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I think some whites do very well when writing nonfiction about slavery. Tarantino isn't one of those, but the business people who put this abomination together don't care what I think. And then we have this from Daniella Gibbs Ledger from the Center for American Progress and a self-professed Tarantino fan. She defended the film but said: It does bring up interesting questions about who gets to tell this story. She wrote this in Essence magazine: "The question I'm more interested in having is this: Could a black director have made this movie? Controlling for factors like Tarantino's film credentials and ability to have strong openings, if you had a comparable black director, could he or she get this movie made without going straight to DVD? Would he or she even be able to pitch this kind of idea to a major studio head without getting stopped at the development door? I don't think so.

And then somebody else says, like, you know, Cousin Susan seems to be grateful for the Occupy Wall Street movement. So it gets going, but this way, you have other people sort of being - introducing topics and ideas. And then you basically - what my husband's family said was: Look, it's really important to discuss these things, but to do so in a way - even when it gets heated, it has to end with a hug. And I have to say, I feel they're fairly successful at doing that. But I like a little more inclusion, a little more control, especially when there are so many generations at the table. One thing about politics is that it tends to dominate - you know, three or four people will dominate, and everyone else is just an audience.

Van Gogh was a patron of this cafe in France and he would go in and spend his afternoons and became good friends with the owners. And, in fact, he painted a very famous painting of Madame Ginoux and a very famous painting of the cafe. Well, Ginoux suffered from mental illness, much like Van Gogh, and he wrote this letter to her basically saying we're not made of wood. We're going to die someday. And he's encouraging her in her plate of despair to persevere. And this is from a man who had a tragic life, who basically was obscure. He had one art review in his lifetime, had never sold a painting, and just died and, you know, and probably in his mind no one would ever know his name and became Vincent Van Gogh.

Well, you know, to be honest, Farai, I mean everything that's been said about this is obviously true and it is there. And I think that we've seen that you can take away legislated racism. You can even take away the legality of openly expressed racism. But in terms of a complete transformation of people's underlying biases and attitudes, I don't think that psychological or sociological science has a way of doing that at this point. And so these conversations certainly should be had. We should know that there are Vidor, Texas's. I don't know. Maybe it's just me. But when I see something like that, I think to myself that if it were even 1967, you wouldn't have to go to Vidor, Texas, and seek out these places and call attention to them on Paula Zahn. You could have gone to any neighborhood in Philadelphia - except roughly Mount Airy and Germantown - and found the exact same thing.

And we've got our Bloggers Roundtable going on. Shavar Jeffries is from Blackprof.com, Patrice Elizabeth Grell Yursik creator of Afrobella.com, and Nashieqa Washington from Yourblackfriend.com. You guys are taking a little bit of heat - and I don't mean individually, I mean black bloggers - from the blacktresses on Essence magazine's December issue. You've got Sanaa Lathan, Nia Long and Gabrielle Union. They talked about the ups and downs of Hollywood and they said that the black bloggers have the knives out for them way more than the white press. Gabriel said, quote, "when you hear crap about us, it is coming from our own community which hurts." She griped that black bloggers, quote, "rip us to shreds ever two seconds from our nose to the weave to the clothes to the shoes to the ashy ankles.

Well, the different witnesses are kept separate. They are very - kept very separate, and I don't know where they are. Some - there's - usually the state's witnesses are in the warden's office. And we're sitting in there, in the break room for the staff of the prison, when the officer who had been shuttling us around walked in and he just said, y'all ready? And that's when all talk just stopped. Everyone shifts into a different mode. And we get into a van, and then there are two other vans for each of the groups of witnesses. And then we all move around the prison, through checkpoints, to the back, and that's it. I mean, everyone gets quiet, and then we go inside. No one speaks until we get out.

So the big difference is who's going to be doing that tracking? Right now, as I said, it's companies like Google or Facebook. What Congress is trying to do is roll back the rules that keep your internet provider - so this is, you know, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile - keep them from doing this sort of basically snooping on your browsing history. And the major difference here is that your internet provider sees everything. Your internet provider sees when you go to Facebook, sees when you go to Google, sees when you buy something, sees when you order a latte. So it's really scary that all of this information could be collected and really abused in one place.

Well, yeah. The Republicans are very much opposed to collective bargaining by public employees, and in I think it was Missouri and in Indiana, newly elected Republicans rescinded executive orders that their Democratic predecessors had put in force. I should just mention--you mention the AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal workers. The most famous public employee strike in American history was an AFSCME strike and it occurred in Memphis in 1968. It was the Memphis sanitation strike where Martin Luther King was assassinated. It was entirely illegal. There was no public bargaining law in Tennessee, but it points out an important thing about public employee strikes. If they are over an issue which is of sufficient importance and they have sufficient support at least from one constituency, then they can succeed dramatically and really change the face of employment, and that's what happened in Memphis. It may or may not be on the cards in New York, but I would say that it's very interesting to look at who's a member of the subway workers union there--they're immigrant workers. And insofar as we're having a kind of civil rights movement for immigrant workers these days, this union to some extent represents it.

As it turns out, Republicans seemed to be talking more about the president being censured than Democrats. Some in the GOP say the natural next step after censure is impeachment. Their message: if Democrats control Congress next year, impeachment could make headlines again. Now, no prominent Democrat has even talked about impeachment, and many are running away from the idea of censure. Still, at a time when the war is loosing support, Republicans seem to be turning to an area where they may be somewhat stronger. A bare majority of Americans supports the president's warrantless wiretapping program. What's more, Republicans may be hoping that if talk of impeachment is in the air, they can fire up their base, people like Ohio Republican Sharon Bronstein(ph).

He is very close to Chavez, and he needs Chavez's support because Bolivia is a very poor country. This is a government that is not very experienced. They have people in all levels of the government - ministers and others - who have never served in various capacities in government, and so they need the advice of experts in issues like energy and so forth. And they also need the money, particularly to move forward on some of their plans like nationalization of the energy industry, which has already started having very serious problems - basically because the state energy company in that country is not prepared to take on this very difficult and monumental task.

President Bush visits the Mexican border area this week to address the issues of immigration. Later today, the president speaks at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, and tomorrow he's scheduled to meet with members of the Border Patrol in El Paso. Earlier this year, the governors of both Arizona and New Mexico declared states of emergency in border areas, and the president's expected to emphasize tighter controls on illegal immigration. But he's also expected to renew calls for a guest worker program that would provide temporary visas for foreign workers if American citizens can't be found for certain jobs. Proponents argue that legal opportunities are critical to the success of any border control program and that American businesses need workers. Some critics believe a guest worker program would be unwieldy and ineffective. Others oppose it because they say it amounts to an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Later in the program, we'll hear two views on the use and definition of torture. But first, immigration and guest workers. If you have questions about how and whether such a program would work, give us a call. We'd especially like to hear from those of you who live and work near the border or who operate businesses there. Our number here in Washington is (800) 989-8255. That's (800) 989-TALK. The e-mail address is totn@npr.org.

…on the coffee table, will you let her - ooh, try to balance, ooh, fall down on her bottom, would you let her do that? And I think that a healthy balance is to let - is to watch some of that happen without swooping in. But I do think that it starts very, very young. It's certainly - I remember seeing this at my daughter's nursery school when, you know, they're 2-and-a-half, they're toddlers. It's very challenging for them to leave you. And there were some parents, who, I could tell, made it much more difficult on a toddler by lingering, by - it was like an opera.

Yes, yes. So, this mechanism really has two components that one has to understand. It has a compass, so the sun compass and all of it resides in the brain of the monarch, I must say, that is no bigger than the head of a pin. So, it's really remarkable stuff. But, anyway, the butterflies sense the skylight information that they're going to use for direction through their sun compass. And then the dilemma is how do they compensate for the movement of the sun, as you mentioned, across the horizon over the course of the day. And the way they do that is to use their circadian clock. So, there is a communication, if you will, between the clock and the compass to recalibrate both systems so that the animals can maintain a fixed bearing, in this instance, going south over the course of the day and the course of many weeks and months, to get to their overwintering grounds.

Blinder says once the crisis erupted, Yellen argued early on to bring interest rates down. She has also been a key supporter of some of the extraordinary measures the Fed has taken over the past few years to revive the economy, such as its massive purchases of long-term Treasury bills. And Yellen has been a big force behind greater openness at the Fed, such as its decision to signal future moves of short-term interest rates. In a recent speech at Berkeley, where she taught for many years, Yellen said greater openness would give the public a solid basis for borrowing and spending decisions.

Yes. My wife works for the State Department, has for many, many years. She has a top-secret clearance and is required to get a security check every five years. Some months ago, as she was interviewed, the investigator asked her whether she's getting psychiatric treatment, and she said yes. And he said, `What's the name of your doctor?' Now I mentioned this to a rather prominent psychiatrist, and he was outraged. He said that, you know, she did not have to answer that kind of question. However, two months ago, when it came down to the crunch and they told my wife that her secure clearance will not be renewed unless she signs the release for the psychiatrist to give the information to the government investigator. And I checked with the same psychiatrist I talked to previously, and he told me, yes, yes, the situation has changed, and right now he himself has been forced to release information on his clients because that is now what the government demands.

You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION: Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. The world's coral reefs are dying. Often called the Rain Forests of the Oceans, they are home to millions of species of sea creatures. And, like the rain forests--the terrestrial rain forests--they continually face threats caused by humans: pollution, over-fishing, and the latest threat, rising ocean temperatures from global warming. Warm ocean waters make the corals spit out their colorful co-habitants, the green algae that help them eat. And when the algae leave home, they leave the coral white, or bleached, and much weaker and much hungrier. For years scientists have been watching coral reefs shrink as more and more corals die off. Just this winter, record warm temperatures in the Caribbean contributed to an unprecedented die-off. But my guest today has found a coral species that seems to have found a strategy to defend itself during a bleaching event, and it does that by gorging itself on food.

Well, there's no doubt. This is clearly a victory in this war on terrorism. However, I don't want anyone to come to the false conclusion that the war is over by any means. You know, this is a day where we have taken a great step forward in this war in terrorism. And I suspect, as we remember the loss of our loved ones in September, that this will be a moment that we can look back on, you know, and feel a certain degree of comfort, that we're moving in the right direction. But nevertheless, no matter what our government does, no matter what our military does, you know, there'll be no replacing those wonderful people that we lost in September of 2001.

But they saw that all moments were not equal. In other words, that when people were fighting over their very lives, that time was compressed or accelerated. And things happen - technology, political developments, revolutions, all of that happened and then Thucydides or Polivius would say to us, 1947 was not as important as 1945, 1918 was more important than 1921, 1864-5 was important than 1852. And for us that are - sort of believe in relativism, we think everything is equal and all history has merits or demerits but not in the classical sense of military history. I think it would be wise for us to rediscover that notion.

And the regulators went back to work. Sure, there were new rules, new leadership, but the people stayed the same. Except Kaplan, he moved on to work in the private sector. And to be clear, Kaplan says he and his colleagues did not mess up. Regulators could only enforce the rules as they were written. And in the early 1980s, Congress changed the rules on them. Thrifts were allowed to take too many risks, so Kaplan says the regulators' hands were tied. But here is what happened next. The renamed agency, the OTS, later became regulator of Washington Mutual, AIG and Countrywide, all key players in our current financial crisis. And so, Congress is now sitting down to rewrite banking reform. Here's Lawrence Kaplan again.

Well, we're doing what we realistically think we can now with the surge. You know, John McCain said he thought it was not going to be enough and that may turn out to have been the case, and it - I think it's quite probable that the surge ultimately will not succeed. But we should be, at least, doing what we are doing, which is trying - to see if we can achieve greater stability. When that happens, we should be pushing the Iraqis, we should be calling for benchmarks the way Congress is doing, and we should be realistic about making sure that those benchmarks are things that are actually capable of being implemented in reality.

It is interesting. But we're not just doing it for the sake of finding out how LSD works in the brain. Let's think of psychopathologies or mental disorders. You know, we might think of something like depression or perhaps something like addiction. Certain patterns, certain configurations in the brain can become overly reinforced. And some of the range of brain activity becomes sort of narrowed and limited. If you have these very debilitating disorders, then perhaps you could introduce something like LSD, which works to introduce a kind of window of plasticity or malleability - conditions for change, essentially - to try and sort of dismantle these entrenched patterns. And if done so with careful preparation, with attendant psychotherapy and then careful working through what is experienced under the LSD and talking through what is experienced, we've seen and others have seen that it can actually be used for good ends.

You know, this has been a challenge for the women's march to sort of define itself and shape its identity. And there have been disagreements about what that should be. They've always tried to address a lot of issues - immigration, poverty, racial inequality among others - along with more traditional feminist concerns like reproductive rights. And that last one was on a lot of people's minds this year with the newly configured Supreme Court, which now includes two Trump nominees, including most recently, of course, Justice Brett Kavanaugh. I talked to Ellie Hackney (ph) of Pasadena, Md. She says she's very concerned about the future of women's rights.

Yeah. I mean, the U.N. recently declared that Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world. It's got a huge gang problem with the Maras. It's got a drug problem, both in terms of drug use and also increasingly with drug trafficking. The Mexican cartels have started moving into Honduras, basically finding it to be an easier place to operate, using Honduras as a transit point for narcotics. We've been running stories just this week about the corruption there, about cops not just being accused of taking bribes, but actually being accused of murder. The state has really been struggling to deal with this violence. The courts are overwhelmed. Many of these inmates are actually pretrial detainees who haven't even been convicted of anything yet.

Yeah. I think from my perspective, it was a clear choice. The nice thing is, sometimes individual interest is in conflict with group interest; that was an example. If you can figure out schemes to get individuals to set their own interests to one side, often the whole society can do better. Whether they had a realistic scheme for doing that, I don't know. It wouldn't work in the U.S., I'm sure, to do it the way they were doing it. But we do look for schemes and sometimes moral norms, social norms are how we get people to set aside their own personal interests for the greater good. You mentioned the returning of wallets that people find. You know, people don't do that because it's the narrowly self-interested thing to do. They do it because they feel that's what they should do.

And there are more every day. Recent polls show that evangelical Christianity is the fastest growing sect in Brazil. According to the Pew Research Center, 22 percent of the Brazilian population identifies as evangelical Christian; that's up from only 5 percent in 1970. And in bad news for the Catholic Church, most of them switched from Roman Catholicism. These days, only about 62 percent of people in Brazil say they are Catholic although in absolute numbers, this still makes Brazil the country with the most Catholics in the world. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: According to the Pew Research Center, 65 percent - not 62 percent - of people in Brazil say they are Catholic.] Fifteen-year-old Natalia Andrande says events like this attract new followers; and she says that's her message to Pope Francis.

Actually, we did allow reporters time and again into Syria, including some of NPR. Brazilian, Indian, Southern African, Russian and Chinese reporters are there, and they do report from Syria a totally different, absolutely different story from the story that is reported here, usually in the United States and the American media. It's extraordinary how facts are distorted. Let me tell you this. Are there political demands in Syria? Of course, there are. What does the Syrian government think of them? We believe they are legitimate. How did we address them? We agreed to a total, a comprehensive political - a poll of the Syrian political system. Who are those guys who are carrying arms and committing crimes and atrocities and attacking both civilians and government officials? They are people that have no political agendas whatsoever related to democracy or freedom or reforms. They have their own extremist, benighted, medieval ideology, and this is the sort of ideology they are trying to impose on Syria.

Well, I think it's a natural human response when you see a child trip and fall on a curb, you walk over and pick them up. In a situation like this, the devastation is just unimaginable. You see the images on TV. And again, I think, all of us say, let's go help these children. One of the problems is, first, we need to get emergency aid to the children first before we're considering just lifting them out of the country. And the second part is, in a time of a national emergency, it's really not the best policy to airlift the children into another country. Here's a quick example of what can happen. You have a child in school. You have a mother or father at work, maybe the work is in a on the opposite side of the island. The earthquake hits, the child is alone for two or three weeks, no one comes to visit. You assume the child's an orphan, you put them on a plane, fly them to France, and they get adopted.

Well, I think first of all, Ira, we should not take it face value. Many of these federal and institutional structures have been put in place to ensure the integrity of science in relation to helping the public. Institutional review boards which are responsible for assuring the safety of volunteers in medical experiments have repeatedly been found to be kind of rubberstamp operations at universities. There are serious efforts underway to improve their performance, but nobody thinks the performance is really very strong. And furthermore, you know, the pharmaceutical industry has been involved in many episodes that have led many, many people to be very wary of its assertions about commitment to the public interest. Consider the Vioxx trials. The lead author of one of the basic papers told the New York Times that Merck wrote the paper and then asked him to edit it. He never heard about a woman dying in the trial until later on.

Well, since I'm a scientist, my job once coming to the philosophical idea that they have to change, is to invent hypotheses as to how they might change. And the whole point is that these hypotheses, since they're about the past, should be testable by observations we can make. So in the book "Time Reborn" I consider several of these hypotheses. The oldest one, the one I've been studying the longest, is called cosmological natural selection and was in fact the subject of my first book in 1997, "Life of the Cosmos." And in that hypothesis, under that hypothesis, universes reproduce by giving birth to new universes inside of black holes, which is an old idea in the field.

Well, there was a line of police here for days who were guarding the station, and they left this morning. So the people who were waiting here - the refugees and migrants- decided to storm the first train they could. It was their chance to get out of it - get to where they really want to go, which is Germany. The people were really trying to force themselves onto the train. They were removed immediately, but they did try to go. But then what happened is the board changed, and all trains to Western Europe were canceled. That means even the trains that the people were try to get on were not going to Western Europe. They were going right back to Serbia and to Romania and to other countries east. So right now people are stuck here, and everybody that I pass says, does this train go to Germany? Do you know? Do you know? They're still wondering what's going on.

We were just talking a little bit about Senator Hillary Clinton and the gender card. Now let's move on to Fred Thompson. Over the weekend, news broke that an advisor for the presidential candidate was reportedly a bookie and a drug dealer back in the '70s and '80s. His name is Philip Martin. And Thompson said he first learned of the criminal past on Saturday. Thompson said Martin had, quote, "paid his debt to society," and he would not, quote, "throw him under a bus because of the revelations." Martin raised more than $6 million for Thompson's campaign. So, John, is this going to hurt Thompson?

This is Rachel. I wonder - I'm kind of with Michelle. I think there are a lot of societal pressures on women that didn't use to be there. I think that, you know, I talk a lot with my women friends about how we are supposed to have soul-mate marriages, perfect children who speak two languages, a successful career. You know, I feel like the pressures and the things that we are supposed to be accomplishing are so insurmountable, it's really not a wonder to me that women turn to alcohol and pills and who knows what else to get them through.

By this time, it was quarter to 6, and I went up to someone that was senior vice president of the bank and I said, how are you doing? And they said, oh, I'm doing all right. And I could tell something was going on and they didn't want to say. And we looked across to the other side of the bank and there was two employees adjusting pictures on the wall. And he kind of laughed and he said, wow, he says, that reminds me of adjusting the chairs on the Titanic before it sank. And that really told me something was going down.

Well, she went back and told her gang affiliation, and there were consequences for that. I mean my so-called friend did me no service whatsoever and I was assaulted, and it was an awful experience, and you have to beg like crazy to get your room changed. And then I was transferred to another room, and I was assaulted by a black gang member just for making a comment about that there was a fight on the field and asking do you get more time added, you know, just asking questions. And her response was: Don't talk about my people that way. And I just was asking questions, not - and I was telling her, you know, I was just asking a question, and so when I went up to go to my locker, for whatever reason she jumped off of her top bunk and punched me in the back of the head.

Well, I think if people are shocked, they probably shouldn't be, and I think plenty of citizens of this country would say that this was a long time coming, and in some sense inevitable, that people are well aware that other similar plots have been thwarted in recent years, and that Jordan was well known to be a potential target for some of these groups. Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is a Jordanian who has a long-standing antipathy to the Jordanian monarchy, the Jordanian government, and anyone that has sort of paid much attention to these groups would have recognized, I think, that this was something that could certainly have happened. The security forces have just been fortunate enough or good enough to stop the attacks from happening in recent years.

Well, let me just give you the details of that particular event. It happened on October 29th and it was in Somaliland, as opposed to Somalia proper. And the young suicide bomber was a young man who'd been missing from Minneapolis for a little over a year. His name was Shirwa Ahmed. And after the suicide bombing occurred and there was a second one that occurred around the same time in Somaliland, they took - the U.S. authorities went there, took a DNA test and actually confirmed that it was Shirwa Ahmed. He was brought back to Minneapolis and, I think, was buried in December.

So they have obviously less access than when they're in the community, but there is still access. And often the prices are much higher, and the risk is much greater. So people who do use end up using often in riskier fashions because they're having to do so, of course, in secrecy and at greater risk to themselves. And I think the most important thing to note is that opioid addiction is an entirely treatable condition, and it can be treated effectively even in correctional settings. And so I think the most important takeaway is really that we need to be offering lifesaving and effective treatment.

I think it's going to be very significant. And I think it also signals the direction the president is heading on the entire war in Afghanistan. I think this call that he made here, I guess yesterday or the day before, has taken his military commanders in the theater by surprise. There's an ongoing negotiation happening right now with the Taliban that's being led by Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, who is my running partner there as the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan during my tenure there. And this is a big shock for everybody who's been following the Afghan war. No. 1, there is a negotiation going on that's ostensibly trying to come to some political solution to the crisis. And at the same time we're doing that, we've now announced we're cutting half of our troop strength. So on the military side, that's going to make the job of counterterrorism forces and the job of the security assistance forces there much, much harder, if not impossible. And on the political side, I think it's going to undercut our negotiations with our adversary in the Taliban over the last 17 years.

Well, I think, what it did not do, was shut down the country, economically. That was one thing it didn't do. But one thing it did do, was to show the solidarity among the people who are arguing for fairer immigration reform, and that they were out there in huge numbers. And it showed somewhat also, the places where they are, and that they are determined to fight. I think that on immigration, though, on the one hand, you can be for it, for the people who are protesting because they're protesting, and that's the American way; and that it's moral, and that it's humane and principled, to let them in. But, you can also lament some of the rhetoric that is there that I think ought to be changed. All this business about jobs that Americans won't do--anybody who reads and pays attention, knows that a majority of the kinds of jobs they're talking about, are done by people who are legal all across the country, and a minority and in some places are, so they don't need to say that. I think that the appeal to morality, the appeal to bring me your tired, your huddled masses to opportunity, was embodied in what happened yesterday. And I think it was very powerful and it was very effective.

But I think as we come to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we'd be making a big mistake not to actually look at other forms of political violence and because we're going to release more data that looks at right-wing terrorism and other forms of political terrorism in the United States, and one of the really interesting takeaways is that we found on the right-wing side four cases of fairly serious attempts to do radiological bombs, so-called dirty bombs, in the United States, coming out of the right wing. They didn't come out of the jihadi terrorists. And so we shouldn't be blind to the fact that there are other forms of political violence, which actually may be more threatening. And for instance, you know, the FBI says that 73 people have died in hate crimes since 9/11. Only 17 people have died in jihadi terrorist attacks. So you know, hate crimes are more of a problem.

It's pretty simple. There are nine, sort of, rules that I discovered after 35 years of rock climbing. Most of them are pretty basic. Number one: don't let go — very sure success method. But really, truly — often you think about letting go way before your body does. So hang in there, and you come up with some pretty peculiar solutions. Number two: hesitation is bad. This is a friction climb, up in Tuolumne Meadows, in the Yosemite high country. Friction climbing doesn't have any sort of hard positive edges. You're climbing on little dimples and nubbins in the rock. The most friction you have is when you first put your hand or your foot on the rock. And then from that point on, you're basically falling. So momentum is good. Don't stop. Rule number three: have a plan. This is a climb called the Naked Edge, in El Dorado Canyon, outside of Boulder. This climber is on the last pitch of it. He's actually right about where I fell. There is about 1,000 feet of air below him. And all the hard pitches are actually below him. Often what happens is you're planning so hard for like, "How do I get through the hardest part? How do I get through the hardest part?" And then what happens? You get to the last pitch. It's easy. And you're completely flamed out. Don't do it. You have to plan ahead to get to the top. But you also can't forget that each individual move you have to be able to complete. This is a climb called the Dike Route, on Pywjack Dome, up in the Yosemite high country. The interesting thing about this climb is it's not that hard. But if you're the leader on it, at the hardest move, you're looking at about 100 foot fall, onto some low angle slabs. So you've got to focus. You don't want to stop in the middle like Coleridge's Kubla Kahn. You've got to keep going. Rule number five: know how to rest. It's amazing. The best climbers are the ones that in the most extreme situations can get their bodies into some position where they can rest, regroup, calm themselves, focus, and keep going. This is a climb in the Needles, again in California. Fear really sucks because what it means is you're not focusing on what you're doing. You're focusing on the consequences of failing at what you're doing because any given move should require all your concentration and thought processes to execute it effectively. One of the things in climbing is, most people sort of take it straight on. And they follow the most obvious solution. This is the Devils Tower in Wyoming, which is a columnar basalt formation that most of you probably know from "Close Encounters." With this, typically crack climbers would put their hands in and their toes in and just start climbing. The cracks are too small to get your toes into so the only way to climb is using your fingertips in the cracks, and using opposing pressure and forcing yourself up. Rule number eight: strength doesn't always equal success. In the 35 years I've been a climbing guide and taught on indoor walls, and stuff like that, the most important thing I've learned was, guys will always try to do pull-ups. Beginning guys, it's like, they thrash, they thrash, they get 15 feet up — and they can do about 15 pull-ups right — And then they just flame out. Women are much more in balance because they don't have that idea that they're going to be able to do 100 pull-ups. They think about how to get the weight over their feet because it's sort of natural — they carry you all day long. So balance is really critical, and keeping your weight on your feet, which is your strongest muscle. And of course there is rule number nine. I came up with rule number nine after I actually didn't plan for a fall, and went about 40 feet and cracked a rib. Once you get to that point where you know it's going to happen, you need to start thinking about how you're going to let go because that is the critical piece of not getting hurt — how you're going to fall onto the rope, or if you're climbing without a rope, fall to a place where you can actually control the fall. So don't hang on till the bitter end. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Well, that's a term that's been coined by American political scientists, and it relates to the fact that once you have - you had the move away from single-party systems to multi-party systems, and even if the incumbent in the single-party system became a contestant in the two-party system or multi-party system, there would be, now, term limits, as opposed to in the past. So let's say - for example, Jerry Rowlings introduced multi-party democracy in Ghana. He stood for two terms. He won in both of those terms, but now he's been succeeded by this businessman, John Kufour. If these elections come off without a hitch, well then we'll be seeing that transitions have been orderly. And if Kufour is thrown out, of course, or his successor is thrown out, then that would be further sign of the consolidation and deepening of democracy. So that's basically what that essentially means.

So a lot of what they're talking about here is the businesses known as pass-throughs. Those are people who are self-employed or own small businesses, where they take all of their income from that business and file it on their individual tax returns, and they saw a ton of changes under this bill. And this is probably a good time to say that when it comes to individual circumstances like this, it's probably best to assess, you know, whatever your own deductions are, your own situation with a professional. We are not in the best position to advise people on that. And for this particular one, some tax breaks in the bill, like state and local deductions, apply differently for the taxes that you've paid on business expenditures and on, you know, routine things you do as a business versus what you as a person do. So it's one of those situations where it's really important to keep very meticulous records of how you spend money and whether it's personal or business, and that will make a big difference going forward.

Aides say Mr. Obama went into the meeting planning to pressure President Karzai on the steps his government needs to take to match up with the steps that U.S. and coalition forces are taking to increase security here in Afghanistan. That means they want to see better governance from the Afghan government. They want to see a stronger effort to combat narco-traffickers, and they want Karzai's government doing more to really reassure the people of Afghanistan that the central government is working for them. There's been a lot of skepticism out of the countryside that the central government is really providing any services in a credible way to the Afghan people, and that makes them, of course, more vulnerable to the Taliban.

Well, you know, what I - what's been interesting, of course, for me as a reporter, is that, you know, there's a bunch of new books, (unintelligible) some things that I didn't really know about that have been announced here that I'm really excited about. If you know, for me - an artist by the name of Paul Pope, a really talented comics artist, he's got almost a cult science-fiction series called "THB" that he's actually self-published himself over the past of couple of years. He just got a big deal, where First Second, which is a New York trade book house imprint because the New York trade book houses are actually really looking at this category very closely. He has signed a book deal and they are going to bring out a four-volume complete edition of "THB." And I think most of us who really love Paul's work are really excited about that. So I'm really pumped about that.

Oh, we saw much more criticisms of government in the mid-'90s, and to some extent that subsided. But where the real action is is on the other side of the equation, and that is the extent to which people want government to do things. And there we've got a fair amount of consistency despite this change. Sixty-nine percent of the people that we questioned in 2007 say it's the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can't take care of themselves. Very little variation on that over time. Eighty-three percent say there need to be strict laws and regulations that the government sets to protect the environment. We have, however, seen some decline and now rise again in support for an activist government. For example, in 1987, 71 percent believes that government should help people who can't help themselves. In the mid-'90s, in the Republican revolution year, that 71 fell to 57 percent. It's now back up to 69 percent. So we are in a period where there is actually more call - more support for a strong safety net, yet pretty high criticisms of the very government that people are calling.

Well, you know, people have actually understood the structure of pearls and shells for quite a while, and it's this combination of biology plus materials and biology plus the inorganic component that make it so valuable. And it's - you can look at the shell and - like you said, you can look at it under the microscope but after the process has already taken place. What's really interesting is actually the dynamic process: how the organism makes the calcium carbon there, how it makes the material because the organism has cells. And these cells are pumping out proteins, and these proteins actually can grab on to ions and solutions, so ions in the ocean, and put them together basically in layers of ions in groups of - groups of ions and atoms. So they build up a structure exactly the way that they need the structure to be, the way that it's actually the strongest and toughest structure so it can withstand things in the environment like otters and other kinds of things that would happen in this environment.

Well, Guy, I can only assume the justices wanted to be as comprehensive as possible and to take a look at all of the questions raised in the lower courts, even when some of those questions were dismissed as total losers. The bottom line here is that the court certified four questions for review. First, and the most important, is whether Congress exceeded its constitutional authority in requiring virtually all Americans to have basic health care coverage. And second, if that individual mandate is unconstitutional, whether the rest of the law stands or whether, as even the government now says, there would be no way to provide the goodies everyone likes in this law without the expanded pool of people paying into the system. The third question is whether the law imposes unconstitutional conditions on the states by requiring them to pay five percent more into Medicaid by 2017 to cover the increased number of people under the program. And the last question is whether it's premature to decide the first three.

Because I've been promising my friends, who happen to be fans, every year, I would say oh, that Gospel is coming out next year. Oh, the Gospel is coming out next year. Then that year passed and another year, another year. I kept not lying to them but praying that my record labels would give me the chance to put out this gospel CD that I needed to put out. But, you know, record labels when you're a secular artist, they say well you know, that's something that can wait. Well, it can never wait for me because I was born gospel, so I always wanted to do it. But when your hands are tied, what do you do? You wait for 10 years and the 10 years is up now. So, I finally did it. So I called it “The Gospel According To Patti LaBelle” because I don't know what I might sing. So I've always had a lot of gospel influence music in my life.

Thank you. I understand and certainly empathize with the need that people have for the burial of their loved ones. I come from a mixed blood background. I am part Native American and in the Native American culture, it is, of course, absolutely forbidden that anyone interrupt the livelihood, if you will, of a grave that exists. However, my family also served in World War II and we lost loved ones. We do not, in my family, go to other countries and demand that they make a sacred space of the place where our loved ones died. For example, my uncle, who died as a pilot in a plane crash in a foreign country, we don't go there and demand that they make this a sacred space.

We wrote a multi-day series about three years ago that explained, both in words and also in graphics, what had happened to the Gulf Coast and particularly the coast of Louisiana over the past decades and how barrier islands had eroded and wetlands and marshes had vanished and continue to vanish. But the point of the series was that these were the natural barriers of our nation against the potential devastation of a hurricane. And without those barriers we are left unbelievably vulnerable, as was proved in Hurricane Katrina. And so building stronger levees and building floodgates alone will not be sufficient and we must find a way to finance the rebuilding of the wetlands through diversion projects. We must find a way to strengthen the barrier islands before they vanish altogether.

The filmmaker has been identified as Sam Becile, which is probably a pseudonym since there are no records of such a person, and he definitely isn't known in Hollywood. When the 12-minute preview was posted on YouTube in July, it didn't get that much attention. So how did it cause such upheaval in Egypt and Libya? Spreading the word about the film were two men, an Egyptian-born Christian activist in Washington, D.C., named Morris Sadek and his friend Terry Jones, pastor of a church in Florida who made headlines last year when he burned a Quran. Terry Jones says he hasn't seen the full two-hour film but he liked what he saw in the preview.

And now, the other end of the income scale. Edward Liddy, the CEO of insurance giant of AIG, is on Capitol Hill today. He is facing a grilling there before the House Financial Services panel. Lawmakers are furious that millions of dollars in bonuses went to AIG employees after the company received billions of dollars in federal bailout money. The panel wants to know what AIG has done with those billions, and how much more money it may need. NPR's David Welna has been following this hearing, and he joins us now from Capitol Hill. So, everyone is angry about these bonuses. How does Edward Liddy justify them today?

First, win a primary, get a trip to Florida where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are today after victories in Kentucky and Oregon. Florida's primary delegates are still in question because the state held its primary earlier then Democratic Party rules allow. But Senators Clinton and Obama are both there today because regardless of who wins the nomination, that state is going to be very important in the fall. Joining us is Slate.com's chief political correspondent John Dickerson. John, what do you make of both senators, Obama and Clinton campaigning in Florida as though both are going to be the nominee?

What we've heard from witnesses is the flames could be seen for miles, that they saw this, you know, red sky light up after they heard the sounds of the explosion when the plane actually crashed into the home. And right now, there are still nine fire departments on the scene battling hot spots. They were also concerned with a natural gas leak that's on the scene, and they're working with the National Fuel GasCompany here in this region to try to contain that. So right now, it's a very hot spot area, is what they're calling it. With the light of day now, they're able to see the debris field. They've described it as very small. They said, so far, they only see is what they suspected in the overnight hours. There was only one structure. That home is completely destroyed by the crash, but there is very little damage to the houses in the area nearby.

That's right. It's really embarrassing. Now, genetic dates are just embarrassing in general, and one of the big uncertainties about genetic dates is that they're based on using a molecular clock, kind of like a carbon-dating clock that counts like emissions of particles, but here's it's emissions of new mutations. But we don't know the rate of those emissions, the human mutation rate, and that's so uncertain that a lot of that broad range is due to just not knowing what the human mutation rate. Hopefully, that will clear up in the next few years, and we'll have a better estimate of important dates, like the time we split from Denisovans and Neanderthals.

It comes up every now and again. Jenny and I - she's really a good friend of mine, so we've gotten to the point now where we could tease each other, and she knows every now and again when she's overstepping my boundaries. I can give her a look and she'll laugh and back off. But, yeah, you know, with Jenny, it was also a difficult situation because I'd really gotten to really appreciate her and her family. And I've learned more about what it's like. I think, for me, again, one of the more humbling experiences is - for frustrated as I get and my venting online, it's like, at the end of the day, I really have to, you know, check myself - what you're talking about. You can buy an airplane ticket whenever you want and leave, like you have absolutely no right to really feel just like this is something that you're allowed to bitch out. Again, it's humbling. But with Jenny, when I go out and I spend time with her family and I look at the realities of what it means to be really poor in this country, it's very difficult. And, yeah, with Jenny, I'm lucky in the sense that we've established a relationship now where I am helping her actually. I also wrote in the article that, again, little victories must be celebrated, and one of my little victories is I've decided to try to help Jenny on a very personal level, just get her through school because her mother can't afford to do that and that keeps me grounded. It keeps me focused on the fact that even when I sometimes question the larger picture at play here, there is somebody that I'm helping and I've formed a really sweet relationship with, so that's helpful and certainly something makes me - keeps me moving forward.

Oh, piggy, one of my childhood games. I talk about this in the book. But it's a softball game. In Chicago we used bigger softballs, 16 inch, and you had a batter, a pitcher and a catcher. That's all you basically needed, but you've got to have a lot of outfielders. And the goal was trying to be at bat. So if the pitcher swung and you hit it, the catchers, if they either caught it on a fly or on one bounce, you'd lose your bat, right? So your goal was to stay at bat, and we would play that in our neighborhood all day long - girls, boys, it wouldn't matter. All you needed was a bat and a softball. You know, but those days, you know, are over. I mean, my mom still lives in the house that we grew up in, and I can count the number of kids that I see outside playing. And we would play outside all day long, from, you know, morning until the streetlights came on.

And yet the problem is that Lindsey Graham, at this point, is, in some respects, a bipartisan coalition of one. He does not have another Republican. John McCain is still in the Senate. Some of the other people who supported McCain and Martinez in 2007, such as Jon Kyl from Arizona, the other Republican senator from Arizona besides John McCain, have backed off, are not willing to commit to this. John McCain is running for re-election this year and has a very tough primary challenge from the right. So he is no longer quite as eager to be front and center on this particular issue as he once was willing to be. In fact, as he was running for president in 2008 in the primaries, he was not willing to commit to a vote for his own bill in 2007. So this is a backing off that's been going on for some while.

And that's another good point. The chairman of GE, Jeff Immelt, told a group last month that he wished the United States would come up with an energy policy, any energy policy of any kind, because what he sees is other countries in the industrialized world moving forward rapidly on efficient and clean energy technologies. And his company, which is a multinational, is going to go with investments in the countries where the commitment is there, the markets are developed and the opportunities are now. So the US basically is running the risk of being left behind in the international technology race.

Hi. I was recently in Yellowstone, and I was quite fascinated by just the change the Earth is taking over the millennia. Is it quite possible that we're in a cycle where, right now, the Earth is hospitable for the human race, but, you know, a hundred thousand years from now, or even sooner, as some scientists here suggesting, it won't be. And the reality is, there's not much humans can - are going to be able to do about this. And perhaps we should be investing our academic capital in improving the lives of people, who are here right now, maybe spend more time and money in Africa, aiding, you know, people who need food right now, instead of worrying about something that might well be inevitable.

Aeon commissioned photographer Tadej Znidarcic to illustrate Graeme Wood’s Outrageous Freedom essay on Ugandan gay rights. Znidarcic had unprecendented access to both sides of the conflict, photographing a gathering of the religious and political firebrands who continue to press for the anti-homosexuality bill to be passed in parliament, as well as the gay activists who campaign for freedom from persecution.

Well, I guess you can put it that way. I don't know, you know, I don't know that we can take that credit in that dimension exactly. I think we were very much aware of the tremendous engineering challenge that the Voyager mission presented to us. Keep in mind the spacecraft, up until that time, were generally, you know, interplanetary spacecraft. There was Pioneer 10 and 11, which were launched in '73, but they're very, very simple spacecrafts, simple spinner spacecraft. These two spacecrafts were complex and we realized the challenge of having had designed them to guarantee mission lifetime. And we did everything that was within our technology at that time, including hardware liability parts, the use of redundancy, the use of both functional and block redundancy. In other words, putting identical pieces of equipment on to back one another up, but also having thought about other functional paths, the use of different pieces of hardware on the spacecraft that could accomplish the same objective. All with the idea, really, guaranteeing that these two missions would last as long as they did.

This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Senator Barack Obama continues to explain last week's comments. In San Francisco, he said, quote, "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And it's not surprising then, they get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations." Rivals Hillary Clinton and John McCain both pounced on Obama's remarks as "out of touch" and "elitist." And the Democratic frontrunner is taking heat from many working-class voters as well. And that's a constituency that will be critical in next week's Pennsylvania primary and just slightly less important, come November. Blue-collar men may be this election's soccer moms.

Well, we need to get more women and men victims of sexual assault to report their crimes to the police. That's going to take a change in the way police handle things. So we need retraining and changes at police stations, but then we need to use the college processes as a bridge to get the victims to report the crime to the police. Colleges and should assign a lawyer to sexual assault victims and make sure their rights are respected. We need to make this process easier. To do that, we've got to make sure that sexual assault is defined on campus the way it's defined in the law - the way it's defined in the real world, not change the meaning of it on campus so that sexual assault on campus covers stuff that isn't an assault. And then we've got to integrate law-enforcement so that a few of these rapists can go to jail and be convicted because I'm telling you, if we can just send a few of them to jail, that is going to change what's happening on college campuses and in frats more than anything else.

Well, I think there's no doubt about it, Ed: Already that's exactly the strategy the White House has adopted, to say this isn't just the federal government's responsibility, not just the president's fault. Look at the fact that you have a Democratic and black mayor, Ray Nagin, and then a Democratic white governor in Louisiana in Kathleen Blanco. Neither of them on the local level as Democrats has emerged as a Rudy Giuliani-type figure, you know, the way Giuliani came out as, you know, sort of a strong leadership type out of 9/11 in New York City. What you have here instead is Blanco having some trouble with regard to how she negotiates her relationship with the federal government, especially with regard to the National Guard. And then secondly, Nagin--I think, you know, Nagin hurt himself when he decided to move his family to Dallas. Obviously, he has to, you know, be concerned about the education of his children. He wanted them in a good school system, but I think if he had moved somewhere else in the state, it might have been more understandable to the voters in New Orleans and to people throughout that Louisiana region. And then to see where he, you know, has to go back and forth in terms of evacuation orders or ordering people back in the city, again it's kind of faulty leadership.

Here's an email we have from Cynthia(ph) in Billings. I was widowed when my children were in elementary school. People tended to either pity me or expect me to bounce back rapidly. I had to learn quickly not to pay attention to what anyone thought. The point was to raise my children. Well, parenthood and - under any circumstance has its challenges. Single parents should be respected for how they meet a greater challenge. We're talking about a Pew survey that found attitudes towards single motherhood to be, well, about seven and 10 of Americans thought it was bad for society. We're talking with Mary Pols, who's the author of "Accidentally On Purpose: The True Tale Of A Happy Single Mother." And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

These Christians pray in shifts at this church in the city of Dohuk in northern Iraq. At 6 p.m., it's the Chaldeans, an hour later the orthodox, then the Syria Christians. Worshipers line up outside their clergy in distinctively different robes and hats, wait for a turn to pray at the altar. This is a modest house of worship with rough, wooden pews, space heaters for heat and the twinkling Christmas tree for the season. But attendance is sparse because so many Christians have already left Iraq. Dr. Kamal Yusef is here with his family. ISIS militants came to his home in Mosul. They demanded that he convert. When he refused, they took his house and forced him to leave.

That's right. But we get through them. And I think the kind of person Donald Rumsfeld is, he has done what he believed was best for the country and responded to the president in a time when the political realities require some show of change. Bob Gates comes in with - he's been out running a university, a great university. He comes in with none of the problems of being too closely associated. He's been there before, but this is one in which he comes in without any context on the issues that have been debated in the election. I think that's a good thing.