Taking Note: Battling the Ivory Trade

Photo Orphan baby elephants at the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage, Nairobi National Park. Credit Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday signed one of the toughest laws in the nation banning the sale of elephant ivory and rhinoceros horns as a "stand against a dangerous and cruel industry."

The new law, which goes into effect immediately, was written to protect elephants that are being slaughtered at the rate of 96 a day in Africa. If it works as intended, the flow of ivory into New York — often ranked the number one importer of ivory in the United States — should soon slow to virtually nothing.

In the past, traders have found a way to get around bans, often by simply providing fraudulent paper work. But the new law is much stricter. New York will not allow trade in anything but 100-year-old antiques with small amounts of ivory (and documented proof of provenance), musical instruments made before 1975, pieces used for education or scientific purposes such as museums and items handed down through estates.

Even more important, the law dramatically increases penalties for those caught trading in these products.  In 2012, federal, state and New York City officials seized more than $2 million worth of ivory from jewelers working in the New York City area. One New York City jeweler was caught with a ton of illegal ivory. He was fined a mere $45,000.The new law, by contrast, starts with a fine of $3,000 or two times the value of the article for the first offense. For any items worth more than $25,000, the penalty can be up to 7 years imprisonment.

The ugly market in ivory is an international problem, of course. The White House and other states can help by tightening their laws.

Quite intentionally, Mr. Cuomo signed the bill on World Elephant Day — August 12. Nearly 100,000 messages, many of them children's drawings about the need to ban ivory sales, were sent to governors and other public officials across the country urging them to follow New York's lead.

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Taking Note: Tennessee Ignores the Koch Brothers

Participants in Tennessee's judicial elections on Thursday rejected a malodorous effort to oust three capable sitting state Supreme Court justices: Chief Justice Gary Wade and Justices Cornelia Clark and Sharon Lee.

Conservative Republican groups, including the Republican State Leadership Committee and Americans for Prosperity — part of Charles and David Koch's big-dollar political operation — underwrote a campaign against the judges. For weeks before Thursday's election, they bombarded Tennessee with ads depicting them as "soft on crime," hostile to business interests and supporters of "the Obama agenda" and "Obamacare." But this was all nonsense: In fact the judges never ruled on a case involving the health care law.

Tennessee voters apparently saw through the lies, a victory not only for the three judges but for elected judges everywhere. The outcome of the election is a sign that judges can sign on to controversial decisions without losing their jobs — despite attack ads.

The downside of the judges' success is that, to achieve it, they raised more than $1 million, much of it from lawyers who may appear before them. The judges' next challenge is to be diligent about avoiding the appearance and reality of improper conflicts-of-interest by recusing themselves from cases involving significant financial backers.

"People can smell court tampering and tend to get their backs up," says Bert Brandenburg of Justice at State, a group that advocates for the preservation of fair and impartial courts. But he warned that if judges take away from it the need to go out and raise lots more money, courts and ultimately justice will lose.

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Room for Debate: A Return to the Fight in Iraq

The U.S. Must Act Now

Emma Sky, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale

The United States should use precise airstrikes to prevent the advance of ISIS and to stop them from taking over the areas where the religious minorities live.

Arab and Gulf Countries Must Take the Lead

Haleh Esfandiari, Woodrow Wilson International Center

This carnage should be an opportunity for Washington to work with responsible actors in the region to form counterterrorism partnerships.

Premature Action Could Backfire

Alan J. Kuperman, University of Texas

If we help Baghdad before Prime Minister Maliki is removed, it would entrench him, alienating Sunnis and compelling them to support ISIS.

Extend Support to the Kurds

Michael Knights, Washington Institute of Near East Policy

Kurds are on the ropes after a series of vicious thrusts by ISIS, but they have the fighting spirit and the determination to hold the frontier of their region.

Strong Legal Justification Is Needed

Sarah Kreps, Cornell University

The U.S. should be cognizant of how military actions are authorized domestically and how they might legitimize the way others decide to use force in the future.

Airstrikes Only Worsen the Situation

Ramzy Mardini, Atlantic Council

The only sustainable solution is for Iraq's Sunni Arabs to turn decisively against ISIS. This requires a wider political solution in Baghdad.

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Taking Note: Proof That Voter Impersonation Almost Never Happens

An enduring Republican fantasy is that there are armies of fraudulent voters lurking in the baseboards of American life, waiting for the opportunity to crash the polls and undermine the electoral system. It's never really been clear who these voters are or how their schemes work; perhaps they are illegal immigrants casting votes for amnesty, or poor people seeking handouts.  Most Republican politicians know these criminals don't actually exist, but they have found it useful to take advantage of the party base's pervasive fear of outsiders, just as when they shot down immigration reform. In this case, they persuaded the base of the need for voter ID laws to ensure "ballot integrity," knowing the real effect would be to reduce Democratic turnout.

Now a researcher has tried to quantify this supposed threat by documenting every known case of voter fraud since 2000 — specifically, the kind of impersonation that would be stopped by an ID requirement. (Note that this does not include ballot-box stuffing by officials, vote-buying or coercion: the kinds of fraud that would not be affected by an ID law.)

There have been more than 1 billion votes cast in local, state and federal elections over the last 14 years. Out of all of them, the researcher, Justin Levitt, a voting expert at the Loyola University Law School, found 31 cases of impersonation fraud. It's hardly a surprise that the number is so low; as he writes in the Washington Post today, casting individual fake ballots "is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens."

A look at some of the 31 cases shows how pathetic the fraudulent-voter threat really is. In May, Ben Hodzic was accused of voting in his brother's name in the Catskill, N.Y., School District Board of Education election. In June 2011, Hazel Brionne Woodard of Tarrant County, Tex., allegedly arranged for her son to vote in the municipal runoff elections in the name of his father. In 2004, an unknown person signed the pollbook line as Rose-Mary McGee, of Albuquerque, N.M.

These conspiracies were the pretext for the voter ID laws that have now been passed in 34 states. And the arguments in many of those states have reached an absurdly high pitch. In Virginia, for example, Republicans are saying that the ID card required in their law has to be current; if you happen to let your driver's license expire, you can't vote, even though the photo on the card clearly demonstrates your identity. The state's Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring, says that's unconstitutional.

But neither the Constitution nor plainly visible reality is likely to halt the Republican crusade to keep certain people from participating in democracy. As the National Commission on Voting Rights documented in a new report, voting discrimination remains "a frequent and ongoing problem," particularly in the South and Southwest, in part because of new barriers to voting thrown up by state legislators.

"It is difficult not to view these voting changes with a jaundiced eye," the report says, "given the practical impediments they create and the minimal, if any, measurable legitimate benefit they offer."

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Room for Debate: Can the U.S. Still Be a Leader in the Middle East?

Gaza may not be all that lies in ruins as Israel winds down its most recent military campaign there. One diplomat said the United States and Israel are in "the most sustained period of antagonism in the relationship" between the two countries.

Secretary of State John Kerry's mediation efforts ended with recriminations from both sides and U.S. officials said they were "appalled" by the "disgraceful" attack on a U.N. school.

Can the United States still help achieve a sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians?

Read the Discussion »

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Congress Didn’t Want to See...

By James S. Brady; James S. Brady was President Ronald Reagan's first press secretary.
Published: April 3, 1990

I wheeled my way up to both houses of Congress in recent months to testify in support of legislation bearing my name: the Brady bill. It would require a national seven-day waiting period for handgun sales from gun dealers. The bill is intended to give police departments time to run a background check on the purchaser, to deny instant access of a concealable weapon to a known felon or to another John W. Hinckley Jr. I believe that if the bill had been law in March 1981, Mr. Hinckley would not have been able to purchase the handgun he used against President Ronald Reagan, and I would not have been wounded and disabled.

It was surprising that Representatives who made a point of voting against the bill last time were conspicuously absent when I put in my two cents at the hearing. Perhaps they didn't want to see what a handgun wound can do to a human being. I'm sure it's easier to deal with the gun issue when you're talking about abstract statistics or contributions from political-action committees.

The Brady bill, still pending in both houses, is a political winner. Few pieces of legislation are endorsed by every major law enforcement group in America and backed by the overwhelming majority of voters. The point left unsaid was that voting against the bill could make the legislator a loser in November.

One thing I've learned on the campaign trail is the need to cloak political candidates in law and order positions. The average voter has a high regard for police officers, knowing they not only work for the public safety but put their lives on the line daily.

In recent political campaigns, from Presidential campaigns on down, there has been a heavy emphasis on law and order themes. Come this fall, with the growing drug-related violence in America, we'll see even more TV spots focusing on this subject.

That's why all politicians should reassess their position on guns. Concealable handguns, especially assault pistols like the Tec-9's, Mac-10's and Uzi's, are increasingly the weapon of choice of crack peddlers and drug addicts.

Law enforcement officials - police chiefs, sheriffs and the rank and file - are united in their call for tough curbs on access to these weapons.

Just recently in Broward County, Florida, the police responded to a robbery in progress at a fast-food restaurant. They confronted two criminals armed with an assault pistol. One deputy sheriff was killed and another seriously wounded. The alleged killer - wanted in Massachusetts on three separate criminal charges - was arrested. In his wallet was a receipt for the assault pistol, which he had easily purchased from a Florida gun dealer.

There was the expected rush of politicians to the bedside of the wounded sheriff. But there was a notable lack of action in the state capitol to prevent another such tragedy from occurring. Too many legislators seem to fear lobbyists of the National Rifle Association more than they do armed drug dealers.

But if I have anything to do with it, that's going to change. I'm a Southern Illinois boy who grew up hunting and at home with guns. Assault pistols aren't used for hunting; they're only used to stalk human prey.

Responsible gun owners don't object to a handgun-waiting period and background check. The only inconvenience is for the gun dealer who can't pocket the money right away. Is this what N.R.A. lobbyists really care about?

Get ready for the next round of pious speeches from politicians on law and order issues. But you'll hear more from those in the police community asking, ''How can our politicians win the drug war when they're arming the enemy?''

drawing

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Opinionator | Draft: The Jargon Trap

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

A few years ago, while immersed in graduate studies in public health at the University of California, Berkeley, I wrote an article for a well-known general interest magazine about the H.I.V. epidemic among gay men in developing countries. I'd been a newspaper reporter for 10 years and had already written a couple of pieces for the publication, so I waited for an email gushing with praise for my thorough reporting and nimble prose.

Instead, my editor informed me that what I'd written was awful. Unreadable. Beyond redemption. "It's dullsville, I'm sorry to say, and there's just nothing I can think of to fix it," she emailed. Ouch!

I nursed my wounds, then reviewed what I'd sent her and understood exactly what she meant. My short piece was stuffed so full of cumbersome language, weighty arguments and important data that everything else — like actual people — got squeezed off the page. Thickets of jargon and numbers obscured whatever profound points I thought I was making. In short, it was an excellent public health paper.

I'm no longer a student; I now teach at Berkeley. And I still toggle between the academic and popular modes of writing. I'm not the only one who finds this flip-flopping to be a challenge. Knowledge in fields like public health and medicine develops slowly; most research, in fact, offers only incremental — read: tiny — advances on existing understandings. Scientists who want to pluck out the most important findings from a body of research and contextualize them for a mass audience need to step back from wallowing in minutiae and transform themselves into an outside observer of their own field.

My colleague Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor of environmental health sciences at Berkeley, says writing opinion pieces aimed at nonprofessionals forces her to sharpen her focus and think hard about what's most important. "For a popular audience, you have to get to your point quickly," she told me in an interview. "In academic writing, the 'so what' is usually buried under a lot of verbiage." Researchers familiar with a particular discipline find great value in academic literature because they're used to the format. But while the rigid structure and formal language of these peer-reviewed journal articles "are useful for the purpose they're supposed to serve," Dr. Morello-Frosch added, "that doesn't make them well written or interesting to read."

Obviously, some scientists and health experts have successfully crossed over and have reached large audiences. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the astronomer Carl Sagan, for example, knew how to transform their professional expertise into stories sparkling with insights that everyone — not just colleagues who shared an arcane vocabulary — could understand and appreciate. These days, Atul Gawande, a surgeon, and Oliver Sacks, a neurologist, routinely enlarge our awareness of life's medical complications and contradictions. But such individuals are the exceptions.

So when I teach public health students at Berkeley how to write for a broader range of readers, I empathize with their struggle to unshackle their inner outside observer. To stimulate the process, I gleefully strip them of two key tent poles of academic writing.

First, I admonish them, forget formal references — and that means no footnotes and no bibliography. This diktat can elicit squawks of concern and anxiety. "What? Include information without citing it? How does that work?" It works, I explain, by not making stuff up and being able to prove your claims should someone challenge them.

On the first assignment, at least one persnickety student usually tries to slip in a footnote or two. I squash any further attempts. I make sure to add that "no references" also means not mentioning every specialized publication consulted for the piece. No one cares that a study appeared in the Journal of Human Lactation, the Journal of Intercultural Ethnopharmacology, or the Journal of Invasive Fungal Infections.

Next, I ban the promiscuous use of acronyms. I'm not talking about F.B.I. or UNICEF or ACT- UP — combinations of letters that readers immediately recognize and understand. Academics (and bureaucrats) love to transform every last concept and process and organization into an acronym. Then they deploy the results as aggressively as possible.

After all, isn't every reader familiar with NACCHO, FIFRA, and MID? (For those out of the loop, that's the National Association of County and City Health Officials; the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; and multi-infarct dementia.) Use the full version for the first mention, I tell students, and after that write around these awkward constructions. Instead of most uses of NACCHO, for example, try "the association." Or "the pesticide act" for most FIFRAs and "the illness" for MID.

Besides their inherent clunkiness, many acronyms have multiple meanings that can confuse readers with different backgrounds. To many journalists, for example, MSM means "mainstream media." To public health professionals, MSM stands for "men who have sex with men" — a term researchers use instead of "gay men" if they're focusing on sexual behaviors rather than sexual identity. According to the website Acronym Finder, these are only two of the 92 possible meanings for MSM.

In other contexts, MSM could mean "methylsulfonylmethane," a naturally occurring chemical compound with reputed health benefits; "Mount St. Mary's," a school in India; or — one of my favorites — "mechanically separated meat," a substance that the United States Department of Agriculture defines as "a pastelike and batterlike meat product produced by forcing bones with attached edible meat under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue."

Going cold turkey on references and acronyms disorients the students and makes them squirm. Bereft of these structural guideposts and crutches, many cope pretty quickly. Some even feel liberated. They learn to dump some of the linguistic dead weight and tighten up their prose.

Before every assignment, I also repeat some basic rules that all journalism instructors know: Tell us the most important thing first, then tell us the rest of the story. Keep it simple. Use the active voice. Be specific. Take things piece by piece — or "bird by bird," as the novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott advises in her book of the same name, a wise guide to writing that I always recommend to students.

I repeat these basic storytelling lessons to myself as well, whenever I'm making the transition back to popular writing. And it seems to help. That "dullsville" article about H.I.V. among gay men in developing countries? Once my mortification over my editor's rejection passed, I administered radical surgery and rewrote it from top to bottom, in the process removing the public health jargon, the ponderous turns of phrase, and many uses of the acronym MSM. Another magazine was happy to have it.

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David Tuller is a writer and the academic coordinator for the University of California, Berkeley's joint master's program in public health and journalism.

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Opinionator | Menagerie: A Man and His Cat

Menagerie: Just between us species.

Photo Credit Lisa Hanawalt

I LIVED with the same cat for 19 years — by far the longest relationship of my adult life. Under common law, this cat was my wife. I fell asleep at night with the warm, pleasant weight of the cat on my chest. The first thing I saw on most mornings was the foreshortened paw of the cat retreating slowly from my face and her baleful crescent glare informing me that it was Cat Food Time. As I often told her, in a mellow, resonant, Barry White voice: "There is no luuve … like the luuve that exists … between a man … and his cat."

'You're in love with that cat!' my then-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair, she was a very attractive cat.

The cat was jealous of my attention; she liked to sit on whatever I was reading, walked back and forth and back and forth in front of my laptop's screen while I worked, and unsubtly interpolated herself between me and any woman I may have had over. She and my ex Kati Jo, who was temperamentally not dissimilar to the cat, instantly sized each other up as enemies. When I was physically intimate with a woman, the cat did not discreetly absent herself but sat on the edge of the bed with her back to me, facing rather pointedly away from the scene of debauch, quietly exuding disapproval, like your grandmother's ghost.

I realize that people who talk at length about their pets are tedious at best, and often pitiful or repulsive. They post photos of their pets online, tell little stories about them, speak to them in disturbing falsettos, dress them in elaborate costumes and carry them around in handbags and BabyBjorns, have professional portraits taken of them and retouched to look like old master oil paintings. When people over the age of 10 invite you to a cat birthday party or a funeral for a dog, you need to execute a very deft etiquette maneuver, the equivalent of an Immelmann turn or triple axel, in order to decline without acknowledging that they are, in this area, insane.

This is especially true of childless people, like me, who tend to become emotionally overinvested in their animals and to dote on them in a way that gives onlookers the creeps. Often the pet seems to be a surrogate child, a desperate focus or joint project for a relationship that's lost any other raison d'être, like becoming insufferable foodies or getting heavily into cosplay. When such couples finally have a child their cats or dogs are often bewildered to find themselves unceremoniously demoted to the status of pet; instead of licking the dinner plates clean and piling into bed with Mommy and Daddy, they're given bowls of actual dog food and tied to a metal stake in a circle of dirt.

Op-Talk

Confessions of a Cat Guy

The author spoke with Op-Talk about people and their pets, and his relationship with the cat who inhabited his life and home for 19 years.

I looked up how much Americans spend on pets annually and have concluded that you do not want to know. I could tell you what I spent on my own cat's special kidney health cat food and kidney and thyroid medication, and periodic blood tests that cost $300 and always came back normal, but I never calculated my own annual spending, lest I be forced to confront some uncomfortable facts about me. What our mass spending on products to pamper animals who seem happiest while rolling in feces or eating the guts out of rodents — who don't, in fact, seem significantly less happy if they lose half their limbs — tells us about ourselves as a nation is probably also something we don't want to know. But it occurs to me that it may be symptomatic of the same chronic deprivation as are the billion-dollar industries in romance novels and porn.

I've speculated that people have a certain reservoir of affection that they need to express, and in the absence of any more appropriate object — a child or a lover, a parent or a friend — they will lavish that same devotion on a pug or a Manx or a cockatiel, even on something neurologically incapable of reciprocating that emotion, like a monitor lizard or a day trader or an aloe plant. Konrad Lorenz confirms this suspicion in his book "On Aggression," in which he describes how, in the absence of the appropriate triggering stimulus for an instinct, the threshold of stimulus for that instinct is gradually lowered; for instance, a male dove deprived of female doves will attempt to initiate mating with a stuffed pigeon, a rolled-up cloth or any vaguely bird-shaped object, and, eventually, with an empty corner of its cage.

Although I can clearly see this syndrome as pathological in others, I was its medical textbook illustration, the Elephant Man of the condition. I did not post photographs of my cat online or talk about her to people who couldn't be expected to care, but at home, alone with the cat, I behaved like some sort of deranged arch-fop. I made up dozens of nonsensical names for the cat over the years — The Quetzal, Quetzal Marie, Mrs. Quetzal Marie the Cat, The Inquetzulous Q'ang Marie. There was a litany I recited aloud to her every morning, a sort of daily exhortation that began, "Who knows, Miss Cat, what fantastical adventures the two of us will have today?" I had a song I sang to her when I was about to vacuum, a brassy Vegas showstopper called "That Thing You Hate (Is Happening Again)." We collaborated on my foot-pedal pump organ to produce The Hideous Cat Music, in which she walked back and forth at her discretion on the keyboard while I worked the pedals. The Hideous Cat Music resembled the work of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, with aleatory passages and unnervingly sustained tone clusters.

Biologists call cats 'exploitive captives,' an evocative phrase that might be used to describe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies.

I never meant to become this person. My own cat turned up as a stray at my cabin on the Chesapeake Bay when I was sitting out on the deck eating leftover crabs. She was only a couple of months old then, small enough that my friend Kevin could fit her whole head in his mouth. She appeared from underneath the porch, piteously mewling, and I gave her some cold white crab meat. I did not know then that feeding a stray cat is effectively adopting that cat.

For a few weeks I was in denial about having a cat. My life at that time was not structured to accommodate the responsibility of returning home once every 24 hours to feed an animal. I posted fliers in the post office and grocery store with a drawing of the cat, hoping its owner would reclaim it. It seems significant in retrospect that I never entertained the possibility of taking the cat to the pound.

When I left for a long weekend for a wedding in another state, my friend Gabe explained to me that the cat clearly belonged to me now. I protested. This was a strictly temporary situation until I could locate a new home for the cat, I explained. I was not going to turn into some Cat Guy.

"How would you feel," he asked me, "if you were to get home from this weekend and that cat was gone?"

I moaned and writhed in the passenger seat.

"You're Cat Guy," he said in disgust.

Photo Credit Lisa Hanawalt

It's amusing now to remember the strict limits I'd originally intended to place on the cat. One of the boundaries I meant to set was that the cat would not be allowed upstairs, where I slept. That edict was short-lived. It was not long before I became wounded when the cat declined to sleep with me.

"You're in love with that cat!" my then-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair, she was a very attractive cat. People would comment on it. My friend Ken described her as "a supermodel cat," with green eyes dramatically outlined in what he called "cat mascara" and bright pink "nose leather." Her fur, even at age 19, was rich and soft and pleasant to touch.

Biologists call cats "exploitive captives," an evocative phrase that might be used to describe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies. I made the mistake, early on, of feeding the cat first thing in the morning, forgetting that the cat could control when I woke up — by meowing politely, sitting on my chest and staring at me, nudging me insistently with her face, or placing a single claw on my lip. She refused to drink water from a bowl, coveting what she believed was the superior-quality water I drank from a glass. I attempted to demonstrate to the cat that the water we drank was the very same water by pouring it from my glass into her bowl right in front of her, but she was utterly unmoved, like a birther being shown Obama's long-form Hawaiian birth certificate. In the end I gave in and began serving her water in a glass tumbler, which she had to stick her whole face into to drink from.

Sometimes it would strike me that an animal was living in my house, and it seemed as surreal as if I had a raccoon or a kinkajou running loose in my house. Yet that animal and I learned, on some level, to understand each other. Although I loved to bury my nose in her fur when she came in from a winter day and inhale deeply of the Coldcat Smell, the cat did not like this one bit, and fled. For a while I would chase her around the house, yelling, "Gimme a little whiff!" and she would hide behind the couch from my hateful touch. Eventually I realized that this was wrong of me. I would instead let her in and pretend to have no interest whatsoever in smelling her, and, after not more than a minute or so the cat would approach me and deign to be smelled. I should really be no less impressed by this accord than if I'd successfully communicated with a Papuan tribesman, or decoded a message from the stars.

WHENEVER I felt embarrassed about factoring a house pet's desires into major life decisions, some grown-up-sounding part of me told myself, it's just a cat. It's generally believed that animals lack what we call consciousness, although we can't quite agree on what exactly this is, and how we can pretend to any certainty about what goes on in an animal's head has never been made clear to me. To anyone who has spent time with an animal, the notion that they have no interior lives seems so counterintuitive, such an obdurate denial of the empathetically self-evident, as to be almost psychotic. I suspect that some of those same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people to rationalize owning other people.

Related

More From Menagerie

Read previous contributions to this series.

Another part of me, perhaps more sentimental but also more truthful, had to acknowledge that the cat was undeniably another being in the world, experiencing her one chance at being alive, as I was. It always amused me to hit or elongate the word "you" in speaking to the cat, as in, "Yooouu would probably like that!" because it was funny — and funny often means disquieting and true — to remind myself that there really was another ego in the room with me, with her own likes and dislikes and idiosyncrasies and exasperatingly wrongheaded notions about whose water is better. It did not seem to me like an insoluble epistemological mystery to divine what the cat would like when I woke up and saw her face two inches from mine and the Tentative Paw slowly withdrawing from my lip.

I admit that loving a cat is a lot less complicated than loving a human being. Because animals can't ruin our fantasies about them by talking, they're even more helplessly susceptible to our projections than other humans. Though of course there's a good deal of naked projection and self-delusion involved in loving other human beings, too.

I once read in a book about feng shui that keeping a pet can maintain the chi of your house or apartment when you're not there; the very presence of an animal enlivens and charges the space. Although I suspect feng shui is high-end hooey, I learned when my cat was temporarily put up elsewhere that a house without a cat in it feels very different from a house with one. It feels truly empty, dead. Those moments gave me some foreboding of how my life would feel after she was gone.

We don't know what goes on inside an animal's head; we may doubt whether they have anything we'd call consciousness, and we can't know how much they understand or what their emotions feel like. I will never know what, if anything, the cat thought of me. But I can tell you this: A man who is in a room with a cat — whatever else we might say about that man — is not alone.

A version of this article appears in print on 08/03/2014, on page SR1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Man and His Cat.

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Opinionator | Fixes: On AIDS: Three Lessons From Africa

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

An AIDS fable: Once upon a time, in the years after AIDS went from being a death sentence to a manageable disease, at least for people rich enough to take antiretroviral therapy, many of the people who ran the world believed that these medicines weren't appropriate for residents of very poor countries. Even leaving aside the cost, they thought that poor people couldn't take their medicines on time. Andrew Natsios, the head of the United States Agency for International Development in the George W. Bush administration, argued against funding antiretroviral therapy in Africa. "People do not know what watches and clocks are," he told the Boston Globe in June, 2001.

The Bush administration got over that idea, and established the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — the greatest achievement of the Bush presidency. And the United States is also the major contributor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In large part because of these programs, which bought generic medicines in enormous quantities, the cost of AIDS therapy has dropped by 99.5 percent. Triple therapy had been $15,000 per year or even more; now some three-drug combinations are $75. And, as we heard at the biennial global AIDS conference in Melbourne last week, AIDS treatment is also AIDS prevention: people who take these medicines consistently are 96 percent less contagious. The treatment that is saving lives has also significantly cut the spread of H.I.V.

But the key word is "consistently." The viral load of H.I.V. in the blood has to be zero, or near zero. Was Andrew Natsios right when he said that Africans would fail?

At Fixes we're interested in what separates success from failure. We're especially interested in positive deviants — the people, places and institutions that are doing much better than others with the same resources. What are they doing that others are not? And what can we learn from that?

In honor of the AIDS conference, I'm looking this week at three different — and surprising — positive deviants, countries that are doing very well on some aspect of fighting AIDS. The first is Rwanda, one of the world's poorest countries. (I had data help from Nancy Fullman of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, who gives her take on Rwanda here.)

Rwanda's Medicine Monitors

Lots of people everywhere, including in Africa, don't take their AIDS medicines correctly, putting themselves and others at risk. Very few of them, however, live in Rwanda. Researchers measured the viral load of people in Rwanda getting antiretroviral therapy: 83 percent of them had an undetectable viral load.

The United States does a few percentage points worse. Rwanda also does better than the United States on getting antiretroviral therapy to those who are diagnosed as needing it — 91 percent have it in Rwanda, 75 percent in the United States. In America, 33 percent of H.I.V.-infected people get antiretroviral therapy. In Rwanda, it's 54 percent, according to the United Nations database AIDSInfo (it's probably higher now).

How does Rwanda do such a good job of getting medicines to its people — and having them take the medicines correctly?

The two most important reasons are common to virtually all countries that are successfully treating AIDS: strong political will to improve health, and a push to spread health care as widely as possible. "Eleven years ago a handful of people were getting care in Rwanda— all of them paying expenses in the city," said Dr. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health, which works extensively in three districts of Rwanda and helped the health ministry develop its national plan. For the very poor, he said, "a round trip bus to go to the city is equivalent of a business class airfare from Boston to Los Angeles."

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Beginning in 2006, however, Rwanda began building clinics and hospitals all over and invested in management systems to make drugs more consistently available (although availability is still a problem). The country hired and trained 55,000 community health workers. "Once you have a good supply chain, you know drugs are in the patient's hands," Farmer said. "That doesn't mean they're in the patient's bloodstream. But if you have village-based accompaniment, you remove a bunch of barriers to adherence. Someone asks how you're feeling. Someone sits with you and talks to you. Critics say it's intrusive. But people like it when they say, hey, I care about you and I'm making sure you take your medicine."

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Ethiopia's Community Conversations

Many countries are seeing a large drop in the rate of new H.I.V. infections — Nepal and Cambodia are two of them. But the most impressive drop belongs to Ethiopia — it's the country with the biggest AIDS burden and the fewest resources. Between 2001 and 2011, the rate of new infections in the country dropped by 90 percent (PDF, Page 11).

How did Ethiopia do it?

As with Rwanda, improvement in AIDS care is part of a general improvement in healthcare, especially in maternal-child care. And Ethiopia, like Rwanda, has increased its health budget and built new clinics and hospitals. In 2003 it started a health extension program, which has trained and employed 30,000 health extension workers. Ethiopia also greatly increased male circumcision in Gambela, the one district where it was not widely practiced.

But Ethiopia's secret weapon — a practice no other country is using on a national level — is community conversations.

These were started by an Ethiopian woman, Bogaletch Gebre, as a way to build popular opposition to female genital cutting. They have been hugely successful, largely eradicating the practice in the region where Gebre works. Now they are used in villages and schools everywhere to fight H.I.V. In 2012, the Joint United Nations Program on H.I.V./AIDS noted in its country report on Ethiopia that in 2010-11 alone, almost 90 percent of local governments had successfully conducted community conversations.

Community conversations are guided groups of 50 people who meet over and over again to talk through issues and gradually reach a consensus. They have rapidly spread the word about H.I.V. "It's amazing how much has moved in a short time," said Luiz Loures, the deputy executive director of program for UNAIDS. "From almost no knowledge about H.I.V. to very high levels compared with other countries."

But knowledge, of course, isn't the same as behavior change. Loures said the community conversations helped that process to happen. "People talking to people — that's the game changer. Knowledge moved from a patronizing way to put it inside the community." Ideas about what to do didn't come from outsiders. They were developed and embraced by the community.

Loures said that one high-risk group that benefited was girls. Sex between older men and young women is an important driver of the H.I.V. epidemic in Ethiopia — as elsewhere. Girls are usually instructed to resist the sugar daddy or negotiate condom use — both very difficult to do. Loures said the community conversations put the community behind the girl, giving her bargaining power.

Malawi's Plan B (Plus)

Like many other nations, in 2011, Malawi was rolling out a nationwide plan to save babies from getting H.I.V. from infected mothers. At the time, the World Health Organization recommended putting H.I.V.-positive pregnant women on full antiretroviral therapy, for life, at 14 weeks gestation if their number of infection-fighting CD4 cells in their blood was below 350 per millionth of a liter. If their CD4 count was higher, however, the W.H.O. recommended one of two other antiretroviral drug regimens, labeled Option A and Option B — countries could choose which to promote. Both were temporary, stopping when breastfeeding ended.

This was a problem for Malawi. Finding out CD4 counts required lab equipment. Women were, of course, having babies all over the country. But Malawi didn't have laboratories all over the country. So Malawi decided to dispense with the CD4 count and start all H.I.V.-positive pregnant women on lifelong antiretroviral therapy — a strategy that has come to be known as Option B+.

Many people thought this was crazy. It meant that every single health clinic that did prenatal care now had to stock large quantities of antiretrovirals and have the ability to prescribe and administer them to patients — for life. The vast majority of these clinics had no doctors. And Malawi already had plenty of challenges: clinics often ran out of H.I.V. testing kits or the course of medicine for pregnant women.

But Option B+ has succeeded. In part because of it, Malawi cut the number of new H.I.V. infections among children by more than half from 2009 to 2012. That's one of the best records in the world at saving babies from AIDS. And Option B+ also helped mothers. In the year following its debut, the number of pregnant or breastfeeding women starting antiretroviral therapy went up 748 percent (not a typo). Option B+ is now the W.H.O.'s recommended strategy.

How did Malawi do it? It trained thousands of health care workers — almost none of whom were doctors — in how to treat AIDS. It gave nurses the ability to prescribe the drugs. Putting pregnant women on the standard antiretroviral therapy simplified procurement, supply, training and other management issues. In December 2011, the drugs were available in 303 clinics. Eight months later, they were in 647 clinics.

Doubling the number of places with access to AIDS medicine helped everyone. "By rapidly decentralizing antiretroviral therapy to do Option B+, you've made it available to communities everywhere," said R. J. Simonds, vice president of program innovation and policy at the the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which works in 15 countries to prevent mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V.

Option B+ still has big challenges. It's expensive — although the short-term costs of putting more people on therapy is probably a long-term savings. Many sites can't track and monitor patients, and a large number of women quit care. Malawi had very little time to show communities why the medicines mattered, and some women threw away their pills, due to stigma or because they had no symptoms.

But it also solved many problems. Women in Malawi give birth on average to more than five children; now they no longer hop on and off therapy with each pregnancy. And permanent therapy protects subsequent children — even if mothers don't start prenatal care until late in the pregnancy.

Option B+ will also leave fewer children orphaned. Evidence is increasing that starting people on antiretroviral therapy as soon as they are diagnosed — called test and treat (PDF) — improves health. "This is going to be the leading edge to test and treat," Simonds said. "And Malawi just did it. They were unique in bucking the World Health Organization and coming up with this strategy — and it's now the strategy."

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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism." She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of "Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World" and the World War II spy story e-book "D for Deception."

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Taking Note: The White House Tries, Fails to Explain Why Marijuana Should Remain Illegal

Photo Marijuana plants.Credit David Mcnew/Reuters

No sooner had the Times published its opening editorials advocating legalization of marijuana than the White House fired back with an unconvincing response on its website. It argued that marijuana should remain illegal because of public health problems "associated" (always a slippery word) with increased marijuana use.

Careful readers will immediately see the White House statement for what it is: A pro forma response to a perceived public relations crisis, not a full-fledged review of all the scientific evidence, pro and con. The White House is actually required by law to oppose all efforts to legalize a banned drug.

Besides, it is hypocritical for the White House, whose chefs brew beer for the president, to oppose legalizing marijuana, which poses far less risk to consumers and society than does alcohol. Two recipes for the White House brew are posted on its website under the headline "Ale to the Chief."

The White House lumped its public health argument under four main headings. Before addressing them individually, we should note that there was an enormous upsurge in marijuana use in the 1970s. So far as we know, no one has claimed that it produced calamitous health or societal harm in subsequent decades. The main metric that soared was arrests for possession of marijuana.

Here are our responses to the four main public health contentions made by the White House.

The first — that marijuana use affects the developing brain — is a concern for all parents of teenagers. That's why we recommended regulations to keep marijuana out of the hands of young people. The White House cites a study by Australian researchers, published in 2012 in the journal Brain, which found that heavy cannabis use starting while young impairs connections between nerve fibers in the adult brain. It also cites a study which purports to show that heavy use by teenagers can lead to a big decline in intelligence in adult years. That study has been criticized as flawed by a Norwegian researcher who believes that socio-economic factors explain most of the apparent loss of IQ and that the true effect of marijuana could be zero. And remember: no responsible advocate of legalization is urging that marijuana be made available to teenagers.

The second contention — that marijuana use by school age children leads to lower grades — is based on studies where marijuana use is "associated with" lower grades but there is scant evidence that it caused the low grades. In fact the survey cited by the White House cautions that "These associations do not prove causation. Further research is needed to determine whether low grades lead to alcohol and other drug use, alcohol and other drug use leads to low grades, or some other factors lead to both of these problems."

Parents who deem marijuana responsible for apathy and lack of motivation in their teenagers should be aware that other factors may be in play. The Institute of Medicine, in its 1999 report, noted that when heavy marijuana users drop out of school, work or social activities the drug is often blamed, but it found no convincing data demonstrating a causal relationship between marijuana smoking and those behavioral characteristics.

The third contention — that marijuana is addictive — greatly exaggerates the kind of dependence that marijuana users experience, as we pointed out in Thursday's editorial on health effects. Some experts believe marijuana is no more addictive, or perhaps even less addictive, than caffeine.  The fourth contention — that marijuana is frequently involved in auto accidents — may overstate the importance of that finding. Some studies suggest that drivers under the influence of marijuana actually overestimate their impairment and drive more carefully, while drivers under the influence of alcohol become more reckless. Some studies implicate marijuana as an important cause of motor vehicle accidents and fatalities but others do not.   The combination of cannabis and alcohol is clearly  more dangerous than either substance on its own.

The White House objections to our editorial campaign seem mostly beside the point. We are not advocating that marijuana be made available to young people, who already seem to get it with relative ease. Rather, we are recommending regulatory steps to keep it away from them and perhaps drive down teenage usage rates. We are not urging that people be allowed to drive under the influence of marijuana: Driving while impaired with any drug, including marijuana, is illegal and will remain so. Nor are we urging adults to take up marijuana smoking. We are simply asking the federal government to get out of the way so that states can decide what marijuana policies would work best for their own people.

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