Exceptional And Unexceptional America
ANDREW SULLIVAN THE DAILY DISH The Atlantic

Glenn Greenwald, in that way he has, asks the toughest question about American exceptionalism. Yes, it's clear Obama believes in the unique role of the US in global politics, and world history, despite the Big Lie from Romney et al. But do we all mean the same thing when we talk of this idea? And is this more than mere national solipsism and myth?

It's easy to see where Romney, for example, gets his belief. Mormonism is the only all-American religion, placing Jesus in America itself ("I just got crucified, you guys"). But for Christians, the notion of God preferring one land-mass or population, apart from the Jewish people from whom the Messiah came, is obviously heretical. As a Catholic, I see no divine blessing for any country, and the notion that God would make such worldly distinctions strikes me as surreal as it did when I first wrapped my head around the phrase "Church of England". If God is God, one island on one planet in a minor galaxy is surely the same as any other, and the truth about our universe surely cannot be reduced to one country's patriotism. Yes, we can ask, as Lincoln did, for God's blessing. But seeking God's blessing is not the same as being God's country - with all the hubristic aggression that can lead to.

Some Straussians see Lincoln as the Second Founder and the abolition of slavery as the return of the West to natural rights. And it certainly seems true that in Lincoln's words and America's example, key ideas about human equality and dignity gained momentum - and you can hear those ideas today in the mouths of a new Arab generation, in a culture so alien to our own it is close to impossible to understand in its complexity. What deeper proof that these ideas are universal and true?

But this also reveals the limits of American exceptionalism. If America's ideals are universal, they cannot be reduced to the ownership of one country. And that country's actual history - as opposed to Bachmannite mythology - is as flawed as many others. Why, after all, did America need a Second Founding under Lincoln - almost a century after it was born? Which other advanced country remained so devoted to slavery until the late nineteenth century? Which other one subsequently replaced slavery with a form of grinding apartheid for another century? Besides, much of the thought that gave us the American constitution can be traced back to European thinkers, whether in Locke or Montesquieu or the Enlightenment in general. Seeing America as the sole pioneer of human freedom is to erase Britain's unique history, without which America would not exist. It is to erase the revolutionary ideas of the French republics. It's historically false.

But was the discovery of America some kind of divine Providence? The Puritans certainly thought so. And the blessing of a vast continental land mass with huge resources is certainly rare in human history. But, of course, that land mass was available so easily because of the intended and unintended genocide of those who already lived there - which takes the edge off the divine bit, don't you think? Call me crazy (and they do) but my concept of God does not allow for God's blessing of genocide as a means for one country's hegemony over the earth.

This is not to say that America doesn't remain, by virtue of its astonishing Constitution, a unique sanctuary for human freedom. We are freer here in terms of speech than in most other advanced countries, cowed by p.c. laws and restrictions. We are freer here in labor and capital than most other countries. To feel pride in this is natural. It is why I love this place and yearn to be one of its citizens. And the vast wealth of an entire continent, unleashed by freedom's flourishing, gave this land of liberty real and awesome global power, which it used to vanquish the two great evils of the last century - Nazism and Communism. This is the noble legacy so many now seek to perpetuate, with good intentions and benign hearts, despite the disastrous and costly interventions of the last decade.

But as the 20th Century wore on, this kind of power had its usual effect, and the establishment of a massive global military machine, as Eisenhower so presciently noted, created the risk of a permanent warfare sustained by domestic interests. Throw into the mix a bevy of intellectuals busy constructing rationales for a uni-polar world - on the neocon right and the neoliberal left - and we slowly became, at best, the indispensable nation and at worst, a benign imperial bully.

In other words, America's ideals are not unique to America, and America's success led it to the same temptations of great powers since ancient times. America's exceptional freedom and exceptional wealth did not exempt it from unexceptional human nature or the unexceptional laws of history. To believe anything else is to engage in nationalist idolatry. In retrospect, Vietnam was a form of madness brought on by paranoia. In Iraq, America actually presided over 100,000 civilian deaths as it failed to perform even minimal due diligence in invading and occupying another country (while barely a few years later, we invoked - with no irony or even memory - the risk of mass murder as a reason to invade another country). And US forces are still there - and the same alliance that gave us the Libya campaign will surely soon be arguing for extending their presence as the Potemkin democracy slowly collapses. In Afghanistan, the graveyard of so many empires, we are busy sending drones to hit targets with inevitable civilian casualties in a war that has no end, no discernible goal, and has now lasted longer than any war in the country's history. When America finds itself in wars where it can accidentally kill nine children gathering firewood, it seems somewhat abstract to talk uncritically of America's moral superiority. And when America has also crossed the line into legalized torture, and refuses to acknowledge or account for it, let alone hold the war criminals responsible, it has lost the moral standing to dictate human rights to the rest of the world.

Obama had a chance to turn this around.

He did end the active torture of prisoners of war. He promised to end the war in Iraq, to close Gitmo and to reframe America's relationship to the world. But he refused to bring the torturers of the last administration to justice, thereby effectively withdrawing from the Geneva Conventions. We remain in Iraq, we have much more aggressive war in Afghanistan, and Gitmo is still open. The kind of humiliations we once inflicted on prisoners of war are now inflicted on American citizens in custody, as in the case of Bradley Manning. And with all this still on our plate, Obama has just - unilaterally - committed America to an intervention in a third civil war in a third Muslim country, with the grave risk of our taking responsibility for another effort at nation-building abroad, when nation-fixing at home was the reason he was elected.

America is exceptional in so many ways. But when we use that exceptionalism to violate our own values, and to meddle in places we have no business or interest meddling in, then, in some ways, we are attacking that very exceptionalism, and ignoring its real power - the power of example and restraint, the belief that freedom can only be won by the people seeking it - not by those seeking to impose their ideals onto a recalcitrant world.

The glib hubris of the Libyan intervention is a sign that the change we hoped for really has morphed into the wet military dreams of neoconservatism and the utopian notion of the US as the rescuer of all those subjected to tyranny we believe we can opportunistically save - for a few days or weeks. What I see here is far from exceptional. It is the routine pattern of the rise and fall of all republics that become empires. It is what happened to Rome and Spain and Britain: Success, over-reach, hubris, bankruptcy and decline. And the withering of the sinews of a republic's body - as in the supine, divided, incompetent Congress, and a court so deferent to the emperor's unrestricted power in waging war wherever he pleases.

In this, especially with this Libya clusterfuck, Obama reverted to embracing the forces he was elected to resist and restrain. One appreciates the difficulty of this and the horrible moral dilemma of Benghazi; and I still hope for success - beause I see no sane alternative to Obama anywhere and no one can hope that the monster Qaddafi stays in power. But the Libya decision was a deep break with the essential argument for the Obama presidency - and that break is one that the Obamaites seemed not to grasp in their insular, secret and arrogant decision-making process. I fear it has already profoundly weakened the president's credibility and strength - and will become as big a burden to him as Iraq was to Bush. He now appears not only more distant from his campaign promises - but also more incoherent. More important, it is impossible to sustain the image of this president as the antidote to Bush when, in picking another Muslim civil war to intervene in - however differently frame - he seems to be Bush-lite.

For those of us who wanted him - and still want him - to succeed, it is a crushing disappointment. Even if success emerges, this capitulation to the very strains that took the US into the ditch of 2008 is a form of pragmatism too far.

Indiana whiz kid with Asperger's, age 12, pursues astrophysics research
From The Indianapolis Star

INDIANAPOLIS – When Jacob Barnett first learned about the Schrodinger equation for quantum mechanics, he could hardly contain himself.

For three straight days, his little brain buzzed with mathematical functions.

From within his 12-year-old, mildly autistic mind, there gradually flowed long strings of plusses, minuses, funky letters and upside down triangles — a tapestry of complicated symbols that few can understand.

He grabbed his pencil and filled every sheet of paper before grabbing a marker and filling up a dry erase board that hangs in his bedroom. With a single-minded obsession, he kept on, eventually marking up every window in the home.

Strange, say some.

Genius, say others.

But entirely normal for Jacob, a true child prodigy.

"Whenever I try talking about math with anyone in my family," he says, "they just stare blankly."

So do many of his older classmates at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who marvel at seeing this scrawny little kid in the front row of the calculus-based physics class he has been taking this semester.

Elementary school couldn't keep Jacob interested. And college courses at IUPUI have only served to awaken a sleeping giant.

Just a few weeks shy of his 13th birthday, Jake, as he's often called, is starting to move beyond the level of what his professors can teach.

In fact, his work is so strong and his ideas so original, he's being courted by a top-notch East Coast research center. IUPUI is interested in him moving from the classroom into a funded researcher's position.

"We have told him that after this semester ... enough of the book work. You are here to do some science," said IUPUI physics professor John Ross, who vows to help find some grant funding to support Jacob and his work.

"If we can get all of those creative juices in a certain direction, we might be able to see some really amazing stuff down the road."

Teenage college student?

Developer of his own original theory on quantum physics?

Paid researcher at 13?

This is not what Jacob's parents expected from a child whose first few years were spent in silence.

Autism, Asperger's, genius?

Because he was diagnosed with a mild form of autism at the age of 2, it was natural for some to suspect that Jacob Barnett might be a savant, a condition made famous in movies like "Rainman." But experts interviewed by the Star say it's more likely that Jacob actually had traits of a child with autism or Asperger's disease.

"Oh my gosh, when he was 2, my fear was that he would never be in our world at all," said Kristine Barnett, 36, Jacob's mother.

"He would not talk to anyone. He would not even look at us."

Child psychologists assessed Jacob at the time and diagnosed behavioral characteristics of a borderline autistic child. He was impaired, they said, and had difficulty showing emotion and interacting with others.

"My biggest fear," his mom said last week, with tears welling up in her eyes, "was that he had lost the ability to say I love you to us."

By age 3, Jacob was the focus of a more intense evaluation from a team of psychologists, therapists and a diagnostic teacher.

Their report indicated that while Jacob continued to struggle with social activities and physical development, he was showing signs of academic skills that were above his age level.

Diagnosis: Asperger's syndrome, a somewhat milder condition related to autism.

After hearing this, Jacob's parents decided to pay closer attention to the things their first-born son was doing — rather than the things he was not.

For example, Jacob often recited the alphabet — forward and then backward. He used Q-tips to create vivid geometrical shapes on the living room floor. He solved 5,000 piece puzzles (rather quickly). And he once soaked in a road atlas and ended up memorizing every highway and license plate prefix.

And perhaps most amazingly, he could recite the mathematical constant Pi out to 70 digits.

"I'm at 98 now," Jacob said, interrupting his mom during an interview.

And then, a week later, he was up to 200 digits after the decimal point — forward and backward.

The Barnetts decided it was time to follow Jacob's lead, adopting a method that some parents of autistic children use — floor-time therapy — to help foster developmental growth. They let their children focus intently on subjects they like, rather than try to conform them to "normal" things.

For Jacob, that meant astronomy. As a 3-year-old, he loved looking at a book about stars, over and over again.

So off they went on a tour of the Holcomb Observatory and Planetarium at Butler University.

Kristine Barnett will never forget the day.

"We were in the crowd, just sitting, listening to this guy ask the crowd if anyone knew why the moons going around Mars were potato shaped and not round," she recalls. "Jacob raised his hand and said, 'Excuse me, but what are the sizes of the moons around Mars?'."

The lecturer answered and "Jacob looked at him and said the gravity of the planet ... is so large, that (the moon's) gravity would not be able to pull it into a round shape."

Silence.

"That entire building ... everyone was just looking at him, like, who is this 3-year-old?"

After that, the Barnetts began to feed Jacob's hunger for knowledge, through more books and more visits to the planetarium. By the time he was 8, he got permission to sit in on an advanced astronomy class at IUPUI.

Meanwhile, his math skills were reaching astronomical levels.

By the time he was in fifth-grade, Jake had become bored with elementary math.

He was coming home from school quiet, huddling in a safe space in the house and starting to show signs of withdrawing.

"I was really afraid we were going to lose him back into the world he was in when he was 2," said his mom.

That did not happen to Jacob, thanks in part to a third psychological evaluation done nearly two years ago that showed that this fifth-grader was not regressing, but was simply bored and needed to be stimulated — in a very big way.

As in dropping out of school.

"Indeed, it would not be in Jacob's best interest to force him to complete academic work that he has already mastered," said clinical neurophysiologist Carl S. Hale of Merrillville, Ind., in a report provided by the Barnetts.

"He needs work at an instructional level, which currently is a post college graduate level in mathematics, i.e., a post master's degree. In essence, his math skills are at the level found in someone who is working on a doctorate in math, physics, astronomy and astrophysics."

Encouraged by this new assessment, the Barnetts made the tough decision to enroll Jacob in IUPUI's early college entrance program that caters to gifted and talented kids — although, typically they are advanced high schoolers, not 12-year-old whiz kids.

"You could tell right off the bat, his performance has been outstanding," said professor Ross, who at age 46 with a doctorate from Boston University, has never seen a kid as smart as Jacob.

"When he asks a question, he is always two steps ahead of the lecture," Ross said. "Everyone in the class gets quiet. Poor kid ... he sits right in the front row and they all just look at him."

Jacob is driven by mom or dad from his home in Hamilton County to IUPUI's campus, where he attends classes a few days each week. In between classes, he spends time at the Honors College lounge, where he has become a go-to guy for much older classmates needing tutoring.

"A lot of people come to him for help when they don't understand a physics problem," said Wanda Anderson, his class partner. "A lot of people think a genus is hard to talk to, but Jake explains things that would still be over their head."

Despite this new experience, his parents insist that Jacob remain close with his friends in Westfield.

He likes playing video games ("Guitar Hero" and "Halo Reach" are his current favorites). He plays basketball with friends, has a girlfriend and recently attended his first dance.

A normal kid.

But then, late at night, when the TV is off, the homework is done and everyone in the house is sleeping — the numbers start to percolate again.

They percolate so much that he has trouble sleeping at night.

"A lot keeps me awake," he said. "I scare people."

The numbers that keep him from snoozing are the same that led him to develop his own theory of physics — an original work that proposed a "new expanded theory of relativity" and takes what Einstein developed even further.

His mom decided to send a video of Jacob explaining his theory to the Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton University— one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry.

That's where astrophysics professor Scott Tremaine does his work. Tremaine is an expert in the evolution of planetary systems, comets, black holes, galaxies.

In a letter back to the Barnetts, Tremaine confirmed the brilliance.

"I'm impressed by his interest in physics and the amount that he has learned so far," Tremaine wrote in an e-mail, provided by the family. "The theory that he's working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics.

"Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize."

Contacted by the Star, Tremaine confirmed the exchange of notes.

"I have seen a YouTube video in which Jake describes his theory and I have spoken with his mother and corresponded with both her and Jake by e-mail," said Tremaine. "I hope that Jake continues his interest in physics and mathematics in the future."

Blindsided by Ferocity Unleashed by a Fault

By KENNETH CHANG NY TIMES
On a map of Japan that shows seismic hazards, the area around the prefecture of Fukushima is colored in green, signifying a fairly low risk, and yellow, denoting a fairly high one.

But since Japan sits on the collision of several tectonic plates, almost all of the country lies in an earthquake-risk zone. Most scientists expected the next whopper to strike the higher-risk areas southwest of Fukushima, which are marked in orange and red.

“Compared to the rest of Japan, it looks pretty safe,” said Christopher H. Scholz, a seismologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, referring to the area hit worst by the quake on March 11. “If you were going to site a nuclear reactor, you would base it on a map like this.”

Records kept for the past 300 years indicated that every few decades, part of the Japan trench, an offshore fault to the east of Fukushima, would break, generating an earthquake around magnitude 7.5, perhaps up to magnitude 8.0. While earthquakes that large would be devastating in many parts of the world, the Japanese have diligently prepared for them with stringent building codes and sea walls that are meant to hold back quake-generated tsunamis.

Shinji Toda, a professor of geology at Kyoto University in Japan, said a government committee recently concluded that there was a 99 percent chance of a magnitude-7.5 earthquake in the next 30 years, and warned there was a possibility for an even larger magnitude-8.0 quake.

So much for planning. Although Japan’s foresight probably saved tens of thousands of lives, it could not prevent the vast destruction of a magnitude-9.0 temblor, which releases about 30 times as much energy as a magnitude-8.0 quake. It was the largest ever recorded in Japan, and tied for fourth largest in the world since 1900. Thirty-foot tsunamis washed over the sea walls and swept inland for miles. The death toll is expected to be more than 20,000, and nearly 500,000 are now in shelters.

“I was surprised,” Dr. Toda said. “Nobody expected magnitude 9.”

This was not the first time scientists have underestimated the ferocity of an earthquake fault. Many were also caught by surprise by the magnitude-9.1 quake in 2004 off Sumatra, which set off tsunamis radiating across the Indian Ocean, killing more than 200,000 people.

Sometimes, scientists are blindsided by earthquakes because they occur along undiscovered faults. The deadly earthquakes in New Zealand this year; in Haiti last year; in Northridge, Calif., in 1994; and in Santa Cruz, Calif., in 1989 all happened along faults that scientists were unaware of until the ground shook.

“It’s shameful, but we’ve barely scratched the surface,” said Ross Stein, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey. In California, for instance, scientists have cataloged 1,400 faults, yet for smaller earthquakes — magnitude 6.7 or less — about one in three still occur on previously unknown faults.

“Humbling,” Dr. Stein said.

That raises a worrisome question: How many major quakes are lurking in underestimated or unknown faults?

The basic dynamics of earthquakes have been understood for decades. Earth’s crust is broken into pieces — tectonic plates — which slide and collide. But the sliding is not always smooth. When the plates stick together, they begin to buckle. Stress builds until the ground breaks and jumps, releasing energy in the form of vibrations: an earthquake. Not surprisingly, places close to plate boundaries are beset by earthquakes, while those far from the boundaries are not earthquake-prone.

The largest earthquakes occur in subduction zones, places where an ocean plate collides with and slides under a continental plate, particularly around the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
But some subduction zones seemed to produce more large earthquakes than others. One explanation was offered in 1980, when Hiroo Kanamori of the California Institute of Technology and Larry J. Ruff, now at the University of Michigan, published a paper that said giant earthquakes occurred more often along ocean faults where the subducting ocean plates were geologically young. The younger plates, like those off Alaska and Chile, were warmer, less dense and harder to push down into the Earth’s mantle, their thinking went. Meanwhile, the older, colder and denser ocean plates like those off Java and the Marianas trench in the Pacific would sink more easily and not produce the giant catastrophic quakes.

And yet the Pacific plate off Japan is 130 million years old, one of the oldest, and it generated a magnitude-9.0 counterexample. “It is not nearly as straightforward as I thought in the beginning,” Dr. Kanamori said.

Dr. Scholz of Columbia said the recent quake in Japan fit with a theory that he and Jaime Campos of the University of Chile developed in 1995. By their theory, the colliding tectonic plates off Fukushima were stuck, and should have been producing earthquakes. But the absence of spectacular earthquakes in the near historic record disagreed with their theory, and led Dr. Scholz to believe that something unknown was relieving the stress.

“Now we know we were wrong about that” and right in the first place, he said. “It does agree with the theory.”

Dr. Scholz said that patches of the Pacific plate off Fukushima become stuck as the plate moves under Japan. In the more modest earthquakes of the past 300 years, just one patch would break free. This time, he said, the patches ruptured together, producing a more cataclysmic quake. “The past 300 years, that hasn’t happened,” Dr. Scholz said. “So if you’re going to use the past history to extrapolate the future, the last 300 years wouldn’t have predicted the recent earthquake.”

Most regions of the world have less historical data than Japan, making it even harder to judge the earthquake patterns. Haiti is a prime example.

Even the notion of an earthquake fault — a long crack in the earth — is not quite as certain as it once was. Near Landers, Calif., seismologists had identified three faults, each capable of a magnitude-6.5 quake. Then, in 1992, an earthquake shook along all three faults at once, at a magnitude of 7.3.

“This is a controversy through the field right now,” said Peter Bird, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles,, “whether we can say we know the names and lengths of the faults.”

In Japan’s history, there does seem to have been a precedent for the recent quake, but it took place more than a thousand years ago. A text known as “Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku,” or “The True History of Three Reigns of Japan,” described an earthquake in July 869 and a tsunami that flooded the plains of northeast Japan: “The sea soon rushed into the villages and towns, overwhelming a few hundred miles of land along the coast. There was scarcely any time for escape, though there were boats and the high ground just before them. In this way about 1,000 people were killed.”

These were the same plains that were submerged this month. Analysis of sediments left by the 869 tsunami led to an estimate that the earthquake had a magnitude of 8.3.

Brian F. Atwater, a geologist at the United States Geological Survey, said that a similar situation exists in the Pacific Northwest. Only in the past couple of decades have scientists realized that the seismic conditions of the Cascadia trench off Oregon had the potential to produce a huge earthquake. Warning systems have been built. Evacuation plans have been drawn up.

Another worrisome subduction zone is the 2,000-mile Java trench in the Indian Ocean. Few earthquakes occur there. The ocean plate there is young, so Dr. Kanamori’s 1980 observations would suggest little likelihood of a great quake.

But Robert McCaffrey, a research professor of geology at Portland State University, said he no longer believes that geophysicists can distinguish dangerous subduction zones from the not-so-dangerous ones. “We just don’t have a long enough earthquake history to make models of subduction,” he said.

The only relevant characteristic, he said, is the length of the fault, and he sees the potential for a magnitude-9.6 earthquake in the Java trench. Indonesia, which has not built extensive sea walls and warning systems, would likely be very hard hit.

“That’s my biggest fear,” Dr. McCaffrey said.

Over the weekend, Dr. Scholz reread his 1995 paper and found that Java’s recent quiet did not fit with what his theory predicted. “It must be missing a very big one,” he said.

Sarkozy Puts France at Vanguard of West’s War Effort

By STEVEN ERLANGER NY TIMES
PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy may be in down in the opinion polls, but he has put France boldly in the forefront of an allied effort to prevent the decimation of the opposition to Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Ten days ago, Mr. Sarkozy met with representatives of the Libyan opposition and recognized it as the country’s legitimate government. And while the United Nations Security Council has authorized the use of force to protect civilians by “all necessary measures,” the logic of the military operation would seem to be the ouster of Colonel Qaddafi.

Mr. Sarkozy, motivated by French failures to respond quickly to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and pressed by a new foreign minister and vocal public figures like the writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, came together with Britain to drag Europe and the United States toward a military engagement in the Arab world that key allies like Washington and Berlin never wanted.

France had “decided to assume its role, its role before history” in stopping Colonel Qaddafi’s “murderous madness,” Mr. Sarkozy said solemnly on Saturday, standing alone before the television cameras and pleasing those here who still have a strong sense of French exceptionalism and moral leadership.

Mr. Sarkozy was aided in his ambitions, ironically, by the rapid decline of the rebels, who fell back quickly toward their last stronghold, Benghazi. It appeared that the quick movement of Qaddafi troops, with all their advantages of aircraft and firepower, would soon put an end to the ragtag opposition. And Colonel Qaddafi and his sons had promised the kind of fierce, merciless retribution that Washington and other allies, including Italy, with its traditional ties to Libya, decided they had to make an effort to stop.
Although the situations are almost entirely different, Libya was compared with Bosnia and Kosovo, and analogies were made to the 1995 slaughter of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica by Serb forces despite promises of United Nations protection.

The aggressive French stance, which included lectures to others by Foreign Minister Alain Juppé about how “the weakness of democracies gives dictators free rein,” and that how “it’s not too late to break with this rule,” put some noses out of joint.
Some officials of NATO countries resented having to rush to Paris on Saturday for an elegant lunch meeting and a show of hands giving symbolic backing to the military strikes while Qaddafi forces were nearing Benghazi, while others complained that initial French air sorties were not coordinated with allies.
But by Saturday night, none of that seemed to matter very much amid an acknowledgement that French action had been instrumental in protecting Benghazi.

The enhanced war against Colonel Qaddafi appears to go significantly beyond the no-fly zone that the Arab League supported a week ago, prompting criticism on Sunday by its longtime secretary general, Amr Moussa, only a day after he was at the Paris meeting called by Mr. Sarkozy.

“What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians,” said Mr. Moussa, who is also a candidate for Egypt’s presidency, as he called for an emergency Arab League meeting.

Arab League support had been crucial to the French strategy for winning international support for the strikes, which French planes began unilaterally even before the meeting was over — in response, French officials said, to anguished calls for help from the Libyan opposition in Benghazi, who said Qaddafi troops were already within the city limits.

To general applause in France, even from the opposition Socialist Party, it appears that French planes were among those that destroyed a column of armored vehicles near Benghazi and halted government air attacks there.
Arab League criticism that the military operation has already exceeded a simple “no-fly zone” was echoed on Sunday by the African Union, China, Germany and Russia, which criticized the “indiscriminate use of force” and said the allies had exceeded the United Nations mandate, a charge rejected by France on Sunday.

But what matters is that some of the most important blows against Colonel Qaddafi have already been struck by French, British and American forces, using cruise missiles and warplanes to dismantle the Libyan air forces and air defenses.

And more allied airplanes were converging on air bases in Italy. While Italy itself decided on Friday, after the Security Council vote, to cooperate fully in the coalition against Libya, not only providing bases and freezing Libyan assets, but also taking part with eight jet fighters of its own, said Maurizio Massari, the Foreign Ministry spokesman.
As for France, with at least 40 aircraft and numerous ships committed, including its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, the battle in Libya is one of the largest French military operations in years, even though it does not involve any troops, as in Afghanistan.

France began the allied attack on Libya on Saturday morning with about 20 planes executing at least four sorties and continued to fly missions with about 15 planes over Libya on Sunday, concentrating on the east, near the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, French officials said.
On Saturday, in what the French are calling Operation Harmattan, French planes attacked armored vehicles and tanks belonging to Qaddafi forces on the outskirts of Benghazi and on the main road leading to the city. The 20 planes, the ministry said, included 12 fighter jets, six refueling planes and an Awacs aircraft.

The aim was to create a no-fly zone over the area around Benghazi, about 60 miles by 90 miles, the ministry said.

In a statement, France’s Defense Ministry said that it flew missions to create “a no-fly zone around the region of Benghazi and to stop the flights of the aircraft of Colonel Qaddafi, including attacks on identified military targets on the ground that menaced the civilian population.”
On Sunday, French planes faced no opposition and saw no threats to civilians, said Laurent Teisseire, the Defense Ministry spokesman.
France has several dozen fighter planes operating from French bases, and Sunday afternoon, the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle left Toulon, France, for Libya with a protective escort including submarines. It carried another 20 planes, mostly Rafale and older Super Étendard combat jets, as well as helicopters and two E-2 Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, the ministry said.

iPod 10 years of the iPodIt's 10 years since Apple's original iPod shuffled on to the scene, changing the way we listen to and buy music for good. But could it soon be time to hang up our white headphones?

 Johnny Davis The Guardian,

"I want to see how competent I am," she says, jabbing the screen of an iPhone 4.

"Put it down," tuts her husband, Andrew. "You're not."

Across the cavernous chambers of the Grade II-listed building similar human-technology interactions are taking place. At other tables, as in any of Apple's 300-plus stores worldwide, tourists check their emails and update their Facebook pages. Like everything else Apple does, its store layouts are ruthlessly designed. Pricey laptops and desktops by the door to lure you in, then iPads, then iPhones, then iPod Touches. The only table not occupied by a small cluster of people prodding, touching and fondling the technology is right at the back, in the store's depths. It's the table with the iPods on it.

The iPod Classic, as the famous scroll-wheel design is now known, hasn't been updated now since September 2009, with a modest capacity jump from 120GB to 160GB. On the Apple Online Store, shipping times have slipped from 24 hours to 1-3 days. Across the US, several major retailers have reported short supplies, leading to speculation the device may soon be discontinued. It didn't even warrant a mention at Apple's annual Developers Conference in 2010. "The iPod's essentially finished, give or take," says Dr Alice Enders, a former senior economist at the World Trade Organisation who now reports on global music markets for media consultancy Enders Analysis. "Sales have been in decline for some time. The converged media device is the way forward." In other words: the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the iPad – devices that the iPod paved the way for, devices that have helped push Apple's latest profits to a record-breaking $20bn. If the iPod now finds itself as the least-loved of the company's shiny portable devices, you get the sense Apple is probably OK with that.

The iPod is 10 this year. Developed during spring 2001 and brought to market in just eight months, the circumstances surrounding its launch were hardly auspicious. For a start, it debuted days after 9/11. The press launch promised "the unveiling of a breakthrough device", the only other information on the invitations from Apple's Silicon Valley HQ was some small print along the bottom: "Hint: It's Not a Mac." The assembled media probably figured that was just as well. Apple's most recent computer, the G4 Cube, had failed to match the success of its iMac – the candy-coloured, egg-shaped machine that had transformed the desktop computer from functional grey workstation to translucent object of desire. And even its appeal was dwindling.

Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, who had recently returned to the company after being dismissed as the head of the Mac division in 1985, had failed to appreciate quite how important downloading would become to the online generation. The "i" in iMac was supposed to stand for "internet", but the first models had no slot drives – users had no way of burning their own CDs or DVDs. Given that almost 30m PCs were sold with this capability during 2000, Apple had missed a trick. Along with other companies associated with the dotcom bubble, its stock was on the slide.

"When I joined Apple, the company was in decline," Jonathan Ive, senior vice-president of industrial design and the man who would help revolutionise the business, has said. "It seemed to have lost what would become a very clear sense of identity and purpose."

Nevertheless, the launch saw Jobs making great play of Apple's "digital hub" strategy. He envisaged the Mac as the centre of a new digital ecosystem, a place where we would soon come to plug in all manner of wonderful new devices. The first of these turned out to be something of a surprise. With no previous experience in music, Apple announced it was launching an MP3 player. "Why music?" Jobs asked. "Well, we love music, and it's always good to do something you love." He suggested music was something that touched everyone. "It's a large target market. It knows no boundaries. And there is no market leader. No one had really found the recipe yet for digital music."

Apple's iPod would hold 1,000 songs, could be recharged within an hour and would cost $399. "Do you remember what it was like when you got your first Walkman?" asked the singer Seal, who alongside other musicians appeared behind Jobs on a giant video screen. "'Wow! I want to carry this wherever I go.'" Others were less convinced. Apple's MP3 player was neither the first nor the cheapest nor the largest capacity device on the market. At that point it was only compatible with Macs – the majority of people used PCs. What's more, it had a silly name. Technology bloggers soon decided iPod must stand for "Idiots Price Our Devices", "I Pretend It's An Original Device" or "I'd Prefer Owning Disks". But within five years, via its iTunes Store, Apple would go on to become the number one music provider in the world – all but taking over the music business. After the introduction of iTunes video in 2007, it would quickly become the world's most popular video store. Now, in 2011, Apple is set to become the world's most valuable company full stop, overtaking the current leader, oil multinational ExxonMobil.

Apple has changed the way we think about technology and design, the way we shop, the way we consume media and the way we interact with each other. Via the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad it has opened up doors for other methods of technology to come into our lives. None of that would have happened without the iPod. "It was the first cultural icon of the 21st century," says Dr Michael Bull, a lecturer in media and film at the University Of Sussex, where his studies on the sociology around the MP3 player have earned him the sobriquet "Professor iPod". "It was the first MP3 player that really worked. With the earlier ones you had to get down on your knees and pray to get a bit of music out of them. And it became symbolic of the way people like to move around in cities. It fitted the desire for a technological freedom, whereby you moved to your own soundscape. Roland Barthes argued that, in medieval society, cathedrals were the iconic form. Then by the 1950s it had become the car – the Citroën DS. I argue that 50 years later it was the iPod, this technology that let you fit your whole world in your pocket. It was representative of a key moment in the social world of the 21st century."

"Apple got the consumer experience right from the start," says Enders. "In 2004 they started introducing smaller iPod variants [the iPod Mini, the iPod Nano] that dramatically increased its penetration." But the real key to Apple's success wasn't so much the iPod, but iTunes. Track the company's share price and it starts heading skywards in 2003, right after the introduction of the iTunes Store. "They made life as simple as possible," Enders says. "Payment issues are a major stumbling block with all ecommerce. Amazon has patented its so-called '1-click' ordering but iTunes does it so much better."

It is usually assumed the iPod was dreamed up by Jobs and Ive. But this isn't quite right. Before there were any MP3 players, there were MP3s: invented in 1987 by a group of German scientists looking for a way to shrink video files so that they would be easier to use on computers. To achieve this they stripped out as much "extraneous" data as possible, supposedly the stuff we wouldn't miss. This loss of quality is at its least discernable when listening on headphones with the volume cranked up, so by 1998 the first portable digital music player had arrived: the MPMan F10, created by South Korean company SaeHan. (It wasn't a hit; SaeHan now mostly manufactures textiles.) In January 2001 Apple had added iTunes to its iMovie and iPhoto "digital hub" suite; a slick geometric window with a brushed metal effect that made something as mundane as organising music files seem like a cool thing to do. Other portable MP3 players had already joined the unfortunate MPMan F10 on the market: now Apple proposed to develop its own.

Jonathan Rubinstein, head of Apple's hardware division, rang a 32-year-old engineer called Tony Fadell, who took the call on a chairlift above the ski-slopes of Vail, Colorado. Rubinstein offered him an eight-week contract but refused to tell him what the project was. Fadell accepted. He had recently quit his post as an engineer at Philips to start his own gadget company. One of the ideas he was shopping around Silicon Valley was a portable music player. Everyone – including Sony, which presumably continues to kick itself daily – had passed. So Apple stuck Fadell in its special projects division and set him to work on project P-68, codenamed "Dulcimer". Fadell began mocking up designs using foam and cardboard. Both Fadell and Rubinstein knew Jobs liked to be presented with prototypes in batches of three. Sure enough, he rejected their first two designs, but the third – a cigarette packet-sized box with a mobile phone-like screen and buttons on the base, he loved. Another Apple executive, marketing vice president Phil Schiller, came up with the idea of a scroll wheel in the middle. Jobs was adamant that every song needed to be accessible in three pushes of the button; any more and people would find it too much bother. According to one Apple insider the iPod was louder than other MP3 players because Jobs is partially deaf, so they pushed up the volume for him.

Leander Kahney's book The Cult of iPod posits that it was Fadell who envisaged a company built around an MP3 player, with a Napster-style shop to support it. In other words, that Apple's future business model was his idea. "This is the project that's going to remould Apple and 10 years from now, it's going to be a music business, not a computer business," he's alleged to have said. Ive set to work on the iPod's case. It would have no battery door or on-off switch and would be a completely sealed unit. "From early on we wanted something that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple you almost wouldn't think of it as having been designed," Ive explained. He maintained that the shape was incidental. "It could have been shaped like a banana if we'd wanted." But white was his idea. "It's neutral, but it is a bold neutral. Just shockingly neutral." (According to Kahney, Fadell dressed each day in clothes and accessories with a different matching colour scheme, down to the rims of his glasses and his socks. Later, the iPod Minis would deploy a similar rainbow palette. "One might wonder if it's mere coincidence," he writes. Fadell left Apple in 2008, and is forbidden from talking about his time at the company.)

"The thing I always admired about Jony [Ive], right from the very beginning, is his absolute commitment to getting it right," says Robert Brunner, who employed Ive at Apple, and is now partner in the San Francisco-based design consultancy Ammunition, makers of Beats By Dr Dre headphones, among other things. Ive had previously co-founded London design firm Tangerine, developers of everything from VCRs to combs. "He'll just relentlessly focus on the details. Of course the products are beautiful and well resolved. But technically they're almost impossible to copy."

Bolstered by the "silhouette" ad campaign devised by New York ad agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, iPod's initial sales were good, but not great. For a new product launch, Apple's ad spend was relatively small – $25m. Instead it was able to rely on the best advertising model of all: word-of-mouth. The iPod's earphones were white as an afterthought, to match the player. The unusual colour served as a showy advert for a gadget that remained mostly hidden from view, in people's bags and pockets. Then the media did their work, falling over themselves to promote this fashionable new wonder-device: pretty soon it was asking "What's On Your iPod?" to everyone from Lenny Henry (Dizzee Rascal) to George Bush (My Sharona). An independent accessories market mushroomed around it, flogging everything from leather Chanel pouches to iPod-enabled toilet roll holders, and is now valued north of $1bn. Playlists replaced albums as the defining way we listen to music; "shuffle" decimated artists' entire recording careers. With its iTunes Store Apple had succeeded in making the one-stop digital superstore that in-fighting and anti-trust competition laws had prevented the record labels from establishing for themselves. Instead, those labels had wasted a lot of time and money trying to set up subscription models: the idea that users would pay a monthly fee to access digital music as and when they liked.

Steve Jobs, a Bob Dylan fan who once dated the singer's ex, Joan Baez, insisted that people wanted to own their music, not rent it. They had collected vinyl, cassettes and CDs in the past and they would collect digital music in the future. One by one, Jobs managed to talk the big five major labels into signing up to his vision. "Jobs's stock went from $8bn to $80bn," recalls one music executive. "Ours went in reverse." Sony, in particular, was hamstrung. On the one hand its hardware division wanted to push a Walkman that would compete with the iPod. On the other, its record label, Sony Music, accounted for the majority of its revenues and was unwilling to push forward with something they thought would be filled with illegally downloaded music. Paralysed, Sony allowed Apple to clean up on both the digital device and the songs to play on it.

"As it turns out, iTunes has become much more important for Apple than simply being a music store," says Roger Ames, former chairman of Warner Music who brokered the iTunes deal with Jobs at the time. "It's been a place where their customers can very helpfully register their credit cards, and Apple can stay in touch with them. Every record label had the opportunity to come to a business model like that."

On iTunes in the US Apple would take 22 cents out of every 99-cent track sold, leaving just 67 cents for the labels to split between the artists, the publishers and themselves. A rather poorer return than those labels had been used to, selling albums for $18. Apple itself wasn't going to get rich on 22 cents a song. But it was going to sell a lot of iPods off the back of it. And the record companies get nothing from iPod sales. "The iPod makes money. The iTunes Music Store doesn't," Schiller has admitted. (Despite the "Don't Steal Music" sticker attached to every new iPod, it makes little odds to Apple where the songs on its devices come from.)

"The record industry was very good at providing the stick to beat file-sharers with, but it singularly failed to provide the carrot. Steve Jobs provided the carrot," says Tim Clark of ie:music, co-manager of Robbie Williams among others. "I'm sometimes asked, 'Who's the richest man in the music industry?' I always say, 'Steve Jobs'."

Today, the iPhone has effectively replaced the iPod. The day it launched Apple quietly dropped "Computer" from its corporate moniker. And it's the ability to download apps, and the connectivity of the device, not music, that's now driving sales. "The US market for digital music appears to be flat," says Enders. "It has flattened well before everyone, and certainly the music industry, hoped. At this point the real issue is that more than 75% of recorded music sales are still on CD." But that's of little concern to Apple. Jobs may now be on a medical leave of absence, and Ive reportedly contemplating a return to the UK so he can educate his children over here, but the brushed steel wheels are unlikely to fall off the Apple juggernaut any time soon. Its next launch is rumoured to be the iPhone Nano. If that does what the iPod Nano did for the iPod – reducing entry point at the mid and lower end of the market, sending sales through the roof – then ExxonMobil can start counting off its remaining days as the world's most valuable company even more quickly.

"We were very lucky," Jobs told Rolling Stone in 2003. "We grew up in a generation where music was an incredibly intimate part of that generation. More intimate than it had been, and maybe more intimate than it is today, because today there's a lot of other alternatives. We didn't have videogames to play. We didn't have personal computers. There's so many other things competing for kids' time now. But, nonetheless, music is really being reinvented in this digital age, and that is bringing it back into people's lives. It's a wonderful thing.

tech@guardian.co.uk

Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage'
by Robert Krulwich NPR

So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexsei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."

This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venymin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This version — if it's true — is beyond shocking.

Starman tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Kamarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space. The two men were close; they socialized, hunted and drank together.

In 1967, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn't back out because he didn't want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.

The story begins around 1967, when Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, decided to stage a spectacular midspace rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships.

The plan was to launch a capsule, the Soyuz 1, with Komarov inside. The next day, a second vehicle would take off, with two additional cosmonauts; the two vehicles would meet, dock, Komarov would crawl from one vehicle to the other, exchanging places with a colleague, and come home in the second ship. It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen.

The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.

The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, "I'm not going to make it back from this flight."

He'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him.

Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. "That's Yura," the book quotes him saying, "and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears.

On launch day, April 23, 1967, a Russian journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov, reported that Gagarin showed up at the launch site and demanded to be put into a spacesuit, though no one was expecting him to fly. Golovanov called this behavior "a sudden caprice," though afterward some observers thought Gagarin was trying to muscle onto the flight to save his friend. The Soyuz left Earth with Komarov on board.

Once the Soyuz began to orbit the Earth, the failures began. Antennas didn't open properly. Power was compromised. Navigation proved difficult. The next day's launch had to be canceled. And worse, Komarov's chances for a safe return to Earth were dwindling fast.

All the while, U.S. intelligence was listening in. The National Security Agency had a facility at an Air Force base near Istanbul. Previous reports said that U.S. listeners knew something was wrong but couldn't make out the words. In this account, an NSA analyst, identified in the book as Perry Fellwock, described overhearing Komarov tell ground control officials he knew he was about to die. Fellwock described how Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin called on a video phone to tell him he was a hero. Komarov's wife was also on the call to talk about what to say to their children. Kosygin was crying.

When the capsule began its descent and the parachutes failed to open, the book describes how American intelligence "picked up [Komarov's] cries of rage as he plunged to his death."

Some translators hear him say, "Heat is rising in the capsule." He also uses the word "killed" — presumably to describe what the engineers had done to him.

Americans Died, Too

Both sides in the 1960s race to space knew these missions were dangerous. We sometimes forget how dangerous. In January of that same year, 1967, Americans Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire inside an Apollo capsule.

Two years later, when Americans landed on the moon, the Nixon White House had a just-in-case statement, prepared by speechwriter William Safire, announcing the death of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, had they been marooned or killed. Death was not unexpected.

The Nixon White House prepared this letter in the event that American astronauts did not survive the Apollo 11 mission.

But Vladimir Komarov's death seems to have been almost scripted. Yuri Gagarin said as much in an interview he gave to Pravda weeks after the crash. He sharply criticized the officials who had let his friend fly.

Komarov was honored with a state funeral. Only a chipped heel bone survived the crash. Three weeks later, Yuri Gagarin went to see his KGB friend. He wanted to talk about what happened. As the book describes it:

Gagarin met Russayev at his family apartment but refused to speak in any of the rooms because he was worried about bugs. The lifts and lobby areas were not safe, either, so the two men trudged up and down the apartment block's echoing stairwells.

The Gagarin of 1967 was very different from the carefree young man of 1961. Komarov's death had placed an enormous burden of guilt on his shoulders. At one point Gagarin said, "I must go to see the main man [Brezhnev] personally." He was profoundly depressed that he hadn't been able to persuade Brezhnev to cancel Komarov's launch.

Shortly before Gagarin left, the intensity of his anger became obvious. "I'll get through to him [Brezhnev] somehow, and if I ever find out he knew about the situation and still let everything happen, then I know exactly what I'm going to do." Russayev goes on, "I don't know exactly what Yuri had in mind. Maybe a good punch in the face." Russayev warned Gagarin to be cautious as far as Brezhnev was concerned. "I told him, 'Talk to me first before you do anything. I warn you, be very careful.' "

The authors then mention a rumor, never proven (and to my mind, most unlikely), that one day Gagarin did have a moment with Brezhnev and he threw a drink in Brezhnev's face.

I hope so.

Yuri Gagarin died in a plane accident in 1968, a year before the Americans reached the moon.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony's book is Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin (Walker Publishing 2011); Yaroslav Golovanov's interview with Yuri Gagarin was published in Komsomolskaya, Pravda, June 11, 1989. Venyamin Russayev's stories about Gagarin and Komarov appeared in 2006 in Literaturnaya Gazeta and were republished on several websites.

Japan Pushes to Rescue Survivors as Quake Toll Rises
By MARTIN FACKLER NY TIMES
NAKAMINATO, Japan — Japan on Saturday mobilized a nationwide rescue effort to pluck survivors from collapsed buildings and rush food and water to thousands in an earthquake and tsunami zone under siege, without water, electricity, heat or telephone service.

Entire villages in parts of the north have vanished under a wall of water, many communities are cut off, and a nuclear emergency was unfolding near two stricken reactors as Japanese tried to absorb the scale of the destruction following Friday’s powerful earthquake and destructive tsunami.

Japanese news media estimates of the death toll ranged between 1,300 and 1,700, but much of the north was impassible. Four passenger trains had not been accounted for as of Saturday night, The Associated Press reported. Most of the deaths were from drowning, but firefighters and Japan’s Self-Defense Forces were rushing to prevent a higher toll, flying in helicopters and struggling to put out fires ignited by exploding gas lines or overturned space heaters in Japan’s many vulnerable wooden homes.

The country had clearly learned the lessons of the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995, when Japan refused to accept offers of international help, leading to criticisms that many of the 6,000 killed died unnecessarily. The United States, which has several military bases in Japan, is sending in helicopters, destroyers, and an aircraft carrier, the Ronald Reagan, which has the ability to act as a hospital as well as convert sea water into drinking water, according to a spokesman for the Navy’s 7th fleet in Japan.

Even as estimates of the death toll from Friday’s quake rose, Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, said 50,000 troops would be mobilized for the increasingly desperate rescue recovery effort, according to the Associated Press. By late Saturday, more than a day after the quake, rescuers had still not arrived in the worst-affected areas.

Meanwhile, several ships from the U.S. Navy joined the rapidly-expanding rescue effort. The USS McCampbell and the USS Curtis Wilbur, both destroyers, prepared to move into position off Miyagi prefecture to assist Japanese forces with search and rescue efforts.

In addition, the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group was en route and is expected to arrive Sunday. The ship can serve as a floating platform for refueling helicopters from the Japanese Self Defense Forces working more closely to shore.

Convoys of Japanese military helicopters could be seen flying over the earthquake zone Saturday, and trucks filled with soldiers were moving heavy equipment into the area.

Near the heart of the quake zone in Sendai, 200 to 300 bodies had washed up on local beaches, according to reports from the police.

Japan was filled with scenes of desperation. Kazushige Itabashi, an official in Natori City, one of the areas hit hardest by the tsunami, said several districts in an area near Sendai’s airport were annihilated.

Rescuers found 870 people in one elementary school on Saturday morning and were trying to reach 1,200 people in the junior high school, closer to the water. There was no electricity and no water for people in shelters. According to a newspaper, the Mainichi Shimbun, about 600 people were on the roof of a public grade school, in Sendai City. By Saturday morning, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and firefighters had evacuated about 150 of them.

On the rooftop of Chuo Hospital in the city of Iwanuma, doctors and nurses were waving white flags and pink umbrellas, according to TV Asahi. On the floor of the roof, they wrote “Help” in English, and “Food” in Japanese. The reporter, observing the scene from a helicopter, said, “If anyone in the City Hall office is watching, please help them.”

The station also showed scenes of people stranded on a bridge, cut off by water on both sides near the mouth of the Abukuma River in Miyagi Prefecture.

People were frantically searching for their relatives. Fumiaki Yamato, 70, was in his second home in a mountain village outside of Sendai when the earthquake struck. He spoke from his car as he was driving toward Sendai trying to find the rest of his family. While it usually takes about an hour to drive to the city, parts of the road were impassable. “I’m getting worried,” he said as he pulled over to take a reporter’s call. “I don’t know how many hours it’s going to take.”

Japanese, accustomed to frequent earthquakes, were stunned by this one’s magnitude and the more than 100 aftershocks, many equivalent to major quakes.

“I never experienced such a strong earthquake in my life,” said Toshiaki Takahashi, 49, an official at Sendai City Hall. “I thought it would stop, but it just kept shaking and shaking, and getting stronger.”

Train service was shut down across central and northern Japan, including Tokyo, and air travel was severely disrupted.

Vasily V. Titov, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Tsunami Research, said that coastal areas closest to the center of the earthquake probably had about 15 to 30 minutes before the first wave of the tsunami struck. “In Japan, the public is among the best educated in the world about earthquakes and tsunamis,” he said. “But it’s still not enough time.”

Complicating the issue, he added, is that the flat terrain in the area would have made it difficult for people to reach higher, and thus safer, ground. On Friday, NHK television showed images of a huge fire sweeping across Kesennuma, a city of more than 70,000 people in the northeast. Whole blocks appeared to be ablaze. NHK also showed aerial images of columns of flame rising from an oil refinery and flood waters engulfing the Sendai airport, where survivors clustered on the roof. The runway was partly submerged. The refinery fire sent a plume of thick black smoke from blazing spherical storage tanks.

The United States Geological Survey said the quake was the most severe worldwide since an 8.8-magnitude quake off the coast of Chile a little more than a year ago that killed more than 400. It was less powerful than the 9.1-magnitude quake that struck off Northern Sumatra in late 2004. That quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

The survey said that Friday’s quake was centered off the coast of Honshu, the most populous of the Japanese islands, at a point about 230 miles northeast of Tokyo and a depth of about 15 miles below the earth’s surface.

President Obama said the United States “stands ready to help” Japan deal with the aftermath. “Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to the people of Japan,” he said in a statement. He later spoke with Mr. Kan and offered assistance.

American military airfields in Japan began accepting civilian flights diverted from airports that suffered damage, American officials said early Friday.

A spokesman for the American Seventh Fleet in Japan said Naval Air Field Atsugi had received several commercial passenger planes that could not land at Narita airport outside Tokyo. Officials said Yokota Air Base also received civilian flights. Three American warships in Southeast Asia will be ordered out to sea to reposition themselves in case they need to provide assistance, a fleet spokesman said.

On Twitter, a person who used the name sinonosama said that students at an agricultural high school in Miyagi Prefecture were fine, but had to take refuge on the third floor after the tsunami flooded the first two floors.

The quake occurred in what is called a subduction zone, where one of the Earth’s tectonic plates is sliding beneath another. In this case, the Pacific plate is sliding beneath the North American plate at a rate of about three inches a year. The earthquake occurred at a depth of about 15 miles, which while relatively shallow by global standards is about normal for quakes in this zone, said Emily So, an engineer with the United States Geological Survey in Golden, Colo.

When such quakes set off a tsunami, the devastation often comes from a succession of waves, which can cross oceans at 500 miles per hour or more.


Michael Wines contributed reporting from Tokyo, Nelson Schwartz from New York and Thom Shanker from Washington.

The New Humanism

By DAVID BROOKS
Over the course of my career, I’ve covered a number of policy failures. When the Soviet Union fell, we sent in teams of economists, oblivious to the lack of social trust that marred that society. While invading Iraq, the nation’s leaders were unprepared for the cultural complexities of the place and the psychological aftershocks of Saddam’s terror.

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student.

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion.

When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say. Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else.

Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view is coming back into view. It is being brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on.

This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people.

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

When Sigmund Freud came up with his view of the unconscious, it had a huge effect on society and literature. Now hundreds of thousands of researchers are coming up with a more accurate view of who we are. Their work is scientific, but it directs our attention toward a new humanism. It’s beginning to show how the emotional and the rational are intertwined.

I suspect their work will have a giant effect on the culture. It’ll change how we see ourselves. Who knows, it may even someday transform the way our policy makers see the world.

Huntington’s Clash Revisited
By DAVID BROOKS NY TIMES
Samuel Huntington was one of America’s greatest political scientists. In 1993, he published a sensational essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations?” The essay, which became a book, argued that the post-cold war would be marked by civilizational conflict.

Human beings, Huntington wrote, are divided along cultural lines — Western, Islamic, Hindu and so on. There is no universal civilization. Instead, there are these cultural blocks, each within its own distinct set of values.

The Islamic civilization, he wrote, is the most troublesome. People in the Arab world do not share the general suppositions of the Western world. Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state. Their culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals, like pluralism, individualism and democracy.

Huntington correctly foresaw that the Arab strongman regimes were fragile and were threatened by the masses of unemployed young men. He thought these regimes could fall, but he did not believe that the nations would modernize in a Western direction. Amid the tumult of regime change, the rebels would selectively borrow tools from the West, but their borrowing would be refracted through their own beliefs. They would follow their own trajectory and not become more Western.

The Muslim world has bloody borders, he continued. There are wars and tensions where the Muslim world comes into conflict with other civilizations. Even if decrepit regimes fell, he suggested, there would still be a fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. The Western nations would do well to keep their distance from Muslim affairs. The more the two civilizations intermingle, the worse the tensions will be.

Huntington’s thesis set off a furious debate. But with the historic changes sweeping through the Arab world, it’s illuminating to go back and read his argument today.

In retrospect, I’d say that Huntington committed the Fundamental Attribution Error. That is, he ascribed to traits qualities that are actually determined by context.

He argued that people in Arab lands are intrinsically not nationalistic. He argued that they do not hunger for pluralism and democracy in the way these things are understood in the West. But it now appears as though they were simply living in circumstances that did not allow that patriotism or those spiritual hungers to come to the surface.

It now appears that people in these nations, like people in all nations, have multiple authentic selves. In some circumstances, one set of identities manifests itself, but when those circumstances change, other equally authentic identities and desires get activated.

For most of the past few decades, people in Arab nations were living under regimes that rule by fear. In these circumstances, most people shared the conspiracy mongering and the political passivity that these regimes encouraged. But when the fear lessened, and the opportunity for change arose, different aspirations were energized. Over the past weeks, we’ve seen Arab people ferociously attached to their national identities. We’ve seen them willing to risk their lives for pluralism, openness and democracy.

I’d say Huntington was also wrong in the way he defined culture.

In some ways, each of us is like every person on earth; in some ways, each of us is like the members of our culture and group; and, in some ways, each of us is unique. Huntington minimized the power of universal political values and exaggerated the influence of distinct cultural values. It’s easy to see why he did this. He was arguing against global elites who sometimes refuse to acknowledge the power of culture at all.

But it seems clear that many people in Arab nations do share a universal hunger for liberty. They feel the presence of universal human rights and feel insulted when they are not accorded them.

Culture is important, but underneath cultural differences there are these universal aspirations for dignity, for political systems that listen to, respond to and respect the will of the people.

Finally, I’d say Huntington misunderstood the nature of historical change. In his book, he describes transformations that move along linear, projectable trajectories. But that’s not how things work in times of tumult. Instead, one person moves a step. Then the next person moves a step. Pretty soon, millions are caught up in a contagion, activating passions they had but dimly perceived just weeks before. They get swept up in momentums that have no central authority and that, nonetheless, exercise a sweeping influence on those caught up in their tides.

I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still be proved right. The Arab world may modernize on its own separate path. But his mistakes illuminate useful truths: that all people share certain aspirations and that history is wide open. The tumult of events can transform the traits and qualities that seemed, even to great experts, etched in stone.