One that got away

I've been amusing myself by reading Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I'm not sure why other than the fact that I like the way those 18th century dudes talk and this book is all about conversation. Back in the day, Johnson was a literary lion, although he is scarcely read today and lives on mostly through his biographer.

Anyhow, old Sam struck a nerve in this morning's reading in a discussion of Italy:

"A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean. On these shores were the four great Empires of the world; the Assyrian, the Persian,  the Grecian, and the Roman.--All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean."

I wouldn't go that far, but he has a point. The sad part for me is that I actually did get to go to Italy last summer and ran around quite a bit for the little time I was there. BUT, alas, I didn't get to see the Mediterranean. I was pretty close at Ravenna but we only had a little time and it just didn't work out.

It is my custom when I meet a worthy body of water to touch and bless myself with a few drops of it on my forehead the way observant Roman Catholics use holy water and I REALLY wanted to do that with the Mediterranean.

Maybe next time. If there is one.

I HATE TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO, but the stimulus, aka American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, actually worked.

RUNNING BEHIND. I meant to include this item by Jared Bernstein on the latest Census poverty data last week. Here's the good news: for the first time in ages, the percentage of uninsured Americans actually fell, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act.

WILL DISNEY SUE? Here's a look at Mickey Mouse on Mercury.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

With a friend like this...

I have this friend named Jeff who is really a nice guy. On the surface anyway. In fact, he's an ordained Methodist minister. But what kind of friend is it who knows that someone is an addicted to something and gets them going on a binge?

The addiction in question is one of several of mine, to wit reading Tolkien. It's not an everyday thing. I can go years or even decades without touching the stuff, but when something gets me started again, I can't stop myself and have to re-read the whole Ring cycle.

It all started innocently enough when we were musing, as we often do, that working for social justice in WV is a bit like being stuck in the early part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Dark lords rising, sinister forces threatening Middle Earth, damage being done that can never be undone. Many defeats and fruitless victories.

But then he tempted me with books I had not read on Tolkien's life and work and before you could say "Attercop!" (something giant spiders in The Hobbit hated to be called) I was hooked again. Now I'm several hundred pages into the whole thing again with more than that to go.

Thanks a lot, pal...

MIXED SIGNALS. Although jobless claims rose a bit last week, new job growth in the private sector surpassed expectations.

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE. Despite a serious downturn, government policies--particularly those related to the Recovery Act--kept millions of Americans from falling into poverty.

NO SURPRISE, BUT STILL IMPORTANT. The wealth gap between the richest one percent and everyone else has gotten bigger in the Great Recession.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. More water problems have been found by investigators of the Massey mine disaster.

HAST ANY PHILOSOPHY IN THEE, SHEPHERD? These may be hard times for philosophy in an age of academic budget cuts, but it seems to be doing just fine at one community college.

PLAY ON. There's a movement to bring back imagination to children's play.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The proper measure

Random animal picture of Arpad chowing down on some old bones he found in the woods. I wouldn't look too closely at this picture if I was you.

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" is one of my favorite sayings. It's attributed to the French writer Romaine Rolland and was also a favorite of Antonio Gramsci. I think this combination of apparently opposing attitudes works pretty well in dealing with social problems.

Pessimism of the intellect, as I interpret it anyhow, involves a hard-headed, totally realistic appraisal of the world and the current situation, without any kind of sugar coating. It's a good remedy against naive optimism, which is one crime for which there is no evidence whatsoever to convict me. Optimism of the will means the determination to do something about it, and the belief that one has a chance at some degree of success.

A few years back, I worked on a project that involved interviewing people about hope. In doing background research on the psychological literature, I came across this a book by Ezra Stotland titled The Psychology of Hope. In it, he had a great definition that works for me. Hope, he said, was "an expectation greater than zero of achieving a goal."

Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will is a pretty good approach to lots of different situations. It may be particularly appropriate to the current social climate.

A MAJOR FIGHT IS BREWING over the federal budget. Deficit hawks in Congress could imperil economic recovery by slashing human needs spending. Here are some facts about the federal deficit.

NOT BIG ENOUGH. Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research argues that failure to pass a big enough stimulus to generate jobs was a fatal mistake that contributed to the results of the recent election.

A BIT MORE AUDACITY might have helped a while back, Krugman argues. It might even help now.

WELFARE TO WHAT. Here's a good review of several recent books on what happened in the wake of welfare reform.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

On wishing to be wrong

Chart by way of wikipedia.

There are times when one would like to be right. There are also times when one would like to be wrong. One thing that El Cabrero would REALLY like to be wrong about is the reality of climate change.

I'm not kidding. I'd like to be foam-at-mouth-howl-at-moon-bat-excrement-crazy-wrong about this. Alas, I have the feeling that at least this time I'm not and that climate change has that characteristic of reality that if one ignores it, it won't go away.

There are any number of ironies about thinking this way in West Virginia, where pretty much all of the state's political leaders have a vested interest in denial. This means that, consciously or not, they can basically be counted on to do all that is within their power to insure a miserable future for humanity--even the ones who know better.

I just finished reading (really, listening to) an interesting book by Amanda Ripley titled The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why. Based on a pretty extensive investigation, Ripley says that people go through a three stage process when REALLY BAD things happen.

The first is denial. The second is deliberation. The third is action. Unfortunately, the smart money as far as I can see is on getting stuck too long in the first stage.

COINCIDENTALLY, this.

INCOME INEQUALITY is getting too big to ignore.

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE. A new report by the WV Center on Budget and Policy argues that the Recovery Act and related federal action helped blunt the impact of the Great Recession on West Virginia. Here's a newspaper article about it and here's the full report.

WAS THERE NO HONOR amongst tyrannosaurs?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Axles and cusswords

Image by way of wikipedia.

In his book Deer Hunting with Jesus, author Joe Bagaent describes some characteristics of Scotch-Irish Appalachians. He had a great one liner that describes my family pretty well:

Cussing is a form of punctuation to us.

Profanity was regarded as a high art form by my father, although my mother is no slouch herself. I've inherited their genes as has my daughter. My son, for some reason, doesn't seem as disposed to it.

I mention all this because my memory has been jogged recently when I was told that my grandson does good on his spelling tests. Back in the day, I did pretty good at spelling. In fifth grade, I came in second in our school's spelling bee.

The great irony was that I lost on--of all things--a four letter word, which is something I kind of specialize in. It was axle by the way and I ended it with an e-l. Since then I have redoubled my efforts to never again be out done in the four letter word department. And that's no ****.

THE RICH GET RICHER...Robert Reich rants here.

SOMETHING ELSE FOR FLAT WORLDERS TO DENY: rapidly melting Greenland and Antarctic ice.

PUNISHED FOR SUCCESS. Here's James Surowiecki on the politics of the Recovery Act.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: a Montana woman fought off a charging bear with a zucchini.

NOTE. This post was scheduled for publication the night before. If anything really good or bad happens between now and then, please accept appropriate congratulations or condolences.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A Malthusian future?

Now that's a crowd. Image from the 2008 Olympics by way of wikipedia.

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, Darwin's idea of natural selection was shaped by Thomas Malthus' ideas on population. Simply put, he argued that humans tend to multiply faster than resources do, which leads to hunger and scarcity and all kinds of nasty checks on population.

This turned out not to be the case for industrial societies, which have been able to dramatically increase production and maintain growing populations. There is also a tendency for population growth to slow as living standards rise. But Malthus might have been at least partially right. There have been numerous cases where pre-modern civilizations collapsed due to over-stressing their environment and growing beyond its carrying capacity. Jared Diamond's book Collapse gives several examples and is a compelling read.

The scary part is that if we don't work towards a sustainable approach to economy, energy, ecology and population, we might head that way ourselves. If that happens, it will be more due to our doing wrong than to Malthus being right.

BIG CHANGES. The Recovery Act is making big changes in technology and clean energy, most of which have been under the radar, as Time Magazine reports.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Recovery Act has lowered unemployment by up to 1.8 points in the last quarter. The problem is that it wasn't big or targeted enough, as Paul Krugman again argues here. Now things have gotten to the point were firefighters are being laid off in many cities.

NOT THE BEST PR DEPARTMENT. The Manhattan Mosque controversy might not be sending the best message around the world.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING WHY FISH IN THE ARCTIC DON'T FREEZE, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Operation deer hide

Many of the animals on Goat Rope Farm have endearing and not so endearing habits. Little Edith Ann the boxer goes mad with squeaky toys most days. Honeysuckle the not-so-baby goat jumps all over us like a puppy. Diego the turkey relentlessly courts his mate with an ever changing display of facial and snood colors (the snood is the thing that hangs down from a male's face when he's trying to get lucky). Cat Seamus expresses his dissatisfaction with the world primarily through excretory functions.

And then there's Arpad, the Great Pyrenees. He mostly abides, like the Dude in the Big Lebowski. His presence has been a pretty good deterrent against predators, with the notable exception of his platonic chicken killing girlfriend up the road. Mostly he just hangs around, but every so often he takes a day off and lights out like Huck Finn for the territory.

Some of these excursions are foraging missions from which he returns carrying bits and pieces of deer carcasses left over from the last hunting season. He returned with one such artifact this week, a vintage November deer hide, periodically shaking it and leaving fur all over the yard.

He's such a pretty good boy that I like to indulge him within reason, but this one required an intervention. This consisted in waiting until he was asleep and bagging it. I don't think he minds too much. As far as I can tell, things just appear, disappear and reappear in his consciousness, such as it is.

The Dude abides.

ONE TO WATCH. Methane monitors have been recovered from the Upper Big Branch mine. They may provide more insight into what happened April 5. And here's uber-blogger Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo post on why people are watching this.

NOT SO GOOD. The latest report on joblessness shows an increase in claims.

UNSTIMULATED. According to the Charleston Gazette, West Virginia ranks next to last in stimulus spending.

BACK TO THE FARM. More people are turning to small farming. What are they thinking?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Rural crime ring busted!!!

A suspect was recently apprehended following a series of tomato theft and vandalism incidents in the vicinity of Goat Rope Farm. The unsub (that's crime buster lingo for unidentified subject of an investigation) refused to identify himself or to issue any statements.

Due to the absence of witnesses, formal charges were not pressed. He was, however, dropped off in the middle of a field about a half mile down the road.

SPEAKING OF FARMS, here's a dispatch by Michael Pollan on the food revolution.

CREATING JOBS. One provision of the Recovery Act has created hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide in both the public and private sector.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, a new report shows the Recovery Act aka stimulus played a major role in the economic recovery.

DENIED. The EPA rejected petitions that denied climate change, as Ken Ward reports in Coal Tattoo.

HIRE THE LADY. Paul Krugman gives the Obama administration a friendly thrashing here and urges that Elizabeth Warren be given the post of the new bureau of consumer protection. Not that anybody cares, but I concur.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Meanly, like ants

In this age of multi-tasking, a dose of Thoreau really clears the palate. If he felt out of place in the mid 1800s, what would he think of an era in which people listen to music, carry on a conversation and send text messages while driving a car?

...we live meanly, like ants...Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

That's a tall order for an ADHD nation.

IMPORTANT SENATE VOTE. The vote to extend key provisions of the Recovery Act--including unemployment insurance extensions and aid to states--is likely to take place today. It has been scaled back further after a failed vote yesterday. If you haven't contacted your senators, please do so today and urge them to vote yes on "the extender bill." Click here to get started.

MAKING THE CASE. In testimony before Congress, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute urges more aggressive action to deal with unemployment.

THE COMMON DENOMINATOR between BP and Massey Energy is greed, according to union leaders Cecil Roberts and Leo Girard.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Radical minds

It would be hard to think of two people more different than Henry David Thoreau and Karl Marx, but the transcendentalist and the red exile sounded alike in their critique of early capitalism.

Particularly in his early writings, the young Marx denounced the alienation of the workers and their degradation in an industrial system that reduced the individual worker to "an appendage to the machine." The hyper-individualist Henry picked up on the same theme, noting in Walden that

lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

He also noted that

the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer

This rant about social inequality from Walden could go toe to toe with those in the Communist Manifesto:

The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world.

I'm not sure what he thought could be done about it, given his distaste for collective action, but at least he saw it. It's also interesting that he almost accidentally gave the world a blueprint for nonviolent action in his essay on civil disobedience.

YOUR GOOD DEED FOR THE DAY would be to call your US senators and urge them to pass HB 4213 with an amendment to extend COBRA benefits and help states avoid layoffs and cuts to services by extending the federal Medicaid match for another six months. The bill would extend key provisions of the recovery act, including jobless benefits. Families USA has provided a toll free number: 888-340-6521.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, the public supports continuing the benefits mentioned above.

MYOPIA. Economist Dean Baker takes another swipe at deficit hawks. If they win, he argues, the recession and accompanying unemployment are likely to linger.

SPIDER GIRL FIGHTS can be deadly.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Only that day dawns

Goat Rope has been spending a bit of time with Henry David Thoreau lately. His writings are full of great nuggets. If you are a fan, click on last week's posts.

Old Henry had a Buddhist soul, although his direct knowledge of the Buddha or Buddhist teachings was very limited. Not a lot was known about Buddhist teachings in the early and mid 19th century America. If memory serves, he may have read a little of a translation of the Lotus Sutra, a Mahayana text which contains little if any information about the "historical Buddha."

Some may want to chalk that up to karmic affinity...

He professed his fondness for Buddha and Christ in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, where amidst musings on various religions he wrote

I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.

Although he didn't have the chance to learn Buddhist meditation techniques, he seemed to have got there on his own, as this passage in Walden indicates:

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than the work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.

He also picked right up on the grand Dharma theme of wakefulness, as is shown in quotes like

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

And

I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

Sorry, Kerouac, but I think he might have been America's first Dharma bum.

MISSING MATCH. Many states are going to have to make painful cuts unless Congress extends the matching Medicaid funding which is part of the Recovery Act.

WHISTLEBLOWING. The folks at Massey Energy don't take too kindly to it, according to this NPR report.

GETTING REGULATION RIGHT. Here's an interesting take from the financial page of the New Yorker.

THE BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN, a major historic site of WV's mine wars, continues.

ZOMBIE CHIC. What's up with the popularity of zombies in pop culture?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The whips and scorns of time

To be (right) or not to be (left).

For several years I taught pre-GED classes at Head Start centers in southern West Virginia. I used to delight in torturing my students by bringing in different literary selections, having the class read them out loud, and then discussing them.

Of course, there's no way I could have resisted bringing in the most famous lines in English literature. And since Hamlet is the theme here, there's no way I can resist even now. So here goes:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn away,
And lose the name of action...

Harold Bloom argues that "this is not a meditation seriously contemplating suicide," but rather the prince hesitating on a course likely to lead to his own death. He has been around the Shakespearean block more times than me and may be right, but I'm not persuaded. Hamlet, after all has already brought up suicide in the first act and things have only gotten worse for him since then.

In any case, while El Cabrero is not too given to depression or thoughts of self-immolation (very often, anyhow), when it did cross my mind, I've always found Hamlet's reasoning to be persuasive.

WV ACTION ALERT. If you live in WV and haven't yet contacted Gov. Manchin and your legislators about modernizing our unemployment system and extending benefits to part time workers and people dealing with domestic violence, sexual assault, and other compelling family reasons, please click here and send a message. It's easy and it's fast. As of last night, over 351 emails have been sent (150 yesterday alone). The bills to draw down $22 million in federal money to do this need to move this week so acting now is crucial.

STIMULATED. Reuters has this to say about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act:

The massive stimulus package passed last year to blunt the impact of the worst U.S. recession in 70 years created up to 2.1 million jobs in the last three months of 2009, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.

The package boosted the economy by up to 3.5 percent and lowered the unemployment rate by up to 2.1 percent during that period, CBO said.

FOOD MILES. Here's another item on local foods.

LET'S GO SQUID HUNTING. Sperm whales may hunt them in packs.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING whether chimpanzees can quantify liquids, the answer is yes. Bartenders, beware!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TGIF

Random picture. Was it once warm enough to grown these things?

Hectic week. In lieu of a regular post, here are some random items that caught my eye:

ONE YEAR LATER. The Recovery Act had its first birthday this week. While it may have been too small, it did a lot of good.

REASON #3949 why we need comprehensive health care reform.

FREE MARKETS. Who pays?

VAMPIRES are considered here as cultural barometers.

URGENT ANCIENT FISH UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Sulphurous and tormenting flames

England was in religious turmoil in the 1500s and 1600s as the tide of the reformation ebbed and flowed under Henry the VIII, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth. People have often speculated about Shakespeare's religious sympathies and whether he or his family were secretly Catholic. My guess is that, like many English people of that period, he was a bit of both.

Just based on a reading of the plays, he always struck me as fairly sympathetic towards Catholicism. One example of that happens in Act 1 scene 4 of Hamlet, when the ghost of Old Hamlet describes his torments in Purgatory, a Catholic idea if ever there was one.

Apparently Old Hamlet's experience of Purgatory was a lot nastier than that described by Dante. In his words:

My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself...

I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

All this brings up a point in the art of tragic murder. If you REALLY had it in for somebody, you didn't just whack them. Instead, you waited until they were in a state of sin, preferably mortal, and THEN whacked them. That way the dying was the easy part and the worst was yet to come.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Food stamps, once stigmatized, have gained greater support across political lines.

DOUBLE STANDARDS. Some of the most vocal opponents of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus, are all to eager to take advantage of it.

UNDERVALUED. If we placed a dollar value on the necessary services nature provides for free, we'd probably do things very differently.

URGENT WEIRD SEA CREATURE PICTURES here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Game on

So how's the weather, anyway? This blog missed a day yesterday since Goat Rope Farm was among the 100,000 or so households without power in West Virginia after the snowstorm that hit this weekend.

Heat and cooking weren't too much of a problem thanks to wood and gas stoves. Water, electricity, telephone and plowed roads were a bit of a setback however. By the time power came on yesterday, personal hygiene took priority over blogging.

Here's hoping the Gentle Reader made it through intact.

Note to self: you know that generator you keep thinking of getting and figuring out how to use? This might not be a bad time to get on that.

SPEAKING OF THINGS THAT HIT WEST VIRGINIA, a new report by the WV Center on Budget and Policy (small parts of which were co-authored by yours truly) was released that documents the impact of the recession on West Virginia. Here's a press release with a link to the full report and here is coverage from today's Gazette and the West Virginia News Service.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, several provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act blunted the impact of the recession on hard hit state residents, as documented in this op-ed by yours truly.

THE BIG NEWS seems to be the progress of health care reform through the US Senate, although many challenges remain before anything reaches the president's desk. AFSC did not take a direct position on the Senate bill, although it supports universal health care and did urge passage of the House bill. It is my own opinion that letting the whole thing die would be a bad idea. There are some good things in the flawed Senate bill and other problems could be dealt with later.

THE OTHER BIG NEWS was a tentative deal on climate change. This should be good for another hissy fit or two in WV.

FINALLY--a venomous dinosaur!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Ghosts

I let Halloween come and go without picking up on the theme. Until, that is, I saw this article in the Gazette about ghosts and how people reconcile belief in them with more conventional religion.

I take no position on whether such things exist, but it seems that West Virginia has more than its share of if not ghosts then at least stories about them. I guess our history--what with the Civil War and other armed conflicts, feuds, industrial disasters, and other mayhem--is a good climate for generating them.

I think it's interesting that in most ghost stories that I know about, the apparitions don't tend to be free rangers. Rather, they seem to be tied to particular places where certain things happened.

Sometimes I do think that events can leave a mark on places. Some places I've been to seem to be more loaded than others. I'm thinking about places like Harpers Ferry, the old state mental hospital at Weston, the old state prison at Moundsville, and an old family farm in Tazewell, Virginia.

There are, after all, more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

NOT ENOUGH OF A GOOD THING. It looks like the stimulus helped pull the US economy back from the brink--up to a point. Here's another argument for another one.

SELF DESTRUCTIVE HABITS. Gazette columnist Perry Mann ponders unbridled capitalism here.

SEALING THE DEAL. Here's E.J. Dionne on the future of health care reform legislation.

SPEAKING OF HAUNTED PLACES. Here's an item about a scientist who artificially designed one.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Who'd a thunk it?

I don't know about you, but the struggle over health care reform seems to have gone on forever. Watching it and participating in it whenever I could has often reminded me of the Iliad as the tide of battle went first this way and that. At crucial points in Homer's epic, Zeus would bring out his golden scales and weigh the fate of mortals in its balance.

During August and September, it looked like the scales went against the public option and maybe the whole shebang. Those were strange days, with bizarre rumors of death panels and rampant paranoia and conspiracy theories. I attended a few of those contentious town hall meetings and they were as weird in person as they were on TV. It was all Whackadoodle all the time for a while.

I've mentioned this before, but my strangest memory of the fight is something that happened at a public meeting in southern West Virginia hosted by Congressman Nick Rahall. When a priest was giving the opening prayer and saying something obviously Bolshevik about caring for our brothers and sisters, a teabagger heckled, saying something like "How much are you getting paid?"

But the tide finally turned again. Across the country, people worked hard to push for real reform. Getting the public option back on the table has been a real victory, although anything could happen.

The House plan was revealed yesterday and votes are still being counted on the Senate's version. I guess the goal at this point is to getting something passed by Christmas.

There is going to be plenty more work to do to make this happen, but there is some motion in the right direction.

AND KRUGMAN SAYS SO too.

RECESSION AND RECOVERY. Here's Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com on the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and what remains to be done.

I RESEMBLE THAT REMARK. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia ranks last for getting enough sleep.

THIS WOULD EXPLAIN A LOT. Is there a gene for bad driving?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: UP THERE WITH CEILING CAT

An interesting question

This guy is very status conscious.

Off and on lately, this blog has been looking at how social status and related factors affect health and longevity. (Short version: they do in a big way.)

But this kind of musing leads to an interesting question:

*Given that there are status hierarchies in primate populations and many other animal groups as well; and

*Given that humans are primates; and

*Given that all human societies have some kind of hierarchy (even if it is mostly a guy thing)....does this not imply that this is a fact of nature and that there's nothing we can do about it?

Epidemiologist Michael Marmot examines this question in his book The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity. Here's one possible answer.

Striving for status is probably a legacy of our evolutionary heritage (again, chiefly amongst the dudes). BUT for most of human history, we were foragers or hunter-gatherers. Such groups in general don't accumulate a lot in the way of property and don't have class systems that institutionalize inequality. Also, one can gain status in such a group in lots of ways, including by showing generosity and concern for others. Also, if you know anything about hunting or fishing, you know that sometimes you're hot and sometimes you're not, which would tend to make status differences fairly fluid.

We really see the status affect in humans at it strongest in class societies quite unlike that of our ancestors. These have all kinds of built-in structural inequalities. But even within these, the affects of status vary widely, with the degree of inequality having a major effect. In other words, a lot of the status syndrome and related social determinants of health are socially constructed and vary widely from society to society.

To quote Shakespeare, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings"--at least to a large extent.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES. Unemployment claims have nearly doubled since last year in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia. Meanwhile, over 300,000 state residents got SNAP or what used to be called food stamps. That number was up over 60,000 from the previous year.

ON THE OTHER HAND, there are some signs that job losses are slowing at the national level.

AND BY THE WAY, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is playing a big role in making things less bad. As part of ARRA, food stamp payments went up and there were also mechanisms to extend, expand and modernize unemployment, aside from all the other effects of the boost in spending.

THE NEXT BIG HISSY FIT after health care reform will be climate change legislation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Getting warmer

This is Holden 22, where Don Blankenship's Labor Day inversion was held. The picture was taken when there was still a mountain there.

I had planned on leading with another topic today, but an item from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo blog caught my eye.

Since Labor Day, I've written here and elsewhere about the contrast between the United Mine Workers of America and Don Blankenship's effort to present himself as the voice and protector of coal miners. The subject of Ward's post, an interview with union president Cecil Roberts on Living on Earth, is a case in point.

In contrast to Blankenship and allies, who are taking the position that climate change cannot be real because it may cut into their profits, UMWA president Cecil Robert admits that it's a reality that must be faced. Roberts said:

The union has never taken a position arguing against the science of climate change. We've engaged in the debate as to how to deal with it.

That realistic response to a problem from labor is a welcome contrast to the ruling class hissy fit we've been subjected to lately. It shows once again the need for workers to have a voice independent of their employers. It is also reason #9484 why we need to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

SPEAKING OF HISSY FITS, here's Dean Baker on the opposition to a public option in health care reform.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's Washington Post columnist Marie Cocco pointing out that we already have several public options and they're working pretty well. Senator Rockefeller said yesterday that he wouldn't support a bill without one.

STILL THERE. Cost of health insurance have increased faster than wages and inflation.

WONKY BUT IMPORTANT. Parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dealing with TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), can be used to do interesting things like beef up emergency assistance for families or even create subsidized employment. The catch is that states have to be willing to do it. Here's info about the possibilities. This is something I'm going to be pushing for with folks in WV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Recessions and child poverty

Random animal picture.

Census figures released last week showed that the poverty rate increased to 13.2 percent in 2008. The actual number of people living in poverty now is 39.8 million. The rate hasn't been that high since 1997 and the numbers haven't been that high since 1960.

This doesn't reflect the worst of the recession, which didn't really hit what I hope is bottom until this year. This probably won't surprise anybody, but poverty rates tend to spike along with unemployment rates. As noted here last week, things would have been a lot worse without the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), but states need to act to take advantage of its provisions.

Child poverty is especially likely to increase during recessions. This is serious since even temporary childhood poverty can have long lasting consequences.

To use West Virginia as an example, a new report by the WV Center on Budget and Policy finds that,

Based on an analysis of previous recessions, one in four West Virginians is expected to fall into poverty during the current recession. The number of state children living in poverty is estimated to increase by more than a third to 130,585, or 34.4 percent. Each one-percent increase in the unemployment rate is projected to raise the number of West Virginia children in poverty by about 8,000. The increase is of particular concern because of the harmful and long-lasting effects of poverty – even temporary poverty –on children...

The report cites a longitudinal study of child poverty which found that children who became poor during recessions had vastly different outcomes than their peers who were never poor. They had median incomes that were 30 percent lower; were three times as likely to still be poor; were less likely to finish high school or college; and were less likely to report being in good or excellent health.

The report recommends taking full advantage of ARRA by accessing emergency contingency TANF funds to provide increased or temporary assistance. These funds can also be used to subsidize employment programs. Other measures states can take include maximizing Medicaid participation, modernizing unemployment insurance by extending benefits to people currently excluded from the system, and expanding Childrens Health Insurance Program benefits.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, WV's fiscal health is better than most states these days, which may make it easier to take advantage of some of the opportunities mentioned above.

COAL WARS. Here's an op-ed by yours truly on coalfield conflicts then and now.

LEFT OUT. Non profit groups are not happy about being left out of current health care reform proposals.

GO TO THE DOGS here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED