walker, had finished pulling out the second one, he drew back--they drew him back five feet so he was in no danger of hitting the underside, and he said, `Well, let me take some pictures,' and then they started to bring him back and they lifted him up and, as you mentioned, this whole operation was predicted to take about an hour and a half. Instead, it took barely an hour, and so he got up and he was about to be pulled back over the side and into the payload bay of the shuttle, when he said, `Wait, wait, stop,' and his fellow space-walker, Soichi Noguchi, was standing up on the orbiter looking over the side at him, and he said, `Oh, what a great shot. He said, `It's like Soichi rising,' and so he got a picture of Noguchi from the bottom of the orbiter looking at the space station, and these views have never been seen in space before. The pictures that he had were absolutely amazing.
Huh? She'd given me the Malagasy price all right in Malagasy. I realized then that bargaining isn't just about getting the lowest price. It's about having a human interaction. She was telling me that I have to earn the Malagasy price, and just like that, we'd established a relationship. Sure, I can shop only at supermarkets where I know I'll get the same price as everyone else, but there's nothing challenging or human about that. In the end, she brought the price down, and by that time, we'd attracted the attention of everyone around us and we all laughed together at my failed attempt to bargain. I still paid more than the Malagasy price, but if that was the cost of being invited into their world, it was worth it. It was still cheaper than Jumbo.
It's absolutely smart politics. If you look at any poll that asks likely Republican voters if they're going to vote in the election what their top issue is - look at the Kaiser Family Foundation poll that just came out on the 18th of this month. Twenty-five percent say immigration is the No. 1 issue. Twenty-three percent say jobs and the economy is. And one just quick point on this immigration point - immigration is not just about building a wall for the GOP base, but it's also become a proxy for jobs in the economy. So you're hitting two birds with one stone if you're Donald Trump and you're talking about immigration to your GOP base.

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