Acclaimed science writer James Gleick talks about data, meaning and knowledge – and his new book, The Information Here’s a paradox: we live in an “information age” and yet information is a maddeningly elusive concept. We habitually confuse it with data, on the one hand, and with knowledge on the other. And yet it’s neither. There’s an arcane mathematical discipline called “information theory” that underpins all digital communications nowadays and yet resolutely disdains to make any connection between information and meaning. It would take a brave author to pursue such an elusive quarry. Or a foolhardy one. James Gleick is an accomplished stalker of mysterious ideas. His first book, Chaos (1987), provided a compelling introduction to a new science of disorder, unpredictability and complex systems. His new book, The Information , is in the same tradition. It’s a learned, discursive, sometimes wayward exploration of a very complicated subject. The subtitle, A History, A Theory, A Flood , gives the game away. This is really three books: one is about the history of information from earliest times to the present day. It opens with a memorable, beautifully written chapter about the “talking drums” of the Congo and explains how a drum with just two tones was used to communicate complex information quickly over large distances. After that we embark on a journey through the history of writing, the rise of the dictionary, the growth of English, the origins of programming and the arrival of Samuel Morse and his amazing electric telegraph. The second part centres on the work of Claude Shannon, the American mathematical genius who in 1948 proposed a general theory of information. Shannon was the guy who coined the term “bit” for the primary unit of information, and provided a secure theoretical underpinning for electronic communications (so in a way he’s the godfather of the modern world). The trouble was that Shannon’s conceptual clarity depended on divorcing information from meaning, a proposition that to this day baffles everyone who is not an engineer. But the most startling insights in the book come when Gleick moves to explore the role of information in biology and particle physics. From the moment when James Watson and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA, molecular biology effectively became a branch of computer science. For the replication of DNA is the copying of information and the manufacture of proteins is a transfer of information – the sending of a message. And then there’s quantum mechanics, the most incomprehensible part of physics, some of whose most eminent practitioners – such as the late John Archibald Wheeler – have begun to wonder if their field might not be, after all, just about information. “It from bit” was Wheeler’s way of putting it. “Every it – every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, its very existence… from bits.” Finally, Gleick surveys the “flood” – the torrent of data and information that now engulfs us. In this section Gleick switches from history to speculation, which means that he is now in the same boat as the rest of us. This writer welcomes him aboard. John Naughton: The book has an astonishing range and I’ve learned a lot from it. It takes one into dozens of specialised fields – some of which (like quantum mechanics) are very arcane. How did you manage to do it? How many years did it take? And did you realise what you were taking on? James Gleick: I knew it was going to be a sprawling, amorphous project; I knew it would send shoots and tendrils every which way, and I didn’t know exactly how I was going to find a shape. In the end it took seven years, but I’d been thinking about it one way or another for a long time. I first heard about this baffling thing, “information theory”, from chaos scientists. In the 1990s I spent some time gathering material for a projected cultural history of the telephone – in other words, looking at the subject the wrong way round. And then, when I was immersed in my last book, about Isaac Newton, I started to feel that I was already writing about information more than, say, physics. JN: I found your account of the life and achievements of Ada Lovelace very moving. She has a pretty good claim to be recognised as the first computer programmer, and yet her story is a classic case-study in how brilliant women can be airbrushed from history, much as Rosalind Franklin was in the double helix story. It was good to see her being given her due. JG: I think of all the people who come and go in my book, she is my favourite. Worse than being airbrushed from history, she was never written in. She had a brief flash of celebrity as Byron’s daughter, but no one, with the lone exception of Charles Babbage, had a chance to glimpse her formidable mathematical powers. We can see it now in retrospect. She could never publish under her name; never belong to a professional society; never even attend university. Yet, working with Babbage as an anonymous younger sidekick, she surpassed his vision of what his proposed computing machines could do and could be. “First programmer” is apt. She was a genius. JN: The chapters I found hardest-going were the ones on randomness and particle physics – though I was much cheered up to discover that the great Richard Feynman said that nobody understands quantum mechanics. Were these the chapters that were the most difficult to write? JG: They were the most fun to write. Finally I had reached the scientific frontier; the point where the people of interest are alive and working and available for conversation. I spent time with Gregory Chaitin [an Argentine-American prodigy in both mathematics and computer science], who has a new idea every hour, and Charles Bennett [an IBM researcher famous for applying quantum physics to the process of information exchange], who showed me “Aunt Martha’s coffin” – his quantum teleportation device – buried under a pile of books and papers in a corner of his office. Hard going is OK. I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory. JN: Claude Shannon plays a central role in the book and your portrayal of him is very vivid. One thing I hadn’t known was that Shannon’s PhD was on genetics viewed in terms of symbolic logic. Was that a surprise to you? JG: A complete surprise. I knew he had written an astounding master’s thesis applying Boolean logic to electrical circuits, but I had no idea about the genetics work. I was thrilled to learn about it, because I knew the connection between information and genetics was going to be a big topic for me. And then it turned out that Shannon’s work had not the slightest influence on modern genetics – he was in a world of his own, and the thesis vanished into academic oblivion. Yet it’s a kind of intellectual story I just love. On its idiosyncratic terms Shannon’s genetics work was apparently quite brilliant. This was long before anyone had any notion of DNA. “Genes” were as mysterious and hypothetical as atoms were to the ancient Greeks. Shannon said he would “speak as though the genes actually exist”, and invented a bunch of arbitrary symbols and proceeded to work out rules for recombination and cross-breeding that we can see, in hindsight, were right on the money. Yet he never published it. JN: There’s an interesting coincidence in the fact that the two defining breakthroughs in modern communications – the transistor and Shannon’s mathematical theory of information – should have emerged from the same lab at the same time. JG: I think you know I don’t consider that a coincidence. The place was right: the research laboratory run by the world’s great communications empire [Bell Labs, the formidable R&D arm of the AT&T telephone monopoly], where all sorts of oddballs were allowed to pursue loose ends with no obvious application to the bottom line. The time was right. The first lumbering computers were walking the earth, with their big hot vacuum tubes and their Boolean circuits. Shannon had a special genius – he was obsessed with just the right motley collection of ideas needed to spawn information theory – and the transistor guys were surely special in their own ways. But these inventions were due, and willy-nilly they arrived. JN: Although Shannon’s theory was a great breakthrough, his insistence on separating information from meaning must have alienated many people. Was a desire to bridge the two one of the reasons you embarked on the project? JG: Actually, that hadn’t occurred to me at first. My plan from the outset was to look at the origins and the influence of what we now call information theory, believing, as I do, that it underpins so much of our information hardware and our information networks and, yes, our information age. But as you note, information is not knowledge. We are more painfully aware of that now than ever. In explaining Shannon’s work I kept having to emphasise his point about the irrelevance of meaning; yet we know full well that meaning is what we really care about. This loomed larger and larger. There’s a hilarious moment in 1950 in a New York hotel meeting room when Shannon tries to explain “information” to anthropologists and psychologists such as Margaret Mead and Lawrence Frank, and they’re a little outraged. Where are the humans in this picture? Where are our brains? If it’s just wires and transistors, who cares? And surely this is precisely our problem, now that information is cheap and plentiful and ubiquitous. I was heartened when I came across a comment by philosopher and historian Jean-Pierre Dupuy: “It was inevitable that meaning would force its way back in.” I made that the epigraph for my final chapter. This is our challenge, surely. JN: Is it not the case that every shift in our communications environment has provoked “overload anxiety”? I can imagine folks in Venice in 1560 complaining about the torrent of print. Or is there something different about the present? JG: I think you’re unusually empathic to imagine ancient complaints about information overload, but of course you’re right. There was Leibniz bemoaning “that horrible mass of books – which keeps on growing…” When we complain that things have never been like this, it’s good to have some perspective. And yet, things have never been like this. Information has never been so cheap; our choices have never been so numerous; the cacophony has never been quite so grand. Everyone knows this, and everyone is right. It’s why we’re fascinated, if not obsessed, with Google and Twitter and all the rest of their oddly named species. We know that information poses as many challenges as opportunities. Computing Mathematics Physics John Naughton guardian.co.uk
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Two new stingrays found in the Amazon are not only revealing much about the species but are also proving great indicators of ecological change Crocodile hunter Steve Irwin’s well-publicised death in 2006 from a stingray attack only heightened public fascination with the animals. Their stings, located on the tail, are sharp, with backward-pointing serrations and venom from mucous secretions at their bases. Most human stings result from bathers stepping on an unsuspecting stingray, innocently resting on the sea bottom, which produces a defensive reflex of the tail forward. But stingrays are not limited to saltwater. Although the Potamotrygonidae family of freshwater stingrays has been known since 1843, two remarkable new species from South America were recently described. Both are nearly circular in shape, the most round disc of any of the current tally of approximately 200 known species of stingrays. The genus was named Heliotrygon , a combination of helio – sun – and trygon, which means ray. Although the two species are new to science, specimens of the genus have shown up in the aquarium fish trade under common names such as “round” or “pancake” rays. These species have tiny eyes and live in murky waters of the central channel areas of Amazonian rivers, coming closer to shore mostly at night to feed. Even though they have reduced mouths that are located away from their snouts, they eat fish almost exclusively. You may be asking how a flat ray, with a tiny mouth located on the underside of its body, could catch fish. Using their “lateral line system”, sense organs that can detect movements and pressure changes in surrounding water, they spot their prey, thrust upward, lift the snouts and quickly open their small but very strong mouths to swallow a fish almost whole. One specimen examined by x-ray had a large catfish in its gut, spines and all. Although these rays are the last thing seen by many fish, they present no danger to us. The stings of Heliotrygon gomesi are among the smallest of all stingrays. A specimen 70cm across has a sting only about as long as the fingernail of your pinky and only one-tenth as wide, incapable of inflicting much damage. Dr Marcelo de Carvalho of the Universidade de São Paulo, one of the scientists who discovered the new species, says that the discovery highlights two important aspects of modern biodiversity science: “That we still have much to discover and that there are too few researchers devoting themselves to this type of research.” De Carvalho says that fieldwork over the past decade has led to the discovery of 15 new species in this specific stingray family. He stresses: “We’re talking here of large stingrays, up to one metre wide. There are a mere 10 research groups working on the taxonomy and diversity of sharks and rays worldwide, even though much collecting and fieldwork is needed to understand the diversity of the group. Part of the challenge is remarkable genetic diversity: no two specimens, even those collected side by side and of the same gender, size, and species, are entirely alike. This great variation has to be properly understood before we can know the true diversity of the group.” Ecologically, because stingrays have internal fertilisation and reproduce slowly compared to many freshwater fishes, they are more easily threatened by environmental degradation or illegal harvesting by the aquarium industry. “They may be good indicators of general environmental health, as top predators usually are,” says de Carvalho. “And all that rests of the shoulders of good descriptive taxonomy and biodiversity science.” Quentin Wheeler is director of the International Institute for Species Exploration, Arizona State University Zoology Wildlife Marine life Animals Quentin Wheeler guardian.co.uk
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The actor created a theatre in Jenin but was killed for his ideals He had feared for his life in the past, but Juliano Mer-Khamis foresaw no danger when he carried his one-year-old son, Jay, to his old red Citroën for the drive home from the theatre he had founded in the West Bank city of Jenin. With his son on his lap and the nanny in the passenger seat, he pulled out and then braked when he heard his name called. Bullets smashed through the car window and Mer-Khamis moved his foot off the brake. The car moved slowly forward past a United Nations depot and a pool hall before scraping to a halt against a wall. The boy was untouched; the nanny suffered a cut to her hand. But Mer-Khamis was hit by seven bullets and died shortly afterwards. The Palestinian police announced on Wednesday that they had arrested a member of Hamas for Monday’s murder. Last week, as friends and supporters of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, which Mer-Khamis ran, struggled to comprehend his death, mourners buried the 52-year-old actor next to his Jewish mother, Arna Mer, in a kibbutz in the north of Israel. Memorial meetings were held in Jenin and Haifa for a man who described himself as “100% Palestinian and 100% Jewish”. “He was aware of the danger and, although he joked about it, he was sometimes afraid,” said his partner, Jenny Nyman, who is pregnant with twins. “But he always said that he would rather die on his feet than live on his knees.” In Haifa, friends gathered at the Al-Midan Theatre, a state-funded Jewish-Arab theatre, where they delivered eulogies in Arabic and Hebrew to Mer-Khamis, who first appeared on film in the 1984 movie of John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl alongside Diane Keaton. He later became a major figure in Israeli cinema and theatre. But it will be for his efforts at the Freedom Theatre that Mer-Khamis will be mainly remembered. A project that grew out of his desire to offer artistic freedom to the youth of Jenin, it was also the resurrection of his mother’s theatre, a West Bank drama group to which she devoted much of her life. In her dying months, Mer-Khamis made a film, Arna’s Children , about her and her theatre – but in 2002, the building was destroyed during the second intifada. In 2006, with the help of Zakaria Zubeidi, a former Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade leader who had renounced violence and was given amnesty by Israel, Mer-Khamis reopened it. Speaking to the Observer last week, Nyman recalled the many difficulties Mer-Khamis had encountered in doing so. “People voiced their concerns, often politely but sometimes with firebombs,” she said. The theatre once staged an adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm , which was perceived to label the Palestinian leadership as collaborators; the building was later petrol bombed. “We had support from sheikhs who led prayers on stage, but there is no doubt that, in an oppressed society like Jenin, there are always people that are afraid of change,” Nyman added. The Freedom Theatre brought change in all sorts of ways. Mer-Khamis found that encouraging girls to take part in productions was no easy task. “We had no problem attracting boys to the theatre,” said Nyman. “But girls were more difficult. We worked hard to make it acceptable. We visited families, invited them to the theatre and we got their consent.” Mer-Khamis, whose parents’ union – that of a Jewish woman with a Christian Arab man – symbolised their vision for the people of Israel and the Arab states, soon became a fixture in Jenin. “When we came in 2006 we were afraid, but we have had no problems for years. The theatre has become part of the society. Not fully accepted, but nothing is ever fully accepted here,” said Jonatan Stanczak, one of the founders of the theatre. Last week an old woman, sitting in the street metres from where Mer-Khamis was shot, kissed the tips of her fingers to emphasise her love for him. “He was wonderful, wonderful,” she said. As she spoke, a sombre procession of mourners, carrying portraits, flowers and Palestinian flags, walked from the centre of Jenin to its refugee camp and theatre. The residents of the camp watched the group of around 60 mourners without disrespect but with no great interest, either. Supporters in Israel and the West Bank are determined that Mer-Khamis’s dream should continue. Colleagues hope to stage an international theatre festival to allow supporters from around the world to show their appreciation. Nyman is looking to the future. “Jay knows that something is wrong. I’m glad that he won’t consciously remember what happened. Now I must take care of our son and give birth to our children and get us on the right track,” she said. “I’ll probably never live in Jenin again, but I feel very strongly that his work has to be carried on. I would hate for his death to have been for nothing.” Palestinian territories Israel Theatre Conal Urquhart guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Longtime far-right ‘Patriots’ moving into the mainstream — thanks to the Tea Partiers
April 9, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Tim Steller had an interesting profile of Richard Mack in the Arizona Daily Star the other day: For years, Richard Mack wrote books and gave speeches, arguing for gun rights, sovereign states and “constitutional sheriffs.” At first, not many people listened to Mack, a two-term Graham County sheriff who lives in Safford. Many wrote him off as a radical. But that’s changing. The tea party’s nationwide emergence and Arizona’s drift to the right are bringing Mack’s ideas from the political edge into the eddies of the mainstream. Since Barack Obama’s election as president, Mack, 58, has been a hot national speaker, and some of his dearest ideas have come up in the current Legislature. A system for Arizona to “nullify” federal laws reached the floor of the state Senate before being voted down last month. Another bill would have forced federal regulators to register with the sheriff in any Arizona county where they want to work. The bill’s author, Rep. Chester Crandell of Heber, said Mack inspired him. “I think the county sheriff has that power and should be protecting the rights of the people,” Crandell said. “This is a way to send a message and say we are a sovereign state.” This is, of course, the same scheme tea-partying legislators in Montana are attempting to pass, too. And as you can see from the above video, it all emanates from Mack’s ceaseless promotion of the radical right’s extremist localism — the belief that the sheriff, and not the federal government, represent the supreme law of the land. Mack certainly didn’t invent this system. Rather, it was first promoted back in the 1960s and ’70s by the old Posse Comitatus movement, which contended that “there is no legitimate form of government above that of the county level and no higher law authority than the county sheriff. If the sheriff refuses to carry out the will of the county’s citizens:” …he shall be removed by the Posse to the most populated intersection of streets in the township and at high noon be hung by the neck, the body remaining until sundown as an example to those who would subvert the law. Not only was the Posse one of the most radical far-right organizations — it became closely associated with the racist Christian Identity movement — it was also one of the most violent, inspiring acts of “lone wolves” like Gordon Kahl as well as the radicals at the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord. It’s also the root of the sovereign citizen movement, which we’ve seen resurgent in the past couple of years as well, along with its accompanying violence and criminal plotting of violence . And now, according to Steller, Mack is getting a broad audience at various Tea Party-related gatherings — and lots of new adherents: In the last 18 months, Mack said, he has given 125 presentations, including an April 15 speech last year before thousands in Amarillo, Texas, and a December appearance at Faneuil Hall in Boston. But he’s got plans, and they could include running for office in Pima County. “Let’s not beat around the bush here,” Mack told about 25 people at the Dusenberry-River Library in the Catalina Foothills March 8. “We no longer live in a free country.” “They control our land, our air, our water, our education, our finances and now our health care,” Mack said of the federal government in a later interview. “What do I get to decide for myself? Nothing.” Of course, we pointed out the meaning of Mack’s involvement with the Tea Parties some time back — namely, he represents an increasing flow of radical-right ideas into mainstream conservatism, where they are being gobbled up like candy. And now Republican legislators are trying to enact these extremist beliefs — which are profoundly inimical to progressive ideals — into law. And no one seems to be paying it much of any mind.
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American ‘optimism expert’ who inspired prime minister fears that he got it all wrong As David Cameron’s £2m plan to measure the nation’s happiness gets under way this month, the American psychologist whose work inspired it has said he has changed his mind about the importance of being happy. One of the pioneers of positive psychology, Professor Martin Seligman insists he is not recanting the doctrine which has made him a bestselling author and world-renowned expert on optimism but just that we should be focusing less on people’s happiness and more on their ability to “flourish”. He said he was naive in the past to think wellbeing was based only on mood. “The word ‘happiness’ always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it’s subjective,” said Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Centre at the University of Pennsylvania. The prime minister has long been interested in Seligman’s work and first floated the idea of a “happiness index” in 2005. When he was in Downing Street Tony Blair considered the idea but dismissed it as “too flaky” and Cameron has been criticised for focusing on wellbeing as a distraction from the economy. He has admitted that measuring happiness could be seen as “woolly” and “impractical” but insists he wants a gross domestic happiness scale to become as reliable an indicator of a country’s progress as its economic output. Now the Office of National Statistics has four happiness questions in this year’s annual Integrated Household Survey which will be sent out to 200,000 British homes this month. Seligman, who has been in touch with the British government over his methods, said he welcomed the move on “both on scientific grounds and on political grounds”. But he added that the notion of what made people happy had to be rethought. He said he has become increasingly frustrated with the perception of what he called “happyology” and has written a new book called Flourish , which will be released in the UK next month. “I wanted to be much clearer that this was much more than a happyology. What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice, they want meaning. An interesting example is that there is quite a bit of evidence that says people’s mood isn’t as good once they have children. If that were all people were interested in, we should have been extinguished a long time ago,” he told Psychologies magazine in an interview to be published next week. Even depressed people, he said, can flourish. “I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn’t very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity. “When positive emotion was more central to your ideas, one problem was the evidence that most people have a ‘set point’ or ‘set range’ for their mood, meaning that whatever they do or whatever happens to them, they tend to revert to a certain level of happiness.” It was while president of the American Psychological Association in 1998 that Seligman began to promote the idea that psychology should be about creating better mental health. He is involved in a project with the US Army to increase levels of resilience and decrease mental health problems among soldiers and there is enormous interest in what positive psychology could achieve in schools. Flourish: A New Understanding Of Happiness And Well-Being – And How To Achieve Them by Martin Seligman is published on 12 May. Health policy Health & wellbeing Health Psychology Tracy McVeigh guardian.co.uk
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Writer and critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali on her nomadic life and her ejection from Holland “All my life I have been a nomad,” writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the beginning of her second memoir, the appropriately titled Nomad . Often when people make this kind of statement, they’re speaking metaphorically or with a certain melodramatic exaggeration. In Hirsi Ali’s case, her geographical and cultural shifts have been many, profound and life-changing. She spent her first eight years in war-torn Somalia, then lived under virtual house arrest in Saudi Arabia, before being thrown out to Ethiopia, then in turn to Kenya. From there, she was supposed to move to Canada in an arranged marriage, but on the flight there she took a detour to Holland, where she gained asylum. As she studied and embraced the Dutch way of life, she gradually cast off her tribal attitudes and Islamic beliefs. With the 9/11 attacks, she decided she was no longer a Muslim and became an increasingly outspoken critic of the religion she was born into. Within a few years, she required police protection and after the film-maker Theo van Gogh, with whom she shot a feminist critique of Islam, was slaughtered in the street, she was forced into hiding. Finally, having become a Dutch MP, she was persuaded to relocate to the US when her own government revoked her citizenship and her neighbours, fearful of terrorism, gained her eviction under human rights law. The continual uprooting would be enough to disorientate and dispirit even the most stable of minds. Then there’s the added inconvenience of being the subject of repeated death threats (at one stage in Holland, she says, the police were uncovering three or four plots a week on her life). But she seems almost serenely relaxed when we meet in a Soho restaurant. “I am able to adapt,” she says. “Sometimes, I think it’s because of my early childhood training, when each move felt like a trauma. But there was a period of extreme pain and mental anguish in 2006 [when she was effectively forced out of Holland] and the way I dealt with it was by telling myself that it wasn’t the end of the world. The future seemed much more uncertain when I left Kenya to come to Holland.” None the less, she feels bitter about how the Dutch government, which had encouraged her to speak out, removed her police protection. “I thought that was disgusting because, indirectly, it’s setting you up for murder.” For the past year or so, she’s been going out with the historian Niall Ferguson. She was shocked to see the British press coverage about their relationship. “So I asked my publishers, what’s this about? They said, ‘It’s not you. He’s the one who’s a celebrity.’” Ayaan Hirsi Ali Islam Religion Niall Ferguson Andrew Anthony guardian.co.uk
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David Puttnam urges David Cameron to back ‘warm words’ with support for creative industries Britain’s economic wellbeing hangs on the government backing up its professed admiration for the arts with cash and commitment, according to Lord Puttnam. Speaking on the eve of giving a major speech in London about the value of the arts, the leading film producer and Labour peer said a viable financial future for Britain was wrapped up with the success of the country’s creative and entertainment industries. “I am not despairing, but there is a real danger we might undo the work of the last few years. There is that real possibility,” he said. “We have no chance of an economic revival without a full understanding of the role that creativity plays. It is warm words and apple pie at the moment.” Puttnam, 70, who first came to fame in the late 1970s and early 1980s when he produced hit films such as Bugsy Malone , Midnight Express and Chariots of Fire, and who is a former chairman of the National Film and Television School, said he wished he could talk to the prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer and the culture ministers together to test their joint resolve on the arts. “I am fed up of just hearing about how important the creative economy is. We all say that. What I would like to know is: do David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey really mean what they say about this?” Parliament has what Puttnam calls a “benign indifference” to the arts. “In the House of Lords, the same 15 people turn up to discuss the sector every time. Most members, I am sure, think of it as a good thing, something they might go to once a fortnight. But do they realise what an economic driver it is?” He also argues that the conservative instincts of many Tory politicians often go against the grain of creativity. Artistic endeavour, he says, always involves looking at something from a new or challenging perspective. “What the arts cause you to do is to reflect on your own experience and on the experience of others. The very act involves having your assumptions challenged. Conservatism is essentially trying to make people feel comfortable and not very challenged. It is not part of their ethos to trouble people too deeply with anything,” he said. Puttnam believes his experience working with organisations such as the Royal Opera House, Channel 4 and The Sage in Gateshead mean he has a clear sense of how long it takes to build up a useful creative institution: “It can take five years or longer. And we should not be taking funding and support away.” He also queried the viability of the new emphasis on private philanthropy. “There are two real problems with relying on individual philanthropists. First, they are usually looking to attach their money to success, so they are trawling for successes most of the time. And second, the fact is that 90% of philanthropic donations go to London. Getting things to happen outside London is bloody hard.” The difficulty, he said, is that outside the capital there are fewer wealthy local philanthropists around. “It is a question of the number of people you can talk to. In the context of Cornwall it might be just four people, in the north-east it might be half a dozen.” Puttnam invited the coalition government to convince him this spring that it appreciates the importance of the creative sector. “If they really believe what they say, there are some serious steps they could take. And if they don’t believe it, there are going to be some real consequences for this country.” Puttnam is to speak tomorrow evening at St Ethelburga’s, Bishopsgate, as part of a series of six talks run by the theatre company Jericho House , in collaboration with University College London. Arts funding Arts policy Vanessa Thorpe guardian.co.uk
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Barack Obama warns that vital programmes will suffer after US federal budget deal between Democrats and Republicans Barack Obama warned Americans yesterday that they faced painful times ahead after Democrats and Republicans struck a deal that would bring in the biggest annual spending cuts in the country’s history. The last-minute agreement averted the threat of a government shutdown that would have brought chaos – but it also removed $38bn (£23bn) of spending intended for important federal programmes. “Some of the cuts we agreed to will be painful. Programmes [that] people rely on will be cut back. Needed infrastructure projects will be delayed. I would not have made these cuts in better circumstances,” the president said in his weekly radio address yesterday. However, he welcomed the agreement and said that the country had to learn to live within its financial means. “Reducing spending while still investing in the future is just common sense. It is what families do in tough times. They sacrifice where they can, even if it’s hard, to afford what is really important,” he said. Though the president struck a conciliatory tone, the period leading up to the agreement had resulted in a remarkable spectacle of political infighting and squabbling that looked likely to bring the federal government to a grinding halt for the first time since 1994. Emboldened by their victory in the 2010 mid-term elections, and propelled by their Tea Party base, the Republicans in Congress had refused to pass the 2011 budget unless it introduced billions of dollars of cuts. Leading Republicans had wanted far more cuts than the $38bn eventually agreed. Democrats fought back, especially as the eventual sticking point appeared to focus, not so much on spending, but more on federal funding around social issues such as abortion. As the midnight deadline for a deal loomed on Friday, it appeared that neither side was able reach a compromise. But with around an hour to go, Republicans backed away from their demands for spending reductions in areas opposed by social conservatives, and reached an agreement to keep the government open. Many senior Republicans had urged the party’s leadership to avoid closing the government because they feared a repeat of 1994 – when a Republican-led shutdown turned voters against the party allowing Bill Clinton to win re-election as president in 1996. Though the central functions of government would have continued in the event of a shutdown, hundreds of thousands of workers would have been laid off, national parks would have shut and members of the military serving in wars abroad would not have been paid. Just the threat of a shutdown last week had slowed much vital government work to a crawl. John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, said that the agreed cuts would eventually help boost the economy, which has struggled to create jobs even as growth rates recover from the recession. “This has been a lot of discussion and a long fight. But we fought to keep government spending down because it really will, in fact, help create a better environment for job creators in our country,” he said. His opponent in the talks, Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader, appeared less pleased, but was relieved that an agreement was reached. “We didn’t do it at this late hour for drama. We did it because it has been hard to arrive at this point,” Reid said. That certainly had been true just hours before, when Reid described Republican efforts to strip spending away from the Planned Parenthood organisation as “indefensible” and “truly shameful”. But those efforts failed, as Obama acknowledged. “[We] prevented this important debate being overtaken by politics and unrelated disagreements on social issues,” he said. The deal was agreed just after midnight. It will be voted on this week. When it passes, the agreement will ensure that the government is funded through to the end of the fiscal year. However, battles over spending are likely to continue, especially as the 2012 presidential election draws closer. Republican leaders have vowed to push for deeper cuts and a roll back of government spending. The debate will form much of the political battleground of the year ahead. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman who has emerged as a leading Republican figure seeking radical cuts, has described the scrap over the budget as “the first bite of the apple”. US federal government shutdown Barack Obama John Boehner Republicans Democrats Obama administration US economy Paul Harris guardian.co.uk
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WikiLeaks founder defends organisation in his first formal public appearance since being arrested over sexual assault allegations WikiLeaks is more accountable than democratically elected governments because it accepts donations from members of the public, Julian Assange has claimed, in his first formal public appearance since being arrested in December following accusations of rape and sexual assault. Questioned at a public debate about the whistleblowing organisation’s own transparency, Assange told an audience of 700 people, many of them supporters: “We are directly supported on a week-to-week basis by you. You vote with your wallets every week if you believe that our work is worthwhile or not. If you believe we have erred, you do not support us. If you believe we need to be protected in our work, you keep us strong. “That dynamic feedback, I say, is more responsive than a government that is elected after sourcing money from big business every four years.” The WikiLeaks founder, who is currently appealing against his extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault, told the audience at a packed debate organised by the New Statesman and the Frontline Club that whistleblowing was essential in a democracy because “the only way we can know whether information is legitimately kept secret is when it is revealed”. He cited the examples of Vietnam and “the disaster that was the Iraq war”, saying that if whistleblowers had had the courage to speak up earlier about both conflicts, “bloodbaths” could have been avoided. He said he “could speak for hours” about the impact of the publication of leaked US embassy cables, much of it through the Guardian, and that leak’s positive impact. The Hindu newspaper had in recent weeks published 21 front pages based on so-called “cablegate” revelations, he said, leading to the Indian government walking out four times and a growing anti-corruption movement in the country. But the political commentator Douglas Murray, director of the centre for social cohesion, challenged Assange over the website’s sources of funding, its staffing and connections with the Holocaust denier Israel Shamir, who has worked with the site. “What gives you the right to decide what should be known or not? Governments are elected. You, Mr Assange are not.” Murray also challenged the WikiLeaks founder over an account in a book by Guardian writers David Leigh and Luke Harding, in which the authors quote him suggesting that if informants were to be killed following publication of the leaks, they “had it coming to them”. Assange repeated an earlier assertion that the website “is in the process of suing the Guardian” over the assertion, and asked if Murray would like to “join the queue” of organisations he was suing. The Guardian has not received any notification of such action from WikiLeaks or its lawyers. Jason Cowley, the editor of the New Statesman and chair of the debate, interjected to ask: “How can the great champion of open society be using our libel laws to challenge the press?” The WikiLeaks founder was obliged to leave before responding to all the questions in order to comply with the curfew conditions of his bail. WikiLeaks’ lawyer Mark Stephens could not be reached for comment. Asked after the debate whether he could shed any light on the supposed legal action, WikiLeaks spokesman Kristin Hrafnsson said “not really”. WikiLeaks Julian Assange Esther Addley guardian.co.uk
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Click here to view this media MSNBC stayed on the air to do some live coverage on the negotiations by the White House, John Boehner and Harry Reid to avoid a government shutdown. As John already noted, the President tried to put a “happy face” on this during his speech tonight. I’m really disgusted with the fact that he’s validating Republican talking points on the deficit and our debt and the fact that making cuts to our budget in the wrong places is only going to make our already fragile economy worse. Lawrence O’Donnell asked Chris Hayes about the statement coming out of Nancy Pelosi’s office which he read on the air. She commends the President for his hard work and perseverance. The then says, House Democrats look forward to viewing the components of the final funding measure. The American people’s top priority is creating jobs. As O’Donnell noted, Pelosi’s statement means that this budget compromise is not going to sail through the House with all of the Democratic support John Boehner might want. As Chris Hayes noted, the Democratic minority was not even part of these negotiations, which isn’t really that surprising given their numbers right now. But as Chris Hayes pointed out, even Rep. James Clyburn who’s in a leadership position in the House could not tell him earlier just what programs are going to be cut. Hayes is exactly right when he says where these cuts are coming from and who’s shoulders they’re resting on really matters, and Nancy Pelosi was just articulating that it does matter where these cuts are coming from. Then we move onto Howard Fineman who gave us the Villagers’ view of what the White House’s political game might be with the President deciding it was a good idea politically to be praising this deal with Republicans. And as Howard noted, a lot of Republicans in the House are not going to be crazy about voting for this deal as well. This passing is likely going to depend on some Democrats in the House voting for it as well. Whether Boehner can get enough of them to help him pass this remains to be seen. Fineman laid out what the White House is counting on here: FINEMAN: One other thing I would say is this. I’m fascinated by President Barack Obama’s ability to seem to be pushed in the places politically he wants to be. Ezra’s right that in terms of stimulus, in terms of macro-economic theory, this runs totally against the grain of Democratic liberal traditions. But politically, this is where Barack Obama wants to be. He wants to be the budget cutter. He has an unerring instinct for the middle of the political spectrum, the middle of the political conversation generally among independent voters right now, which is about budget cutting, so politically he’s making the gamble that he’s moved to the right political place and that economically, the economy is recovering fast enough now, we’ve had good growth, job growth numbers in the last couple months. He’s making a bet that those job growth numbers will continue and whatever stimulus is removed by this will not adversely affect the economy enough to counter balance what he thinks is a smart move to the center. And he looks like he’s been pushed there, but politically that’s where he wants to be. If the Obama administration honestly thinks throwing their base under the bus again during this budget fight is good for them politically, I’d like to have a little of what they’re smoking. Democrats in Wisconsin have figured out that if you stand with your base, your base is going to support you and be enthusiastic with that support. That’s apparently something that’s been lost on this administration.
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