GOOD SONG, BAD ADVICE

Caption: This man went down by the riverside but didn't know when to quit.

On the fifth anniversary of President Bush's unnecessary war in Iraq, like thousands of other Americans, I attended an anti-war gathering. It was a good event. The previously threatening skies cleared up and the weather was warm. At one point, someone sang "Down by the Riverside."

As you no doubt recall, Gentle Reader, the chorus says "I ain't gonna study war no more." It's catchy, easy to sing and easy to plunk out on a guitar for those so inclined.

The only problem is this: if you take it at face value and think about it, it's really bad advice for people who want to make the world less violent and more just.

I've ridden this hobby horse before here, but here goes again. I suspect that many people involved in peace or anti-war movements have felt this way: war and violence are bad and therefore not to be studied. That may be Reason # 59385 that such movements haven't exactly set the woods on fire (metaphorically speaking).

Again, can you imagine what the current state of medicine or public health would be if people didn't study diseases and injuries because they are "bad"?

That is one of two kinds of popular magical thinking. It involves ignoring things we think are bad and don't like. The other kind, as in The Secret, a New Age idea taken up by Oprah a while back, holds that if we think about things we want, we just might get them.

(Note: the second of these is preferred by the animals at Goat Rope Farm. When they want something they stare at it--and sometimes it works.)

Both kinds of magical thinking have their problems, but at least the second one might actually work every once in a while. At least if you think something is possible you might be more aware of opportunities for making it happen. But ignoring unpleasant realities has a much worse track record.

One of the best chances we have for reducing violence, warfare, killing and the conditions that contribute to them is to try to learn as much as we can about them and creatively apply that knowledge as we seek their reduction and--one can dream--eventual elimination.

BREAKING THE BANK.James Surowiecki, financial writer for the New Yorker, has some interesting things to say about the credit crisis and ill-advised changes in bankruptcy laws.

JOBS TANK. Dean Baker analyses federal data on the drop in employment here.

STRESSED OUT. The stress of repeated tours of duty in Iraq is causing concern in the Army.

OH GOOD. Blackwater got its Iraq contract renewed. That should win some hearts and minds.

EVERY MOUNTAIN SHALL BE BROUGHT DOWN. The United Mine Workers of America may be open to the long term goal of ending mountaintop removal, according to this article by Ken Ward.

COURT FIASCO. Here's the Wall Street Journal legal blog on the Blankenship/Benjamin WV supreme court mess. Also, check out ABC News today. At last word, they were planning on showing the video of a scuffle between a reporter and supreme court I mean Massey CEO Don Blankenship.

CHIP. Here's an op-ed by yours truly on the need to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LET US CULTIVATE OUR GARDEN

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is the relative merits of optimism and pessimism. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

One of funniest and most telling refutations of naive optimism was the novel Candide: Or, The Optimist, written by the French sage Voltaire (1694-1778). Voltaire may have been moved to write this classic by the brutalities of the Seven Years War and the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, which killed tens of thousands of people.

The earthquake struck on Nov. 1, All Saints Day, when many people were in church. It was followed by a tsunami and a devastating fire. This event caused quite a crisis of faith for many religious believers, some of whom came up with elaborate explanations vindicating the goodness and providence of God. Although Voltaire as a Deist believed in a somewhat disengaged God, he would have none of it.

His particular target in this novel is the Theodicy or vindication of benevolent providence of the philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), who argued that this was "the best of all possible worlds." Let it be noted, however, that Voltaire's jaded view on this question did not stop him from trying to make the world a better place.

The novel tells of the misadventures of the young man Candide, his lover Cunégonde, and optimistic teacher Doctor Pangloss (all talk) over several continents, where they suffer from war, various kinds of violence and mayhem, the Lisbon earthquake, the Inquisition, and a host of calamities.

Through it all, Pangloss keeps maintaining that everything is for the best:

Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches. Stones were formed to be quarried and to build castles; and My Lord has a very noble castle; the greatest Baron in the province should have the best house; and as pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round; consequently, those who have asserted all is well talk nonsense; they ought to have said that all is for the best.

and

...private misfortunes make the public good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more everything is well.

After suffering the buffeting of fate, Candide observed that optimism is

the mania of maintaining that everything is well when we are wretched.

By the end of the book, Candide and his band are living a modest life in the countryside. Pangloss delivers yet another optimistic harangue, but this is the response he gets:

"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden."

That's pretty good advice, whether it applies to our private plots or to the ailing garden we collectively inhabit.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the overall health of the U.S. could stand some cultivation. Here's an interesting article from the New England Journal of Medicine that among other things looks at the effects of economic inequalities on health.

HOW TO (NOT) WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE. This is a response to Blackwater from Iraqis.

STAGNANT WAGES. According to the latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute, "Since 2001, median wages in nearly half of all states have failed to keep pace with inflation."

SPEAKING OF GOAT ROPES, El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia is in the process of overhauling its Medicaid program, with lots of confusing changes. It offers a basic and an enhanced plan, but people have to opt into the enhanced version. The new basic plan offers less services than traditional Medicaid. There also seems to be a huge information gap. Here's some good coverage from WV Public Radio.

SENATOR BYRD ON MINE SAFETY. The Bush administration is called the "weak link" that has eroded safety for coal miners.

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID. I admit it; I'm totally hooked on NBC's The Office. And I'm pleased to say that Dwight Shrute has updated his blog. And if you're really hard core, check out Creed Thoughts.

BABOONS THINKING. Darwin once said, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Here's a stab at it.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FISH AND WHISTLE

Caption: Seamus McGoogle has a tragic sense of life.

El Cabrero has been musing on optimism and pessimism lately. It has occurred to me that I know some pretty miserable people who consider themselves to be optimists.

I tend to be pessimistic at times about the Big Picture by virtue of temperament and persuasion but otherwise am pretty content. I'm even optimistic about small things. The universe as a whole may be tending towards entropy but not all parts of it are at any given moment.

Camus once said that while he was pessimistic about human destiny, he was optimistic about people.

Let me explain the pessimistic part first. While I don't think the universe is out to get us, it probably won't go out of its way to cut us any slack. In the human world, bad things happen to good people and vice versa all the time. The distribution of wealth, power, and prestige seems to me to have more to do with randomness than with merit. As the writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes put it:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (9:11)

Another prophet, Leonard Cohen, put it this way:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

(Parenthetically, the next verse of the song pretty well sums up life under the Bush administration:

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died)

Then there's the whole Buddhist thing about the noble truth of suffering. That tradition speaks of six major kinds of suffering that can happen to everyone: birth/becoming, death/dying, sickness, aging and the loss of abilities, having what you don't want and wanting what you don't have. That's a pretty good list.

Many religions teach that all this will be straightened out farther along. That would be nice, but it's beyond the view of the naked eye.

Not that I'm complaining or anything. All this doesn't mean we can't win sometimes--it makes it sweeter when we do. And even though we can't fix everything, we can fix a lot.

Nietzsche spoke about "Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems."

That works for me.

THE LAST WORD on President Bush's CHIP veto goes to Jon Stewart.

AN ENDANGERED SPECIES. The US invasion of Iraq and subsequent events is threatening the survival of what may be the world's last remaining authentic Gnostic sect, the Mandeans. Gnosticism was once a powerful movement within early Christianity and had pagan and Jewish varieties. Here's an interesting op-ed on the subject.

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL. At first I thought this was a joke, but it looks like for a time some folks at the Air Force considered the development of a bomb that would lead to rampant homosexual activity. It even won an "award" of sorts. The possibilities of snark are overwhelming to me at this point, so I'll just pass.

FACTOIDS DEPARTMENT. According to The Week Magazine

The salary of Gen. David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, works out to $493 a day. Senior managers of Blackwater, a private contractor paid by the U.S. government to provide security in Iraq, make $1,075 a day.

and

More than three times as many blacks live in prison cells than in college dorms, according to a new Census Bureau report. For Latinos, the ration is 2.7 inmates for every dorm dweller. Twice as many whites live in college housing as in prison.

PUT UP OR... E.J. Dionne's newest column asks "Would conservatives and Republicans support the war in Iraq if they had to pay for it?" Speaking of which, I actually got something useful out of a George Will column, to wit this Adam Smith quote:

Were the expense of war to be defrayed always by a revenue raised within the year...wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A CHALLENGE

Welcome to Albert Camus Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

El Cabrero just noticed by accident that 2007 is the 50th anniversary of Camus' Nobel Prize for literature.

Here's what he had to say about the challenges of his generation (which kinda sounds like the challenges of ours):

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death.

Sound familiar? There's more:

In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant.

He believed, rightly or wrongly, that some people from his generation were up for the challenge:

It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself. In any event, certain of your complete approval, it is to this generation that I should like to pass on the honour that you have just given me.

More to the point, are we?

SPEAKING OF (NOT) PREVENTING THE WORLD FROM DESTROYING ITSELF, click here.

CHIP UPDATE. The House passed a stopgap spending measure to keep funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program at its current rate through Nov.

DOES GLOBALIZATION MAKE FOR WAR OR PEACE? According to this analysis, it depends...

BANG FOR THEIR BUCK. It looks like the folks at Blackwater are a little trigger happy even by military contractor standards.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. This is the latest legal news as of now. There have been rumors of outside groups coming to Logan County to protest but these have not materialized so far. Meanwhile, local residents have been discussing organizing some kind of positive community event in response to these crimes. More on that as plans develop.

TALKING SENSE. The Chicken Littles of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia are always talking about how we rank at or near the bottom in this or that (often spurious) business ranking list. This post a while back from abetterWestVirginia.com is a good response.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

STRANGE WISDOM

Caption: "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God."--Blake

One of William Blake's stranger short works is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which was written between 1790 and 1793. For him, Heaven seemed to symbolize reason and passivity, while hell meant energy and activity.

Note: Blake's theology, like his art, is highly idiosyncratic. To say the least.

He believed that people need both:

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.

Here's part of the text (minus the art).

Some of his most striking passages are from a section of this work called The Proverbs of Hell. These are short, kind of Zenlike epigrams that seem to anticipate the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, and others. Here's a sample:

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with the bricks of Religion.

What is now proved was once, only imagin'd.

One thought fills immensity.

The eagle never lost so much time. as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Pretty strong stuff, huh? More is on the way tomorrow.

POSSIBLE MOTIVE IN THE MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. This is from today's New York Times.

DON'T TELL MY QUAKER EMPLOYERS, but El Cabrero is a big fan of Machiavelli, who has an undeservedly bad reputation. He supported republican forms of government and was even tortured for it. One theme of his was that it was a really bad thing for republics to rely on mercenaries. Speaking of which...

RISKS OF ORGANIZING: According to an international federation of labor unions,

Nearly 150 labour activists were killed worldwide in 2006, a new global trade union said in a report Tuesday outlining a rising tide of violence and harassment against unionists across the globe.

The number killed of activists killed rose to 144 from 115 in 2005, while 800 were injured or tortured and more than 5,000 arrested and 500 jailed, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) said.A single country, Colombia, accounted for more than half the victims with 78 unionists killed last year, according to the ITUC’s first annual survey of rights violations since being founded in November 2006.

ARE YOUR FARM ANIMALS TERRORISTS? Don't worry--the Bush administration and big agribusiness are on the case! As Jim Hightower puts it, "This is Animal Farm meets the Marx Brothers!" On the other hand, I trust our goats about as far as I could throw them...

HEALTH INSURANCE A GROWTH INDUSTRY. According to the Economic Policy Institute's latest snapshot:

Economist Paul Krugman and many others have suggested that the health insurance industry has a lot to do with the excessive cost of U.S. health care. As Krugman describes the industry, an important part of its business model is collecting premiums while denying deserving claims and seeking out reasons to exclude patients from coverage they need. It takes a lot of extra employees to do this socially questionable work, and the industry's employment has grown like a weed over the past 10 years.

From August 1997 to August 2007, employment in the health insurance industry grew an astounding 52%, from 293,000 to 444,000.... During the same period, employment among physicians, nurses, and others who provide health services or work to support them grew half as fast, by 26%, from 10,387,000 to 13,042,000. Employment in the economy as a whole grew even more slowly, by only 12% over the same 10-year period... The ratio of health insurance industry employees to health service providers grew from 28 insurance employees per 1,000 provider employers, to 34 per 1,000.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHAT'S A MONSTER TO DO?

Public domain poster courtesy of moviewallpapers.net.

Welcome to Frankenstein Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts. As mentioned previously, one reason Mary Shelley's story keeps on trucking is because its themes still speak to people.

If your idea of the plot of Frankenstein is taken from most movie versions or take-offs, you might be surprised by the book version.

The story begins when explorer Robert Walton, seeking a northwest passage by sea to the New World, sees a sled driven over the ice. Later, he finds another man on a sled on the ice in a very weakened condition. The man is Victor Frankenstein, who proceeds to tell his story, which goes something like this:

The eldest son of a loving family in Geneva, Victor loves his adoptive sister Elizabeth and younger brother William. Fascinated by the secrets of nature, Victor studies the writings of early alchemists and natural philosophers such as Cornelius Agrippa (after whom one of Goat Rope's goats was named), Paracelcus, and Albertus Magnus. He eventually enters the university at Ingolstadt, where he excels in natural science and begins to ponder the secrets of life and death.

After discovering the secrets of reanimation (conveniently not described by the author), he begins the experiment which will lead to the destruction of all he holds dear.

Assembling parts from various cadavers, he succeeds in bringing his creature to life only to abandon it in horror. The creature is frightened away. Victor succumbs to brain fever and is nursed back to health by childhood friend Henry Clerval, from whom he hides his secret.

On returning home, he discovers that his younger brother has been killed and a trusted household servant Justine has been charged with the murder after an item of his was found on her. She is executed for the crime. We soon learn that the creature is responsible both for killing William and leaving the evidence with the sleeping Justine.

Later, Victor encounters the creature on a mountain, where the latter recounts his sad story of hiding, loneliness, and rejection. He tells of how he learned to speak and write by secretly watching a family living in a humble cabin. The creature demands that Victor prepare a mate for him and promises to leave him and the world in peace if he does so.

Victor eventually journeys to England and prepares to make the “bride of Frankenstein” on a remote Orkney island. Eventually recoiling from the task, he destroys his work. The creature promises a terrible revenge on his wedding night.

Incredibly obtuse for a genius, Victor interprets this as a threat only to himself. Instead, his wife, the companion of his childhood, is strangled. At this point the hunted becomes the hunter as Victor pursues the creature into the Arctic wastes where he is found by Walton.

Victor dies after telling his tale and warning Walton of the danger of excessive ambition. The creature makes a final appearance on the ship, where he tells Walton that his “heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy” and that his abandonment by his creator and resulting isolation led to this tragic chain of events. The monster is last seen traveling across the ice towards his self-destruction.

Walton eventually gives up his quest, perhaps taking to heart part of Victor’s ambiguous warning to “Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in my hopes, yet another may succeed.”

No big electrical scene, no bolts from the neck, more talking, and a rehash of the ancient theme that the sin of hubris invites the retribution of Nemesis. Good though.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Terry Jones, an original member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, had this item in the UK's Guardian about Blackwater and the privatization of war. Thanks to El Ermitano for the heads up!

ACCESS TO EDUCATION. Post secondary education is crucial for economic well-being these days, even while funding for financial aid has been slashed in recent years. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has proposed a plan to make community college education free to state residents by 2015.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED