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.