curious

sorry for the absence. I have been having trouble with my password so I couldn't sign on. And Amelia and her fiancee and his mother are staying with us this weekend, so there's not much blogging time. Soon. Soon.

Extreme gardening

Sometimes things just work out. We had a prairie burn yesterday when no one thought there would be a burn and things just seemed to be going the wrong way all week. As Yi-Fu Tuan notably said, we rarely think it's unfair when good things happen to us. Maybe it was unfair, but yesterday was a good day.

It rained Thursday. Friday was windy. Today it's snowing. But Saturday was an ideal burn day. Low temperature, moderate humidity, light winds. Northwest Airlines managed to deliver Bonnie to Madison Friday night only a few hours late. We managed to get the truck out of the mud Friday afternoon so we didn't make that mistake on Saturday when we should have been burning.

And we got an excellent burn in the woody corner where Bruce and I cut away the brush three years ago, so maybe now the prairie grass will start to re-colonize that corner. It once was oak savannah as is evident from the few large oaks still standing. But it probably had no fire or other attention for over 100 years until we started clearing and now burning for the past two years. Will it come back? Maybe yes, maybe no. It's a mightily hard thing to restore a prairie. You really understand the tenacity of life when you try to extinguish one kind of life in favor of another. Prickly ash, choke cherry, honeysuckle all want to live just as fiercely as do Indian grass, little bluestem and lead plant. We can only tip the balance a little.

This is one difference between gardening as we ordinarily understand it and extreme gardening of the prairie variety. You don't control the landscape, you only tilt the balance of power and depend on time and persistence to make a difference over the long run. The scale is so vast and the forces so large that change can only be incremental. This week we will plant some prairie seed in the areas we burned. Maybe next year some of it will come up. Maybe it will take three or four years.

Maybe some year we will see a profound change. In the meantime, it is the effort and the intention that count. And the glorious hours spent doing nature's work.

Fair and balanced my ass!

Talk about fair and balanced. FOX Business interviewed Bruce Nilles yesterday on the topic of CO2.

Well, not really. Actually, there was no interview involved. It was an interrogation. They set him up and blasted away at him with all guns to try to make him and the Sierra Club look as bad as possible and they used every dirty trick short of waterboarding to do it.

To set the "fairness bar" at a "balanced" level, the interviewer started off informing his audience that the decision to regulate CO2 "sets the stage for massive new government regulations and power over business." I guess you didn't have to watch the rest of the segment to know what you were supposed to think.

This guy was the most argumentative, opinionated and dishonest so-called journalist I have seen in a long time. Bruce held his own, which is saying a lot. If you don't watch FOX (and who does?) this bald-faced exhibition of venomous ill will is enough to angrify your blood for the week.

Worshipping the fire god

We are coming up on the high holy days around here. It's time to burn the prairie and the weather looks perfect on Saturday "the good lord willin' and the creeks don't rise" as Hank Williams used to say. It's hard to believe. We still have snow from Monday's blast. There's standing water everywhere. We'll probably get the truck axle-deep again this year if we try to drive it anywhere near the burn site. Last year we had to drag the truck out of a mudhole with the tractor and nearly got both mired. The weather report for the next couple of days can't decide between rain and snow.

But underneath it all, the European grasses are greening up and before we know it, it will be too green to burn. The big bluestem and the indian grass on the south-facing slope are just begging for fire. And the honeysuckle and prickly ash could use a good dose of it too. The prairie looks dead for sure, but the little bit of burning we have done over the past few years has encouraged species that we never saw before. The indian grass is especially a surprise because we never saw any before.

On some prairies you might expect to see pasque flowers, dwarf buttercup and prairie smoke starting to bloom in the next few weeks. We don't have any pasque flower, but hope we can find a little of the dwarf buttercup or prairie smoke. This will also be a good time to knock down some of the brushy stuff that's always just one step ahead of the chain saw and the drip torch. We may be able to burn just a bit in the woods this year if all goes well. We have about 10 acres that really should be oak savannah and all it would take is a few years of fire.

More prairie thoughts to come.

More money down the same rat hole

In today’s Times, Secretary of State Clinton at least acknowledges that the drug problem is not Mexico’s drug problem, but the USA’s drug problem. However, her solution is to throw more money down the rat hole and further militarize our southern neighbor. Three helicopters are a token. 300 wouldn’t make a difference. Drug runners aren’t the problem; drug buyers are the problem. Middle class white males. Politically untouchable. The only solution is to take the money out of the drug trade.

March 26, 2009
Clinton Says U.S. Feeds Mexico Drug Trade
By MARK LANDLER
MEXICO CITY — Seeking to ease a cross-border relationship strained by drug trafficking, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived here Wednesday and offered the clearest acknowledgment yet from an Obama administration official of the role the United States plays in the violent narcotics trade in Mexico.

“Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Mrs. Clinton said, using unusually blunt language. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.”

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were coupled with a pledge that the administration would seek $80 million from Congress to provide Mexican authorities with three Black Hawk helicopters to help the police track drug runners.

(I support legalization of drugs as a policy. I do not use drugs or advocate the use of drugs.)

David Brooks asks "Do animals have morals?"

David Brooks asks Do Animals Have Morals? No, he wasn’t discussing Congress. He was moderating a panel discussion titled Darwin 200: Evolution and the Ethical Brain, sponsored by the Templeton Foundation earlier this month.

I won’t spoil the fun by providing the definitive answer here. Video of the discussion featuring Michael Gazzaniga (UC-Santa Barbara), Jonathan Haidt (University of Virginia), and Steven Quartz (Caltech), is on the Templeton Foundation’s website.

The discussion is supposed to shed light on the question of whether evolution can account for traits like altruism, cooperation, conscience, and a sense of justice. Can a richer view of our evolved nature help us to understand modern society?

I wish Brooks et al had taken up the case of Santino the Chimp. Chimpanzee's Plan to Attack Zoo Visitors Shows Evidence of Premeditated Thought.

When Santino the chimpanzee started pelting zoo visitors with stones, his keepers were mystified.

Not that they were surprised by his displays of aggression — the 31-year-old chimp is, after all, a dominant male. But there was no obvious source of stones in his enclosure; so where was he finding all the missiles?

All became clear when they carried out a search and found his stockpiles of rocks. Santino had been fishing stones from the moat surrounding his enclosure - and, even more impressively, he had been shaping odd pieces of concrete into aerodynamic disc-shaped missiles. Then he had been stashing them away for future use.

His behaviour has led scientists to conclude that premeditation is not a uniquely human trait.

Unfortunately, the Templeton Foundation tends to the high-minded sort of discussion rather than the really interesting stuff like Santino. Last week they awarded the £1 million 2009 Templeton Prize for progress in spiritual thought to Bernard d'Espagnat, an 87 year old French physicist whose main contribution to spiritual thought seems to have been to note that reality can’t be explained by science.

Bernard d'Espagnat, 87, was today announced as the winner of the £1 million Templeton Prize, founded by the late US multi-millionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir John Templeton to honour scientists who contribute to progress in religion.Dr d'Espagnat, professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Paris-Sud university, believes that science cannot fully explain "the nature of being".

Dr d'Espagnat said in prepared remarks that, since science cannot reveal anything certain about the nature of being, it cannot tell us with certainty what it is not. "Mystery is not something negative that has to be eliminated," he said. "On the contrary, it is one of the constitutive elements of being."

His main contribution to the development of quantum mechanics was made from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s when he carried out experiments testing the "Bell's inequalities" theorem. His work centred on a concept described as "veiled reality", a reality that is hidden beneath what is perceived as time, space, matter, and energy, concepts challenged by quantum physics as possibly mere appearances.

Well, duh! For a million, I could have come to the same conclusion.

Spring green

Spring has arrived in the woods. I know because the garlic mustard is back. I went out with the chain saw to slice up the various trees and branches that had fallen on the trails over the winter and there it was, already rather large and robust looking. Soon the entire forest floor will be a carpet of toxic green.

What’s wrong with garlic mustard? After all, it makes a tasty addition to a salad or soup. Here’s what the Plant Conservation Alliance says:

Garlic mustard poses a severe threat to native plants and animals in forest communities in much of the eastern and midwestern U.S. Many native widlflowers that complete their life cycles in the springtime (e.g., spring beauty, wild ginger, bloodroot, Dutchman's breeches, hepatica, toothworts, and trilliums) occur in the same habitat as garlic mustard. Once introduced to an area, garlic mustard out-competes native plants by aggressively monopolizing light, moisture, nutrients, soil and space. Wildlife species that depend on these early plants for their foliage, pollen, nectar, fruits, seeds and roots, are deprived of these essential food sources when garlic mustard replaces them. Humans are also deprived of the vibrant display of beautiful spring wildflowers.

I have given up fighting garlic mustard. When it first appeared several years ago, I went on a rampage of uprooting it, poisoning it with Roundup and even burning it. I have the propane flame thrower to prove it if anyone cares to know. Nothing worked. It seems to thrive on Roundup. Maybe it ingested some of those Roundup ready genes Monsanto is using to spike its soybean seeds.

If it were just the one thing, maybe a guy could feel that something could be done. But if you spend all your time fighting garlic mustard, when will you fight the buckthorn or the Japanese honeysuckle? And there is no way to fight the Dutch elm disease, oak wilt or green ash borer.

All that makes a walk in the spring woods rather a bittersweet experience. It even makes it kind of tempting to enjoy the things that invaders can’t destroy, like the roar of a sweetly tuned Stihl saw with a very sharp blade. At least when you cut something, it stays cut.

The theology of orgasm

Paul Schmelzer tweeted this story Celibate Catholic Priest Writes Sex Manual and I thought it was pretty funny. Priests are like doctors. They think they know how to do everything. The Catholic Church has about 15 centuries worth of fomenting a crippling kind of guilt and disinformation about sex, not to mention the subjugation of women and exploitation of, well you know. They are as responsible as anyone for the sexual disfunction in the world. At least we can all get a laugh from their lame attempts to fix things up.

There is a bit of news here though. Twelve percent of priests admit to being in a sexual relationship. One out of eight. And that's just those who admit it. I assume they don't mean with boys. I hope.

I also got a good laugh from the "reader review" on Paul's tweet.

"I read this book. It’s not bad but it’s only two chapters long. The first one is on masturbation and is 736 pages. The second chapter, sex with younger, same sex partners is only half the size of the first. Still, I felt the book was authoritative and would recommend it to anyone wishing to learn more about either topic. Don’t knock something you haven’t read, based solely on a YouTube video."

Who's to blame?

Jim Jubak at MSN Money is kind of the people's wealth advisor and financial commentator, but lately he hasn't been touting investments as much as explaining the financial crisis in terms ordinary folks can understand. His latest column is worth reading because it points the finger directly at Congress and the big-money campaign contributions coming from AIG, CITI, etc. Of course, one column or even a book can't assess all of the blame. It was too much of grab the money and run for both bankers and Congress. Here's the top of his column.

The folks in power in Washington and on Wall Street want to pretend that the current global financial crisis -- you know, the one that reduced household net worth in the United States by $11.2 trillion in 2008, according to the Federal Reserve -- was an accident caused by some unfortunate confluence of greed and asleep-at-the-switch regulators.

What we're now living through, though, is the result of a conscious, planned looting of the world economy. Its roots stretch back decades. And it wouldn't have been possible without the contrivances of the bought-and-paid-for folks who sit in Congress.

We aren't going to get a real fix if we shrug our shoulders and say it's too complicated for us to understand. That's what they want. We aren't going to get reform if we direct all our anger at the miscreants at AIG etc. Look at the grandstanding Congress is doing this week by passing a 90% tax rate on bonuses. Clearly it will be thrown out by the courts, but Congress will be able to assuage public anger and look like the good guys while actually doing nothing.

We need a new Progressive movement to push through a genuine reform of all financial regulation that is based on concern for all, not just the few. That won't happen if you and I don't demand it.

On another topic. I know I post a lot about drug policy and advocate the legalization of drugs, but just for the record, I don't use drugs and don't advocate the use of drugs. I just think the cure is worse than the disease.

Bruce on Rolling Stone's Top 100

And he doesn't even play air guitar! Bruce was #74 on Rolling Stone's list of 100 people who are changing the world. Of course, Neil Young made the list too (but lower down). Here's what RS said about Bruce:

The director of the Move Beyond Coal campaign, Nilles is Big Coal's worst nightmare: an aggressive, strategic lawyer who knows how to monkey-wrench the industry. Behind Nilles' efforts, the Sierra Club claims to have stopped plans for 24 new coal plants in the U.S. last year.

Despite all the accolades, Bruce remains totally unpretentious. There's a great photo of him in RS. It doesn't tell you he's wearing a hand me down shirt. Looks good on him though. Hope to see him here for some prairie burning in a couple of weeks.

UN set to renew war on drugs despite devastating consequences

A UN commission today is set to endorse another decade of the “war on drugs” despite admitting the current policies have had devastating consequences.

You did not read this in the New York Times. Fortunately, The Independent and The Guardian are not as timid as The Times when it comes to drugs. I have included just the tops of their stories below in a slightly shorted form. Click the links to read the whole stories.

War on drugs 'has enriched cartels'
By Toby Green in Vienna

The Independent, Thursday, 12 March 2009 -- United Nations member states are set to paper over their differences today and sign up to 10 more years of the much-criticised "war on drugs" at a drugs summit in Vienna.

Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said addiction to illicit drugs had "stabilised" in the past few years but admitted that a "dramatic unintended consequence" of the battle to stamp out the illicit trade was that drug cartels had become so rich they could destabilise impoverished and vulnerable nations in Africa and South America.

Ten wasted years:
UN drug strategy a failure, reveals damning report
By Duncan Campbell
The Guardian, Wednesday 11 March 2009

The UN strategy on drugs over the past decade has been a failure, a European commission report claimed yesterday on the eve of the international conference in Vienna that will set future policy for the next 10 years.

(The commission) declared that they had found "no evidence that the global drug problem was reduced". They wrote: "Broadly speaking, the situation has improved a little in some of the richer countries while for others it worsened, and for some it worsened sharply and substantially, among them a few large developing or transitional countries."

In an article for the Guardian, Mike Trace, chairman of the International Drug Policy Consortium, says: "We're about to see the international community walk up the political and diplomatic path of least resistance. It will do nothing to help the millions of people around the world whose lives are destroyed by drug markets and drug use."

In London, Lady Meacher, speaking on behalf of more than 30 members of the Lords, warned that the existing hardline prohibitionist strategy, which has been led by the US, had been deeply damaging. "We are concerned that the war on drugs has failed and the harm it has caused is far greater," said Meacher, at a briefing organised by the drugs advice charity Release.

However, while ignoring the failure of the drug war, The Times did have this yesterday:

Forbes’s list of the richest people in the world includes a fugitive drug don from Mexico who goes by the name Shorty. Joaquín Guzmán Loera, 54, who is the head of the feared Sinaloa Cartel, appears for the first time at No. 701. Mr. Guzmán escaped from a Mexican prison in a laundry cart in 2001, days before he was to be extradited to the United States. The United States government is offering a $5 million reward for his capture, which is pocket change for Mr. Guzmán; Forbes put his net worth at about $1 billion. His industry is listed as “shipping.”

Inside the asylum

Sometimes you have to listen to the really far right to understand how crazy this country really is. They make Rush look mainstream. Of course, not everyone has the stomach to troll those websites. Fortunately, truthout columnist William Rivers Pitt has done that for us in today’s column. Here’s the start. You can read the rest here:

One thing is certain: martial arts movie star Chuck Norris does not like President Obama. Not at all. Not one little bit. Norris dislikes Obama so much, in fact, that he discussed running for the office of president of Texas, which doesn't exist, as part of a larger move by him and a variety of other right-wing groups to overthrow the American government and return honor and decency to the country.

No, really, he said all that, and more. Read it yourself if you don't believe me. The best part is where he writes, "Remember the Alamo!" Great stuff.

Or something.

There's more. The owner of right-wing web forum Free Republic, Jim Robinson, was recently forced to post a truly deranged piece of apologia regarding the attention his web site recently earned from the Secret Service. "Unfortunately," wrote Robinson, "we are saddled with a communist sympathizer in the White House. I don't know whether or not he's an actual card carrying commie, but he's definitely an America-hating, anti-capitalist Marxist leftist who thinks communism is the way to go. So now comes the problem. If you feel it's your duty to call Obama a traitor and use salty language in your proposed resolution, ie, suggest the commie be keelhauled, walked off the plank, run up the yardarm, tarred and feathered and run out of Dodge, etc, etc, etc, you may be facing a visit from your friendly Secret Service."

"Keep," wrote Robinson in closing, "your powder dry." Yeah, O.K., good thinking.

Or something.

Last month, Fox News celebrity Sean Hannity ran a poll on his web site. It asked readers what kind of revolution they'd prefer: military coup, armed rebellion or war for succession? "#3 seems most realistic," opined Hannity, "since it does present an opportunity for more homogeneous states to sort of capitalize on their homogeneity. However, it would likely lead to mass migrations of the minority partisans out of the rebel states. Of course, that may be fine with those states. Yet it seems that the ultimate paradox in any rebellion for freedom from within is that the ultimate goal is to impose the will of the rebels on everyone else through force. It seems the very foundation of representative democracy is ****tered if we accept that we exchange the power of ideas for the power of the sword upon each other. Nevertheless, I am still very interested in your own preferred form of revolt."

That page has since been removed from Hannity's web site, surely due to some technical glitch, but before it was taken down, "armed rebellion" appeared to be the most popular choice of the three.

Science but not necessarily nature

On Monday, the Templeton Foundation will announce its 2009 winner of the Templeton Prize to honor contribution to mankind’s spiritual life. Last year’s winner was Michał Kazimierz Heller, a professor of philosophy at The Pontifical Academy of Theology in Kraków, Poland, and an adjunct member of the Vatican Observatory staff.

I can’t say I have any interest in his theology and I’m sure I wouldn’t understand his physics, but I did learn something from him that perhaps I should have learned years ago: there could hardly be a science more divorced from what we think of as nature than physics. Unless it’s theology.

Here is the bit that opened my eyes:

People often say that physics is a science of matter or of material world, but while most books on theoretical physics contain lots of mathematics, few mention anything about matter. This is because physics develops by constructing mathematical models of the world and then by confronting them with empirical results. One may say that the world, as viewed by modern physics, is constructed not out of matter but rather out of mathematics.

Now I don’t feel so bad about having to read Stephen Hawking twice to even begin to understand what he’s talking about. He is describing a purely mental model of the universe. Any little stories physicists tell about people on trains moving in opposite directions or observers viewing a beam of light on a spaceship are no more than correct than the little stories adults use to tell children about how things work in the real world.

Incidentally, the Templeton Prize is a big deal. Valued at one million pounds sterling (approximately $1.41 million or €1.12 million), the Templeton Prize is the world's largest annual monetary award given to an individual.

What's the nature of nature?

In keeping with our tradition of reading hair-raising tales of arctic near-death experiences in the Wisconsin winter, The Drinking and Reading Society this month is reading The Final Frontiersman by James Campbell. The story’s subject, Heimo Korth, lives in a way none of us can imagine. Here’s the opening to the book:

I arrive at Heimo Korth's cabin on the Old Crow drainage in the far northeastern corner of Alaska in early January 2002 after a three-hour, 300-mile flight from Fairbanks. Only thirty minutes outside of Fairbanks, Rick, the bush pilot, and I had left behind civilization. For the next two and a half hours, there was not even a building to mar the harsh beauty of the Alaskan winter, and I had the feeling that I was being transported straight back into the nineteenth century.

"Heimo and his family are the only subsistence family I know," Rick said as we crossed Stranglewoman Creek. "'Subsistence' gets a lot of lip service in Alaska, but the Korths live almost strictly off the land. You got to respect them for that. Hell, their closest neighbor is a hundred miles downriver on the Porcupine."

Looking out the window at the endless sweep of land, at the trees bent double under the weight of snow, and the cow moose bedded down in the frozen creek bed, I tried to imagine it: New York City to Philadelphia; Chicago to Milwaukee; Los Angeles to San Diego -- not a soul in between.

Campbell’s tale is sympathetic. He’s Korth’s cousin, as he tells us early, and is a friend to the family as well as an observer.

But he asks tough questions about trapping and killing animals, questions Korth is not oblivious to, but which he resolves in favor of himself and his chosen way of life.

In a larger sense, Campbell raises the question about the place of humans in the wilderness. Is wilderness someplace separate from humans, where only a few may visit, but none may stay? Or are we part of wilderness, as Bill Cronon wrote in The Trouble with Wilderness: or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature? Cronon argues that our duty in these times is to find a way to live with nature, not outside of nature.

Certainly humans throughout the last few million years have both been in nature and observers of nature. Cronon was the first to shatter the myth of a pristine North American wilderness with his book Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. Charles Mann expanded that vision to all of the Americas in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.

Heimo Korth and his family live in the tradition of the pre-Columbian natives, although Campbell makes it clear that the natives do not share Korth’s vision of wilderness as a place to escape to. But in that sense, he reflects the mainstream of American attitudes about wilderness. Even if we only drive our 4x4s to the supermarket, we still want to believe that we could chuck it all and lite out for the fronteer if we wanted to. Korth’s life fulfills that romantic vision (if your idea of romance is eating caribou steak at 40 below for weeks on end).

But Campbell points out that the romantic vision works best when it’s just an idea, not when lots of people try to practice it.

Our current notion of wilderness preservation – setting aside chunks of land so some future generation will be able to screw it up themselves – is at odds with the American myth of the frontier and also with historical reality.

I’m not sure we’ve come to grips with that contradiction very well, but The Final Frontiersman certainly does ask the provocative question – and it provides some genuine chills along the way.

Rush vs. Paris debate. That would be hot!

I agree with Mark Shields' comment on the News Hour last night that the White House should not give even the slightest nod of acknowledgment to Rush Limbaugh’s cheeky challenge to Barack Obama to debate him on his show.

But I would love to see a debate between Rush and Paris Hilton in any venue whatever. Wait, it’s not ridiculous! No, I don't think Paris Hilton is hot. She'd like us to think she is. Rush would like us to think he's substantive and serious, but he's no more serious than Hilton is. They're a perfect pair.

Neither has ever been elected to anything. They are both entertainers. They both make a lot of money. They both are famous for saying and doing outrageous things in public. They both use drugs (well, OK, I don't have any evidence that Paris Hilton uses drugs).

This would not be nearly the mis-match that you might think. Paris is no slouch at politics as you can see from her campaign ad.

My personal opinion is she would do America a great favor by kicking his fat butt and puncturing his inflated ego on national TV. It would be great entertainment and might even jump-start the economy by creating a big media advertising event.

What about it Rush?

Rush to destruction

Rush Limbaugh makes a big, fat target for anyone with an ounce of wit and the ability to write a coherent sentence, and most of those folks have been making hay this week about Limbaugh’s de-facto take-over of what will henceforth be known as the Rushpublican Party. The CapTimes rose to the occasion with one of their better editorials, although they made the mistake of actually seeming to take him seriously. Bloggers in general seem to have a better perspective on Rush because they can get down in the mud with him and enjoy the experience. If you love sarcasm (and who doesn’t?) you’ll enjoy Bob Cesca’s blog courtesy of Huffingtonpost.com.

I will confess I don’t listen to Rush except by accident. I think it’s an accident when anyone listens. But I hope someone will do a serious study of his rhetorical style because we could learn a lot. There hasn’t been a propagandist this good since Joseph Goebbels. From what I can understand, the way it works is you start with a couple of true statements, add in an emotional appeal and then zing the audience with an appealing non-sequitur like a pitcher raring back and flinging a changeup at a batter who was expecting a fastball. Like him, we whiff every time. But unlike the hapless batter, we have no ump to cry “steee-rike” so we don’t know we’ve just grown jackass ears. I suppose if this happens to you for long enough you think it’s normal.

And that, rather than any deep analysis, is my explanation for why Rush is now the non-titular head of what’s left of the Republican Party. We love to be seduced, even when we know we’re going to wake up tomorrow morning with a sore ass.

The cranes of spring

Everyone has his own private sign of spring. The croak of the first redwing. The azure flash of a bluebird. Even the musical trickle of water running over old ice. I love all of those of course. Who doesn’t love a sign of spring after a long winter of turning inward. We like to define ourselves by our thoughts, we humans do, but after too long of living with on our intellect, we need the muck and wind of a spring day so we can take a deep breath and remember who we actually are.

For me, spring is the trumpet sound of cranes. They’re back this week. I have heard them three days in a row. Sandhills. Soon they will be circling the marsh and dancing on the muddy banks. They will fill the spring air with their calls until it gets just about as annoying as an errant fire alarm. Fortunately not as loud.

In his essay Marshland Elegy in 1937, Aldo Leopold reminded us that the return of the crane is not just a sign of the annual return of the sun, but a connection to all of our animal ancestors reaching into the dimmest reaches of time. The crane is our brother and our sister and reminds us that the glacier was here and is coming again, that the continents are moving under our feet, that all we see is a brief frame in the film of life. But let him say it:

Our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within these hills. And so they live and have their being - these cranes – not in the constricted present but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time. Their annual return is the clicking of the geologic clock. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

CNN report cuts and pastes the news

Watching Wednesday's CNN report on clean coal and the interview with Bruce reminded me of the Don Henley song about the media, Dirty Laundry. "We can do the innuendo; we can dance and sing. When it's said and done we haven't told you a thing."

It's instructive for a media worker like me or a media consumer like most folks to watch a report like that critically. Look at the quick edits that start or end in the middle of a sentence. Look at the sucker-punch questions. Look at how they just cut and pasted tiny scraps of video together to make it say whatever they wanted. It's a really good job of manufactured news, but it's like eating Twinkies. It leaves you with the feeling that you've been manipulated but you're not quite sure how.

If people hate and distrust the media, who's to blame?

Our favorite environmentalist dodges a trick question

This morning, CNN interviewed our favorite environmentalist. Bruce Nilles, Director of Sierra Club's Move Beyond Coal Campaign, discussing “clean coal” and whether President Obama is “misleading the nation.” Bruce, you probably shouldn't say "good question" when they ask you things like that. The report features a new ad directed by the Academy Award-winning Coen Brothers that has generated a lot of buzz. Watch the report here courtesy of CNN and Huffingtonpost.com.

In praise of doubt

People who are drawn to doubt and who like to see both sides of things are considered weak and flip-floppy in our society. We value certainty, action, decision. We admire people who know the truth and don’t look back. But what if it’s not possible to really know the truth? What if reality is like reading the BZFED of an eye chart while the ophthalmologist tries different lenses. “Is it clearer with #1 or #2?”

The science of behavioral economics has been heartily embraced by marketers, who intuitively understood its power even before it had a name. But most people are threatened by the notion that they don’t have a firm logical grasp on their own perceptions, choices and decisions.

The story in today’s NYTimes Liked the Show? Maybe It Was the Commercials doesn’t add any profound weight of evidence to the premise that our brains are running wild without our conscious knowledge or control, but it does turn the microscope to a topic that we all think we understand totally – TV commercials. If we can be wrong about that, what else might we be wrong about?

In two new studies, researchers who study consumer behavior argue that interrupting an experience, whether dreary or pleasant, can make it significantly more intense.

“The punch line is that commercials make TV programs more enjoyable to watch. Even bad commercials,” said Leif Nelson, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the new research. “When I tell people this, they just kind of stare at me, in disbelief. The findings are simultaneously implausible and empirically coherent.”

Over the years, psychological research has found that people are not always so clear on what makes them happy. When reporting on their own well-being, they exhibit a kind of equilibrium: After a loss (divorce, say) or a gain (a promotion), they typically return in time to about the same happiness level as before. Humans habituate quickly, to hardship and prosperity, to war and peace.

Gal Zauberman, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said the findings were solid, and added: “To me, the most interesting part is that almost everyone says, ‘I just wish I never had to watch a commercial.’

“It’s all a part of this phenomenon that we have found in other work,” he continued, “that people are not fully aware of what makes them happy, especially when there’s a temporal component, when one experience affects another in time.”

If that doesn't get you to think that, just maybe you don't have all the answers, what would?

Another small ray of sunshine

Good news reported by The Washington Post and relayed by Truthout.org, the liberal-leaning compiler of news and comment. I don’t know how long they’ll be around since they’re always begging for money, something that doesn’t trouble the conservatives. Anyway, here’s today’s dose of good news. We need lots more before we’re washed clean:

Today President Obama will restore rules requiring U.S. agencies consult with independent federal experts to determine if their actions might harm threatened and endangered species, according to an administration official who asked not to be identified, marking yet another reversal of President Bush's environmental legacy.

In December 2008, the Bush administration changed a longstanding practice under the Endangered Species Act by issuing rules that allowed agencies to move ahead with projects and programs without seeking an independent review by either the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Environmentalists and scientists said this shift could allow agencies to press ahead with plans that could hurt already-vulnerable species across the country.

Today Obama will issue a presidential memorandum, an administration official said, that will direct departments to yet again consult with the two agencies on decisions that could affect imperiled plants and animals "while the Interior and Commerce Departments review the Bush rulemaking."

Time to admit we've lost the drug war

If you thought the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan were going badly, you haven’t been paying attention to the other war we’re losing – the drug war.

Billions of dollars are flowing from middle class Americans to fund drug cartels and terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mexico. Guns and money from the USA are used to subvert, bribe and terrorize government officials and ordinary citizens.

This week the State Department had to caution U.S. college students about the dangers of spring break travel in Mexico. Today there was this in the New York Times:

With Force, Mexican Drug Cartels Get Their Way
By MARC LACEY
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Mayor José Reyes Ferriz is supposed to be the one to hire and fire the police chief in this gritty border city that is at the center of Mexico’s drug war. It turns out, though, that real life in Ciudad Juárez does not follow the municipal code.

It was drug traffickers who decided that Chief Roberto Orduña Cruz, a retired army major who had been on the job since May, should go. To make clear their insistence, they vowed to kill a police officer every 48 hours until he resigned.

They first killed Mr. Orduña’s deputy, Operations Director Sacramento Pérez Serrano, together with three of his men. Then another police officer and a prison guard turned up dead. As the body count grew, Mr. Orduña eventually did as the traffickers had demanded, resigning his post on Feb. 20 and fleeing the city.

Replacing Mr. Orduña will also fall outside the mayor’s purview, although this time the criminals will not have a say. With Ciudad Juárez and the surrounding state of Chihuahua under siege by heavily armed drug lords, the federal government last week ordered the deployment of 5,000 soldiers to take over the Juárez Police Department. With the embattled mayor’s full support, the country’s defense secretary will pick the next chief.

Chihuahua, which already has about 2,500 soldiers and federal police on patrol, had almost half the 6,000 drug-related killings in all of Mexico in 2008 and is on pace for an even bloodier 2009. Juárez’s strategic location at the busy El Paso border crossing and its large population of local drug users have prompted a fierce battle among rival cartels for control of the city.

The solution is not more guns and greater militarization of Mexico and the U.S. We’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. The solution is to cut off the supply of money at the source by legalizing and regulating recreational drugs. The cartels would deflate like tired balloons. Terrorists wouldn’t be able to afford airline tickets. We would be able to deal with drug problems within a rational healthcare system, not as only a criminal problem.

When set against the background of a collapsing government on our borders, the unproven assumption that more people might use drugs (so what?) is pretty flimsy. It’s time to solve this problem before terrorists figure out that we have a great big open sore on our southern border just waiting for them to take over.

No wonder some people are so stupid

Prints Show a Modern Foot in Prehumans
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: February 26, 2009
Footprints uncovered in Kenya show that as early as 1.5 million years ago an ancestral species, almost certainly Homo erectus, had already evolved the feet and walking gait of modern humans. An international team of scientists, in a report on Friday in the journal Science, said the well-defined prints in an eroding bluff east of Lake Turkana “provided the oldest evidence of an essentially modern humanlike foot anatomy.” They said the find also added to evidence that painted a picture of Homo erectus as the prehumans who took long evolutionary strides — figuratively and, now it seems, also literally.

Until now, no footprint trails had ever been associated with early members of our long-legged genus Homo. Preserved ancient footprints of any kind are rare. The only earlier prints of a protohuman species were found in 1978 at Laetoli, in Tanzania. Dated at 3.7 million years ago, they were made by Australopithecus afarensis, the diminutive species to which the famous Lucy skeleton belonged. The prints showed that the species already walked upright, but its short legs and long arms and its feet were in many ways apelike.

More evidence that the brain evolved last. Or was created by God last, if that’s your viewpoint. Was it an afterthought? An incidental improvement that just happened? What was Homo Erectus thinking about with her tiny brain? If there was ever a fascinating question, that’s it. How much of our complex modern behavior happened in a very short period of time? Any why?

Why I like David Brooks

My friend PZ excoriates David Brooks for being such an enemy of the people and I certainly don't agree with a lot of what Brooks says. But I really like the way he says it. And I like his fundamental understanding of America, even when I disagree with his conclusions. Last night was a great example of David Brooks saying what he really thinks -- a rarity on TV, especially when it comes to criticism of a rising star in his own party.

Check out this clip with Jim Lehrer:

I think Bobby Jindal is a very promising politician and I opposed the stimulus package because I thought it was poorly drafted, but to come up at this moment in history with a stale, ‘government is the problem’ argument is just a disaster for the Republican party. The idea that the federal government has no role in this, in a moment when only the federal government is big enough to actually do stuff . . . it’s just a form of nihilism. I think it’s insane.”

Or this one later on PBS (sorry I don't know the moderator's name):

“Bobby Jindal gave possibly the worst response to a Democratic speaker in the history of democracy. For Bobby Jindal to come out and say government is the problem . . . that is just insane. That was the best thing that happened to Barack Obama tonight. That response from the most promising Republican politician was just an unmitigated disaster.”

Whatever you think about David Brooks' politics, he has an understanding of American culture. I saw him at a seminar sponsored by HG Magazine in New York just after Bobos in Paradise came out and he really nailed some big cultural trends. And he approached the research findings with humor and humility, which I find appealing.

So, sorry PZ. David's the man. Or at least he was last night.

Don’t give the doubters any more ammo

Andrew Revkin’s Dotearth blog today had this story:

Gore Pulls Slide of Disaster Trends
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Former Vice President Al Gore is pulling a dramatic slide from his ever-evolving global warming presentation. When Mr. Gore addressed a packed, cheering hall at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago earlier this month, his climate slide show contained a startling graph showing a ceiling-high spike in disasters in recent years. The data came from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (also called CRED) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels.

The graph, which was added to his talk last year, came just after a sequence of images of people from Iowa to South Australia struggling with drought, wildfire, flooding and other weather-related calamities. Mr. Gore described the pattern as a manifestation of human-driven climate change. “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented,” he said.

Now Mr. Gore is dropping the graph, his office said today. Here’s why.

Two days after the talk, Mr. Gore was sharply criticized for using the data to make a point about global warming by Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a political scientist focused on disaster trends and climate policy at the University of Colorado. Mr. Pielke noted that the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters stressed in reports that a host of factors unrelated to climate caused the enormous rise in reported disasters (details below).

Dr. Pielke quoted the Belgian center: “Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one — even if its impact on the figures will likely become more evident in the future.

This is just the kind of thing that Rush and his gang of blow-hards pick up on and play back every day for the next ten years to prove to their mindless flock of sheep that environmentalists are pulling the wool over their eyes (how would that work?) about global warming.

There is plenty of good science on our side. We should be telling people that this is a long, slow process that is also going to take a long time to fix. I know people like to think in terms of this year vs last year, but do you really want the global climate change campaign to live or die on how much snow they get in New York next winter? Or whether Miami happens to get hit by a hurricane? We have a harder job than the poo-pooers. Let’s not make their work any easier.

Is it spring yet?

This morning I was reminded once again that Wisconsin is whitetail country. The fields and hillsides in our little valley are creased and lined with deer trails in the new fallen powder. Bounding in straight lines right up the sides of the bluffs. Rushing together and breaking apart like crazy tributaries of some big, braided river like in Alaska. Drawing loops and figure eights down on the flats, but not too far from the edge of the woods. Out there for everyone to see are the highways, cross roads and meandering rustic avenues of the deer family. Not just in one place, but all up and down the length of the valley (except right next to the few houses). This is not just a herd, but a family, a tribe, a nation coming together and breaking apart in their search for food under the snow.

Of course, the deer are here all the time. In the summer when the leaves make the wooded hillsides a visually impenetrable mass of green. In the dead of winter when the old snow is too gray and hard to hold the tracks. We just don’t see the evidence as flagrantly as today. This is our evidence of their existence, like the howling is the evidence of the coyotes. It was -14 this morning and I imagine even the deer are getting tired of that!

The end of coal

This week’s program on public radio’s Living on Earth focused on coal and how the unstoppable momentum for more coal power was stopped by a few people standing in front of the tanks.

Plans for some 150 new coal-fired power plants have bitten the dust as uncertainty grows about how to handle coal's emissions. Now the Obama administration adds to coal's woes with steps to regulate mercury, fly ash and greenhouse gases from coal plants. Living on Earth's Jeff Young reports.

One of Jeff’s interviews was naturally with Bruce Nilles, who takes the position that no coal is good coal.

NILLES: For the last eight years the answer has been to put our heads in the sand and ignore carbon dioxide. And the days of pretending global warming does not exist and that carbon dioxide will not be regulated are simply over. The Obama administration is gonna use existing authorities to begin to take a bite out of global warming and do our part.

We need people like Bruce who will stand up to the forces of “reason” and tell them they’re not being reasonable. Bruce argues that coal is actually more expensive than wind and solar right now. If you haven't caught up on the latest with coal, give a listen.

Living on Earth is a weekly environmental news and information program distributed by Public Radio International and broadcast weekly on approximately 300 Public Radio stations. The show airs in 9 of the 10 top radio markets and reaches 80% of the US.

Can't get into The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Everybody said I should read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. It's about dogs. It's set in Wisconsin. It was Amazon's Book of the Month in June 08. So how come my bookmark it stuck at page 90? Why do I walk past the book every day and reach for something else? Maybe it's ADD - I need too much stimulation and this book unfolds verrrrry slowly. What do YOU think?

Baby steps on drug policy

The NYT today reports joy among the drug realists at the potential appointment of R. Gil Kerlikowske, the chief of the Seattle Police Department as the nation’s drug czar. The Times reported:

The anticipated selection of Chief Kerlikowske has given hope to those who want national drug policy to shift from an emphasis on arrest and prosecution to methods more like those employed in Seattle: intervention, treatment and a reduction of problems drug use can cause, a tactic known as harm reduction. Chief Kerlikowske is not necessarily regarded as having forcefully led those efforts, but he has not gotten in the way of them.

Is that the best we can do?

What about shifting our national drug policy to a policy of legalization, regulation and problem reduction? What about a policy that actually does something effective to stop the flow of billions of dollars from middle class Americans drug consumers to terrorist organizations and drug thugs?

A story in the Wall Street Journal last week by Jose De Cordoba reported that a commission led by three conservative Latin American former presidents - Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, and César Gaviria of Colombia warned that the U.S. antidrug strategy was putting the region's fragile democratic institutions at risk and corrupting "judicial systems, governments, the political system and especially the police forces."

American drug laws are destroying the governments, economies and societies of countries like Mexico and Afghanistan, places we don't want to see become lawless havens for mobsters and terrorists and where we spend billions to prop up shaky governments and fund anti-drug activities. We are our own worst enemy in these places and American money is funding both sides of the war.

Prohibition has never worked. An interesting blog by conservative Tom Evelin not only makes a forceful case for legalization, but also points out that this is not a liberal or conservative issue.

Legalizing drugs is a stimulus package that comes at a negative cost to the taxpayer, punishes the bad guys by ruining their business, creates new business opportunities for good guys and lets us treat drug problems as we do alcohol and other addictions. The only problem is that it's political dynamite and will cause a huge anti-Obama surge from the right (but not from real conservatives like me).

There is some small measure of hope. Even in a climate of racial fear, massive drug-war propaganda, and no organized educational campaign for legalization, a growing number of Americans no longer see drugs as the monster under the bed. A poll last month by CBS found that 41% believe marijuana should be legalized, 52% oppose and 7% have no option. 30 years ago a similar poll found 69% against.

If the American public were presented with the real costs of the drug war, I believe attitudes would change quickly. But who can do that? Hmmm. How about it Anheuser-Busch and Altria? Ready for your own stimulus package?

Baby steps indeed!

Neanderthal walks into a coffee bar, says "hold the cream"

Svante Paabo announced on Darwin’s birthday that he has sequenced the Neanderthal genome. You can listen to the news conference from the Max Planck Institute here. This project took at least 2.5 years to complete the study of 200 extracts from 70 fossils and 16 sites. The fossils ranged in age from 38,000 years to 43,000 years. 



From the preliminary results, the genomic evidence is for a divergence approximately 830,000 years ago. The researchers looked with great interest at the lactose gene which is found on chromosome 2. Most Europeans have the gene which allows them to consume milk as adults. The Neanderthal DNA showed no such capacity to drink milk. However, the FOXP2 gene which is associated with speech is found in the Neanderthal. This does not specifically mean that they could speak. It does not even confirm that this gene was expressed. It does however show that there is the possiblility that they spoke.

Missing the point of anti-evolutionists

How people in various countries view evolution

This is from the Economist.

It is 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which suggested that all living things are related and that everything is ultimately descended from a single common ancestor. This has troubled many, including Darwin himself, as it subverted ideas of divine intervention. It is not surprising that the countries least accepting of evolution today tend to be the most devout. In the most recent international survey available, only Turkey is less accepting of the theory than America. Iceland and Denmark are Darwin's most ardent adherents. Indeed America has become only slightly more accepting of Darwin's theory in recent years. In 2008 14% of people polled by Gallup agreed that “man evolved over millions of years”, up from 9% in 1982.

These surveys appear all the time, especially on science-oriented websites, accompanied by a lot of boo-hoo about how scientifically illiterate Americans are. I certainly won’t disagree with the assertion, but I think we are missing something if we just attribute doubt about evolution to a literal belief in creation stories.

The main reason people doubt evolution is that it posits a universe without plan, order or purpose. Physicists do the same thing, but ordinary people are so confused about curved space-time, string theory and uncertainty principles that they can ignore what physicists say.

Many people, on the other hand, say they feel the hand of God in their lives, that prayer seems to work for them and that they can’t feel comfortable with a random world. If we want to spread understanding of evolution – or string theory – we need to deal with that. People may say they doubt evolution because it conflicts with Genesis, but that’s just a convenient way of avoiding the real sticking point. Pointing out the logical flaws in Genesis is talking to the shadow, not the substance. The real question is, does science have anything hopeful to say to people who are yearning for meaning in their lives?

Way to go Bruce!

The environmental news site Grist.org has finally announced the winner of the 2008 eco-hero vote. Is it Barack Obama? James Hansen? No.

With 730 votes ... the Grist 2008 Eco-Hero of the Year is ... [drum roll] … Bruce Nilles. Nilles is director of the Sierra Club's National Coal Campaign, which has helped coordinate the extraordinary grassroots movement that's sprung up in the last few years to fight against new coal plants. This victory for Nilles is really a victory for that movement, which has -- with very little help from the establishment or resources from big-money funders -- pulled off an amazing string of victories that is still going on. Nice job, movement. And nice job, Bruce.

Of course, if you want to know what’s wrong with the environmental movement today, just read some of the nasty comments. Talk about Balkanized! Relax dudes. Yer all on the same side.

Happy birthday; now drop dead

As Darwin is being lauded as one of the most important scientists in history on this 200th anniversary of his birth, less than half of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution, and just 55% can associate the man with his theory, according to a Gallup Poll.

Americans' religious beliefs are a significant predictor of their attitudes toward Darwin's theory. Those who attend church most often are the least likely to believe in evolution, and most likely to say they do not believe in it.

Americans who have lower levels of formal education are significantly less likely than others to be able to identity Darwin with his theory, and to have an opinion on it either way.

I would say I am surprised, but this is totally consistent with previous polls. After all we just spent 8 years with a president who didn't believe in evolution.

Lives of the (evolutionary) saints

Sean B. Carroll is a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin and a pretty smart guy who spends his days tracing the course of evolution via DNA and spends his nights writing about it. Maybe being a storyteller makes him a better scientist. In The Making of the Fittest, he put the full faith and credit of DNA-based research at the service of evolution and made it sing.

His new book, published just in time for Darwin’s 200th birthday today (happy birthday Charles), isn’t like that. Remarkable Creatures is a simple history of evolutionary thinking as told through brief biographies of noted scientists, starting with Alexander von Humboldt, who believed in an entirely static world, through Svante Paabo, who figured out how to extract DNA from Neanderthal fossils, thus proving they were not our ancestors. Along with way he profiles Roy Chapman Andrews, the pistol-toting Beloit native who provided the original model for Indiana Jones. 

For anyone who has not really delved into evolution and its history, these stories of the ongoing search for the missing links might be fascinating. I hope it will inspire a whole new generation of paleo-geneticists. Even if you know all about Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Walcott, you will find stories here that you probably have never heard told in a breezy, entertaining prose that moves the stories along like a good mystery novel.

But unlike Carroll’s other work, Remarkable Creatures breaks no new ground. Unlike some of the recent Darwin biographies, it offers no new perspective on why he did what he did. You will find no academic skullduggery, professional backstabbing or scientific mis-deeds here. Unfortunately, it would have required many more volumes.

God and Darwin

This week as we observed Darwin’s 200th birthday, so many of the comments about evolution have reflected such a dumbed down expression of Christianity that’s it’s a beautiful relief to read exploringourmatrix by James McGrath, Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University. I don’t always agree with him, but in every case his is the voice of reason. Too bad more Christians don’t listen.

Here are a couple of relevant excerpts from his recent blogs:

The majority of Christians who accept evolution do so because scientists with relevant expertise accept it. I don't think it should be otherwise. It certainly is wonderful if someone has the time and interest to become well informed about a subject outside their specialty, and for most of us evolution falls into that category. But if you don't have the time to inform yourself, then you really ought to accept what the scientific consensus is, and not a handful of engineers and preachers who tickle people's ears and tell them emotionally-charged things that they want to hear.

For me, my own personal faith has ceased to be about claiming certain things did or didn't happen in the past. That has its place. But I focus more on my own experience, and the reality that we inhabit now. If the teachings of Christianity are "true" in any meaningful sense, then we ought to be more concerned with how we treat others than with debating questions of history or even science.

McGrath takes fundamentalists to task for failing to understand the difference between what we know (for sure) about Jesus (which isn’t much) and what someone believes.

How do we do justice to that higher order of emergence in our experience that we have traditionally referred to as 'God'? The framework within which we speak of such things has changed, and our ideas will thus need reformulation. But in the end, until the experience of the earth's apparent immobility was accounted for, no satisfactory understanding of its motion could be formulated. In the same way, we cannot adequately rethink the nature of reality without doing justice in some way, even if a radically rethought and reformulated one, to the sense of meaning, purpose and transcendence that many human beings have experienced and continue to experience.

Of course, McGrath, with all his biblical learning, is a believer in science and evolution. His faith is not threatened by either. It makes you wonder why they are so threatening to so many others. What does it say about your faith if it can be challenged by a mere scientific discovery?

Too little too late

Having trouble understanding the economic recovery plan? I am.

Mostly you hear from politicians who are trying to either mollify or stir up voters who know next to nothing about economics or the plans. So I turned to a guy who has a long record of representing middle America. Jim Jubak usually writes about which stocks to buy and sell for MSN.com. So now that nobody’s buying, he’s writing some of the most informed and provocative stuff about the recovery plan.

Here is his reaction to the $500,000 salary cap for bankers.

That's it? That's the punishment for the reckless risk taking that pumped up the housing bubble, turned a decline in home prices into a global financial crisis that could shake banks and governments to the core, set off a credit crunch that brought the global economy to a standstill and has necessitated a tidal wave of taxpayer bailouts that will saddle generations to come with a mountain of debt and lower economic growth?

He also takes a more realistic view of what really drives economic activity.

Most economic policy -- and most economic theory -- is built on an assumption that human beings behave rationally. Good luck with spending money effectively on that foundation.

I am making no attempt to summarize his opinions or prescriptions here. The topic is way too complicated, but I do urge you to read his columns as a way of cutting through the clutter from the point of view of someone who is motivated by the same things that are important to the average person. What a relief!

If more people would read what he’s writing, perhaps Congress wouldn’t be so quick to pander.

Foxes still running the henhouse

Watching Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) talk about the stimulus on Meet the Press yesterday had me thinking about why you should never put a politician on TV. They all sounded like they were reading from their prepared talking points. I know. I’ve done lots of talking points. I practically wore out the MUTE button. It was like this was all about them. No. It’s all about me. I’m the one looking for a job or freelance work. They’re still getting paid to blather.

It especially fries me when I hear pols talk about how we can’t afford a stimulus package. I think the term used was “precious taxpayer dollars.” This is coming from the same people who spent the past eight years voting for a trillion dollar deficit. Their “borrow like there’s no tomorrow” policies actually were at the root of the current depression. All that extra money overheated the economy; it had to go somewhere and if you guessed Real Estate, give yourself a gold star. All this talk about irresponsible homeowners who really shouldn’t have taken out that big mortgage or that nasty community reinvestment act that forced bankers to lend to local people is a smoke-screen. This is fiscal policy at its simplest and they failed the final test miserably. Why should anyone listen to them now?

Darwin's other controversy

Darwin may be 200 years old and his theory of evolution by natural selection 150, but there are still many scientists who have a problem swallowing one of the principal implications of “descent with modification” – the idea that animals share emotions with humans. Patricia McConnell, an adjunct professor in the UW zoology department used her time slot at Saturday’s Darwin Day celebration to demonstrate why “human nature” and “animal nature” aren’t so far apart.

Read Darwin still raising controversy...for another reason, by Susan Troller in the CapTimes.

Charles Darwin was able to stir up almost as much controversy with notions about dogs and emotions as with chimps and evolution.

Although Darwin's pioneering notions about natural selection and evolutionary biology continue to draw plenty of fire and fury from religious creationists, he has another book that ruffles feathers, too: "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," published in 1872.

It’s interesting that although the “scientific” objections of Skinnerians and Marxists are not necessarily the same, both come from the same root as the religious objections – a faith in a worldview that’s based outside of science.

Skinnerians (behaviorists) want to think they are pure scientists because they believe only what they can directly observe. But their belief in the separate natures of humans and animals really grows out of a biblical foundation – the supposedly separate creation of humans and animals. They demand proof that there is congruence between humans and animals rather than starting from the Darwinian position that evolution logically implies similarity.

Marxists, of course, tend to deny human nature because they would like to think all human differences, beliefs and customs are created by culture, as writing on a blank slate, not locked in by chemistry or genetics.

Affirming a biological basis for human nature, and admitting that we share some of that nature with our fellow creatures is not the same as saying human behavior is pre-determined (as some fear). But it is the necessary starting point for understanding our behavior, which is step one in making a more civil society.

Celebrating Darwin

The University of Wisconsin is celebrating Darwin Day on Saturday, Feb. 7. Featured speakers include Sean Carroll, a UW-Madison professor of genetics and one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, Patricia McConnell, an authority on dogs and dog behavior, and Jeremy Jackson, an eminent scientist from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography who will speak on evolution and extinction in the oceans. Like evolution itself, Darwin Day is free and open to the public. They thoughtfully provided a helpful reading list, in case you can’t make it to the event.

Sean Carroll - Remarkable Creatures 

Sean Carroll - The Making of the Fittest

Sean Carroll - Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Patricia McConnell - Play Together, Stay Together

Patricia McConnell - Tales of Two Species

Patricia McConnell - For the Love of a Dog
Ethne Barnes - Diseases and Human Evolution
Noel Boaz - Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World is Making Us Sick
Peter Bowler - Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design
Janet Browne - Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography
Frederick Burkhard - Charles Darwin: The Beagle Letters
Francis Collins - The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
Jerry Coyne - Why Evolution is True
Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin - The Descent of Man
Richard Dawkins - The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Adrian Desmond - Darwin's Sacred Cause: How Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's View on Human Evolution
Jared Diamond - The Third Chimpanzee
Peter Grant and Rosemary Grant - How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin's Finches
Bert Holdobler and E.O. Wilson - The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Society
David Quammen - The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution
National Academy of Sciences - Science, Evolution, and Creationism
Neil Shubin - Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Elliot Sober - Evidence for Evoltuion: The Logic Behind the Science
E.O. Wilson, Michael Ruse, and Joseph Travis - Evolution: The First Four Billion Years

Hit by technology

I was planning to blog today but then I discovered that TDS had turned off my email account and it took two hours on the phone and a couple more more on the computers to get things sorted out. It's a lot more work for me, but I guess it's less work and cost for TDS. We see who the important party is in this relationship. There will be a blog tomorrow, the Good Lord willing and the creeks don't rise.

Hold those negative thoughts

The economy in a funk. An unpopular war dragging on overseas. Enemies arrayed against us around the world. A final presidential approval rating of 32%.

No, not George Bush. Harry Truman. Apparently history has a way of revising popular opinion, so it behooves all of us to hang on to our negative thoughts about GW Bush as long as possible to prevent any possible rehabilitation by future generations who don't know him as well as we do. Read all about it on the Gallup website.

Groundhog smoundhog

In the mundane scheme of things, today is Monday, a workday and also trash day for me. But there is a lot more to celebrate on this Feb. 2 besides bright sunshine.

Call it groundhog day, Imbolc, Candlemas, St. Brigid’s Day or whatever, this is one of those days in the calendar when celebrations from olden times come down to us like cultural echoes that we can hear but not quite understand. They have the power, if we care to pay attention, to open for us a much longer sense of time and tradition.

According to the Celts, the end of winter and the start of the awakening of the world is marked by Imbolc, or 'the lactation of the ewes' in Celtic. The birth of the first lamb means that there is once again fresh milk available, and is the proof of new life returning.

Imbolc is traditionally a time of weather prognostication, and the old tradition of watching to see if serpents or badgers came from their winter dens is perhaps a precursor to the North American Groundhog Day.

Today is also Candlemas in the Christian calendar. Traditionally the term "Candlemas" (or Candle Mass) referred to the practice of blessing beeswax candles for use throughout the year, some of which were distributed to the faithful for use in the home.

Since the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council, this feast has been referred to as the Feast of Presentation of the Lord, with references to candles and the purification of Mary de-emphasised.

In the British Isles, the day is dedicated to the goddess Brigid; it was adopted as St Brigid's Day in the Christian period. In Scotland the festival is known as Là Fhèill Brìghde, in Ireland as Lá Fhéile Bríde, and in Wales as Gŵyl Fair. Fire and purification are an important aspect of this festival. The lighting of candles and fires represents the return of warmth and the increasing power of the Sun over the coming months.

Whatever its ancient origins, our Groundhog day apparently began as a German custom in southeastern and central Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There is no more evidence to support the accuracy of the groundhog’s forecast than there is of the efficacy of holy candles getting one into heaven. On the other hand, it’s pretty sure that somewhere in the world a lamb was born today, signifying the return of life to our cold, cold world. For that, and all the other shards of history, we can celebrate. It sure beats trash day.

Darwin at 200

Harry recommends a couple of new books on Darwin that were reviewed in the New York Times, including Darwin’s Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear Darwin’s 200th birthday will be the occasion of some ideas about him that clearly deserve to be left in the dust of evolution. This may be one.

Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s argument in their new book, “Darwin’s Sacred Cause,” is bluntly stated in its subtitle: “How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution.” They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a “tough-minded scientist” who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution. This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. “Darwin’s starting point,” they write, “was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a ‘common descent’ ” of all human beings.

I hate to disagree with scholars, but it seems to me that Darwin’s revulsion at slavery was at least as much colored by his place in society as by his moral objections.

We forget because slavery lasted another 30 years in America, but by the time the Beagle sailed in 1831, abolition was an accepted fact in Britain. Darwin, as an enlightened gentleman certainly subscribed to the idea. Slaves were emancipated by Act of the British Parliament in 1834. William Wilberforce’s Slave Trade Act 1807 abolished the trade in the British Empire, and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished it per se.

Darwin may have hated slavery personally, or he may have been reflecting the spirit of his times, but he reflected in full measure his society’s prejudices against other races. I addressed that issue in my blog on Oct. 23:

Darwin was profoundly conservative and Anglo-centric in his social awareness. “To hoist the British flag," he wrote, "seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity and civilization.” Time and again he judges the natives harshly from the narrow viewpoint of an English gentleman. The Fuegans, the Maori, even the Tahitians are described by Darwin in almost subhuman terms born of racial prejudice and social arrogance. Of the Fuegans (natives of Tierra del Fuego) he wrote: "These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skin filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make one’s self believe that they are fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world.”

Moral panic

Earlier this week, the NY Time had two stories of interest. One noted that crack babies grew up to be pretty much normal, despite a lot of worry that they wouldn’t. The other noted the teen sex epidemic that apparently exists more in adults’ minds than in reality. I though “I should blog on that.” But Judith Warner got there first with her analysis of America’s “moral panic”, and as usual, she had a lot more to say that I.

In her blog today, Warner reported that researcher Maria Kefalas of St. Joseph’s University told her:

“For a 14-year-old to be having sex it’s usually a symptom of a kid who’s really broken and really hurt. Those who are having sex without contraception are a distinct set: they’re poor, from single-parent households, doing poorly in school, have low self-esteem. Teen pregnancy is so high in America compared to other places not just because of access to contraception but because we have a lot of poverty. But Americans don’t want to see themselves as a poor society. They want to make a moral argument: if only teens had better values.”

Some of this is a cautionary tale: don’t believe everything you read or hear at a cocktail party. In fact, we tend to believe the things that support our underlying prejudices and beliefs and ignore those things that challenge them.

But it’s also to note that throughout history, every generation has decried the moral degeneration of the next. You can bet our grandparents thought our parents’ generation was going to hell in the back of the jalopy. My grandparents had a copious photo collection of their kids and relatives standing next to wrecked cars with booze bottles in hand, proof of how immoral the next generation had become.

Kefalas said she had to struggle mightily to get people to understand that teens are not in a downward spiral or out of control. “They just don’t believe you. You might as well be telling them the earth is flat.”

No one as Irish as Barack Obama

Great video. Enjoy. Share.

Theres no one as Irish as Barack OBama- Corrigan Brothers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xkw8ip43Vk

Source: www.youtube.

Saint of the day

The Roman Catholic Church observes January 28 as the day of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), by universal consent the preeminent spokesman of the Catholic tradition of reason and of divine revelation.

Beliefnet.com says this of Aquinas:

His greatest contribution to the Catholic Church is his writings. The unity, harmony and continuity of faith and reason, of revealed and natural human knowledge, pervades his writings. One might expect Thomas, as a man of the gospel, to be an ardent defender of revealed truth. But he was broad enough, deep enough, to see the whole natural order as coming from God the Creator, and to see reason as a divine gift to be highly cherished.

I don’t usually extol the virtues of saints on this blog, but as we are approaching the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on Feb. 12, I was thinking that perhaps Aquinas could have found a way to reconcile the evolutionists and the theists. I am perhaps being to free in paraphrasing Aquinas to say that he believed that if your faith could be thrown into doubt by scientific discovery then perhaps there was something seriously wrong with your religion.

The good old days

People seem to divide themselves into two types: 1. Optimists who see a brighter tomorrow in every technical innovation or social change and who tend to believe, at least subliminally, that Creation has a goal or purpose that lies over the next horizon, and 2. Pessimists who believe we are descended from a Golden Age and who yearn for a return to the traditional values of olden times. Neither, of course, is based on reality, and most of us recognize that in our more lucid moments. But in the interest of putting past and present in perspective, here is what John Muir wrote about his own time in Our National Parks, published in 1902. It doesn’t lend much support to the belief that the “good old days” were all that good.

“Few in these hot, dim, strenuous times are quite sane or free, choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money, or so little, they are no longer good for themselves.”

The quote is from A Passion for Nature, Donald Worster's new biography of John Muir. It's destined to be a seminal book in any search for the roots of American environmentalism. It provides a more rounded and understandable view of Muir than his own writings did, and after reading about his writing process, you can easily understand why.

Some things never change

“It is an infirmity in our nature to mingle our interests and prejudices with the operation of our reasoning powers, and attribute to the objects of our likes and dislikes qualities they do not possess and effects they cannot produce.”

President Andrew Jackson (annual message to Congress, December 6, 1830)

I was thinking of this quote while watching Larry Summers on Meet the Press talking about the incentive package. Things wear the clothing of virtue when they happen to suit our interests; if we don't feel like we will directly benefit, we find a thousand faults.

By the way, I thought Summers was an arrogant ass; Obama may have changed some things, but some things never change.

Push n Pull

I write frequently and effusively about the environmental work that Bruce does to fight Big Coal from his position at the Sierra Club's National Coal Project, but I should also say something about future son-in-law Bryan, who is working on the other end of the power equation by selling the converters that make solar and wind energy practical.  So this one's for Bryan. These aren't his projects, but projects all over the world that have been done by Outback Power Systems. He writes: 

We have been participating in this rural electrification project in the Federated States of Micronesia for the past few years. Last night the following blog and pictures were passed along to me. I thought that these were some amazing photos.

It’s very cool to see where some of our equipment ends up.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Konings.FSM/KapingamarangiEUREP5PVInstallations#

http://picasaweb.google.com/Konings.FSM/NukuoroEUREP5PVInstallations#

http://picasaweb.google.com/josvandenakker/MicronesiaSolarPVInstallationProject#

http://eu-fsm-solar.blogspot.com/

Hear no evil

One of the pleasures of reading history is discovering that people in other times were just as mean, petty and vindictive as modern representatives of the race.  I found this passage in American Lion, Jon Meacham's new biography of Andrew Jackson. It came from a speech by Edward Livingston, a congressman from Louisiana in 1830, but it put me in mind of Rush Limbaugh and the other hate preachers on the radio and Internet today.

“The spirit of which I speak creates imaginary and magnifies real causes of complaints; arrogates to itself every virtue – denies every merit to its opponents; secretly entertains the worst designs . . . mounts the pulpit, and in the name of a God of mercy and peace, preaches discord and vengance; invokes the worst scourges of Heaven: war pestilence and famine, as preferable alternatives to party defeat; blind, vindictive, cruel, remorseless, unprincipled, and at last frantic, it communicates its madness to friends as well as foes; respects nothing, fears nothing.”

On Tuesday, Americans put that spirit away. But for how long? That is not up to the hate shouters to determine, but to the American people; if we don't listen, they won't continue to talk for long.

Obama's books

The NYT ran a story titled A Reading List That Shaped a President that listed some of President-elect Barack Obama’s favored reading matter.  Do you share any of his favorites?

The Bible 

Parting the Waters,” Taylor Branch

“Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gandhi’s autobiography

“Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin

“The Golden Notebook,” Doris Lessing

Lincoln’s collected writings

“Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville

“Song of Solomon,” Toni Morrison

Works of Reinhold Niebuhr

“Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson

Shakespeare’s tragedies