Apologies, lies.com. I have been neglectful lately. To tide things over until I can obsess properly, I bring you: Portland Prom Prank Probed.

As the parent of an almost-17-year-old, I can’t condone the sentiment. But as a former wiseass, I appreciate the concept and execution.

Brings new meaning to the phrase “war on drugs”: Troops battle 10-foot marijuana plants.

“We tried burning them with white phosphorous — it didn’t work. We tried burning them with diesel — it didn’t work. The plants are so full of water right now … that we simply couldn’t burn them,” [Canadian Army General Rick Hillier] said.

Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.

“A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those (forests) did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action,” Hillier said dryly.

One soldier told him later: “Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I’d say ‘That damn marijuana’.”

I’m not sure how to categorize this, but I guess I’d call it a cross between sports and drugs. Anyway, it’s Good experience games, a site listing lots of fun little flash games.

For all his talk about going after evil-doers, Bush sure can be a wimp when it comes to standing up for the public interest in the face of big campaign contributors. I thought that when he let Bill Gates off with a wrist-slap after Microsoft’s antitrust conviction, and now he’s done it again: Tobacco escapes huge penalty.

After eight months of courtroom argument, Justice Department lawyers abruptly upset a landmark civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry yesterday by asking for less than 8 percent of the expected penalty.

What a wuss.

I could while away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain
And my head, I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain.

I’ve just finished reading Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, and it’s had me thinking about the non-neurological component of intelligence.

Dawkins’ book is a journey backwards through our ancestors, cast as a pilgrimage to the “Canterbury” of the remotest common ancestor shared by all life on earth. It’s an interesting journey, in part because of the way it emphasizes the literal truth of the notion that all life is related. Reading the book puts you in the position of imagining what it was actually like to be a pre-human hominid, a shrew-like early mammal, a proto-vertebrate, a worm, an amoeba, a bacterium.

In the ‘later’ (that is to say, earlier) stages of that journey, you’re inhabiting a body that doesn’t have much in the way of a brain. And yet, despite their lack of big cerebral cortexes and the resulting large vocabularies that would let them do things like post rambling conceptual pieces on their weblogs, “simpler” organisms seem to have some pretty interesting abilities that are analogous to what we like to think of as the characteristically “human” manifestation of intelligence.

I also just finished reading Jeremy Narby’s Intelligence in Nature. Narby writes in his book about Martin Giurfa of the Centre of Animal Cognition Research in France, who, along with four co-authors, published The concept of ’sameness’ and ‘difference’ in an insect. In Giurfa’s experiment, bees were trained to enter a simple Y-shaped maze that had been marked at the entrance with a particular color. Inside the maze was a branching point where the bee was required to choose between two paths. One path, which led to the food reward, was marked with the same color that had been used at the entrance to the maze, while the other was marked with a different color. Bees learned to choose the correct path, and continued to do so when a different kind of marker (black and white stripes oriented in various directions) was substituted for the colored markers. When the experimental conditions were reversed, rewarding bees for choosing the inner passage marked with a symbol that was different than the entrance symbol, the bees again learned to choose the correct path. “Thus,” write Giurfa et al., “not only can bees learn specific objects and their physical parameters, but they can also master abstract inter-relationships, such as sameness and difference.”

Narby also talks about slime molds, which in part of their life cycle resemble huge colonial assemblages of one-celled individuals who have fused their cytoplasm into a single enormous (well, by unicellular standards) cell containing thousand of nuclei. Narby visited Japanese scientist Toshiyuki Nakagaki, whose studies have shown that slime molds can “solve” a simple maze, arranging their bodies to lie along the shortest path between two food items placed in opposite corners (see Slime mould solves maze puzzle).

Plants, too, manifest something that could arguably be called intelligence. We hyperactive denizens of kingdom Animalia aren’t really wired to notice it, but on longer time scales plants adapt and respond to their environment, and research has shown that they actually respond surprisingly quickly (albeit in ways not easily visible) to outside stimuli of various kinds — all without benefit of brains, or even individual nerve cells.

Narby visits with Scottish scientist Tony Trewavas, who has been making waves in recent years by publishing studies describing what he refers to as “plant intelligence”. (See Root and branch intelligence and Aspects of plant intelligence.) For example, Trewavas talks about earlier research by CK Kelly showing that dodder, a parasitic plant that takes the form of bright orange twining tendrils (and which I happened to be checking out a couple of days ago while taking a hike in the Caprinteria salt marsh with my son), can quickly discriminate between a “good” host and a poor one, “choosing” in a matter of an hour or two how much of its resources to devote to a particular new host plant.

All of which brings me to the item I actually wanted to talk about when I started this posting: Scientists experiment with ‘trust’ hormone. It’s an article describing recent research into how the hormone oxytocin, which I’m mainly familiar with from its medical use in stimulating contractions during childbirth, can render people more trusting.

Oxytocin is secreted in brain tissue and synthesized by the hypothalamus. This small, but crucial feature located deep in the brain controls biological reactions like hunger, thirst and body temperature, as well as visceral fight-or-flight reactions associated with powerful, basic emotions like fear and anger.

For years oxytocin was considered to be a straightforward reproductive hormone found in both sexes. In both humans and animals, this chemical messenger stimulates uterine contractions in labor and induces milk production. In both women and men, oxytocin is released during sex, too.

Then, elevated concentrations of the hormone also were found in cerebrospinal fluid during and after birth, and experiments showed it was involved in the biochemistry of attachment. It’s a sensible conclusion, given that babies require years of care and the body needs to motivate mothers for the demanding task of childrearing.

In recent years, scientists have wondered whether oxytocin also is generally involved with other aspects of bonding behavior - and specifically whether it stimulates trust.

The article goes on to describe how researchers dosed experimental subjects with oxytocin, then had them play a simple investment game that revealed the level of trust they were willing to extend to a randomly assigned trading partner. Those who got the hormone were dramatically more trusting.

Researchers said they are performing a new round of experiments using brain imaging. “Now that we know that oxytocin has behavioral effects,” Fehr said, “we want to know the brain circuits behind these effects.”

I’m sure there’s more to learn about how the brain is involved in all this, but I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that it necessarily plays the most important role. Brains are a relatively recent innovation. For most of our collective history of living on the planet we haven’t had them — yet we’ve been intelligently negotiating our environment the whole time, presumably through the same sorts of complex chemical interactions that underlie the “intelligent” behavior of our distant relatives, the slime molds and dodder plants.

Okay. Done rambling for now.

I know that valued lies.com reader Sven, at least, will be interested in this: QuickTime trailer for A Scanner Darkly.

Some more about the movie from Philip K. Dick’s children: Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly film adaptation.

You may recall hearing about John Perry Barlow’s ongoing battle to get some misdemeanor drug possession charges against him thrown out on Fourth Amendment grounds. (Barlow was arrested after a Transportation Safety Authority baggage screener found a small quantity of marijuana, some mushrooms, and some ketamine in an ibuprofen bottle in his checked luggage before an airplane flight.)

If you haven’t heard about it, it’s time you did. That’s the sound of your Constitutional freedoms fluttering away…

Anyway, there was a hearing this past Wednesday on the matter. Seth David Schoen has an interesting (if maddening) write-up of it: In the Superior Court of California, County of San Mateo. You can also check out Barlow’s pre-hearing description of the original incident: A taste of the system, and if you’re feeling really masochistic, you can read some of the relevant court documents: “The Man” vs. John Perry Barlow.

I got tired of the Kevin Kelly/Wired magazine-style of breathless technological optimism pretty early on. “The future’s here, and it’s amazing!” To a certain extent I’ve let my disdain for the stylistic approach those folks use spill over into a generalized dislike of the whole Bay Area techno-libertarian scene. But having put my wank-o-meter in neutral long enough to read this John Perry Barlow interview by Brian Doherty, I found that it’s actually pretty interesting.

I especially like the discussion of his fight against a misdemeanor drug bust. (He had a small amount of marijuana in his checked luggage while flying; it was found during a Department of Homeland Security search and they pulled him off the plane before departure and arrested him. He’s fighting to exclude the evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds.) I also like his take on John Kerry; it matches up almost exactly with my own.

Anyway, from the latest issue of Reason magazine: John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body — and his politics.

The thing about lying is, it has a way of taking over your life. It’s the old slippery-slope thing. You tell a little white lie because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, and you find out hey, that was actually pretty easy. And then you tell another one to save yourself embarrassment. And another because you just really, really want the shiny happy outcome that telling it will help you achieve. And another one because you were too lazy to tell the complex, messy truth when a simple lie would work just as well.

And then you start telling them automatically, just because.

My wife and I are dealing with this issue with our daughter these days. She isn’t so much lying as just being dishonest with herself about whether or not she really looked for the shirt before complaining that it wasn’t in her drawer, or had time to pick up the dog poop before going to see her friend, or really is (or isn’t) willing to make the commitment to continue with her piano lessons. And then, having lied to herself, she tells us what she now honestly believes (for certain values of the term) to be the truth. I mean, if it was good enough to get past her own bullshit detector, shouldn’t it be good enough for ours?

Well, actually, no.

An interesting case that kind of goes the other way is this one, in which the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy presumes to tell parents how they should talk to their kids about marijuana: Your government wants you to lie to your kids.

As the debunking by AlterNet’s Bruce Mirken amply demonstrates, many of the things the White House drug czar wants you to tell your kids are blatant falsehoods. But I think parents willing to take the current administration’s assertions on pretty much anything at face value, and then pass it on to their kids, are guilty of the same kind of failure as my daughter is when she lies to herself, and then expects her parents to believe her.

Yeah, well, good luck with that.

Tommy Chong has been released from prison after serving nine months for selling bongs over the Internet, huzzah. He apparently was on the Tonight Show last night, which I might accidentally have instructed my Tivo to record; I’ll check on that as soon as I can reclaim the box from my son, currently rotting his brain with a Spongebob rerun. If I did record it, I’ll watch it and update y’all. In the meantime: Actor Tommy Chong makes 1st post-prison TV appearance on the Tonight Show, Friday July 9.

This is really pretty sweet. From craigslist.org, via some weblogger whose identity I foolishly misplaced: Hey crackhead.

ymatt threw this my way. I’m not sure where he found it, but it’s kinda interesting: Acid trip 1.

From the LA Weekly’s Steven Mikulan comes this update on the plight of Tommy Chong: Chong family values.

Bill Maher rules. In particular, in his latest weblog entry: Rush Limbaugh. Makes a nice counterpoint to the David Frum blather I was mocking earlier.

Proving once again the benefits of carefully crafting headlines to maximize one’s Googlerank, my previous entry, Rush Limbaugh: Addict is currently #1 on a search for that phrase, and the profusion of comments on the page is the result.

Most of the comments are predictable serves-him-right snark. But looking afield for other comments, I noticed the following from David Frum: Rush and Us, II (you have to scroll down a bit past the actually somewhat apt commentary on liberal hypocrisy during Monicagate). Here’s an excerpt:

To these gloatings, there are two things that should immediately be said.

First, if the only people allowed to argue in favor of moral standards are people without moral imperfections, then there will be nobody to do the job at all. Every one of us on the conservative side of the great moral and cultural divisions of the day is riddled with faults, flaws, and failings.

Second, on the drug issue in particular – who knows better than the drug addict how seductive and deadly drugs can be? In light of Rush’s own dependency, his attacks on drug use and drug legalization resound more powerfully than ever. This is not hypocrisy: It is conviction grounded in painfully acquired personal experience.

I can appreciate, on a certain level, the artistry that goes into crafting an up-is-down assertion that does a good job at maintaining internal self-consistency. And given the overwhelming power of human belief, there doubtless are fans of Frum’s who read that passage (in its original home, at the National Review Online, at least, if not here) nodding their heads in sober agreement.

Tools.

Rush got caught in flagrant hypocrisy. You either recognize that, or you’re deluding yourself. I’d wager pretty much any amount that Frum falls into the former category, rather than the latter, so I lump him in with the rest of those willing to knowingly deceive others in pursuit of their larger aims.

SmokeFreeMovies recently came to my attention when my girlfriend told me about a lecture (PPT) she’d just attended by Stan Glantz. Dr. Glantz is somewhat of an eccentric in the Public Health community and started the project on a lark, knowing that Big Tobaco has a history of working with major movie studios — but then he discovered that smoking in movies does significantly stimulate smoking in kids.

Personally, I thought the idea was a little goofy, but he presents some pretty interesting statistics (like: characters in movies smoke 300% as much as people in real life) and their goals are very modest, and seem completely reasonable to me. In particular, they’d like to see smoking given the same consideration as profanity and alcohol in determining if a movie should get an R Rating.

If nothing else, it’s interesting to see some of the Ads the organization has run in industry publications to promote their cause within the Hollywood system. (They are listed in reverse chronological order, so I suggested starting at the bottom and reading up). Of particular interest to me was the Ad they made after finding out about the letter writting campaign of a group of High School kids in New York who wrote 202,000 letters to various Hollywood big shots and got only two replies: one refusing delivery, and one from Julia Roberts’s people threatening legal action if they sent any more letters.

While I detest the role he has played in undercutting open, honest debate in this country, I still feel sorry for Rush Limbaugh, given the private hell he’s apparently been living with for some time, and the sudden transformation of it into a very public hell. But anyway, this timeline from Kynn at Shock & Awe makes fascinating reading: Rush Limbaugh hearing loss timeline.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, has a new book out: Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. He looks at the free-market side of the marijuana, sex, and undocumented-worker stories, pointing out some interesting facts along the way. Like, marijuana has now passed corn as the US’s leading cash crop, and the black-market business in drugs, pr0n, and illegal labor now constitutes nearly 10% of the US GDP. Schlosser’s conclusion is that as a country we’re deeply screwed up, with high-profile public morality masking a depraved underbelly.

A few links: The book’s first chapter, as excerpted by the New York Times, a review in the Times, and an interview with Schlosser at bookpage.com.

As commented upon interestingly by Sungo at Sungo’s Journal, check out the story of Antron Singleton, rap artist, aspirer after fame, and cannibal.

A little wise-ass knavery for your Saturday, courtesy of our good friends in Chile (as reported by Ananova, via Dave Barry’s blog): Kermit rolls a joint in joke email.

Update: Still haven’t been able to find a copy of the actual movie, dangit, but Hiro found this, which gets pretty close: Rana Gustavo. Hm. And now that I think of it, I wonder if that sequence of images actually is the “animated clip” that the Ananova article refers to. But whatever.

Something I find really interesting is the way society and the media conspire to maintain the life-cycle of big exposés. A story breaks, with all its shocking revelations; reporters swoop in, stories get filed, and then what? Maybe some things actually change: laws are passed, powerful people resign their positions, the guilty are punished, the innocent exonerated. Or maybe not. Maybe nothing much at all changes. The cameras and TV lights are boxed up and shipped off somewhere else, the big papers stop covering the story, and the people left behind do their best to pick up the pieces and move on with their lives. Or sit in their jail cells counting the months to their hoped-for parole. Anyway, a nice object lesson in all this is a recent story from Nate Blakeslee of the Texas Observer, covering the aftermath of the bogus drug convictions in Tulia, Texas: Can You Hear Me Now?

Courtesy of Hiro: “This information is only for kids who are smart and mature enough to respect the dangers involved with injecting heroin…”

from the good-luck,-Diogenes dept.

Silly-ass N.Y. Times login required (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works, among others), but the story is too good to pass up: Boomers’ Little Secret Still Smokes Up the Closet, in which we learn of the heartbreak of parents who want to go along with the Just Say No message being taught to their kids in school, while still sparking up the occasional doob. Gee, daddy, what is that smell on your clothes?

from the strange-bedfellows dept.

How did I go so long without hearing about Christians for Cannabis?

from the more-heat-than-light dept.

A loyal lies.com reader, Shadowwalker, submitted the following story. I normally wouldn’t run something without a link, but in this case the story itself is interesting enough to serve as a nice break between my incessant Israeli-Palestinian postings. At least that’s what I decided. Follow the link below, or scroll down, to read the story itself, which, as near as I can tell, is a fictional account of nefarious goings on in the Douglas, Wyoming, police department, as reported by someone with truly atrocious spelling.
(more…)

from the wonder-if-it’s-one-of-the-Colonel’s-11-secret-herbs-and-spices dept.

From Guardian Unlimited comes the story of Bi Jingxiang, the owner of a restaurant in Beijing, who has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for sprinkling ground opium on his spicy fish dishes. The District People’s Court apparently didn’t buy his claim that the drug is a traditional condiment renowned in his hometown for its many beneficial effects.

from the don’t-make-me-come-over-there dept.

Joseph Frederick, in addition to suffering the stigma of having two first names, was suspended from his high school recently after he hoisted a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” at an off-campus event. Now he, along with the Alaska Civil Liberties Union, are suing the school for violating his free-speech rights. Among the things the suit alleges is that the school’s principal doubled Frederick’s 5-day suspension to 10 days after the boy quoted Thomas Jefferson to her.

from the don’t-bogart-that…-whatever-that-is dept.

From Reuters (via Yahoo News) comes the story of five Australian drug activists arrested for publicly smoking what appeared to be a 36-inch joint. Except it actually wasn’t; a spokesman explained that the item was simply a prop made with tobacco and “legal herbs”. Police were unimpressed, saying the protesters would be charged anyway, for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and, especially, for making them look stupid.

from the posted-at-4:20-(UT)-on-4/20,-no-less dept.

From the LA Times comes an article describing the cultural phenomenon of “420″ (or 4:20, or 4/20) as a reference to pot smoking. No, it turns out not to be a police code, or a reference to Hitler’s birthday. The real story of where the term came from is a pretty cool example, though, of how weird associations like this come into being. Something to think about at 4:20 today…

from the another-drug-war-propaganda-related-death dept.

From ABC News comes this 20/20 story about 16-year-old Brandy French, who died after taking Ecstasy for the first time, while the friends who gave her the drug spent hours, literally, trying to decide if they should risk calling 911 or taking her to a hospital. Now the girl’s father is suing her friends, hoping to send a message to others who might find themselves in a similar situation. Too bad he didn’t name the Partnership for a Drug-Free America in the suit, for the role that organization plays in fostering the environment of fear and ignorance that leads to deaths like these.

from the lies,-damn-lies,-and-Texas-narcotics-officers dept.

Guardian Unlimited has the story of the dropping of charges against Tonya White, a woman accused of selling cocaine to Tom Coleman, a narcotics officer whose undercover investigation during 1998 and 1999 led to the arrests of 43 people. The problem in White’s case was apparently that she didn’t live anywhere near Tulia, Texas (the site of the alleged drug sale), and was able to produce bank records proving she was in Oklahoma, hundreds of miles away, at the time Coleman says she was selling him drugs. White’s attorney says the outcome shows that Coleman, who worked alone and used no audio or video surveillance, was simply a liar willing to send innocent people to prison to further his own career.

from the kids’ll-stick-anything-in-their-mouths dept.

From CNN comes this story of a 12-year-old Nigerian boy who arrived in New York yesterday on a British Airways flight, then became ill, went to the hospital, and told police he had swallowed 87 condoms filled with heroin in return for a promise of $1,900 for smuggling the drugs into the U.S. The boy is in stable condition, facing charges, while the investigation continues.

from the have-a-cookie dept.

From Guardian Unlimited comes the story of a claim by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB - the successor to the KGB) that CIA agents secretly administered psychotropic drugs to a Russian defense worker in an effort to obtain information from the man. A CIA spokesman and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow declined comment.

from the want-some-candy,-little-girl? dept.

According to an article in the Washington Post, The Food and Drug Administration has cracked down on three online pharmacies that were selling nicotine-containing lollipops, saying the “smoking cessation products” had not been tested for safety. FDA attorney David Horowitz explained that “we at FDA understand the tobacco industry’s need to find innovative ways to promote tobacco use among children, but they need to follow the rules.”

from the do-as-I-say,-not-as-I,-well,-you-know dept.

From Reuters’ Oddly Enough (via Yahoo News) comes this unlikely item: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will be featured in an upcoming ad campaign from the good people at NORML, in which the billionaire financial-information mogul is quoted as saying, in reply to a question on whether he ever smoked pot, “You bet I did, and I enjoyed it.”

from the they-gave-him-lousy-grades-as-a-student,-too dept.

The Guardian has the story of Yale University’s decision to join other colleges in reimbursing students who lose federal financial aid due to drug offenses. Under a law passed in 1998, but not enforced until our current education President took office, students convicted of drug possession can lose their financial aid money. The Bush alma mater joins Hampshire College, Swarthmore, and Western Washington University in its decision to offer scholarships to affected students. “It’s really about fostering diversity,” explains Yale spokesperson Tom Conroy. “Some people, including President Bush, apparently, think hard drinking is all that higher education has to offer today. We want people to know, though, that a rich, vibrant tradition of marijuana, cocaine, and LSD use that is alive and well at Yale University.”

from the I-must-have-this dept.

I’ve always been an avid collector of field guides, so when my friend Yarbelito showed me this one, I knew my life would never be the same: I will not rest until I’ve obtained my own personal copy of The Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants.

from the this-message-brought-to-you-from-the-salvia-advisory-board dept.

Knowing that drug coverage is always good for ratings, ABCNews.com is running a fairly breathless article touting salvia divinorum as the new LSD. Hmm. What was wrong with the old LSD?

from the 101-uses-for-your-compact-Mac dept.

From Wired comes this story of two enterprising youngsters who have turned their aging Mac SE/30 into a bong. The youth of today are so creative; I couldn’t think of anything better to do with my old SE at my last garage cleaning than to toss it into the dumpster.