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I suppose the most significant would be the one that had the most delegates. That would be Washington State. That was a caucus and it attracted record turnout, more than double the turnout record in previous years in Washington State. And it was won convincingly, overwhelming, two-to-one, by Barack Obama. You could also say that the largest number of votes that were cast in any state over the weekend were in Louisiana, which did not have quite as big a delegate payout but which was a primary and therefore had a larger voting base. Also won by Barack Obama, although with a little less than 60 percent.
It's supposedly written by a senior administration official. It's a cry for help, perhaps, from inside, talking about thwarting the president. It may be a watershed, or it may be more water under the bridge. It depends on who the author turns out to be. If it isn't a senior admission - administration official, someone of real importance, that could be problematic for The Times. But those people who are denying they wrote it, we should remember that Deep Throat - Mark Felt denied for 30 years that he was Deep Throat. That was the source for Bob Woodward's first book - big book - first big revelation in the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.
Republicans also made broad statements about what they wanted when they were in the minority only to suddenly struggle to find common ground in the majority. Working with a bill that only needs 50 votes to pass, McConnell hasn't found a way to keep both moderate and conservative Republicans happy. If he had to restart the process on a broader bill, it would need 60 votes to advance. Then moderate Democrats would suddenly become the new swing votes, Democrats like Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Jon Tester of Montana, who are both up for re-election next year in deep red states. Both say they'd be happy to deal but that Republicans would need to drop their push to scale back Medicaid spending.
Kavanaugh's placement on the court cements a conservative 5-4 majority, probably for years to come. Whereas Justice Kennedy, the Reagan appointee that Kavanaugh will replace, was pretty conservative himself - but he occasionally sided with the court's liberal wing, most famously in a string of gay rights cases - Kavanaugh is expected to occupy a space well to the right. So that shifts the center of gravity. You will now have Chief Justice John Roberts as the tipping-point justice. The question is how much restraint Roberts displays in the name of the court's institutional integrity. That will determine whether the shift to the right is gradual or swift. But a shift it will be.
Totally free - going in my purse. I do kind of dig all of the descriptions about wine and how it's made and - because there's a certain writerly quality to how people explain wine. And there's a story behind it, and there's always kind of a little bit of magic that you have to buy into. But our characters in "Wine Country" couldn't give a hoot about what they're drinking and, in fact, feel a little irritated every time someone's trying to explain wine to them. And we would laugh a lot as we were shooting the film because we were in front of these incredible landscapes. We were in the Napa Valley and just looking at these beautiful views and having these wonderful people talk to us about wine. And we were just cutting them off to talk about our - the mundanity of our own lives.
There's another one of those timeline problems. Can you set a timeline for departure from all bases, and the answer is no. Can you say no permanent basis? Yes. One could say that and it's a little baffling why the administration hasn't simply said look, we have no territorial designs. There will be no permanent bases, even if, frankly, once you build the PX and the swimming pool it kind of looks permanent. Finally, Dan Gouré, we just have a few seconds with you left. As this report nears, do you think that this is going to be a pivotal moment in - at least for the last few years of the Bush administration?
Later on, they had a more elaborate system using silver pipes. And still there, the transfusion - these records are - which are really quite detailed. There would always be this moment of, is it going to clot? In fact, in one case report, as they were sitting there for nearly a minute after they had inserted the tubes into the donor and the recipient, and it didn't look like they were going to get much. And so, what they would do is, oh, the room is getting too cold. Let's stoke the fire. Oh, let's rub the patient, right? So we really don't know. They had an elaborate system in the Paris Academy of Sciences to answer just that question that Peter asked. They put two dogs on scales, the old-fashion scales with weights, right?
Well, when I go to Yankee Stadium to attend a Yankees game, I get searched, so does everybody else who goes into the stadium. The very first thing I would do in connection with deterring or stopping or ameliorating the impact of mass shootings in public places would be to increase security. This is not a panacea. This is not a very satisfying or emotionally resonant response. It doesn't ban anything. It seems very mundane. But if I owned a movie theater or I ran a house of worship or I supervise a school, I would make sure that you had armed security the way we do in front of federal court buildings, in front of other government buildings and the type of security that we routinely accept these days at sports stadiums and at airports.
Maybe not, but I think that the Pentagon is acting because there's been a lot of concern within the military about the potential for further foreign attacks to be external attacks to be planned from Libya - Libyan soil in Europe or elsewhere in the West. And I think that what no one wants to see is a repeat of the situation in Syria, where the lawlessness allowed the Islamic State to thrive, to gain resources, to attract foreign fighters. And I think the idea is that by backing these Libyan forces who had taken the initiative, after some period of time, to fight the Islamic State that there's a chance to sort of stamp out this threat where - when it's at a relatively small level in Libya.
...because they're not looking for that. They - you know, whereas we have a totally different search image from when a geologist is looking. They're looking for, you know, what are the age of the rocks, what's the mineral composition of the rocks, different things like that. We're - we are - we want to make sure that we're in the type of rock that we're looking for. We want to make sure we're not in, for example, volcanic rocks or something, you know, that we're never going to find dinosaurs in. So we need to be on the right type of rock, but we're not concentrating as much on the deposition of these rocks. We're looking for what are the inclusions in those rocks, and the inclusion we're looking for those dinosaur fossils or whatever fossils we're looking for.
Yes, both their, you know, retirements are cut in half, and they're also supporting my brother. So my father actually was going to take out a loan for himself to help me out for last semester, and I really didn't want, you know, that on his shoulders after all he's done for me. So that's why I took the break. And the military really was never an important idea to me, and ideally I would like to take a more noble stride (unintelligible) in my opinion, do the Marines. But, you know, not agreeing with the things that we're doing in the world, staying on the home front is something that they can accept and, you know, help me out. And hopefully, the sustainable architecture market will be ready and open for me when I get done with the Reserve program.
You know, I talked with my wife an hour yesterday, because they had not left the States to come here, about whether or not they should come or not. And, you know, she's a lot stronger than I am. Of course she got on the plane anyway. And I'll be happy to have them here, you know. And, you know, we can't live in fear or anger about what happened. All you can do is, you know, send your prayers and sympathies to the family and try to continue what Hugh would want us to do, and that's try to win a gold medal.
But I have to admit, their criticisms do help with my resolve. I'm not sure if I could have made it this far without them constantly teasing me. So I guess I should be thanking my family because there are those times when I'm by myself and I could just go downstairs and pile a plate with a mountain of spaghetti covered in ranch dressing. It helps knowing that if I gain five pounds, even though the people outside my home won't notice, my family will. And they will comment on it. For now, that's one more reason for me to keep turning down that greasy Chinese food every Friday.
My own brother, who had been my favorite growing up, my hero, had been shot and killed by policemen, by white policemen, in my hometown of Gary, Indiana, under circumstances that were inexplicable and that, to this day, don't make sense to me, but that taught me, you know, in a very deep and profound way, the dangers that could take my sons from me. Because Darrell was a great guy. He was funny, and he was sweet, and he was smart and talented. And that people couldn't perceive that was astonishing. And so these kids, who were so vulnerable and who were mine, I had to find some way to prepare them.
According to China's own official figures, it has doubled its defense spending in the last five years. Now that still leaves China way behind the United States on military spending, but China unquestionably has embarked on a major military modernization program, and some analysts also have questioned some of the language in the Pentagon's draft report that got quite specific about various scenarios for dealing with Taiwan. That's in the event of a confrontation between Taiwan and China. But the one thing everyone in the administration seems to agree on, and this is important, is that China's military buildup is of great concern to the United States. Vicky, why is this report getting so much attention this year?
I'm really happy to say that I'm sort of off the commercial food grid. Whatever I don't get from that farm, I would say that I buy 80 percent of what I don't get. And that includes my meats, my eggs, other produce, I buy from local farmers. Now, that's not to say I - that I don't still like, you know, my -some imported cheeses from France and some ham from Italy. But I feel like we have struck a balance in our household and the balance leans - heavily towards supporting local farmers who, in turn, support the local economy. And I think that that's the bigger picture that we all need to see and work towards.
It's actually going very well. We have started so many new programs this year to not only end homelessness but to stop it from ever happening. We've got some creative programs. Our supportive services for veterans and their families, this is VA's first effort and ability to actually help veterans and their families before they become homeless or if they become homeless to rapidly rehouse them. We - it's built on a foundation of case management, and it's a very veteran-centric program. If a veterans needs some assistance with bringing their rent to currency so they can stay in the home they have, we can help them with that. If they've lost that home, we can help them get into a new one.
I think the implications of another war in the Middle East and a military strike on Iran are quite problematic. First of all, we recognize - and I think this is shared across the board, including by former senior Israeli officials - that any strike, best-case scenario an American strike, worst-case scenario an Israeli strike, which would be more limited in its capacity, would only set back the program for some limited period of time. If it were an Israeli strike, it might set back the Iranian nuclear program by as little as a year or as much as a handful of years.
Sure because the problem here is that basically, Secretary Tillerson announced several goals that the United States right now has in Syria, and one of those goals is ensuring that ISIS or al-Qaida never re-emerge. But there are other goals stated that include, for example, supporting the United Nations-led political process, diminishing Iran's influence, making sure the country doesn't have weapons of mass destruction and helping refugees. And it - when - comes to those other goals, it is unclear, you know, what kind of a military operation might be needed, and it seems like a broader military operation might be needed to support those other goals and that some of those military operations could potentially continue for a very long time. And that is not what Security Council resolution here had in mind.
Well, I think they're doing what they can right now without addressing what is perhaps the elephant in the living room, and that's what people have done at these anti-guerrilla wars. Coin is the term we use today with counterinsurgency-type things. There is a new book out by a man named Sean Harissa(ph) that talks about what people have experienced in terms of post-traumatic stress and, of course, suicide. Well, the title of the book is "We Weren't Like This Before." So I think we have to do a lot of introspection about what kinds of things people did overseas that led to some of these problems and perhaps more soul searching than anti-psychotic medications are called for.
I think being aware of how much you've become addicted to the latest information. Thinking about, well, how many push notifications do you have activated? On your social networks, I would advise turning off auto play so you don't see a graphic video that you didn't expect to see. And I think it's a case of people saying, I'm going to go to a website now and I'm going to look for the news. Or I'm going to turn on my radio or television, as opposed to the news finding us on our mobile devices. We're having a nice conversation with a friend or our child and then our phone buzzes and you look at it. And you're like, oh, my goodness, I can't believe this. And I think that uncontrolled nature is what's really troubling.
No, that's absolutely right. And what Clinton saw that a lot of other people didn't is President Bush could be subject to something called the business cycle, just like every other politician. And Bush's popularity was sitting at around 80 or 90 percent after the victory in the Gulf War. Cuomo didn't run I think partly for that reason. But I also think he had personal doubts about possibly himself. There was a curious humility about him. He once said I do desperately want to believe in something better than I am. That's not something you hear from many politicians which is why he was so interesting.
I think so. I mean it goes back to the climate of the times when people were much more scared of terrorism than they are now, much more willing to tolerate this sort of behavior. And according to earlier reports of those intelligence briefings, members of Congress were encouraging them to do everything they possibly could. And so I think it's entirely possible they were briefed, though, I don't know. I think the one clear thing we can draw is we should have some sort of commission looking into this. It should not be run out of the Congress because people there are just too conflicted. So we should have somebody outside the Congress looking into not only what happened in the executive branch, but the legislative.
Well, off the shelf, it will be a $100, but you don't necessarily need to put it on right away. Your old Windows is going to work in your old computer. But eventually you are going to end up with it probably in a new PC, unless you buy an Apple computer. And that's a real risk here for Microsoft. If you're asking users to switch their operating system, they might just take the opportunity to switch to a Mac. But Vista is supposed to be a lot better than XP, more stable, better security, nicer to look at, easier to use. Although it does mean we're going to have to learn new ways of running some of those familiar programs.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Lynn Neary in Washington. Young-adult literature, those teen classics by Judy Blume, Lois Duncan, even Louisa May Alcott, is often dismissed with the faint praise of genre fiction. But the girls and women that devoured these books never forgot them, like author Lizzie Skurnick, who's written a reading memoir about teen fiction. It's called "Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading." She's with us today in Studio 3A, and we want to know what you never stopped reading. What teenage books meant the most to you, and how did they explain or change your childhood experience? Give us a call. The number is 800-989-8255, or send us an email to talk@npr.org, and you can join the conversation at our Web site. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Right. You know, I'm not surprised just because of where we are as a nation. And we've become increasingly divided over the last decade, more than I remember in my whole lifetime. We're being pulled apart, it feels like, as a country. And, you know, with the age of social media, it's - everybody can see it and feel it and contribute to it a lot more, I think. So, no, I'm not surprised. I mean, it wouldn't have mattered what he did after sitting if it wasn't standing, facing, saluting the flag maybe exactly how somebody pictured what - that respect is supposed to be, I think a lot of people still would have been upset. You know, and the irony behind that is there's a lot of people maybe now that do that that didn't do it before.
Yet Cunningham's admission comes after another plea bargain in another congressional ethics probe. Washington consultant Michael Scanlon pleaded guilty last Monday to a sweeping conspiracy charge. He implicated his former partner, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and a congressman, Republican Bob Ney of Ohio. Abramoff and Scanlon had close ties to other lawmakers, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Cunningham's case is unrelated to Abramoff, but polls already show that Americans think Congress doesn't look out for ordinary people. Colgate University Professor Michael Johnston teaches a course on political corruption. He expects that a scandal involving big houses and big boats will linger in people's memories.
I feel like that when I finally got help that the medical community was very serious about it. I think the problem was maybe the delineation between baby blues and postpartum depression isn't all that clear because people do expect a little bit of crying and kind of just hormones wreaking havoc on your system. And so perhaps they don't take it as seriously if you bring that up early on after having a baby. And maybe we do need to look at how to take mothers who kind of know themselves and know that there's something more serious going on - to take them more seriously.
A little practice, absolutely. But a little bit of what I hear here and why he's been able to prolong himself for nine years here is that there is passion and that there is a next level of depth or quality that can be delivered. All too often, when we see the ninth generation of something or the third version of a movie, we wonder what's changed. The technical acumen has gotten better. Probably the VA and the audio, the quality of actors that you can spend has gotten better. But what created that first spark, what created the extra effort to really have the care almost as for me my third child, is the passion behind it. And I think I can see that, why this business has also been able to have been that successful.
Yeah. Charlotte, North Carolina is probably one of the most prosperous areas on the East Coast. We've got something like 3,000 people a month moving here from the Northeast. And of course, you know, that would suggest that it is a destination, a place for people to move - young people and retirees and whatever. Plenty of jobs, banking town, lots of money. Unfortunately, what's happened is it has created a kind of overdevelopment and urban sprawl and fights and crime and not enough seats for kids in the schools. One of the problems that Charlotte has suffered from is lack of identity. In fact, they've actually had Chamber of Commerce meetings where they pulled guys in from the university to talk about how they could finally get themselves an identity because this sprawl is taking away from us.
Well, they got there because what they did is they - home prices over the last decade - particularly though in the last five years - have just zoomed up. We've all seen the stories that Las Vegas prices going up 41 percent a year - southern California, southern Florida, northeast - and so when prices rise that dramatically, people to be able to keep up have been getting bigger and bigger mortgages, and then they started using exotic mortgages. Interest only loans allow you to buy much more house for the money; and pay option arms were you're paying even less - it's a negative amortization loan - you're paying less than you owe, really owe - that also allows you to boost your buying power. So they're spending tremendous amounts of money to buy these houses, and now that the price might be coming down a bit, they find they can't sell, and they're mortgages are converting - their adjustable rate mortgages, they're starting to convert - it's a big problem all the way around.
So, artificial intelligence is known for disrupting all kinds of industries. What about ice cream? What kind of mind-blowing new flavors could we generate with the power of an advanced artificial intelligence? So I teamed up with a group of coders from Kealing Middle School to find out the answer to this question. They collected over 1,600 existing ice cream flavors, and together, we fed them to an algorithm to see what it would generate. And here are some of the flavors that the AI came up with. [Pumpkin Trash Break] (Laughter) [Peanut Butter Slime] [Strawberry Cream Disease] (Laughter) These flavors are not delicious, as we might have hoped they would be. So the question is: What happened? What went wrong? Is the AI trying to kill us? Or is it trying to do what we asked, and there was a problem? In movies, when something goes wrong with AI, it's usually because the AI has decided that it doesn't want to obey the humans anymore, and it's got its own goals, thank you very much. In real life, though, the AI that we actually have is not nearly smart enough for that. It has the approximate computing power of an earthworm, or maybe at most a single honeybee, and actually, probably maybe less. Like, we're constantly learning new things about brains that make it clear how much our AIs don't measure up to real brains. So today's AI can do a task like identify a pedestrian in a picture, but it doesn't have a concept of what the pedestrian is beyond that it's a collection of lines and textures and things. It doesn't know what a human actually is. So will today's AI do what we ask it to do? It will if it can, but it might not do what we actually want. So let's say that you were trying to get an AI to take this collection of robot parts and assemble them into some kind of robot to get from Point A to Point B. Now, if you were going to try and solve this problem by writing a traditional-style computer program, you would give the program step-by-step instructions on how to take these parts, how to assemble them into a robot with legs and then how to use those legs to walk to Point B. But when you're using AI to solve the problem, it goes differently. You don't tell it how to solve the problem, you just give it the goal, and it has to figure out for itself via trial and error how to reach that goal. And it turns out that the way AI tends to solve this particular problem is by doing this: it assembles itself into a tower and then falls over and lands at Point B. And technically, this solves the problem. Technically, it got to Point B. The danger of AI is not that it's going to rebel against us, it's that it's going to do exactly what we ask it to do. So then the trick of working with AI becomes: How do we set up the problem so that it actually does what we want? So this little robot here is being controlled by an AI. The AI came up with a design for the robot legs and then figured out how to use them to get past all these obstacles. But when David Ha set up this experiment, he had to set it up with very, very strict limits on how big the AI was allowed to make the legs, because otherwise ... (Laughter) And technically, it got to the end of that obstacle course. So you see how hard it is to get AI to do something as simple as just walk. So seeing the AI do this, you may say, OK, no fair, you can't just be a tall tower and fall over, you have to actually, like, use legs to walk. And it turns out, that doesn't always work, either. This AI's job was to move fast. They didn't tell it that it had to run facing forward or that it couldn't use its arms. So this is what you get when you train AI to move fast, you get things like somersaulting and silly walks. It's really common. So is twitching along the floor in a heap. (Laughter) So in my opinion, you know what should have been a whole lot weirder is the "Terminator" robots. Hacking "The Matrix" is another thing that AI will do if you give it a chance. So if you train an AI in a simulation, it will learn how to do things like hack into the simulation's math errors and harvest them for energy. Or it will figure out how to move faster by glitching repeatedly into the floor. When you're working with AI, it's less like working with another human and a lot more like working with some kind of weird force of nature. And it's really easy to accidentally give AI the wrong problem to solve, and often we don't realize that until something has actually gone wrong. So here's an experiment I did, where I wanted the AI to copy paint colors, to invent new paint colors, given the list like the ones here on the left. And here's what the AI actually came up with. [Sindis Poop, Turdly, Suffer, Gray Pubic] (Laughter) So technically, it did what I asked it to. I thought I was asking it for, like, nice paint color names, but what I was actually asking it to do was just imitate the kinds of letter combinations that it had seen in the original. And I didn't tell it anything about what words mean, or that there are maybe some words that it should avoid using in these paint colors. So its entire world is the data that I gave it. Like with the ice cream flavors, it doesn't know about anything else. So it is through the data that we often accidentally tell AI to do the wrong thing. This is a fish called a tench. And there was a group of researchers who trained an AI to identify this tench in pictures. But then when they asked it what part of the picture it was actually using to identify the fish, here's what it highlighted. Yes, those are human fingers. Why would it be looking for human fingers if it's trying to identify a fish? Well, it turns out that the tench is a trophy fish, and so in a lot of pictures that the AI had seen of this fish during training, the fish looked like this. (Laughter) And it didn't know that the fingers aren't part of the fish. So you see why it is so hard to design an AI that actually can understand what it's looking at. And this is why designing the image recognition in self-driving cars is so hard, and why so many self-driving car failures are because the AI got confused. I want to talk about an example from 2016. There was a fatal accident when somebody was using Tesla's autopilot AI, but instead of using it on the highway like it was designed for, they used it on city streets. And what happened was, a truck drove out in front of the car and the car failed to brake. Now, the AI definitely was trained to recognize trucks in pictures. But what it looks like happened is the AI was trained to recognize trucks on highway driving, where you would expect to see trucks from behind. Trucks on the side is not supposed to happen on a highway, and so when the AI saw this truck, it looks like the AI recognized it as most likely to be a road sign and therefore, safe to drive underneath. Here's an AI misstep from a different field. Amazon recently had to give up on a résumé-sorting algorithm that they were working on when they discovered that the algorithm had learned to discriminate against women. What happened is they had trained it on example résumés of people who they had hired in the past. And from these examples, the AI learned to avoid the résumés of people who had gone to women's colleges or who had the word "women" somewhere in their resume, as in, "women's soccer team" or "Society of Women Engineers." The AI didn't know that it wasn't supposed to copy this particular thing that it had seen the humans do. And technically, it did what they asked it to do. They just accidentally asked it to do the wrong thing. And this happens all the time with AI. AI can be really destructive and not know it. So the AIs that recommend new content in Facebook, in YouTube, they're optimized to increase the number of clicks and views. And unfortunately, one way that they have found of doing this is to recommend the content of conspiracy theories or bigotry. The AIs themselves don't have any concept of what this content actually is, and they don't have any concept of what the consequences might be of recommending this content. So, when we're working with AI, it's up to us to avoid problems. And avoiding things going wrong, that may come down to the age-old problem of communication, where we as humans have to learn how to communicate with AI. We have to learn what AI is capable of doing and what it's not, and to understand that, with its tiny little worm brain, AI doesn't really understand what we're trying to ask it to do. So in other words, we have to be prepared to work with AI that's not the super-competent, all-knowing AI of science fiction. We have to be prepared to work with an AI that's the one that we actually have in the present day. And present-day AI is plenty weird enough. Thank you. (Applause)
Hi. My name's Kathleen, and I'm from Athens, Ohio, and I'm really nervous. I call in a lot, but it's really different being here. I was just in New Orleans in April and with my youngest daughter, and she was considering attending Loyola. I was shocked--I hadn't been n New Orleans in 25 years. I was shocked at how the disparity, the gap was much wider than it had been 25 years before that. I like to interview people, David, so I began to ask a lot of the service workers who were working at Tulane and Loyola what they were making, if they had health care. Then when I was riding the trolleys, I talked to a lot of the older women. Many of them were maids working in the--What's the district there?
I think that would be a terrible--I mean, everybody realizes that. And it's been talked about--they were talking about it last night, they were talking about it right now, but I think it's really the last option. If they can't do anything, if everybody starts to walk away, then there's really--there isn't much choice. But I think that that would be a genuine political crisis that you would add on to every other crisis that's here and the guerrilla insurgency, and I think everybody realizes that it could really send things into a tailspin and make them worse than they are now, and I think everybody wants to avoid that--most people want to avoid it.
This is TALK OF THE NATION Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Autism rates are on the rise, according to numbers released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease may affect one out of every 150 children. That is up from about one in 160 in the last survey period. Researchers aren't sure why autism rates are rising because they don't exactly know what causes autism. There have been lots of suggestions, ranging from mercury in vaccines to better detection of the disease. The one area that researchers feel will yield a trustworthy clue is in the genetics of the people with the disease.
You really hit a really important point that I think the scientific community is partly responsible. We tend to sometimes hype things so much. And we have to be aware. You know, we've got to be careful about saying what is likely to happen, and we want to promote things. After all, the Large Hadron Collider costs a lot of money and we try to convince people to spend money to do something. And we often like to say it's going to recreate the early universe. It's going to - and sometimes that comes back to bite us. I think it's very important that scientists try, of course, to get people interested in what we're doing but not over-hype the situation because it's always bad. And in fact, it's exactly that if we say we're guaranteed to discover all these new particles of Large Hadron Collider and we see nothing, then how can we come back and later say, you know, that was what we really wanted. Okay.
(Reading, as Crumpet the Elf) This afternoon I was stuck being photo elf for Santa Santa. Santa Santa has an elaborate little act for the children. He'll talk to them and give a hearty chuckle and ring his bells and then he asks them to name their favorite Christmas carol. Santa then asks if they'll sing it for him. The children are shy and don't want to sing out loud, so Santa Santa says, oh, little elf, little elf, help young Brenda (ph) here sing that favorite carol of hers. Late in the afternoon, a child said she didn't know what her favorite Christmas carol was. Santa Santa suggested "Away In A Manger." The girl agreed to it but didn't want to sing because she didn't know the words. Santa Santa said, oh little elf, little elf, come sing "Away In The Manger" for us. It didn't seem fair that I should have to solo, so I sang it the way Billie Holiday might have sang if she'd put out a Christmas album.
Experts call a slum any settlement that is overcrowded, where people live without title to the land or without safe water, sanitation or durable materials. That covers lots of ground, and it doesn't tell us whether things are getting better or getting worse. Around the world, migrants are carving out new neighborhoods, first building shantytowns and then more permanent housing. You might find schoolteachers or professionals living in these so-called slums. But other slums are pits of decline. These can be middle-class neighborhoods that got overcrowded and deteriorated, or they are newer settlements that never turned the corner. These slums sent workers out into the rest of the city as domestic labor, street vendors, prostitutes, beggars and drug traffickers. These workers bring back only the bare minimum to survive. In real life, it can still be difficult to distinguish between the two, and there are lots of opinions about whether we can and what we should do with what we find out.
That is correct. This statute only applies to public servants. And as you know, the First Amendment, it's an absolute so you can't lie about people, you can't publish their private facts and you can't assault them, threaten them with imminent bodily harm. But in this instance, Johnson did not threaten the police with imminent bodily harm, or if he did, he did so so long ago that there's no reason to think that today, he still threatening them. So there's real a question, again, about whether he actually committed the crime and if so, would the punishment that's in light of the fact that he wrote this in a context of an artistic expression.
Well, that is extremely kind. Oh, of course, gratefully and with warm heart, and I return it. And I - you know, since we're in the apologizing mode, I'm very sorry that you felt that I had mistreated people whom you admire. I was trying to make a broader case, and you, in a manner of speaking, got dragged into it because of the comparisons that have been made between you and Judy Blume, because to look at your work beside her work was - it was just an instructive - it was an entry point for readers to consider how young adult literature may have changed, since you have in commonality the idea that you are both in some means a version of Judy Blume. But thank you very much for your gracious words, completely accepted.
Well, I think that, number one, parents are very busy. They're overburdened. They're working hard, working double jobs. I mean, it's really a burden to have to be a parent and then also have to be a biochemist and have to decide, read the literature, you know, what vaccines are good, what vaccines aren't good. In the background, we have these increasing incidents of autism, which is incredibly frightening. Then you have talking heads on the media saying it may be related to vaccines. So, all of that have topped parents in their tracks from wanting to take any chance that they were going to expose their child to something that might be dangerous. I totally understand that and sympathize with that.
The Arctic Monkeys songs are camera phone shots of working class life, from its scramble to earn money to its weekend hedonism. One big reason WHATEVER PEOPLE SAY I AM, THAT'S WHAT I'M NOT has found such an audience in Britain is that its sound and images resonate with the young. People recognize themselves and their frustrated emotions here. There's nothing especially original in the Artic Monkeys' music, but they perform it with a swagger, the jagged edges deliberately intact. The jerky restless rhythms are infectious and their choruses soar into the brain. That sound should win American fans. The trick will be whether their shadowed vision of English life can fully cross the Atlantic.
Happy Thanksgiving to you. I had a son when I was very young, and he was adopted before he was born, basically. And recently, we reconnected, and it's truly amazing. We really enjoy one another's company, and over the weekend, he brought his wife to meet me from Chicago, and we had a great visit. The person I would really like to talk to is the woman who raised him, his mother, his real mother, and to find out things like what it was a like to have this wonderful child and whether she ever wondered if he would be different if he were her birth child. And - because I'd always thought that the babies, you know, they learn their facial expressions from the person that they're looking at. But this man is 39 now, and he - when we smile, we smile alike, and we laugh at the same things, and we have the same kind of weird, quirky intellect. And�
Right. We're talking about the world's two biggest economies, so an all-out trade war would be destructive on both sides. And the ripple effects would go global. Probably the effects be worse for China than for the U.S., but it would be painful here as well. Although Trump claimed in his tweet that China is bearing the cost of the existing tariffs, most analysts say that's not true. Chinese companies may be absorbing some of the cost of these tariffs, but the bulk is being passed on to U.S. businesses and consumers. And if the tariffs were in fact to go from 10 to 25 percent, as he threatened in his tweets, that price tag would only go up. We saw a warning about those effects yesterday from the National Retail Federation. They say it would cost jobs. It would cost consumers money. And the fallout would be even bigger if Trump followed through on a threat to expand the tariffs.
And we have - the iceman was excavated in 1991. He's dated at 5,600 years old and he's tattooed. We have Pazyryk chiefs, 3,500 years old mummified bodies -glorious tattoos with stags and leaping hares and tigers - almost a modern approach to the way in which they're laid out and placed on the skin. It's been with us forever. It's just ebbed in and out popularity. And largely, the American culture is based on European culture and the immigrants from Europe. I am a firm believer that the prejudice against tattooing was brought with the early settlers, and most of them with religious agendas. And I think that goes back to 325 Council of Nicaea, when Constantine outlawed tattooing as a pagan practice - actually, outlawed penal tattooing of the face as a pagan practice.
Good prevention in most diseases is worth the pound of cure. But again, when it translates to the patient frequently is they feel so bad, they come in for an average, for an instance an average of emergency department bill for just a nursing care I'd say you'd get two medicines say you get a medicine for nausea and maybe four dollars or something for the aches and pains from which you're suffering and a bag of IV fluid. The average charge for that is $954 not withstanding if you have respiratory symptoms or older chest x-ray is which is about 195 as well as then the physician charge, if it's a level two or three, you're looking at least $180. So it really translates into, again, the information. How does that translate into saving health care? The patient, those with or without insurance offers $1,500. I need to look more into the site but it seems like a great idea. Just maybe it's a tool that we need to find the right bolt to help it screw down some things.
Right. So that was a - that's a great story, actually. That was Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, and they discovered it in 1964. And they basically had this - they found noise in an antennae they were building, and they said what was that? And it turns out it's the same noise that's in your television when it's between stations. And it turns out that's the same noise from the beginning of the universe. And they originally thought it might be bird droppings or something, and then they finally discovered wow, this is left over from the Big Bang. And so this COBE, this satellite was able to measure it in very, very precisely and to look for actual differences in temperature - very small differences in temperature of the radiation.
Jack Shaffer pokes fun at us all the time. The - because we love, you know, tumult and change in political horserace coverage, and that's what's happening here. Also, Republicans have been upset and unhappy, so there's a real reason to cover Thompson because a lot of those who've been upset with the current crop - there are 10, of them by the way; Thompson will make it 11 Republicans running for president - they're upset with the current crop, and they see him as a savior. And so it is a legitimate story in addition to our affection for it in terms of the horserace.
Yeah, that's true. My mother's side of the family--completely musical from--my uncle was Ray Bryant, a really famous jazz piano player, and my mother had a--she would always teach piano. She was the one there that had a piano, so Ray would come over with a bunch of people all the time and rehearse. And I had this idea that I wanted to play violin and they said, `You know, you're not going to stick to violin.' And I said, `Oh, no, I want to play violin.' And so I took violin lessons for about five or six years, and, then, like they said, I quit. And that's when I wanted to play guitar, and that's when they said, `Oh, no.'
Yeah, I - but I do think it's a decent that people who are up for election who have done it - Jeff Flake in Arizona - are in trouble. But I think what the Republican elected officials have to look at is it doesn't matter if you're John Barrasso, who's a Republican senator from Wyoming, or anywhere else. Bannon and company are coming out to get you. So you're either going to try to be like them, in which case you're probably going to lose 'cause you're just going to be a second-rate version of them. Or you're going to have to stand up for what you believe in. And so the idea that there's some safety, some safe hiding ground for establishment Republicans is just not true.
Actually, the caller makes a good point. Restrictions, you know, and the strings attached to a lot of--or some of the federal aid are a problem. Remember that the rhetoric initially was locals know best. I mean, that's what we've been hearing to--you know, forever that locals, local school boards, local teachers, classroom teachers, the people in the trenches know best, and yet, you know, there's a big question as to whether this law is either too proscriptive or whether it's allowing states to go back--in fact, if they've had to abandon successful practices. You know, how easy is it for some of these states to continue those given that the mandates of the law become and have become, and certainly among both Republican and Democratic governors, these are proscriptive. These are mandates that are, in some cases, in their views unfunded or they're essentially forcing school boards and locals to adopt practices that they may not even agree with. And once you tie money to these things it's very hard to unbundle that money to spend on things that may be working better.
The Times report says Trump lost so much money during the decade that he was able to completely avoid paying taxes in eight of the 10 years from 1985 to 1994, but Trump noted in a tweet this morning that big losses on paper, at least, were common in real estate at the time. He said developers got massive write-offs that allowed them to declare a loss in most cases. It was sport, he said. It's called tax shelter. Tomasz Piskorski, who teaches real estate at Columbia Business School, says that was pretty much true. Real estate developers had lots of legal ways to avoid paying taxes.
Growing up, you know, I never - my first Indian friend was made in New York because it wasn't that easy to get visas and go over it and spend time. Despite the fact we are - Karachi is an hour and a half from Bombay, which is exactly the same time it takes from Karachi to Lahore. But the shared history's there, as Sonia said. And it - I think it's been manifested now with Indian films being allowed to be shown in Pakistan for the first time in almost four decades and they're doing phenomenally well in the cinemas. What I feel when I went to India with my film is, there is - even now, some kind of - I don't know if it's ignorance but maybe a lack of understanding about what is Pakistan because India doesn't get Pakistani TV channels, for example.
Oh, most definitely. I remember when I was a young kid, we had this earthquake in 1970. I remember our whole house was - oh, well, there were seamstresses doing, you know, quilts and comforters, and there were all sorts of activity going on. It wasn't just in our house. I remember a lot of my friends, similar things were happening in their house. And it's almost spontaneous, you know. People just collected materials and donated it to the government, and they helped distribute them. And now, I think because of all sorts of issues, a lot of people basically feel more comfortable donating to private organizations because they're, if nothing, they're far more efficient, you know, and less corrupt, obviously.
They think he has accomplices. There is a group called the Hofstad Network in the Netherlands. It's a group of young Muslims from The Hague in Amsterdam, and they think Bouyeri is a member of that group. But in the murder of van Gogh, Bouyeri acted alone. Only he did it. And maybe he had help--somebody gave him a gun, somebody gave him money--but the killing itself, only Bouyeri did that. Later this year, probably in November, there will be a separate trial, and in that trial, all the members of this Hofstad Network will be sentenced for membership of a criminal organization. And in that trial, Bouyeri will also be charged.
I mean, if they're taking you out for dinner, it's kind of nice if he says, `Honey, I got the check,' even though it's still coming out of your joint bank account. If you're dating, and I tell women this all the time, I think it's unfair to expect the man to pay all the time or most of the time. And women like to say that they're all--you know, women libbers and we're--you know, bring home the bacon and all that, but when you really deep-down ask 'em, they want the guy to pay. But if you're dating frequently with a person, I think you should be mindful of his budget as well, and maybe one time you pick it up, one time he picks it up. But be careful about that because sometimes the women will pick it up when it's McDonald's and he'll pick it up when it's a five-star restaurant. So make sure it's fair.
You know, vitamins are important, and certainly, there's some good evidence that certain kinds of vitamins, particularly the B vitamins, for example, have an important link with how memory goes as we age. B vitamins are--you can't obtain--these are not produced from within. You have to actually get them through food, through supplements. Those are important and certainly there are vitamin deficiencies, certain kind of B vitamin deficiencies, which can produce severe memory problems, so that's critical. And often, one of the things we look for in patients presenting with memory complaints, we want to have a good idea of what their nutritional status is, what they're eating, maybe what they're missing, supplementing things. It's important.
Absolutely. I think that's the real central issue that we have to look at head on when dealing with Ahmadinejad is precisely what Babeq has mentioned, which is his popularity, you know, both at some point in Iran when he was popular and around the world and the Islamic world especially is simply symptomatic of people's resentment internationally at American policies in the Middle East. When - I've had the same experience traveling and, you know, in other Arab capitals. You get into a taxi and someone finds out you're Iranian, they immediately want to, you know, rave about how much they love Ahmadinejad and it's precisely because he provides an outlet for all of this resentment at Iraq falling apart and at support - what is considered blind support for Israel. And so, really, what we - if we want to understand the phenomenon, it's a symptom rather than a phenomenon in its own right.
Well, there's a number of things here. What we basically got was a series of photographs and a series of documents which are in the investigation into what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes. Basically what the photographs showed was Mr. de Menezes who had had his--basically his brains blown out by the police officers on the train. A story that had gone around at the beginning was that he was wearing a heavily padded jacket and that may have shown--revealed that he was wearing basically a suicide bomb underneath it. In fact, the pictures reveal very clearly that he was wearing a light denim jacket. At the time when the story first came out as well, there'd been a number of reports that he'd vaulted the barriers at the Tube station. This has proven to be totally incorrect. In fact, he used a ticket to go through the barriers, walked down and when he entered to the bottom of the stairs--or got to the bottom of the escalator he saw a train was in the station. And he did what normal Londoners would do at that point and run for the train because they tend to go very quickly.
By the late-18th century, Native Americans and European newcomers had lived together in the Americas for nearly 400 years. They had cajoled, fought, killed and hated one another, and Europeans had built colonies on coastal plains and along major river valleys, dispossessing dozens of Indigenous societies – with the crucial help of smallpox and other new deadly diseases that wreaked havoc in Native communities. Yet in 1776, much of the continent was still under Indigenous control. That changed, with shocking rapidity, when the 13 colonies rebelled against British rule and became the United States of America. Liberated from British restrictions on western settlement, self-styled American pioneers began to push beyond the Appalachian Mountains, seeking land and personal independence. That the West belonged to Native nations who had lived there for multiple generations mattered little to them. In April 1832, the US president Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the ruling of John Marshall, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court. In Worcester v Georgia, the Marshall Court had decided that Native American nations retained their ‘natural rights as the undisputed possessors of the soil from time immemorial’. Dozens of treaties between the Native nations and the US had sanctioned these rights. Jackson, however, was unmoved. By 1850, in a sustained campaign of ethnic cleansing, 100,000 Indians had been deported west of the Mississippi. Nearly 200 years after Jackson, on 27 July 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a lawsuit against the US Army Corps of Engineers over the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP). The pipeline was to pass under the Missouri River north of Bismarck, but the citizens of the capital objected to the risks: pipelines tend to leak and cause environmental degradation and foul drinking water. ETP revised its plans, moving the crossing near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, where it traversed Native burial sites and risked contaminating the reservation’s water reservoir. ETP bulldozers moved in, ignoring the requests of three US departments to halt construction in a reservation where 47 per cent of the population lives in poverty. The president Barack Obama ordered an environmental review. He vowed to regard the Indians as sovereign nations. Obama’s pledge turned to a dead letter when Donald Trump became US president in 2017. Four days into his presidency, Trump expedited the construction of the pipeline. Immediately, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Phyllis Young, Joye Braun and other Sioux women mounted a powerful resistance. Separated by 185 years, Jackson’s and Trump’s executive interventions both sit at the heart of modern Native American life and history. Both concern sovereignty, a vitally important concept – at once clearcut and elusive – in the world of politics and states. It can be defined as the supreme right of a self-designated body of people to govern itself and control its territory and resources without outside interference – with the crucial caveat that it has to be recognised by others to be effective. Together, through these two actions, we can see something essential about the rights of Native peoples in North America, past and present. Jackson’s and Trump’s assertions of US power over Indigenous peoples call attention to their singular political status as nations within a nation, and they speak to the continuing Indigenous struggle for sovereignty. Treaties are the quintessential tool of international diplomacy, and the US has long practice of making them with the peoples whom it dispossessed from their ancestral lands through brutal and at times genocidal methods. Emerging from the coalescing American empire and the rapacity of American capitalism, Indian Removal marked the erosion of Indigenous sovereignty east of the Mississippi Valley. It was the Lakota – a Native people that includes the Hunkpapa, the Minneconjou, the Oglala, the Sans Arc, the Sicangu, the Sihasapa and the Two Kettles – who mounted the longest and most comprehensive opposition to US expansionism. The riches promised by King Cotton fuelled a rapid and ruthless implementation of US control and sovereignty in the Black Belt, the part of the American South where geological processes left soils almost perfectly suited for cotton cultivation. In a striking contrast to the forced mass removal of Indigenous Southerners, the Lakota thwarted American imperialism in the West for generations, all the way to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. To do so, the Lakota had to reinvent themselves as a formidable warrior society. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud and other iconic warrior-leaders embodied that transformation. That history is well-known. What has remained more obscure is how the Lakota mounted a nearly two-centuries-long campaign to preserve Indigenous sovereignty in the face of a US empire that saw them as wards and, when fighting and killing them, as internal enemies. Military resistance against the US empire was often a blunt affair that demanded direct violent action, materiel and calculated balancing between objectives and acceptable losses. In contrast, the Lakota assertion of sovereignty demanded creativity, flexibility and tenacity. Sovereignty in an Indigenous context can be best understood as a self-identified group’s right and capacity to govern itself against foreign powers that claim superior authority over it. The historian James J Sheehan in 2006 described state-making as ‘the ongoing process of making, unmaking, and revising sovereign claims’. Replace ‘state’ with ‘nation’, and we have a blueprint for the startling history of the generations-long Lakota struggle for sovereignty, which has witnessed numerous reiterations of what Indigenous sovereignty is and how it has been challenged, undercut and reasserted. On 24 January 1848, about 100 miles north of San Francisco, a carpenter working for the Swiss émigré John Sutter found a yellow substance that turned out to be gold. Nine days later, in Guadalupe Hidalgo near Mexico City, Nicholas Trist and the Mexican envoys signed a treaty that ended the US-Mexico War and transferred about half a million square miles of Mexican soil to the US. Virtually overnight, California became the most prized place on Earth. People rushed in: in 1850 alone, 50,000 overlanders crossed the central plains. In between the fortuneseekers and the prospect of California gold stood the Lakota, the most populous member of a larger Sioux alliance, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, or the Seven Council Fires. Since the early 18th century, the Lakota had gradually expanded westward from the Great Lakes region. By 1850, they had grown into a formidable power in the heart of the continent, dominating much of the Great Plains. When the migrants to California carried in deadly diseases, the Lakota began attacking the unauthorised newcomers. American officials grew nervous: the overland trails, the United States’ umbilical cord to distant California, was in danger of being severed. The mid-19th-century US was a territorial behemoth but a military midget. The Regular Army, reduced after the Mexican War, consisted of roughly 9,000 enlisted men and fewer than 900 officers. The Lakota alone could put 3,000-4,000 warriors on horseback and arm most of them with guns and metal weapons, which they secured from American fur companies that craved their high-quality buffalo robes. The Lakota were but one of the many Plains Indian nations that had experienced a heady expansion of power and reach with the introduction of horses. Military action against these horse nations would have been reckless. War also seemed unnecessary. The US had just won a stunning victory over the Republic of Mexico. It was a victory that owed much to the Comanches who had raided and pillaged northern Mexico for years, weakening the region for the US invasion. By 1850, the Americans saw the rest of the West as a soft target. The removal of Indigenous Southerners – Indians whom they deemed as at least semi-civilised – had conditioned them to see the continent as a collection of blocks – of land, of people, of wealth – all conquerable and absorbable. The block they now considered, the Great Plains, appeared to them a transitory world inhabited by wild and disorganised hunters whose nomadic way of life was already doomed: the bison herds, the foundation of their economy, seemed to be fading. Many Americans now believed that they enjoyed a special divine fate and that God had ordained for them to take possession of the continent from lesser people in the name of progress and liberty. In 1845, John Louis O’Sullivan, an Irish immigrant and journalist, called it a ‘manifest destiny’. Guided and blinded by this providential thinking, US policymakers thought that they could be generous. In the spring of 1851, they invited several Plains Indian nations to a grand summit at Fort Laramie in Wyoming, on the North Platte River. There they would negotiate the boundaries and roads through the continental grasslands into California. Some 10,000 Indians arrived, drawn by promises of generous distribution of goods and gifts. The US plan was both ambitious and clearcut: the midcontinent was to be carved up into three sections: a southern reservation, or a ‘colony’, for the Comanche, the Kiowa and the Plains Apache; a middle one for the southern Cheyenne and the southern Arapaho; and a northern one for the Lakota, the Crow, the Assiniboine, the Mandan, the northern Cheyenne and the northern Arapaho. In between the blocks, there were slices of land that would accommodate two overland arteries, the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail, carrying settlers to the Pacific Coast. The Lakota commanded the midcontinent like an imperial power, moving over it at will What the Americans did not realise was that they were facing an Indigenous power that, in the great interior of North America, eclipsed them in military might, political prestige, diplomatic reach and commercial prowess. Lakota spokesmen explained to the US envoys the realities of the steppe. Black Hawk, an Oglala, rejected the carving out of the plains into reservations: ‘You have split the country, and I don’t like it,’ he protested. The Lakota did not understand territory as a block of land, but as spheres where they could move freely and access resources. ‘What we live upon, we hunt for, and we hunt from the Platte to the Arkansas,’ Black Hawk insisted, superimposing a Lakota view of sovereignty over the US one. Bison movements, not fixed boundaries, would define the Lakota range and sovereignty. Black Hawk’s demands contradicted the Americans’ block design for the grasslands almost entirely. The central plains south of the Platte Valley, Black Hawk noted, belonged to the Lakota by the right of conquest – they had ‘whipped’ their rivals out of them – and the Americans caved. To a significant degree, the resulting treaty represented superior Lakota military power. It recognised the Lakota’s title to 100,000 square miles and – covertly – authorised them to range and hunt wherever necessary. The US had effectively handed over a huge chunk of the mid-continent to an Indigenous nation of some 13,000 people. US delegates had come to Fort Laramie to curb Indigenous sovereignty. Instead, they returned east with their own severely constrained. The US would be reduced to paying for access through lands they considered theirs – $50,000 a year for 50 years. The Lakota political victory exemplifies what have been called ‘imperfect geographies’ of empire. Thwarted by the Lakota and other nomads, the US government had to consign itself to corridors of control through the vast sea of grass that is the Great Plains. The Lakota commanded the midcontinent like an imperial power, moving over it at will. It was US sovereignty there that was fragmented, contested and full of holes. In reality, US authority there consisted of a few trading posts, garrisons and waystations. It was the Lakota who controlled access to the West. They allowed civilians to pass through, but not forts or soldiers on their lands. As long as the Americans behaved properly, paying for access and sharing their wares and technology, the Lakota found this layered sovereignty acceptable. But in 1863, gold was discovered in Montana, and the US Army began to build unauthorised military forts along the Bozeman Trail. The Lakota and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies went to war, defeating the US Army with relative ease. The US War Department ordered the forts closed, and Red Cloud – after whom the war would be named – came to Fort Laramie and made the Americans ‘touch the pen’. US commissioners and Oglala chiefs meeting for the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. Courtesy the National Anthropological ArchivesThe resulting Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 marked another stage in the evolution of Lakota ideas about power, territory and sovereignty. The Lakota-led Indigenous alliance had defeated a rising industrial giant – an imperial nation-state – in the battlefield, forcing it to negotiate over terms. The resulting treaty created the Great Sioux Reservation and formalised state presence in Lakota lives in the form of government agencies, schools and missionaries. The Lakota, it seemed, had conceded to a plural or limited sovereignty over their domain. In reality, however, the treaty bolstered Lakota power. Article 2 set apart for ‘absolute and undisturbed use and occupation’ a reservation of more than 48,000 square miles for the Lakota (and some Yanktonai). Article 16 designated the lands north of the North Platte River as ‘unceded Indian territory’. The crucial Article 11 reaffirmed the Lakota’s right ‘to hunt on any lands north of the North Platte, and on the Republican Fork of the Smoky Hill, so long as the buffalo may range thereon and justify the chase’. By linking the ownership of land and sovereignty to the bison and the hunt, the 1868 treaty seemed to have acknowledged the Lakota practice of delineating territory in terms of access to resources rather than through boundaries. But like many Indigenous-colonial treaties, the Laramie treaty was riddled with inconsistencies. It did not define the northern boundary of the unceded territory, thus unintentionally authorising Lakota expansion deep into the northern plains, and it confirmed Lakota hunting rights in the central plains. Moreover, by linking the Lakota domain to the viability of the hunt, the treaty effectively compelled the Lakota to expand and dispossess other Native people to preserve their sovereignty. Lakota national viability and the migrations of the bison had to overlap, almost perfectly. Controlling the Article 11 hunting domains became a Lakota priority. This could lead only to war. When the US Indian Office proposed to build a government agency for the Oglala in 1870, the Lakota welcomed it because it facilitated the distribution of treaty goods and rations. Led by Red Cloud, the Oglala insisted that the agencies could not be located within the reservation. They would have to be outside of its boundaries, near the North Platte River. This stipulation baffled US agents. The Oglala, they reported, ‘are extremely sensitive in regard to the slightest encroachment upon their reservation … and have objected even to the establishment of an agency for their own benefit within the limits.’ The agents of the Indian Office had missed the point. Article 11 of the Treaty of Fort Laramie had in effect allocated a massive block of land for the Lakota. They meant to retain sovereignty over it by keeping foreign bodies out of it. US policymakers had anticipated neither the full implications of Article 11 of the treaty, nor the Lakota commitment to their sovereignty. Yet they welcomed both developments for their own reasons. The Lakota practice of their sovereign rights soon led other Native peoples to seek deals with the US government, because the Lakota soon dominated nearly all of the northern plains, ranging deep into Canada, pushing rival Native hunters out of their way. Desperate to secure American protection, the Shoshone ceded the mineral-rich western portion of their reservation to the US, and the Ute traded their large reservation in the Colorado territory for a much smaller one farther west. In the central plains to the south, the Lakota fought with the Pawnee, the Ponca, the Omaha and the Otoe-Missouria for hunting rights, and the US pressured the weakened groups to move to Indian Territory, thereby completing another crucial stage in its effort to lock the continent’s Natives in a single confined spot. The Lakota and the Americans were both imperial nations, but they managed to coexist in Western North America for decades not because they were similar but because they were so different. The two nations – the two empires – saw the world, the land and the people on it in incompatible ways. The variance allowed a kind of common ground to arise where they pursued their different visions for themselves. As in many other places where Indigenous and colonial regimes brushed against one another, expedient and creative misunderstandings allowed them to live in peace, even after brutal outbursts of violence. The most useful misunderstandings involved sovereignty and its different meanings for the two people. The Lakota had to be domesticated. Nearly everything that made them who they are fell under attack In 1874, when George Custer’s Black Hills Expedition spotted traces of gold in the sand and triggered a massive gold rush, the Lakota changed their views once again. For them, the Black Hills – Pahá Sápa – was their birthplace as a nation. Pahá Sápa was to the Lakota ‘the heart of everything that is’ and therefore inviolate. Custer’s intrusion amounted to an unmitigated assault on the sovereign rights of the Lakota and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies. Before this violation, the Lakota had accepted, even embraced, layered forms of sovereignty. Now they adopted a distinctly territorial stance and closed the Black Hills to outsiders. To keep prospectors out, the US Army began patrolling the eastern face of the mountain range. But the driving goal was just to buy time for the president Ulysses S Grant to find legal ways to extinguish the Lakota’s title to the gold-laden hills. It was the collision of the different Lakota-US sovereignty regimes that caused the Great Sioux War of 1876. The US government forced a clash with the most powerful Indigenous nation in North America, which led to the Battle of the Little Bighorn and a devastating US defeat. The Lakota had won the war but they lost the peace. The bison herds were nearly gone, destabilised and destroyed by railroads, cattle ranches and reckless commercial hunting. Within a year of Custer’s Last Stand, nearly all Lakota lived within the Great Sioux Reservation, boxed in and monitored by government agents. By US logic, there were not supposed to be any sovereign Native nations left within the US, and the Lakota – the killers of Custer – had to be domesticated. Nearly everything that made them who they are fell under attack. Bills and policies poured in from Washington, DC tearing down Lakota sovereignty piece by piece. In the Fall of 1876, a vindictive Congress passed legislation cancelling all government support for the Lakota unless they relinquished all their lands outside the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills. US government officials sought to suppress the Sun Dance and other ceremonies, and hundreds of Lakota children were forced into off-reservation boarding schools. In 1889, Congress broke the Great Sioux Reservation into five small ones, shattering the unified territorial foundation of Lakota sovereignty. Amid the destruction, inspired by the Paiute holy man Wovoka, Lakota began dancing to bring back dead kin and bison herds and rid the world of white invaders and diseases. This was the Ghost Dance movement. Much of it was symbolic, but its subversive undertones alarmed Indian agents, army officers and settlers who reckoned the movement dangerous. The US government sent the Seventh Cavalry – Custer’s old regiment – to restore order. They escorted the supposedly hostile Indians to Wounded Knee Creek. Army units have long memories. The next day, at least 270 Lakota – children, women and men – were dead. The Lakota had become a captive people, confined to reservations that sometimes seemed less homelands than prisons. The Indian Office continued to attack their religious traditions, pressure them to dress and talk like white Americans, and use their land according to capitalist principles. By withholding rations, government officials coerced Lakota to lease and sell their land to white farmers and cattle ranchers. Christian churches proliferated, and the Great Spirit became associated with the Christian God. The Lakota continued to weather violations of their sovereignty. In one particularly symbolic transgression, Americans carved colossal presidential heads (Mt Rushmore) into Six Grandfathers, a spiritually alive section of Pahá Sápa; the initial plan to include Sacagawea, Crazy Horse and Red Cloud was dropped. The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act divided the Oglala and the Sicangu into traditionalist full-bloods, who welcomed the Act as a means of cultural preservation, and progressive mixed-bloods, who denounced it as a forced retrenchment into outmoded ways. The Pick-Sloan plan of 1944 authorised the Army Corps of Engineers to build a 370,000-acre reservoir that deprived Standing Rock Reservation of 200,000 acres of its most valuable land; and in the 1950s, Whiteclay – a minuscule Nebraskan village built on land summarily taken from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1904 – was founded with one function: to sell alcohol into the reservation. In 1947, the Indian Office became the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an agency designed to make itself obsolete. The federal government wanted, at long last, to complete the assimilation of the American Indians. Reservations and tribes would be absorbed into the body politic, which in turn would make the BIA itself obsolete. The policy was a disaster: every terminated tribe suffered politically, economically and psychologically, while many of the 100,000 Indians who moved into cities struggled. In the 1960s, the federal government shelved the failed policy. Its primary accomplishment was to deepen Native Americans’ loathing of the BIA, which meant to turn the first Americans into white Americans whether they wanted it or not. The ‘absolute terror’ that the BIA spread across Indigenous communities helped to foster a powerful sense of pan-Indian solidarity. No Lakota reservations were targeted for termination, but Lakota emerged as key figures in the growing Indian activism of the 1960s. Vine Deloria, Jr, a theologian-scholar from Standing Rock, served as the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, a new Indigenous rights organisation. Deloria’s leadership coincided with a massive increase in membership. His book Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) was a galvanising manifesto of Indian rights in which he condemned, among other things, the termination policy as a flagrant land-grab. He castigated the federal government’s abysmal record in honouring its more than 400 treaties with Indigenous nations. Alongside the Black Power movement, Deloria argued, there should be a Red Power movement but with a distinct agenda centred on Indigenous sovereignty and continued cultural integrity. Deloria helped to provide an intellectual foundation for a Native American protest movement that was already gathering force across North America. In Minneapolis, Native activists founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) to help the thousands of Indians that the government’s programmes had pushed into urban slums. Though it quickly expanded into a pan-Indian endeavour, AIM relied deeply on Lakota leadership. Shots were exchanged, and another massacre at Wounded Knee, now against US citizens, seemed possible In 1972, white Indian-haters in Gordon, Nebraska captured and murdered Raymond Yellow Thunder, a middle-aged Oglala ranch hand. Authorities failed to mount a proper investigation. AIM brought 1,400 protestors from 80 different tribes to Gordon, engulfing the town in anger. The frightened town officials established an impromptu human rights commission, and a district court jury convicted the killers of manslaughter and false imprisonment. The AIM leaders had seen what they wanted – genuine fear among white authorities – and they knew they could reach further. They took their movement to the East. In the Fall of 1972, a large pan-Indian delegation, the Trail of Broken Treaties, caravanned to Washington, DC where it occupied the BIA headquarters. The Indians demanded the return of 110 million acres of Native American land and the abolition of the BIA, which they denounced as an instrument of continued colonialism. It was a stunning display of anger and collective action as well as a stinging humiliation to the US government. The Lakota struggle for sovereignty was becoming nearly synonymous with a broader Indigenous struggle for rights. In the Pine Ridge Reservation, the tribal chairman Dick Wilson, a mixed-blood and a BIA favourite, tried to transfer uranium-rich lands to the Department of the Interior, and used a private militia to neutralise opposition. Pine Ridge was one of the poorest places in the US, with 50 per cent unemployment and collapsing healthcare and education; Wilson’s corruption threatened to plunge the reservation further into the abyss. In February 1973, AIM decided to move to Pine Ridge. Wilson was ready: 75 federal marshals, all members of an elite rapid-response strike force, had arrived to protect the tribal office building. On the roof of the militarised building stood a .50-calibre machine gun. It was then and there that AIM realised its vision of itself as a modern-day warrior society, leading the Oglala into a fight against an aggressive foreign government. About 200 Indians, some of them carrying shotguns and hunting rifles, motorcaded to Wounded Knee, a hamlet of roughly 100 residents. It became a standoff. The BIA refused to remove Wilson, and heavily armed FBI agents, National Guard soldiers, and federal marshals sealed off Wounded Knee with roadblocks and armoured personnel carriers. Shots were exchanged, and another massacre at Wounded Knee, now against US citizens, seemed possible. The difference was that all of it was now public: TV crews had arrived. The Indians at Wounded Knee declared themselves the Independent Oglala Nation. They invoked the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had been negotiated on a nation-to-nation basis, and established the legal foundation of Lakota sovereignty. The Independent Oglala Nation welcomed the assistant attorney general Harlington Wood like a foreign dignitary: two young mounted Indians escorted him to meet the Oglala activist Russell Means, the Sicangu holy man Leonard Crow Dog, and the Ponca activist Carter Camp. The Oglala also received a delegation from the Six Nations of Iroquois Confederacy that shared the Lakota’s struggle for self-determination. The besieged Indians – buoyed by numerous solidarity demonstrations in the US and abroad by antiwar groups, Chicanos and Black Panthers – held off for 71 days. On the 59th day of the siege, Buddy Lamont, an Oglala Vietnam veteran from Pine Ridge, was hit by M-16 fire and bled to death. The White House promised to investigate AIM’s complaints. The Lakota disengaged in early May. Wounded Knee II, as the confrontation became known, galvanised the American Indian sovereignty movement. Politicians took note. In 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which empowered tribes to enter into contracts with the federal government. They could administer their funds and run their own schools; they could exercise sovereignty over their economies and education. After a century and a half of US paternalism, Native nations negotiate over federal programmes – and turn them down. Then, in 1980, after more than six decades of litigation and lobbying, the Supreme Court ruled that the US government had violated the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty in which it had pledged that the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills, had been permanently preserved for the ‘absolute and undisturbed use and occupation’ of the Sicangu, the Oglala, the Minneconjou and the Yanktonai. The court awarded the Indians $17.5 million as compensation, a sum that is today, with retroactive interest, more than $1.2 billion. The Lakota refuse the money – they want Pahá Sápa back, a principled stance that is vital for the larger battle for Indigenous sovereignty. The Native American push toward self-determination seemed unstoppable. Congressional acts legalised tribal casinos, defined the criteria for the repatriation of sacred items and ancestral remains, and established laws to protect authentic Indigenous art. The Ronald Reagan and the George H W Bush administrations both reaffirmed the United States’ government-to-government relationship with Indian tribes, and in 1994 the president Bill Clinton met the leaders of 322 federally recognised tribes on the White House lawn and welcomed them home. ‘It has taken the United States and the Indian nations 200 years to come to the point where we can begin to deal with one another as sovereign nations,’ responded gaiashkibos, the president of the National Congress of American Indians. Obama suggested that Congress return part of the Black Hills to the Lakota and the other Sioux nations Wounded Knee II elevated the Lakota into renowned Indigenous freedom-fighters. They now commanded the attention of government agents, human rights activists, presidents and Hollywood. For decades, they had fought a losing battle to ban beer trade into their reservations, and in the summer of 1999 the battered bodies of two Lakota men were found in Whiteclay, the ‘little Skid Row on the prairie’. AIM arrived once more in Lakota country. The Anishinaabe activists Vernon Bellecourt and Dennis Banks joined Russell Means to lead a march into Whiteclay, delivering mayhem and claiming the hideous border town for the Oglala nation. With Wounded Knee II echoing in the background, hundreds of protestors squared off with the Nebraska State Patrol and the Pine Ridge tribal police. The old clash between traditionalists and progressives burst to the surface, and another standoff seemed imminent. Clinton helicoptered into Pine Ridge, becoming the first president to visit an Indian reservation in more than 60 years. Harold Salway, the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, welcomed Clinton into a sovereign Native nation and then edified his counterpart of the realities of Indian country: Pine Ridge’s 73 per cent unemployment rate, its life expectancy of 45, its need of basic infrastructure. While many Lakota valued the visit – part of the president’s poverty tour – it was not enough. It was like ‘cramming 2,000 years of history into 10 minutes’, said Milo Yellow Hair, the tribe’s land director. The Lakota had made a classic cameo appearance in the Clinton years. The Indians briefly held centrestage in US and even international media. US politicians have frequently engaged with suffering Native communities but, more often than not, the real work of solving problems has been left to the Indians themselves. Since the late 1990s, the Lakota have built community colleges, libraries, research centres and casinos, and they have litigated the closing of Whiteclay beer stores, ending the generations-long ‘liquid genocide’. Yet poverty still gripped their reservations, and alcoholism, drugs, malnutrition, diabetes and suicides kept claiming lives. Racism, both overt and hidden, manifested itself in the hiring practices, funding allocation and judicial system of South Dakota and Nebraska. Many Lakota did not feel welcome in Rapid City and Bismarck, or other nearby cities. But they were known across the world, and they enjoyed the attention of powerful allies. A 2012 United Nations investigation recommended the return of the Black Hills to them and, two years later, Obama visited Standing Rock where the US president announced that ‘nation-to-nation relationship with Indian Country isn’t the exception; it’s the rule’. He suggested that Congress could return part of the Black Hills to the Lakota and the other Sioux nations. The momentum for Indigenous sovereignty seemed unstoppable. Trump’s authorisation of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2017 challenged and also galvanised the Indigenous sovereignty movement. Everything the Lakota had achieved and endured – defying an aggressive empire for generations, killing Custer, surviving a massacre, leading the battle for Indigenous rights, holding on to the Black Hills while rejecting monetary compensation for a broader principle, and carrying the mantle of being the most celebrated Indigenous nation on Earth – seemed to crystallise into a remarkable global moment. And, as in 1973, the world took note. People started travelling to Standing Rock from all over the globe. Trump’s decision to halt the Army Corps of Engineers’ ongoing environmental review – which included considering alternative routes for the pipeline – was condemned as a case of racism and a clear move to undermine Indigenous sovereignty. Thousands of people arrived to protest and show solidarity, defying attack dogs, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and mace. The Trump administration seemed unfazed, and state authorities closed the protest camp. Within a year, the Dakota Access Pipeline had leaked at least eight times. Unlike the treaty violations and the shattering of the Great Sioux Reservation in the 19th century, the most recent assault on Lakota sovereignty unfolded while the world watched. In the spring of 2018, delegates from numerous Native nations joined Lakota in Laramie, Wyoming for a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The multitribal event honoured an Indigenous sovereignty that predates US sovereignty, has never been ceded, and was explicitly recognised in 1868 by the US in the form of the Great Sioux Reservation. The speakers – Lakota, Cheyenne and representatives from many other tribes – talked about the United States’ treaty violations and unfulfilled treaty obligations, their tone ranging from critical to angry and sometimes bitter and hopeless. They talked about what it means to be pushed aside and forgotten, as if your words, thoughts and life do not matter, but they also talked about what it takes to fight for relevance and to be heard. They talked about poverty, alcoholism, diabetes and the departed, gone too early, and they talked about survival – physical, political, cultural and spiritual. They talked about self-determination in their everyday lives – not having liquor stores whose only function was to sell alcohol into reservations on their borders, and they talked about spiritual rights and sovereignty, how they must have the sacred Black Hills back. Young people shared their gratitude for the elders, for their wisdom and lessons, and the elders shared their trust in the younger generation whose determination to continue the fight for recognition and rights was awesome. They were insisting, not hoping, to be heard. Indigenous sovereignty still faces denouncers, haters and contemptuous foreign governments, but there is real momentum now too. A new era of Indigenous solidarity and sovereignty beckons. In August 2019, the principal chief Chuck Hoskin Jr nominated Kimberly Teehee – the vice president of government relations for Cherokee Nation Businesses and the director of government relations for Cherokee Nation – as the Nation’s delegate for the US House of Representatives. He did so on the basis of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, which provided the legal basis for the forcible removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia, while also codifying the right for the Cherokee to send a delegate to the US Congress. ‘Over 184 years ago, our ancestors bargained for a guarantee that we would always have a voice in the Congress,’ explained Hoskin. ‘It is time for the United States to uphold its end of the bargain.’ The author would like to thank Tiffany Hale for her insightful comments on this essay.
Well, it's very similar to Afghanistan in a lot of ways: topographically very mountainous; you know, as you said, multiple civil wars. It's the kidnapping capital of the world. I was almost kidnapped there in 2000. It is a very beautiful country. The central government has very little control. It's the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula. It's, of course, Osama bin Laden's home - where his family's from, the (unintelligible) mountains, southern Yemen. You know, Western - American tourists have been kidnapped there as early as 1998 by an al-Qaida affiliate. Al-Qaida's had a presence - it's not a new thing. It's a very old thing. But clearly with these airstrikes that you've referenced already, Neal, they - you know, the presence is quite large, and it makes sense. If you were an al-Qaida person, where would you go? This is an Arabic-language - an Arabic-speaking country with very limited state control. It's the perfect place to function. It's also one of the most heavily armed countries in the world. I think the ratio between numbers of people and weapons - population is like 20 million, numbers of weapons, 80 million. Tribal disputes are settled by artillery. You know, it's a fun place.
Arthur Andersen is just a mere shell of what it once was. You know, it used to have 28,000 employees in the US, more than 80,000 employees worldwide. Almost all of them are gone. There's a skeletal staff in its old Chicago headquarters here that basically is just clerical and attorneys handling civil lawsuits that are filed from time to time. And there is also a substantial staff of maybe 100 or so at a former training complex it had in the western suburbs of Chicago, but they're not really related to the former accounting and consulting practices that Arthur Andersen have. Indeed, I mean, the company is essentially dead. It's no longer what it once was.
Well, it's primarily about geography. East Africa is basically just south of the Middle East. And there's a potential overspill of the turmoil in the Middle East. Influences have always traveled that way. Christianity basically found its legs in the Ethiopia. Islam also did, when the Islamists were thrown out of Saudi Arabia or when they were thrown out of Mecca. They found refuge in Ethiopia. And now, the fear is that this sort of turmoil that you see to the north will also come south and to some extent, that's already come true. Somalia is home to the oldest and best-established jihadi camps in Africa. Al-Qaida has a presence there. You know, lot of the Islamism is homegrown and locally focused. But there are - both al-Qaida and U.S. military, regards Somalia essentially as the third front on the war on terror.
Well, there's a lot of controversy now in archaeology over the use of LIDAR. I mean, LIDAR is an extremely expensive technology. It cost half a million dollars to survey this valley, and archaeologists are a very impecunious group. They don't have a lot of money. They don't have the kind of financing that some of the other scientists get. So they look at LIDAR as being too expensive. It's a technology that they don't understand - some of them. Engineers run it, not archaeologists. So there was a - so a number of archaeologists look askance at this search. They didn't think that anything would be found. Or if they find something, it wouldn't be very important.
Great conversation. I wanted to interject into that that there have been quite a few actions on the federal level, when we talk about what the nation is doing. There had been some traction for requiring a percentage of homes in new subdivisions to be what's called visitable, which would include, you know, zero entry, no steps, wide doorways, adaptable bathrooms and kitchens, so perhaps there are no grab bars, but the bracing behind the walls would be there. And we're seeing a lot within the Americans With Disabilities Act for that exact thing because we all understand that aging does include disabilities. And consequently, we're seeing what's being really termed a green movement, aging in place as an environmental factor, not moving people but designing for 10 years down the road or 20 years down the road.
Well, one product that I found that was interesting is called the Wiebetech Drive eRazer. That's eRazer, R-A-Z-E-R. It's a small box that plugs directly into a hard drive and wipes the data, and you don't have to deal with any software. If you have an older computer that no longer works, for instance, and you want to clear the hard drive inside before you donate or recycle the computer, it's a good option. It doesn't require any computer, and there are adapters that plug into virtually any kind of hard drive, even the smaller notebook drives. The eRazer runs about a $100 to $200, depending on what model and adapters you buy, but it works with virtually anything.
I think it's both. I was surprise when I started writing the book and I started with that chapter. I was surprised at how much emotion that incident stirred up, and I did quite literally go right into therapy, and just sit there and talk about it and try to come out the other side of it because it explained a lot of why audiences had always scared me a little bit. Well, of course, I mean, if you go on stage everyday thinking that you're not going to survive the hour, you're going to be frightened of your audience. So, in that sense, it was a scar but as my therapist said to me, you know, scar tissue is stronger that regular tissue.
Well, our sensors system - and we had a very large group of sensors on the P-3, these I should mention these are former submarine chasers. It was their primary function in the Navy at the time, and the Naval Research Laboratory and its - the Navy Scientific Development's Squadron 1, VXS-1, have a couple of P-3s that are stripped out of all their military hardware, all the sensors for submarine warfare, and all the weapons systems have been removed. And they've been turned into research trucks that can carry lots of different kinds of equipment. We had gravity, magnetics, hyper-spectral let's see, what else...
The administration says yes, they have several complaints filed against him. The problem is they're not making the accusations against him public, which they say is standard procedure. We don't know what he's been charged with, and it's unlikely to be made public. And the hearing that is going to be held will be held in camera, which means that no one will know exactly what's going on. So there could be a legitimate case. Chaudhry has a reputation, we're told, of being somewhat pushy, unkind to his colleagues. There's also allegations of him misusing government planes. At this point, you know, these are all allegations. We just don't know.
And as you wrote about online, it felt in a way like life had returned to some sort of normalcy. It was Ebola-free. That was the first impression, but you began to get a different impression as you spent some time there. POOLE Yeah, I did. It took some time, but slowly I began to realize what was going on below the surface. People were really hungry. There was very little food because when Ebola hit, it was right after planting season, so all of the weeding and tending of the rice fields that had to happen didn't happen. So they were extremely hungry.
Thank you, Tom. Thank you for taking my call. First of all, I want to offer my condolences to your guest, Mr. Navdeep Singh, and to the entire Sikh community on this great tragedy, you know, the senseless violence, the senseless lost of life. I think the couple of things in addition to that which brings to me as a member of a minority Islam - I'm an American Muslim - is looking as your guest, Mr. Navdeep Singh, said this act of violence could have been because of the fact that this is a community who prays differently, who looks differently, and that's the reason they were targeted. If that's the case, not only the Sikhs in the U.S., but all the other minorities need to be concerned and are concerned because - whether they be Muslims, Hindus, Baha'is, Buddhists or even Jewish temples we've seen had been targeted. Anytime a place of worship is targeted like that, it's an awful shame for the entire American nation. All of us are ashamed by these acts.
‘One coward may lose a battle, one battle may lose a war, and one war may lose a country.’ This was Rear-Admiral and Conservative MP Tufton Beamish speaking to the House of Commons in 1930, giving voice to an idea that must be as old as war itself. Caring only for his own safety, blowing cover, attracting fire, the coward can be more dangerous to his own side than a brave enemy. Even when he doesn’t run, the coward can sow panic simply by the way he looks – changing colour, as Homer observed in the Iliad, unable to sit still, his teeth chattering. Cowards are also known for soiling themselves. No wonder soldiers in the field worry about being cowardly far more than they dream of being heroic; or why cowardice is often counted the most contemptible of vices (not just by soldiers): while heroes achieve fame, cowards are often condemned to something worse than infamy – oblivion. As Dante’s guide Virgil says of the cowardly neutrals who reside in the anteroom of hell: ‘the world will let no report of them endure’. Virgil himself doesn’t want to speak of them. Yet speaking about cowards and cowardice can help us judge and guide human conduct in the face of fear. ‘Fear,’ Beamish went on to say, ‘is perfectly natural. It comes to all people. The man who conquers fear is a hero, but the man who is conquered by fear is a coward, and he deserves all he gets.’ But things are not quite so simple as that: some fears are unconquerable. Aristotle said that only the Celts do not fear an earthquake or flood, and we are right to think them crazy. The coward, he said, is ‘a man who exceeds in fear: he fears the wrong things, in the wrong manner, and so forth, all the way down the list’. We typically judge someone cowardly when his fear is out of proportion to the danger he faces, when he is defeated by such fear, and in consequence fails to do something he should: his duty. We also typically reserve the cowardly label for men, as Aristotle’s and Beamish’s sexist language suggests. Even today, the term sounds strange when it is applied to women, and seems to need some explanation. If, as Beamish tells us, a coward deserves all he gets, what exactly does he get? Beamish was speaking against a proposal to end the death penalty for cowardice and desertion. His logic was clear. If a coward can cost a country its existence, the country needs to be willing to deprive the coward of his. The practice of killing cowards has a long and varied history. The Romans sometimes executed cowards through fustuarium, a dramatic ritual that would begin when the tribune touched the condemned with his cudgel, at which signal all soldiers in the camp would bludgeon the man to death. The preferred modern way is the firing squad. The British and French shot hundreds of soldiers for cowardice and desertion in the First World War; the Germans and Russians, tens of thousands in the Second World War. Humiliation is a much more usual punishment for cowardice, as Montaigne noted in ‘Of the Punishment of Cowardice’ (1580). Quoting Tertullian’s observation that it is better to make the blood rush to a man’s face than flow from his body, Montaigne explained the thinking: a coward who is allowed to live might be shamed into fighting courageously. The ways of humiliation are even more various than those of killing – from dressing up the coward as a woman, to branding or tattooing him, to shaving his head and making him wear a placard that says ‘coward’, to naming him and recounting his ignominious deeds in his hometown newspaper. Whether the coward dies or lives, his punishment must be public if it is to fit his crime. In trying to run and hide, the coward threatens the group by setting the worst sort of example and spreading fear like an infection; one coward makes 10, as a German proverb has it. The spectacle of the coward caught and exposed serves as a kind of inoculation for those who witness it, complete with a stinging reminder of the price should they themselves give in to cowardice. Evolutionary psychologists have had little to say about cowardice, perhaps because it seems such an obvious case of following the evolutionary imperative to preserve the self. But there is widespread agreement that natural selection can favor uncowardly, co‑operative, even altruistic behaviors. Many animals engage in ‘fitness sacrificing’ – advancing another’s chance to live (and reproduce) by risking their own lives. Upon seeing a prowling fox, a rabbit thumps its foot and raises its rear to flash a furry white alarm to its fellows, even though doing so draws dangerous attention to itself. Rabbits that thump increase the survival rate of their relations, which gives the thumper’s genes a better chance of being passed on – if only by way of a sister or brother or cousin – thereby creating more rabbits that thump. But rabbits do not attack those who fail to thump, and while aggression within species is very common, no animals other than humans are known to punish a conspecific for not performing expected fitness-sacrificing acts. A recent study by Keith Jensen and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2012, suggests that even one of our closest relatives, the chimpanzee, does not engage in such ‘third-party’ punishment; it might be a uniquely human practice. when it comes to war, effectiveness at punishing (and preventing) cowardice improves one’s chances of winning Third-party punishment of cowardice can happen even without the benefit of an organised military or centralised political system, as Sarah Mathew and Robert Boyd showed in PNAS in 2011. These anthropologists, then at the University of California in Los Angeles, study the Turkana, a ‘pre‑state’ East African people – egalitarian pastoralists who sometimes raid other groups to steal their cattle. If a Turkana man refuses to go on a raid without good reason or flees when danger comes, he can be subject to punishment ranging from ‘informal verbal sanctions’ to severe corporal punishment, including being tied to a tree and whipped. The fact that third parties (and not just kin, neighbours or people endangered by the coward’s actions) participate in the punishment process enables the practice on a large scale, and when it comes to war, all other things being equal, effectiveness at punishing (and preventing) cowardice improves one’s chances of winning. The Turkana admire and reward bravery in combat, but Mathew and Boyd note that if positive incentives were enough to motivate men to always do the right thing during raids, ‘there would be no need for direct punishment’. They conclude that such punishment does not just enable large-scale co‑operation. It is essential to it. To put it in Beamish’s terms, if one coward can lose a country, and the country is not willing to condemn the coward, then the country itself might be condemned. Curiously, though, we have become less willing to condemn or punish cowardice with the passing years. Beamish lost the debate. Parliament abolished the death penalty for cowardice and desertion in April, 1930. Other countries have acted similarly, some in the letter of the law and many more in practice. Under US military code, desertion remains punishable by death during wartime, but since 1865 only one soldier, Private Eddie Slovik, has been executed for it (or any other military crime – rape and murder are a different story), and that was in 1945. Courts-martial for cowardice have become increasingly rare, and many of the European soldiers who were executed for cowardice or desertion in the world wars have been posthumously pardoned. Some countries have monuments honouring them. There are many reasons for this shift. Foremost is what Ernest Thurtle, the Labour MP who had long campaigned to abolish the death penalty for military crimes, called in the debate with Beamish ‘the almost indescribable strain of modern warfare’. Surely there has always been great strain in warfare, and the military historian Martin van Creveld, for one, doubts that the strain has worsened in modern times, or that suffering through artillery bombardment could be any more traumatic than watching one’s kin get scalped alive. But it’s not unreasonable to think that the scale of modern warfare – its ability to inflict greater damage over greater distance for prolonged periods of time – has produced a greater strain than before. If the Celts did not fear an earthquake, the bombings of Tokyo, Dresden or London might have given them pause. When it comes to cowardice, whether the strain of modern war is unprecedented is less important than the perception that it is. Shell shock, when that diagnosis was first made in 1915, was thought to be caused by explosives more powerful than the world had ever seen. New weapons must cause new diseases. New terms were needed to explain strange symptoms – tremors, dizziness, disorientation, paralysis – that in women would have been attributed to hysteria. As Elaine Showalter pointed out in The Female Malady (1985), ‘shell shock’ sounded much more masculine. Seemingly ‘cowardly’ conduct is not a matter of character or manliness but genes, environment, trauma Even when doctors concluded that shell shock was a purely psychological disorder, the term stuck and became the first of a series of terms (‘war neurosis’, ‘battle fatigue’, ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’) that gave official, alternative ways to, as Thurtle put it, ‘judge the men who had failed with a much deeper sympathy and understanding’. The point is not that soldiers thus diagnosed were actually cowards, but that misconduct that previously would have been considered to reflect a defect in character or a corruption of gender identity was now more likely to be seen as a sign of illness. Monolithic ideas of masculinity were thus complicated and challenged. Moral judgment gave way to medical treatment. This shift has advanced as medicine has advanced. Thanks to new neurological tests that can detect evidence of blast injuries to the brain that would have gone undetected even a decade and certainly a century ago, researchers have revived the original hypothesis about shell shock – that it had a physical cause. We also know more about how physiological factors such as the formation of the amygdala and cortisol levels make different people constitutionally more or less able to deal with fear. Seemingly ‘cowardly’ conduct (quotation marks rather suddenly become necessary) is not a matter of character or manliness – it’s a matter of genes, environment, trauma. Given this shift, it is not surprising that, according to the Google Ngram corpus, usage of ‘coward’ and ‘cowardice’ declined by half relative to all English words published over the course of the 20th century. Even as cowardice has lost linguistic currency, however, contempt for it has not disappeared. A century of the therapeutic has not undone millennia of revilement. It shadows even the terms that give us an alternative way of understanding soldiers’ trauma-related derelictions of duty; soldiers are ashamed to seek psychiatric help because it can be seen as cowardly. And one still hears ‘coward’ used pejoratively, as a label for terrorists, paedophiles and other predatory criminals. It’s an unreflective and coarse misapplication of the term, but it shows that the insult endures, even as the idea behind it becomes foggier. Paedophiles might be cowardly in not confronting their predilections (and their dreadful consequences), and terrorists might indeed be guilty of having what might be called the cowardice of their convictions – an excessive fear of being viewed as cowardly in the eyes of their god, or by the light of their cause. But when we hurl ‘coward’ at such villains it’s usually just a way of expressing contempt for those who take advantage of the vulnerable or helpless. It can feel good, but it can also distract us from pondering our own cowardice and deprive us of an ethical tool that can be useful, and not just to soldiers or men. ‘We all of us suffer from fear,’ Beamish said as he stood before the House of Commons. ‘I am suffering from it at the present moment, but I should be a coward if I sat down and did not say what I feel.’ What he felt was, I think, wrong. To execute someone for cowardice ignores, among other things, what we have learned about human limits in the face of the horrors of modern war. Yet I respect Beamish for not sitting down, and I appreciate how he exploited the shame of cowardice to brace himself for daunting political battle. Though he believed that the man who conquers fear is a hero, I respect Beamish also for the way he does not congratulate himself for heroism. He sets an example worth following the next time you want to speak up for a cause because you think it’s the right thing to do, even if the prospect frightens you. Telling yourself to be a hero might be no more help to you than it is to a soldier. It’s too grand a notion, and the word has been emptied by overuse. (The same might be said of ‘courage’.) But telling yourself it would be cowardly not to stand up and speak might actually get you out of your seat. ‘perhaps we need a coward in the room when we are talking about nuclear war’ The stigma attached to cowardice has caused terrible harm, most obviously to those who have been made to pay for the alleged ‘crime’. Less obvious, but more pervasive, is the damage done by people who, fearing the shame of cowardice, have acted in reckless, often violent ways. Remembering this should make us less ready to use the label of ‘coward’, especially in the case of someone refusing to use violence. Too often, in retrospect, we realise that a refusal to fight was neither spineless nor craven, but prudent, even courageous. After advising President Kennedy to compromise with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the US ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson observed that ‘most of the fellows will probably consider me a coward… but perhaps we need a coward in the room when we are talking about nuclear war’. Samuel Johnson noted that ‘mutual cowardice’ keeps us in peace. Yet the stigma of cowardice can make it a powerful guide and goad for our conduct, and not just in battle or political combat, where Beamish contended, but wherever fear and duty conflict. We all face similar moral reckonings – instances where the bracing shame of cowardice can be more useful than the exalted dream of heroism – in all sorts of other contexts, including the most personal. And, alas, sometimes it seems as though we all let duty give way to fear, all the time. Mark Twain wrote of ‘man’s commonest weakness, his aversion to being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the supreme feature of the make-up of 9,999 men in the 10,000’. It is so common, so normal, that it does not feel like cowardice at all. That might be because the first thing cowardice does, as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued, is to keep ‘a man from knowing what is the good, the truly great and noble, what ought to be the goal of his striving and of his labour early and late’. But thinking about cowardice, pondering the age-old contempt that, for better and worse, still clings to the idea, can concentrate our minds as we work out exactly what we should be doing, and help us confront the fears that keep us from doing it. In some curious and perhaps contradictory ways, I seek to defend cowardice, first against the coarse and thoughtless application of the term. This has done terrible damage, most obviously to those who have been humiliated or even killed for their alleged cowardice. Even when there might be an element of cowardice in someone’s conduct, we would do well to cultivate a ‘deeper sympathy and understanding’, to use Thurtle’s phrase, in our judgment of them. Louis-Ferdinand Céline goes further in his novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) about the First World War and its aftermath. Fearing that he is ‘all alone with two million stark raving heroic madmen, armed to the eyeballs’, his narrator congratulates himself for having ‘sense enough to opt for cowardice once and for all’. Céline presents bravery as the problem, and cowardice as the solution. Stevenson saw things similarly. There are compelling reasons to accept such a position even when we’re not talking about nuclear war; Johnson, after all, noted that ‘mutual cowardice’ keeps us in peace. But I don’t want to embrace cowardice entirely, and so the second way I want to defend cowardice stands in contrast to the first. The contempt we still typically feel toward cowardice can concentrate our minds as we think about exactly what we should be doing, and about the fears that keep us from doing it. The idea of cowardice can inform our thinking not just in battle or in the obvious combat of politics, where Beamish draws on it. How we love, who and where we are, what we do, what we think, even what we know and allow ourselves to know – sometimes it seems as though these have all been shaped by overblown fears and evasions of duty, held for so long that they feel like normalcy. Pondering cowardice can help us overcome them. Cowardice: A Brief History (2014) By Chris Walsh is published via Princeton University Press.
Well, the original GI Bill had the power to transform the lives of the veterans and the rest of the country along with them. And the current GI Bill is, although modeled on the original, is just - has so much more range of benefits. You can't really make it through college. In most areas, the strain on veterans that tried to do so is often great because they have to hold down a job, take out loans. And many veterans - and this is kind of scandalous, really - who served duty at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, who happened to be Reserves or National Guardsmen, only get about 27 percent of the benefits, and sometimes not even that.
(Reading) I am. I am really happy that there are certain things that's too late to do. No one will ever expect me to ride a horse across the desert or swim the English Channel or play Grace Kelly in the movie of her life. In-line skating is close to me as is a medical career. I will not ride in a demolition derby or drive a Porsche on the Autobahn. I will not dine on camel tongue or eat that fish in Japan that gives you a poisonous buzz, or herd cattle, or play the machines in the Casino called something like the Delta Queen, and wink at the guy who has just hit the jackpot on the quarter slots and leave the same night to get married in Las Vegas at the Elvis Chapel because that is something, it turns out, that both of us have always wanted to do. But this is what I'm really happy about. On the other hand, it's also way too late for me to give birth to someone who will grow up to be a serial killer.
The effect has been devastating. And one can see the legacy of this discrimination even today. Look at the numbers of black physicians. The estimates range from - no one's quite sure how many there are, which is interesting. But the estimates range from two to three percent to six percent. Even if one takes the higher six percent number, we're talking about a number of black physicians that's roughly half what it should be, blacks being 12.2 percent of the population. So we have fewer black physicians. But the damage doesn't stop there. We have fewer black physicians, we have a ruptured trust between black physicians and black patients, and the American Medical Association. Part of the legacy of this very tragic history is that many physicians and patients simply don't believe the American Medical Association is looking out for its interests and advocates on behalf of them as well as white physicians.
I don't suppose most kids around the country would consider the things we see on the way to school routine. The massive uprooted trunks of fallen trees, gutted houses and collapsed buildings, garbage, sheetrock, shingles, and appliances piled to the sky. A brown stain marking how high the floodwaters got, a murky and unbroken line like a bathtub ring around the city. And these are the good neighborhoods, the ones that survived. My family recently returned from a four-month exile, and we settled back into the rhythms and flow of this strange and alluring city. We picked up where we left off. Dinner with friends--those who are here, Music in the clubs, walks in the park, bicycle rides, that kind of thing. Then, over the weekend, we took a drive to the lower Ninth Ward, a once obscure community now known the world over as the site of the worst destruction from the flood. It is nuclear, a lunar wasteland. Most of the city's destroyed neighborhoods still have the shells of houses in them, but the flood just shoved the lower ninth out of the way. Houses and oak trees, stacked one atop the other and washed five blocks away. My kids thought it looked more like movie set than a real place. My 4-year-old looked out his window and said purple upside-down car. He captured the perfect metaphor.
Right. Well, the president is going to decide that and he's not going to consult me. I think that if the president were making that decision today, he would reappoint him. Because, one, he's done a good enough job. Two, changing Fed chairman at a time like this could create some uncertainty and doubt in the markets, and that could raise interest rates and hurt the economy, which is weak. And third, I suspect the president will realize that if he puts someone from his team in charge of the Fed, that will lead to suspicions that he's trying to muscle the Fed or help them keep the deficits going or create inflation or all sorts of perceptions that he won't want to create.
Yes, very quickly. Mr. Ambassador, I heard you speaking of US troops moving out of certain regions and Iraqi troops taking over in those regions. Is it possible that this is being called--this is just being a redeployment of American troops in other parts of the country rather than the actual removal of troops from Iraq? And, you know, you speak of the success in Iraq and how it will be a failure for all of us. Well, unfortunately, I think that because we have so many troops abroad, we have the inability to take care of ourselves at home. Look at Hurricane Katrina and all of the problems that we face. We have failures of hundreds of thousands of people...
Early this week, the story leaked that the European Union was preparing a new set of incentives to Iran to stop its uranium enrichment. The package reportedly will go beyond what the Europeans unsuccessfully offered Iran last year and includes a light water nuclear reactor. This is a kind of reactor that generates electricity and is less prone to producing the fissile material used to make a bomb. At this point there does not seem to be consensus among the Europeans and the U.S. that such a reactor will be part of the package, and EU negotiators have extended their discussions into next week to work out the details. But almost within hours of the story leaking, Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, mocked and rejected the idea in a speech in the town of Ahraq.
Whether it's seed from crops or rare native species, seed banks are all about preserving genetic diversity. And what clever chlorophyllic creatures plants are. They've evolved to handle whatever's been thrown at them - hot and humid, wet and mucky, dark and dry. But as any gardener knows, put the wrong plant in the wrong place and you're courting catastrophe. Water-loving iris resents being high and dry. Yet if it can't keep up with the fast pace of climate change, how will that iris survive? How about by borrowing a little DNA from some next-of-kin cactus. And that's what gene-splicing scientists with access to seed banks may some day want to do.
Bell's son was Alexander Graham Bell. He, too, taught speech and helped lead deaf educators to replace Sign Language with the teaching of speech and reading lips, so that deaf people would adapt to the hearing world. That put American Sign Language in eclipse for about a century. Its revival was boosted by the Gallaudet student protests in 1988, when the school picked its first deaf president. To use Sign became an expression of deaf pride and belonging to the deaf world. Some of Alexander Graham Bell's biographers say when he helped invent the telephone, what he really was trying to do was come up with a device to help his deaf wife communicate. No other piece of technology would more cut off deaf people from the hearing world than the telephone. Today deaf people have found technology to connect them to both worlds When's the last time you saw a telephone booth? At the Gallaudet Student Center, they have them.
Persily predicts the Legislature will vote the deal down. Such a vote would leave the state looking for another way to get its nearly 40 trillion cubic feet of natural gas out of the ground. That would be good news for a competing gas line group, the Alaska Gasline Port Authority. This public group represents a number of municipalities around the state, including Fairbanks and the port of Valdez. They want the state to build and operate the pipeline itself without the energy companies, and they would like to see the governor's plan fail. To that end, this week the group sued two of three energy companies the governor is negotiating with. The suit claims BP and Exxon are sitting on Alaska's huge natural gas reserves, refusing to bring it to market. For NPR News, in Fairbanks, I'm Sarah Neal.
I'm here to offer you a new way to think about my field, artificial intelligence. I think the purpose of AI is to empower humans with machine intelligence. And as machines get smarter, we get smarter. I call this "humanistic AI" — artificial intelligence designed to meet human needs by collaborating and augmenting people. Now, today I'm happy to see that the idea of an intelligent assistant is mainstream. It's the well-accepted metaphor for the interface between humans and AI. And the one I helped create is called Siri. You know Siri. Siri is the thing that knows your intent and helps you do it for you, helps you get things done. But what you might not know is that we designed Siri as humanistic AI, to augment people with a conversational interface that made it possible for them to use mobile computing, regardless of who they were and their abilities. Now for most of us, the impact of this technology is to make things a little bit easier to use. But for my friend Daniel, the impact of the AI in these systems is a life changer. You see, Daniel is a really social guy, and he's blind and quadriplegic, which makes it hard to use those devices that we all take for granted. The last time I was at his house, his brother said, "Hang on a second, Daniel's not ready. He's on the phone with a woman he met online." I'm like, "That's cool, how'd he do it?" Well, Daniel uses Siri to manage his own social life — his email, text and phone — without depending on his caregivers. This is kind of interesting, right? The irony here is great. Here's the man whose relationship with AI helps him have relationships with genuine human beings. And this is humanistic AI. Another example with life-changing consequences is diagnosing cancer. When a doctor suspects cancer, they take a sample and send it to a pathologist, who looks at it under a microscope. Now, pathologists look at hundreds of slides and millions of cells every day. So to support this task, some researchers made an AI classifier. Now, the classifier says, "Is this cancer or is this not cancer?" looking at the pictures. The classifier was pretty good, but not as good as the person, who got it right most of the time. But when they combine the ability of the machine and the human together, accuracy went to 99.5 percent. Adding that AI to a partnership eliminated 85 percent of the errors that the human pathologist would have made working alone. That's a lot of cancer that would have otherwise gone untreated. Now, for the curious, it turns out that the human was better at rejecting false positives, and the machine was better at recognizing those hard-to-spot cases. But the lesson here isn't about which agent is better at this image-classification task. Those things are changing every day. The lesson here is that by combining the abilities of the human and machine, it created a partnership that had superhuman performance. And that is humanistic AI. Now let's look at another example with turbocharging performance. This is design. Now, let's say you're an engineer. You want to design a new frame for a drone. You get out your favorite software tools, CAD tools, and you enter the form and the materials, and then you analyze performance. That gives you one design. If you give those same tools to an AI, it can generate thousands of designs. This video by Autodesk is amazing. This is real stuff. So this transforms how we do design. The human engineer now says what the design should achieve, and the machine says, "Here's the possibilities." Now in her job, the engineer's job is to pick the one that best meets the goals of the design, which she knows as a human better than anyone else, using human judgment and expertise. In this case, the winning form looks kind of like something nature would have designed, minus a few million years of evolution and all that unnecessary fur. Now let's see where this idea of humanistic AI might lead us if we follow it into the speculative beyond. What's a kind of augmentation that we would all like to have? Well, how about cognitive enhancement? Instead of asking, "How smart can we make our machines?" let's ask "How smart can our machines make us?" I mean, take memory for example. Memory is the foundation of human intelligence. But human memory is famously flawed. We're great at telling stories, but not getting the details right. And our memories — they decay over time. I mean, like, where did the '60s go, and can I go there, too? (Laughter) But what if you could have a memory that was as good as computer memory, and was about your life? What if you could remember every person you ever met, how to pronounce their name, their family details, their favorite sports, the last conversation you had with them? If you had this memory all your life, you could have the AI look at all the interactions you had with people over time and help you reflect on the long arc of your relationships. What if you could have the AI read everything you've ever read and listen to every song you've ever heard? From the tiniest clue, it could help you retrieve anything you've ever seen or heard before. Imagine what that would do for the ability to make new connections and form new ideas. And what about our bodies? What if we could remember the consequences of every food we eat, every pill we take, every all-nighter we pull? We could do our own science on our own data about what makes us feel good and stay healthy. And imagine how this could revolutionize the way we manage allergies and chronic disease. I believe that AI will make personal memory enhancement a reality. I can't say when or what form factors are involved, but I think it's inevitable, because the very things that make AI successful today — the availability of comprehensive data and the ability for machines to make sense of that data — can be applied to the data of our lives. And those data are here today, available for all of us, because we lead digitally mediated lives, in mobile and online. In my view, a personal memory is a private memory. We get to choose what is and is not recalled and retained. It's absolutely essential that this be kept very secure. Now for most of us, the impact of augmented personal memory will be a more improved mental gain, maybe, hopefully, a bit more social grace. But for the millions who suffer from Alzheimer's and dementia, the difference that augmented memory could make is a difference between a life of isolation and a life of dignity and connection. We are in the middle of a renaissance in artificial intelligence right now. I mean, in just the past few years, we're beginning to see solutions to AI problems that we have struggled with literally for decades: speech understanding, text understanding, image understanding. We have a choice in how we use this powerful technology. We can choose to use AI to automate and compete with us, or we can use AI to augment and collaborate with us, to overcome our cognitive limitations and to help us do what we want to do, only better. And as we discover new ways to give machines intelligence, we can distribute that intelligence to all of the AI assistants in the world, and therefore to every person, regardless of circumstance. And that is why, every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter. That is an AI worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause)
I think the effects are very different. Vocational programs and education are absolutely critical but their pay-off is in the future. And so if you were asking me what I think the biggest difference in the long run options for people at the bottom end of the labor market, I would have to say that investing in education is absolutely crucial, but we would have to wait for five years to see much of a benefit. And we have let the minimum wage sink in value for such a long time that we really do need to attend, I think, sooner than that to the plight of people at the bottom of the labor market. To me the sharper debate, really, is between raising the minimum wage and increasing the benefits that flow into the Earned Income Tax Credit. The Earned Income Tax Credit is a benefit we provide right now only to parents, that is people with children who are earning very low wages and it basically returns to them the taxes that they would otherwise pay. The EITC is a targeted benefit. It goes only to low-income workers who are heads of families.
Yes. The simple answer is yes. And this is what's disturbing about this trend. I think it's great that Russia is back on its feet. The Russian people deserve the economic growth that they have. I think for Americans, a strong and democratic Russia that would be allied with us to fight common enemies - and we have common enemies - would be a truly sensational thing that would be in our interest. The problem is is that the current leadership in Moscow doesn't see themselves as joining the West. They don't see Russia as part of the democratic community of states. They've moved increasingly in an autocratic direction at home and therefore, I don't think it's just an accident that they're using their power in a more coercive way vis-a-vis countries particularly like Georgia as you mentioned, but other places as well - Ukraine, Belarus.
Well, absolutely. In 1994, George W. Bush essentially made Alberto Gonzales an offer he couldn't refuse, as it's been said in Texas, to come join them. And not just to join them as a member of the governor's staff, he joined George W. Bush with the full understanding that, really, the train had already left the station for a run for the presidency, and that Gonzales was going to be aboard for the long haul. And, yeah, absolutely every real public moment in Alberto Gonzales' life he owes to George W. Bush. And I'd say both the good moments and the bad moments.
I want to make sure that the America Eats, all the proceeds are going to the National Archives. I think I told you when this exhibition, "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam?" that I'm inviting everyone in America to come to the Archives and visit the great (unintelligible) they have, but also the exhibition, and they can come to America Eats. The proceeds are going back to the Archives because I feel this is almost like, I'm immigrant, my way to pay back to the institution that is doing so much to bring back our past in cooking and food. It's so much of our past that I want to make sure that no dish, no ingredient, no person is forgotten like paw-paws. How that the most amazing American fruit, 95 percent of America, doesn't know about?
Well, in general, I'm interested in this from the very point that you're talking about, of extraterrestrial habitability. So I'm a collaborator on the NASA mission called Kepler. And this mission is one mere telescope that we launched into space to look for earth-sized planets around other stars for the first time. And what's interesting is that we think - we hope - and I think there's every reason to think this will be true - that, in a couple of years, we will have discovered the first earth-sized planet at an earthlike distance from its star, such that we think it should have liquid water on its surface.
Three planned missions, Apollos 18, 19, 20, were cancelled. The three remaining giant Saturn 5 rockets were scrapped as ornamental lawn pieces, serving as roosting places for birds. And since then, no one has been back. When asked later about what he thought the most fantastic part of the moon landing was, science fiction icon Arthur C. Clarke quipped: It was the fact that we could go to the moon and never go back. This hour we'll talk about those moon missions, called moon shots by those of us who remember them. They were not without their disasters, like the Apollo 1, in which three veteran astronauts died without leaving the ground, and the storied Apollo 13, which turned a public, ho-hum mission into a nail-biter and a tale of human ingenuity.
Well, the documentaries are always the strength of Sundance. And they're especially strong this year. One is called "Stranded," and it's about the people whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 and only 16 people were left alive. They survived for 72 days. And that movie named "Alive" - best-selling book named "Alive" based on their story - this is the first time now the real people tell their story. And the filmmaker, who grew up with them, he took them back to the crash site, and it's kind of amazing to hear these people talk about what they survived.
Sure. I mean, it's - this is a, if you will, a conversation as the devil's triangle of family discussions, whether it's the home safety issue or the driving issue or frankly, longevity planning. But I think things that we have to think about as adult-children, we're not talking about the cold, calculated issue of home safety or driving safety. We're really talking about the home as independence and dignity or driving is really about personal freedom. And frankly, longevity planning is not talking about the future in a positive way. It's making preparations for, shall we say, the end. So as a result, we've really got to redefine our discussion with our parents to reflect what is that they are trying to protect - their independence, their freedom, their sense of appositive(ph) from the time that they may have, and so…
Well, they impeached him for the wrong thing. They adopted the wrong theory of impeachment. And I talk a little bit about that, the broad view and the narrow view. The broad view suggesting that when - that there's - you don't have to have a commission of an actual crime to impeach a President, and the narrow view saying that it had to be a crime. He had to violate a specific law. And all I was saying is that once they made the decision to go with the narrow view, his acquittal was pretty much foregone. I mean, that there was, you know, that he was actually going to win given the political climate. And also, he didn't have that much longer to go, you know, if you think about it. He just, you know, had another year on his term, and impeachment is a very, very - it's a major thing. Americans, for most of American history, have sort of reviled and sort of been reluctant to do that for the president, at least. We've only done it twice.
We came in December to look for a house to rent. And when we came back in December, it was pretty hardcore. Luis had come back in October through a mission flight to bring medicine, and he had seen Ponce, which is his town, and I think it was sort of the first time that he had been able to talk to his mom after, like, three weeks of not hearing anything from her. It was pretty intense. My dad didn't have electricity up until the end of February, and he lived in Trujillo Alto, which is, like, 15 minutes from San Juan. My grandmother who was 96 was incredibly depressed. She said that she thought that it was going to be her last, like, year of life. Her brother had died from, you know - I think from complications probably from depression from after the hurricane.
No. You know, if this spinach was making other spinach sick, maybe it carried a virus that contaminated other spinach plants, we have a government agency that can go in, they can do a mandatory recall of the product, they can quarantine an area if they need to, they can do inspections. That's called the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and they have on farm authority to control animal and plant diseases. But when it comes down to problems that impact humans, we don't have the same level of control. We're dealing with hundred-year-old statutes, and FDA's budget has been cut so dramatically that it's going to be very hard to manage and see improvements in this area until FDA has the tools and the resources it needs to do the job.
It is estimated that at least a quarter million people have been killed in the five years of the Syrian civil war that began as an uprising against Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. says about six and a half million Syrians have been displaced from their homes. The country's economy has collapsed, along with most schools, health care and culture. More than 4.8 million Syrians are refugees, many stewing in vast teeming camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, the islands of Greece and other parts of Europe. A few have been able to come to the United States. Even compassionate souls worry about how large numbers of refugees might destabilize their own countries and exhaust their resources. And I've learned in every war I've covered that refugees rarely return home when a long conflict finally ends. The bleeding of human talent goes on when good people are needed most to rebuild a country from its ashes. You may also wonder what the people running for president of the United States would do about this urgent, smoldering world problem. But the candidates rarely seem to talk about Syria except about that the U.S. should not become more deeply involved. This week, like many others, it looks like the world has found it easiest just to say that they've signed a cease-fire and go on to something else.
Well, I'd challenge them to go to Dayton and to El Paso and to Orlando and to Las Vegas and some of the other places that Mayor Lightfoot mentioned. You know, before we were talking about this issue, we were focused on another national issue, and that was - you know, is immigration. And it's another example where Congress is in action waiting to find the perfect scenario that, you know, answers every question and checks every box has developed into this untenable situation at the border. And the folks that are feeling that most are the mayors. And and so it's similar to this where I think mayors have a slightly different perspective than members of Congress and then, you know, members of our statehouses and so forth because we actually have to deal with the problem. You know, we can't, you know, postpone it to a later meeting or come back after recess. These problems, whether they be immigration or gun violence, you know, have to be handled.
Well, I recently completed a project for the Russell Sage Foundation, which, actually, Ron Ferguson was a part of as well. We were very happy to have him on board. And what we did was look at the trends in black-white test-score gaps over the last 30 or 40 years. And we were originally interested in looking at this because, after an initial period back in the '70s and '80s, when the black-white test-score gap had closed considerably, there has been a period of stalled progress. And it looked like there was no further movement in closing the black-white test-score gap in the late '80s and into the '90s. And it's only in the most recent period, the test-score period between '99 and 2004, that we see some closing of the black-white test-score gap again.
It's part of Turkey's growing presence in Africa. State media report Turkey's trade volume with Africa is at least six times what it was in 2003. And Turkish Airlines flies to more than 50 African destinations. If you get sick in Somalia, you may be treated at the Recep Tayyip Erdogan Hospital. Visitors arrive at an airport terminal run by a Turkish company and travel on roads built by Turkey's development authority. Along the way, they may see the garbage being collected by the Turkish Red Crescent. There are questions, however. Critics note that Turkey's involvement was facilitated by non-competitive Somali contracts awarded by a state notorious for its corruption. And Somalia isn't the only troubled state where Turkey is making a splash. President Erdogan recently addressed the Parliament in Sudan. He spoke warmly of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has been accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
Well, I found myself in Sendai about three days after 3/11 two years ago. I was asked to join a group of Dutch TV crew to just film what was there. And what I saw was just a lot of people who were really not sure what had happened. I mean, they had been struck by the tsunami in their seaside town off Shichirigahama in Sendai. And we spoke with the people who had safely been able to evacuate themselves to the town halls, which are very basic places. They just had blankets and, you know, canned food. The toilets had no running water, so they had to have lots of buckets to just clean themselves. And we just asked them so, you know, what's going on, and what do you plan to do, and really just their answers were we're just waiting for the government to give us a direction. We're just finding remnants of our houses, our fridges on the beach. We're just picking up food that we can eat and waiting for a new day to come.
It's Tuesday, and time to read from your comments. We heard from several of you last week, following the devastating tornadoes that destroyed much of Joplin, Missouri. We asked for your stories about cleaning up after an event like that. Mary Adams(ph) wrote: Our neighborhood went through a tornado in Iowa City five years ago. I cried when so many people showed up to help clean up the mess. Our town did not suffer as much as many do, and Joplin looks destroyed. They have lost it all. Those people are in shock, and what we need to do is to remember them as time goes on. They will still need help.

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