Excellence and fragility

The classical scholar Martha Nussbaum opens her book The Fragility of Goodness with a quote from the ancient Greek poet Pindar, who made a career for himself writing odes for victors in the Olympic and other sacred games. He wrote:

...human excellence
grows like a vine tree
fed by the green dew,
raised up, among wise men and just,
to the liquid sky.
We have all kinds of needs for those we love--
most of all in hardships, but joy, too
strains to track down eyes that it can trust.

In other words, most of the good things or qualities we have are not inherently ours--even if they are things we've worked hard to achieve or attain. They depend on many other and external conditions, all of which are changeable and subject to loss and reversal.

Nussbaum expounds on Pindar thus:

The excellence of the good person, he writes, is like a young plant: something growing in the world, slender, fragile, in constant need of food from without. A vine tree must be of good stock if it is to grow well. And even if it has a good heritage, it needs fostering weather (gentle dew an drain, the absence of sudden frosts and harsh winds), as well as the care of concerned and intelligent keepers, for its continued health and full perfection. So, the poet suggests, do we. We need to be born with adequate capacities, to live in a fostering natural and social circumstances, to stay clear of abrupt catastrophe, to develop confirming associations we other human beings.

We are all, in other words, subject to fortune and reversal. One of the functions of Greek tragedy, the theme these days at Goat Rope, is to remind us that no one is immune and to warn us against assuming that fleeting good luck is something we own.

50 HERBERT HOOVERS. This NY Times editorial talks sense about the fiscal crisis many states are facing.

GOD ON THE BRAIN. Here's a link to a recent NPR series on science and spirituality.

RELIGION IN THE WAR ROOM. Here's an item about how briefings for for former president Bush were laced with biblical language.

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? Here's an item from Wired Science about why we stare.

TEXTING could be bad for teenagers'
health.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

What escapism?

El Cabrero admitted in yesterday's post to being a Tolkien dork. I've read the trilogy several times since discovering it in jr. high and of course have seen the movies.

As such things go, I have a fairly minor case of Tolkiendorkitis. A friend of mine who is an occasional reader of this blog is a member of a Tolkien society and has read The Silmarillion multiple times. (I'd recommend getting help after reading it more than once.) I made the mistake of listening to it on a long trip while I thought the Spousal Unit was asleep and never heard the end of it.

But I digress...

Anyhow, I most recently re-read the trilogy in late 2003/early 2004, a time when it seemed that the forces of evil were taking over the world and were going to keep it for a very long time.

It is a popular criticism of such books to view them as mere escapism. I beg to differ on several fronts. First, the proper measure of escapism can be a great aid in dealing with the realities of the world. More to the point, however, was that The Fellowship of the Ring seemed to be more a description of the world as it was than a break from it.

In that book, dark forces are sweeping over Middle Earth, even to places like the Shire that had often been spared from world events. The powers of evil were arrogant and insolent and there seemed to be no stopping them. The good guys were divided and mistrustful of each other and things seemed to be hopeless.

It was like the line from Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" about the best lacking all conviction and the worst being filled with passionate intensity.

In other words, the book was pretty much exactly like 2003/2004. And it even offered suggestions about how to get past it. More tomorrow.

INCOME INEQUALITY hit record levels in the Bush years, according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

HARD TIMES. Here's a look at the human side of the recession.

CLIMATE CHANGE, COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS and the Clean Air Act are discussed in this post from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo.

JAR JAR BUSH? This New Yorker blog post ponders Star Wars, torture and the ex-prez.

FRIENDSHIP is good for your health.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Smart or smart aleck

Don't take a job interviewing class from this man. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope these days is Buddhism and some of its lore, but you'll also find links and comments about current events. The series started last week. This week's posts are about the legendary figure of Bodhidharma or Daruma, who is said to have brought Zen to China and is also associated with the martial arts of Shaolin and karate.

As yesterday's post related, the legends say that on arrival he had an interview with the emperor that didn't go all that well. In response to his questions, the monk told him that the ruler had acquired no merit from building temples and translating scriptures; that the essence of Buddhism was "vast emptiness;" and that he (Bodhidharma) had no idea who he was.

In his defense, his answers, however abrupt, were in line with classical teachings:

*No merit. Someone who does good deeds solely to gain karmic brownie points is probably lacking in true compassion or generosity. This attitude has been called "spiritual materialism" and is kind of like wealthy Christians through the ages who tried to buy their way into heaven.

*Vast emptiness. When the Buddha attained enlightenment, he was said to have seen that all things were empty or insubstantial (anatta), meaning that things come into being and pass away as conditions change. In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, Emptiness (sunyatta) could be understood as pure potentiality from which all things come. The Heart Sutra, a key text in that tradition, states that "form is emptiness and emptiness is form itself." So, yeah, that's pretty much it.

*No idea. Finally, Buddhism teaches that people lack a permanent self. What we think of as the self is a constantly changing bundle of form, sensations, perceptions, mental reactions and consciousness. Clinging to the illusion of a permanent self or ego is a cause of suffering. Who is anybody, really?

Was he being a good teacher, a smart ass or a little of both? You be the judge.

HOMING IN. Here are some ideas on how to help with the housing crisis. On a related note, the number of homeless people is increasing in WV.

THE BUSH LEGACY? Whatever.

UNNATURAL SELECTION. Humans are messing with evolution and that's probably not a good thing, according to research detailed here.

HEALTH CARE. A new report by Families USA shows the benefits of expanding Medicaid eligibility in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

LOVE AND ANTI-LOVE POTIONS are discussed here.

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS, but some dinosaurs had them too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A RELIGION OF THE HEART

Camp meeting, circa 1839, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme this week at Goat Rope is a paradox of the American religious experience: while the US is among the most religious and religiously diverse countries in the world, many residents measure pretty low on surveys of religious literacy--both of the religions they profess and of those they don't.

One thing that may have set the tone for this was the popularity of revivalism on the American frontier, of which the Second Great Awakening of the first half of the 1800s is a prime example. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote,

Long before America was discovered, the Christian community was perennially divided between those who believed that the intellect must have a vital place in religion and those who believed that intellect should be subordinated to emotion, or in effect abandoned at the dictates of emotion...under American conditions the balance between traditional establishments and revivalist or enthusiastic movements drastically shifted in favor of the latter. In consequence, the learned professional clergy suffered a loss of position, and the rational style of religion they found congenial suffered accordingly. At an early stage in its history, America, with its Protestant and dissenting inheritance, became the scene of an unusually keen local variation of this universal historical struggle over the character of religion; and here the forces of enthusiasm and revivalism had their most impressive victories.

Of course, given the hardships of farm and frontier life, this kind of religion provided relief from toil, a chance to socialize, and a welcome form of entertainment. Abraham Lincoln, who was pretty unorthodox in religious matters, enjoyed such spectacles while growing up. He once said "When I see a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees."

The effects of the Second Great Awakening can still be felt in El Cabrero's neck of the woods. I remember many conversations I had growing up about religion with people for whom religion was preaching and who suspected educated clergy to be instruments of the devil. They believed every word of the Bible, even if they were a little hazy on what these might actually be.

As Stephen Prothero notes in Religious Literacy, this religion of the heart was a marked change from the kind that prevailed before when the nation was founded:

As has been noted, religious faith and religious knowledge were inseparable in the colonies and the early republic...But early Americans didn't just know Jesus; they knew the Sermon on the Mount (often by heart). They believed, as the Reverend John Lathrop of Boston's Second Church wrote, that "the connexion between knowledge and faith, is such, that the latter cannot exist without the former."...All that changed, however, with the rise to public power in the early nineteenth century of a new form of Protestantism called evangelicalism. By the end of that century a lack of elementary knowledge of Christianity would constitute evidence of authentic faith. What for generations had been shameful--religious illiteracy--would become a badge of honor in a nation besotted with the self-made man and the spirit-filled preacher.

The triumph had unintended consequences:

In the name of heartfelt faith, unmediated experience, and Jesus himself, they actively discouraged religious learning. To evangelicalism, therefore, we owe both the vitality of religion in contemporary American and our impoverished understanding of it.

LEAVING A RECORD...DEFICIT. President Bush will leave his successor the biggest one yet.

THAT'S JUST SWELL. The US has reassured Israel that it might whack Iran. Here's more on the subject from Scott Ritter.

LOSING TIME. This doesn't show up on official unemployment statistics, but millions of American workers have had the hours of work cut.

IF "SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN" RAN HOROSCOPES, here's what they would look like.

OLD SCHOOL COMPUTING. This is an interesting look at an ancient Greek computational device. Where did they plug it in?

HYPERION TO A SATYR. A professor from El Cabrero's alma mater Marshall University will write a biography of George W. Bush. The author, Jean Edward Smith, has previously written 12 books, including a prize-winning and bestselling biography of FDR--peace be unto him. The contrast between the two is mind boggling.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TLALOC AND TROTSKY AND A LIZARD

Tlaloc!, courtesy of wikipedia.

While traveling in Mexico recently, El Cabrero made a new acquaintance and renewed an old one. I encountered the new one while visiting Aztec and pre-Aztec ruins around Mexico City. It was none other than the rain and water god Tlaloc, who had googly eyes and was kind of big on earrings. Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent god, gets all the press, so it's high time my wet friend got his due.



I'm not sure why I bonded with Tlaloc, other than the fact that I think water was one of the universe's better ideas and that his name is fun to say over and over again. His abode was the fourth layer of the heavens, where eternal springtime and lush greenery prevailed. He did however have a certain unfortunate fondness for human sacrifice, a custom to which I am generally opposed. I guess we all have our foibles...



I also paid a visit to the Leon Trotsky Museum in Cocoacan, the site of the fallen Russian revolutionary's last home in exile and of his murder by Stalinist agents. (Leon in his glory days was no stranger to human sacrifice either.) One thing that El Cabrero has in common with Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens is that we all were impressed at one time by Isaac Deutscher's three volume biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. While I'm no Trotskyist, one thing I got from those books was an understanding of and a visceral hatred for Stalinism and anything that reeks of it.

And finally,



here's a lizard from Leon's garden.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVIL is the subject of this NPR story about the work of psychologist Philip Zimbardo, designer of the classic Stanford Prison Experiment and author of the excellent recent book The Lucifer Effect. You can expect lots more about the latter starting next week.

THE CHANGING OF THE EVANGELICAL GUARD is the subject of this abstract from a longer 6/30New Yorker article. The full article wasn't anywhere I could find it on line, but is definitely worth a look if you find a print copy.

NEXT STOP...IRAN? Here's Seymour Hirsch's New Yorker piece on the Bush administration's mad fixation on starting another unnecessary war.

HOW DOES YOUR LIST COMPARE? Here's an item from alternet about the 10 worst moments of the Bush presidency. Jeez, where do you start?

ANOTHER LOOK AT WEST VIRGINIA from the outside. This one is from the UK Guardian.

IS THAT AN AZTEC DEATH WHISTLE IN YOUR POCKET OR... Speaking of meso-American antiquities, here's an interesting item about an eerie musical instrument.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TALKING SENSE

Several years ago, I stumbled on a thought provoking book titled Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. The author, James Gilligan, is a physician and psychiatrist who worked extensively in prisons and mental hospitals and who drew extensively on his decades of experience with violent offenders in developing his theories.

Recently, I gave the book another look and found that the public health approach he advocated holds up pretty well both in terms of personal violence committed by individuals and the much more extensive structural violence inflicted every day on poor and relatively powerless people.

The unfortunate fact that this book did not find as large an audience as it deserves is probably because he took it in a direction which many people want to avoid: the economic inequities that are violent in themselves and contribute to the level of interpersonal violence. This isn't exactly new. In the first half of the 20th century Mahatma Gandhi observed that "poverty is the worst form of violence."

Gilligan cites research on economic disparities in his book that indicates that 180 people die prematurely due to economic factors such as lack of food, clean water, health care, public health measures, etc. for every 1 person killed in armed conflict. The numbers have changed since his book came out in 1996, but the vast majority of the carnage is still on the economic side.

Let's start by just looking at (lack of) health care related deaths in the US. Families USA recently reported that in 2006 alone 22,000 Americans died prematurely because they lacked health insurance. West Virginia's share amounts to an estimated 210 unnecessary deaths per year or around four people per week.

If you look at the number of deaths attributable to economic disparities on a world scale, the results would be staggering. According to UNICEF, more than 26,000 children under age five die from preventable deaths every day. That's almost 10 million preventable deaths year, not counting people over age five.

Unfortunately for us all, as Gilligan puts it,

When violence is defined as criminal, many people see and care about it. When it is simply a byproduct of our social and economic structure, many do not see it; and it is hard to care about something one cannot see.

SPEAKING OF VIOLENCE, screening for domestic violence by medical professionals can help to end it, according to this NY Times article.

THE BUTCHER'S BILL. From the Hightower Lowdown, here's a damage assessment of 10,000--I mean nearly eight--years of Bush/Cheney.

HUNGRY COUNTRY. USA Today reports that food stamp enrollment has surpassed the previous record set in 1994. Here's one thing that's changed:

Since 2006, soaring food and fuel prices have combined with lost jobs and stagnant wages to boost the number of Americans needing food aid. More than 41% of those on food stamps came from working families in 2006, up from 30% a decade earlier, according to the latest Agriculture Department data.

CAN MUSIC HELP HEAL PEOPLE? Maybe.

RANDOM LINK. Scientists have found millions of starfish hanging out in an undersea volcano. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything but thought it was kind of cool.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DREAM WEAVER

Image credit: fromoldbooks.org.

Aside from the usual assortment of links and comments about current events, the theme of this week's Goat Rope is dreams and what they may or may not mean. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's posts.

When I was a little kid, I had an odd dream that stuck with me until the present. In it, I was sitting alone at night among old stone ruins. Though it was dark, there was some light from the moon and stars. The odd thing is that I wasn't afraid; awe might be a better word.

That dream kind of set the tone for me. I've always been drawn to things that are ancient or at least old enough to withstand the tests of time. While it's important these days to keep up with current events and the latest in science and research, I don't look much to the present for wisdom. I find all I can handle--and more--in Greek tragedy, Homer's epics, myths, the Bible, and ancient Western, Buddhist and Chinese philosophy.

Speaking of which, there's probably little in human history more ancient or universal than a fascination with dreams and what they mean. Dreams play a part in the folklore of many cultures and are mentioned in many ancient texts from places as diverse as Egypt, ancient Greece, Mesopotamia and China.

Dreams are prominent in several biblical stories, with several major ones in Genesis. During a time of troubles, the patriarch Jacob dreamed of a ladder to heaven with angels ascending and descending. A little later in the book, dreams and their interpretation both get Joseph into trouble with his brothers and into the good graces of Pharaoh.

The prophet Daniel was also portrayed as a great interpreter of dreams--even when he wasn't told what the dream was. It was written that God appeared to King Solomon in a dream offering him anything he wished. Famously, he chose wisdom.

Dreams are also frequently discussed in the Talmud, a collection of rabbinical writings and commentaries. One rabbi said there that "An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter" and another that "A man is shown in his dreams what he thinks in his heart."

Dreams play a major role in the early chapters of the Gospel attributed to Matthew. Joseph is warned in a dream to accept Mary as his wife though she is with child; to fly with his family to Egypt to avoid the wrath of King Herod; and to return from Egypt when Herod dies. The "wise men" were warned in dreams not to tell Herod of the child. Later in the gospel, Pilate's wife has a dream about Jesus and warns her husband to have nothing to do with him.

In ancient Greece, dreams were a major part of healing. In a practice known as dream incubation, a patient would sleep in a temple of the healer Aesculapius and the dream they received there was used as the basis of treatment.

In the second century BC or BCE, a Greek named Artemidorus wrote five volumes about dreams in a work called Oneirocritica, which described and attempted to interpret 3,000 different dreams. Although his interpretations strike us as odd today--for example, the thought it was good luck to dream of having a well-shaped nose (Holy Tristram Shandy, Batman!)--the work is still in print.

Of course, even in ancient times, there were those who dismissed dreams as stuff an nonsense (which admittedly many are). The Roman politician, writer and orator Cicero wrote

Let us reject...this divination of dreams...For, to speak truly, that superstition has extended itself through all nations, and has oppressed the intellectual energies of all men, and has betrayed them into endless imbecilities.

Whatever the case may be, we get one or more free indie movies every night.

COMMENT ON THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS: Whatever. That was mine. Here's The Nation's.

ALGORITHMS OF LOVE? Has a mathematical computer program figured out compatibility? This would have vastly simplified Pride and Prejudice.

MATH AND GOD. This is a fun one on religion and mathematicians, complete with this great line from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg:

With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.

TORTURE AND DEMOCRACIES have often co-existed.

HEGEMONY CRICKET. Here's a long one from the NY Times magazine about the changing status of the US in the world during the Bush disaster.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GROWING UP POE-ISH

Photo credit: sektordua by way of EveryStockPhoto.com.

Welcome to Poe Week at Goat Rope. Why now, you may ask? Why not?

Besides, we are approaching the bleak December and it won't be long before each separate dying ember will have wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Also, Poe was a big factor in my life. El Cabrero was a haunted child, thanks largely to the efforts of my old man.

When I was a very little kid, my dad took great delight in reading Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems aloud to me. They scared the bejesus out of me, and I loved every minute of it.

The Telltale Heart, The Black Cat, etc., and especially The Raven, much of which I once memorized.

My brother, who was eight years older, was keenly aware of all this. He took his own great delight in picking up a phone, pretending to dial the Plutonian shores, asking to speak with the Raven, and requesting that he come get his little brother Ricky.

The Poe factor was amplified when I spent time at the ancestral farm in Tazewell, Va., just across the McDowell County line. It was an old crumbling place in an isolated hollow with a mouldering family graveyard on the hill. Nights were darker there. I spent a lot of time alone soaking up that atmosphere as a kid.

Holy fall of the house of Ussher, Batman! I'm not saying it was haunted but it definitely had hoodoo.

Normality was never an option.

Aside from link and comments about current events, there will be a Poe theme here every day this week.

Only this and nothing more...

TALK ABOUT SOMETHING SCARY. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz discusses the nightmarish Bush legacy here.

ON THE SAME NOTE, here's a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that does a good job of mythbusting about tax cuts.

ARCHIVEGATE GOES NATIONAL. The fallout from the Manchin administration's unsportsmanlike firing of a dedicated WV state archivist continues. Here's a summary from Lincoln Walks at Midnight.

THIS IS KIND OF FREUDIAN. Old Sig could have a field day with Poe--jeez, where would you start? According to this article, Freud is alive and well in university classes, but not so much in the psychology departments.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LOVE AND HATE

Caption: Sometimes these guys get on each other's nerves.

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope is social conflict and how it works. You'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

It has long been observed that there's a fine line between love and hate and that sometimes people have some of both kinds of feelings for people they are close to. Freud called it ambivalence. As he wrote in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,

Almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time--marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children--leaves a sediment of feeling of aversion and hostility, which have first to be eliminated by repression. This is less disguised in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come together in large units. Every time two families become connected by marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns, each is the other's most jealous rival.

The closer the relationship, the more occasions for conflicts of interest and often the more intense the conflicts. As Coser said,

Closely knit groups in which there exists a high frequency of interaction and high personality involvement of the members have a tendency to suppress conflict. While they provide frequent occasions for hostility (since both sentiments of love and hatred are intensified through frequency of interaction), the acting out of such feelings is sensed as a danger to such intimate relationships, and hence there is a tendency to suppress rather than allow the expression of hostile feelings. In close-knit groups, the feelings of hostility tend, therefor, to accumulate and hence to intensify.

If conflict does break out in such a group,

it will be particularly intense for two reasons: First, because the conflict does not merely aim at resolving the immediate issue which led to its outbreak; all accumulated grievances which were denied expression previously are apt to emerge at this occasion. Second, because the total personality involvement of the group members makes for mobilization of all sentiments in the conduct of the struggle.

Speaking of love and hate, one interesting feature of conflict between groups is that it can, with time, bring the opposing parties closer together.

SHAME ON PRESIDENT BUSH for vetoing expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program. In his statement on the subject, the president spoke of the dangers of a federalized health care system. Last I heard, he enjoys federal health care benefits. Yesterday, El Cabrero participated in a press conference protesting that decision. Here's the Gazette coverage.

All of WV's congressional delegation supported CHIP. Gov. Manchin issued a statement that said in part: “I have joined with other states in writing to the president to urge him to sign this legislation into law, and am disappointed in his decision to use his veto power."

NO U.S. TORTURE POLICY 'ROUND HERE. Just the same thing with a different name.

MORE ON THE LOGAN COUNTY VIGIL in support of Megan Williams can be found here.

IMAGE PROBLEM. According to this interesting item from Time, some Christians are giving Christianity a bad name. That problem has been around a while...

IF I'M READING THIS RIGHT, Massey Energy is suing two law firms that represented them and lost. So like...what will happen if the guys filing this one lose?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

KANT WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?

Caption: These guys have figured it out. Why can't we?

Is there any chance that the human race might eventually get its act together? That's the question this week on Goat Rope.

According to 18th century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, we may just have a chance. He thought that the craftiness of Nature (or what Hegel called "the cunning of Reason") could make use of even our nasty side to get us there. That's the subject of his 1784 essay, Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Purpose.

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

To briefly recap, he thought our "unsociable socialness" compelled humans both to live together and to constantly struggle to outdo each other. This competition and antagonism forced us to develop our potential. And, while individual human lives are short, the life of humanity is long, so the gains in culture, knowledge, science, etc. build up over time.

Over time, people are or will be gradually compelled to arrive at some kind of social order which balances the striving of individuals with the need for social order. That means a free society based on the rule of law.

Of course, one major problem is that even if people reach that level within a given country, different countries treat each other like "barbarians" in a state of nature (an international Wild Wild West, if you will).

He believed that the same process would repeat itself on a larger scale between nations:

The same unsociability which drives man to this causes any single commonwealth to stand in unrestricted freedom in relation to others; consequently, each of them must expect from another precisely the evil which oppressed the individuals and forced them to enter into a lawful civic state. The friction among men, the inevitable antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security.

In other words, after lots of wars, international crises, suffering, etc,

Nature forces them to make at first inadequate and tentative attempts; finally, after devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion, she brings them to that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad experience, to wit, to step from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations. In a league of nations, even the smallest state could expect security and justice, not from its own power and by its own decrees, but only from this great league of nations...

He was basically an optimist, at least in the long term. This long view of history "gives hope finally that after many reformative revolutions, a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose, will come into being as the womb wherein all the original capacities of the human race can develop."

Of course, Kant lived before weapons of mass destruction (the real ones) and ecological collapse. I'd say we're in a race between Nature's cunning and humanity's self-destructiveness and the odds are even at best...which means we've got our work cut out for us.

Before we dismiss this view as a naive view of progress, some people today have explored similar themes and possibilities, including Robert Wright, author of Nonzero.

Game theory also explores how cooperation can emerge among self interested parties over time.For more, see an earlier Goat Rope series on the work of Robert Axelrod (if you go there, start at the bottom and scroll up).

On the level of popular culture, the emergence of cooperation and culture out of lawlessness was also the main theme of the HBO series "Deadwood." (Why did they cancel that, anyway?)

EVIL MONSTER RATS, ANYONE? The Russians have bred some in case you're looking.

EDUCATED AND UNINSURED. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows that a growing number of entry level jobs for college graduates lack employer-provided health care.

SPEAKING OF THE UNINSURED, a Senate panel including all Democrats and a majority of Republicans yesterday recommended expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program. WV's Senator Jay Rockefeller has played a key role in this. The measure now faces a veto threat from President Bush.

According to the NY Times, Rockefeller described the attitude of Bush and DHHS secretary Michael O. Leavitt to the bill as “pretty belligerent” in criticizing the bill.

But Mr. Rockefeller said, “It’s not clear to me that the president has any intention of vetoing this,” because the political consequences of such an action could be disastrous.

“There are very few symbols as powerful as kids,” Mr. Rockefeller said.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GILGAMESH, THE LOVE GODDESS, AND THE BULL OF HEAVEN

In this installment, Gilgamesh insults Ishtar, the goddess of love (represented here by Venus the goat). Big mistake!

Welcome to Goat Rope's Fun With the Epic of Gilgamesh Week, which is devoted to a lighthearted look at what may be the earliest written epic in human history (along with snarky comments on current events). If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

After slaying the monster Humbaba, Gilgamesh is on a roll. He returns in glory to Uruk, he catches the eye of the love goddess Ishtar, who proposes marriage in extravagant terms:

Come to me Gilgamesh, and be my bridegroom; grant me seed of your body, let me be your bride and you shall be my husband. I will harness for you a chariot of lapis lazuli and of gold, with wheels of gold and horns of copper; and you shall have might demons of the storm for draftmules...

The thing is, Ishtar doesn't have such a good track record. Her consorts tend to wind up dead. Gilgamesh refuses and insults the goddess (another bad move).

This is a major mythological problem: when gods or goddesses ask something from people, or vice versa, it doesn't usually turn out well for the humans involved no matter what they do.

Ishtar goes into a rage to Anu, father of the gods, and asks permission to unleash the Bull of Heaven on Uruk for vengeance. He doesn't want to go there but relents when she threatens to "bring up the dead to eat the food like the living and the dead shall outnumber the living."

Sounds like a zombie movie...

Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven and Enkidu throws its thigh at the goddess as an insult (another bad move). For this offense, he falls sick and ultimately dies, a fate of which he was warned in one of the many dreams in this epic. Enkidu describes the abode of the dead thus:

There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness...

Gilgamesh goes nuts. He wails over Enkidu, hoping to revive him with his lamentations. He only relents after a week, when "a worm fastens on him." He stops eating and bathing (although the extent to which he normally engaged in the latter is unclear) and caring form himself.


He finally orders a glorious funeral, then decides to set off on a quest for immortality. This is the most dangerous journey of all. He seeks the Sumerian Noah--Utanapishtim, who along with his wife, survived a cataclysmic flood in an ark and were the only humans to be granted immortality...

...which, unlike poor Enkidu, will keep until tomorrow.

HEALTH CARE. Economist Dean Baker love to point out the myth that economic conservatives rely on the market while progressives rely on government is just that. Instead, what we really have in many arenas is what he calls "a conservative nanny state." This is from a recent op-ed of his on health care:

if we are ever going to think seriously about how best to restructure health care, we will have to clearly understand how the system works now. The current system is not a free market; it is a set of government rigged rules that ensure that the insurance and pharmaceutical industries prosper, and that tens of millions of people go without access to care.

POLL SHOWS GROWING OPPOSITION TO IRAQ WAR. According to a Reuters report,

WASHINGTON - Opposition to the Iraq war has climbed to a record high and President George W. Bush’s approval rating dropped to a new low amid growing dissent from members of his own Republican party over his war strategy, according to a new USAToday/Gallup poll.

Bush’s approval dropped to 29 percent in the poll taken Friday through Sunday, down from 33 percent in early June, USA Today reported on Tuesday....

More than seven in 10 Americans favor withdrawing nearly all U.S troops from Iraq by April, the newspaper said.

Meanwhile, Bush wants the proverbial course to be "stayed."

QUESTIONING THE MARKET GOD. Here's an item from today's Times about growing dissent with the ruling consensus in the economics field.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL. From today's Gazette, here's a story on WV native musician Kathy Mattea's investigation of mountaintop removal mining for an upcoming album. Mattea is pretty popular here, but just wait and watch while the right wing noise machine tries to make her hated...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GHOST STORIES AND RUNAWAY MONSTERS

Public domain image courtesy of www.moviewallpapers.net.

One dark and story night in Switzerland in 1816, the story goes, a bunch of high strung artsy types decided to write a ghost story. If you were making odds at the time, the smart money would have been on the poetic host, Lord Byron, or his best known guest, the romantic poet Percy Shelley.

Score one for girl power instead. The hands down winner in the eyes of the ages was the work of Percy's young wife Mary, who gave us Frankenstein, which has become the source of many movies, cartoons, comic books, songs, toys, spoofs, etc.

According to Mary, the inspiration came from a waking dream:

I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some power engine shows signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful it must be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

Maybe one reason why the story of Frankenstein's monster has such (anonymously "donated") legs is that it was a prescient metaphor for modern life, when our own creations and actions sometimes get away from us and do a lot of unintended damage.

At the very least, it ought to help fill up a week's worth of blogging...

SPEAKING OF UNLEASHED MONSTERS, if you haven't already seen Newsweek's "After Bush" item, here is a little sampling:

Today, by almost all objective measures, the United States sits on top of the world. But the atmosphere in Washington could not be more different from 1982. We have become a nation consumed by fear, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world, we see ourselves besieged and overwhelmed. While the Bush administration has contributed mightily to this state of affairs, at this point it has reversed itself on many of its most egregious policies—from global warming to North Korea to Iraq.

In any event, it is time to stop bashing George W. Bush. We must begin to think about life after Bush—a cheering prospect for his foes, a dismaying one for his fans (however few there may be at the moment). In 19 months he will be a private citizen, giving speeches to insurance executives. America, however, will have to move on and restore its place in the world. To do this we must first tackle the consequences of our foreign policy of fear. Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast, alone, unilaterally and pre-emptively, we have managed in six years to destroy decades of international good will, alienate allies, embolden enemies and yet solve few of the major international problems we face.

HIGH ROAD OR LOW ROAD? There's been a lot of talk among WV's anti-labor right wing about "unleashing capitalism." I think they are at least 100 years late. Also, I'm not aware of too many people here who advocate for state ownership of the means of production or the collectivization of agriculture (although the possibility of having the goats around here confiscated sounds pretty good at times). The real question is, how can we promote high quality economic development for West Virginia in a way that benefits its people?

The economic royalists want a war on labor, starting with pushing for so-called "right to work" laws, which are more like right to work for less, as I argue here. That would be the low road.

There is a better way, one which might actually work:

West Virginia’s future economy is dependent primarily on one thing — investment in people, said Tom Witt, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University.

“We need to keep an eye on this ball,” he told the Charleston Rotary Club on Friday. “This is going to affect our long-term economic development.”

Investing in people means more education, on-the-job training and health care, so people can become productive in the labor market, Witt said. People must also be encouraged to take part in the economy by actively seeking jobs and/or education, he said.

That would be the high road.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ALMOST DONE WITH DOSTOEVSKY

Caption: Alyosha Karamazov (right) receives spiritual guidance from the saintly Father Zossima (portrayed by Seamus McGoogle).

Like a cat with a stubborn hairball, El Cabrero is still trying to get Dostoevsky out of his system.

Maybe a little medley of quotes from his works will do it:

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

Man gets used to anything, the scoundrel.

"You're a gentleman," they used to say to him. "You shouldn't have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that's no occupation for a gentleman." --Crime and Punishment

"So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship."

Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete beastiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea- he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility... --Brothers Karamazov

"When . . . in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?"--Notes from the Underground

Is there suffering on this new earth? On our earth we can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love. --Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Whew! I feel better already...

HERMAN, OF COURSE. Who would the nearest American equivalent to a writer of Dostoevsky's weirdness and stature? Gotta be Melville. Here's an interesting item on Bush, the prophet Jonah, and Melville's Moby-Dick.

DWIGHT! I am way late in posting this, but don't miss The Office's Dwight Shrute's latest blog entry "When Ninjas Attack." As he so aptly points out, this IS the season for ninja attacks and one can never be too careful.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ON POETRY, THE SOUL, THE WAR, WEST VIRGINIA, MINIMUM WAGE AND JERRY FALWELL

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope has been selections from Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Prudence," which appeared in the 1856 2nd edition of Leaves of Grass (along with stuff on current events). If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

Whitman characteristically puts his own slant on the word prudence, which comes to mean a vast view of life in which is basically endless.

I decided to fill a week with this poem while remembering the death of a close friend and co-worker with whom I frequently discussed it. As we approach Memorial Day and remember the fallen, his message that the gulf between the living and the dead is not absolute seems to fit.

Here's the rousing conclusion:

What is prudence is indivisible,
Declines to separate one part of life from every part,
Divides not the righteous from the unrighteous or the living from the dead,
Matches every thought or act by its correlative,
Knows no possible forgiveness or deputed atonement,
Knows that the young man who composedly peril'd his life and lost it
has done exceedingly well for himself without doubt,
That he who never peril'd his life, but retains it to old age in
riches and ease, has probably achiev'd nothing for himself worth
mentioning,
Knows that only that person has really learn'd who has learn'd to
prefer results,
Who favors body and soul the same,
Who perceives the indirect assuredly following the direct,
Who in his spirit in any emergency whatever neither hurries nor
avoids death.

VOX POPULI. This item from the NY Times shows opposition to the war to be at an all time high. some excerpts:

Six in 10 Americans surveyed say the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, and more than three in four say that things are going badly there — including nearly half who say things are going very badly, the poll found....

A large majority of the public — 76 percent, including a majority of Republicans — say that the additional American troops sent to Iraq this year by Mr. Bush have either had no impact or are making things worse there. Twenty percent think the troop increase is improving the situation in Iraq.

A majority of Americans continue to support a timetable for withdrawal. Sixty-three percent say the United States should set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq sometime in 2008.

Bush meanwhile "enjoys" a 30 percent approval/63 percent disapproval rating.

MINIMUM WAGE INCREASED. After more than 10 years of neglect, Congress finally raised the minimum wage in increments to $7.25. In a bizarre twist, for the last several weeks, the wage increase was linked to the bill funding the Iraq war, a move opposed by AFSC and many members of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Coalition from the start.

WE'RE MUTANTS. West Virginians are pretty used to being statistical oddities. Here's a good commentary on the subject by Scott Finn of WV Public Broadcasting.

FIG TREE'S FAREWELL TO FALWELL. (How was that for alliteration?) Jim Lewis' latest edition of Fig Tree Notes muses on Jerry Falwell, Christopher Hitchens, The Wizard of Oz, Christianity and other topics.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE WISEST BOOK

According to an old legend, one of the wisest books ever written came about by accident.

Lao Tzu, or Laozi in pinyin , lived in the 6th century BC and was a archivist during the Zhou dynasty. When he became tired of the artificialities of court life, he gave up his post and retreated westward to the wilderness.

At a frontier post, a gatekeeper asked him to write down his teachings so they would not be lost to the world. The result was the Tao Te Ching, or the Classic of the Way and its Power, a short work of 5000 characters and 81 brief chapters.

Actually, none of this probably happened and there may never have been a Lao Tzu, but it doesnt' matter. We have the book. If I could, I'd give everyone in the world a copy of it.

The Tao or Dao that gives the book its name is usually translated as the Way, meaning the ultimate principle or natural order of things. We can observe and infer things about it but ultimately it is something beyond name and form, as the Tao Te Ching states in its opening lines:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

Although some people have read it as a mystical work, I think it's the most practical book ever written. Its insights can be useful in all aspects of public and private life. Short version: people can live in harmony with the nature of things (including people) or not. The correct answer is the former.

More on this later.

NOT IN HARMONY WITH THE TAO. A basic idea of the Tao Te Ching is that aggression provokes resistance and feeds violence. If you want to see a perfect example of an anti-Taoist, look no further than the White House. If you want to see the consequences, look at the world. The latest tragic example comes from a Pentagon survey of the mental health of U.S. troops serving in Iraq. The NY Times reports that the results of the survey

suggested that extended tours and multiple deployments, among other policy decisions, could escalate anger and increase the likelihood that soldiers or marines lash out at civilians, or defy military ethics.

ON THE OTHER HAND, the same paper carried this item on the growing political clout of some anti-war groups.

CHAMBER CONTINUES WAR ON WV. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce continues to flood the airwaves with ads attacking WV's legal climate. This doesn't seem to be getting them anywhere. This is from today's Gazette. Here's hoping they spend it all.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY OR THE LACK THEREOF, A GOAT MOVIE AND OTHER STUFF

Caption: These guys never obey anybody.

This is the second of several posts dealing with the issue of obedience to authority (among other things). If this is your first visit, please scroll down to yesterday's entry.

The question of why people obey authority when they are asked to do things they would never do as individuals has taken on urgency since the Nazi holocaust and subsequent atrocities.

It's pretty easy to understand why people would obey if violence or the clear threat of violence was involved. But most of the time it isn't (although the unspoken threat of violence or other sanctions is often a factor).

In general rulers prefer not to rule by force alone but by making the ruled obey in a way that appears to be voluntary (Marx called the belief system that supports this ideology).

Obviously socialization, as in experiences in learning from and dealing with other individuals and institutions from birth on plays a major role. As Dostoevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment, "Man gets used to anything, the scoundrel."

Sociology pioneer Max Weber identified three types of authority that have prevailed at one time or another in various societies. These were often seen as legitimate by both rulers and ruled. They are traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal.

(Note: Weber used the word "rational" in several senses and would be the first to say that so-called rational authority can be very irrational in a substantive sense.)

Traditional authority is pretty much what it sounds like. An example would be hereditary monarchy, chieftains, or any long-standing social institution.

Charismatic authority involves the special power of the leader, who may lack other forms of authority. Charismatic authority can be as good or bad as the leader involved. Jesus would be a classic example. He was neither a priest or a ruler and people responded to him on the basis of his personal characteristics. On the bad side, Hitler would be an example of a charismatic leader who fascinated his followers. Charisma still plays a role even in rational-legal systems. It tends to be fairly unstable.

In our world, the kind of authority that prevails is rational-legal, which is based on rules, laws, and procedures that are generally written down. We obey this kind of authority figure not because of personal traits or long standing tradition (though both can be a factor) but rather because these are seen to be legitimate within their sphere of influence.

To use some examples, most people would write a term paper assigned by a teacher in a class in which they are enrolled but wouldn't accept a parking ticket from him or her. They might obey a supervisor at work but not at home, etc.

Obeying isn't always or even usually a bad thing. But it gets interesting and tragic when rational-legal authorities demand from their subjects acts of injustice, violence and aggression on others.

When that happens, people too often seem to stop being morally autonomous individuals and enter what Stanley Milgram called "the agentic state" in which they become in effect a cog in the machinery of power.

More on this next time.

SPEAKING OF (DECLINING) LEGITIMACY, a recent poll of Iraqis shows that only 18 percent have confidence in U.S. led forces,

About 86 percent were concerned about someone in their household being a victim of violence. Iraqis were also disappointed by reconstruction efforts since the invasion, with 67 percent saying efforts had not been effective.

AND THEN THERE ARE THOSE TIMES WHEN RATIONAL-LEGAL AUTHORITY IS NEITHER...such as the domestic spying scandal, the firing of U.S. attorneys, or any number of other examples.

I guess the good news is that when authority oversteps the bounds, it sometimes loses legitimacy...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A RHETORICAL FLOURISH,WINNERS AND LOSERS IN IRAQ, AND ANOTHER MESS

Caption: Bantam rooster and noted free-market economist Dr. Denton "Denny" Dimwit is a master of rhetoric.

Political rhetoric is never exactly innocent, but El Cabrero suspects that the rhetoric of our time, particularly that of people in power, is way over the top.

What better antidote can there be than a dose of George Orwell's classic 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language"?

Here are some nuggets:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible...

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer...

Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

WINNERS AND LOSERS. Tha March/April issue of Foreign Policy has an interesting feature by several authors on the subject of "Who Wins in Iraq?" There are ten winners.

Sneak preview: the U.S. didn't make the list.

The top three winners were

1. Iran ("After nearly 25 years of wrestling with Saddam Hussein, Iran's Shiite rulers have the war to thank for their newfound power.");

2. Moqtada al-Sadr ("How a radical Shiite cleric became the most powerful man in Iraq"); and

3. Al Qaeda ("The terrorist network was on life support after September 11--until a new front opened in Baghdad and revived its mission.")

Other "winners" who made the list were, in order, Samual Huntington of "Clash of Civilizations" fame; China; Arab dictators; the price of oil; the United Nations (diplomacy may not be so stupid after all); Old Europe (see previus item); and Israel.

My guess is that the legitimate interests of the American people are buried somewhere in the "also ran" category.

ANOTHER MISTAKE WAS MADE. The latest collateral damage inflicted by the Bush administration hit the Medicaid program, which provides health care to around 55 million children, people with disabilities, low income families, and elderly Americans.

The so-called Deficit Reduction Act of 2006 (you know, the one that didn't reduce the deficit) included draconian cuts to social programs and harsh new rules in order to pay for more tax cuts for the rich. This is from the New York Times:

A new federal rule intended to keep illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid has instead shut out tens of thousands of United States citizens who have had difficulty complying with requirements to show birth certificates and other documents proving their citizenship, state officials say...

Under a 2006 federal law, the Deficit Reduction Act, most people who say they are United States citizens and want Medicaid must provide “satisfactory documentary evidence of citizenship,” which could include a passport or the combination of a birth certificate and a driver’s license.

Under a 2006 federal law, the Deficit Reduction Act, most people who say they are United States citizens and want Medicaid must provide “satisfactory documentary evidence of citizenship,” which could include a passport or the combination of a birth certificate and a driver’s license.

The article quotes state officials who say that the rule changes haven't turned up many undocumented immigrants receiving Medicaid but has resulted in significant drops in rolls due to the difficulty of complying with the new rules.

Of West Virginia's congressional delegation, only Shelley Moore Capito supported the Deficit-Reduction-Act-Which-Didn't-Reduce-the-Deficit.


SPEAKING OF IMMIGRANTS EATING ALL THE HEALTH CARE (NOT)...Doh! The same issue of Foreign Policy cited above has a little item titled "You Can No Longer Argue..." It completes the sentence like this: "...that illegal immigrants are an excessive burden on U.S. healthcare...According to a RAND Corp. study on healthcare spending in the United States, foreign-born residents, particularly the undocumented, use far fewer medical services relative to their population share than U.S.-born citizens."

Legal immigrants make up 9.9 percent of the population and account for 7 percent of health care spending; undocumented workers are estimated to be 3.2 percent and account for 1.5 percent of healthcare spending.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MISTAKES WERE MADE

Caption: Mistakes were made by this man, but they were pretty mild.

El Cabrero has been thinking lately about the subject of political rhetoric.

The immediate trigger was musing over President Bush's comments on Iraq to the effect that "mistakes were made." That kind of phrase is often used in lieu of more straightforward expressions such as "I screwed up."

While I ain't no grammarian, this is a case of using the passive voice. Consider the difference between saying "the glass was broken" vs. "I broke the glass."

As Wheaton College professor Michael D.C. Drout wrote in the course guide to his enjoyable series of lectures, A Way with Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion,

What if you want to leave out information? Then passive voice is your friend. "Mistakes were made," you say, when challenged about the collapse of the multibillion dollar corporation you were running. Why not say "I made mistakes"? Well, it makes you a lawsuit target (you have just "admitted" to making mistakes), whereas if you just say "mistakes were made," you end up looking as if you've admitted something without actually doing any admitting. "I made a mistake" is a performative utterance, with all the difficulties that go with it. "Mistakes were made" is not performative. As an analyst of rhetoric, look out for passive voice...

On the same note, here's an interesting fairly recent commentary on the president's use of the passive voice.

Now, on to some more recent "mistakes" that were made...

DOMESTIC SPYING A number of congressional representatives, not to mention many Americans, are outraged over the federal government's domestic spying on ordinary citizens. It looks like another mistake was made.

CARING FOR IRAQ VETERANS. It's fair to say that some major "mistakes were made" in this department. Marie Cocco, syndicated Washington Post columnist put it well:

A culture of contempt for government infects those who govern. It has shamed America and left the government itself in a shambles.

It is seen in the callous maltreatment of gravely wounded soldiers who've returned from Iraq. The scandal of Walter Reed Army Medical Center is compounded by a veterans' health care system starved of funds needed to accommodate a new generation of the disabled and disfigured -- a shortfall that has long been clear to those who use the system and who lobby for veterans, but not to those who blindly protect the Bush administration's tax cuts above all else...

It is the same cavalier incompetence that led to the debacle of the Hurricane Katrina response, its nightmarish aftermath still lived by the uprooted and the abandoned. The overlap between the twin tragedies of Katrina and Walter Reed is not imaginary. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has uncovered an internal Army document outlining how the hiring of a private contractor to provide support services at the military hospital led to an exodus of skilled government workers and put patient care ``at risk of mission failure.'' As it happens, the very same contractor had botched its role in the response to Hurricane Katrina.

(By the way, it was a native of West Virginia, Army Spc. Jeremy Duncan, who blew the whistle on the wretched treatment of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Good job and best wishes to him and all those in similar situations!)

Mistakes have been made indeed.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LABOR CALLS FOR IRAQ SOLUTIONS

Caption: Time to get out of the web.

The national AFL-CIO executive board called on the United States to seek an end to its military involvement in Iraq.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the statement:

No U.S. foreign policy can be sustained without the informed consent of the American people. Last November, the people spoke clearly, calling on the president and Congress to change course in Iraq. Rather than heed the will of the citizenry or listen to the military leaders speaking out against the current policy in Iraq, the president has chosen to escalate military action. This blind pursuit of the war now undermines the very war on terror that was its justification.

And here's one from the middle:

It is time to bring our military involvement in Iraq to an end. Admittedly, there are no good options now in that country. It has descended into a sectarian civil struggle, with American troops caught in the crossfire. The latest National Intelligence Estimate reports that the greatest violence comes not from al Qaeda and foreign terrorists, but from sectarian militias caught up in their own internal conflict.

And here's one from the end:

The AFL-CIO continues to strongly support initiatives and programs to promote democracy, workers’ rights and economic development in the Middle East. We believe the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (the Baker-Hamilton Commission) provides the president and Congress with a broad range of recommendations to address the wider regional conflict as well as economic and reconstruction assistance while charting a path for reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq.

We, therefore, call on President Bush to reconsider the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. Specifically, the administration should open up a diplomatic offensive with allies and Iraq’s neighbors. This should include a new initiative to revive a peace process in the Middle East and it should include a timetable for redeploying U.S. troops out of Iraq’s civil strife. We also call on Congress to support these actions and insist on a timetable for disengagement. If the president refuses to act, Congress must use its powers under the Constitution and act.

Works for me.

WV UPDATE. The WV House Finance Committee modified a Senate-passed corporate tax cut bill. The house version includes combined reporting, which closes corporate tax loopholes and cuts in the business franchise tax. Combined reporting is a good step. The overall business tax package is less that what passed the senate. So that's a victory of sorts.

Here's the deal: about half of WV's general revenue fund goes to K-12 education, about 10 percent to higher ed, about 20 percent to health and human services, the the rest covers everything else from parks to public safety. Going nuts on tax cuts means cutting the things we most need for a better future. Cutting education money to give goodies to out of state corporations when we can't adequately give teachers or public employees a decent raise is a little weird.

RANDOM BUT INTERESTING NEWS ITEM. Here's the lead of a cool but random news story:

Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before. The smell of roses — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept — improved their performance on a memory test by about 13 percent.

Who'd a thunk it?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BARKS AND BITES

El Cabrero is a pretty much lifelong student of the martial arts, which have quite a bit to teach those who are willing to learn about strategy and the dynamics of conflict.

Here's a basic rule: never do anything if you can help it that makes your potential opponent more powerful and dangerous than he (usually it is a he) already was. That's another lesson lost on the Bush administration.

Here's a case in point:

The Feb. 19 & 26 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article by James Surowiecki about how the belligerence of the Bush administration towards Iran actually strengthens the hardliners in the regime. The title is Troubled Waters over Oil.

Basically, the political fortune of Iranian President Ahmadinejad follow the price of oil. When it goes up, the regime has more money to spend. When it goes down, reformers and internal critics are usually in a stronger position. So when signs point to a crisis and conflict, the "risk premium" and thus the price of oil increases.

When buying and selling oil, traders don’t just look at today’s supply and demand. They also try to forecast the future. And if buyers think there’s a chance that supply is going to be lower down the line—because, say, Iranian oil fields will be shut down—they will be willing to pay a higher price today in order to guarantee that they will have the oil they need. That’s why, in the run-up to the Iraq war, oil prices jumped more than fifty per cent. In the current confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, these same concerns create a perverse set of incentives: whenever the U.S. says things that make a military conflict with Iran seem more likely, the price of oil rises, strengthening Iran’s regime rather than weakening it. The more we talk about curbing Iranian power, the more difficult it gets.

The inflated risk premium provides the revenue that the government depends on. This means that "Ahmadinejad, whatever his religious or nationalist inspiration, has an economic incentive to say confrontational things that spook the oil market."

But by himself, he can only do so much, since traders know that Iran does not really want to shut off the supply of oil. What really raises the risk premium are the American public responses to these provocations.

He concludes

Talking tough may look like a good way of demonstrating U.S. resolve, but when tough talk makes our opponent richer and stronger we may accomplish more by saying less.

ROUGE'S GALLERY: Meanwhile back to El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia. Here is an op ed on state budget issues by GR amigo Ted "Beavis" Boettner. He's gunning for the position of uber-wonk and is going to be pretty insufferable now.

And this one by AFL-CIO secretary treasurer Larry Matheney asks some big questions.

And finally, a few years back, WV became the "mouse that roared" when it passed legislation aimed at reducing the price of prescription drugs. Since then, we've been more like the mouse that...I don't know...didn't. This one by Dan Kurland suggests we're facing a moment of truth.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED