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For example, this week the city's utility announced plans for adding up to 400 megawatts of solar power to their energy menu. So what is the most efficient way to use all that new energy? When you want to run the dryer or charge up your electric car, can you choose the cheapest time of the day or night to draw that power, and how do you know when electricity might be cheaper? That could be the role of smart meters and smart appliances. Many experts think that they are vital if we want to make our energy use most efficient, something the mayor of San Antonio says is a priority for his city. I'd like to bring on the mayor of San Antonio, and we're going to bring on other local experts about pioneering efforts to make it go green.
Well, it might have raised red flags if the Russians had provided additional information about Tamerlan and what he was doing in Russia. But U.S. officials told me that didn't happen. And since they'd already taken a hard look at Tamerlan and hadn't found anything, they said it was unrealistic, in the absence of any new information, to expect that they'd go back and question him after his trip to Russia. And there was nothing to indicate that they actually needed to go back. In fact, yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin came out and said his security services hadn't uncovered any contact between Tamerlan and radical Islamist groups in Russia when Tamerlan was there last year. And Putin said security officials have been closely tracking these groups, and if Tamerlan had trained in Russia, the security services would have known about it. Now, of course, he has a stake in saying that, to look like the security services are on top of these groups. But what we're hearing from U.S. officials is that after being in Russia themselves with investigators, they aren't finding any indication that Tamerlan was in a camp. Now, that could change, but that's where the investigation has taken them so far.
In the two and a half years they lived here, the Ranks replaced their air-conditioning unit three times. Homes in this section of Heritage Harbor were built by Lennar, one of the nation's largest homebuilders. The company says it's identified at least 30 homes in this subdivision and at least 50 others elsewhere in the state that have what they're calling drywall issues. Lennar hired and environmental services company to conduct the most extensive study of the emissions from the drywall to date. Company officials aren't giving interviews that, but made available Bob DeMott, the toxicologist with Environ. He says testing showed that the drywall emits sulfide gases, which react with metal to cause corrosion and pitting. At the low levels he found, DeMott says, the chemicals don't pose a health risk. Dr. ROBERT P. DEMOTT (Managing Principal, Environ Corp.): In all the homes that we sampled, we determined that there were no levels of any of the sulfide gases of concern that were higher than either the government standards available or the levels that are reported in the scientific literature to produce effects on humans.
I can understand your point what your father said about the flooding and all, but where are you going to go? You're going to have earthquakes, fires, you name it, you're going to have it, so where you going to run to? That's what I don't understand. You know, when we first got to San Antonio the people just kept, well come and live in Texas. They just couldn't understand why we would want to go back to New Orleans, and I kept saying, well, it's my home, it's where I want to go, it's where I belong, it's what I know. And I said anywhere in the world there's always some kind of a natural disaster that happens and people deal with it and they cope with it. So we're going to deal with it, we're going to cope with it, and we're going to go back home.
Well, they've called for a NATO meeting and will consult with NATO allies on Tuesday. The foreign minister stopped short of calling for any armed response, but this is the second serious provocation between the two neighbors. Back in April, the Syrian military shot across the Turkish border. They killed two Syrian refugees, wounded 20 others, including a Turkish policeman. So, as a NATO member, Turkey threatened then to invoke the NATO charter, which says that NATO members can call for consultations. The foreign minister did say that Turkey's response would be measured and not sudden and then they will take it the U.N.
Now, on the other question on roads, let's take the Chad Cameroon Pipeline as an example. Here is an instance where oil corporations, the World Bank, NGOs come together with the government of Chad and put together a $3.7 billion pipeline to bring oil forward. And the earnings from the oil are supposed to be dedicated towards schools, education, road building and the like for broad beneficial impacts. Now this has been going on for about a year and a half, it's in a bit of crisis right now. There's been a lot of questions around the equity. Some of the most recent investigations in The New York Times and elsewhere have shown that, in fact, the big contracts on road construction that have come out of that experiment, which is a very promising experiment, have, in fact, lined the pockets of relatives of President Deby of Chad and raised the whole question that Sarah brings forward, which is, at the level of this average citizen, how much benefit actually accrues to the citizen in terms of access to well paved roads that weren't there before that could connect them to markets.
I'm a cancer doctor, and I walked out of my office and walked by the pharmacy in the hospital three or four years ago, and this was the cover of Fortune magazine sitting in the window of the pharmacy. And so, as a cancer doctor, you look at this, and you get a little bit downhearted. But when you start to read the article by Cliff, who himself is a cancer survivor, who was saved by a clinical trial where his parents drove him from New York City to upstate New York to get an experimental therapy for — at the time — Hodgkin's disease, which saved his life, he makes remarkable points here. And the point of the article was that we have gotten reductionist in our view of biology, in our view of cancer. For the last 50 years, we have focused on treating the individual gene in understanding cancer, not in controlling cancer. So, this is an astounding table. And this is something that sobers us in our field everyday in that, obviously, we've made remarkable impacts on cardiovascular disease, but look at cancer. The death rate in cancer in over 50 years hasn't changed. We've made small wins in diseases like chronic myelogenous leukemia, where we have a pill that can put 100 percent of people in remission, but in general, we haven't made an impact at all in the war on cancer. So, what I'm going to tell you today, is a little bit of why I think that's the case, and then go out of my comfort zone and tell you where I think it's going, where a new approach — that we hope to push forward in terms of treating cancer. Because this is wrong. So, what is cancer, first of all? Well, if one has a mass or an abnormal blood value, you go to a doctor, they stick a needle in. They way we make the diagnosis today is by pattern recognition: Does it look normal? Does it look abnormal? So, that pathologist is just like looking at this plastic bottle. This is a normal cell. This is a cancer cell. That is the state-of-the-art today in diagnosing cancer. There's no molecular test, there's no sequencing of genes that was referred to yesterday, there's no fancy looking at the chromosomes. This is the state-of-the-art and how we do it. You know, I know very well, as a cancer doctor, I can't treat advanced cancer. So, as an aside, I firmly believe in the field of trying to identify cancer early. It is the only way you can start to fight cancer, is by catching it early. We can prevent most cancers. You know, the previous talk alluded to preventing heart disease. We could do the same in cancer. I co-founded a company called Navigenics, where, if you spit into a tube — and we can look look at 35 or 40 genetic markers for disease, all of which are delayable in many of the cancers — you start to identify what you could get, and then we can start to work to prevent them. Because the problem is, when you have advanced cancer, we can't do that much today about it, as the statistics allude to. So, the thing about cancer is that it's a disease of the aged. Why is it a disease of the aged? Because evolution doesn't care about us after we've had our children. See, evolution protected us during our childbearing years and then, after age 35 or 40 or 45, it said "It doesn't matter anymore, because they've had their progeny." So if you look at cancers, it is very rare — extremely rare — to have cancer in a child, on the order of thousands of cases a year. As one gets older? Very, very common. Why is it hard to treat? Because it's heterogeneous, and that's the perfect substrate for evolution within the cancer. It starts to select out for those bad, aggressive cells, what we call clonal selection. But, if we start to understand that cancer isn't just a molecular defect, it's something more, then we'll get to new ways of treating it, as I'll show you. So, one of the fundamental problems we have in cancer is that, right now, we describe it by a number of adjectives, symptoms: "I'm tired, I'm bloated, I have pain, etc." You then have some anatomic descriptions, you get that CT scan: "There's a three centimeter mass in the liver." You then have some body part descriptions: "It's in the liver, in the breast, in the prostate." And that's about it. So, our dictionary for describing cancer is very, very poor. It's basically symptoms. It's manifestations of a disease. What's exciting is that over the last two or three years, the government has spent 400 million dollars, and they've allocated another billion dollars, to what we call the Cancer Genome Atlas Project. So, it is the idea of sequencing all of the genes in the cancer, and giving us a new lexicon, a new dictionary to describe it. You know, in the mid-1850's in France, they started to describe cancer by body part. That hasn't changed in over 150 years. It is absolutely archaic that we call cancer by prostate, by breast, by muscle. It makes no sense, if you think about it. So, obviously, the technology is here today, and, over the next several years, that will change. You will no longer go to a breast cancer clinic. You will go to a HER2 amplified clinic, or an EGFR activated clinic, and they will go to some of the pathogenic lesions that were involved in causing this individual cancer. So, hopefully, we will go from being the art of medicine more to the science of medicine, and be able to do what they do in infectious disease, which is look at that organism, that bacteria, and then say, "This antibiotic makes sense, because you have a particular bacteria that will respond to it." When one is exposed to H1N1, you take Tamiflu, and you can remarkably decrease the severity of symptoms and prevent many of the manifestations of the disease. Why? Because we know what you have, and we know how to treat it — although we can't make vaccine in this country, but that's a different story. The Cancer Genome Atlas is coming out now. The first cancer was done, which was brain cancer. In the next month, the end of December, you'll see ovarian cancer, and then lung cancer will come several months after. There's also a field of proteomics that I'll talk about in a few minutes, which I think is going to be the next level in terms of understanding and classifying disease. But remember, I'm not pushing genomics, proteomics, to be a reductionist. I'm doing it so we can identify what we're up against. And there's a very important distinction there that we'll get to. In health care today, we spend most of the dollars — in terms of treating disease — most of the dollars in the last two years of a person's life. We spend very little, if any, dollars in terms of identifying what we're up against. If you could start to move that, to identify what you're up against, you're going to do things a hell of a lot better. If we could even take it one step further and prevent disease, we can take it enormously the other direction, and obviously, that's where we need to go, going forward. So, this is the website of the National Cancer Institute. And I'm here to tell you, it's wrong. So, the website of the National Cancer Institute says that cancer is a genetic disease. The website says, "If you look, there's an individual mutation, and maybe a second, and maybe a third, and that is cancer." But, as a cancer doc, this is what I see. This isn't a genetic disease. So, there you see, it's a liver with colon cancer in it, and you see into the microscope a lymph node where cancer has invaded. You see a CT scan where cancer is in the liver. Cancer is an interaction of a cell that no longer is under growth control with the environment. It's not in the abstract; it's the interaction with the environment. It's what we call a system. The goal of me as a cancer doctor is not to understand cancer. And I think that's been the fundamental problem over the last five decades, is that we have strived to understand cancer. The goal is to control cancer. And that is a very different optimization scheme, a very different strategy for all of us. I got up at the American Association of Cancer Research, one of the big cancer research meetings, with 20,000 people there, and I said, "We've made a mistake. We've all made a mistake, myself included, by focusing down, by being a reductionist. We need to take a step back." And, believe it or not, there were hisses in the audience. People got upset, but this is the only way we're going to go forward. You know, I was very fortunate to meet Danny Hillis a few years ago. We were pushed together, and neither one of us really wanted to meet the other. I said, "Do I really want to meet a guy from Disney, who designed computers?" And he was saying: Does he really want to meet another doctor? But people prevailed on us, and we got together, and it's been transformative in what I do, absolutely transformative. We have designed, and we have worked on the modeling — and much of these ideas came from Danny and from his team — the modeling of cancer in the body as complex system. And I'll show you some data there where I really think it can make a difference and a new way to approach it. The key is, when you look at these variables and you look at this data, you have to understand the data inputs. You know, if I measured your temperature over 30 days, and I asked, "What was the average temperature?" and it came back at 98.7, I would say, "Great." But if during one of those days your temperature spiked to 102 for six hours, and you took Tylenol and got better, etc., I would totally miss it. So, one of the problems, the fundamental problems in medicine is that you and I, and all of us, we go to our doctor once a year. We have discrete data elements; we don't have a time function on them. Earlier it was referred to this direct life device. You know, I've been using it for two and a half months. It's a staggering device, not because it tells me how many kilocalories I do every day, but because it looks, over 24 hours, what I've done in a day. And I didn't realize that for three hours I'm sitting at my desk, and I'm not moving at all. And a lot of the functions in the data that we have as input systems here are really different than we understand them, because we're not measuring them dynamically. And so, if you think of cancer as a system, there's an input and an output and a state in the middle. So, the states, are equivalent classes of history, and the cancer patient, the input, is the environment, the diet, the treatment, the genetic mutations. The output are our symptoms: Do we have pain? Is the cancer growing? Do we feel bloated, etc.? Most of that state is hidden. So what we do in our field is we change and input, we give aggressive chemotherapy, and we say, "Did that output get better? Did that pain improve, etc.?" And so, the problem is that it's not just one system, it's multiple systems on multiple scales. It's a system of systems. And so, when you start to look at emergent systems, you can look at a neuron under a microscope. A neuron under the microscope is very elegant with little things sticking out and little things over here, but when you start to put them together in a complex system, and you start to see that it becomes a brain, and that brain can create intelligence, what we're talking about in the body, and cancer is starting to model it like a complex system. Well, the bad news is that these robust — and robust is a key word — emergent systems are very hard to understand in detail. The good news is you can manipulate them. You can try to control them without that fundamental understanding of every component. One of the most fundamental clinical trials in cancer came out in February in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they took women who were pre-menopausal with breast cancer. So, about the worst kind of breast cancer you can get. They had gotten their chemotherapy, and then they randomized them, where half got placebo, and half got a drug called Zoledronic acid that builds bone. It's used to treat osteoporosis, and they got that twice a year. They looked and, in these 1,800 women, given twice a year a drug that builds bone, you reduce the recurrence of cancer by 35 percent. Reduce occurrence of cancer by a drug that doesn't even touch the cancer. So the notion, you change the soil, the seed doesn't grow as well. You change that system, and you could have a marked effect on the cancer. Nobody has ever shown — and this will be shocking — nobody has ever shown that most chemotherapy actually touches a cancer cell. It's never been shown. There's all these elegant work in the tissue culture dishes, that if you give this cancer drug, you can do this effect to the cell, but the doses in those dishes are nowhere near the doses that happen in the body. If I give a woman with breast cancer a drug called Taxol every three weeks, which is the standard, about 40 percent of women with metastatic cancer have a great response to that drug. And a response is 50 percent shrinkage. Well, remember that's not even an order of magnitude, but that's a different story. They then recur, I give them that same drug every week. Another 30 percent will respond. They then recur, I give them that same drug over 96 hours by continuous infusion, another 20 or 30 percent will respond. So, you can't tell me it's working by the same mechanism in all three size. It's not. We have no idea the mechanism. So the idea that chemotherapy may just be disrupting that complex system, just like building bone disrupted that system and reduced recurrence, chemotherapy may work by that same exact way. The wild thing about that trial also, was that it reduced new primaries, so new cancers, by 30 percent also. So, the problem is, yours and mine, all of our systems are changing. They're dynamic. I mean, this is a scary slide, not to take an aside, but it looks at obesity in the world. And I'm sorry if you can't read the numbers, they're kind of small. But, if you start to look at it, that red, that dark color there, more than 75 percent of the population of those countries are obese. Look a decade ago, look two decades ago: markedly different. So, our systems today are dramatically different than our systems a decade or two ago. So the diseases we have today, which reflect patterns in the system over the last several decades, are going to change dramatically over the next decade or so based on things like this. So, this picture, although it is beautiful, is a 40-gigabyte picture of the whole proteome. So this is a drop of blood that has gone through a superconducting magnet, and we're able to get resolution where we can start to see all of the proteins in the body. We can start to see that system. Each of the red dots are where a protein has actually been identified. The power of these magnets, the power of what we can do here, is that we can see an individual neutron with this technology. So, again, this is stuff we're doing with Danny Hillis and a group called Applied Proteomics, where we can start to see individual neutron differences, and we can start to look at that system like we never have before. So, instead of a reductionist view, we're taking a step back. So this is a woman, 46 years old, who had recurrent lung cancer. It was in her brain, in her lungs, in her liver. She had gotten Carboplatin Taxol, Carboplatin Taxotere, Gemcitabine, Navelbine: Every drug we have she had gotten, and that disease continued to grow. She had three kids under the age of 12, and this is her CT scan. And so what this is, is we're taking a cross-section of her body here, and you can see in the middle there is her heart, and to the side of her heart on the left there is this large tumor that will invade and will kill her, untreated, in a matter of weeks. She goes on a pill a day that targets a pathway, and again, I'm not sure if this pathway was in the system, in the cancer, but it targeted a pathway, and a month later, pow, that cancer's gone. Six months later it's still gone. That cancer recurred, and she passed away three years later from lung cancer, but she got three years from a drug whose symptoms predominately were acne. That's about it. So, the problem is that the clinical trial was done, and we were a part of it, and in the fundamental clinical trial — the pivotal clinical trial we call the Phase Three, we refused to use a placebo. Would you want your mother, your brother, your sister to get a placebo if they had advanced lung cancer and had weeks to live? And the answer, obviously, is not. So, it was done on this group of patients. Ten percent of people in the trial had this dramatic response that was shown here, and the drug went to the FDA, and the FDA said, "Without a placebo, how do I know patients actually benefited from the drug?" So the morning the FDA was going to meet, this was the editorial in the Wall Street Journal. (Laughter) And so, what do you know, that drug was approved. The amazing thing is another company did the right scientific trial, where they gave half placebo and half the drug. And we learned something important there. What's interesting is they did it in South America and Canada, where it's "more ethical to give placebos." They had to give it also in the U.S. to get approval, so I think there were three U.S. patients in upstate New York who were part of the trial. But they did that, and what they found is that 70 percent of the non-responders lived much longer and did better than people who got placebo. So it challenged everything we knew in cancer, is that you don't need to get a response. You don't need to shrink the disease. If we slow the disease, we may have more of a benefit on patient survival, patient outcome, how they feel, than if we shrink the disease. The problem is that, if I'm this doc, and I get your CT scan today and you've got a two centimeter mass in your liver, and you come back to me in three months and it's three centimeters, did that drug help you or not? How do I know? Would it have been 10 centimeters, or am I giving you a drug with no benefit and significant cost? So, it's a fundamental problem. And, again, that's where these new technologies can come in. And so, the goal obviously is that you go into your doctor's office — well, the ultimate goal is that you prevent disease, right? The ultimate goal is that you prevent any of these things from happening. That is the most effective, cost-effective, best way we can do things today. But if one is unfortunate to get a disease, you'll go into your doctor's office, he or she will take a drop of blood, and we will start to know how to treat your disease. The way we've approached it is the field of proteomics, again, this looking at the system. It's taking a big picture. The problem with technologies like this is that if one looks at proteins in the body, there are 11 orders of magnitude difference between the high-abundant and the low-abundant proteins. So, there's no technology in the world that can span 11 orders of magnitude. And so, a lot of what has been done with people like Danny Hillis and others is to try to bring in engineering principles, try to bring the software. We can start to look at different components along this spectrum. And so, earlier was talked about cross-discipline, about collaboration. And I think one of the exciting things that is starting to happen now is that people from those fields are coming in. Yesterday, the National Cancer Institute announced a new program called the Physical Sciences and Oncology, where physicists, mathematicians, are brought in to think about cancer, people who never approached it before. Danny and I got 16 million dollars, they announced yesterday, to try to attach this problem. A whole new approach, instead of giving high doses of chemotherapy by different mechanisms, to try to bring technology to get a picture of what's actually happening in the body. So, just for two seconds, how these technologies work — because I think it's important to understand it. What happens is every protein in your body is charged, so the proteins are sprayed in, the magnet spins them around, and then there's a detector at the end. When it hit that detector is dependent on the mass and the charge. And so we can accurately — if the magnet is big enough, and your resolution is high enough — you can actually detect all of the proteins in the body and start to get an understanding of the individual system. And so, as a cancer doctor, instead of having paper in my chart, in your chart, and it being this thick, this is what data flow is starting to look like in our offices, where that drop of blood is creating gigabytes of data. Electronic data elements are describing every aspect of the disease. And certainly the goal is we can start to learn from every encounter and actually move forward, instead of just having encounter and encounter, without fundamental learning. So, to conclude, we need to get away from reductionist thinking. We need to start to think differently and radically. And so, I implore everyone here: Think differently. Come up with new ideas. Tell them to me or anyone else in our field, because over the last 59 years, nothing has changed. We need a radically different approach. You know, Andy Grove stepped down as chairman of the board at Intel — and Andy was one of my mentors, tough individual. When Andy stepped down, he said, "No technology will win. Technology itself will win." And I'm a firm believer, in the field of medicine and especially cancer, that it's going to be a broad platform of technologies that will help us move forward and hopefully help patients in the near-term. Thank you very much.
Seleto(ph) is in her early twenties and she had kind of a wild youth and got pregnant very young, had her son Tibong(ph) I think at the age of 18 and realized within about six months that he was severely disabled and I think really wasn't quite sure how to deal with this and basically ran away and left her son to be cared for by her family. And then about five years later she began to fall ill and become sick and she basically went home to her home village to die. Her son at that point had also, really his whole life, had been quite ill. But fortunately at that point in Botswana, the government was beginning to offer anti-retroviral drugs and so she was able, along with her son, to enroll in the anti-retroviral drugs program. And so I met her just about the time that she started taking the drugs, both she and her son. And the transformation really was quite remarkable. I mean when I first met her, she was rail thin and had, just looked really — her body was just really ravaged, and Tibong was tiny. I mean he was five years old but he looked like an 18 month old. He couldn't speak. He couldn't sit up. He couldn't walk. He couldn't talk. And, really, to watch the transformation, they went through in the period of a year was amazing. And at the same time, it didn't really solve a lot of the underlying problems.
Yeah. They thought it was a bad idea. Just as they thought the Israeli attack on the Syrian reactor in 2007 was a bad idea. The Bush administration didn't tell Israel not to do either of those things, but it both cases, they said, you know, we think that's a bad idea and you're going to regret it. And we're worried about what the consequences will be. Well, in both cases, from the Israeli point of view, they feel like they've been vindicated. They got what they wanted in Gaza, which was an end to the rocket attacks. There were no larger diplomatic consequences. There was no larger war, and same with Syria in 2007. They bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor that had been supplied by North Korea. The fears that this would start some kind of war between Israel and Syria or some other larger conflict were unfounded, and they feel like, again, once again, they were vindicated in not listening to Washington.
It drove him out of the House. Yeah, it did. It pained him no end. Reed stood for, among other things, principally, I guess, majority rule. He believed that black men, white men and women should vote, and the majority should rule. And here, the majority plainly was for this war of choice. It drove him crazy. It saddened him no end. The last recorded quip of Thomas B. Reed was when he was - he went down to Washington to hang out with his friends in the House, and he began to talk about some of the interventionist stuff that the Roosevelt administration was doing, including this trust-busting thing. And here's what he - here's how he characterized this inchoate campaign against big business by Teddy Roosevelt, quote, "An indefinable something is to be done in a way nobody knows how at a time nobody knows when that will accomplish nobody knows what."
Yeah, Governor Brown announced a plan last year, 12 points of it including a higher retirement age at a hybrid model and the Democrats have slow walked it a bit. They vow, and in fact they vowed once again today, that they will do pension reform this year. Now, what exactly it looks like, those details aren't really out there yet. There, you know, there's some details, but not much and it's not exactly what the governor wants. And, in fact, Republicans took to the floor of the state Senate today to say, hey, look, why aren't you doing pension reform? And they pointed to last week's primary election, or actually earlier this month's, where voters in San Diego and San Jose strongly approved big changes to their city's pension systems. And those are cities, San Jose in particular, that tend to vote Democratic.
It won't happen in the auction per se because the government will only auction, and you'll get back, par. But in the so-called secondary market, which is kind of like a used-car market for securities, it did happen that after the auction, you actually earned a negative rate of return, meaning people were so nervous that after the auction, they wanted those bills so badly, that they were willing to offer someone that held one of those bills more than $10,000 to get $10,000 back. But that would happen only in the so-called secondary market. The government would be issuing them at par, so that's the best they can do.
The first one that I wanted to read was from Leigh - L-E-I-G-H. And she says, my mother had so many secrets. She expected us to hide them. I don't think it qualified as abuse, but it was hard not to tell. You know, with poetry, like the people who are the most honest in maybe the most difficult ways are the most interesting to me. So I - that one really caught my eye - when my mother - because I think everyone's mother has secrets. I'm a mom. I might have a couple of my own, and you keep things from your children sometimes just for their own safety.
Well, so the thing about these bugs that makes them so extraordinary is, you know, we - you mentioned MRSA. And we think of - MRSA is a bug that primarily likes to live on our skin. And so we've gotten very used to, in medicine, to thinking about people having to wash their hands really rigorously to get it off skin. But these - KPC and other bugs like it, which are generally known as the highly resistant gram-negatives, they don't just live on skin. They live on surfaces that other bugs have difficulty surviving on, things that aren't organic and that have very low nutrients and very low oxygen, like metal, like plastic, like the rails of a bed or the counter that a computer rests on.
It's Tuesday, and time to read from your comments. Last Tuesday, during our discussion about parents with a physical or cognitive disability, we heard from Maribeth(ph) in Denver: My daughter and son-in-law are congenitally deaf, she wrote. Both are graduates of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. and lived there when their first child was born, who was hearing and did not suffer from not hearing spoken word from her parents. She started signing at age seven months, was signing and speaking with a vocabulary of 40 words when she was one year old. She could read by the time she was four and read "Harry Potter" to me, even though she didn't understand all of it. She's now 16 and an excellent student. When I asked her about reading early, she said it was because of closed captioning on TV.
Lt. Col. KEEL: We've gotten their fingerprints, done retinal scans. I got all their names. I know who these folks are. I know where a lot of them live. If they choose to get away from the parameters we have given and they turn, then I'm going to go arrest them. The Shiite-dominated government may resist legitimizing this new force. As it has with the other locally established armed groups in Sunni tribal areas in western Iraq. But Keel says the U.S. troops cannot remain in Amriya forever and west Baghdad will be lost if political reconciliation doesn't catch up with the military gains.
Well, as Chris pointed out, I study the human brain, the functions and structure of the human brain. And I just want you to think for a minute about what this entails. Here is this mass of jelly, three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity. And this peculiar recursive quality that we call self-awareness, which I think is the holy grail of neuroscience, of neurology, and hopefully, someday, we'll understand how that happens. OK, so how do you study this mysterious organ? I mean, you have 100 billion nerve cells, little wisps of protoplasm, interacting with each other, and from this activity emerges the whole spectrum of abilities that we call human nature and human consciousness. How does this happen? Well, there are many ways of approaching the functions of the human brain. One approach, the one we use mainly, is to look at patients with sustained damage to a small region of the brain, where there's been a genetic change in a small region of the brain. What then happens is not an across-the-board reduction in all your mental capacities, a sort of blunting of your cognitive ability. What you get is a highly selective loss of one function, with other functions being preserved intact, and this gives you some confidence in asserting that that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function. So you can then map function onto structure, and then find out what the circuitry's doing to generate that particular function. So that's what we're trying to do. So let me give you a few striking examples of this. In fact, I'm giving you three examples, six minutes each, during this talk. The first example is an extraordinary syndrome called Capgras syndrome. If you look at the first slide there, that's the temporal lobes, frontal lobes, parietal lobes, OK — the lobes that constitute the brain. And if you look, tucked away inside the inner surface of the temporal lobes — you can't see it there — is a little structure called the fusiform gyrus. And that's been called the face area in the brain, because when it's damaged, you can no longer recognize people's faces. You can still recognize them from their voice and say, "Oh yeah, that's Joe," but you can't look at their face and know who it is, right? You can't even recognize yourself in the mirror. I mean, you know it's you because you wink and it winks, and you know it's a mirror, but you don't really recognize yourself as yourself. OK. Now that syndrome is well known as caused by damage to the fusiform gyrus. But there's another rare syndrome, so rare, in fact, that very few physicians have heard about it, not even neurologists. This is called the Capgras delusion, and that is a patient, who's otherwise completely normal, has had a head injury, comes out of coma, otherwise completely normal, he looks at his mother and says, "This looks exactly like my mother, this woman, but she's an impostor. She's some other woman pretending to be my mother." Now, why does this happen? Why would somebody — and this person is perfectly lucid and intelligent in all other respects, but when he sees his mother, his delusion kicks in and says, it's not mother. Now, the most common interpretation of this, which you find in all the psychiatry textbooks, is a Freudian view, and that is that this chap — and the same argument applies to women, by the way, but I'll just talk about guys. When you're a little baby, a young baby, you had a strong sexual attraction to your mother. This is the so-called Oedipus complex of Freud. I'm not saying I believe this, but this is the standard Freudian view. And then, as you grow up, the cortex develops, and inhibits these latent sexual urges towards your mother. Thank God, or you would all be sexually aroused when you saw your mother. And then what happens is, there's a blow to your head, damaging the cortex, allowing these latent sexual urges to emerge, flaming to the surface, and suddenly and inexplicably you find yourself being sexually aroused by your mother. And you say, "My God, if this is my mom, how come I'm being sexually turned on? She's some other woman. She's an impostor." It's the only interpretation that makes sense to your damaged brain. This has never made much sense to me, this argument. It's very ingenious, as all Freudian arguments are — (Laughter) — but didn't make much sense because I have seen the same delusion, a patient having the same delusion, about his pet poodle. (Laughter) He'll say, "Doctor, this is not Fifi. It looks exactly like Fifi, but it's some other dog." Right? Now, you try using the Freudian explanation there. (Laughter) You'll start talking about the latent bestiality in all humans, or some such thing, which is quite absurd, of course. Now, what's really going on? So, to explain this curious disorder, we look at the structure and functions of the normal visual pathways in the brain. Normally, visual signals come in, into the eyeballs, go to the visual areas in the brain. There are, in fact, 30 areas in the back of your brain concerned with just vision, and after processing all that, the message goes to a small structure called the fusiform gyrus, where you perceive faces. There are neurons there that are sensitive to faces. You can call it the face area of the brain, right? I talked about that earlier. Now, when that area's damaged, you lose the ability to see faces, right? But from that area, the message cascades into a structure called the amygdala in the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, and that structure, called the amygdala, gauges the emotional significance of what you're looking at. Is it prey? Is it predator? Is it mate? Or is it something absolutely trivial, like a piece of lint, or a piece of chalk, or a — I don't want to point to that, but — or a shoe, or something like that? OK? Which you can completely ignore. So if the amygdala is excited, and this is something important, the messages then cascade into the autonomic nervous system. Your heart starts beating faster. You start sweating to dissipate the heat that you're going to create from muscular exertion. And that's fortunate, because we can put two electrodes on your palm and measure the change in skin resistance produced by sweating. So I can determine, when you're looking at something, whether you're excited or whether you're aroused, or not, OK? And I'll get to that in a minute. So my idea was, when this chap looks at an object, when he looks at his — any object for that matter, it goes to the visual areas and, however, and it's processed in the fusiform gyrus, and you recognize it as a pea plant, or a table, or your mother, for that matter, OK? And then the message cascades into the amygdala, and then goes down the autonomic nervous system. But maybe, in this chap, that wire that goes from the amygdala to the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, is cut by the accident. So because the fusiform is intact, the chap can still recognize his mother, and says, "Oh yeah, this looks like my mother." But because the wire is cut to the emotional centers, he says, "But how come, if it's my mother, I don't experience a warmth?" Or terror, as the case may be? Right? (Laughter) And therefore, he says, "How do I account for this inexplicable lack of emotions? This can't be my mother. It's some strange woman pretending to be my mother." How do you test this? Well, what you do is, if you take any one of you here, and put you in front of a screen, and measure your galvanic skin response, and show pictures on the screen, I can measure how you sweat when you see an object, like a table or an umbrella. Of course, you don't sweat. If I show you a picture of a lion, or a tiger, or a pinup, you start sweating, right? And, believe it or not, if I show you a picture of your mother — I'm talking about normal people — you start sweating. You don't even have to be Jewish. (Laughter) Now, what happens if you show this patient? You take the patient and show him pictures on the screen and measure his galvanic skin response. Tables and chairs and lint, nothing happens, as in normal people, but when you show him a picture of his mother, the galvanic skin response is flat. There's no emotional reaction to his mother, because that wire going from the visual areas to the emotional centers is cut. So his vision is normal because the visual areas are normal, his emotions are normal — he'll laugh, he'll cry, so on and so forth — but the wire from vision to emotions is cut and therefore he has this delusion that his mother is an impostor. It's a lovely example of the sort of thing we do: take a bizarre, seemingly incomprehensible, neural psychiatric syndrome and say that the standard Freudian view is wrong, that, in fact, you can come up with a precise explanation in terms of the known neural anatomy of the brain. By the way, if this patient then goes, and mother phones from an adjacent room — phones him — and he picks up the phone, and he says, "Wow, mom, how are you? Where are you?" There's no delusion through the phone. Then, she approaches him after an hour, he says, "Who are you? You look just like my mother." OK? The reason is there's a separate pathway going from the hearing centers in the brain to the emotional centers, and that's not been cut by the accident. So this explains why through the phone he recognizes his mother, no problem. When he sees her in person, he says it's an impostor. OK, how is all this complex circuitry set up in the brain? Is it nature, genes, or is it nurture? And we approach this problem by considering another curious syndrome called phantom limb. And you all know what a phantom limb is. When an arm is amputated, or a leg is amputated, for gangrene, or you lose it in war — for example, in the Iraq war, it's now a serious problem — you continue to vividly feel the presence of that missing arm, and that's called a phantom arm or a phantom leg. In fact, you can get a phantom with almost any part of the body. Believe it or not, even with internal viscera. I've had patients with the uterus removed — hysterectomy — who have a phantom uterus, including phantom menstrual cramps at the appropriate time of the month. And in fact, one student asked me the other day, "Do they get phantom PMS?" (Laughter) A subject ripe for scientific enquiry, but we haven't pursued that. OK, now the next question is, what can you learn about phantom limbs by doing experiments? One of the things we've found was, about half the patients with phantom limbs claim that they can move the phantom. It'll pat his brother on the shoulder, it'll answer the phone when it rings, it'll wave goodbye. These are very compelling, vivid sensations. The patient's not delusional. He knows that the arm is not there, but, nevertheless, it's a compelling sensory experience for the patient. But however, about half the patients, this doesn't happen. The phantom limb — they'll say, "But doctor, the phantom limb is paralyzed. It's fixed in a clenched spasm and it's excruciatingly painful. If only I could move it, maybe the pain will be relieved." Now, why would a phantom limb be paralyzed? It sounds like an oxymoron. But when we were looking at the case sheets, what we found was, these people with the paralyzed phantom limbs, the original arm was paralyzed because of the peripheral nerve injury. The actual nerve supplying the arm was severed, was cut, by say, a motorcycle accident. So the patient had an actual arm, which is painful, in a sling for a few months or a year, and then, in a misguided attempt to get rid of the pain in the arm, the surgeon amputates the arm, and then you get a phantom arm with the same pains, right? And this is a serious clinical problem. Patients become depressed. Some of them are driven to suicide, OK? So, how do you treat this syndrome? Now, why do you get a paralyzed phantom limb? When I looked at the case sheet, I found that they had an actual arm, and the nerves supplying the arm had been cut, and the actual arm had been paralyzed, and lying in a sling for several months before the amputation, and this pain then gets carried over into the phantom itself. Why does this happen? When the arm was intact, but paralyzed, the brain sends commands to the arm, the front of the brain, saying, "Move," but it's getting visual feedback saying, "No." Move. No. Move. No. Move. No. And this gets wired into the circuitry of the brain, and we call this learned paralysis, OK? The brain learns, because of this Hebbian, associative link, that the mere command to move the arm creates a sensation of a paralyzed arm. And then, when you've amputated the arm, this learned paralysis carries over into your body image and into your phantom, OK? Now, how do you help these patients? How do you unlearn the learned paralysis, so you can relieve him of this excruciating, clenching spasm of the phantom arm? Well, we said, what if you now send the command to the phantom, but give him visual feedback that it's obeying his command, right? Maybe you can relieve the phantom pain, the phantom cramp. How do you do that? Well, virtual reality. But that costs millions of dollars. So, I hit on a way of doing this for three dollars, but don't tell my funding agencies. (Laughter) OK? What you do is you create what I call a mirror box. You have a cardboard box with a mirror in the middle, and then you put the phantom — so my first patient, Derek, came in. He had his arm amputated 10 years ago. He had a brachial avulsion, so the nerves were cut and the arm was paralyzed, lying in a sling for a year, and then the arm was amputated. He had a phantom arm, excruciatingly painful, and he couldn't move it. It was a paralyzed phantom arm. So he came there, and I gave him a mirror like that, in a box, which I call a mirror box, right? And the patient puts his phantom left arm, which is clenched and in spasm, on the left side of the mirror, and the normal hand on the right side of the mirror, and makes the same posture, the clenched posture, and looks inside the mirror. And what does he experience? He looks at the phantom being resurrected, because he's looking at the reflection of the normal arm in the mirror, and it looks like this phantom has been resurrected. "Now," I said, "now, look, wiggle your phantom — your real fingers, or move your real fingers while looking in the mirror." He's going to get the visual impression that the phantom is moving, right? That's obvious, but the astonishing thing is, the patient then says, "Oh my God, my phantom is moving again, and the pain, the clenching spasm, is relieved." And remember, my first patient who came in — (Applause) — thank you. (Applause) My first patient came in, and he looked in the mirror, and I said, "Look at your reflection of your phantom." And he started giggling, he says, "I can see my phantom." But he's not stupid. He knows it's not real. He knows it's a mirror reflection, but it's a vivid sensory experience. Now, I said, "Move your normal hand and phantom." He said, "Oh, I can't move my phantom. You know that. It's painful." I said, "Move your normal hand." And he says, "Oh my God, my phantom is moving again. I don't believe this! And my pain is being relieved." OK? And then I said, "Close your eyes." He closes his eyes. "And move your normal hand." "Oh, nothing. It's clenched again." "OK, open your eyes." "Oh my God, oh my God, it's moving again!" So, he was like a kid in a candy store. So, I said, OK, this proves my theory about learned paralysis and the critical role of visual input, but I'm not going to get a Nobel Prize for getting somebody to move his phantom limb. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a completely useless ability, if you think about it. (Laughter) But then I started realizing, maybe other kinds of paralysis that you see in neurology, like stroke, focal dystonias — there may be a learned component to this, which you can overcome with the simple device of using a mirror. So, I said, "Look, Derek" — well, first of all, the guy can't just go around carrying a mirror to alleviate his pain — I said, "Look, Derek, take it home and practice with it for a week or two. Maybe, after a period of practice, you can dispense with the mirror, unlearn the paralysis, and start moving your paralyzed arm, and then, relieve yourself of pain." So he said OK, and he took it home. I said, "Look, it's, after all, two dollars. Take it home." So, he took it home, and after two weeks, he phones me, and he said, "Doctor, you're not going to believe this." I said, "What?" He said, "It's gone." I said, "What's gone?" I thought maybe the mirror box was gone. (Laughter) He said, "No, no, no, you know this phantom I've had for the last 10 years? It's disappeared." And I said — I got worried, I said, my God, I mean I've changed this guy's body image, what about human subjects, ethics and all of that? And I said, "Derek, does this bother you?" He said, "No, last three days, I've not had a phantom arm and therefore no phantom elbow pain, no clenching, no phantom forearm pain, all those pains are gone away. But the problem is I still have my phantom fingers dangling from the shoulder, and your box doesn't reach." (Laughter) "So, can you change the design and put it on my forehead, so I can, you know, do this and eliminate my phantom fingers?" He thought I was some kind of magician. Now, why does this happen? It's because the brain is faced with tremendous sensory conflict. It's getting messages from vision saying the phantom is back. On the other hand, there's no proprioception, muscle signals saying that there is no arm, right? And your motor command saying there is an arm, and, because of this conflict, the brain says, to hell with it, there is no phantom, there is no arm, right? It goes into a sort of denial — it gates the signals. And when the arm disappears, the bonus is, the pain disappears because you can't have disembodied pain floating out there, in space. So, that's the bonus. Now, this technique has been tried on dozens of patients by other groups in Helsinki, so it may prove to be valuable as a treatment for phantom pain, and indeed, people have tried it for stroke rehabilitation. Stroke you normally think of as damage to the fibers, nothing you can do about it. But, it turns out some component of stroke paralysis is also learned paralysis, and maybe that component can be overcome using mirrors. This has also gone through clinical trials, helping lots and lots of patients. OK, let me switch gears now to the third part of my talk, which is about another curious phenomenon called synesthesia. This was discovered by Francis Galton in the nineteenth century. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin. He pointed out that certain people in the population, who are otherwise completely normal, had the following peculiarity: every time they see a number, it's colored. Five is blue, seven is yellow, eight is chartreuse, nine is indigo, OK? Bear in mind, these people are completely normal in other respects. Or C sharp — sometimes, tones evoke color. C sharp is blue, F sharp is green, another tone might be yellow, right? Why does this happen? This is called synesthesia. Galton called it synesthesia, a mingling of the senses. In us, all the senses are distinct. These people muddle up their senses. Why does this happen? One of the two aspects of this problem are very intriguing. Synesthesia runs in families, so Galton said this is a hereditary basis, a genetic basis. Secondly, synesthesia is about — and this is what gets me to my point about the main theme of this lecture, which is about creativity — synesthesia is eight times more common among artists, poets, novelists and other creative people than in the general population. Why would that be? I'm going to answer that question. It's never been answered before. OK, what is synesthesia? What causes it? Well, there are many theories. One theory is they're just crazy. Now, that's not really a scientific theory, so we can forget about it. Another theory is they are acid junkies and potheads, right? Now, there may be some truth to this, because it's much more common here in the Bay Area than in San Diego. (Laughter) OK. Now, the third theory is that — well, let's ask ourselves what's really going on in synesthesia. All right? So, we found that the color area and the number area are right next to each other in the brain, in the fusiform gyrus. So we said, there's some accidental cross wiring between color and numbers in the brain. So, every time you see a number, you see a corresponding color, and that's why you get synesthesia. Now remember — why does this happen? Why would there be crossed wires in some people? Remember I said it runs in families? That gives you the clue. And that is, there is an abnormal gene, a mutation in the gene that causes this abnormal cross wiring. In all of us, it turns out we are born with everything wired to everything else. So, every brain region is wired to every other region, and these are trimmed down to create the characteristic modular architecture of the adult brain. So, if there's a gene causing this trimming and if that gene mutates, then you get deficient trimming between adjacent brain areas. And if it's between number and color, you get number-color synesthesia. If it's between tone and color, you get tone-color synesthesia. So far, so good. Now, what if this gene is expressed everywhere in the brain, so everything is cross-connected? Well, think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common, the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, "It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun." Well, you don't say, Juliet is the sun, does that mean she's a glowing ball of fire? I mean, schizophrenics do that, but it's a different story, right? Normal people say, she's warm like the sun, she's radiant like the sun, she's nurturing like the sun. Instantly, you've found the links. Now, if you assume that this greater cross wiring and concepts are also in different parts of the brain, then it's going to create a greater propensity towards metaphorical thinking and creativity in people with synesthesia. And, hence, the eight times more common incidence of synesthesia among poets, artists and novelists. OK, it's a very phrenological view of synesthesia. The last demonstration — can I take one minute? (Applause) OK. I'm going to show you that you're all synesthetes, but you're in denial about it. Here's what I call Martian alphabet. Just like your alphabet, A is A, B is B, C is C. Different shapes for different phonemes, right? Here, you've got Martian alphabet. One of them is Kiki, one of them is Bouba. Which one is Kiki and which one is Bouba? How many of you think that's Kiki and that's Bouba? Raise your hands. Well, it's one or two mutants. (Laughter) How many of you think that's Bouba, that's Kiki? Raise your hands. Ninety-nine percent of you. Now, none of you is a Martian. How did you do that? It's because you're all doing a cross-model synesthetic abstraction, meaning you're saying that that sharp inflection — ki-ki, in your auditory cortex, the hair cells being excited — Kiki, mimics the visual inflection, sudden inflection of that jagged shape. Now, this is very important, because what it's telling you is your brain is engaging in a primitive — it's just — it looks like a silly illusion, but these photons in your eye are doing this shape, and hair cells in your ear are exciting the auditory pattern, but the brain is able to extract the common denominator. It's a primitive form of abstraction, and we now know this happens in the fusiform gyrus of the brain, because when that's damaged, these people lose the ability to engage in Bouba Kiki, but they also lose the ability to engage in metaphor. If you ask this guy, what — "all that glitters is not gold," what does that mean?" The patient says, "Well, if it's metallic and shiny, it doesn't mean it's gold. You have to measure its specific gravity, OK?" So, they completely miss the metaphorical meaning. So, this area is about eight times the size in higher — especially in humans — as in lower primates. Something very interesting is going on here in the angular gyrus, because it's the crossroads between hearing, vision and touch, and it became enormous in humans. And something very interesting is going on. And I think it's a basis of many uniquely human abilities like abstraction, metaphor and creativity. All of these questions that philosophers have been studying for millennia, we scientists can begin to explore by doing brain imaging, and by studying patients and asking the right questions. Thank you. (Applause) Sorry about that. (Laughter)
If you were a child in America anytime between the 1950's and now, you may very well have made the acquaintance of Ramona Quimby. She's sometimes known as Ramona the Pest. Though Ramona herself would be the first to tell you she's not really a pest. Ramona, her sister Beezus, Henry Huggins and the other kids on Klickitat Street, are the creations of Beverly Cleary. The beloved children's author turns 90 this week. Cleary published the first of her dozens of books in 1950. It was Henry Huggins. In an interview from her home she told me that Henry's Klickitat Street is just like the neighborhood where she grew up in Portland.
Yes. The goal is to show what happens when an everyday person, when an average Joe, if you will, reads the book for the first time and encounters it directly. And so much of what the encounter we have for the Bible is mediated through rabbis or historians or anthropologists or priests or ministers, and there is very little direct congress with this book. And I'm hoping that just my, you know, my very naive and I hope funny in a reverent curiosity about this is infectious and it that makes people, you know, look twice at this book and remember how beautiful and how interesting and odd and glorious it is.
Well, he put an enormous amount of money from the stimulus bill into renewable energy projects and it's been a mixed track record, most famously the Solyndra half-billion dollar loan guarantee for the solar panel maker, which went bankrupt. But the amount of money that's gone into projects that have failed is still somewhat less than what was originally forecast for the failure rate in the beginning. So it hasn't been a spectacular success. It hasn't been a spectacular failure. It's a little early to tell for a lot of these things. And the other problem is that all these technologies, whether they're renewable or nuclear or even coal, are competing against extremely low natural gas prices and that has really rearranged calculations for all other forms of energy.
Three days after, some towns and cities remain under water. Millions can't turn on the lights. Transportation is better but still a mess. Amid all the problems, the elderly and physically disabled face special challenges. Many remain stranded in cold, dark high rises, in nursing homes, adult care facilities, worried about food and medicine and water. Some rely on electricity to power ventilators or recharge wheelchairs. If you or someone you know with a physical disability got hit in the storm, what happened? 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. We begin in Tribeca in New York City with Alejandra Ospina. She's a local disability advocate and joins us by phone from her home. Nice to have you with us today.
You described the diversity of my constituents better than most people and understand that district and so certainly, I can't say that I operate in ways that I know exactly what they're thinking and I'm representing them. I think that we are elected to provide leadership and I think in doing that, you listen as much as you can, you take into consideration the information that you get, you evaluate from your vantage points in ways that people may not be able to see behind the scenes and you take all that information, you put it together, you make a decision.
The travel ban affects people from six nations - Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Iran and Yemen. According to the guidelines laid out by the administration, people from those countries with a very specific set of relatives in the U.S. can qualify for visas to come here. So for instance, if your mother or father lives here or your spouse or child or your sister or brother, you're good. People with step-siblings or half-siblings would also qualify, as would people with mothers- or fathers-in-law here. But if it's your fiance or grandmother or grandfather you're hoping to visit, you're out of luck. The administration says those and other extended family members are not close enough relations to qualify. Cornell University immigration law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr says it's a bit hard to figure.
Yeah. I think that's the interesting question. I think these - historically speaking, these sort of situations tend to not necessarily hurt the bottom line but they tend to not necessarily help, either. So if you're Chick-fil-A and you post revenues, for example, earlier in February, $4.1 billion in revenues and there's a market out there, a gay and lesbian community that has consumer spending power upwards of $850 billion, it just doesn't make business sense to get involved in a discussion that could potentially be interpreted as that community saying that - or interpreting your message as being: you don't want to sell us chicken.
See, Rubin was such a, you know, he was very particular about most things. And that was great in the news business because in those days, if we made a mistake, we couldn't wait to get on a microphone and correct it. Today, if there's a mistake made in television news, they simply forget about it and hopefully won't repeat it again, but you'll never them apologize for it or acknowledge the fact that they made a mistake. Maybe on some of the networks like Brian Williams' show, you might get that. But you're not going to get it on most of them. But Rubin, in those days, he got on our reporter out in Detroit for using initials instead of the name. And he says, we do not cover GM, we cover General Motors. So, therefore, any report that you put on this network you will identify the company by their title. So when that reporter signed off that night, and he later went to a public television and all, his real name was Robin McNeil, but he later took the name of Robert McNeil. But when he signed off that night, he said this is Robin MacNeil, National Broadcasting Company News, Detroit.
Billions of years ago on the young planet Earth simple organic compounds assembled into more complex coalitions that could grow and reproduce. They were the very first life on Earth, and they gave rise to every one of the billions of species that have inhabited our planet since. At the time, Earth was almost completely devoid of what we’d recognize as a suitable environment for living things. The young planet had widespread volcanic activity and an atmosphere that created hostile conditions. So where on Earth could life begin? To begin the search for the cradle of life, it’s important to first understand the basic necessities for any life form. Elements and compounds essential to life include hydrogen, methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, phosphates, and ammonia. In order for these ingredients to comingle and react with each other, they need a liquid solvent: water. And in order to grow and reproduce, all life needs a source of energy. Life forms are divided into two camps: autotrophs, like plants, that generate their own energy, and heterotrophs, like animals, that consume other organisms for energy. The first life form wouldn’t have had other organisms to consume, of course, so it must have been an autotroph, generating energy either from the sun or from chemical gradients. So what locations meet these criteria? Places on land or close to the surface of the ocean have the advantage of access to sunlight. But at the time when life began, the UV radiation on Earth’s surface was likely too harsh for life to survive there. One setting offers protection from this radiation and an alternative energy source: the hydrothermal vents that wind across the ocean floor, covered by kilometers of seawater and bathed in complete darkness. A hydrothermal vent is a fissure in the Earth’s crust where seawater seeps into magma chambers and is ejected back out at high temperatures, along with a rich slurry of minerals and simple chemical compounds. Energy is particularly concentrated at the steep chemical gradients of hydrothermal vents. There’s another line of evidence that points to hydrothermal vents: the Last Universal Common Ancestor of life, or LUCA for short. LUCA wasn’t the first life form, but it’s as far back as we can trace. Even so, we don’t actually know what LUCA looked like— there’s no LUCA fossil, no modern-day LUCA still around— instead, scientists identified genes that are commonly found in species across all three domains of life that exist today. Since these genes are shared across species and domains, they must have been inherited from a common ancestor. These shared genes tell us that LUCA lived in a hot, oxygen-free place and harvested energy from a chemical gradient— like the ones at hydrothermal vents. There are two kinds of hydrothermal vent: black smokers and white smokers. Black smokers release acidic, carbon-dioxide-rich water, heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius and packed with sulphur, iron, copper, and other metals essential to life. But scientists now believe that black smokers were too hot for LUCA— so now the top candidates for the cradle of life are white smokers. Among the white smokers, a field of hydrothermal vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge called Lost City has become the most favored candidate for the cradle of life. The seawater expelled here is highly alkaline and lacks carbon dioxide, but is rich in methane and offers more hospitable temperatures. Adjacent black smokers may have contributed the carbon dioxide necessary for life to evolve at Lost City, giving it all the components to support the first organisms that radiated into the incredible diversity of life on Earth today.
I think it does. There is some controversy over the broken-windows notion, but in part, the controversy stems from different interpretations of what broken windows might mean. But the general issue of communities banding together to, in a sense, repair those broken windows - which, you know, by extension means to ensure that the lawns are mowed in vacant property, that vacant storefront windows don't get broken, that sort of thing - but more generally, communities banding together to ensure that children who are playing on the streets are kept safe, so enhanced community surveillance, those kinds of activities do, indeed, seem to reduce crime.
What they should do is get the best medical advice they can get in their area. It might be a primary care doctor who's experienced with this, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a social worker--somebody who's dealt with kids with ADHD before--and get those people to help you work through it. Now they can't give you a clear answer. Nobody really knows how often these drugs cause side effects. And the other thing to remember for the families is that every drug--every drug I know of, at least--can cause side effects. You can be allergic to penicillin. You know, other drugs don't work in some people and do work in others. Any time you give your kid a drug, you're taking a risk. You've got to weigh that against the possible benefit. Unfortunately, in this case, the risk is unclear, but again, you know, you've got to think of that every time you give your kid a drug.
In some respects, yes it would, I think. I mean, there would be no way of dodging this. So, Abe is in a very difficult situation there. He's prided himself on being very hawkish. But there would be a lot of criticism, I think, if he wasn't seen to be doing everything he could to try and get them back. At the same time, I should say that there's quite a lot of criticism in Japan of these two men. The people are saying that they got themselves into the situation and neither of them had any business being there. And there's some anger towards them.
It's been three years since the main rebel groups in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Movement, the SLM, and JEM, the Justice and Equality Movement, took up arms against the Sudanese government in the western region of Darfur. The reason for the rebellion, they accused the Arab-dominated Muslim government in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, of deliberately marginalizing the predominately-black Muslim populations of Darfur. And like the Rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army in the south, locked in a bitter civil war with Khartoum, the Darfur rebels claim they were fighting for independence in the west. But it soon became clear that civilians were to be the main casualties in Darfur. After the Sudanese government unleashed its proxy militiamen, known as the Janjaweed, devils on horseback, on the rebels and the people. In 2004, these were some of the harrowing accounts that Darfur refugees gave to NPR reporters, including Jason Beaubien, who spoke with Avan Hassan(ph).
Yes. Hilla is about one hour and a half or two hours south of Baghdad. It's a rather desert area. I went there from Baghdad, and I saw hundreds of people - men and women. They were digging mass graves, and in 1991, the Shias in the south of Iraq tried to gain independence in order to overthrow the Iraqi regime after the Kuwait war through an uprising, but Saddam Hussein very harshly suppressed the uprising and buried thousands of Shia people alive in the graves. They were there for - until 2003. Their families didn't dare to even approach the mass graves. But when I went there and I saw them digging up the graves and taking up the bones, putting them in shrouds and taking them away to be buried in separate graves - but despite all of the crying and sadness, they were still happy, and they smiled to me.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Lynn Neary in Washington. Neal Conan is away. Here are some of the headlines of the stories NPR News is following today. Debt relief for Africa tops the agenda at this week's G8 summit in Scotland. The leaders of the world's eight wealthiest nations are also expected to debate climate change policy. And the International Olympic Committee is meeting in Singapore to decide which city will host the 2012 Olympics. Paris, London and New York are the leading contenders. The winner will be announced tomorrow. You can hear details of these stories and more, much more, later on "All Things Considered" from NPR News.
Well, this doesn't surprise me because we live in a culture where everyone's life is on display. In the era of reality television, people put their lives and reality on display all the time. So there's a certain innate desire within us to look at other people's tragedies or what's--or their celebrations, but we want to live vicariously through other people. And a disaster is something that fascinates America, whether it's for the good or for the bad. So it doesn't surprise me that this would become a tourist attraction similar to what took place after the World Trade Center terrorist attack and folks flocked to New York City.
Hi. Number one, it's really a pleasure to talk to you. I'm a huge fan of the movie and the show, so thank you for your contributions. Second, I would say the thing that makes it modern for me - I'm a performance major - a graduate vocal performance major in university right now and I've performed in "West Side Story." What makes it so modern for me is the rhythm, actually, the mixed meter in some of the numbers. I'm specifically thinking some of it is "Dance at the Gym" and then possibly the rooftop dance when they're going in those different time signatures. It's very, very difficult to do and I recall my director at one point saying that, you know, originally, people had sort of struck out against it. They thought it was too hard to sing and to dance to, so that's definitely what makes it for me.
What an intriguing group of individuals you are ... to a psychologist. (Laughter) I've had the opportunity over the last couple of days of listening in on some of your conversations and watching you interact with each other. And I think it's fair to say, already, that there are 47 people in this audience, at this moment, displaying psychological symptoms I would like to discuss today. (Laughter) And I thought you might like to know who you are. (Laughter) But instead of pointing at you, which would be gratuitous and intrusive, I thought I would tell you a few facts and stories, in which you may catch a glimpse of yourself. I'm in the field of research known as personality psychology, which is part of a larger personality science which spans the full spectrum, from neurons to narratives. And what we try to do, in our own way, is to make sense of how each of us — each of you — is, in certain respects, like all other people, like some other people and like no other person. Now, already you may be saying of yourself, "I'm not intriguing. I am the 46th most boring person in the Western Hemisphere." Or you may say of yourself, "I am intriguing, even if I am regarded by most people as a great, thundering twit." (Laughter) But it is your self-diagnosed boringness and your inherent "twitiness" that makes me, as a psychologist, really fascinated by you. So let me explain why this is so. One of the most influential approaches in personality science is known as trait psychology, and it aligns you along five dimensions which are normally distributed, and that describe universally held aspects of difference between people. They spell out the acronym OCEAN. So, "O" stands for "open to experience," versus those who are more closed. "C" stands for "conscientiousness," in contrast to those with a more lackadaisical approach to life. "E" — "extroversion," in contrast to more introverted people. "A" — "agreeable individuals," in contrast to those decidedly not agreeable. And "N" — "neurotic individuals," in contrast to those who are more stable. All of these dimensions have implications for our well-being, for how our life goes. And so we know that, for example, openness and conscientiousness are very good predictors of life success, but the open people achieve that success through being audacious and, occasionally, odd. The conscientious people achieve it through sticking to deadlines, to persevering, as well as having some passion. Extroversion and agreeableness are both conducive to working well with people. Extroverts, for example, I find intriguing. With my classes, I sometimes give them a basic fact that might be revealing with respect to their personality: I tell them that it is virtually impossible for adults to lick the outside of their own elbow. (Laughter) Did you know that? Already, some of you have tried to lick the outside of your own elbow. But extroverts amongst you are probably those who have not only tried, but they have successfully licked the elbow of the person sitting next to them. (Laughter) Those are the extroverts. Let me deal in a bit more detail with extroversion, because it's consequential and it's intriguing, and it helps us understand what I call our three natures. First, our biogenic nature — our neurophysiology. Second, our sociogenic or second nature, which has to do with the cultural and social aspects of our lives. And third, what makes you individually you — idiosyncratic — what I call your "idiogenic" nature. Let me explain. One of the things that characterizes extroverts is they need stimulation. And that stimulation can be achieved by finding things that are exciting: loud noises, parties and social events here at TED — you see the extroverts forming a magnetic core. They all gather together. And I've seen you. The introverts are more likely to spend time in the quiet spaces up on the second floor, where they are able to reduce stimulation — and may be misconstrued as being antisocial, but you're not necessarily antisocial. It may be that you simply realize that you do better when you have a chance to lower that level of stimulation. Sometimes it's an internal stimulant, from your body. Caffeine, for example, works much better with extroverts than it does introverts. When extroverts come into the office at nine o'clock in the morning and say, "I really need a cup of coffee," they're not kidding — they really do. Introverts do not do as well, particularly if the tasks they're engaged in — and they've had some coffee — if those tasks are speeded, and if they're quantitative, introverts may give the appearance of not being particularly quantitative. But it's a misconstrual. So here are the consequences that are really quite intriguing: we're not always what seem to be, and that takes me to my next point. I should say, before getting to this, something about sexual intercourse, although I may not have time. And so, if you would like me to — yes, you would? OK. (Laughter) There are studies done on the frequency with which individuals engage in the conjugal act, as broken down by male, female; introvert, extrovert. So I ask you: How many times per minute — oh, I'm sorry, that was a rat study — (Laughter) How many times per month do introverted men engage in the act? 3.0. Extroverted men? More or less? Yes, more. 5.5 — almost twice as much. Introverted women: 3.1. Extroverted women? Frankly, speaking as an introverted male, which I will explain later — they are heroic. 7.5. They not only handle all the male extroverts, they pick up a few introverts as well. (Laughter) (Applause) We communicate differently, extroverts and introverts. Extroverts, when they interact, want to have lots of social encounter punctuated by closeness. They'd like to stand close for comfortable communication. They like to have a lot of eye contact, or mutual gaze. We found in some research that they use more diminutive terms when they meet somebody. So when an extrovert meets a Charles, it rapidly becomes "Charlie," and then "Chuck," and then "Chuckles Baby." (Laughter) Whereas for introverts, it remains "Charles," until he's given a pass to be more intimate by the person he's talking to. We speak differently. Extroverts prefer black-and-white, concrete, simple language. Introverts prefer — and I must again tell you that I am as extreme an introvert as you could possibly imagine — we speak differently. We prefer contextually complex, contingent, weasel-word sentences — (Laughter) More or less. (Laughter) As it were. (Laughter) Not to put too fine a point upon it — like that. When we talk, we sometimes talk past each other. I had a consulting contract I shared with a colleague who's as different from me as two people can possibly be. First, his name is Tom. Mine isn't. (Laughter) Secondly, he's six foot five. I have a tendency not to be. (Laughter) And thirdly, he's as extroverted a person as you could find. I am seriously introverted. I overload so much, I can't even have a cup of coffee after three in the afternoon and expect to sleep in the evening. We had seconded to this project a fellow called Michael. And Michael almost brought the project to a crashing halt. So the person who seconded him asked Tom and me, "What do you make of Michael?" Well, I'll tell you what Tom said in a minute. He spoke in classic "extrovert-ese." And here is how extroverted ears heard what I said, which is actually pretty accurate. I said, "Well Michael does have a tendency at times of behaving in a way that some of us might see as perhaps more assertive than is normally called for." (Laughter) Tom rolled his eyes and he said, "Brian, that's what I said: he's an asshole!" (Laughter) (Applause) Now, as an introvert, I might gently allude to certain "assholic" qualities in this man's behavior, but I'm not going to lunge for the a-word. (Laughter) But the extrovert says, "If he walks like one, if he talks like one, I call him one." And we go past each other. Now is this something that we should be heedful of? Of course. It's important that we know this. Is that all we are? Are we just a bunch of traits? No, we're not. Remember, you're like some other people and like no other person. How about that idiosyncratic you? As Elizabeth or as George, you may share your extroversion or your neuroticism. But are there some distinctively Elizabethan features of your behavior, or Georgian of yours, that make us understand you better than just a bunch of traits? That make us love you? Not just because you're a certain type of person. I'm uncomfortable putting people in pigeonholes. I don't even think pigeons belong in pigeonholes. So what is it that makes us different? It's the doings that we have in our life — the personal projects. You have a personal project right now, but nobody may know it here. It relates to your kid — you've been back three times to the hospital, and they still don't know what's wrong. Or it could be your mom. And you'd been acting out of character. These are free traits. You're very agreeable, but you act disagreeably in order to break down those barriers of administrative torpor in the hospital, to get something for your mom or your child. What are these free traits? They're where we enact a script in order to advance a core project in our lives. And they are what matters. Don't ask people what type you are; ask them, "What are your core projects in your life?" And we enact those free traits. I'm an introvert, but I have a core project, which is to profess. I'm a professor. And I adore my students, and I adore my field. And I can't wait to tell them about what's new, what's exciting, what I can't wait to tell them about. And so I act in an extroverted way, because at eight in the morning, the students need a little bit of humor, a little bit of engagement to keep them going in arduous days of study. But we need to be very careful when we act protractedly out of character. Sometimes we may find that we don't take care of ourselves. I find, for example, after a period of pseudo-extroverted behavior, I need to repair somewhere on my own. As Susan Cain said in her "Quiet" book, in a chapter that featured the strange Canadian professor who was teaching at the time at Harvard, I sometimes go to the men's room to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous extroverts. (Laughter) I remember one particular day when I was retired to a cubicle, trying to avoid overstimulation. And a real extrovert came in beside me — not right in my cubicle, but in the next cubicle over — and I could hear various evacuatory noises, which we hate — even our own, that's why we flush during as well as after. (Laughter) And then I heard this gravelly voice saying, "Hey, is that Dr. Little?" (Laughter) If anything is guaranteed to constipate an introvert for six months, it's talking on the john. (Laughter) That's where I'm going now. Don't follow me. Thank you. (Applause)
You do feel that he simply is not aware of how hungry and desperate his fellow compatriots are. There is a very good Spanish journalist, called Jordi Evole, who's accompanied Maduro in his car driving around Caracas, and he sees everything as normal - people going to the markets, people are going about their daily work and what have you. But he doesn't seem to understand that beneath the surface reality, there is a material deprivation affecting 90, 95 percent of Venezuelans, which is tremendous. I mean, below that top upper crust of high-level officials and the civilian regime or in the military, there are a whole number of public sector officials who really don't have a wage which amounts to more than $6 a month. And although they receive rationed food, and the education for their children is free, they can't actually buy any food. And that is the experience of most state officials.
Let me also ask about the GI Bill - the post 9/11 GI Bill to which you referred. I guess we should explain for people this is simply making it easier for veterans to afford tuition to college. There has been, as I'm sure you know very well, some discussion of restraining the growth of the budget of that program as part of the broader effort to cut the federal deficit. It's been discussed in Congress. It's been discussed before the supercommittee that's considering deficit reductions now. Can you do that in a way that would not be too harmful to people?
Hi, this is Taylor. So initially how much money I would make, that is what drove me initially when I was in high school. So I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I thought I wanted to do things that would result in me having, like, a really fat paycheck, right? But when I came to Howard and I began to learn more about myself and more about the world and as I began to understand my purpose, I realized that I'm not put on this earth just to make money. And that's not to say that money isn't important, but it is not my driving factor. My driving force is to serve my people. And if God leads me to make a million dollars a year, then all glory to God, and I will continue to serve my people. If I am lead and I make $30,000 a year, all glory to God. I will continue to serve my people.
I feel - today it's a pretty good day. You know, it's been a really rough six months, and I think the hardest thing has just been watching all of my peers, you know, graduate with their degrees and go off and get jobs and things. I - just like your caller, I was actually working an internship in Brazil when I started to get sick, and one of the first things I did when I got back to America was go to the doctor. I had a lump, and they said oh, it's just a lymph node. You'll be fine in a few weeks. And a few months later, it was stage 4 cancer. So...
I don't buy that argument. I don't buy the argument that you can't make this argument work. When half of the nation, again, half of us, 150 million people was either in or near poverty, this is not a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. It clearly - pardon my English, ain't black or white. Look at these poverty numbers that came out this week from the Census Bureau. Look at the dismal job numbers last week. This is an American catastrophe, Neal, that's about to be cemented. Poverty is threatening our democracy. Poverty is a matter of national security. And so I think you can actually make the argument and make it work. The Democrats used the word poor or poverty three times for every 25,000 words at their convention, according to The New York Times. This might surprise you, Neal. The Republicans said the word poor or poverty five times for every 25,000 words. So interestingly, the Republicans at least gave greater lip service to word poor or poverty than the Democrats did, but I don't buy the argument that you can't sell this. You can sell this. You can sell to the American people that we've got to do something about the growing numbers of the poor if you make the argument.
Yes. The director of operations didn't want to have any of its case officers in the room if there were interrogations going on that were sort of beyond the limit of the law as we understood it. We also remember the history that goes all the way back to Vietnam. So essentially, CIA was out of the business of enhanced interrogating from that point on. And they were trying to make up - they were trying to get into the game at this late date and do it on the basis of two-week training assignments of interrogators, and it struck me as pretty feckless.
Actually, I think what I miss most is travel. I grew up traveling a lot. My dad worked for the United Nations, so we traveled a lot. And traveling informed a lot of who I am as a person. I love to participate in other cultures. And when the experiment's over - I mean, I think that the difference between now and when the experiment's over will be just a matter of strictness. But all the same, I, you know, I don't think I'll ever be the type of person that flies somewhere for the weekend anymore. It's - there are steps we can take, like instead of flying twice for the weekend, you can fly once for a week sort of thing. But I still think that I'm going to be a lot more conscience about my air travel than I was before.
You're right, Renee, she is. That was the Colonial in May of 2003. That was an amazing time for her and for women's golf. The cable news networks were actually keeping track of her score as if it was the Dow or the Standard & Poors index. She missed the cut, but the crowds were swelling in Ft. Worth in a way that I had never seen for women athletes; little girls and their dads coming out to watch. And I think that that is one of the reasons why we know Annika so well and probably why many people, if they think about this record, would say, `Oh, doesn't she already have this, this, you know, five, six in a row?' just because she's done so much in the women's game.
Well, I think we're mixing apples and oranges here. You know, people talk to me all the time as I travel around the country about how they wish they didn't have to choose between us. And, you know, until one of us gets the nomination, neither of us has any ground to offer anything to anyone, and of course I haven't. So I think that we're just going to proceed through these next contests, see who ends up with the nomination, probably in June sometime that will be resolved. And then one of us will have the duty and the responsibility of picking a running mate.
As Scott said, a major reason why he decided to support Medicaid expansion is that for the first three years, it would cost the state almost nothing and would pump an estimated $51 billion into Florida's health care economy. Elsewhere in the country, the windfall of federal money and the opportunity to provide health care for low-income residents also appealed to other Republican governors, such as Michigan's Rick Snyder and Ohio's John Kasich. But like Scott, those governors are also being stymied by opposition from within their own party. In Florida, Republican House Speaker Will Weatherford said he opposed it because of what he called the federal government's all-or-nothing approach to Medicaid.
I must admit, I'm on the other side of the fence from Gen. Batiste on this. I guess I'm on the same side in certainly in the sense that I find great fault with Secretary Rumsfeld and believe that he should have been fired long ago. But having said that, it's not the business of generals to hold civilian officials accountable. It's the business of the Congress and it's the business of the people. I wouldn't, for a second, question the right of retired officers to speak out, but I think they probably ought to think carefully about the wisdom of exercising that right.
You know, there is in this sense - again, it's going back to this price point. And this is where I think Amazon has been very, very smart. They now have a $79 e-Reader. So, say if you're a parent, you might get your kid that $79 e-Reader and immediately you're tapped into Amazon's bookstore, right? You can buy a lot of them. So it's really going to be a push, I think, to sort of a future where you have a lot of screens that do a lot of different things. And I think they've really moved us in that direction by introducing these products.
As a child growing up, I never watched a sanitized Holocaust film. As a child growing up, thank God, I did not get to see sanitized versions of those news reels of black kids being hosed down in the Civil Rights movement, and thank God, I actually saw people actually using the N word and speaking about African-Americans. I think it is wrong when you sanitize it. I disagree with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. I think we do a disservice when we don't put history in its proper context, and so, I don't think we have to sanitize our kids. One of the reasons why kids today--and now you have adults today, who don't think a lot of these things happened--is because they never saw it. They didn't experience it, they never saw it, they never read it. And so, we do a huge disservice when we take it to these lengths.
Not at this point. They do make one of the points that one of the central goals in terms of fighting terrorism is to establish democracies which they say are less hospitable for terrorists and that Iraq is one of the places where they believe they're doing that. They even say that the new government in Iraq is an ally in the war on terror. The president's often talked about Iraq as the central front in the war on terrorism, but given that, it's mentioned relatively few times in this report. The focus seems to be really on terrorism more broadly, and the White House in this report really does respond to criticism. It specifically says that terrorism is out there as a threat not because of the president's policies in Iraq and not because of his policies in fighting terrorism, that these threats existed when he came into office. They really materialized on 9/11, and he's worked to fight it.
Despite rosy outlooks like this, China's overall growth continues to slow. The reason is basic math. The service sector isn't expanding fast enough to offset the slide in the old industrial economy, and that the client is also affecting other sectors, such as banking. Bryson, who's 31, quit his job as a loan officer at a government bank earlier this year. He was making two-thirds fewer loans than when he started in 2012. That's because state-owned industrial companies were doing so badly they could no longer qualify. We spoke over dinner while he was in town to train for a new job.
Liane, I think this is one of the questions the American public and politicians are going to have to grapple with. "Imminent" depends - it's a risk assessment. How risky are you to run? And in the shadowing effect of 9/11, it seems to me that you recalculate what risk. Based on the intelligence that existed, I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat. Now that you know reality on the ground as opposed to what you estimated before, you may reach a different conclusion - although I must say, I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than in fact, we thought it was even before the war.
Absolutely. These were sophisticated societies. And Africans were just as curious about what was on the other side of the proverbial other side of the mountain as anyone else was. The first iron technology in the world was developed in Africa in 1800 B.C., even earlier than in India and the Middle East. Here's another amazing thing. Almost all of the gold used in Europe between 1000 A.D. and 1500 A.D. was mined at one of three regions in West Africa. The richest man in the history of the world, according to networth.com, was the emperor of Mali. And his name was Mansa Musa. Mansa Musa's net worth is estimated to be about $400 billion, which makes my cousin Bill Gates' net worth...
In a June report, Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission said it had received 15 formal complaints from women candidates about intimidation. And even though there have been no reports of violence against women running for office so far, the Ministry of Interior was concerned enough to start assigning a policeman to any female provincial candidate who requested one. Sima Samar, who chairs the human rights commission, says it's not just Taliban militants who are impeding women in this election. She says female candidates are also stifled by chauvinistic traditions and a lack of campaign funds. She also accuses the country's male presidential candidates of setting a poor example for other Afghan men. She says women are almost invisible in their campaigns, even at their rallies.
A larger question is whether the oil industry, which so many of us depend on, fueled a chain of deadly events. Two years ago, Shell consultants said the company was paying for land in ways seen as unfair. The warning came in a larger report on Shell's security strategy. That report said that several Shell policies contribute to the Delta's violence, and the consultants warned that without big changes, the giant company could be driven out of the Delta oil fields by 2008. Shell's Chris Finlayson says the company has since improved the way it communicates with communities, and he argues that Nigerians need to cooperate with their country's most lucrative industry.
The Supreme Court earlier this month disagreed, and the conviction has now been reinstated. We want to hear from those of you in law enforcement: public defenders, prosecutors, judges. How does this change what you do? 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Our guests are Fred Harran, director of public safety for the Bensalem Township Police Department in Pennsylvania; and Stephen Mercer, chief of the Forensics Division for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. And Stephen Mercer, just before the break, Fred Harran was saying, well, in many cases DNA, well, gets - proves that the defendants are not guilty.
Well, I hate to generalize, and I hate to speculate about a particular state or a particular city. But you know, the facts are pretty are damning here, Farai. I mean, the current governor is under an ethical cloud, the previous governor went to prison as you mentioned on corruption charges, you had former Representative Dan Rostenkowski, the very powerful former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who went to prison, who had been later pardoned by President Clinton. It just seems to me that the old-style school of politics in Chicago is one that is fast and loose with the truth and, you know, slide me a little brown paper bag of money under the table and let's shake hands and move on. I had hoped that with the conviction of former Governor Ryan that Chicago had turned the page, that this old-style form of politics had been finally stamped out. But the current indictments and the current situation in the Windy City have me scratching my head and many millions of Americans around the country saying, goodness gracious, what could come next?
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan. Today Marc Fisher of the Washington Post on his portrait of the Tsarnaev family, the suspected Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, also their parents Anzor and Zubeidat. It ran in the Bay Newspaper over the weekend. As I mentioned earlier, it was a team effort reported by Aaron C. Davis, Jenna Johnson and Carol D. Leonnig in Boston; Tara Bahrampour in Massachusetts and New Jersey; Dan Morse in Washington; Michael Rosenwald in Rhode Island and Will Englund in Moscow; Kathy Lally in Dagestan and Stephanie McCrummen in Toronto. Researchers Alice Crites and Julie Tate also contributed to the piece.
Prof. D'ANTONIO: Well, I think most of the issues that are likely to come up, and that, therefore, we're going to be interested in are certainly on the screen. The reason the minimum wage looks like it ought to be possible to reach across the lines and even get the president's support, there is the question about taxes and what will happen to taxes. And it's known that the Democrats do not want to allow the ending of certain taxes - estate taxes and other taxes that just really principally help the wealthy. One, it's not on the radar screen that - certainly not right now, but although you see the more progressive members of the Democratic party, groups like MoveOn urging them in what certainly is the deficit and the debt.
And on top of that, he said that Cory Booker is the one who needs to apologize, which certainly surprised a lot of people hearing that comment. Biden supporters have been pointing out that he has repeatedly said the reason he decided to run in 2020 was President Trump's equivocating response on the violent Charlottesville white supremacist rally, that Biden has worked for civil rights legislation throughout his career and, among other things, is very proud to have been Barack Obama's vice president. Jim Clyburn is the highest-ranking African-American lawmaker in the House, and he defended him, as well, yesterday. He told reporters, you don't have to agree with someone to work with them.
The police released a timeline today and an incident report, which shows that at about noon, the police department received a 911 emergency call from a QuikTrip convenience store. The officer went there, he was on another call, went there and was told by the clerk that two men had come into the store and had pretty aggressively stolen some cigars from the store, that they had attempted to stop them, that didn't happen. So he gave a description about who came into the store. The police officer didn't see anybody matching that, went to canvas the neighborhood, came back to talk to the clerk again and then went out to canvas the neighborhood again. Presumably, he found Michael Brown, whom he thought matched that description when the incident occurred, when the shooting incident occurred.
And that's a good question. I think it's part of the exploration. I think all human beings deserve exploration. I think that's how we understand each other. I mean, I would love to read - we write about farmers or corporate executives, and everybody has their own kind of identity - working moms. A couple of people wrote in in some of our Web chats, well, what about the white man? What about doing a series on being a white man? I think that would be a fascinating series. I really do. Because I think that everybody has a way of internalizing who they are, and I think that's how we help to understand each other, to really bore into that. And part of our intent was to really get people to understand the experiences of black men - how they see the world from their eyes.
Those of you who have seen the film "Moneyball," or have read the book by Michael Lewis, will be familiar with the story of Billy Beane. Billy was supposed to be a tremendous ballplayer; all the scouts told him so. They told his parents that they predicted that he was going to be a star. But what actually happened when he signed the contract — and by the way, he didn't want to sign that contract, he wanted to go to college — which is what my mother, who actually does love me, said that I should do too, and I did — well, he didn't do very well. He struggled mightily. He got traded a couple of times, he ended up in the Minors for most of his career, and he actually ended up in management. He ended up as a General Manager of the Oakland A's. Now for many of you in this room, ending up in management, which is also what I've done, is seen as a success. I can assure you that for a kid trying to make it in the Bigs, going into management ain't no success story. It's a failure. And what I want to talk to you about today, and share with you, is that our healthcare system, our medical system, is just as bad at predicting what happens to people in it — patients, others — as those scouts were at predicting what would happen to Billy Beane. And yet, every day thousands of people in this country are diagnosed with preconditions. We hear about pre-hypertension, we hear about pre-dementia, we hear about pre-anxiety, and I'm pretty sure that I diagnosed myself with that in the green room. We also refer to subclinical conditions. There's subclinical atherosclerosis, subclinical hardening of the arteries, obviously linked to heart attacks, potentially. One of my favorites is called subclinical acne. If you look up subclinical acne, you may find a website, which I did, which says that this is the easiest type of acne to treat. You don't have the pustules or the redness and inflammation. Maybe that's because you don't actually have acne. I have a name for all of these conditions, it's another precondition: I call them preposterous. In baseball, the game follows the pre-game. Season follows the pre-season. But with a lot of these conditions, that actually isn't the case, or at least it isn't the case all the time. It's as if there's a rain delay, every single time in many cases. We have pre-cancerous lesions, which often don't turn into cancer. And yet, if you take, for example, subclinical osteoporosis, a bone thinning disease, the precondition, otherwise known as osteopenia, you would have to treat 270 women for three years in order to prevent one broken bone. That's an awful lot of women when you multiply by the number of women who were diagnosed with this osteopenia. And so is it any wonder, given all of the costs and the side effects of the drugs that we're using to treat these preconditions, that every year we're spending more than two trillion dollars on healthcare and yet 100,000 people a year — and that's a conservative estimate — are dying not because of the conditions they have, but because of the treatments that we're giving them and the complications of those treatments? We've medicalized everything in this country. Women in the audience, I have some pretty bad news that you already know, and that's that every aspect of your life has been medicalized. Strike one is when you hit puberty. You now have something that happens to you once a month that has been medicalized. It's a condition; it has to be treated. Strike two is if you get pregnant. That's been medicalized as well. You have to have a high-tech experience of pregnancy, otherwise something might go wrong. Strike three is menopause. We all know what happened when millions of women were given hormone replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms for decades until all of a sudden we realized, because a study came out, a big one, NIH-funded. It said, actually, a lot of that hormone replacement therapy may be doing more harm than good for many of those women. Just in case, I don't want to leave the men out — I am one, after all — I have really bad news for all of you in this room, and for everyone listening and watching elsewhere: You all have a universally fatal condition. So, just take a moment. It's called pre-death. Every single one of you has it, because you have the risk factor for it, which is being alive. But I have some good news for you, because I'm a journalist, I like to end things in a happy way or a forward-thinking way. And that good news is that if you can survive to the end of my talk, which we'll see if that happens for everyone, you will be a pre-vivor. I made up pre-death. If I used someone else's pre-death, I apologize, I think I made it up. I didn't make up pre-vivor. Pre-vivor is what a particular cancer advocacy group would like everyone who just has a risk factor, but hasn't actually had that cancer, to call themselves. You are a pre-vivor. We've had HBO here this morning. I'm wondering if Mark Burnett is anywhere in the audience, I'd like to suggest a reality TV show called "Pre-vivor." If you develop a disease, you're off the island. But the problem is, we have a system that is completely — basically promoted this. We've selected, at every point in this system, to do what we do, and to give everyone a precondition and then eventually a condition, in some cases. Start with the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors, most of them, are in a fee-for-service system. They are basically incentivized to do more — procedures, tests, prescribe medications. Patients come to them, they want to do something. We're Americans, we can't just stand there, we have to do something. And so they want a drug. They want a treatment. They want to be told, this is what you have and this is how you treat it. If the doctor doesn't give you that, you go somewhere else. That's not very good for doctors' business. Or even worse, if you are diagnosed with something eventually, and the doctor didn't order that test, you get sued. We have pharmaceutical companies that are constantly trying to expand the indications, expand the number of people who are eligible for a given treatment, because that obviously helps their bottom line. We have advocacy groups, like the one that's come up with pre-vivor, who want to make more and more people feel they are at risk, or might have a condition, so that they can raise more funds and raise visibility, et cetera. But this isn't actually, despite what journalists typically do, this isn't actually about blaming particular players. We are all responsible. I'm responsible. I actually root for the Yankees, I mean talk about rooting for the worst possible offender when it comes to doing everything you can do. Thank you. But everyone is responsible. I went to medical school, and I didn't have a course called How to Think Skeptically, or How Not to Order Tests. We have this system where that's what you do. And it actually took being a journalist to understand all these incentives. You know, economists like to say, there are no bad people, there are just bad incentives. And that's actually true. Because what we've created is a sort of Field of Dreams, when it comes to medical technology. So when you put another MRI in every corner, you put a robot in every hospital saying that everyone has to have robotic surgery. Well, we've created a system where if you build it, they will come. But you can actually perversely tell people to come, convince them that they have to come. It was when I became a journalist that I really realized how I was part of this problem, and how we all are part of this problem. I was medicalizing every risk factor, I was writing stories, commissioning stories, every day, that were trying to, not necessarily make people worried, although that was what often happened. But, you know, there are ways out. I saw my own internist last week, and he said to me, "You know," and he told me something that everyone in this audience could have told me for free, but I paid him for the privilege, which is that I need to lose some weight. Well, he's right. I've had honest-to-goodness high blood pressure for a dozen years now, same age my father got it, and it's a real disease. It's not pre-hypertension, it's actual hypertension, high blood pressure. Well, he's right, but he didn't say to me, well, you have pre-obesity or you have pre-diabetes, or anything like that. He didn't say, better start taking this Statin, you need to lower your cholesterol. No, he said, "Go out and lose some weight. Come back and see me in a bit, or just give me a call and let me know how you're doing." So that's, to me, a way forward. Billy Beane, by the way, learned the same thing. He learned, from watching this kid who he eventually hired, who was really successful for him, that it wasn't swinging for the fences, it wasn't swinging at every pitch like the sluggers do, which is what all the expensive teams like the Yankees like to — they like to pick up those guys. This kid told him, you know, you gotta watch the guys, and you gotta go out and find the guys who like to walk, because getting on base by a walk is just as good, and in our healthcare system we need to figure out, is that really a good pitch or should we let it go by and not swing at everything? Thanks.
‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ says Ozymandias’s ruined statue in the desert of Shelley’s imagination. Shelley’s sonnet is often interpreted as a sober warning that human works are fleeting, but when I read it as a young boy it kindled a sense of adventure; it suggested a wonderfully mysterious past beneath my familiar suburban surroundings. As a child, I was obsessed with archaeology, the attempt to understand the past through enigmatic remains. I spent many afternoons digging up dark patches of Midwestern soil, as I searched the region’s dense forests for artefacts of the Mississippian Indian cultures. I never found a lost city, but I occasionally turned up an arrowhead that would set me speculating about its owner and how it was lost. Through archaeology, I came to see landscapes as temporary surfaces that concealed a deep history. The world became rich with hidden texts. Boyhood obsessions often linger into adulthood, even if they aren’t immediately recognisable. These days I find myself looking up into the Milky Way’s majestic thread, wondering if its stars play host to monuments as haunting as those found in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. The natural sciences tell us that time is deep, and that civilisations could have arisen well before the Earth formed. Today, a small group of interstellar archaeologists is looking for evidence of those civilisations. They are tantalised by the possibility that the universe is not just a birthplace of alien cultures but also their necropolis. We use the word ‘archaeology’ to describe this effort, because looking into deep space takes us deep into the past. The photons that strike our telescopes’ detectors take time to reach us: the light of Alpha Centauri, the nearest stellar system, is 4.3 years old when it arrives. It travels at 300,000 kilometres per second but has to cross 40 trillion kilometres to get here. Dig gradually into the soil and you push through layers accreted by wind, rain, construction, and flood. Dig deep into the sky, beyond local stars such as Alpha Centauri, and you push the clock back with the same inexorability. Epsilon Eridani, another nearby star, is seen as it was over 10 years ago. Light from the fascinating Gliese 667C, a red dwarf with three planets in its habitable zone, takes 22 years to make the journey. In the cosmic scheme of things, these are trivial distances. Our green and blue world circles its star some 27,000 light years from the galactic centre. The glow we see at the Milky Way’s core began its voyage towards us at a time when prehistoric hunters were chasing mammoths across Europe’s ice sheets. The galaxy itself spans 100,000 light years, and its nearest equivalent, the great disc of Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away. We see it as it looked when humanity’s ancestors walked the African savannah. When interstellar archaeologists tilt their telescopes to the sky, they are gazing into the deep history of the cosmos, but to find a civilisation more advanced than ours, they have to tilt their imaginations into the future. They have to plot out a plausible destiny for humanity, and then go looking for it in the cosmic past. If we can so easily misinterpret our own past, how might we misconstrue the artefacts of a truly alien culture? Conventional archaeology has shown us how difficult it is to make guesses about civilisations across time. In the late 19th century, the excavation of Hisarlik, the site in Turkey now thought to be the location of ancient Troy, soared into the European imagination through the work of Heinrich Schliemann. Legend has it that the wealthy amateur sent a cable that prematurely proclaimed: ‘I have looked upon the face of Agamemnon.’ It is not clear that he actually used those words, but we do know Schliemann’s work enchanted the salons of Europe, a continent that was besotted with the mysteries of a deeply romanticised past. But Schliemann was hardly a professional scientist. He had made his fortune as an indigo merchant, export agent and commodities speculator before succumbing to a growing passion for all things Mycenaean. When he got to Hisarlik, he and his team unwittingly dug straight through the layer now thought to have been Homer’s Troy, compromising much of that stratum for later investigation, while uncovering decorative objects from between 300 and 500 years earlier — objects that Schliemann’s wife, a Helen in the Victorian fashion, wore when out on the town. If we can so easily misinterpret our own past, how might we misconstrue the artefacts of a truly alien culture? One can only wonder if a modern-day Schliemann, armed with telescope or radio dish, and freighted with myriad assumptions, might not blunder away an equally enigmatic interstellar find. Interstellar archaeologists are looking for evidence of engineering on scales that dwarf our own. They assume that civilisations eventually build technologies capable of exploiting the energy resources of entire stars. They are building on the early work of the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, who, in 1964, set about categorising these futuristic civilisations. His scheme, called the Kardashev Scale, has three types, and so far humanity does not even rate as a Type I — a civilisation that can master the energy resources of its entire planet. A Type II culture can tap all the resources of its local star, and a Type III can harness the energy of an entire galaxy. We do not, of course, know if any civilisation other than our own exists, but Kardashev’s scale offers us a way of approaching the problem of detection: it gets us thinking about what kind of traces these advanced civilisations might leave behind. Imagining the engineering of ancient extraterrestrials is difficult work, foolhardy even. The earliest attempts to do it tended to focus on the largest conceivable structures. The former Fermilab scientist Richard Carrigan, one of interstellar archaeology’s pioneers, has long been a vocal proponent of the hunt for Dyson spheres, a technology proposed by Freeman Dyson in 1960. Dyson predicted that energy-seeking civilisations would surround their home stars in a technological shell, or a swarm of spacecraft, in order to capture its energy. A sphere with the radius of Earth’s orbit would have an interior surface area 100 million times as large as the surface area of our planet. In 1966, Carl Sagan suggested that such spheres might be detectable, but he cautioned that they would be hard to distinguish from natural objects that gave off a similar infrared signature. Decades later, Carrigan would tell New Scientist that he wanted to try anyway, that he ‘wanted to get into the mode of the British Museum, to go and look for artefacts’. True to his word, Carrigan has conducted a series of searches for Dyson spheres, following earlier work by the Russian astronomers Vyacheslav Ivanovich Slysh and MY Timofeev. Carrigan combed IRAS, the infrared sky survey that dates back to the 1980s, looking for the distinct infrared signatures calculated for this purely theoretical technology. More recently, Berkeley’s well known exoplanet hunter Geoff Marcy began studying 1,000 Milky Way star systems for evidence of large structures, looking for visible disturbances in light levels around the parent star as the techno-structures transit between their star and the Earth. At Penn State, Jason Wright and his colleagues Matthew Povich and Steinn Sigurðsson are pushing the search for Dyson spheres deeper into the galaxy, and even beyond it, by examining infrared data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Wright’s group is also looking for ‘Fermi bubbles’, patches of a galaxy that show higher infrared emissions than the rest, which could be a sign that a civilisation is gradually transforming a galaxy as it works its way across it. M51, the ‘Whirlpool’ galaxy, offers a good field for study, because it is turned so that we see it face-on. In the age of big data, it is possible that evidence of an extraterrestrial civilisation is already hiding in our archives None of the ongoing interstellar archaeology searches will be easy to confirm, supposing they find something notable, for natural explanations for such phenomena abound. For one, spiral galaxies already contain voids that can mimic a civilisation’s spread. The galaxy VIRGOHI21 is a good example. At optical wavelengths, it’s dark enough to suggest it might be a candidate for Dyson-style engineering. But HI21 is also explained through the effects of so-called ‘tidal shredding’, a natural process that may be producing the same signature. Dyson sphere signatures are trickier still: they could be nothing more than stars enshrouded in dust clouds. Positive results turned up by interstellar archaeologists will need plenty of scrutiny. The field’s deeper thinkers are starting to wonder if there might be other ways to search. Milan Ćirković, from the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, has suggested we go after large artificial objects in transiting orbits. He says we ought to look for something like the huge space colonies once championed by Gerard O’Neill, structures that could be involved in large-scale industrial operations, which might be furnaces for antimatter. If so, their existence could be confirmed by the detection of unusual gamma ray signatures. Alien engineers might even manipulate their own central star. In 1957, Fritz Zwicky suggested that civilisations could fire fuel pellets into their local stars, to move their solar systems to new locations, especially when interstellar dangers loomed. Forty years later, the physicist Leonid Shkadov suggested that huge spherical mirrors could be built to accomplish the same thing, by creating a feedback effect from the star’s radiation, that would let its creators control the star’s trajectory through the galaxy. Interstellar archaeologists are forced to wonder what structures like these might look like from a distance of thousands or tens of thousands of light years. Fortunately, they can tinker with different signatures, because we already have a vast trove of star data to trawl. With detailed information on billions of systems sitting on our servers, and processing power whose growth shows no signs of slowing, we can tune our algorithms to search for transit signatures that could flag engineering projects of immense scale. In the age of big data, it is possible that evidence of an extraterrestrial civilisation is already hiding in our archives. Our searches might even turn up a galactic gravestone, a monument meant to record the wonders of a dying civilisation for posterity. Luc Arnold from the Aix Marseilles Université has suggested that distant civilisations might use planet-sized objects as deliberate celestial signs, knowing that their signature could be readily detected by alien astronomers. Such objects might be the final act of a civilisation in its death throes, left behind as a legacy to surviving cultures. The astronomer Charles Lineweaver has pointed out that most of our galaxy’s terrestrial-class worlds are two billion years older than Earth. How many civilisations have flourished and died out in that time? Of course the search for the remnants of these civilisations need not stop with unusual light signatures. In addition to energy, an ancient spacefaring culture would need large amounts of raw material to build its structures. Working with Martin Elvis of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the astronomer Duncan Forgan has investigated the possibility that the debris discs around other stars could show signs of large-scale asteroid mining. Rock and ice debris is concentrated in our own solar system at various distances, from the main-belt asteroids between Mars and Jupiter to the Kuiper Belt and the still more distant Oort Cloud. And we now have unambiguous evidence of similar discs of debris around stars such as Vega, Fomalhaut and Beta Pictoris. Beech thinks blue straggler stars could mark a Kardashev Type II culture trying to preserve its habitat. Asteroid mining could show up in our telescopes as chemical imbalances in these discs. If we were to see a sharp depletion of elements like iron and nickel, or rare elements, such as platinum and palladium, that might flag extraterrestrial mining operations. The dynamics of the debris disc itself would likewise be affected, as larger objects were broken down for industrial use. The production of dust through mining process might also cause unusual temperature gradients. We don’t have the equipment to make these measurements at present, but future space-based observatories may be able to. And what of stars that are anomalous such as the ‘blue straggler’ stars that seem much younger than the stars around them? Astronomers are puzzled by them because globular clusters — ancient cities of stars that sit in a spherical halo around the Milky Way — are where blue stragglers were first identified, and these are thought to contain stars that formed at the same time. Now we’re finding blue stragglers in the galactic bulge itself, another unusual place for younger stars since most star formation there has stopped. The giant blue stars we see shining there should have exploded into supernovae billions of years ago. There are many theories that attempt to explain the blue straggler phenomenon, but only one implicates interstellar archaeology. Martin Beech, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, has suggested that we consider blue stragglers candidates for follow-up searches to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). There are scenarios in which you could imagine a sufficiently advanced civilisation decided to adjust its own star’s ageing process. Pump enough shell hydrogen back into the inner core of a star and you should be able to prolong its lifetime, thus preserving any culture that lives in the vicinity. Beech thinks blue stragglers could mark a Kardashev Type II culture trying to preserve its habitat. All of these searches ask us to put ourselves in the minds of beings about whom we know absolutely nothing. The physicist David Deutsch has flagged this as a problem for prediction of all kinds, not just those involving SETI. According to Deutsch, we can distinguish between ‘prophecy’ and ‘prediction’, with prophecy being the discussion of things that are not knowable, while prediction deals with conclusions that are based on good explanations of the universe. As prognosticators from Thomas Malthus to the Club of Rome have demonstrated, we may be able to identify problematic trends in the present that can be extended into the future, but we cannot know what knowledge we will acquire in the future to manage those problems. This is why no scientific era has succeeded in imagining its successor. The scientists of the late 19th century discovered this firsthand, when confronted with the emergence of quantum theory and relativity early in the early 20th. Both theories raised questions earlier theorists couldn’t have even formulated. In the context of interstellar archaeology, the problem is that we have no analogues in our experience for what advanced cultures might create. Patience is the byword as the effort proceeds, the same patience that Heinrich Schliemann’s successors have used to master the art of sifting through rubble, with careful digging and delicate brushwork sweeping aside soil to uncover the shape of a fragmentary artefact. Interstellar archaeologists are tasked with sifting through gigabytes of data, not layers of soil, but the principle is the same. In a recent paper with Robert Bradbury and George Dvorsky, Milan Ćirković offered a paradigm for a new SETI, one that would include not only searches like these but a wide range of ‘future studies’ that would encompass how a post-biological intelligence might emerge and make itself known — intentionally or unintentionally. This approach asks interstellar archaeologists to expand their field to include the study of computer science, artificial life, evolutionary biology, the philosophy of mind and the evolving science of astrobiology. A successful search for macro-engineering would challenge us to re-imagine our position in the cosmos, confronting us with structures that might identify a living culture, or one long dead. In this respect the interstellar archaeologists are like the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic peoples who inhabited Britain after the end of the Roman occupation. They found themselves living amid engineering that was beyond their own capabilities, a disquieting experience that made its way into Anglo-Saxon poems such as ‘The Ruin’: The city buildings fell apart, the worksOf giants crumble. Tumbled are the towersRuined the roofs, and broken the barred gate,Frost in the plaster, all the ceilings gape,Torn and collapsed and eaten up by age.And grit holds in its grip, the hard embraceOf earth, the dead-departed master-builders,Until a hundred generations nowOf people have passed by. Often this wallStained red and grey with lichen has stood bySurviving storms while kingdoms rose and fell.And now the high curved wall itself has fallen.Verse like this infuses our past with grandeur while imbuing its artefacts with the rich patina of shared human experience. It serves as a connective tissue between cultures. But no such collective history can illuminate the discoveries of our interstellar archaeologists. Finding the monuments of civilisations more advanced than our own would challenge us to place ourselves in a totally unfamiliar context, as cosmic newcomers who can suddenly aspire to long lifetimes. If we found a lost city in the sky, it might fire our imaginations. It might give us reason to think we’ll outlast existential threats like nuclear weapons and biological terrorism. An interstellar Hisarlik would tell us that some civilisations do survive these dangers and learn to harness immense energies to grow. Rather than despair, we may see their mighty works and rejoice at what we can become.
The lead plaintiff in today's case is Jesus Gonzales, a Yuma, Arizona school janitor who registered to vote, or tried to, on the day he became a U.S. citizen. His application was twice rejected by state officials, the first time because, following instructions on the state form, he supplied his naturalization number, but as it turned out there was no way for the state to verify that number with the Department of Homeland Security. On his next try, he entered his driver's license number, but as it turned out, because he had obtained his license when he was a legal resident, but prior to becoming a citizen, the license, unbeknownst to him, was flagged in state files as issued to a foreigner.
Well, if it is a federally funded program, and that means that if there's $1 of federal funds in the project, then the agency, whoever it may be whose buying the property, must comply with a federal law, that is the Uniform Relocation Act. This law is very equitable. There are very few cases - there are very few instances where someone is abused by this. And there's very few condemnation cases involved. If it's a state program, now the state doesn't necessarily have to follow the federal rules if there's no federal dollars in it. And there could become abuses with that. I'm not questioning that. And people should follow the federal law and the abuses wouldn't be there.
As to the rewarding the hospitals and the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry, the hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry cut deals, you know, early on to not oppose this bill. I think one of the reasons that it looks like this bill has - well, it certainly has gotten further than any previous major health bill in the past. Whether or not it becomes law is still be seen - is that it has not had the opposition of the hospital industry and the pharmaceutical industry. The insurance industry, they've gotten off a little bit easier, but they're not so thrilled with a lot of the things in this bill. So it's yet to be seen.
Yeah. It was - it came out in '82 and it - Disney released it. And it really kind of was a flop. It had more computer generated imagery in it and some computer characters and environments than anything that had come before. And because it was a flop, people said it really set the industry back, you know, back a ways because, you know, if it had been a hit, people would have kept investing in the technology. But a lot of the people involved in "Tron" said, you know, it didn't resonate with audiences and so, Hollywood kind of wrote off the potential of computers.
Yeah. Well, my mother and father always taught us no matter what you have, you make it work. And they instilled in us to have strong ethics and do right, and we had a strong religious background. So, you know, I'm just proud that I was able to work my way up. And I teach my daughter that, because she'll have it a lot easier than I did. Both my husband and I both have college degrees. We are professionals, and we'll be able to provide for her. But we are committed to making her participate as far as earning some money to put herself through college because I don't want her to lose that. I think that strengthens your character so when things aren't as well as you - you know, as - you know, when the stock market crashes, or when you lose everything, you're not devastated. You know that it will get better because it's been like this before, and it's not going to kill you.
Things never happen the same way twice, Aslan the all-powerful says in "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian." While the lion king is referring to the ways of the world, he might be talking about this film as well. "Prince Caspian" retains the kid-friendly PG rating of the previous episode. But this film is noticeably darker in tone. It begins with the piercing scream of a woman in childbirth, and it dwells on the ruthlessness of its villain, the evil Miraz. When Miraz threatens Prince Caspian, he blows on a magic horn to summon the four siblings from the last film.
First of all, I didn't fly through any major storms, but I try to fly around them. You know, whether on the backend or front end of them. And the visibility is poor, especially in the North Pacific for example. You have to rely on your instruments. You can't rely on your body senses, which can cause, you know, misdirection. You might think you're up when you're really upside down. So you rely on the instruments, and most importantly, you don't panic. You know, there were times, of course, yes, I was very nervous. You know, I wasn't sure exactly what was happening right off the bat at first, but you analyze and you evaluate. You look at your altitude. You look at your airspeed. For example, flying from northern Japan to (unintelligible) Alaska. You know, I was flying to a destination on an island that's only two miles big and two miles in circumference and one mile in length, you know? So there's just…
Well, it is a bit of a quieter day as people recover from the violence of yesterday. But we still do see protesters, not far from where we're sitting here, heading down toward the Israeli border fence. And we hear scattered gunshots, which we presume is the Israeli army, firing back. People are not done with this protest. And one question is how much farther Hamas, the biggest power here in Gaza, wants to take this protest. But it's come at a tremendous cost. We stopped by the main hospital in Gaza City this morning and visited, and it was extremely crowded with patients, people with gunshot wounds. It's so many of them, so overwhelming the system that we met one young man who had been waiting 24 hours to be seen at all.
Right. Well, you know, also, presidential politics enters into this in that Bill Frist is considered a contender for the White House in '08 and John McCain, another Republican in the Senate is also considered a contender. They have competing proposals, really, because Frist only deals with border security, McCain's deals with a path for citizenship for people who are right now in the country illegally. And I think that those two camps are pretty much split among Senate Republicans. They haven't had votes in the full Senate, so we don't really know what the head count is on this right now. But we do know from comments that Republicans in the Senate have made that this is something that they're very anxious about. It's, it's, many are saying this is the most difficult legislation that they're probably going to deal with this entire year. For Democrats, Democrats are sort of standing back and letting, as you said, Republicans beat up each other. But Democrats also have differences. There are Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, from Massachusetts, who is very much for opening up the U.S. to more foreign workers and to speeding a path to citizenship for those who are here. And then there are others, such as Diane Feinstein from California, who are mainly concerned with supplying workers for the agg industry, and having citizenship in the end is not the ultimate goal, but rather having some kind of a regular situation. But this is something that has not pitted Democrats against each other. Right now, it's more Democrats pointing to Frist and saying he's forcing the Senate to do something that it's not quite ready to do yet, and they're trying to make political hay out of that.
Cilek's refusal to do that, she says, was viewed as confusing to voters, disruptive and designed to draw election judges into a dispute. Election officials worried, for instance, that people in the line would leave without voting if they thought erroneously that they needed a photo ID to vote and hadn't brought one with them. Indeed, she says, one head election judge told her he was not sure he would serve again if the ban is struck down because he wouldn't be able to protect the judges he supervises from getting drawn into political battles. After all, Gelms contends, that's not what polling places are for.
Oh yes. I don't think there's any doubt about that. I mean, I think the Iranian foreign minister in particular is being very disingenuous at this time. I think there's been a considerable amount of financial support and of course logistical, I mean in terms of these rockets that have been sent over and other weaponry. And it was quite well known, I mean even in Iran, that Hezbollah were there as, in Iranian terms, as Iran's deterrence against Israel. I mean, that was the way they looked at it and they were quite happy to arm them in order to provide this special force on Israel's northern border.
Well, we had that report two months ago when it was in its draft form and some of it appears in the series. They pretty much exonerated ICE from the two deaths. But they pointed out, and I don't have it in front of me so this is just from memory - that ICE's oversight was lacking. That ICE said that it had set up some inspection groups but that those were really in its infancy. They also inspected some files and found that they are way out of whack. That there were many that hadn't been done in the period of time that they were supposed to be done, and that really matters when you're talking about medical care. You need to get people in and examine them and if there's a problem, it's identified, you need to treat it or it will get worst under those circumstances, or you know, perhaps spread to other people. Many cases of doctors and nurses and other health care providers worrying that their staff shortages are making it difficult to do the exams. And that a very dysfunctional computer system that was put in place after millions were spent to create an electronic medical records system wasn't working. It fact, it was losing records or chewing up records, and people were very frustrated with this. Everyone knew that it was a problem, and yet, the management was not fixing it quick enough.
So I start in a Moroccan souk with a rug seller called Majid El Fenni, who started out selling sheepskin jackets to hippies in the '60s and is now one of the great purveyors of Moroccan carpets, rugs, tiles to hotels and movie stars and rock stars all over the world. I went to Japan; I met a life insurance saleswoman called Mrs. Shibata who's the top saleswoman at a company called Dai-ichi Life, which is one of the great life insurance companies. I met a guy called Guillermo Ramirez - known as Memo - who's a Mexican contractor in Baltimore, who arrived in the United States when he was 19 and now runs a very thriving contracting business in Baltimore. And again, a terrific salesman, completely untaught but just wonderful with a huge array of different clients from, you know, wealthy bankers in Baltimore to kind of 20-year-olds who have their first home, a terrific reader of people, and a great enthusiast and a great manager of people.
Well, as it stands right now, certainly on the Democratic side, neither the Michigan nor the Florida delegates are recognized. Right now, they don't have any delegates at all. It's hard to imagine that in two crucial states that these delegates ultimately will not be seated, and I think it'll be up to the Democratic nominee, whoever he or she will be, to decide about that. But it's interesting because right now the way it is, it looks like the needed number of delegates to win the Democratic nomination may not include Florida and Michigan. Hillary Clinton has made the case that, look, these are - they're real people too, and they should have a say. And so that could be a very interesting convention fight if the fight for the nomination goes that far.
And this is the heart of crew resource management and we did have that absolutely on the Cali, Colombia accident. Two heads down, both of them trying to figure out what was going on. As a matter of fact, one of the most dangerous phrases we have in today's modern cockpits is, quote, "Why do you suppose it's doing that?" End quote. And we also have the schism between Airbus and Boeing. Airbus wanted to go with more and more automation, Boeing saying the pilots should always be in control of the airplane. We even have a problem that is going to be very interesting to see how the safety board comes out with their report on whether the engines in this Airbus A320, had they not been computer controlled, could have been kept in operation, even imperfectly.
Well, I think everyone outside of Europe would like to see that. They'd like to say, look, you can't just tell the people in Spain and Italy, Ireland that they have to be in recession forever, that they keep having to tighten their belts. We have seen years of recessions in these countries, the forecast for more years of recession. And at some point, that has to come to an end. And you're absolutely right. The way would be to just write down the debts. But politically, it's very difficult - particularly for the Germans - to admit that. So they play this game of, well, you know, here's more money. Maybe you'll pay me. When we finally get to an endgame to this, we'll really see some write-downs, some forgiveness. We're nowhere near that yet.
Now we have a political story with a slightly different flavor. As members of the Trump administration began moving into the D.C. area, so did some people hoping to have a voice in the administration. One of those people is Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute. That's a think tank that promotes white supremacy, a member of the so-called alt-right. Spencer and his group rented an office on King Street, a popular shopping area in Alexandria, Va. Protesters have found the office, which is posing some unique challenges for one business on the block, but not in the way you might expect.
Well, yeah, yeah, but I mean, I think the British metropolitan police are savvy enough to realize that, you know, let's choose - let's assign - you know, let's be - let's all sort of pretend that everybody's all in one basket, and if we have if they have ideas that we disagree with, somehow they're all our enemies, which I think is, you know, we've seen too much of that. What they're saying is, you know, if people are Muslim fundamentalists and they want to take over this mosque and they're not involved in violence and they've abjured it, fine.
The United States has just moved past Germany as the world's leading supplier of wind energy. Wind turbine companies are focusing on the U.S., a rapidly growing market, but there is a downside to this energy alternative. Those swirling blades have been known to kill migratory bats. See, every fall, some species of migratory bats fly from Canada down south for the winter, but not all of them make it. A wind installation in Southern Alberta, on the plains just east of the Rockies, an installation stands in their path. And each wind turbine there can take out several dozen bats a year during this migration season, and there are others like this all over North America.
Another encouraging sign was that job growth in November and December was a good bit higher than first estimated. As it does every January, the Labor Department revises job data for the preceding year. The latest revisions showed that employers added 181,000 jobs a month on average last year. That's a good bit stronger than earlier estimates and that may have been what pushed stock prices higher. But the Labor Department report also portrayed a job market that still has plenty of slack. The report shows that the length of the average work week stayed the same in January, an average hourly earnings posted at best modest gains. Heidi Shierholz is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
...of a crime. He has, as you said already, been indicted for, for one in Texas, but the real threshold there is to be convicted. In this particular case, I think Tony Rudy has already been convicted by his plea agreement, and is cooperating with the federal authorities. There are some other names of former DeLay staffers, including his former chief of staff back in the ‘90s, Ed Buckham, who was extraordinarily important to Tom DeLay, who's been his spiritual advisor, who lives in a religious community out in western Maryland, who is involved in a great number of Tom DeLay activities, and who ran a group called the Alexander Consulting Group, which still does exist in a legal sense, as a lobbying organization and a lot of other things. These people have been part and parcel of Tom DeLay's large operation in Texas and in Washington, and really, around the country for a long period of time. If somebody like Tony Rudy is pleading guilty, if somebody like Ed Buckham might be indicted, and he has not been indicted yet, if these things are happening, Tom DeLay has a reasonable expectation that he may himself be indicted. Then this is a critical factor to why he is, I think, resigning and choosing not to run for reelection. If he runs for reelection, in the same sense that Nick Lampson was going to spend millions, Tom DeLay would have raise and spend millions of dollars. He has a certain amount of money now, if he doesn't spend it on the campaign, he can use it for his legal defense.
Up next, more on the effect of climate change and what is having - it is having on our planet and how we can see it working. A report out this week says that trees - trees in the Western U.S. are dying at an increased rate and in some place, dying at twice the rate over the past two to three decades. And the proposed cause of that mortality is climate change. There's changing precipitation, insect population booms brought on by warming temperatures - they're all taking toll on trees from Oregon to Colorado to Arizona, and that's the gist of a report in the journal Science. And now, here to talk with me more about it is Philip van Mantgem. He is a research ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's, Western Ecological Center in Arcata, California. Welcome to Science Friday.
Yes. You know, one of the judges I talked to there in Azan, he was telling me this. He was telling me like I have - we've learned from our mistakes in Iraq. We should have a very critical, you know, relationship with the tribes. We don't want to repeat our mistakes in Iraq. So basically you have guys who have studied their, you know, the progress of the past 10 years. They have seen what happened to them in Iraq. They have seen what happened to them in different parts of the world. They've seen the, you know, the Arab Spring. Basically I was personally, before going to Yemen, I thought this is the end of al-Qaida. After the killing of bin Laden, after the Arab Spring, the Arab youth kind of like started tasting democracy. Why would you ever kind of want to have al-Qaida running your affairs? But here you are, you have al-Qaida regenerating itself. The jihadis, you know, the same ideology in a different image, in a different presentation, basically, and trying to represent the Arab world, the Arab uprising of the world, as an, you know, something that they have started.
Everybody is wondering that. The Israeli government took pains to say that this does not mean more escalation, that this doesn't mean a ground invasion. But we're getting signals from Syria that Syria is seeing this call-up and wondering about whether Israel is going to expand the war. And in fact Israeli leaders today, both military and political leaders, went to great lengths to send a signal to Syria that they don't mean this to be a general mobilization to lead to an attack on Syria. What the Israeli leaders say is they're calling these reservists up to meet any eventuality.
Well, it probably started with the tuck rule, when they beat the Raiders with the benefit of a obscure rule that actually existed in the NFL but, to anybody's knowledge, had never been applied. From there, you got to Spygate, where the Patriots were accused of spying on the other team. Then you got to Deflategate, where Tom Brady was accused of having footballs deflated during their win over the Indianapolis Colts, which is a violation of NFL rules. Then you had, basically, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady being associated with Donald Trump, which is its own set of red flags.
How high could indictments go? Despite earlier denials of involvement, it is now clear that presidential assistant Karl Rove and vice presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby had some role in inviting reporters to dig further. Could this go higher? The prosecutor interviewed President Bush and Vice President Cheney at some length. It is not publicly known if they are implicated. It may be remembered that the Watergate grand jury wanted to indict President Nixon for obstruction of justice. When advised that a sitting president could not be prosecuted, the grand jury named him as an `unindicted co-conspirator.' This is Daniel Schorr.
It's a perfect illustration of some of the benefits of the Promise that are not well-understood. We tend to focus on kids who weren't going to go to college and now can go to college. The reality of the impact is much more complex than that. Students are able to choose different colleges. We see this trading-up phenomenon. We sometimes see - I hate to call it trading down - but we see a shift in college preferences because of the requirement that you attend a public, in-state institution. But, you know, that's quite good for the state, that more of our top students are being driven to public, in-state institutions.
Well, yeah. And some of us are really good at learning those kinds of tells. But one of the things that happens at a poker table is that you eventually learn whether the person is bluffing or not. In everyday life, we don't get that advantage. We don't - we're not able to tell if someone has been lying to us or not most of the time. So we don't have much feedback in terms of whether we are correct in our assumptions about when someone is lying or not to us. There's also a truth bias that we carry around with us that most of us just generally believe that others are telling us the truth. So we're not very good in that sense in determining whether somebody is lying to us.
He just said Father Sullivan was a great orator. He was a great debater on theology - so on and so forth. And then my wife asked if there are any relatives living in the area? And he said, I don't think so. But there is a relative connection in Buffalo if you'd be interested in hearing about that. So he took us down the hall into a bigger office. He sat behind the desk. We sat on the other side. He said to my wife, are you an attorney? And she said no. He looked at me - are you an attorney? I said no. He said whatever we say here will stay in this room today. So I said to him, you know. He said, yeah, I know. I said, how do you know? He said, you look just like him.
That is remarkable, and, you know, I spoke with some people, and we've - I think a lot of us heard of people who have had years-long waits. And I met someone who was going through a local brick-and-mortar agency in Maryland, very near to here, who was told the average wait, two to three years, but then it actually, he was told, would be longer because of the Internet, because birth mothers in Maryland were suddenly communicating with prospective adoptive parents all over the country and maybe, you know, letting them adopt their children instead of keeping it within this local area. And so he was actually advised, he and his partner, to go online, set up their own website and market themselves also nationally.
Chris Anderson: Welcome to this next edition of TED Dialogues. We're trying to do some bridging here today. You know, the American dream has inspired millions of people around the world for many years. Today, I think, you can say that America is divided, perhaps more than ever, and the divisions seem to be getting worse. It's actually really hard for people on different sides to even have a conversation. People almost feel... disgusted with each other. Some families can't even speak to each other right now. Our purpose in this dialogue today is to try to do something about that, to try to have a different kind of conversation, to do some listening, some thinking, some understanding. And I have two people with us to help us do that. They're not going to come at this hammer and tong against each other. This is not like cable news. This is two people who have both spent a lot of their working life in the political center or right of the center. They've immersed themselves in conservative worldviews, if you like. They know that space very well. And we're going to explore together how to think about what is happening right now, and whether we can find new ways to bridge and just to have wiser, more connected conversations. With me, first of all, Gretchen Carlson, who has spent a decade working at Fox News, hosting "Fox and Friends" and then "The Real Story," before taking a courageous stance in filing sexual harassment claims against Roger Ailes, which eventually led to his departure from Fox News. David Brooks, who has earned the wrath of many of [The New York Times's] left-leaning readers because of his conservative views, and more recently, perhaps, some of the right-leaning readers because of his criticism of some aspects of Trump. Yet, his columns are usually the top one, two or three most-read content of the day because they're brilliant, because they bring psychology and social science to providing understanding for what's going on. So without further ado, a huge welcome to Gretchen and David. Come and join me. (Applause) So, Gretchen. Sixty-three million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Why did they do this? Gretchen Carlson: There are a lot of reasons, in my mind, why it happened. I mean, I think it was a movement of sorts, but it started long ago. It didn't just happen overnight. "Anger" would be the first word that I would think of — anger with nothing being done in Washington, anger about not being heard. I think there was a huge swath of the population that feels like Washington never listens to them, you know, a good part of the middle of America, not just the coasts, and he was somebody they felt was listening to their concerns. So I think those two issues would be the main reason. I have to throw in there also celebrity. I think that had a huge impact on Donald Trump becoming president. CA: Was the anger justified? David Brooks: Yeah, I think so. In 2015 and early 2016, I wrote about 30 columns with the following theme: don't worry, Donald Trump will never be the Republican nominee. (Laughter) And having done that and gotten that so wrong, I decided to spend the ensuing year just out in Trumpworld, and I found a lot of economic dislocation. I ran into a woman in West Virginia who was going to a funeral for her mom. She said, "The nice thing about being Catholic is we don't have to speak, and that's good, because we're not word people." That phrase rung in my head: word people. A lot of us in the TED community are word people, but if you're not, the economy has not been angled toward you, and so 11 million men, for example, are out of the labor force because those jobs are done away. A lot of social injury. You used to be able to say, "I'm not the richest person in the world, I'm not the most famous, but my neighbors can count on me and I get some dignity out of that." And because of celebritification or whatever, if you're not rich or famous, you feel invisible. And a lot of moral injury, sense of feeling betrayed, and frankly, in this country, we almost have one success story, which is you go to college, get a white-collar job, and you're a success, and if you don't fit in that formula, you feel like you're not respected. And so that accumulation of things — and when I talked to Trump voters and still do, I found most of them completely realistic about his failings, but they said, this is my shot. GC: And yet I predicted that he would be the nominee, because I've known him for 27 years. He's a master marketer, and one of the things he did extremely well that President Obama also did extremely well, was simplifying the message, simplifying down to phrases and to a populist message. Even if he can't achieve it, it sounded good. And many people latched on to that simplicity again. It's something they could grasp onto: "I get that. I want that. That sounds fantastic." And I remember when he used to come on my show originally, before "The Apprentice" was even "The Apprentice," and he'd say it was the number one show on TV. I'd say back to him, "No, it's not." And he would say, "Yes it is, Gretchen." And I would say, "No it's not." But people at home would see that, and they'd be like, "Wow, I should be watching the number one show on TV." And — lo and behold — it became the number one show on TV. So he had this, I've seen this ability in him to be the master marketer. CA: It's puzzling to a lot of people on the left that so many women voted for him, despite some of his comments. GC: I wrote a column about this for Time Motto, saying that I really believe that lot of people put on blinders, and maybe for the first time, some people decided that policies they believed in and being heard and not being invisible anymore was more important to them than the way in which he had acted or acts as a human. And so human dignity — whether it would be the dust-up about the disabled reporter, or what happened in that audiotape with Billy Bush and the way in which he spoke about women — they put that aside and pretended as if they hadn't seen that or heard that, because to them, policies were more important. CA: Right, so just because someone voted for Trump, it's not blind adherence to everything that he's said or stood for. GC: No. I heard a lot of people that would say to me, "Wow, I just wish he would shut up before the election. If he would just stay quiet, he'd get elected." CA: And so, maybe for people on the left there's a trap there, to sort of despise or just be baffled by the support, assuming that it's for some of the unattractive features. Actually, maybe they're supporting him despite those, because they see something exciting. They see a man of action. They see the choking hold of government being thrown off in some way and they're excited by that. GC: But don't forget we saw that on the left as well — Bernie Sanders. So this is one of the commonalities that I think we can talk about today, "The Year of the Outsider," David — right? And even though Bernie Sanders has been in Congress for a long time, he was deemed an outsider this time. And so there was anger on the left as well, and so many people were in favor of Bernie Sanders. So I see it as a commonality. People who like Trump, people who like Bernie Sanders, they were liking different policies, but the underpinning was anger. CA: David, there's often this narrative, then, that the sole explanation for Trump's victory and his rise is his tapping into anger in a very visceral way. But you've written a bit about that it's actually more than that, that there's a worldview that's being worked on here. Could you talk about that? DB: I would say he understood what, frankly, I didn't, which is what debate we were having. And so I'd grown up starting with Reagan, and it was the big government versus small government debate. It was Barry Goldwater versus George McGovern, and that was the debate we had been having for a generation. It was: Democrats wanted to use government to enhance equality, Republicans wanted to limit government to enhance freedom. That was the debate. He understood what I think the two major parties did not, which was that's not the debate anymore. The debate is now open versus closed. On one side are those who have the tailwinds of globalization and the meritocracy blowing at their back, and they tend to favor open trade, open borders, open social mores, because there are so many opportunities. On the other side are those who feel the headwinds of globalization and the meritocracy just blasting in their faces, and they favor closed trade, closed borders, closed social mores, because they just want some security. And so he was right on that fundamental issue, and people were willing to overlook a lot to get there. And so he felt that sense of security. We're speaking the morning after Trump's joint session speech. There are three traditional groups in the Republican Party. There are the foreign policies hawks who believe in America as global policeman. Trump totally repudiated that view. Second, there was the social conservatives who believed in religious liberty, pro-life, prayer in schools. He totally ignored that. There was not a single mention of a single social conservative issue. And then there were the fiscal hawks, the people who wanted to cut down on the national debt, Tea Party, cut the size of government. He's expanding the size of government! Here's a man who has single-handedly revolutionized a major American party because he understood where the debate was headed before other people. And then guys like Steve Bannon come in and give him substance to his impulses. CA: And so take that a bit further, and maybe expand a bit more on your insights into Steve Bannon's worldview. Because he's sometimes tarred in very simple terms as this dangerous, racist, xenophobic, anger-sparking person. There's more to the story; that is perhaps an unfair simplification. DB: I think that part is true, but there's another part that's probably true, too. He's part of a global movement. It's like being around Marxists in 1917. There's him here, there's the UKIP party, there's the National Front in France, there's Putin, there's a Turkish version, a Philippine version. So we have to recognize that this is a global intellectual movement. And it believes that wisdom and virtue is not held in individual conversation and civility the way a lot of us in the enlightenment side of the world do. It's held in — the German word is the "volk" — in the people, in the common, instinctive wisdom of the plain people. And the essential virtue of that people is always being threatened by outsiders. And he's got a strategy for how to get there. He's got a series of policies to bring the people up and repudiate the outsiders, whether those outsiders are Islam, Mexicans, the media, the coastal elites... And there's a whole worldview there; it's a very coherent worldview. I sort of have more respect for him. I loathe what he stands for and I think he's wrong on the substance, but it's interesting to see someone with a set of ideas find a vehicle, Donald Trump, and then try to take control of the White House in order to advance his viewpoint. CA: So it's almost become, like, that the core question of our time now is: Can you be patriotic but also have a global mindset? Are these two things implacably opposed to each other? I mean, a lot of conservatives and, to the extent that it's a different category, a lot of Trump supporters, are infuriated by the coastal elites and the globalists because they see them as, sort of, not cheering for America, not embracing fully American values. I mean, have you seen that in your conversations with people, in your understanding of their mindset? GC: I do think that there's a huge difference between — I hate to put people in categories, but, Middle America versus people who live on the coasts. It's an entirely different existence. And I grew up in Minnesota, so I have an understanding of Middle America, and I've never forgotten it. And maybe that's why I have an understanding of what happened here, because those people often feel like nobody's listening to them, and that we're only concentrating on California and New York. And so I think that was a huge reason why Trump was elected. I mean, these people felt like they were being heard. Whether or not patriotism falls into that, I'm not sure about that. I do know one thing: a lot of things Trump talked about last night are not conservative things. Had Hillary Clinton gotten up and given that speech, not one Republican would have stood up to applaud. I mean, he's talking about spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure. That is not a conservative viewpoint. He talked about government-mandated maternity leave. A lot of women may love that; it's not a conservative viewpoint. So it's fascinating that people who loved what his message was during the campaign, I'm not sure — how do you think they'll react to that? DB: I should say I grew up in Lower Manhattan, in the triangle between ABC Carpets, the Strand Bookstore and The Odeon restaurant. (Laughter) GC: Come to Minnesota sometime! (Laughter) CA: You are a card-carrying member of the coastal elite, my man. But what did you make of the speech last night? It seemed to be a move to a more moderate position, on the face of it. DB: Yeah, I thought it was his best speech, and it took away the freakishness of him. I do think he's a moral freak, and I think he'll be undone by that fact, the fact that he just doesn't know anything about anything and is uncurious about it. (Laughter) But if you take away these minor flaws, I think we got to see him at his best, and it was revealing for me to see him at his best, because to me, it exposed a central contradiction that he's got to confront, that a lot of what he's doing is offering security. So, "I'm ordering closed borders, I'm going to secure the world for you, for my people." But then if you actually look at a lot of his economic policies, like health care reform, which is about private health care accounts, that's not security, that's risk. Educational vouchers: that's risk. Deregulation: that's risk. There's really a contradiction between the security of the mindset and a lot of the policies, which are very risk-oriented. And what I would say, especially having spent this year, the people in rural Minnesota, in New Mexico — they've got enough risk in their lives. And so they're going to say, "No thank you." And I think his health care repeal will fail for that reason. CA: But despite the criticisms you just made of him, it does at least seem that he's listening to a surprisingly wide range of voices; it's not like everyone is coming from the same place. And maybe that leads to a certain amount of chaos and confusion, but — GC: I actually don't think he's listening to a wide range of voices. I think he's listening to very few people. That's just my impression of it. I believe that some of the things he said last night had Ivanka all over them. So I believe he was listening to her before that speech. And he was Teleprompter Trump last night, as opposed to Twitter Trump. And that's why, before we came out here, I said, "We better check Twitter to see if anything's changed." And also I think you have to keep in mind that because he's such a unique character, what was the bar that we were expecting last night? Was it here or here or here? And so he comes out and gives a looking political speech, and everyone goes, "Wow! He can do it." It just depends on which direction he goes. DB: Yeah, and we're trying to build bridges here, and especially for an audience that may have contempt for Trump, it's important to say, no, this is a real thing. But as I try my best to go an hour showing respect for him, my thyroid is surging, because I think the oddities of his character really are condemnatory and are going to doom him. CA: Your reputation is as a conservative. People would you describe you as right of center, and yet here you are with this visceral reaction against him and some of what he stands for. I mean, I'm — how do you have a conversation? The people who support him, on evidence so far, are probably pretty excited. He's certainly shown real engagement in a lot of what he promised to do, and there is a strong desire to change the system radically. People hate what government has become and how it's left them out. GC: I totally agree with that, but I think that when he was proposing a huge government program last night that we used to call the bad s-word, "stimulus," I find it completely ironic. To spend a trillion dollars on something — that is not a conservative viewpoint. Then again, I don't really believe he's a Republican. DB: And I would say, as someone who identifies as conservative: first of all, to be conservative is to believe in the limitations of politics. Samuel Johnson said, "Of all the things that human hearts endure, how few are those that kings can cause and cure." Politics is a limited realm; what matters most is the moral nature of the society. And so I have to think character comes first, and a man who doesn't pass the character threshold cannot be a good president. Second, I'm the kind of conservative who — I harken back to Alexander Hamilton, who was a Latino hip-hop star from the heights — (Laughter) but his definition of America was very future-oriented. He was a poor boy from the islands who had this rapid and amazing rise to success, and he wanted government to give poor boys and girls like him a chance to succeed, using limited but energetic government to create social mobility. For him and for Lincoln and for Teddy Roosevelt, the idea of America was the idea of the future. We may have division and racism and slavery in our past, but we have a common future. The definition of America that Steve Bannon stands for is backwards-looking. It's nostalgic; it's for the past. And that is not traditionally the American identity. That's traditionally, frankly, the Russian identity. That's how they define virtue. And so I think it is a fundamental and foundational betrayal of what conservatism used to stand for. CA: Well, I'd like actually like to hear from you, and if we see some comments coming in from some of you, we'll — oh, well here's one right now. Jeffrey Alan Carnegie: I've tried to convince progressive friends that they need to understand what motivates Trump supporters, yet many of them have given up trying to understand in the face of what they perceive as lies, selfishness and hatred. How would you reach out to such people, the Tea Party of the left, to try to bridge this divide? GC: I actually think there are commonalities in anger, as I expressed earlier. So I think you can come to the table, both being passionate about something. So at least you care. And I would like to believe — the c-word has also become a horrible word — "compromise," right? So you have the far left and the far right, and compromise — forget it. Those groups don't want to even think about it. But you have a huge swath of voters, myself included, who are registered independents, like 40 percent of us, right? So there is a huge faction of America that wants to see change and wants to see people come together. It's just that we have to figure out how to do that. CA: So let's talk about that for a minute, because we're having these TED Dialogues, we're trying to bridge. There's a lot of people out there, right now, perhaps especially on the left, who think this is a terrible idea, that actually, the only moral response to the great tyranny that may be about to emerge in America is to resist it at every stage, is to fight it tooth and nail, it's a mistake to try and do this. Just fight! Is there a case for that? DB: It depends what "fight" means. If it means literal fighting, then no. If it means marching, well maybe marching to raise consciousness, that seems fine. But if you want change in this country, we do it through parties and politics. We organize parties, and those parties are big, diverse, messy coalitions, and we engage in politics, and politics is always morally unsatisfying because it's always a bunch of compromises. But politics is essentially a competition between partial truths. The Trump people have a piece of the truth in America. I think Trump himself is the wrong answer to the right question, but they have some truth, and it's truth found in the epidemic of opiates around the country, it's truth found in the spread of loneliness, it's the truth found in people whose lives are inverted. They peaked professionally at age 30, and it's all been downhill since. And so, understanding that doesn't take fighting, it takes conversation and then asking, "What are we going to replace Trump with?" GC: But you saw fighting last night, even at the speech, because you saw the Democratic women who came and wore white to honor the suffragette movement. I remember back during the campaign where some Trump supporters wanted to actually get rid of the amendment that allowed us to vote as women. It was like, what? So I don't know if that's the right way to fight. It was interesting, because I was looking in the audience, trying to see Democratic women who didn't wear white. So there's a lot going on there, and there's a lot of ways to fight that are not necessarily doing that. CA: I mean, one of the key questions, to me, is: The people who voted for Trump but, if you like, are more in the center, like they're possibly amenable to persuasion — are they more likely to be persuaded by seeing a passionate uprising of people saying, "No, no, no, you can't!" or will that actually piss them off and push them away? DB: How are any of us persuaded? Am I going to persuade you by saying, "Well, you're kind of a bigot, you're supporting bigotry, you're supporting sexism. You're a primitive, fascistic rise from some authoritarian past"? That's probably not going to be too persuasive to you. And so the way any of us are persuaded is by: a) some basic show of respect for the point of view, and saying, "I think this guy is not going to get you where you need to go." And there are two phrases you've heard over and over again, wherever you go in the country. One, the phrase "flyover country." And that's been heard for years, but I would say this year, I heard it almost on an hourly basis, a sense of feeling invisible. And then the sense a sense of the phrase "political correctness." Just that rebellion: "They're not even letting us say what we think." And I teach at Yale. The narrowing of debate is real. CA: So you would say this is a trap that liberals have fallen into by celebrating causes they really believe in, often expressed through the language of "political correctness." They have done damage. They have pushed people away. DB: I would say a lot of the argument, though, with "descent to fascism," "authoritarianism" — that just feels over-the-top to people. And listen, I've written eight million anti-Trump columns, but it is a problem, especially for the coastal media, that every time he does something slightly wrong, we go to 11, and we're at 11 every day. And it just strains credibility at some point. CA: Crying wolf a little too loud and a little too early. But there may be a time when we really do have to cry wolf. GC: But see — one of the most important things to me is how the conservative media handles Trump. Will they call him out when things are not true, or will they just go along with it? To me, that is what is essential in this entire discussion, because when you have followers of somebody who don't really care if he tells the truth or not, that can be very dangerous. So to me, it's: How is the conservative media going to respond to it? I mean, you've been calling them out. But how will other forms of conservative media deal with that as we move forward? DB: It's all shifted, though. The conservative media used to be Fox or Charles Krauthammer or George Will. They're no longer the conservative media. Now there's another whole set of institutions further right, which is Breitbart and Infowars, Alex Jones, Laura Ingraham, and so they're the ones who are now his base, not even so much Fox. CA: My last question for the time being is just on this question of the truth. I mean, it's one of the scariest things to people right now, that there is no agreement, nationally, on what is true. I've never seen anything like it, where facts are so massively disputed. Your whole newspaper, sir, is delivering fake news every day. DB: And failing. (Laughter) CA: And failing. My commiserations. But is there any path whereby we can start to get some kind of consensus, to believe the same things? Can online communities play a role here? How do we fix this? GC: See, I understand how that happened. That's another groundswell kind of emotion that was going on in the middle of America and not being heard, in thinking that the mainstream media was biased. There's a difference, though, between being biased and being fake. To me, that is a very important distinction in this conversation. So let's just say that there was some bias in the mainstream media. OK. So there are ways to try and mend that. But what Trump's doing is nuclearizing that and saying, "Look, we're just going to call all of that fake." That's where it gets dangerous. CA: Do you think enough of his supporters have a greater loyalty to the truth than to any ... Like, the principle of not supporting something that is demonstrably not true actually matters, so there will be a correction at some point? DB: I think the truth eventually comes out. So for example, Donald Trump has based a lot of his economic policy on this supposition that Americans have lost manufacturing jobs because they've been stolen by the Chinese. That is maybe 13 percent of the jobs that left. The truth is that 87 percent of the jobs were replaced by technology. That is just the truth. And so as a result, when he says, "I'm going to close TPP and all the jobs will come roaring back," they will not come roaring back. So that is an actual fact, in my belief. And — (Laughter) GC: But I'm saying what his supporters think is the truth, no matter how many times you might say that, they still believe him. DB: But eventually either jobs will come back or they will not come back, and at that point, either something will work or it doesn't work, and it doesn't work or not work because of great marketing, it works because it actually addresses a real problem and so I happen to think the truth will out. CA: If you've got a question, please raise your hand here. Yael Eisenstat: I'll speak into the box. My name's Yael Eisenstat. I hear a lot of this talk about how we all need to start talking to each other more and understanding each other more, and I've even written about this, published on this subject as well, but now today I keep hearing liberals — yes, I live in New York, I can be considered a liberal — we sit here and self-analyze: What did we do to not understand the Rust Belt? Or: What can we do to understand Middle America better? And what I'd like to know: Have you seen any attempts or conversations from Middle America of what can I do to understand the so-called coastal elites better? Because I'm just offended as being put in a box as a coastal elite as someone in Middle America is as being considered a flyover state and not listened to. CA: There you go, I can hear Facebook cheering as you — (Laughter) DB: I would say — and this is someone who has been conservative all my adult life — when you grow up conservative, you learn to speak both languages. Because if I'm going to listen to music, I'm not going to listen to Ted Nugent. So a lot of my favorite rock bands are all on the left. If I'm going to go to a school, I'm going probably to school where the culture is liberal. If I'm going to watch a sitcom or a late-night comedy show, it's going to be liberal. If I'm going to read a good newspaper, it'll be the New York Times. As a result, you learn to speak both languages. And that actually, at least for a number of years, when I started at National Review with William F. Buckley, it made us sharper, because we were used to arguing against people every day. The problem now that's happened is you have ghettoization on the right and you can live entirely in rightworld, so as a result, the quality of argument on the right has diminished, because you're not in the other side all the time. But I do think if you're living in Minnesota or Iowa or Arizona, the coastal elites make themselves aware to you, so you know that language as well, but it's not the reverse. CA: But what does Middle America not get about coastal elites? So the critique is, you are not dealing with the real problems. There's a feeling of a snobbishness, an elitism that is very off-putting. What are they missing? If you could plant one piece of truth from the mindset of someone in this room, for example, what would you say to them? DB: Just how insanely wonderful we are. (Laughter) No, I reject the category. The problem with populism is the same problem with elitism. It's just a prejudice on the basis of probably an over-generalized social class distinction which is too simplistic to apply in reality. Those of us in New York know there are some people in New York who are completely awesome, and some people who are pathetic, and if you live in Iowa, some people are awesome and some people are pathetic. It's not a question of what degree you have or where you happen to live in the country. The distinction is just a crude simplification to arouse political power. GC: But I would encourage people to watch a television news show or read a column that they normally wouldn't. So if you are a Trump supporter, watch the other side for a day, because you need to come out of the bubble if you're ever going to have a conversation. And both sides — so if you're a liberal, then watch something that's very conservative. Read a column that is not something you would normally read, because then you gain perspective of what the other side is thinking, and to me, that's a start of coming together. I worry about the same thing you worry about, these bubbles. I think if you only watch certain entities, you have no idea what the rest of the world is talking about. DB: I think not only watching, being part of an organization that meets at least once a month that puts you in direct contact with people completely unlike yourself is something we all have a responsibility for. I may get this a little wrong, but I think of the top-selling automotive models in this country, I think the top three or four are all pickup trucks. So ask yourself: How many people do I know who own a pickup truck? And it could be very few or zero for a lot of people. And that's sort of a warning sign kind of a problem. Where can I join a club where I'll have a lot in common with a person who drives a pickup truck because we have a common interest in whatever? CA: And so the internet is definitely contributing to this. A question here from Chris Ajemian: "How do you feel structure of communications, especially the prevalence of social media and individualized content, can be used to bring together a political divide, instead of just filing communities into echo chambers?" I mean, it looks like Facebook and Google, since the election, are working hard on this question. They're trying to change the algorithms so that they don't amplify fake news to the extent that it happened last time round. Do you see any other promising signs of ...? GC: ... or amplify one side of the equation. CA: Exactly. GC: I think that was the constant argument from the right, that social media and the internet in general was putting articles towards the top that were not their worldview. I think, again, that fed into the anger. It fed into the anger of: "You're pushing something that's not what I believe." But social media has obviously changed everything, and I think Trump is the example of Twitter changing absolutely everything. And from his point of view, he's reaching the American people without a filter, which he believes the media is. CA: Question from the audience. Destiny: Hi. I'm Destiny. I have a question regarding political correctness, and I'm curious: When did political correctness become synonymous with silencing, versus a way that we speak about other people to show them respect and preserve their dignity? GC: Well, I think the conservative media really pounded this issue for the last 10 years. I think that they really, really spent a lot of time talking about political correctness, and how people should have the ability to say what they think. Another reason why Trump became so popular: because he says what he thinks. It also makes me think about the fact that I do believe there are a lot of people in America who agree with Steve Bannon, but they would never say it publicly, and so voting for Trump gave them the opportunity to agree with it silently. DB: On the issue of immigration, it's a legitimate point of view that we have too many immigrants in the country, that it's economically costly. CA: That we have too many — DB: Immigrants in the country, especially from Britain. (Laughter) GC: I kind of like the British accent, OK? CA: I apologize. America, I am sorry. (Laughter) I'll go now. DB: But it became sort of impermissible to say that, because it was a sign that somehow you must be a bigot of some sort. So the political correctness was not only cracking down on speech that we would all find completely offensive, it was cracking down on some speech that was legitimate, and then it was turning speech and thought into action and treating it as a crime, and people getting fired and people thrown out of schools, and there were speech codes written. Now there are these diversity teams, where if you say something that somebody finds offensive, like, "Smoking is really dangerous," you can say "You're insulting my group," and the team from the administration will come down into your dorm room and put thought police upon you. And so there has been a genuine narrowing of what is permissible to say. And some of it is legitimate. There are certain words that there should be some social sanction against, but some of it was used to enforce a political agenda. CA: So is that a project you would urge on liberals, if you like — progressives — to rethink the ground rules around political correctness and accept a little more uncomfortable language in certain circumstances? Can you see that being solved to an extent that others won't be so offended? DB: I mean, most American universities, especially elite universities, are overwhelmingly on the left, and there's just an ease of temptation to use your overwhelming cultural power to try to enforce some sort of thought that you think is right and correct thought. So, be a little more self-suspicious of, are we doing that? And second, my university, the University of Chicago, sent out this letter saying, we will have no safe spaces. There will be no critique of micro-aggression. If you get your feelings hurt, well, welcome to the world of education. I do think that policy — which is being embraced by a lot of people on the left, by the way — is just a corrective to what's happened. CA: So here's a question from Karen Holloway: How do we foster an American culture that's forward-looking, like Hamilton, that expects and deals with change, rather than wanting to have everything go back to some fictional past? That's an easy question, right? GC: Well, I'm still a believer in the American dream, and I think what we can teach our children is the basics, which is that hard work and believing in yourself in America, you can achieve whatever you want. I was told that every single day. When I got in the real world, I was like, wow, that's maybe not always so true. But I still believe in that. Maybe I'm being too optimistic. So I still look towards the future for that to continue. DB: I think you're being too optimistic. GC: You do? DB: The odds of an American young person exceeding their parents' salary — a generation ago, like 86 percent did it. Now 51 percent do it. There's just been a problem in social mobility in the country. CA: You've written that this entire century has basically been a disaster, that the age of sunny growth is over and we're in deep trouble. DB: Yeah, I mean, we averaged, in real terms, population-adjusted, two or three percent growth for 50 years, and now we've had less than one percent growth. And so there's something seeping out. And so if I'm going to tell people that they should take risks, one of the things we're seeing is a rapid decline in mobility, the number of people who are moving across state lines, and that's especially true among millennials. It's young people that are moving less. So how do we give people the security from which they can take risk? And I'm a big believer in attachment theory of raising children, and attachment theory is based on the motto that all of life is a series of daring adventures from a secure base. Have you parents given you a secure base? And as a society, we do not have a secure base, and we won't get to that "Hamilton," risk-taking, energetic ethos until we can supply a secure base. CA: So I wonder whether there's ground here to create almost like a shared agenda, a bridging conversation, on the one hand recognizing that there is this really deep problem that the system, the economic system that we built, seems to be misfiring right now. Second, that maybe, if you're right that it's not all about immigrants, it's probably more about technology, if you could win that argument, that de-emphasizes what seems to me the single most divisive territory between Trump supporters and others, which is around the role of the other. It's very offensive to people on the left to have the other demonized to the extent that the other seems to be demonized. That feels deeply immoral, and maybe people on the left could agree, as you said, that immigration may have happened too fast, and there is a limit beyond which human societies struggle, but nonetheless this whole problem becomes de-emphasized if automation is the key issue, and then we try to work together on recognizing that it's real, recognizing that the problem probably wasn't properly addressed or seen or heard, and try to figure out how to rebuild communities using, well, using what? That seems to me to become the fertile conversation of the future: How do we rebuild communities in this modern age, with technology doing what it's doing, and reimagine this bright future? GC: That's why I go back to optimism. I'm not being ... it's not like I'm not looking at the facts, where we've come or where we've come from. But for gosh sakes, if we don't look at it from an optimistic point of view — I'm refusing to do that just yet. I'm not raising my 12- and 13-year-old to say, "Look, the world is dim." CA; We're going to have one more question from the room here. Questioner: Hi. Hello. Sorry. You both mentioned the infrastructure plan and Russia and some other things that wouldn't be traditional Republican priorities. What do you think, or when, will Republicans be motivated to take a stand against Trumpism? GC: After last night, not for a while. He changed a lot last night, I believe. DB: His popularity among Republicans — he's got 85 percent approval, which is higher than Reagan had at this time, and that's because society has just gotten more polarized. So people follow the party much more than they used to. So if you're waiting for Paul Ryan and the Republicans in Congress to flake away, it's going to take a little while. GC: But also because they're all concerned about reelection, and Trump has so much power with getting people either for you or against you, and so, they're vacillating every day, probably: "Well, should I go against or should I not?" But last night, where he finally sounded presidential, I think most Republicans are breathing a sigh of relief today. DB: The half-life of that is short. GC: Right — I was just going to say, until Twitter happens again. CA: OK, I want to give each of you the chance to imagine you're speaking to — I don't know — the people online who are watching this, who may be Trump supporters, who may be on the left, somewhere in the middle. How would you advise them to bridge or to relate to other people? Can you share any final wisdom on this? Or if you think that they shouldn't, tell them that as well. GC: I would just start by saying that I really think any change and coming together starts from the top, just like any other organization. And I would love if, somehow, Trump supporters or people on the left could encourage their leaders to show that compassion from the top, because imagine the change that we could have if Donald Trump tweeted out today, to all of his supporters, "Let's not be vile anymore to each other. Let's have more understanding. As a leader, I'm going to be more inclusive to all of the people of America." To me, it starts at the top. Is he going to do that? I have no idea. But I think that everything starts from the top, and the power that he has in encouraging his supporters to have an understanding of where people are coming from on the other side. CA: David. DB: Yeah, I guess I would say I don't think we can teach each other to be civil, and give us sermons on civility. That's not going to do it. It's substance and how we act, and the nice thing about Donald Trump is he smashed our categories. All the categories that we thought we were thinking in, they're obsolete. They were great for the 20th century. They're not good for today. He's got an agenda which is about closing borders and closing trade. I just don't think it's going to work. I think if we want to rebuild communities, recreate jobs, we need a different set of agenda that smashes through all our current divisions and our current categories. For me, that agenda is Reaganism on macroeconomic policy, Sweden on welfare policy and cuts across right and left. I think we have to have a dynamic economy that creates growth. That's the Reagan on economic policy. But people have to have that secure base. There have to be nurse-family partnerships; there has to be universal preschool; there have to be charter schools; there have to be college programs with wraparound programs for parents and communities. We need to help heal the crisis of social solidarity in this country and help heal families, and government just has to get a lot more involved in the way liberals like to rebuild communities. At the other hand, we have to have an economy that's free and open the way conservatives used to like. And so getting the substance right is how you smash through the partisan identities, because the substance is what ultimately shapes our polarization. CA: David and Gretchen, thank you so much for an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you. That was really, really interesting. (Applause) Hey, let's keep the conversation going. We're continuing to try and figure out whether we can add something here, so keep the conversation going on Facebook. Give us your thoughts from whatever part of the political spectrum you're on, and actually, wherever in the world you are. This is not just about America. It's about the world, too. But we're not going to end today without music, because if we put music in every political conversation, the world would be completely different, frankly. It just would. (Applause) Up in Harlem, this extraordinary woman, Vy Higginsen, who's actually right here — let's get a shot of her. (Applause) She created this program that brings teens together, teaches them the joy and the impact of gospel music, and hundreds of teens have gone through this program. It's transformative for them. The music they made, as you already heard, is extraordinary, and I can't think of a better way of ending this TED Dialogue than welcoming Vy Higginsen's Gospel Choir from Harlem. Thank you. (Applause) (Singing) Choir: O beautiful for spacious skies For amber waves of grain For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain America! America! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea From sea to shining sea (Applause)
Conventional wisdom depicts moral struggle as an internal conflict between a higher moral self and an untamed dark side. This picture pervades popular imagination: the angel and the devil on either shoulder, the ‘two wolf’ parable, the Ego and the Id, the ‘true self’ and the ‘false self’. It resonates with religious traditions that place us between angels and animals in a Great Chain of Being, leaving us torn between higher and lower, spirit and body, good and evil, the demands of conscience and the lure of sin. This view also calls to mind a philosophical tradition from Plato to Immanuel Kant that often presents life’s major moral struggles as a kind of combat between the requirements of duty and the dangers of desire. The self is fragmented and must struggle for wholeness by casting out or silencing its evil components, refusing to give immoral intentions a foothold in thought and deed. A good deal of moral theory, therefore, tends to assume that there’s a morally right answer about what one ought to do in any given circumstance. Any difficulty in doing the right thing results from (evil, selfish) resistance, not from the fact that one cannot do all the good or valuable things that one is called upon to do. However, this familiar view ignores the fact that, in many cases, the problem is not how best to override or silence one’s dark side, but how to cope with having too many good or morally neutral demands on your limited time, energy or resources. In other words, the key issue in many cases is not whether to be moral at all – but rather how best to distribute your moral resources in conditions of scarcity and conflict. Coping well with this latter kind of moral challenge requires very different ways of thinking about moral agency and how to lead good lives. There are (at least) three different classes of goods that regularly give rise to incommensurable but competing legitimate moral claims, each revealed through a different practical stance that we adopt towards the world as we try to figure out what to do and who to be. On this picture, each agent is indeed fragmented, but this fragmentation is not best understood as an internal conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ selves. Instead, moral conflict should be understood in terms of competing dimensions of the good – not all of which can be accommodated in any given moment. What are these three basic normative domains or classes of value? It can be helpful to think of these in terms of the traditional literary distinction between the first-, second- and third-person perspectives. A novel written from the first-person perspective provides access to the protagonist’s struggles from the inside; the reader says ‘I’ along with her. In the second-person perspective, the focus is on the other person: the ‘you’ takes centre stage. When written from the third-person perspective, every character’s struggles are viewed from the outside; each is referred to as ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘it’ in descriptions of their movements in the world of the novel. Though some characters might be more important than others, typically none is singled out as providing the primary lens through which the world finds its meaning. These perspectives are not just useful literary devices. They are core practical perspectives that we adopt toward the world and our place in it. As we pursue our projects and pleasures, interact with others, and share public institutions and meanings, we are constantly shifting back and forth among these three practical perspectives, each bringing different elements of a situation to salience and highlighting different features of the world and our place in it as good or bad. From the first-person stance, you navigate the world as an agent trying to realise your projects and satisfy your desires. From the second-person perspective, you understand yourself and the world through the lens of other people, who are a locus of projects and preferences of their own; projects and preferences that make legitimate demands on your time and attention. From the third-person stance, you understand yourself as one among many, called to fit yourself into the shared standards and rules governing a world made up of a multitude of creatures like you. These different perspectives reveal different features of the same object or situation. Take the example of your own body. When weeding the garden or washing the dishes you are – despite the physical nature of the work – largely ‘unaware’ of your body except insofar as it is the vehicle of your will. Indeed, what’s valuable and salient about the body from this first-person perspective is precisely its ability to disappear into the task. If you’re hampered by a migraine or an arthritic shoulder, the body’s status as vehicle of your agency is compromised, and you’re forced to think of it instead as a kind of recalcitrant object that needs to be managed. If it’s a perfect manifestation of your will, it’s no longer ‘your body’; it is, rather, simply you. From the second-person perspective, your body appears as an object of experience for the other person. Think of how differently you experience your own body when you’re alone, as opposed to when someone suddenly enters the room. From the second-person perspective, one’s own body might seem awkward, desirable, average, ineffectual and so forth, depending on who the other person is. Now imagine that same body of yours being examined by a doctor. Then your body shows up for you as something quite different from a seamless expression of agency or the manifestation of self before another individual. Your attention shifts to a third-person perspective such that your body is revealed as a physical object subjected to the rules and categories of other physical objects. Different features become important. During a medical examination, you experience your own body as an instance of a general physical type, capable of being helped or hindered by generic procedures and processes developed for managing objects of that kind. You must answer for who you are – if not to others, then to yourself This kind of third-person practical perspective moves to the background when another perspective is setting the terms for what counts as particularly relevant or meaningful in a given situation. The point is to see how these different perspectives give us access to different forms of meaning, value and reasons – though we never occupy one stance in total isolation from the others. While occupying one perspective, we don’t simply forget the others, but are aware of and answerable to the claims that they make in an implicit way. Each perspective is constantly providing important information about what matters and what’s best, and we’re answerable to all three at once, even when only one is setting the agenda for how best to allocate our limited time, care and attention in a given situation. The fact that there’s a plurality of these normative perspectives means that there’s more than one way of understanding what’s best. Best for whom? For me? For you? For the many who share the world with us and the institutions that enable this sharing? No single perspective can fully encompass the others. Each shows us a different facet of the world’s irreducibly complex meaningfulness and our place in it. Each gives us access to different ways of understanding what’s important, valuable or good. Our condition of normative pluralism means that we’re supplied with different resources for answering the basic questions of agency: what should I do? What are the better or worse options in this situation? Who am I trying to be? To whom am I answerable? This moral complexity makes living a good life challenging because competing goods from these different normative categories can’t be compared on a single metric. In most cases, there is no simple answer about what to do. To negotiate life’s demands, we constantly move in and out of each perspective against a background sense that we’re answerable to the different criteria of meaning and value constitutive of each of the three perspectives. This emphasis on ‘answerability’ is a core feature of existentialist accounts of personhood. We experience ourselves as being ‘at stake’ in our choices, aware of the fact that who we are is up to us, and that we care about getting it right. Though we regularly try to cover up and forget this fact by means of bad faith, mindless conformity and self-deception, to be human is to be haunted by the anxiety that comes with an awareness of our freedom and the existential responsibility it entails. Ultimately, you must answer for who you are – if not to others, then to yourself. Our basic status as normatively responsive beings – that is, as beings with a capacity to be oriented towards distinctions of better and worse – depends on this sense of being responsible for who you are. The awareness of being entrusted with an existence for which you alone are answerable means that we’re always on the lookout for guidance in how to make choices well. The three different normative domains revealed via the first-, second- and third-person perspectives provide tools for answering the fundamental existential questions that underwrite every choice. Each offers a different basic value framework through which the world makes demands on us about what it’s best to do. We are indeed fragmented selves, but what divides us is not, for the most part, a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ intentions. Rather, it’s a tension between different practical frameworks for assessing better and worse options, each anchored in a different aspect of the good. According to this existentialist picture, you can’t be entirely unmoved by whatever strikes you as better or best in any situation. Why? Because to be utterly indifferent to the considerations that count in favour of choosing one way rather than another is to forfeit one’s agency – to adopt the posture of a thing determined solely by causal forces, rather than that of an agent responsive to reasons. But even this forfeit is a manifestation of agency, albeit one that seeks to conceal this fact from itself. Though it’s not always clear how best to respond to specific normative claims as they arise across different practical perspectives in particular situations – and one might be incompetent or cowardly in facing up to them – we can’t escape the sheer fact that we’re answerable to such claims. We cannot help but care about the difference between better and worse lives, and that means we cannot help but care about responding well to the claims of each of the three practical perspectives. In contrast, a good deal of moral theory prioritises one of these practical perspectives and downplays the moral relevance of the others by ruling them out as providing genuine access to moral reasons. This has the effect of allowing any responsiveness to other classes of normative claims to be categorised as irrational or evil. For example, classical utilitarianism enjoins us to think of everyone – ourselves included – as an equal unit in the moral calculus that aims to maximise the satisfaction of legitimate desires and preferences. This is a third-person way of approaching the question of what it’s best to do, since each of us is to be treated as an equal moral unit, subjected to the same categories and assessments as any other. Similarly, Kantian deontology prioritises the third-person universality of a reason understood to be identically present in all agents. In each case, the good life is defined in terms of your ability to submit yourself to universally shared moral categories – to think of yourself in third-person moral terms. There is something right about this approach. It has the compelling result of putting pressure on us to do more for strangers in distress than we tend to do because we’re so often caught up in our own troubles, or those of loved ones. But it also gives rise to objections that ultimately derive from a recognition of the equal value and importance of the first- and second-person perspectives in our moral lives. For example, critics of Kantian deontology point out that respect for a universal reason that manifests in every other human is hardly the same thing as loving concern for this particular person. Critics of utilitarianism, meanwhile, have pointed out that maximising ‘total expected utility’ – ie, getting as large a ‘quantity’ of good results as possible – might require us to, say, harvest someone’s organs when she arrives for a routine check-up at the doctor’s office, since five of her healthy organs could save the lives of five critically ill people. Allowing her to keep her organs will save only a measly one. Though utilitarians and deontologists have come up with many ingenious responses to such objections, these worries follow naturally from a third-person practical perspective, in which each person is viewed as an interchangeable and largely anonymous unit of general rationality or calculable outcomes for the world at large. An adequate account of the good life requires that all three classes of good are accommodated But if we think of what matters from the first-person perspective – namely, the individual’s power to govern her own life and express her own unique will – then this kind of approach strikes us as monstrous. Indeed, the approach to moral agency dear to economists and libertarians – rational egoism – swings far in the other direction, insisting that the individual’s power to govern her own life and express her own will is the only thing that is truly valuable, the only thing that can show up as a genuine reason to do anything. According to accounts of this kind – which prioritise the first-person perspective to the exclusion of the others – institutions or persons are immoral insofar as they thwart any individual’s efforts to satisfy her own preferences. All ostensible practical reasons must be understood in terms of the individual’s free pursuit of her preferences if they’re to count as reasons at all. Again, something about this seems right. Each agent is indeed legitimately claimed by a desire for autonomy and individual success, a basic yearning to satisfy one’s preferences and realise one’s projects. But suggesting that this is the only or the primary source of value – the only legitimate way to answer the question ‘What is best?’ – leads to highly counterintuitive conclusions about the nature of the good life. The main objection is that it completely elides the deeply social nature of good human lives, reducing others to a mere means of satisfying one’s preferences. In contrast, the truth revealed to us from the second-person perspective is that we treasure others and regularly seek to enable them in their projects and preferences, even at great personal cost. From the second-person perspective, the agent experiences herself as claimed by the value of another person, not as a mere representative of a universal moral category, nor as a useful tool for her own pursuits. The other person is instead experienced as intrinsically valuable. Hence the second-person perspective reveals that even actions that don’t promote one’s own interests can count as reasons. But the legitimacy of the other two normative domains – the goods of shared world-building and self-expressive autonomy – means that they cannot simply be subordinated to the altruism of the second-person perspective. An adequate account of the good life requires that all three classes of good are accommodated. Though the subordination of the self or the shared political domain to acts of extreme self-sacrifice or charity is a compelling moral ideal advocated by many of the world’s religions, it too distorts the moral picture of what counts as a good human life. Despite the best efforts of moral theorists to simplify the moral terrain by constraining us to a single perspective on the good – a single source of normative claims to which we’re answerable – doing so invariably results in a picture of human life that neglects some of the sources of value that make a good life good. Each of these normative perspectives offers us a set of distinct reasons that cannot be reduced to or translated into the others without erasing some essential feature of our moral lives. This means that life confronts us with a fundamental and irresolvable tension. We are tasked with negotiating competing legitimate normative claims – a plurality of goods – with no recourse to an ultimate metric or higher perspective through which to eliminate conflict in answering the basic existential questions to which we’re condemned: who should I be? What should I do? To whom am I beholden? This shouldn’t prompt us to embrace nihilism, but to recognise the only form that a good life can take for normatively fragmented creatures like ourselves. Leading a good human life – what is sometimes called flourishing – requires that we continuously negotiate these three competing ways of encountering goodness. Flourishing demands achieving a fragile and shifting balance between the different normative terrains. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these domains (self-fulfilment, good relationships, and responsiveness to the demands of a shared world) but achieved in such a way that success in one domain doesn’t unduly compromise success in another. Well okay, you might be thinking, but how do we know what to do in any particular circumstance? The approach outlined here – which emphasises the irresolvable messiness and conflict at the foundation of our moral lives – seems to have the drawback of not offering sufficient guidance for actually figuring out what one ought to do, at least compared with the resources provided by other moral theories. But those other approaches succeed in offering guidance by ignoring the moral complexity of being in the grip of an irreducible plurality of goods. This is not to oversimplify these positions, of course. Kantian deontology prioritises the third-person universality of reason, but we can see that it attempts to accommodate the other normative perspectives through the notions of respect for others (the second-person dimension) and respect for self (the first-person dimension). It essentially enjoins us to respect ourselves, respect others, and build a world in which all can be respected. As such, it maps well on to the tripartite moral terrain that I’ve specified above, but it tends to ignore the complexity that results, assuming that all three normative perspectives will subject you to the exact same moral demands. Everyday moral deliberation involves shifting constantly from one perspective to the other Similarly, utilitarianism prioritises the third-person norm of universal utility, but it attempts to accommodate the other perspectives through the fact that one’s own preferences don’t automatically trump the other person’s (the second-person dimension) and the fact that the nature of its guiding norm – satisfaction – includes a fundamental reference to the first-personal domain. But in both cases the intention – an intention that’s understood as realisable – is to provide a decision procedure that stipulates adopting a neutral third-person stance that purportedly captures the normative force of the other two normative domains without remainder. It’s this view that must be questioned. What engagement with these other theories helps us to recognise is how everyday moral deliberation involves shifting constantly from one perspective to the other in an effort to weigh them against each other, despite their fundamental incommensurability. Imagine that you’re trying to decide whether to quit your job to pursue a less stressful career. The lower pay will make things harder on your family, and you won’t be able to help others as much in the new job. Is it self-indulgent to pursue the easier option when you have the skills to help others, and doing so supports your family? But don’t you deserve a break, too? And the stress is taking a toll on your health and mood, which also affects your family. With the extra time and energy the change affords, you could help out in the community more. What should you do? These perspective shifts demonstrate that it will almost always be impossible to assess the moral quality of specific acts except against the background of the general tenor of one’s life. In other words, when assessing moral success or failure, the primary target should be lives, not acts. In most cases, a specific act is meaningful only in terms of its place in one’s life as a whole; in terms of the role it plays in the general landscape of competing demands from self, other and world. Are you the kind of person who regularly helps and respects others on both an individual and an institutional level? If yes, then you’re entitled to make some room for your own comfort or pleasure. But if you’re always submitting to the siren call of self-indulgence, then you should think about reallocating your limited resources so that your life better reflects the value of the other two classes of good. Responding well to the criteria of excellence constitutive of each normative domain – being good to ourselves, to others, and to the world – demands negotiation work such that these three classes of competing goods can be accommodated in a coherent way. Hence flourishing requires us to organise our priorities – not simply in the moment, but over the course of our projects, relationships and identities. Of course, there will be certain lowest common denominators in each normative domain. No amount of good behaviour will ever entitle you to torture others – at least, not if you’re to be counted a good person and your life a good life. But these absolute constraints are few, and few of us find them particularly tempting, at least in their obvious forms. They are therefore incapable of offering sufficient practical guidance when it comes to the choices that most people make in their everyday lives. The emphasis on lives, not acts, is a distinctive feature of the virtue-ethical approach in moral theory, according to which our focus should be on a person’s character and life context, not primarily on isolated choices or events. My view, which combines existentialism with virtue ethics, endorses this approach, along with another core feature of virtue ethics: the central place of role models in our moral reasoning. When we feel torn between competing legitimate moral demands both within a normative domain (eg, when we’re claimed by the competing needs of two loved ones) or across domains (eg, when the needs of a loved one compete with the demands of institutional justice), we must think about how to allocate priorities in our lives as a whole, and we regularly take inspiration from the models of excellent lives provided by our moral exemplars. What you choose to do should be guided by your understanding of how those actions shape a life. But understanding how specific actions create a certain kind of life or character is information that we learn mainly by looking to the lives and characters of others. How to find good role models and how to break free of bad ones are of course important questions to address, but those challenges shouldn’t interfere with recognising moral exemplars as a key source of guidance as we navigate this complex moral terrain. One of the ways in which we learn from others how to succeed at the accommodation and negotiation work made necessary by normative pluralism is in terms of the virtues. The virtues are problem-solving stances through which we address obstacles to human flourishing that are built into the human condition. These obstacles to flourishing include mortality and temporal finitude, material scarcity, and temptations posed by desire for bodily pleasure and aversion to pain. The virtues are character traits – tendencies of seeing, feeling and doing – that enable a good person to respond well to all three normative domains even in the face of these obstacles. For example, patience helps us continue to respond well to self, other, and shared world, despite the temporal limitations that make doing so difficult. By habituating ourselves into these exemplary forms of normative responsiveness, we can better accommodate the different ways that the good reveals itself in our lives. Together with certain absolute prohibitions on a limited set of extreme violations of the good, and moral exemplars who orient us in our striving, the virtues can help us cope with deep structural challenges to flourishing. The popular ‘combat’ view of morality, wherein agents are constantly torn between immoral desires and the demands of duty, gets much of its plausibility from our normatively plural predicament, which requires us to negotiate conflicts and tensions arising from competing normative resources provided by self, other, and shared world. We are indeed conflicted – torn between comparably legitimate, substantively moral demands – but this is often simply a feature of the messy moral landscape to which we’re condemned, not a sign of intrinsic moral corruption. What might count as a ‘bad intention’ on the combat model is often better understood as the manifestation of another legitimate claim to goodness, one that’s at odds with a value that we ultimately take to have a greater claim to recognition in this context or at this point in our lives. Hence doing what’s right isn’t simply or primarily a matter of silencing an evil desire – though it might be strategically useful to think of goods we can’t realise in this way – but rather a matter of figuring out what’s best now in the context of a well-lived life considered as a whole. And there’s no simple algorithm for knowing how to exercise this moral discernment as we struggle to do justice to all of the sources of value to which we find ourselves answerable. Am I happy? Am I generous? Am I contributing to the world? The moral struggle we face is finding a way to honestly and accurately answer ‘Yes’ to all three of these questions at once, over the course of a life that presents us with many obstacles to doing so. To read more on ethical living, visit Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychological knowhow, philosophical understanding and artistic insight.
It's possible, but I wouldn't bet on it. You know I would say to Sensenbrenner, you and your fellow House members could go back to your safe District and say you defeated an amnesty bill. And I suspect in your safe District you will be treated as a hero. On the other hand, in the country at large, for a problem that really does plague the country, that is uppermost on voters' minds, do you really want to go back to the election and say, we did nothing? And that's really the alternative and that pressure, to not do nothing, is going to move the House. Whether it moves them to actually reach an agreement with the Senate, I kind of doubt. But it's possible.
All right. Here's an email, this from a listener who asked to remain anonymous. This is my story, or should I say my son's story. Ohio does not have an age-out. My son is 22 years old and still receives nursing care provided by the waiver program. It allows me to work 40 hours per week. Without that, I don't know what I would do. All of his other care is, as you said, provided free by me. But let me say that caring for him has been the most rewarding time of my life. I don't know what I would do without him in my life.
Which is, of course, a big claim. But whether this particular product can deliver on it or not, the two companies do share a distinction. Like Google, TiVo not only gave the world a new technology, it also gave it a new verb - as in, did you catch "Idol" last night? No, I TiVo-ed it. But unlike Googling, the vast majority of TiVoing doesn't occur while using an actual TiVo, and that's a problem for the company. James McQuivey is an analyst at Forrester Research. He says there are about 1.5 million TiVo-brand digital video recorders in American living rooms right now.
First of all, I'd like to apologize to anyone in the room who considers themselves to be architecturally sensitive. What you're about to see may upset you. So, the number one question I get in my inbox all the time is, so McMansion hell, what the hell is McMansion? So, it's pretty easy. I've narrowed it down to a couple of factors. First of all, they are oversized. That means there's over 3,000 square feet which is 500 feet more than the highest national housing average. So, AKA that space, as you can see here probably 26 children. (Laughter) And the other thing is, if you look at this house, which is quite lovely, (Laughter) I'm sorry. This house probably has three media rooms, seven bathrooms with a garden tub, and a chandelier and whatever, but it doesn't have a front porch and I cannot find the front door. (Laughter) Also there's no lawn So, that leads to my second point, they are poorly designed. So, that means there's no respect for form or scale or other things that people in the architecture would call 'the basic rules of architecture.' So, as you can see here, this house looks like it was designed by someone who maybe saw a house once in their life, but either had some sort of visual issues or was wearing kaleidoscope glasses that you get during Halloween. Even worse these poorly designed houses are cheaply constructed. So, I will get to that in a second. But, I'd like to point out that this is an engineering marvel. This is a house that is a wood frame covered in different types of foam. (Laughter) So, and finally, they are disrespectful. (Laughter) So, you have to feel really bad for the poor folks in these little houses who on longer have any natural light in their homes. It is a dark time for them as it is for all of us. So, basically they are fundamentally bad architecture. Now, even though I'm dressed impeccably well, I'm not the gatekeeper of what is and is not good aesthetic architecture. But, we've been talking about these things in architectural history for thousands of years starting with Vitruvius, the great-great-great -granddaddy of architecture. Sorry art history majors, this is going to be boring. So, Vitruvius said that architecture should be three things, right? It should be durable, it should be useful or functional, and it should be beautiful. And McMansions are well, you know, none of these things. So, let's start with durable. So, through most of human history houses were built to last generations, that means that you were born in the house, had kids in your house, died in your house, and then your kids had kids in your house and died in your house. AKA, they were permanent. That changed in the 1980s with access to cheaper construction methods and materials and also in deregulation economies, etc, causing a huge housing bubble, right? That we all know of. And basically these houses weren't built to last 15 years, because they were built to have the most amount of space for the lowest price, and people didn't really care about how long they'd last anyway because they were going to live there for maybe six years, maybe less because they were going to flip that house and make, like, a million dollars. A million dollars. (Laughter) And they would be on the next house before you ever knew it, so it was not their problem anymore, but we all know how that ended. So that brings me to another part of durability- they are not aesthetically durable. That means that certain house designs like you know, you have the box, and the box has a roof and the roof looks like this, and this is the house that every child draws, this is your idea of the house. These houses, of course, as you can see in this case, this is a house that is got water damage, and the balconies don't lay anywhere, you can actually go out open those doors, you will fall into your yard. (Laughter) These were just trends. People saw stuff like this on TV and said, "I want that on my house." And so they're not really aesthetically durable because they were built on these trends, and when the trends ran out, they would be onto the third house or the fourth house because they were flipping and making millions of dollars. So, according to Bloomberg now, these houses aren't selling well. And houses that are smaller, you know, like normal people houses, built for normal people not giant cars to live in, are appreciating at a much higher and faster rate. And so we are gonna move on to useful. What does it mean for house to be useful? So there are primary uses for a house. One is to keep us, you know, out of the elements. Like you saw in the last example, it's not doing a good job of that with the water damage in the missing deck. Oh, speaking of the elements, imaging trying to heat and cool that house. So you can't even stay warm or cool without spending millions of dollars. (Laughter) But most of all, a house is suppose to be our home. It's a place for our sanctuary, community, and being one with our families. And in a space that is designed where everyone has their own room, and their own living room, and their own dining room, and their own pool table? You don't have to interact with any members of your family. So trust me I would have loved that in the seventh grade. But I think most of us are the well-adjusted people that we are, because we've had to fight with our siblings in our parents, and all these things that come from living in a smaller-knit space. And when you rob that sense of community from our homes, what real purpose do they have? But McMansions ignore both of these purposes to focus on a new purpose, and that purpose was the house is an asset, the house was now becoming through series of, you know, deregulatory economic policies, etc, a liquid asset, it was money, it was no longer a place to live, and it was seperated from the sense of place and space that we know and consider our homes, and so beautiful. McMansions don't follow the rules of traditional architecture, but really love to use the icons and the symbols, and shapes of the traditional architecture like columns in windows styles, and the box with the roof, though the roof is three times as big as the box. And in this case, you can see none of the windows actually match. Some have muntains which is the bits that separate the panes of glass, and some don't, and most of all it looks like it is a screaming animal. (Laughter) So, there's no regard for basic matching, scale, you know, the rules of architecture, because they were designed mostly from the inside out, and mommy really needed her cathedral ceilings in the bathroom. You know sometimes that meant you had a roof on that looked like this. Okay what's the point, right? Why do I even care about McMansions if they are so horrible, and why do I write about them? Well, it's about education. 60 percent of people according to the U.S. census bureau live in the suburbs, and not all of us have access to the fabric of our cities that have buildings from different eras, and all their beautiful details, all interwoven into an urban fabric. Most of us have to live with, you know, McMansions. And so it's about teaching with what you have, and also they're politically charged. They're sort of the poster child of the recession, and they are attached to concepts like urbanism and sustainability and other things that make up a better world. You might be still asking, "Okay, well, why not talk about you know good architecture?" Well why so negative? I started writing about architecture in high school to defend buildings like this. This is the Goshen Government Centre by Paul Rudolph, in Goshen, New York which is undergoing, what I like to call 'a murder.' (Laughter). I discovered, in the fight for preservation of late modernist and post-modernist architecture which is the part that I like, if you were on the side of "I don't like this," you have the advantage. People say, "Oh, I like this," and like, okay, but if you say, "I don't like this," then like why? And if you don't know why you're pretty much a jerk - but that gets people talking and starts a disscusion and so in McMansion hell I saw this opportunity to explore, because a lof people hate McMansions but they have no idea why. They're like, "I hate that, it's big and it's ugly!", but they don't know what is so ugly about it or why it seems so big, and that's sort of where I come in, and it brings me to my final point. It's about the greater purpose. So my professor at Peabody where I study acoustics has this saying that says, "The first step to good design is avoiding the bad, then you can design the good, and the first step to avoiding the bad is recognizing the bad." It's about looking at the world through a critical eye, and the best part about being snarky is that you are automatically critical. And so people can say, avoiding the bad, right? You don't want a house thet looks like the ginormous thing that's on the screen here. This is literally the McMansion, it is a house that someone took to their little mouth and blew up into a balloon. It's like they took the nice house with the cable and (Puffs) Now if you know I don't like that, and here's why I don't like that then I can start thinking about encouraging other people and educating them about why I don't like that and they don't like that. And maybe through this sort of education and design, getting people who don't care about design to talk about design is another really huge step in perpetuating better design. And so through using America's ugliest and most hated houses, I mean, I'm sorry. We can... (Laughter) In talking about them in a way that introduces humor so it's not, "I'm shoving my good design down your throat, dang you!" We can encourage people through discussion, through education, through empowerment, to be a greater force for change, and a change towards a more beautiful, a more sustainable, a more inclusive, and you know, a better-looking world. (Laughter) Or at least, prevent them from building more McMansions. Thank you! (Applause)
Well, I think he's got to tell us, you know, what happens after this. I don't think you have an action and it's just a once and forever action. Where does he think this will lead us? You know, what kind of credibility does he think is on the line? This is, by the way, somewhat of a new redline. And the Iraqis used poisoned gas against the Iranians in the '80s. That wasn't a redline for America. They used it against their own people with the Kurds. That wasn't a redline. To some degree, the president drew this, I think, without thinking through perhaps what the consequences might be if he arrived to cash that check, so to speak. And I think that's where we're at.

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