Obama: Jekyll & Hyde on energy
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama once again tried to reconcile the split personality of his energy policy. On the one hand, the President clearly stated his Dr. Jekyll…
Opinion
We face being buried under an avalanche of Chinese science
I was chatting with a friend and collaborator based in Germany recently about the completion of a new building that his university was constructing, dedicated to biomedical imaging sciences. I was sharing my own exhilaration about the serious investment that our government, regional agencies and the EU were making in graphene research at the University of Manchester. At some point in our conversation it became apparent that as extraordinary as the investments in our institutions were, they did not even come close to what we had both experienced from recent trips in China.
Our conclusion was that "for each floor refurbishment in Europe, a new building is built is China, and for each new building in Europe, a new campus is built in China …"
The magnitude of R&D investment in China is unprecedented and well-documented. Nanoscience is a strategically important field in the eyes of Chinese policymakers: a poster-child of new-age, high-tech China. The volume of scientific data generated and published by Chinese laboratories in all areas of nanotechnology has been increasing exponentially.
What I fear is that we all – Asians and westerners alike – run the risk of getting buried under this avalanche of manic scientific output and the oversimplification of capitalist principles applied to science in an artificially consumerist – yet not truly capitalist – society. Let me try to explain.
The key question is whether this surge of research activity in China is going to be translated into industrial leadership, economic growth and benefit to humankind. The assumption of the Chinese ruling class is based on the "American paradigm" of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, that tremendous investment in academic, governmental, military and industrial R&D will lead to world domination in science and business innovation, creating both wealth and power. It is widely believed that Chinese officials, and the majority of the Chinese people, are eager to challenge if not take over world leadership from the US.
There are, however, a few fundamental differences between the United States of the 1950s and China in the 2010s that go well beyond the realms of nanoscience.
First and foremost, after the ravages of fascism and war, the United States of the 1950s was perhaps the most welcoming, positive, liberal and liberating environment worldwide. It opened its capitalist gates to everyone with ambition, vision and creative energy.
Irrespective of our views on the political divide during the cold war era, the fundamental difference between the US and the Soviet Union, or later Japan – which have at times both been in a position to challenge the scientific dominance of the United States – can be summarised in one word: "openness". Openness in a broad sense, including thought, expression, social acceptance, attraction and retention of the brightest foreign minds. I do not think that China today is by any means close to that measure of openness compared with the United States of the 1950s and 1960s.
Second, the US has always been a deeply "western" society, built on European philosophical principles, with the values of independent thinking and dialectic discourse deeply ingrained. Such a mindset allows challenges of the status quo and unconventional thinking that are intricately linked with scientific and entrepreneurial progress. I am still not convinced that these values can be adopted by Chinese (or other Asian societies) where completely different cultures and philosophical principles prevail, for example the strong respect for hierarchical order.
We should therefore recognise the need for a modified version of scientific discourse and practice in China that is, not necessarily worse, but certainly different from that of the Descartian rationalism predominant in western societies. It is enlightening when one realises that going to a conference in Asia will not involve open discussion and challenge ideas, simply because this is considered disrespectful.
Third, the blind adoption of capitalist incentives into the practice of science by the Chinese establishment is outright wrong. For example, if a Chinese colleague publishes an article in a highly regarded scientific journal they will be financially rewarded by the government – yes, a bonus! – on the basis of an officialacademic reward structure. Publication in one of the highest impact journals is currently rewarded with bonuses in excess of $30,000 – which is surely more than the annual salary of a starting staff member in any lab in China.
Such practices are disfiguring the fundamental principles of ethical integrity in scientific reporting and publishing, agreed and accepted by the scientific community worldwide. They introduce motives that have the potential to seriously corrupt the triangular relationship between scientist or clinician, publisher or editor and the public (taxpayer) funding agency. They exacerbate the damage caused by journal quality rankings based on "impact factor", which is already recognised by the scientific community in the west as problematic.
Such measures also do nothing to help Chinese journals gain recognition by the rest of the world, as has been described by two colleagues from Zhejiang University in an article entitled "The outflow of academic articles from China: why is it happening and can it be stemmed?".
I admire Chinese culture, history, creativity and motivation for progress. However, judging from my personal experience in nanoscience and medicine (which I suspect applies to many other disciplines), we have to accept that the scientific landscape is being dramatically remodelled by the way research is being implemented in China. Asian and western academics, politicians, publishers and investors must engage in an honest discussion about the massive changes to the way science is practised, being made by a society that is culturally, linguistically and philosophically very different from those that have a historical tradition in modern scientific discourse.
• Kostas Kostarelos is professor of nanomedicine at the University of Manchester and director of the university's Nanomedicine Lab
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Scientist Touching Dna Molecule on Shutterstock]
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Noah's Ark revealed to be filled with cannibal rats, drifting toward British coast
Cartoon Christian and Tea Party clown Bryan Fischer alerted us to the Associated Press story about Noah's Ark this morning.
Ancient Mesopotamian tablet confirms biblical account: worldwide flood, huge ark, animals in pairs. https://t.co/hD8T6y7cI7
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) January 25, 2014"Ancient Mesopotamian tablet confirms biblical account: worldwide flood, huge ark, animals in pairs," he wrote.
Of course, the story he linked to does no such thing. The excellent piece by the AP's Jill Lawless explains that a new book is coming out about a 4,000-year-old clay tablet from modern Iraq that contains a fascinating message in Mesopotamian cuneiform writing.
The tablet gives detailed instructions for building an ark for surviving a flood. And yes, it talks about putting animals on it "two by two," but the craft described has a circular shape -- it's known as a coracle, Lawless explains, which was a familiar kind of craft for plying the rivers of Mesopotamia.
The man who translated the message, Irving Finkel of the British Museum, explained to the Guardian that the tablet's tale is far older than the Biblical story, and he figures the Bible's writers were drawing on accounts that had been passed around "by Hebrew scholars during the Babylonian exile."
In other words, a Mesopotamian folk tale ended up being recycled for the Bible. (And there are plenty of other examples.)
The tablet's tale is supposedly spoken by a deity, but Finkel doesn't say which Mesopotamian god described the ark (there were plenty of gods to choose from). One thing's for certain: it's not the god of the Bible.
Also, there's this: "I am 107% convinced the ark never existed," Finkel said.
Sure, even 4,000 years ago, the people passing around that fantasy knew it was just a tall tale, perhaps built up from memories of an even more ancient deadly flood.
That's just how these sort of tales get embellished. It even happens now. Take, for example, the story of the derelict cruise ship that may or may not be floating around in the North Atlantic. The Lyubov Orlova was built in what was then Yugoslavia in 1976, but by 2010 was sitting abandoned in Newfoundland after its owners defaulted on a debt. Seized for scrap, in 2012 it was being towed to the Dominican Republic when it somehow got free, and has been floating around, a ghost ship, ever since. Or maybe it's sunk by now. No one seems to know for sure.
Last year, there was a story about the ship possibly drifting toward the British Isles, and an official mentioned that if it crashed on the coast, the rats living inside might be a "biohazard."
A year later, the story came up again, and those details got somewhat embellished by creative minds. Now the ship was barrelling toward the English coast and the rats inside were eating each other to stay alive.
Some scolds at the Smithsonian and elsewhere chastised the press for promoting this "bogus" story, but really, did anyone read "ghost ship with cannibal rats heading for British coast" without realizing it was an exaggeration?
When tales get told and retold, they tend to pick up a life of their own. That's what people do. We tell tales in an attempt to make sense of the world. In this case, didn't everyone realize the cannibal rats story was a pimp?
Maybe not. There are still people who believe a giant ship was built by a guy named Noah, after all.
And Hollywood is banking on that! Check out the trailer for this year's March release, Noah, which features Russell Crowe in the title role, as well as Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, and Jennifer Connelly...
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'The Days of Anna Madrigal': review
As Armistead Maupin's beloved cast of free spirits convene at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, Laura Miller bids a fond farewell to the Tales of the City series
It's hard to determine which piece of news makes a more devastating javelin to the heart of San Franciscans: that Armistead Maupin has published the final book in his Tales of the City series or that the author, the literary embodiment of San Francisco's grand old hedonistic, bohemian spirit, has moved to Santa Fe. What's more, most of the new novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal, takes place in Nevada at the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert and in Winnemucca, the town where the title character, Anna (then Andy), grew up and now the destination of a pilgrimage she makes in her 93rd year.
If you've never read Tales of the City or the seven novels that come between it and The Days of Anna Madrigal, this is not the place to start, and if you have even the slightest hankering for freedom or capacity for joy, do yourself a favour and go and find the first book right now. In the nearly four decades since 1976, when Maupin first began writing his serialised fiction about life in San Francisco for a local newspaper, his long, twisty narrative has encompassed homophobia, Jonestown, Aids, cancer, divorce, Republicanism and many other shocks and disappointments, all without losing its essentially sunny spirit.
Perhaps the most telling detail dropped into The Days of Anna Madrigal is the news that 28 Barbary Lane, the funky boarding house where, in the 1970s, Mrs Madrigal grew pot and played enigmatic but sagacious den mother to the four questing young people at the centre of the series, has been bought by wealthy "dot-commers"; they have "made it look like a five-star B and B". Anna now lives with Jake, a young transgender carer, in a flat near the Castro district. The unofficial "family seat", as one character puts it, has been relocated to the Noe Valley household of Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and his husband, Ben. Anna's unconventional clan consists of a group of people who share very little blood but a whole lot of history. They are what she calls her "logical family".
That's been the overarching theme of all the Tales novels: the way that people with rejecting (or simply absent) relations have formed families of choice in the fog-washed utopian outpost of San Francisco. Maupin's characters go spinning out of each other's orbits periodically, yet somehow always end up drifting back together again. Brian, a one-time singles-bar habitué, phones from his roving Winnebago caravan at the beginning of this novel to tell Anna he is bringing a new wife home to meet her. Brian's adopted bisexual daughter, Shawna, author of a successful novel composed entirely of text messages, has decided she wants a turkey-baster baby, to be conceived at Burning Man. Ambitious Mary Ann Singleton, whose mid-life crisis provided the subject of the previous Tales novel, Mary Ann in Autumn, has "divorced well in the East" and settled in a prosperous Bay Area suburb to take yoga classes and hang out with DeDe and D'or, an inter-racial lesbian couple.
Like all Tales novels, The Days of Anna Madrigal is part tenderly unfurling soap opera, part dispatch from the more sybaritic precincts of the Bay Area's counterculture. Shawna had a blog (Grrrl on the Loose), back when that was a thing, and now she hangs out at Litquake (an underground literary events series) and wears a high-waisted dress "as a friendly nod to Lena Dunham in Girls". Jake, Anna's carer, meets his boyfriend via Buck Angel Dating, a service for trans men. And finally there's Burning Man, that explosion of eccentricity, wild costumes and performance art in the vast alkali flats of Nevada. In the course of the novel, the characters gradually converge there to take drugs, stage pageants, get laid and generally let their freak flags fly.
Much of the appeal of The Days of Anna Madrigal derives from catching up with familiar characters, so a goodly chunk of exposition has to be got out of the way before you start to notice how vividly Maupin writes, with the economy of a good journalist and the instincts of a poet. Burning Man, in particular, with its biblical accompaniment of dust storms, brings out these talents: a car's wipers "carved adobe arches on the windshield", while the festival itself is "block after block of dust-fuzzed tents and shade structures jutting like bat wings into the sky, [while] the night rang with the sound of sledgehammers on rebar". Maupin is here not just to tell you what the wild kids are up to these days, but to make you see and feel and hear it as well.
In counterpoint to these contemporary shenanigans are the sepia-toned chapters recounting Anna's past as a teenage boy in the Blue Moon brothel, owned and operated by her mother. It turns out that Anna Madrigal, that reliable dispenser of startling plot reveals, still has a secret up her sleeve, and getting to the bottom of it will require a return visit to Winnemucca in Brian's caravan. This juxtaposition makes a sweet coda to the series, a reminder of just how far Anna has come in her life, and how much of her own hard-won self-acceptance she has managed to inspire in her many charges.
Yet so little of that old liberation can be sourced in San Francisco nowadays; the dot-commers and finance guys have priced the city out of the range of the people who once generated its best tales. The Days of Anna Madrigal is by necessity a somewhat melancholy book, as Anna charts the "small surrenders" of old age, what she gracefully chooses to regard as "simplification" and "leaving like a lady". Like her creator, she understands the virtue of letting go when the time comes, and one more time the two of them show the rest of us how it's done.
• Laura Miller's The Magician's Book is published by Little, Brown.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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You'd be surprised at how poor the new 'middle class' is in the developing world
The International Labour Organisation has identified a rapid growth of 'the developing middle class' – a group earning between $4 and $13 a day
When a million people swarmed on to the streets of Brazil last June there was consensus that the protest was a phenomenon of the "new middle class" – squeezed by corruption and failing infrastructure. As the Thai protests continue, these too are labelled middle class: office workers staging flashmobs in their neat, pressed shirts.
But what does middle class mean in the developing world? About 3 billion people earn less than two dollars a day, but figures for the rest are hazy. Now, fresh research by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) economists shows in detail what's been happening to the workforce of the global south during 25 years of globalisation: it is becoming more stratified – with the rapid growth of what they term "the developing middle class" – a group on between $4 and $13 a day. This group has grown from 600 million to 1.4 billion; if you include around 300 million on above $13 a day, that's now 41% of the workforce, and on target to be over 50% by 2017. But in world terms they're not really middle class at all. That $13 a day upper limit corresponds roughly to the poverty line in the US in 2005. So what's going on?
The ILO researchers mined data from 61 household surveys across the world to come up with these figures. In the process they adopted a rough definition of the lifestyle of the sub-$13 group. The key markers were: families had access to savings and insurance, were likely to have a TV in the home and to live in smaller households (four people). They would typically spend 2% of their income on entertainment – plus they would have better access to water, sanitation and electricity. These, then, are the "winners" from globalisation: an expanding group for whom global growth has meant a serious rise in real income, year after year, compared with the recent near stagnation of incomes for working and lower-middle-class families in parts of the developed world.
You might assume the "developing middle class" are mainly factory workers but they're not. One of the most startling results of the ILO survey is that more than half the "developing middle class" works in the service sector. Factory workers form between 15% and 20% of each income group: they are spread from the destitute to the above-$13 group. This, say the researchers, reflects the fact that the industrial sector of the global south now offers as much skilled, high-value work as it does sweated labour.
When Harvard economist Richard Freeman calculated the "great doubling" of the world's workforce – as a result of global development and the entry of former communist states into the market – the assumption was that this would recreate a "proletariat" at the periphery of capitalism. It did, but the ILO calculation is the strongest evidence to date that they are moving steadily towards stratification and more service-oriented work, just as its rich-world counterpart did in the 1960s and 70s. Go to the reality of being "new middle class" in Brazil, Morocco or Indonesia and the word "comfortable" does not spring to mind. It means often living in a chaotic mega-city, cheek-by-jowl with abject poverty and crime, crowding on to makeshift public transport systems and seeing your income leach away into the pockets of all kinds of corrupt officials, middlemen and grey market people. This in turn has shaped what people protest about. There remain, of course, high-profile workers' struggles: in Argentina there are still more than 180 occupied factories. The cotton city of El-Mahalla el Kubra in Egypt remains the kind of place that can pull a total work stoppage and, as in December 2012, declare "autonomy" from the government.
But the ILO trend suggests that, by the second quarter of the century, the typical social dynamics of a medium-developed country will be a mixture of "workplace" conflicts and the more networked, sporadic and volatile ones we saw in Turkey and Brazil last year. The western left has lived through decades of angst over the decline of the manual work, and its ideology of resistance, sometimes softened by the hope that it would all be recreated somewhere else. The ILO survey suggests not.
What was unthinkable 20 years ago is now becoming tangible: that the real incomes of skilled workers, knowledge workers and managers in "developing countries" are overlapping with those at the bottom of the heap in western society. But where once this prospect was understood to foretell stability, it does not. As the World Bank lead economist Branko Milanovic has shown, when it comes to causing inequality, the impact of class and location have reversed: "Around 1870, class explained more than two thirds of global inequality. And now? The proportions have exactly flipped: more than two thirds of total inequality is due to location."
Milanovic calls this the "non-Marxian world", in which class struggle becomes less useful as a strategy and the logical thing to do is migrate: "Either poor countries will become richer or poor people will migrate to rich countries". I think, on the contrary, that the upsurge of unrest is a signal that the rising, poor, new middle class – which cannot migrate en masse – has decided to force poor countries to become richer in democracy, sustainability, urban infrastructure, healthcare.
They're choosing signal issues – corruption, transport, green space as in the Gezi Park occupation in Istanbul – but across the world their determination to make life on $13 a day less arbitrary and insecure is clear.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Is the author of 'The Social Contract' as relevant as ever?
The philosopher's thought still has the power to challenge our deepest assumptions on identity, religion and the Enlightenment
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is generally seen, especially in Britain, as the worst sort of intellectual: absurdly self-regarding, and dangerously naive, in his fond belief in the natural goodness of humanity, which fed the excesses of the French Revolution, and maybe sowed other totalitarian seeds.
I have come to think he deserves more respect. While recently researching the roots of secular humanism, I found that he stood out from the list of dead white males I was considering. While other thinkers made important contributions to this or that movement, Rousseau made the weather. Also, he is psychologically fascinating – he makes other thinkers of the age seem wooden.
His thought is as relevant as ever, for he confronted deep human needs, such as the need to reconcile personal integrity with social belonging, the need to reconnect with the natural world, the need to escape the hyped-up tinny crap that passes for culture and seek out some sort of authenticity, and above all perhaps, the glorious yet embarrassing need that drives us all, the need to be ourselves. And some of our deepest assumptions seem rooted in his thought, or first expressed there. For example, the assumption that the large-scale systems we inhabit are corrupt, tawdry, destructive, and that we individual people are the poor little pure-as-snow victims. Another example: we are all the authors of our life-stories. We don't notice such patterns of thought until we see them being thought up.
Also, I think that looking at Rousseau's thought can nudge us towards more intelligent discussion of religion and atheism. This is not because I agree with his thinking on religion – I don't. But it helps us to see where our debate stems from. He passionately believed in a God who created the world and who allowed himself to be known – but not through revelation, in the sense of something contained in scripture or church tradition; rather through the compassion that comes naturally to us, and the appetite for rational wonder that he has instilled in his creatures. He thought that this natural moral impulse will flourish as long as false ideas and conventions do not twist it out of shape. There's a major overlap with what we know as atheist thinking here, but in religious, or at least theistic, form. Maybe attending to this can prod us into seeing our own debates afresh.
Rousseau was born in Protestant Geneva in 1712. His father was a watchmaker; his mother died in childbirth. Aged 16 he left his apprenticeship and wandered through Savoy, doing odd jobs. He found a patroness-cum-mistress who was a very liberal Catholic; she helped him find work as a musician. He then moved to Paris in 1741, and did some writing for the Encyclopédie. Then, in 1749, he had an acute experience of vocation. It came as he saw the title of a journal's essay competition: "Has the advance of the sciences and the arts helped to destroy or to purify moral standards?" Suddenly he knew that he hated his culture, and that he was a great thinker. He won the competition, and fame, by arguing that modern culture was, for all its proud enlightenment, a mire of falsity, corruption and inauthenticity. And he showed that he meant it, by refusing the identity of the urbane literary star and choosing to earn a living by copying out musical scores – no schmoozing with influential employers for him. (He also wore conspicuously cheap clothes, like someone choosing to wear nasty old jumpers from charity shops.)
What was his problem? Didn't he believe in rational progress towards a more humane world? Here's the interesting paradox: he did believe in this Enlightenment vision, but with an awkward intensity that made him see its other advocates as complacent, worldly, merely pragmatic. He thought that the humanist vision needed a new basis in a big narrative about the liberation of humanity's innate goodness, a story about how civilisation tends to impair this. This was expressed in various works of the 1750s and then in The Social Contract .
He also found a wider audience as a novelist. But he became no more settled, no less prickly. His novel Emile expressed reformist religious ideas that so angered the authorities that he had to flee – to Germany, then England for a time, where he was hosted by a rather bemused David Hume. He now developed a partly justified persecution complex. He started writing autobiographically: his startlingly frank Confessions occupied his last years. He still failed to enjoy his fame as an author, forever complaining that his ideas were misunderstood and his character maligned. He found some solace in his hobby of botany. He died in 1778.
Oh yes, and all this time – since his move to Paris in the 1740s – he had a partner, or mistress (they finally married in 1768), with whom he had five children. What fortunate children, you might think, to be born to such a great champion of the compassionate human spirit. Think again: they were given away to an orphanage as babies.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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Facing the truth of China's 'Cultural Revolution'
Chinese and Western scholars have written extensively about the causes, directions and details of some of the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution, and now estimate that at least 100 million people were persecuted in some way: arbitrary arrests, brutal confrontations, beatings, torture, outright murder, serious injuries, forced suicides, denied medical treatment after beatings, houses looted, forced banishment to remote rural provinces. Top officials were not spared. A half dozen of them committed suicide in the opening overtures of the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiao Ping’s son, Pufang, was thrown out of a window during a “struggle” session and left paralyzed for life.;
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A man was shot for texting at a movie. This isn't an anomaly in America
The spontaneous shooting of a father over some texting and tossed popcorn had barely grabbed our attention when the headlines came about the even more horrific crime in New Mexico. Both were senseless, both all the more riveting for their quotidian settings. The antsy atmosphere of a pre-screening theater, the casual boredom of a student assembly – these are the universally-identifiable situations of stand-up comedy routines. To have them turned inside-out by unspeakable violence provokes primal outrage and fear.
Because school shootings absorb us especially thoroughly (they are especially appalling), they attract the most sympathy for the gun control cause. Support for stronger regulation is never more ardent than after such tragedies. The New Mexico school shooting will likely stir up more calls for changes to the law. It's terrible that it takes such tragedy against our kids to motivate us to action.
But I wish more Americans realized that it's shootings like the one in the Tampa, Florida suburb at the movie theatre that say more about how gun control laws have failed everyday Americans, and made us less safe, not more so.
We may have the good sense to understand that the wall-to-wall coverage of school shootings is still, thank God, out of proportion to their frequency. It's their infrequency, in addition to their awfulness, that makes them news. Advocates of gun control use them as evidence not because they represent the scope of the problem, but because most people instinctively understand that part of the tragedy is the sense that it could have been prevented. The mind recoils so thoroughly at the thought of children murdering children, we cling to the notion that something could be done. Gun control advocates try to leverage this desperation into laws that often only tangentially intersect with the violence in the news.
But gun advocates can trump gun control support exactly because these child-on-child crimes stir such desperation and are so shocking to our sensibilities. This may be why support for regulation seems to fade so quickly. Yes, something could be done, the National Rifle Association and others say: we can protect our children from evil by disarming evil. They argue for mental health restrictions or "enforcing existing law", both methods that depend on the belief that bad things happen because of bad people. If you're a good guy, they argue, guns aren't just neutral but perhaps necessary. We shouldn't keep guns out of the hands of thegood guys.
Curtis Reeves was a retired police officer, the very definition of a good guy. He may also prove to be unbalanced in a legally-applicable way, but that wouldn't have prevented him from getting a concealed carry permit in Florida. Since Florida grants concealed carry permits via its Department of Agriculture, rather than, say a criminal justice agency, the state cannot use the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to screen applicants. To put that another way, Florida simply doesn't have the federal background check required in every other state that grants concealed carry permits.
Indeed, even if Florida had a more stringent conceal carry screening process – or if it didn't have a concealed carry law at all – Reeves could have had his weapon on him. Retired law enforcement personnel are allowed by federal law to carry a concealed weapon in any jurisdiction except where it's explicitly banned by law or the property owner. This is a loophole that may seem natural (again: good guys!), but it's actually a reflection of just how deeply we've bought into the myth that guns aren't the problem and we only need worry about who has them. That's not true: we need to worry about guns, no matter who has them.
The National Rifle Association likes to argue that criminals, or people intent on committing a crime, will obtain guns no matter what the law says. Among the 5,417 gun homicides in 2012 that the FBI assigns a circumstance to (3,438 are "unknown circumstances"), a mere 1,324 were committed in conjunction with another felony. Three times that (3,980) were committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Of that, over half (1,968) were the result of an argument that escalated fatally out of control.
To put it another way: otherwise unpremeditated murders, where people kill out of momentary rage, are the single most common type of gun homicide in America. More than gangland killings (822); more than murders committed during robberies (505) and drug deals (311) combined.
Much as with gun suicides (which account for a majority of all gun deaths), these are the deaths that the government has the most power to stop, simply by making guns harder to get a hold of. Any argument can end in violence, no one can stop that. But if there's a gun involved, the likelihood of someone dying is far greater.
You keep a gun out of the argument, you will save lives. This is not hypothetical. A person may be intent on killing someone else, but it is simply harder to do with anything else. That's why forms of homicide other than guns account for only about a third of all homicides. Someone gets angry at someone else, they may reach for a weapon. If we make guns harder to get, by requiring a test for the license, or by banning handguns more broadly, the one at hand might be far less deadly. Like, say, popcorn.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
['Man pointing a gun' via Shutterstock]
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That West Virginia chemical spill? It's likely a bigger scandal than Bridgegate
If we called West Virginia 4-methylcyclohexane-methanol leak "Watergate", do you think the political press would pay more attention?
Hours of cable news time and thousands of words have been spent in search of what "Bridgegate" means for Chris Christie. An equal and opposite amount of energy has been poured into an examination of what the Christie situation means for Obama.
Meanwhile, in West Virginia, there are 300,000 people without useable water, and an unknown number who may fall ill because the warning to avoid the tainted supply came seven hours after the leak was discovered – and perhaps weeks after it happened. (Neighbors of the plant have told reporters they detected the chemical's odor in December.)
Complaining about desperate news coverage is to call foul on a game that is actually just playing by a different set of rules. I know that. I know, too, that there's no organized conspiracy, nor even any vague ill will, involved in how it came to be that Bridgegate continues to attract punditry while West Virginia only generates the kind of sympathetic-if-distant coverage we usually grant far-off and not too devastating natural disasters.
Bridgegate is just sexier; it features big personalities and a bold storyline. It gives reporters a chance to show off a range of pop culture references (The Sopranos, Bruce, assorted other Twitticisms!). It is taking place in the literal backyard of most national political reporters. It has very little to do with policy, or numbers, or science. Perhaps best of all, to opine about Bridgegate is to engage in a punditry wager with little or no cost, since 2016 is so very far away. Write that it's the end of Christie's career! Write that he'll be fine! No one is keeping score (truth be told, even when people keep score in punditry, nothing bad happens to the losers).
Journalists can further excuse their myopia about the lane closure controversy with the notion that they're just giving the public what they want. The story is "breaking through" because everyone can identify with those poor stuck commuters: "Traffic is a huge deal," as one writer put it. That may be the case, but don't even more people drink water?
I shouldn't be too hard on journalists, though. On the surface, the West Virginia spill just isn't as interesting or dynamic as revenge conspiracy. It's a single event with an obvious bad guy (the deliciously-named "Freedom Industries").
There's no compelling narrative, no unfolding drama, no whodunit to solve, and catastrophic environmental destruction in West Virginia, on an even larger scale than the nine counties affected by the spill, is old news. The state harvested its entire 10m acres of virgin forest between 1870 and 1920. In the past 50 years, mountaintop-removal mining has made over 300,000 acres of unfit for economically productive use, and the clean water supply has been systematically reduced by= 20% in the last 25.
I suspect there's a more subtle yet uglier motivation in how the New Jersey story beguiles us even as West Virginia toxifies.
Bridgegate as we understand right now it in no way asks us to take a look at our own lives or behavior. The questions people have about the Fort Lee lane closures take as a given that people should be able to drive to and from work minimal interference; we want to get to the bottom of "why the traffic was held up for hours?" but not, "Why are there so many people driving?"
That people identify with the drivers ("that could happen to me") and see the West Virginia chemical draught as a merely a terrible misfortune ("those poor folks") illustrates why dust-ups like Bridgegate decide elections but environmental issues continue to lag far behind as an issue voters care about, despite the growing urgency to combat climate change. We can personalize a scandal, but the effects of environmental damage happen to other people – the people of West Virginia, to be specific.
Because make no mistake: our country's national habits are at the heart of West Virginia's regional tragedy – perhaps even this specific one. We don't get much coal from West Virginia anymore, it's true – because a century of steady consumption stripped the state almost bare. (There are West Virginia mines that have been continuously excavated for over 120 years.) As coal production has shifted away from the Appalachians to Wyoming and the plains, West Virginia politicians have become increasingly desperate to make their state as attractive as possible to industry. In that context, that state authorities knew about Freedom Industries' massive stockpile of MCMH as long ago as last year and did nothing about it makes sense.
Compared to the systematic devastation of an entire region's environment, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" seems like the petty feud that it was. But my real hope isn't that we shift our focus from New Jersey to West Virginia, it's that people realize that both are scandals, and both are environmental policy stories. And they both speak to the costs of letting shortsighted, local economy goals trump more global concerns.
The traffic on the George Washington Bridge is, in part, as bad as it is because of the antiquated rail service between New York and New Jersey. The system needs the exact sort of overhaul that Christie scuttled as one of his first acts in office. And if you thought that New York bureaucrats hated the traffic Christie's cronies caused, well, they hated the congestion pricing that Bloomberg threatened to bring about in his first term even more. (Just last November, New York Governor Cuomo dismissed the idea again.) One sure way to foil traffic vigilantes of the future, after all, would be to deny them a hostage.
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The 10 most subversive women artists in history
Artemisia Gentileschi
When she was a teenager, this 17th-century baroque artist was raped by a painter. She responded by turning her art into a weapon. In Gentileschi's repeated paintings of the biblical story of Judith slaying Holofernes, the Israelite hero is helped by her muscular servant. As one woman holds down Holofernes on his bed, the other saws through his neck with a sword. Blood spurts everywhere in a sensational image of women taking revenge on patriarchy.
Hannah Wilke
In her SOS Starification Object Series (1974-82), Wilke was photographed with blobs of chewing gum stuck on to her flesh. Dotting her face and bare body, these bizarre markings resembled a modern form of tribal scarification (this was before ritualistic body modification became fashionable) and resemble vaginas. Or are they eyes? Wilke's "starification" marked her with the burden of being objectified by the male gaze.
Adrian Piper
In her Catalysis performances (1970), Piper turned herself into a human provocation in public places such as the New York subway. In one performance, she rode the subway after soaking her clothes in pungent substances for a week to make them stink. She muttered in the street, entered the elevator of the Empire State Building with a red towel stuffed in her mouth or simply made eye contact with strangers. Her purpose was to dramatise social unease and ultimately the unspoken tensions of race in America.
In the early 20th century, Georgia O'Keeffe posed nude for her lover, the modernist photographer and art impressario Alfred Stieglitz, and painted abstractions that have an explicitly vaginal beauty. Compared with some artists in this list she may seem soft, but her cussed exploration of her own body and soul mapped out a new expressive freedom for women making art in the modern age.
In photographs taken from the 1920s to 1940s, this French artist often portrays herself in male clothes and hairstyles, contemplating her own transformed image as she experiments with the fictions of gender. Cahun's pioneering art is typical of the freedom the surrealist movement gave artists to question sexual and social convention.
The labyrinthine mind of the last great surrealist envelops the spectator of her art in memories of an early 20th-century French childhood, intense secret worlds and the very interior of the body. Collapsing the masculinist art form of sculpture into something organic and ripely carnal, she is the spider of subversionweaving a web that has transformed the very nature of art.
Lyubov Popova
Art exploded in the early 20th century into the revolutionary fragmentations of cubism and its spinoffs. Popova claimed the freedom of this new art for her fractured visions of Russian life. Working on the eve of the Russian revolution, she took apart the traditional subjects of art with ruthless scientific skill. In her1915 painting The Model, a nude becomes a gigantic tower of blocks as the conventions of gender disintegrate.
Cindy Sherman
In her Untitled Film Stills, this contemporary Arcimboldo endlessly remakes her image and reimagines her identity. Sherman's insight is that the self is created by storytelling. From early black-and-white photographs in which she poses as a Hitchcock heroine in unresolved scenes from films we almost recognise, to later works that more violently transfigure her features with monster makeup, Sherman evokes the tales that shape who people become.
Does art have to be public? Does it have to be political or progressive? Woodman's haunting photographs are subversive in a quieter and stranger way. She used her art to explore a secret world. Poetic reveries in silent rooms, fleeting glimpses of a rich inner life make for an art that suggests the freedom of the introspective self.
Eva Hesse
The honeycomb yellows and urine golds of Hesse's synthetic yet organic-seeming materials make you intensely aware of possessing a body packed full of strange stuff. Where men had built statues for centuries and then arranged steel girders in the macho arrangements of minimalism, her sagging, hanging sculptures reveal other dimensions to the physical world. For Hesse, mind and body are not separated in a hierarchy. We too are stuff.
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America declared an 'unconditional war on poverty' 50 years ago, but you'd never know it
Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty for reasons both economic and moral. They are still relevant today
This 8 January marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's declaration of "unconditional war on poverty". The statement came in a state of the union address that, because of its often drab prose, has rarely drawn much praise. But a half century later, it's time to re-examine the case Johnson made in 1964 for remedying poverty in America.
In an era such as our own, when – despite a poverty rate the Census Bureau puts at 16% – Congress is preparing to cut the food stamp program and has refused to extend unemployment insurance, Johnson's compassion stands out, along with his nuanced sense of who the poor are and what can be done to make their lives better.
Johnson's 1964 ideas on how to wage a war on poverty (today a family of four living on $23,492 a year and an individual living on $11,720 a year are classified as poor) not only conflict with the current thinking of those on the right who would reduce government aid to the needy. They also conflict with the current thinking of those on the left who would make the social safety net, rather than fundamental economic change, the answer to poverty.
Johnson's approach to poverty reflects the influence of John F Kennedy and the New Deal thinking of Franklin Roosevelt, but the passion behind Johnson's call for a war on poverty has its deepest historical parallel in a figure very unlike him – the turn-of-the-century American pragmatist William James. James, in his 1906 essay, the Moral Equivalent of War, made the case for bringing the fervor we associate with war to improving civic life.
In words that might easily have been spoken by James, Johnson declared:
In the past we have often been called upon to wage war against foreign enemies which threatened our freedom. Today we are asked to declare war on a domestic enemy which threatens the strength of our nation and the welfare of our people.
On 4 December 1963, shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, Johnson wrote a letter to the American Public Welfare Association in which he spoke of launching an "attack on poverty". But over the course of 1964, it was through a series of public addresses and in championing such legislation as the Economic Opportunity Act, for which Congress, at Johnson's urging, appropriated $947m, that LBJ showed how committed he was to eradicating poverty.
At the core of Johnson's war on poverty, which he continually linked to civil rights, lay his belief that, while coming to the rescue of the poor was important, temporary relief could not be the basis of victory. "The war on poverty is not a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others," LBJ insisted. "We want to offer the forgotten fifth of our people opportunity and not doles."
For Johnson, the war on poverty was a struggle to transfer power to those in need by enabling them to stand on their own feet. Better schools, better healthcare, better job training were fundamental to Johnson's war on poverty because these measures allowed those who were once poor to compete equally. They no longer had to ask others to take pity on them.
The initial agent for achieving such change, Johnson had no doubt, was the government, and he made no apologies for government activism; as far as LBJ was concerned, government had historically played an activist role in American life. He believed he was proposing nothing the country had not done in different ways before.
In March 1964, when he formally proposed his nationwide war on poverty, Johnson told Congress:
From the establishment of public education and land-grant colleges, through agricultural extension and encouragement to industry, we have pursued the goal of a nation with full and increasing opportunities for all its citizens.
In helping people out of poverty, Johnson realized that he was making American society more egalitarian by lessening the gap between rich and poor, but he did not see the action he was taking as detrimental to the wealthy. His war on poverty was not a zero sum game in which one group's gains promised another group's losses. "Our history has proved that each time we broaden the base of abundance." Johnson argued, "we create new industry, higher production, increased earnings, and better income for all".
At a period when the economy was expanding, and polls indicated that more than 75% of Americans believed they "could trust government to do the right thing most of the time", Johnson's argument resonated with voters more readily than it would today. In the end, though, LBJ was unwilling to let his efforts depend on economics alone. He made a point of defending the moral basis of a war on poverty:
Because it is right, because it is wise.
In Johnson's eyes, the measure of a victorious war on poverty rested on achieving an America "in which every citizen shares all the opportunities of his society". By contrast, "soulless wealth", as Johnson observed during a speech at the University of Michigan, was abundance that remained inaccessible to all but a relative few. Soulless wealth typified a society divided between haves and have-nots.
We will never know how much more successful Johnson's war on poverty might have been without the impact of the Vietnam War on the American economy and American political life. Yet by 1973, just nine years after Johnson's declaration of war, poverty in America was down to 11.1%, compared to 19% when Johnson took office.
This is an achievement we have not equaled in recent years, but it is one we should learn from, especially as we continue to struggle with built-in headwinds such as a federal minimum wage of just $7.25 per hour ($15,080 annually) and the lingering effects of the Great Recession.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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Sorry, conservatives: Antarctic sea ice increase is because of weather, not climate
The predicament and subsequent rescue of 52 passengers – both tourists and scientists – on the Russian ship Academik Shokalskiy has gripped media around the world. The smooth rescue was impressive and a great relief, although the vessel itself and its crew are still stuck – and now one of the icebreakers sent to help in the rescue, the Chinese ship Xue Long, is itself stuck in the ice.
Some commentators have remarked on what they describe as the 'irony' of researchers studying the impact of a warming planet themselves being impeded by heavy ice. With some even suggesting that the situation is itself evidence that global warming is exaggerated.
In fact, the local weather patterns that brought about the rapid build up of ice that trapped the Academik Shokalskiy tell us very little about global warming. This is weather, not climate.
Regionally, climate change can vary markedly across the Earth so to detect human influences on the climate system climate scientists must consider the Earth as a whole.
What is clear is that the impact of climate change on ice at both poles is complex.
In the area where the Akademik Shokalskiy is trapped there has been an increase in sea ice extent for the year as a whole since the late 1970s, although not for the month of December (see attached graph). The amount of ice in the area can vary considerably from year to year making ship operations difficult. The December ice extent in 2011 and 2012 was much larger than the long-term mean, and the ice in 2013 has obviously been of comparable magnitude.
We have relatively short records of the extent of sea ice across the polar regions and can only accurately examine trends since sophisticated microwave instruments became available on the polar orbiting satellites in the late 1970s. However, the records do show that since that time the two polar regions have experienced very different trends in ice extent. Arctic sea ice has been declining in extent in every month of the year, but with the maximum loss of almost 14% per decade being found in September. In contrast, sea ice extent around the Antarctic has increased in every month of the year with the largest increase being almost 4% per decade in March. The contrasting nature of the changes was highlighted in September 2012 when both polar regions experienced new record extents of sea ice for the satellite era. On 16 September the Arctic sea ice extent reached a new minimum level of 3.41m sq km, beating the previous record minimum that occurred in 2007. However, in the Antarctic there was a new record maximum extent of 19.72m sq km on 24 September, exceeding the previous record of 19.59m sq km, which occurred on 24 September 2006. In September 2013 there was even more sea ice across the Southern Ocean, beating the 2012 record.
The reasons for the trends in sea ice are still being debated. However, for the Arctic it is estimated that anthropogenic forcing through the emission of greenhouse gases has contributed 50–60% of the long-term decline of Arctic sea ice. The remaining contribution is believed to come from natural variability. But in the Antarctic the reason for the increase in ice is less clear. The pattern of sea ice change around the Antarctic is dominated by a decrease to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula and an increase across the Ross Sea, which can be attributed to more storm activity between these two areas. The extent of sea ice is strongly influenced by the strength and direction of the winds and the increase in storms has given more warm, northerly flow over the Bellingshausen Sea and greater cold, southerlies over the Ross Sea. This pattern of change is consistent with the increasing temperatures observed over the Antarctic Peninsula and west Antarctica, where temperatures have risen as much as anywhere in the southern hemisphere.
It's currently not clear why there has been an increase in the number and intensity of storms over the southern South Pacific since the late 1970s. However, this area is where the ozone hole has a large impact on the atmospheric circulation and where signals of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, one of the largest climatic cycles on Earth, are felt most in the Antarctic. It's also where the greatest natural variability in atmospheric circulation is observed in the southern hemisphere, which has been attributed to the fact that the large Antarctic ice sheet is displaced slightly from the pole.
Sea ice extent has a large natural variability in both polar regions because of the amplifying effect of interactions between the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice. In the Arctic there is now increasing evidence that rising greenhouse gas emissions are playing a significant part in the loss of sea ice. However, in the Antarctic the increase in annual mean sea ice extent is only just over 1% per decade, making it impossible at present to separate natural variability from any human influence.
• Prof John Turner is leader of the Climate Variability and Modelling project at the British Antarctic Survey
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Direct your anger at the greedy rich, not 'Wolf of Wall Street' movie
Bank of America and JP Morgan's CEOs are more productive targets for rage at injustice than a Hollywood blockbuster
Greed is still pretty good. Con enough people out of millions of dollars and you'll get to live a life of hedonistic luxury where you can surround yourself with chimps on roller skates, pay women to have sex with you and enjoy midget throwing contests during slow days at the office. You might crash the odd helicopter during quaalude-fueled binges or sink the occasional yacht off the coast of Italy, but all in all, it will be a good life. You'll be the envy of many, and even if your treachery finally does bring about your downfall, the landing will be relatively soft.
So goes the basic story line of Martin Scorsese's latest film, the Wolf of Wall Street, featuring the debauched shenanigans of Jordan Belfort, a penny stock broker who swindled over $100m from thousands of investors, many of whom never recovered. The filmmaker has been criticized for glamorizing the protagonist's greed and failing to infuse the film with an Oliver Stone (director of the original greed's not really so good Wall Street flick) style message that the decent folk will prevail in the end. It's kind of odd though that so much resentment would be directed towards the filmmakers for doing what artists are supposed to do – be a witness to their time in history – rather than the real life enablers that allow the Jordan Belfort's of this world and their less ostentatious, but ultimately more deadly, counterparts to survive and thrive.
In the week since the movie's release, Scorsese has been heckled at Oscar screenings, criticized in various respectable publications for failing to use the film as a platform to showcase the suffering of Belfort's victims and admonished by the daughter of a former business associate of the self-anointed Wolf in an open letter printed in the LA Weekly. The daughter, now called Christina McDowell, after changing her last name when her con-artist father, Tom Prousalis, stole her identity to launder money, has good reason to be upset. Her family were devastated financially and otherwise by her father's ruthlessness and she has every right to be angry that guys like Belfort get to profit from their life stories while their victims wait in vain to be fairly compensated for their losses, but this is justifiable anger that is sadly misplaced.
The same week the movie opened, the very week the birth of Christ, the original champion of social justice, is celebrated, our God fearing GOP-led congress stripped 1.3 million Americans who have been unable to find work of their unemployment benefits. If there were ever victims who needed some attention shed on their plight it is those who lost their jobs and can't find another one thanks to the recession brought about by the outrageous greed and barely legal (and sometimes not legal at all) behavior of the "too big to jail" financial institutions and those who run them. By comparison guys like Belfort and Prousalis, who at least did some prison time for their crimes, are small players.
I'm not suggesting statues be erected in their honor or statuettes be awarded to those who celebrate such lives on film, but the anger expressed towards the film, its protagonist and its makers would be much better placed were it directed at those who continue to enable the fraudulent behavior of the big banks that helped wreck the economy while heaping scorn on those who are still suffering as a result. Put another way, if there's anyone who should be getting heckled at the moment it's GOP Congressman and ardent Catholic Paul Ryan – the driving force behind the benefits cuts – who loves to preach about Christianity and what a great guy the pope is (except when he goes on anti-capitalists rants of course) while practicing the opposite.
Meanwhile, as the Wolf of Wall Street (and those who told his story) are having their feet held to the flame, the man who likes to portray himself as the benign lamb of Wall Street, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, is chalking up the misdeeds with relative impunity. As David Dayen wrote recently in Salon, JP Morgan has racked up a veritable rap sheet of crimes and misdemeanors ranging from mortgage fraud to money laundering to fraudulent sales of derivatives to obstruction of justice, at least some of which the CEO could, and in a fairer world would, be held accountable.
In November, JP Morgan agreed to pay $13bn to the federal government after admitting to making bad mortgages and then inflating their value to investors. This behavior that Dimon evidently sanctioned (he is supposed to be in charge after all) is partially responsible for the housing bubble that culminated in the financial collapse that so many Americans are still reeling from. The government is conducting at least nine other probes into fraudulent and possibly criminal behavior by the bank, including its alleged practice of giving jobs to the daughters and sons of the rich and powerful in China. Despite his Annus Horribilus, however, Dimon is apparently confident enough in his current and future prosperity to risk wrecking his own living room and the Jackson Pollock painting it contains with a tennis bat.
Some of that $13bn is supposed to go towards alleviating some of the pain and suffering of the millions of Americans who lost their homes or are at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure, but it remains to be seen how efficiently and readily it will be distributed to those who most need it. A recent report by Bloomberg News revealed that Bank of America (BofA) and other big financial institutions continue to scam homeowners seeking loan modifications under the government's Home Affordable Modification Program (Hamp). Instead of helping the homeowners, the report found that BofA has continued to send qualified borrowers into foreclosure or even more expensive repayment plans all the while heaping on delay induced fees.
So there's plenty of reason to be angry at those who encourage greed or enjoy its spoils while ignoring the pain of its victims, but there are better ways to channel that anger than getting upset about a blockbuster film. True, Scorsese missed an opportunity to tell a great morality tale about the price of excess, but the kind of people whose life goal is to enrich themselves at any cost so they can pal around with chimps or fling midgets about for an afternoon's entertainment are unlikely to have been swayed by such a film anyway.
On the other hand, Scorcese might have done us all a favor by showing us how greed unchecked really plays out. If the public become less tolerant of the reckless behavior of the stealthier wolves of wall street as a result, then the movie will, at least, be worth the admission fee.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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