Mr. Bush's credit card bill

The WHO famously sang that "we won't be fooled again," yet we continue to be fooled again and again and again. Now George W. Bush's credit card bill has arrived. Why do we let the GOP get away with talking conservative while spending the nation into a recession again and again. This from The New York Times today.

Gasoline prices, which for months lagged the big run-up in the price of oil, are suddenly rising quickly, with some experts fearing they could hit $4 a gallon by spring. Diesel is hitting new records daily and oil closed at an all-time high on Tuesday of $100.88 a barrel.On Tuesday, diesel prices rose to a record $3.60 a gallon, compared with $2.62 a gallon last year..

These costs could exacerbate the nation’s economic woes, piling a fresh energy shock on top of the turmoil in credit and housing. Other new figures showed that home prices around the country are falling at an accelerating pace, suggesting no end is in sight for the housing meltdown. The depth of the nation’s economic problems became clearer Tuesday with the release of figures showing that prices at the producer level rose 1 percent in January, driven in large measure by energy costs. Compared with a year ago, prices were up 7.4 percent, the worst producer price inflation in the United States since 1981.

As of Tuesday, regular gasoline was selling at a nationwide average of $3.14 a gallon, according to AAA, the automobile club, up from $2.35 a year ago. The price has jumped 19 cents a gallon in two weeks. Energy specialists predict that as demand picks up further this spring and summer, retail prices will surpass the high of $3.23 a gallon set last Memorial Day weekend.

Pig Bodine where are you?

I understand from the reviews that Denis Johnson’s Vietnam novel Tree of Smoke isn’t very good. The characters are flat. There’s no plot. Some of the facts are wrong. I’m only a couple hundred pages into it, so that could all turn out to be true, but I have just finished reading Elizabeth Rubin’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine about Afghanistan and I’m seeing the same characters in the same settings doing and thinking the same things. It doesn’t take much imagination to put Johnson’s characters in Rubin’s report or vise versa. That doesn’t mean the book has anything new to say about Vietnam. I have read most of the other books, so I don’t expect to learn something new. But Johnson's characters have that self-unawareness that is so hard to portray and hard to understand, but is nonetheless true. Not just the fog of war, but the fog of life. A lot of the fog is self-induced either through organization (CIA/Military intelligence), drugs (your choice) or insanity.

Tree of Smoke has been compared with Catch 22. I don’t think it has such a profound message at Catch 22. It's more about the individual experiences of war and how people are kept in the dark or keep themselves in the dark about what's going on in their own lives.

I keep hoping Pig Bodine, the legendary sailor from Thomas Pynchon’s V, will come staggering out of a Saigon alley to slap one of these guys in the face. It would add a little much-needed humor. And also it would prove that Johnson understands how thin is the veil between delusion and clarity. Tree of Smoke is fundamentally surrealistic because the characters have such a severely constricted knowledge/awareness of themselves and the events going on around them, but it's never really just slap-dash weird the way Pynchon is.

Are you an Evo-Liberal or a librevolutionist?

I don't know the date of this story, but thought it was worth posting.

Denise Gellene, Los Angeles Times

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research. Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social or scientific ideas.
"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Food for thought

I found this passage in Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and thought it went right to the heart of his message.

When most of us think about food and health, we think in fairly narrow nutritionist terms – about our personal physical health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it’s possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food and health. If my explorations of the food chain have taught me anything, it’s that it is a food chain, and all the links in it are in fact linked: the health of the soil to the health of the plants and animals we eat to the health of the food culture in which we eat them to the health of the eater, in body as well as mind. Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.

We went to a fund-raiser at church this weekend, which linked food+companionship+cause -- all of the things in Pollan's mesage. And although the food was the least of the elements (don't mean to criticize too much), it set the tone for the evening, at least for us. People put a lot of work into that food, but I'm not sure they put a lot of thought into it in the way that Pollan does. Like the 100 mile dinner we produced last fall, it serves as a measure of how far we have come and how far we have to go before any of us individually or all of us collectively begin to look at food as an ecological element.

More about wolves

“The successful recovery of wolves is something to celebrate and be proud of,” says Lisa Naughton, a professor in the Nelson Institute. “But ultimately the next phase is going to be even more challenging: figuring out how we’re going to coexist with wolves and share this space.” To see the full story, click on this link: http://www.wisconsinidea.wisc.edu/profiles/Naughton/

Obama and the people

In 1960, I jammed into the upper balcony of the University of Wisconsin field house with thousands of others to see the tiny figure of John F. Kennedy. In 1992, I stood for two hours in the hot sun with my young children for a chance to shake Bill Clinton’s hand. Last night, Barak Obama was in Madison, but I didn’t go. It just didn’t sound like fun to have to jostle with 19,000 others and wait two hours to see the next president of the United States. I must be getting old.

Instead I listened to most of the speech in the car, so I may have missed some important parts. But what I heard – and didn’t hear – was a little troubling. Maybe I just missed it, but I didn’t hear Obama’s clarion call for a populist movement “You must be the change you seek.” Instead I heard him promise that everything would be different in Washington if he were president. Electing President Obama will not change Washington. Creating a popular movement for change at the grassroots will – at least for a while. Bill Clinton failed because he couldn’t or didn’t leverage his immense personal popularity into a movement for change.

I hope Obama has not forgotten that he is winning because he is riding a wave of people power. He is not winning because he is so smart or so capable, but because he has provided a rallying point for the immense pent-up frustration of a nation that is tired of being taken for fools. He is the lightening rod; we are the lightening. Let’s not get the two confused.

Please don't eat Bullwinkle

Do you ever watch a nature show on TV and wonder whether you should cheer for the cheetah or the antelope? While you were reading Decade of the Wolf, did you feel any sympathy for the elk or the cattle that ended up on the canis lupis dinner table? Joel Berger, a professor at the University of Montana and senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, gave this Moose-eye view of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone in The New York Times today.

Until the mid-1990s, the moose of the Yellowstone basin lived in a kind of moose paradise, without predators. The wolves had all been shot out about 70 years earlier. Grizzly bears were heavily hunted, and there were few of them. Without their traditional predators, Grand Teton moose were docile, naïve.
That all changed in the mid-1990s when the grizzlies rebounded because of a ban on their hunt and when wolves were reintroduced to the Yellowstone region. The first Grand Teton moose to encounter a wolf probably thought it was nothing more than a big coyote, which she didn’t fear. We reconstructed the interaction from tracks we found in the snow. From what we could see, the wolves just walked up to the moose and grabbed her 300 pound calf and ate it.
Grand Teton moose have learned a lot since then. Most of us think of moose as these dim lumbering Bullwinkles, but they figure things out.

Most of us have hiked in grizzly country and some have lived around wolves so we can maybe appreciate why even Douglas Smith, the expert author of Decade of the Wolf, felt nervous riding his horse into the back country of Yellowstone. It's rare humans to feel like prey, but on those occasions when we do, it should make us aware of the truism that man is not separate from nature, but lives in nature. There is no nature separate from man; our big challenge is to figure out how to live in harmony with the natural world, not in opposition.

mmmm food

One of the books on my table just now is Michael Pollan's new one "In Defense of Food", an extended version of his New York Times Magazine cover story from about a year ago, which answers his question: What shall we eat? The answer hasn't changed: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants. Unlike "Omnivore's Dilemma", In Defense of Food asks how we ever forgot how to eat and what to eat, something that didn't trouble humans for their first million years or so. It's the damn nutritionists, he decides, who for the last 150 years have been busy breaking food down into its constituent parts and every few months pronouncing one or another of them either the devil in our diets or the very thing to save us from our ills. Rather than scrutinize food labels for cholesterol, fat, Omega 3, etc., etc., Pollan says we should simply eat what our grandparents ate. ( He never met my grandparents; I doubt he's recommending Jello salad for every meal.)

Blog? Who has time to blog?

For the past two weeks, we have been spending nearly all our time trying to keep up with the new puppy. She's a Doberman, of course. We call her DaNiece (or Neesa) because she is Aoife's niece (sired by Aoife's brother). She may be cute, but she's 12 pounds of trouble and loves to type on the computer. Maybe she'll write the next post.

DNR encouraging blaze-orange brigade to target feral swine

Bruce has been a vegetarian for 25 years, but I swear he would kill and eat a feral pig if he had the chance. He sends this.

By Jim Lee
Gannett Wisconsin Newspapers

VIROQUA — A successful Crawford County hunter returned home from the 2007 gun deer season with 225 pounds of pork, a trip to the taxidermist with his trophy and congratulations from the Department of Natural Resources.

"It's entirely legal to shoot feral pigs," said Brad Koele, DNR wildlife damage specialist.

The department urged hunters to target wild pigs during the fall deer season as part of an ongoing effort to rid the state of a potential problem.

"I know at least six wild pigs were shot during the deer season in Crawford County and one in Eau Claire County ," Koele said. "It looks like a hunter shot a pig in Calumet County that was really a domestic pig that escaped. He was able to keep the animal, which weighed about 400 pounds, because it had been on the landscape for several months. I'm sure he got a few dinners out of it."

Feral pigs — sometimes known as wild boars, wild hogs or razorbacks — are a recent addition to the list of undesirable, non-native species that have found their way into the Wisconsin countryside.

Descendants of early European swine or recent domestic swine that escaped or were released by their owners, feral pigs are found in nearly two dozen states. They have proven to be hardy and highly adaptable. In some southern states, their numbers range in the hundreds of thousands.

Feral pigs have been documented in Wisconsin since 2000 and have been spotted in at least 29 counties, according to the DNR.

"Free-roaming pigs can be found across a wide variety of habitats and are highly destructive because of the rooting they do in search of food," Koele said. "They're also efficient predators, preying on many species, including white-tail deer fawns and ground-nesting birds like grouse, woodcock, turkeys and songbirds."

Feral pigs are known to sometimes carry brucellosis, pseudo rabies and other diseases damaging to the domestic swine industry. There have been reports in Wisconsin of wild boars jumping into swine pens in an attempt to mate with domestic pigs.

There is no bag limit or closed season on hunting wild pigs in Wiscon-sin. A small-game license and landowner permission are the sole requirements. Landowners hunting pigs on their property do not need a license.

In 2007, the DNR received reports of wild pig sightings or wild pigs killed in Calumet, Clark, Crawford, Eau Claire, Jackson, Marathon, Oneida, Pierce, Polk, Sauk, St. Croix and Wood counties.

"In Crawford County , we estimate there are 50 to 100 feral pigs, based on a survey we did last winter," Koele said. "That is the biggest population that we know of, and Crawford County is definitely our biggest area of concern."

"We really want to get more trapping taking place," Matheys said, "because hunting alone hasn't eradicated the pigs."