Turkey babies!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to announce the hatching of Goat Rope Farm's first baby turkey. If all goes well, there could be as many as six more to come.

The proud parents are Frida (pictured above) and Diego. The father was unavailable for comment as he was busy displaying to anything he could find and attempting to mate stray feathers left on the ground.

Unlike turkeys in industrial type farms, which are over bred mutants incapable of natural reproduction, Diego and Frida are heritage breeds which retain more of the features of their wild ancestors. As a result, the baby pictured above came into the world in the time-honored fashion; that is to say with a great deal of showing off on the part of the male and a great deal of apparent indifference on the part of the female. Something, however, must have worked.

THE BANALITY OF TORTURE. Here's NY Times columnist Frank Rich on the torture policies of the Bush administration.

ON THAT NOTE, some people close to the situation have argued that Bush era torture policies were so counter-productive that they may have contributed to the deaths of many US soldiers in Iraq.

OH GOOD. Executive pay at investment banks is going up.

JOHN BROWN REVISITED. The 150th anniversary of John Brown's historic raid on Harper's Ferry in what is now West Virginia will occur this fall. Here's some new insights on this event by a history professor from Shepherd University.

MORALITY AND POLITICS. Here's a good article on the research of psychologist Jonathan Haidt on how liberals and conservatives share many key moral values but place difference emphases upon them.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Starting a list

She's got a pretty long list of her own.

One night this week I was invited to talk to a graduate social work class about "the failure of conservative economic policy." It was one of those where-do-you-start moments.

The chance to rant on that topic generated any number of thoughts, but for starters, it made me think about the need to compile a list of Things The Human Race Should Have Figured Out By the End of the Twentieth Century.

Here the first two items for the list:

*Stalinist centralized command economies don't work very well; and

*neither does un- or under regulated capitalism.

There will be way more to come on that list but that's a start.

LOOKING BACK. Harper's Index provides an interesting retrospective look at the Bush era. It's really worth a look.

MORE ON THE NEW NEW DEAL. Here's a fond look back at Depression-era public works projects and what we can learn from them.

STATE OF THE STATES: not good, but federal aid during a recession can help, as this snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows.

MORE EVIDENCE of global warming has been found in Antarctica.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ?

An image of a day

Yesterday was a day rich in images destined to be replayed for a long time to come. But for me, the most memorable image came unexpectedly, after the official events had been televised.

At the West Virginia Veterans Memorial outside the state capitol on a cold and windy afternoon, I saw a solitary African-American man carrying an American flag and walking calmly, silently, slowly and mindfully around the monument. It was at once a very public and very private act, full of dignity and gravity.

I could imagine any number of thoughts and feelings that motivated this walking vigil, any number of interpretations, such as memories of past sacrifices, a feeling of inclusion and pride, a veteran's solidarity with the fallen, or many other possibilities. But to have interrupted this solitary procession would have been a profanation.

I asked no questions. It was enough to stop, look and remember.

NOW WHAT? Here's one take on what lies ahead.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED? Esquire looks back at the last eight years here.

STUDIES OF PREJUDICE may suggest ways to overcome it.

THE FIRST AMERICANS. New genetic evidence suggests two separate early migrations to America.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ?

Going south

This rooster had a keen sense of honor, which may have led to his untimely demise.

For the last week, Goat Rope has been looking at cultural factors that may influence attitudes towards the use of violence. Please click on last week's posts if you find this interesting.

To recap briefly, in societies where the good things of life are scarce and easily stolen, people tend to develop a "culture of honor" which encourages people to engage in or at least credibly threaten violence in response to insults or threats. Such cultures often develop among herding peoples where central authority is weak or nonexistent, but once established they can continue long after a society's economic base has changed.

El Cabrero's beloved region of Appalachia may be a case in point...

In a 1996 book, Culture of Honor: the Psychology of Violence in the South, researchers Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argue that many parts of the American south and Appalachia (the two are not identical in my view) were settled by herding people such as my own Scotch-Irish.

They also identify different attitudes towards violence between those areas and northern states.

Let me be the first to say that it's dangerous to overgeneralize about a region and that the American south has undergone many changes, demographic, political and otherwise. I'm not going to give this book the coveted Blanket Goat Rope Endorsement, but it is interesting in at least identifying historical trends.

Nisbett and Cohen found (using data from the early 1990s) that homicide rates for white southerners were higher than that of white non-southerners in fights that developed as a result of arguments which generally involve some kind of insult. They controlled for other factors, such as urbanization, poverty, etc.

In terms of attitudes, they found that

southerners were not more in favor of violence in general, that they were not more in favor of violence in many specified contexts unrelated to culture-of-honor concerns, but that they were more likely to endorse violence when it was used for self-protection and for social control. The...data also showed that southerners were no more likely to endorse violence than northerners in a wide variety of specific situations. It was only for situations involving an affront, the protection of self, home, or family, and the socialization of children that southerners were more likely to endorse violence. Thus, southern ideology does not make all violence acceptable but, rather, allows violence as a tool for special purposes.

On the other hand, this attitude that violence may be permissible under some circumstances may have also contributed to southern traditions of courtesy, politeness and hospitality:

Perhaps that is also why southerns have a reputation for being so polite. The best way to keep a conflict from spiraling out of hand is to avoid the conflict in the first place. So southern hospitality, politeness, and friendliness are what keep social interactions going smoothly.

Y'all have a nice day!

PARTING SHOTS. President Bush is spending his last weeks in office rewriting rules and deregulating industries.

WHAT PRICE REFORM? This review of coal mine safety from the Charleston Gazette is a reminder that improvements were paid for by the deaths of miners.

MY PICK DIDN'T MAKE THE LIST. Here's one estimate of the 10 worst corporations of 2008.

DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING--SIT THERE. Here's more evidence that mindfulness meditation can be good for your brain.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Post election dharma talk

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

This post was deliberately written before the election and I have no idea how things will turn out. Since I'm sure the results of many different races will be on most people's minds today and that most of us will be thinking that some were good and some were bad, I think a little Buddhist story might be appropriate now.

If memory serves, it goes something like this: One day, a poor farmer's horse ran away. His neighbors came to console him, but he said that this could be either good or bad--who could tell?

The horse came back with several other wild horses. His neighbors congratulated him on his good fortune. Just as before, he said that this could be either good or bad.

Then his son broke his leg while trying to tame one of the horses. His neighbors again consoled him, but he again said that he couldn't really know if that was good or bad.

Shortly thereafter, the army came by looking for conscripts and left his son behind because of the injury. As before, his neighbors congratulated him on his good fortune.

"Who can tell?," he said.

Here's hoping it's for the good.

PARTING SHOTS from the Bush administration may be hard to undo.

INTERESTING INTERVIEW. American historian Eric Foner has some interesting things to say in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. Here's an excerpt:

SPIEGEL: In Europe people tend to call on the government in times of economic insecurity. Why doesn't this happen in the US?

Foner: First of all, in Europe it is the ordinary people who call on the government. Here, it is the rich who call on the government. Look at what is happening with investment bank Bear Stearns or mortgage lenders Fannie Mae. They have no qualms about turning to the government to rescue them. That is hundreds of billions of dollars involved there and the phrase here is, they are too big to fail. It is quite ironic.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS. Here's Foreign Policy's take on the world's most powerful religious leaders.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: WHO CAN TELL?

BLOWING IT

Aeolus, keeper of the winds. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The series on the Odyssey of Homer continues, along with links and comments on current events.

After several (largely self-inflicted) misadventures, it looks like Odysseus and his men are finally going to get a break. Aeolus, keeper of the winds, has given Odysseus a huge sack containing all the winds but the West Wind, which will blow him straight back to his home of Ithaca.

It should have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately, our hero, like many people who have been traumatized, doesn't trust anybody. He doesn't explain the nature of the gift to his men and he doesn't trust them to be able to steer the ships. He insists on doing it all, without taking any breaks:

Nine whole days we sailed, nine nights, nonstop.
On the tenth our own land hove into sight at last--
we were so close we could see men tending fires.
But now an enticing sleep came on me, bone-weary
from working the vessel's sheet myself, no letup,
never trusting the ropes to any other mate,
the faster to journey back to native land.

His men start to grumble to themselves about the mysterious gift from Aeolus. They are jealous, thinking that he has been given special gifts and declined to share them with his troops. They decide to take a peek:

A fatal plan, but it won my shipmates over.
They loosed the sack and all the winds burst out
and a sudden squall struck and swept us back to sea,
wailing, in tears, far from our own native land.
And I woke up with a start, my spirit churning--
should I leap over the side and drown at once
or grin and bear it, stay among the living?

Helpless and embarrassed, he heads back to Aeolus, hoping for another break. Not this time. Aeolus sends him away in disgust:

'Away from my island--fast--most cursed man alive!
It's a crime to host a man or speed him on his way
when the blessed deathless gods despise him so.
Crawling back like this--
it proves the immortals hate you! Out--get out!'

Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who works with Vietnam veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress problems, finds this story similar to those told by some of his patients who were offered a break such as a great job by a "big man" on returning.

Unfortunately, some of them lost valuable opportunities offered by well meaning benefactors by treating an ordinary job as a "combat mission," working day and night without sleeping, not trusting co-workers to do the job right, and not giving them the information they need to help him do the job. When they failed, they had to go back like Odysseus to ask for one more chance--sometimes with the same results.

But there's a universal theme here as well. Think about how many times in life we almost got things right, almost made it to some desired state, only to have things fall apart when the end seemed to be in sight,leaving us feeling, like Odysseus, to be despised by the gods.

I hate it when that happens.

SPEAKING OF BLOWING IT, scientists are concerned that the permafrost covering parts of the northern hemisphere contains huge amounts of carbon. If this thaws as a result of climate change, they'd release even more into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change even more.

UNDOING THE DAMAGE. A recent issue of Mother Jones magazine has a series of articles on cleaning up the mess that will be left behind by the Bush administration.

MASSEYGATE MAKES THE NY TIMES (AGAIN). Here's an editorial from the Sunday New York Times about Massey Energy's relationship with the WV Supreme Court.

PLENTY OF SCHOOLS LEFT BEHIND. An example of the recent failure to invest in infrastructure and public goods is the declining investment in public school facilities.

NATURE OR NURTURE? This is an interesting article on scientific studies of gender differences.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BALANCE

Caption: Judo throw (osoto-gari), courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is applying some ideas from the martial arts to working and writing for social change or social conservation. You'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

One of the most central concepts in many martial arts is that of balance. It's also an important thing to keep in mind when working to change or preserve things.

In martial arts, at the very least it's hard to deliver effective techniques when you're off balance. More to the point, any time you are off balance--whether you do it yourself or someone or some thing does it to you--you can fall or be thrown. Hard.

To lose balance is to lose self control. To lose self control in a serious situation is to risk losing everything.

(Have you ever noticed that a lot of folks who want to change things have serious self control issues? This is probably going to sound really bad, but when I'm deciding which individuals and groups I'm going to work with, I tend to divide them into those with and without self control and avoid the latter.)

You don't need to be grappling with a physical opponent to lose your balance. You can lose it under the influence of anger, fear, ideology,or even a conviction of being right. Those things impede a person from responding adequately to cues from others or the environment. In writing, people lose balance by venting inappropriately, exaggerating, inflating rhetoric, twisting facts and logic, and using hyperbole.

I knew the US was going to be in really BIG trouble post 9/11 when then Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said US military policy was going to be "forward leaning." To be forward leaning is to be off balance; to be off balance is to be vulnerable to over-reaching. Over reaching means there's a good chance of being thrown, falling--or in this case, leaping--into a quagmire.

In judo, the art of breaking the opponent's balance is called kuzushi, which can be the first step to victory. But, as with all this, your opponents can do all this to you.

I also remember being involved in some serious labor struggles several years back. We used to have some pretty big ones in WV. It often happened that during a strike or lockout, companies would import "goon guards," as they were sometimes unaffectionately called, from out of state. It wasn't unusual for them to try to provoke union members or their families into losing their "balance" and doing things that could discredit their cause.

That's a classical example of kuzushi in action. The trick is not to take the bait.

I'll close for today with a couple of suggestions straight from judo:

*Any time one's opponent overreaches and loses balance, an opportunity exists. I've spent a lot of time waiting for such moments. As Tom Petty sang, the waiting IS the hardest part. It can take years.

*It's always a good idea to figure out what your opponent would like you to do--and then not do it.

HOW DOES YOUR LIST COMPARE? Here's a good collection of Bush administration disasters. Which ones were left out?

INVISIBLE HAND VS. GREEN THUMB. This item from Scientific American shows the flaws in neo-classical economic theory which are particularly telling in dealing with things like climate change.

SPEAKING OF CLIMATE CHANGE, I hope these guys are wrong. They probably do too.

JUST ONE COMMENT about the WV primary. It looks like Massey Energy just lost a friend on the state Supreme Court with the defeat of justice Spike Maynard. (Note any similarity between this story and the theme of today's post is purely coincidental. But that's what I'm talking about).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

INTRODUCING THE HILLBILLY HEALTH CLUB, AND LOTS MORE

At this time of year, lots of people join gyms. El Cabrero is all set to cash in on this trend. I hereby announce the founding of the Hillbilly Health Club. It's all right there in the perty picture.

It has the latest in exercise equipment--including sledge hammer, wedge, splitting maul, wheel barrow and sycamore stumps--and offers a comprehensive exercise program with the following elements:

*Resistance. Splitting and chopping wood. Sycamore is all about resistance.

*Flexibility. Bend over, pick up the split wood, and put it in the wheel barrow. If you are anything like El Cabrero, this can be the hardest part, especially after an hour or so of splitting and chopping.

*Aerobics. Push the wheel barrow to the woodpile.

Holistic health--Appalachian style!

Annual memberships are now available, with special discounts to Goat Rope email subscribers. Ask about special family rates.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED. El Cabrero would like to round out the week of New Year by mentioning three 2007 books that are worth a look. Today's choice is Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her basic thesis is that economic, political, and ideological elites have taken advantage of human-made and natural disasters to impose an extreme version of unregulated capitalism on populations that would otherwise have rejected it.

Klein does an interesting job of weaving the history of shock therapy and other efforts at mind control with the rise of the Chicago School of economics as represented by Milton Friedman until his recent death. Friedman opposed unions, social programs, public education, business regulations, safety laws, etc. in the name of the "free" market.

He acknowledged that most people would find this distasteful, and said that

only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Friedman got the chance to put his ideas into action when General August Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile in 1973 and imposed a military dictatorship. Then, with the help of mass murder, repression, and torture, he was able to advise the regime on how to impose the blessings of the "free" market.

Klein's book looks at several examples of disaster capitalism in the U.S. and around the world. Katrina was a classic case in point, as was the development of Iraq's "Emerald City" as a free market utopia under the direction of Friedman disciple Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq. Both of those went over real well...

It's interesting that in WV, some advocates of "Unleashing Capitalism" have tried to create a climate of panic and crisis in the hopes of pushing through a political agenda which includes attacks on union membership, worker safety rules, etc.

SAD NEWS from Kenya.

PUBLIC OPINION ON IRAQ is at odds with the views of many presidential candidates, according to this item.

THE STATE OF THE NATION in the Bush years is the subject of this New Year's Eve NY Times editorial.

LABOR UNDER ATTACK. Here is some info on the anti-union bias of the Bush Labor Department.

TWO YEARS AFTER SAGO, mine safety is still an issue. As Ken Ward reports in today's Gazette, 67 US miners have died since that disaster.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LEARNED AND UNLEARNED HELPLESSNESS

Caption: She's not learned but is kind of helpless.

Aside from links and comments about current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is optimism and pessimism. The first three posts tilted towards the pessimistic end of the spectrum. In the interests of fairness, I'm trying to work the other side of the street today.

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

In 1965, the psychologist Martin Seligman preformed a classical experiment which probably did not endear him with dog lovers and which, if the Buddhists are right, racked up a good deal of bad karma.

The short version was that he put a caged dog in a situation where it seemed that no matter what it did it would receive an electrical shock. Eventually, the dog gave up on even trying to escape it when it was really possible. He called this phenomenon "learned helplessness," which has since been used as a model to explain some types of depression and has been applied to many different situations.

In variations on this experiment, it took many efforts and much intervention for the dog to unlearn the helplessness.

Most of us have probably been in situations where it seemed like we were *&^%-ed no matter what we did. If it happens enough, people tend to give up too.

Since then, in a move probably cheered by dog lovers, Seligman became one of the leaders in the positive psychology movement and developed the theory of learned optimism.

To use the short version once again, he found that the way people think about experiences can make all the difference. As he put it in his book Authentic Happiness:

Pessimists have a particularly pernicious way of construing their setbacks and frustrations. They automatically think that the cause is permanent, pervasive, and personal: "It's going to last forever, it's going to undermine everything, and it's my fault."

By contrast, optimists

have a strength that allows them to interpret their setbacks as surmountable, particular to a single problem, and resulting from temporary circumstances or other people.

In other words, pessimists (the term is not used in its philosophical sense here) tend to come up with global explanations when things go badly. When things go well, they attribute it to accident and unique conditions. With optimists, the reverse is true. The kind of thinking we engage in can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and has wide ranging effects. According to Seligman, people stuck in the pessimistic groove can learn new ways of thinking that can lead to different results.

There are some who criticize positive psychology as don't worry/be happy feel good fluff. Here's an example of that point of view. Point taken. But on the other hand, if you think changing anything is impossible, you probably won't try very hard to do it.

BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS. A new paper by Third Way looks at ways Evangelicals and progressives can meet in the middle over the common good. This was also the subject of a recent column by E. J. Dionne.

PRIORITIES. This Economic Policy Institute snapshot highlights the Bush administration's spending priorities on war and domestic needs.

IRAQI CIVILIAN CASUALTIES. These are the opening lines from a piece in the Baltimore Sun by two public health professors:

Not wanting to think about civilian deaths in Iraq has become almost universal. But ignorance of the Iraqi death toll is no longer an option.

An Associated Press poll in February found that the average American believed about 9,900 Iraqis had been killed since the end of major combat operations in 2003. Recent evidence suggests that things in Iraq may be 100 times worse than Americans realize.

News report tallies suggest that about 75,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasion. But a study of 13 war-affected countries presented at a recent Harvard conference found that more than 80 percent of violent deaths in conflicts go unreported by the press and governments.

DEMAND SIDE ECONOMICS. Supply side economics has become orthodoxy in far too many circles these days. Here's an item by Jeff Madrick in The Nation about the other end of the spectrum.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

RUNNING WAR LIKE A (BAD) BUSINESS

No rest for the wicked at Goat Rope Farm...The following op-ed of El Cabrero's on the privatization of war appeared in today's Charleston WV Sunday Gazette-Mail. Also, check out Gazette writer Paul Nyden's excellent coverage of yesterday's public forum on Iraq.

In this rush to privatize government, what losses

In Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch-22, the hyper-capitalist Milo Minderbinder says, “Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.”

What was once a laugh line is becoming a reality, due to the Bush administration’s ideological mania for privatization, or outsourcing government functions to business.

I’m not a fan of the Iraq war, but this drive to “run war like a business” made a bad situation even worse for U.S. troops, Iraqi civilians and the American people.

Even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld planned the privatization of many defense functions. The day before the attacks, he described the Pentagon bureaucracy itself as “an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America.”

For Rumsfeld, President Bush, crony capitalists and worshippers of the market god, the answer to most questions was to farm out as many government functions as possible, from warfare to Social Security, to private corporations.

Privatization of traditional military functions to corporations such as Halliburton and security firms such as Blackwater has been a major component of the war in Iraq. While this has been a bonanza for the corporations involved, the well-being of U.S. troops has arguably suffered.

Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich point out a chilling example of this in their 2005 book The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. In December 2004, 22 people were killed when insurgents in Mosul, Iraq, blew up a mess hall which had previously come under attack.

In an interview on “The News Hour” with Jim Lehrer, retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters noted that the traditional military rule for dispersing during meals in a combat zone to reduce the risk of mass casualties was ignored. “And what’s clearly happened in Iraq is that we violated our own rules about troop dispersion in wartime. I suspect it has to do with outsourcing. This mess hall, mess facility, chow hall, was run by a contractor. ... Instead of security, what we saw was convenience and efficiency.”

That’s a clear case of the pursuit of profit trumping the protection of people.

One underreported aspect of the Walter Reed scandal was the roll that privatization played in reducing the quality of services provided to injured Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

The Army Times and other sources have carried reports of an internal memo which said that privatization of services at Walter Reed put services for veterans “at risk of mission failure” as skilled federal workers left in droves in anticipation of losing their jobs.

Last month, CNN reported that “needed repairs went undone as the non-medical staff shrank from almost 300 to less than 50 in the last year and hospital officials were unable to find enough skilled replacements.”

Jim Hightower reports in the April Hightower Lowdown that in 2006, IAP Worldwide Services, a corporation “run by two former senior Halliburton officials,” was awarded a $120 million contract to run the facilities. He notes that the same company “botched the delivery of ice to New Orleans in the wake of the Katrina fiasco.”

Another example of privatization in action in Iraq was the shipment of 12 billion dollars with no strings attached — 363 tons of cash to be exact — to Iraq when Paul Bremer was in charge of the Civilian Provisional Authority, as National Public Radio reported in February. The Emerald City, as the Green Zone has been called, was a living laboratory of neocon utopianism.

As Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, wrote in the Washington Post, jobs with the Civilian Provisional Authority were dispensed on the basis of political loyalty to the administration and its ideas.

He writes that instead of rebuilding that country’s infrastructure and promoting security-steps that might have undercut the insurgency and stopped the civil war before it started, “many CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot like the United States.”

Other priorities included reopening the Iraqi stock exchange and putting an end to free health care.

Is anyone surprised that the cash disappeared? Or that the situation deteriorated? God knows what was bought and by whom with the money, although it’s a safe bet some of it exploded.

True believers in the cult of the market god accept as an article of faith the idea that privatization always promotes more efficient outcomes and that profit-seeking corporations always outperform public institutions in promoting the common good, but clearly that is not the case, either in war or peace.

In the real world, business has a very important role, but is no substitute for democratic institutions and a vigilant public. A good society is one based on systems of countervailing power, where government institutions, businesses, labor, non-governmental organizations, other institutions and citizens (not necessarily in that order) provide checks and balances against the excesses of others.

Some things are more important than the corporate bottom line.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: SELF-EXPLANATORY