Opinion
Where's the 'Cosmos' of ideas? We turned to Michael Bérubé for an answer
The new 'Cosmos' has some of the best celestial animation ever broadcast -- that scene last week with the 'ship of the imagination' struggling as it fell into the 'event horizon' of a black hole was on a par with the best stuff you see at the movie theater.
But even with the slick graphics and animated sequences, what makes 'Cosmos' work is the same thing that made it work the last time: charismatic scientists talking to us as if our interest in the universe mattered.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, just like Carl Sagan before him, really seems to care that we get interested in the history of the cosmos. He wants us to understand how we know what we know, and why it matters. That's why this show works so damn well.
And last week, after it was obvious that deGrasse Tyson has become the new science superstar with a mission to infect us with curiosity about the world, we couldn't help wondering why the same thing couldn't happen in the world of ideas.
It turned out an old friend, Adam Weinstein at Gawker, had the same thought, and he asked it after last week's show: Where's the Neil deGrasse Tyson of the humanities? We thought it was such a good question, we asked Penn State professor Michael Bérubé to wrestle with it. He's a favorite of ours here at Raw Story, and , we think you'll see why.
Recap: 'Game of Thrones,' Season Four, Episode One: "Two Swords"
The season premier of Game of Thrones begins, symbolically, where the last season ended -- with the destruction of all things related to House Stark. First, the sword that took Ned Stark's head -- which just so happened to be his own -- is melted down and re-forged into the "Two Swords" of the title, one of which is destined for Tywin Lannister's son Jaime, the other his grandson, Joffrey.
Just in case viewers missed the symbolism, director and series producer D.B. Weiss has Tywin toss a wolf pelt onto the fire that heated the coals that melted the swords.
The Starks have gone the way of the Baratheons, as Weiss makes obvious when he recapitulates a table-setting scene from the Season One episode, "You Win or You Die." In that scene, the audience is introduced to Tywin Lannister, who is "cleaning" the carcass of a stag and complaining that his son, Jaime, has been a poor example of Lannister for not having taken care of Robert Baratheon in a more timely, thorough fashion. Being a Lannister is a gift of birth that, Tywin believes, Jaime is squandering.
Three seasons later, Tywin hasn't changed his mind. This time the gift is literal -- one of the valyrian swords forged before the opening credits -- but the complaint is still the same, since the right-handed, right-handless Jaime can't use it. After Jaime tells his father that he will not leave the King's Guard, Tywin allows him to keep the sword but only, it seems, because he believes it will serve as a perpetual reminder of the bloodline he's squandering.
Speaking of sons who disappoint the Lannister patriarch, Weiss then cuts to a scene of the youngest, Tyrion, waiting outside King's Landing for the arrival of a Dornish prince for King Joffrey's wedding. When the Dornish entourage arrives, he's informed that not only will the wrong Dornish prince be attending the wedding, but that Prince Oberyn arrived before dawn and had already taken up residence in Littlefinger's whorehouse.
In the bordello, it quickly becomes apparent that there's something very different about the Dornish -- and it's not just that they're all, apparently, bisexual. After he's chosen the women and men he wants to bed, Oberyn hears someone singing "The Rains of Castamere" off-screen. A look comes across his face, and it's a familiar one, if one that never augurs well.
[NOTE TO READERS: Should you ever hear the opening bars of the official anthem of House Lannister, do yourself a favor and just start running.]
After a brief exchange, the Lannister lackey stares Oberyn down and says, "Gods, look at this one" in much the same way a GOP congressional candidate talks about "those people."
"Why are you wasting a woman like this on a Dornishman," the Lannister flunky asks. "Why not just bring him a shaved goat and a bottle of olive oil?" Oberyn takes unkindly to the unsubtle implication, gathers himself for a moment, then pins the man's hand to the table with a short sword just as "the King's own 'Uncle Imp'" enters the room.
Oberyn and Tyrion exit Littlefinger's establishment to rehearse the long, terrible history their families share. Tyrion seems genuinely interested in currying favor with the Dornish prince, but Oberyn is having none of it. He reminds Tyrion that "Gregor Clegane, 'the Mountain,' raped [his sister] and split her in half with his great sword."
"I wasn't there," a pitying, pitiful looking Tyrion replies.
"But if the Mountain killed my sister, your father gave the order," Oberyn replies. "Tell your father I'm here, and tell him that the Lannisters aren't the only ones who pay their debts."
That ominous bit of foreshadowing out of the way, the scene shifts to Essos, where Dany is enjoying a pleasant picnic with her increasingly large dragons:
That tender moment ends quickly enough, as a dragon-fight over a carcass of some kind ensues. After Jorah Mormont reminds her, yet again, that dragons are dangerous, can't be tamed, so don't even try -- after he does that again, she walks off to find Daario Naharis, who's engaged in a symbolic-of-nothing sword-holding contest with Grey Worm, the leader of her army of Unsullied. She informs them both that neither will be riding alongside her when the army marches, because she'd rather be accompanied by men a little more secure in their masculinity.
Then begin the trials of poor Tyrion in earnest. First, he must listen to his wife, Sansa Stark, recount the many horrible things his father ordered done to her mother and brother. Then, he must meet up with her current handmaiden -- his former paramour, Shae -- and disappoint her by adamantly refusing to engage with her sexually.
Tyrion, clearly, is in a mood.
So, too, is his brother Jaime, who is being fitted for a gold-plated hand that's as pretty as his valyrian sword and just as useful. While being fitted, his sister-lover Cersei drinks circles around him while recounting all the many ways in which he's disappointed her.
"You come back after all this time with no apologies and one hand and expect everything to be the same?" she asks.
"What do you want me to apologize for?"
"For leaving me," the ingrate replies.
"You think I wanted to be taken prisoner?" he asks.
"Don't know what you wanted, you weren't here," she replies.
The pair prattle on, bewilderment bashing against the sharp rocks of ingratitude, until the scene mercifully shifts just south of the Wall, where a powerful new threat to Westeros lumbers across the screen. Who are they? Why are they so big? What's with the crow-eating cannibalism?
The crows of the Night's Watch would probably like to know, but unfortunately, they're too busy putting Jon Snow on show-trial for obeying direct orders. Standing before a tribunal comprised of fellow members of the Night's Watch, Snow tries to communicate the magnitude of this new threat.
"While we sit here," he says, "debating which rules I broke, Mance Rayder marches on the Wall with an army of 100,000." Fresh from being stripped of his lands, titles and honor by Tyrion, Janos Slynt takes the lead in this mock trial after Snow starts belittling him.
"Have you ever been beyond the Wall, sir?" Jon asks.
"I commanded the City Watch of King's Landing, boy," Slynt responds.
"And now you're here. You must not have been very good at your job," Jon says, clearly trying to make a good impression on the once-impressive Slynt.
"How dare you?" Slynt replies, before asking his fellow judges why they ought to listen to "the bastard."
"Because he's telling the truth," another of the judges, Aemon, replies.
"And you always know when a man is telling a lie? How did you acquire this power?" Alliser Thorne asks.
"Because I grew up in King's Landing," Aemon says, dropping the mic as he shuffles away.
And shuffling is the cause of the moment, because just as Aemon shuffles off-screen, Brienne of Tarth shuffles on, interrupting Margaery and Olenna Tyrell's conspiratorial brunch in King's Landing. "You are singular," Olenna tells the lumbering woman with the hanging head who's barely able to choke out a request for audience with Margaery.
As they walk back towards King's Landing, Brienne informs Margaery that "a shadow with the face of Stannis Baratheon" murdered her ex-husband Renly, a point which is likely important, but quickly dropped as the two walk past a statue of a King Joffrey standing astride an arrow-pierced wolf -- because, as everyone who watches the show knows, King Joffrey is personally responsible for every military victory accomplished by the underlings he so despises.
Like his uncle-father, Jaime, whom Joffrey spends the entire next scene tormenting. Given the events at the Red Wedding, one might think that Joffrey would take a little more interest in the security arrangements being made for his wedding -- but this is Joffrey, so of course he doesn't. Why ensure a long, happy life full of fucking and breathing when you can torment the man you don't even realize is your father? And torment he does, chiding him -- without a hint of irony -- for failing to have accomplished anything in his 40-odd-years of life.
At which point, director Weiss cuts from the King who's done nothing in Westeros to the Queen who's already played Abe Lincoln to the slaves of Essos. Dany receives flowers from a humbled Daario Naharis and a string of dead slaves, strung out one-per-mile along the entire road to Meereen, from someone, presumably, in Meereen.
She is, needless to say, unimpressed, then does that thing with her face that she does when she remembers she's the only one with dragons.
The camera cuts away, and suddenly the audience finds itself in a particularly violent episode of Scooby Doo:
From their place in the trees, Arya Stark and her erstwhile Hound investigate a lodge that, likely as not, could provide them with food. Arya spies the man who killed her friend, Lommy, and darts in before the Hound can stop her. Once inside, the brigand offers the Hound a place among his men in exchange for allowing them to have a go at Arya.
The Hound declines, then begins playing a game of "chickens" in which, every time "the talker" annoys him, he demands another chicken. The game escalates, the Hound starts channeling dialogue from Deadwood, and violence ensues.
Needless to say, Arya and the Hound walk away with all the chickens.
If one thinks about the beginning and end of "Two Swords" as bookends -- and on Game of Thrones, one should -- the fate of House Stark seems somewhat less grave at the end of the episode than it did at the beginning. Arya's taken some revenge and earned herself a pony, Joffrey's being careless with his wedding preparations, and Jon Snow's ascending the ranks of the Night's Watch with aplomb.
This isn't to say that the episode ends happily, only that its anti-Lannisterian arch is thoroughly gratifying. Tywin will never be as happy as he was when the episode began, melting down the titular "Two Swords" for the son he thinks will obey him and the grandson he believes will secure the kingdom for his family. In a sense, what began as an episode of House Lannister triumphant ends with a strong note crumbling and peril.
Which has been, for this viewer, well-deserved and a long time coming.
A blistering dissent in ‘McCutcheon’: Conservatives substituted opinion for facts
Central to the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decisions in the John Roberts era is that the government’s only legitimate interest in this area is preventing direct, quid pro quo corruption — a donor demanding that a specific law be passed, or…
Dick Cheney lies
At the bottom of a Mother Jones article covering a "behind-closed-doors talk" by former Vice President Dick Cheney -- in which he talked up (to applause) the idea of bombing Iran and whined that President Obama was too weak in the Middle East -- the…
U.S. wealth inequality in one chilling video
This video demonstrates a few crazy things. One: US wealth inequality is even much greater than most Americans think. Two: US wealth inequality has grown tremendously in the past few decades. Three: US wealth inequality is absolutely insane. The visualizations…
A gay businessman fires back at Mississippi's far right as legislature passes anti-LGBT law
Tonight, the Mississippi legislature passed SB2681 --the so-called "Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act." As Raw Story noted on February 3, 2014:
The broadly worded measure prohibits the government from placing a “burden” on a person’s free exercise of religion, which the measure defines as action or inaction that is substantially motivated by sincerely held religious beliefs — even if those beliefs are not compulsory or central to the person’s professed faith.
Following is a response from Jackson, Miss. businessman Eddie Outlaw, which originally appeared in the Jackson Free Press.
JACKSON — I keep hearing about the hypothetical baker whose religious convictions compel him not to make wedding cakes for gay couples.
This business owner whose religious liberties are under attack has been talked about at great length in every state that has proposed some form of "religious freedom" legislation. But let me ask you this: What of the countless members of the LGBT community who face discrimination every single day? I say "countless" because there's no real way to assign a number because so many of us cannot afford to be counted.
I acknowledge that I'm the exception to the rule. I can afford to speak out and feel a very profound obligation to do so. But, here in Mississippi alone, we can be fired or denied employment, we can be denied housing and face eviction, we cannot adopt a child in need of a loving home, and we aren't even included in anti-hate crime legislation. What we fight for isn't limited to, and doesn't stop with, marriage equality. We as a community, both visible and unseen, are fighting for our rightful place as fully equal citizens of this nation.
It's estimated that as much as 40 percent of our homeless youth identify as LGBT, and 43 percent of them say their parents forced them out because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. When paired with the fact that LGBT youth are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as their heterosexual peers, it's not hard to imagine why so many of us move into adulthood and accept a life lived hiding in plain sight. Because we have no protections in Mississippi, most fear being visible or being outed because of a very real threat to their ability to provide for their families.
If an employer can fire someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, what's to stop a business owner from denying goods or services for the same reasons?
Legislation like SB2681, which the Mississippi Legislature passed today, would compound the potential for discrimination in Mississippi, and let's be honest, there is a long and well-documented history of discrimination based on religious beliefs in our state.
Conservative groups like The Alliance Defending Freedom and The American Religious Freedom Project have been influential in states like Ohio, Kansas and most notably Arizona, according to Talking Points Memo. Mississippi has an organization funded by the Southern Baptist Convention working to influence lawmakers, too.
In an email posted by Cottonmouthblog, Jimmy Porter of Christian Action Commission used thinly veiled threats against members of the House if HB2681 didn't pass.
"The Christian Action Commission will work diligently to ensure the blame will be laid at the feet of these 20 alleged Republicans. Approximately 60,000 Baptist households will read about it and know the truth," the email stated.
And in a move that goes against the national messaging that these proposed bills have nothing to do with "the gays" specifically, he writes "Our state passed the Defense of Marriage Act by the widest margin of any state at 86/87%."
Faced with a sea change on LGBT equality unparalleled in our country's history, the far-right conservatives are lashing out. While the nation and, yes, Mississippians, increasingly support full equality for the LGBT community, they would have us know our place.
The very same people who claim to "love thy neighbor" would have us stay in the closet for fear of discrimination. Legislation like SB2681 is certainly meant to whip up support in the conservative base, but it is also intended to cut off the progress the "Upitty Homo" has made in the fight for full equality under the law. But we've come to far to turn back now.
I don't have to look back very far in my lived experience to recall a time when I was afraid to live openly. I once thought the very best I could hope for was to get a job, fall in love, and keep that part of my life hidden from family and clients. The idea that I could be myself was mind-blowing at the time. Yet here we are. We find ourselves at a pivotal point in our struggles, well beyond the tipping point and so much closer to the finish line.
They can refuse to recognize our unions now, but change is coming anyway.
They can fire us or deny us employment now, but change is coming anyway.
They can keep us from giving loving homes to children in need now, but change is coming anyway.
They can deny us goods and services now, but change is coming anyway.
They can try to make us live in fear, to force us to live in the shadows, to be satisfied as unequal citizens of this grand experiment for now, but change is coming anyway.
They can use hateful language, they can bully, they can beat us and leave us hanging on a fence to die now, but change is coming anyway.
Eddie Outlaw owns a business in Jackson, Miss., with his husband, Justin. He is a regular contributor to the Jackson Free Press.
[Image credit: Justin McPherson (left) and Eddie Outlaw (right) own William Wallace Salon and The Fondren Barber Shop in Jackson's Fondren district. They married inCalifornia, but it is not legally recognized in Mississippi. Photo by Trip Burns ]
Eisenhower's military-industrial warning rings truer than ever
The latest in the Snowden and NSA revelations show the reach of the military-information complex
On 17 January 1961, the outgoing US president, Dwight D Eisenhower, went on TV to deliver his valedictory address to the American people. Ike had been a relatively uncontroversial president. He had overseen a period of astonishing prosperity and economic growth. He had impeccable military credentials, having been supreme commander of allied forces in the second world war. So nobody could have accused him of being a radical.
Nevertheless, in his valedictory address Ike said this. "Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defence; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defence establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognise the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. ... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Rings some bells, doesn't it? Over the 10 presidencies since Ike's the United States has spent more on its military-industrial complex than all of the other countries in the world combined have spent on defence. But 50 years is a long time in technology, and over that period there has been a steady decline in the importance of dumb "kinetic" weaponry and a rapid increase in "smart" miniaturised weaponry, together with the rise of the internet, cyber-espionage and information warfare.
Like any good parasite, the military-industrial complex has evolved to match the changing nature of the organism on which it feeds. It still does the kinetic stuff, of course, but in recent decades it has moved into non-kinetic areas, notably surveillance and cyber "security". Which is how Edward Snowden came to be an employee not of the National Security Agency, but of a long-standing member of the military-industrial complex, Booz Allen Hamilton – a company that has 24,500 employees, a market capitalisation of $2.5bn and annual revenues of $5.8bn.
As they burgeoned, the big internet companies looked with disdain on the leviathans of the military-industrial complex. Kinetic warfare seemed so yesterday to those whose corporate mantras were about "not being evil" and adhering to "the hacker's way". So when Snowden revealed NSA claims that the spooks had untrammelled access to their servers the companies reacted like nuns accused of running a webcam porn site. It wasn't true, they protested, and even it if was they knew nothing about it. Of course they did comply with government requests approved by a secret court, but that was the extent of it. As the months rolled by, however, this reassuring narrative has unravelled. We discovered that the NSA and GCHQ had indeed covertly tapped the data-traffic that flows between the companies' server farms. But since Google and co were – they claimed – unaware of this, perhaps their protestations of innocence seemed justified. More embarrassing were the revelations about the astonishing lengths to which one company (Microsoft) went to facilitate NSA access to its users' private communications.
Last Wednesday, another piece of the jigsaw slotted into place. The NSA's top lawyer stated unequivocally that the technology firms were fully aware of the agency's widespread collection of data. Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said that all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the Prism system and the covert tapping of communications moving across the internet.
In one way, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. The NSA and the internet companies ultimately share the same business model, namely intensive surveillance. The only difference is that the companies do it with the "consent" of their hapless users. What it means, though, is that we're witnessing the evolution of a military-information complex. And if you expect Obama to express regrets in his valedictory address, dream on.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The climate change deniers have won
Scientists continue to warn us about global warming, but most of us have a vested interest in not wanting to think about it
The American Association for the Advancement of Science came as close as such a respectable institution can to screaming an alarm last week. "As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do," it said as it began one of those sentences that you know will build to a "but". "But human-caused climate risks abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes."
In other words, the most distinguished scientists from the country with the world's pre-eminent educational institutions were trying to shake humanity out of its complacency. Why weren't their warnings leading the news?
In one sense, the association's appeal was not new. The Royal Society, the Royal Institution, Nasa, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the IPCC and the national science bodies of 30 or so other countries have said that man-made climate change is on the march. A survey of 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 20 years found that 97% said that humans were causing it.
When the glib talk about the "scientific debate on global warming", they either don't know or will not accept that there is no scientific debate. The suggestion first made by Eugene F Stoermer that the planet has moved from the Holocene, which began at the end of the last ice age, to the manmade Anthropocene, in which we now live, is everywhere gaining support. Man-made global warming and the man-made mass extinction of species define this hot, bloody and (let us hope) brief epoch in the world's history.
If global warming is not new, it is urgent: a subject that should never be far from our thoughts. Yet within 24 hours of the American association's warning the British government's budget confirmed that it no longer wanted to fight it.
David Cameron, who once promised that if you voted blue you would go green, now appoints Owen Paterson, a man who is not just ignorant of environmental science but proud of his ignorance, as his environment secretary. George Osborne, who once promised that his Treasury would be "at the heart of this historic fight against climate change", now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and gas industry, cuts the funds for onshore wind farms and strips the Green Investment Bank of the ability to borrow and lend
All of which is a long way of saying that the global warming deniers have won. And please, can I have no emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you can't call us "global warming deniers " because "denier" makes us sound like "Holocaust deniers", and that means you are comparing us to Nazis? The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do.
Tempting though it is to blame cowardly politicians, the abuse comes too easily. The question remains: what turned them into cowards? Rightwing billionaires in the United States and the oil companies have spent fortunes on blocking action on climate change. A part of the answer may therefore be that conservative politicians in London, Washington and Canberra are doing their richest supporters' bidding. There's truth in the bribery hypothesis. In my own little world of journalism, I have seen rightwing hacks realise the financial potential of denial and turn from reasonable men and women into beetle-browed conspiracy theorists.
But the right is also going along with an eruption of know-nothing populism. Just as there are leftish greens, who will never accept that GM foods are safe, so an ever-growing element on the right becomes more militant as the temperature rises.
Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they said unbribed. The movement was in the grip of "cognitive dissonance", a condition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s . They examined a cult that had attached itself to a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resign from their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was to engulf the earth on 21 December 1954. They would be the only survivors. Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down and save the chosen few.
When 21 December came and went, and the Earth carried on as before, the group did not despair. Martin announced that the aliens had sent her a message saying that they had decided at the last minute not to flood the planet after all. Her followers believed her. They had given up so much for their faith that they would believe anything rather than admit their sacrifices had been pointless.
Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel.
The politicians know too well that beyond the corporations and the cultish fanatics in their grass roots lies the great mass of people, whose influence matters most. They accept at some level that manmade climate change is happening but don't want to think about it.
I am no better than them. I could write about the environment every week. No editor would stop me. But the task feels as hopeless as arguing against growing old. Whatever you do or say, it is going to happen. How can you persuade countries to accept huge reductions in their living standards to limit (not stop) the rise in temperatures? How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?
The American historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Eril M Conway quoted a researcher, who was asked in the 1970s what his country's leaders said when he warned them that C02 levels would double in 50 years. "They tell me to come back in 49 years," he replied.
Most of the rest of us think like the Washington politicians of the Carter era. And most of us have no right to sneer at Dorothy Martin and her cult either. We cannot admit it, but like them, we need a miracle to save us from the floods.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Ladders on Everest are just the latest step in our commodification of nature
Ladders on Everest? For a place already blighted by litter, fistfights and unburied dead bodies, it's not so much "health and safety" as "access all areas". Its greatest hero, Edmund Hillary, declared in 2006, two years before he died: "I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top." His successor, Stephen Venables, the first Briton to climb the peak without oxygen, agreed. "The mountain has become a commodity, to be bought and sold like any other," he said. We humans have come to expect the natural world to come commodified, negotiated, shaped to our needs. From high to low, there's nowhere we can't go, nothing we can't do. In this age of the Anthropocene – the era of human manipulation heralded by the industrial revolution – it is a given that we have tuned the environment to suit ourselves. Dominion is all; human ingenuity has encompassed the planet. Now pass me the phone: "I'm on the mountain."
What mystery is left when the roof of the world resembles your loft conversion? Or when the third person ever to have descended to the bottom of the world – the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, which is 10km deep – is a movie director, James Cameron? Even outer space, courtesy of Richard Branson, is already becoming a future tourist destination.
Nature is no longer red in tooth and claw, but filmed and tagged. Leviathans of the deep must be tracked by electronic signals on their enigmatic missions, bleeping back news of their trysts. Migrating birds, which defy all our aviation technology by flying from one pole to another, are banded with little rings so that we know where they go, and when. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, those same bands appeal to children who trap and kill the birds and use the rings to make necklaces.
Our curiosity is part of what we are; it is what has enabled our rise to the status of apex predator. It is part of our glory, but it may also be the means of our downfall. Like Pandora, we cannot leave secrets uncovered; we have to reinvent the world in our image, and apply our technology to its mysteries. This week scientists announced the results of experiments on the narwhal, the "sea unicorn", to understand why it should bear such a weighty ivory tusk. Apparently this wondrous appendage is actually used by the Arctic creature to determine the salinity of the water, and thus of the state of the ice. But in order to gather this information, a narwhal had to be captured and its tusk clamped in a plastic tube.
Recently, as part of the Litmus Project, an arts-science initiative at the University of Southampton, I've been working with a marine biologist, Dr Verity Nye, whose task it is to observe the deep sea bed, and the miraculous vents that sustain chemosynthetic life. Dr Nye is regularly discovering new species of crustacean down there, in the sunless depths; bizarre, pallid, alien animals that garden their own fringed limbs for sustenance. But even here, as far from "civilisation" as one could imagine, her fellow scientists have been shocked to discover Coke cans on the ocean floor. And as those remote locations are revealed, conglomerates are already preparing to mine them for their rare earth metals – so that we can make more mobile phones. Meanwhile, the results of a Google-funded survey of the sea bed of the Southern Ocean will be immediately loaded on to Google Earth – long before the scientists' ship has returned to dock – enabling fishermen to identify and exploit new resources.
What we observe, we also destroy. And yet we also assume too much. In her new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert puts it all into a salutary context: that in the geological strata of deep time, we humans will leave behind a layer the thickness of a cigarette paper. Thus will pass the sum of all human art and endeavour – from great cities to cutting-edge technology, from ladders on mountains to litter on the sea bed; all reduced to a slime sandwich. Tasmania, from where I write, boasts one of the greatest expanses of wilderness in the world. Beyond all expectation, swathes of its temperate rainforest have escaped human attention (though perhaps not for much longer).There are still big green gaps on the Tasmanian map, proposing an enticing notion: that even in the "developed" world, one might be defeated by nature. Then I discovered that same forest is traversed by a steel "air walk", 600 metres of mesh suspended 20 metres above the forest floor, from which lofty height we humans may look down on the world, masters of all we survey. I'll bet there are Coke cans down there, too.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Hiker image on Shutterstock]
Elon Musk writes a letter to the people of New Jersey
Editor’s Note: Following our first article and then second brief article on the Tesla–New Jersey controversy, here’s one more. I’m not going to add commentary unless I’m stimulated to down in the comments. Below is simply a letter from Tesla…
Look who’s selling your voting records
Investigative journalist Julia Angwin, author of the new book Dragnet Nation, speaks to Bill in this three-minute clip about the ways in which the government and the private sector are compiling a personal profile of you. Did you know, for instance,…
George P. Bush and the U.S. obsession with political dynasties
For a nation that constitutionally bans inherited power, America has always had a soft spot for political royalty. So it came as no surprise that when George P Bush won the Republican primary for the little-known but powerful position of Texas land commissioner last week, it attracted national attention.
The relative of two former presidents, he is already the subject of speculation as to whether he too may one day lead his country from the White House.
From the early days, when John Quincy Adams, the nation's sixth president, was the son of its second, political brand names have endured in America. The most talked about names of potential candidates for the 2016 presidential election are those of former presidents, even if Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, brother of George W and son of Bush Sr, have yet to declare an interest in running.
Barbara Kellerman, leadership specialist at Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government, believes several factors are at play in the nation's continuing obsession with political dynasties. The cult of celebrity, the electoral system and nostalgia for bygone days all play a role, she says.
The nature of the electoral system "is about the individual not the party", says Kellerman. "It used to be in back rooms but now it is in primaries. There are a very small number of people voting in primaries and they tend to vote for people they know.
"We are quite nostalgic," she adds, "and the name of George Herbert Walker Bush – president number 41 – was a time of relative gentility. The names of Bush and Clinton remind us that we are quite centrist in America. That it is not all Ted Cruz, but we have centrist politicians."
For that reason, she said, "if Jeb Bush runs he will lend his discourse more on his father than on his brother".
Kellerman, the author of several books, including All the Presidents' Kin: Their Political Roles, singles out the Kennedy dynasty, which has spawned senators, a president and ambassadors, including Caroline Kennedy, the current US ambassador to Japan, as proof of the culture of celebrity in politics.
"Starting with John F Kennedy, we get to know not just the candidate but the candidate's spouse, the candidate's children and the candidate's siblings. It's no accident that Caroline [daughter of JFK] is a celebrity in her own right."
According to a 2009 study on US political dynasties, between 1966 and 1996 about 10% of the members of US Congress had relatives enter Congress ahead of them. More recently, Time, writing about the chances of former vice-president Dick Cheney's daughter Liz in the Republican senate primary in Wyoming (before she later dropped out), reported: "There are 37 current members who have a relative who served in Congress."
Pedro Dal Bo, an associate professor of political economics at Brown University and co-author of the 2009 report, said: "We compared people who had been in Congress for one term and people who had been in Congress for more than one term. Being in Congress for longer affects your chances of a family member getting into Congress in the future. It is a big effect," he said.
What is more difficult, he said, is to assess the reason behind it. "There are alternative theories. One is that it is like a brand name. There was a study in Argentina that looked at relatives of politicians who had the same name and ones without the same name. You can compare nephews, for instance, from different sides of the family. They found there was a value in the name.
"The last name tells you that they are related, something about the family characteristics.The public know this politician has a reputation to protect."
Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets, The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government and The Hidden History of the Last 50 Years – says that the reliance on political brand names in the US is partly driven by voter apathy.
"It's different for different strata of society. We are extremely jealous of the British and their Royal family, and although we have the idea of being able to rise from nothing, we are hung up on status. We crave the fantasy of royalty, we think its ennobling. We like the Kennedys and the Bushes and the Clintons.
"For average people, these families give us a sense of security. If we don't question what they actually stand for, then we don't have to actually feel guilty about our apathy."
The other big interest in American political royalty, says Baker, comes from wealthy businessmen who donate to candidates in return for political favours.
"They know the money that enables them to get elected can be repaid," he says.
It is notable, he adds, that "George P Bush is land commissioner – they have control over assets and mineral rights of a state that is larger than most European countries".
"Money is the key. So is celebrity. The media is looking to give people what they want and what they want is dancing with the stars. Why bother looking at the substance of what these people are, what their values are?" asks Baker.
But it is not just politics that is a sucker for a big political name, he adds, pointing out that Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of George W and Laura Bush, is a special correspondent for NBC's Today Show and a contributor to NBC Nightly News, while Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill and Hillary, was hired as a special correspondent for NBC in 2011.
"Nepotism is very much alive in America. Just look at those who get handed jobs on our news sites. It's like everything has got to have a child of one of these political dynasties."
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