From Xico

I Hate Daylight Savings Time

Never do I quite get used to the loss of that hour hour in the morning. I really need my cup of coffee when we are enduring DST.  Although it's not terribly hot here where we live very often, it can be a bit uncomfortable during the middle of the day. (And who knows what will happen as the climate changes.)  So I have to wake up very early (CST) for us to get our walk with the dogs in before the sun is too high. Suppertime rolls around too soon. And if it has been a hot day, we have to wait an hour longer for the sun to start to set and the air to cool. 

And then all of a sudden it's bedtime!   Pet peeves rather than serious, I know.  But still....

Here in Mexico, we change our clocks in the spring about a month later than in the US and about a week earlier in the fall.  It was decided quite sensibly to leave things as they were and not to follow those Merkans up north who for some unknown reason decided to make DST season even longer than it had been a few years ago. And mercifully (a little bit) we turn back the clock about a week earlier in the fall. Some countries did not follow suit at all, like Chile.  But of course Chile doesn't lie along an uneasy border shared with the US.

The photo above is of workers changing the time on (I think) Big Ben that I stole from this article on the time changes in BBC News online including the bit on Chile which just decided to reject, cast off, DST this year.

Some Time Change facts, courtesy of the BBC article, bits of which I translated, below:

• It was originally a German idea introduced during the First World War to economize on energy.
• It was thought that housseholds wouldn't need artificial light in the evenings until later which would be good.
• However, someone forgot that it meant you'd have to use it in the morning for longer.
• In the United States, there is a growing number of voices challenging  the idea that the benefits of DST are worth the pain of getting up an hour earlier.
• In a study called "Estimating the Economic Loss of Daylight Saving Time for US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (whew!)put out by Chmura Economics, it's said that the contry loses $424 milllion dollars in r educed productivity because of DST.
• A Yale study by Matthew Kotchen and Laura Grant looked at the change in Indiana which only adopted Daylight Savings Time in 2006. They found that lighting use was reduced but air conditioning increased, and the air conditioning is more expensive.
• There are various United States states investigating the elimination of DST yay!) 

And I grew up thinking it was to give farmers an extra hour of light for work during the farm season.

You folks up north are already on DST.  Down here, don't forget to change your clocks on April 5.

Peña Nieto in Great Britain: Unfavorable Press for Drug War in Mexico

EPN is in the midst of a state visit to Great Britain.  He has visited the queen and I think is staying in Buckingham Palace.

And right in the midst of his visit, Nick Cleg, the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK and Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin Airlines had an interview published in The Guardian urging the UK to begin decriminalizing drugs.  Like many others, they say the "war on drugs" has failed.They pointed out that "The Home Office's own research, commissioned by Liberal Democrats in government. . . found there is no apparent correlation between the 'toughness' of a country's approach and the prevalence of adult drug use." [Branson is a member of the global commission on drugs policy.]

In the article by Clegg and Branson, they continue, "Yet the criminal market continues to grow, driving unimaginable levels of profit for organized crime....,"

Clegg and Branson continue, "As Mexico's president, Enrque Peña Nieto, visits the UK, we should remember the estimated 100,000 people killed in Mexico alone since 2006."

There is much meat in the article and praise for Portugal's apparently successful approach as well as the position of the President of Colombia.

Hello. Cuba, If you behave yourself, we will help you.

I guess John Kerry still believes in US exceptionalism and US superiority (a tad different from exceptionalilsm) and that everyone wants the US´s help.. In Washington on the 23rd of February, he spoke about what he called"Cuba´s possibility of a transformation", thanks to the US's new policy toward Cuba.

Then he said, surprise, surprise, that the lifting of the embargo means that the Cuban government won't be able to blame the United States for the embargo.  "They will have to assume responsiblilty for their own mistakes."

He acknowledged that the embargo, which lasted sixty years, had accomplished nothing.  He finished up saying that the new policy doesn't ask what "the Cubans can do for the United States, but what the United States can do for the Cubanos and for Americans."  This seems an echo of John Kennedy saying "Ask not what you can do for your country...." Who knows?  In any case, it sure sounds like arrogance to me, but maybe I'm prejudiced.

Which corporations are jumping up and down with glee right now?

Take a look at Kerry's photo in La Jornada.  Here´s the link.

And I think it is arrogance which permits the US to say the embargo accomplished nothing.  First of all, what did the various US governments want it to accomplish, realistically?  Did they think that since the Cubans couldn't get cake or new cars, an embargo would drive them to overthrow Castro? And at what price?  Rather, I think the embargo hurt Cuba in economic ways, but the country was not anxious to substitute US hegemony for Castro.  Are they now?