WORLD AFFAIRS BLOG: Greens embrace nukes; can this marriage survive?
By Jerd Smith, Rocky Mountain News
Published April 10, 2008 at 7:45 a.m.
Updated April 10, 2008 at 7:30 p.m.
Photo by Jerd Smith/Rocky Mountain News
Mary Hughes, a political consultant and expert on women in politics, speaks at the World Affairs Conference to how electable women are and why they've been held back.
BOULDER — 12:30 p.m. Friday: Greens and nukes new odd couple
This is how crazy climate change is making the world: Mother Jones Magazine is coming out with a cover story on the benefits of nuclear power.
At a panel titled, "Green Goes Nuclear," Mother Jones Publisher Jay Harris is citing stats from the article which indicate nuclear may emit as little carbon dioxide as solar energy does.
No Nukes activist Harvey Wasserman is sharply critical. “It pains me to see magazines that I count on do something like this. I feel as if I’m swimming up stream,” he said.
Wasserman has a word for any discussion that suggests nuclear energy is safe and economically viable: “criminal.”
Says Harris: “We didn’t bring this to the table. It’s there.”
9:15 a.m. Friday: Last day of CU brain drain
It is the final day of the CU’s 60th Annual Conference on World Affairs. Crowds are down here a bit today. The mental tennis, as one participant described the week’s the think fest, is almost over.
Some of the economists, actors, diplomats and historians who have been here all week have already left. Those who remain say the week has been, as always, a rush.
“By Friday, your mind has turned to mush because you have all these ideas running through your head,” said retired Air Force Brigadier General Jim Smith, a regular at this confab.
Jazz singer Lillian Boutte is the only African American and the only woman sitting on a discussion panel on The End of the World As We Know it. You’ll never confuse her with a policy wonk, though. In a deep red shirt, she is standing up singing.
“It’s the only way to really tell you what’s in my heart,” she said.
3:30 p.m. Thursday: Women confront 'velvet noose'
During a session on women and leadership, dozens of girls hang over the balcony in Old Main Chapel, listening eagerly to women from Kenya, Pakistan, and the United States.
This from Mary Huges, a political consultant and expert on women's issues:
"It’s important to remind ourselves there is hope, even when the statistics are exceedingly sober. I would argue to you that the notion of competence is a velvet noose. We have asked women to do so many things that much better than men. What do we drive women to when we ask them to be hyper-competent? It costs them some of their humanity, and in a society like ours, that humanity would make them more electable."
12:30 p.m.: Mosh-free zone
The main ballroom at the University Memorial Center is packed for this session on protest music and social change. On the panel are former punk rocker Jello Biafra, lead singer for the Dead Kennedys, Beatboxer Shodekeh, Hip Hop artist Shamako Noble, and Robert George, a conservative commentator and an editorial page writer for the "New York Post," and the only non-musician on the panel.
As people jammed in, George encouraged the elderly in the standing-room-only crowd to sit at the front of the hall.
“If there are older people back there, they can sit up front,” he said. “There’s not going to be any moshing today. At least not that I know."
From the mouth of a non-partisan Shamako Noble:
“I’m neither a Republican or a Democrat. I’m actually an independent. But there is a web site called Hip Hop Republicans. It exists. Believe it.”
After the applause and laughter dies down, the artist, who lives above a community center in San Jose, Calif., said he would launch is presentation from a distinctly “hippie” perspective.
“I’d like to talk about love,” he said.
12:09 p.m.: The long and winding campaign
The 2008 campaign for the White House seems the longest in history.
But consider the upside, say political pundits and commentators, some of whom predicted (wrongly) that American Public would tire of the 2008 campaign.
“I like this longer take. A long campaign season – where you can see a candidate perform over time – is helpful,” says Michael Stoff, a historian from Austin, Texas. “We’re really getting to know them.”
Of note: Average online contribution to Barack Obama’s campaign: $97, according to Janet Breslin-Smith, writer and professor at the National War College who has worked on Obama’s campaign.
Snow is important at CU’s Conference on World Affairs because it makes the outdoor crazed people who live in this town more willing to hang out indoors at the eclectic think fest, or so organizers believe.
Here’s what’s on tap today: There’s a conversation about the Left-Right Roots of Creativity and Leonardo, sessions on China’s role in Africa, as well as talks on Imperialist Russia and the Middle East.
For non-policy wonks, there’s Film and the Aesthetics of Brutality and the Evolution of Song.
If you’re stuck at your desk, you can view many of the most popular sessions live, online. Go to www.colorado.edu/cwa and click on the link to the web casts.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9: Men, Sex and Power
4:30 p.m.: Mike Franc ventures into Land of the Left
Political conservatives are in short supply here, so when people like Mike Franc, vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, show up at CU's Conference on World Affairs, he's in demand.
Franc is a longtime politico who is an old fan of Republicans, including former Colorado Sen. Bill Armstrong and former Rep. Bob Beauprez.
Coming to Boulder, he says, "keeps me intellectually sharp."
The biggest issues facing conservative and liberal Americans, he said, the rising cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
"It's daunting," he said. "If you want enough money to protect the environment, then Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are your biggest enemy."
One idea he thinks is interesting: put these giant entitlement programs on budgets, rather than allowing them to grow as the number of recipients, such as the elderly and the poor, grows.
Rising pressure to raise taxes is also of concern, Franc said, especially since the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in January of 2011. That will occur at a time, he said, when the U.S. tax burden is "higher on average than it's been since World War II."
1:30 p.m.: Tim Long, Simpsons writer and executive producer
Like all good writers, Simpsons creator Tim Long carries his character with him. And that held true this afternoon as he showed hundreds of fans at CU’s Conference on World Affairs clip after clip of Simpsons cartoons, hilarious, bitter and off color.
Scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission, and the response of the Fox Network, which carries the show, causes Bart Simpson and his merry band of social critics, to writhe and turn in ways that wind up funny, but come pre-loaded with angst.
“Fox censors twist themselves into knots trying to figure out what will get us into trouble and what will not,” said Long, a Canadian who has won four Emmy’s and been nominated for eight.
“Now people can file complaints online with the FCC,” Long said. He reads them religiously.
One of his favorites came from a viewer who saw a commercial for the Simpsons, in which Bart was having a homosexual encounter with a space alien. “I think that would be entirely inappropriate for the preschool audience who would be watching this show,” the complaint read.
Asks Long: “Would a heterosexual encounter have been okay?”
In an encounter with Fox censors, Simpsons writers described a sexual act that was performed 1,000 times. The censors objected, saying the number 1,000 was inappropriate. When the writers suggested using 1 million instead, the censors signed off on the script.
12:30 p.m.: Men, Sex and Power
As hundreds of high school students arrived at the University of Colorado at Boulder this morning, they heard a broadcast of Time International Editor Michael Elliott discussing men, sex and power, in a grumpy, joking kind of way.
“When you come here,” Elliott says, “you have serendipitous experiences and you go back to your day reinvigorated. But there are things about Boulder that piss me off and this panel epitomizes it,” he says, grinning as the local crowd erupts in laughter. His teasing gripe is that the local press has failed to mention his high brow presentations on China and leadership, choosing instead to focus on his presence on the panel on sex.
“I have absolutely nothing meaningful to say about men, sex and power, but I have quite a bit to say on Chinese consumption patterns,” Elliott says.
Oh well.
It’s day three of the Conference on World Affairs, a week-long gathering that brings writers, economists, actors and diplomats to campus for one of the largest think fests in the country.
To ensure everyone can participate at some level, the university broadcasts key sessions via web cams in classroom buildings, and provides outdoor radio broadcasts in such heavily traveled places as the plaza in front of the University of Colorado Memorial Center.
Though most of the high schoolers probably didn’t know who Michael Elliott is, most would know Rachel Maddow, social activist and host of the Rachel Maddow Show on Air America.
She’s broadcasting live each afternoon from the conference, but this morning she’s expounding on Men, Sex and Power in Macky Auditorium.
“The most concrete way I have prepared for this panel is by ensuring that my water bottle is bigger than all the other bottles on this stage,” she says. “And if you think that’s an accident……”
On a slightly more serious note, Maddow offers this notion. That despite popular social myths that suggest everything men have achieved is somehow symbolically phallic, is wrong.
“There is so much men have accomplished that’s worth bragging about that isn’t phallic,” she says. “Like booze, for instance. Distilling – that’s just not a phallic display.”
Highlights from Tuesday:
What would Bart Simpson say? Ask the man who helps put words in his mouth, Tim Long, a co-executive producer and writer for The Simpsons.
Midweek at University of Colorado's 60th annual Conference on World Affairs, which is free and open to the public and being held at various venues around Boulder, the crowds keep getting bigger, forcing students, visitors and townies alike to sit on floors, stand in line and listen remotely to dozens of world-famous politicos, entertainers, diplomats and writers, chew the fat.
Today, in addition to Long, conference-goers can listen and weigh in on "Men, Sex and Power," and how that charming electronic gadget, the Wii, is "Changing the Face of Sports."
But there's plenty more. For details on today's lineup, visit colorado.edu and click on the conference's link. To see the Simpsons' co-creator Long in action, click on the CWA's live Web Cam at 12:30.
10:30 a.m.: Politics
Loyalty is wearing thin in American politics and that means if voters survive what Mother Jones publisher Jay Harris described as an "unprecedentedly" ugly presidential campaign, issues such as health care and the war may decide who wins in November.
Harris and Robert Jones, an editor for the New York Post, were among panel members examining voter tendencies this fall.
Jones, who is black and a supporter of John McCain, said race is challenging the voting habits of Americans. Until this year, he said, Americans have had a clear idea of the person who should be president. "There's always been an archetype for what a president looks like," Jones said. "He's a white guy."
Jones said that he normally likes to ask blacks to respond to a series of questions. "But there's only one person here I could ask," Jones said, talking to a young black woman in the front row. "You work for (Democrat Barack) Obama, right?" he said to her.
"Actually, I'm a Republican," she said.
12:30 p.m.: Facebook
This is the power of Facebook.
More than 150 people jam into the Boulder High School room set aside for the confab, where online luminary Sasha Cagen and others are set to speak.
Another 100 or so sit on the floor in the long hallway outside as conference organizers scramble to arrange an impromptu radio broadcast for them. Few if any people turn away, so intent are they on hearing more about this social phenomenon.
"I'm a heavy user of Facebook because I work in this space," says Cagen. "This morning I checked my e-mail and I had six notifications from Facebook."
Among them: that two of her friends have signed up for a tango class and two others are attending a party in a park.
"Some people are on Facebook two hours a day," she said, and other people are like 'Why are people sending me these friend requests?' "
Cagen said the site has potential for keeping people connected to one another. "It's become the town crier of the Internet," she said.
But the site has its problems as well, Cagen said, because it sometimes connects in ways that are intrusive and potentially harmful. Earlier this year, a partnership with Amazon.com, which automatically posted Facebook members' purchases online, created an outcry among members, Cagen said. The program was restructured to include only those who wanted their purchases made public.
3:30 p.m.: Naughty tricks and sexy tips
Coercion is out, but just about everything else is in where sex is concerned.
"Mutuality is critical," says Evelyn Resh, a sexuality counselor. "What does that mean? It means the absence of coercion. That's the only thing I consider aberrant where sex is concerned. If everybody wants to be tied up, that's fine. I can tell you where to get the scarves and the best knots."
Resh's colleague on this advice-giving panel, Margot Adler, a National Public Radio correspondent, said she prefers a good conversation or dinner with a friend to real "in and out" sex.
"I'm a very sensual person, but I gotta tell you, it's about No. 10 on my list," she said. That indifference, despite wild times in the 1960s and 1970s, has deep roots in her life. "During the Summer of Love," she told the crowd, "I was a left-wing nun."
TUESDAY, APRIL 8: Sex, torture, and an ugly presidential campaign
3:30--Naughty Tricks and Sexy Tips
Coercion is out, but just about everything else is in where sex is concerned.
“Mutuality is critical,” says Evelyn Resh, a sexuality counselor and panel member at CU’s Conference on World Affairs. “What does that mean? It means the absence of coercion. That’s the only thing I consider aberrant where sex is concerned. If everybody wants to be tied up that’s fine. I can tell you where to get the scarves and the best knots.”
Resh, who is writing a book on raising sexually healthy teenage girls, said she travels the country talking about sex. “That’s what I do. But I don’t always tell people. Sometimes I lie. It depends on my level of stamina.”
Resh colleague on this advice-giving panel, Margot Adler, a National Public Radio Correspondent, said she prefers a good conversation or dinner with a friend to real, “in and out” sex.
“I’m a very sensual person, but I gotta tell you it’s about No. 10 on my list,” she said.
That indifference, despite wild times in the 1960s and 1970s, has deep roots in her life. “During the Summer of Love,” she told the crowd, “I was a left-wing nun.”
2:00 --Torture
How many American people would have to be saved to justify the use of harsh interrogation techniques on prisoners of war or informants?
Hard to know.
“The ultimate question is what we’re willing to sacrifice to keep the American way of life alive,” said Robert George, a panelist and an associate editorial page editor at the New York Post. “It’s an easy answer to say we cannot give up our principles in the context of torturing an individual. But I’m not so sure it’s that easy. And I don’t know what the percentage would have to be. If we do “x” to an individual, is it going to save 100 lives or 1,000. I don’t know. I don’t know at what number a government is willing to do certain things to protect its citizens.”
George was the only conservative member on a Conference of World Affairs panel that included writer and editor Lou Dubose, actor Mike Farrell and Mother Jones Publisher Jay Harris.
Said Farrell: “I’m horrified that we’re even discussing this issue in this country at this time.”
12:30 --Facebook
This is the power of Facebook.
At a session at CU’s Conference on World Affairs, more than 150 people jam into the room set aside for the confab, where online luminary Sasha Cagen and others are set to speak.
Another 100 or so sit on the floor in the long hallway outside as conference organizers scramble to arrange an impromptu radio broadcast for those left outside. Few if any people turn away, so intent are they on hearing more about this social phenomenon.
“I’m a heavy user of Facebook because I work in this space,” says Cagen. “This morning I checked my e-mail and I had six notifications from Facebook.”
Among them: that two of her friends have signed up for a tango class and two others are attending a party in a park.
“Some people are on Facebook two hours a day,” she said and other people are like ‘why are people sending me these friend requests?’”
Still Cagen said the site has tremendous potential for keeping people connected to one another and informed. “It’s become the town crier of the Internet,” she said.
Create a profile on the site, get 200 people to sign up as your “friends” and then you’re connected to them and all of their friends as well. You receive automatic updates of what they’re doing, where they’re going and what they’ve been writing on other sites.
“Then it just goes from there,” Cagen said.
But the site has its problems as well, she said, because it sometimes connects in ways that are intrusive and potentially harmful. Earlier this year, a partnership with Amazon, that automatically posted what Facebook members were buying online, created an enormous outcry among members, Cagen said. Eventually, the program was restructured so that only those who wanted their purchases made public were included.
But the phenomenon of social networking sites raises other troubling issues as well, said Marget Engel, who is managing editor of Newseum, an online interactive museum about newspapers.
10:30-- Politics
Loyalty is wearing thin in American politics and that means if voters can survive what Mother Jones Publisher Jay Harris described as an “unprecedentedly” ugly presidential campaign, issues such as health care and the war may decide who wins in November.
Harris and Robert Jones, an editorial page editor for the New York Post who also writes the blog, Ragged Thots, were among members of a panel examining the tendencies of voters this fall.
Jones, an African American who is a supporter of Republican John McCain, said race is challenging the voting habits of Americans. Until this year, he said, American’s have had a clear picture of the person who should be president. “There’s always been an archetype for what a president looks like,” Jones said. “He’s a white guy.”
Jones, like most good politicos, knew the the heavily local crowd at CU today was made up of backers of Democrat Barack Obama. He was almost right.
He told the room of roughly 200 attendees that he normally likes to ask blacks to respond to a series of questions. “But there’s only one person here I could ask,” Jones said, talking to a young black woman in the front row. One of two blacks in the massive conference room. “You work for Obama, right?” he said to her.
“Actually, I’m a Republican,” she said.
10:45 a.m. -- Health care
Until teaching people to be well is as lucrative as treating them when they’re sick, health care costs are likely to continue rising in the United States, leaving more citizens without adequate care.
“We need to make preventive care more appealing to doctors,” said Daniel Odeschalchi, a political consultant and panelist at CU’s Conference on World Affairs.
“It’s in society’s best interest to have healthy people,” he said. “But it is the responsibility of the individual as well as the state.”
“Does anyone really want the government telling us what to eat or to get up in the morning and go for a jog?”
Probably not.
But without incentives for individuals to stay well and doctors to help keep them well, little is likely to change, he said.
“There are always going to be people who are not interested in taking care of themselves. And a lot of people just don’t know how to take care of themselves,” he said. “What we need are more incentives. Incentives work.”
3:05 p.m. Monday -- Searching for love
The Old Main Chapel is filled to the brim with those who wonder why so many of us are, well, Too Busy To Fall In Love.
More than 100 people, young and old, have filled all the seats. Those who have arrived late are sitting cross-legged, knee-to-knee on the floor, willing to sacrifice comfort at the Conference on World Affairs in exchange for a little advice.
So are we too busy to take the plunge? For the most part, yes.
We’re also just not willing to turn off our cell phone.
“It’s a love killer,” says Mohammad Mahallati, a scholar and expert in Islamic studies and a poetry lover. “Turn it off. Of all the calls you received last week, which one gave you the gist of love?”
None of course.
1:00 p.m. -- Play for me
Latin and African music is being performed and analyzed all over the University of Colorado campus this week as part of the Conference on World Affairs.
It’s something to be greatful for. After all the search for hard-core policy analysis has to end every once in a while, and the music gives everyone a needed break.
Today, floating out into a hallway are sounds of jazz violin, guitar and keyboards. It’s Oscar Castro-Neves, playing and weighing in on the musical form he helped originate – the Bossa Nova.
He and the Grusin brothers, Don and Dave, as well as Charlie Bisharat on violin, perform and talk, recalling 50 years of evolution in this musical form, the one that made songs like the Girl from Ipanema, famous.
“The music still mesmerizes me,” says Castro-Neves.
At an anniversary concert in Brazil recently, some 80,000 people came to listen, still lured to a musical form that is re-invented with each innovative musician who takes it on.
“In reality you can’t create without knowing what came before,” Castro-Neves says. “New writers are always innovating. This year in Brazil there were a lot of young people listening, who knew everything we were talking about. That really touched me,” he said.
11:30 a.m. -- Understanding Muslims
Macky Auditorium fills quickly as the 60th Annual Conference on World Affairs prepares for the opening keynote address from Wendy Chamberlin, former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan.
Long, maroon velvet curtains hang over the auditorium’s stained glass windows. The majestic old hall, home to the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, holds about 2,700 people. By the time the session begins, only a handful of seats, in Macky’s gloomy upper reaches, remain open.
Newly appointed University of Colorado President Bruce Benson, who attended the conference as a student, introduces Chamberlin.
Now head of the non-partisan Middle East Institute, Chamberlin was the first female U.S. ambassador appointed to a post in a Muslim country and she was in Pakistan on Sept. 11.
Chamberlin’s mission Monday is to give World Affairs conference-goers a bit of a primer on Muslims.
As she talks, her presentation is being beamed live all over CU’s campus. Her face appears on TV monitors in hallways as students and others pause in their studies to listen.
“It is absolutely necessary that we try to reshape our relations with the Middle East and the larger Muslim world,” she says. “ We need to acknowledge the Muslim world is a very diverse community. There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. Arab’s are only a small minority. The most populous Muslim country isn’t even in the Middle East. It’s Indonesia.”
“Too often our politicians focus on one extremely small fraction of the Muslim community, the militant jihadists. We don’t talk enough about the mainstream Muslims who are most decidedly not violent, not radical and not extremists.”
Key facts: International polls conducted worldwide indicate that 93 percent of Muslims abhorred what happened on 9/11, while only a small minority, 7 percent, identified with the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C.
“What are Muslims like?” Chamberlin asked. “They’re like most Americans. They’re family people. They practice their faith. Most are young (under 30). They want better education. They want jobs. The polls show the majority want to improve law and order and they want to promote democratic ideals in their own political systems,” she said.
“The clear majority also want legal rights for women. For millions of Muslims their religion is a religion of peace and they’re outraged at the notion that their mosques are used for violence.”
But Chamberlin said the United States rebuffed the attempts by Muslim countries to reach out to Americans after 9/11 and since then relations have continued to deteriorate, in part because of our misperceptions about Islam.
Several years ago, just 23 percent of Americans associated Islam with violence. Now, Chamberlin said, despite the minority of Muslims that support terrorism, more than 40 percent of Americans link terrorism with Islam.
And that must change before Islamic countries and the United States can begin working together to stamp out terrorism,” she said.
“They feel they have no more control over the radical fringe than we did over Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City Bomber). We have to focus on the forces that unite us,” Chamberlin said. “Regrettably, we have a lot of work before us.”
10 a.m. Scary powerful women
Despite the sloppy snow drenching the University of Colorado campus this morning, more than 120 people – including 26 men – pack the Old Main Chapel to wrap their heads around why powerful “teste” women scare people.
“There is an edge in a lot of women who try to assert themselves in this world,” says author and activist Terri Jentz. “There is an element of over reaction in women that has to do with the power imbalance between men and women. Whenever someone goes over the edge of what’s acceptable, over the border, there’s fear.”
Jentz, musician Lillian Boutte, and political consultant Mary Hughes are leading one of the first “extraordinary conversations” of the week here at the Conference on World Affairs, a giant, five-day long public think fest that draws economists, diplomats, writers and artists from around the world.
Hughes, a long-time, non-partisan observer of politics, says we fear women because they’re a huge unknown in America’s political world. After all just 16 percent of our congressional representatives are female, Hughes points out, giving the United States a ranking of 71st worldwide for representation by women.
“What might make us fear them, is that we force them to put their necks into the velvet noose of hyper-competence. We make them be better on every score in order to play. If you’ve had to prove yourself more, you get to a place where you feel you have more to offer,” Huges said. That’s scary.
And then there’s this: “Maybe the real reason we fear women in power is because we don’t know what they might do,” Hughes said. “They might really do things differently, and we don’t know what that might mean.”
Coming up later today. The conference opens formally at 11:30 with former diplomats discussing the Middle East. Later we’ll take a look at America’s desperation for health care and why we’re too busy to fall in love. Is that a good thing?
It's all about politics, magic, music and economics.
Throw in space and religion, a little romance, a diatribe or two on technology and you have the 60th Annual Conference on World Affairs, a week when everyone is encouraged to think with wild abandon.
"It's tough to choose the best session," said Ramsay Thurber, a spokesman for the conference, one of the largest think fests in the country. "You can have an idea about what's going to be interesting, but a lot of it has to do with the energy of the week."
Founded by University of Colorado sociology professor Howard Higman in 1948, the conference now consists of some 200 sessions over five days. One hundred of the world's top thinkers - economists, diplomats, musicians and writers - will travel to Boulder to talk about health care, jazz, hip hop, torture, college athletics and more.
The event swamps the CU campus. Speakers appear for free, staying with host families who must promise to keep their identities and schedules private.
"We run it on a shoestring," said co-chair Jane Butcher, who first attended the conference as a student volunteer some 30 years ago. "We're very proud that it's free and open to the public. That's the way it started."
About 65,000 people are expected to attend the confab this year, which includes appearances by Tim Long, executive producer of The Simpsons; jazz great Dave Grusin and his brother Don; Oscar Castro Neves, one of the men behind the bossa nova; Mike Franc, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank; and keynote speaker Wendy Chamberlin, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.
"This originally started as a small university event run by professors," Butcher said. "They cooked the dinners for participants every night."
Now, people like Butcher and other Boulder families do the cooking.
True to form, she's keeping mum about who is staying at her house this year.
"But I can tell you that in the past I've had the former head of the KGB. I've had musicians. I've had astronauts," she said.
The best part for Butcher will be watching college students rub shoulders and break bread with world-famous thinkers as she did herself decades ago.
"The conversation this year is going to be extraordinary," she said. "But the real high point for me is seeing the kids 'get it.' "
Ponder this: A week of deep thinking in Boulder
The 60th Annual Conference on World Affairs begins today at the University of Colorado and runs through Friday. This giant think fest - with 200 sessions and an estimated 65,000 attendees - is free and open to the public. Each day the conference will offer live video streaming of key sessions. There is a full program guide on www.colorado.edu/cwa.
Among the highlights of the week:
Monday: Former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin opens with a keynote on U.S.- Middle East relations.
But there's romance on this day, too. Check out "Why We're Too Busy to Fall in Love."
Tuesday: Examine "The Power of Facebook." If the dark side seems more interesting, weigh in on "Torture: When the Unthinkable Becomes Acceptable."
Wednesday: Brace for "Men, Sex and Power" or "The Obama Phenomenon: A Post-Racist America?" And don't miss "Simpsons Forever!" with co-producer Tim Long.
Thursday: Take your head abroad and check out "China in Africa" or "A Czar is Reborn: Imperialist Russia." On gender issues, there is "Feminism: The New F Word."
Friday: Offerings too cerebral? Listen in on the musical offering: "Artful Duet, Latin America: A Musical Journey." Or examine one of the hottest topics in energy development with "Green Goes Nuclear."
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April 10, 2008
9:54 a.m.
Suggest removal
CWW writes:
Are these wackos still at it?????
April 10, 2008
10:06 a.m.
Suggest removal
buffsoldier writes:
yeah real wackos, because getting together discussing relevant global issues, meeting new people and exchanging ideas and ways of thought and learning new things is wacko.
Getting to hear from minds from all over and seeing international viewpoints is just completely inane.
Whatever.