Those difficult gift decisions (and a half hearted defense of peacocks)

A few days ago, Alternet ran an article about what to get for that billionaire on your Christmas list. It was pretty humorous, although I have to take issue with the first item on the list, to wit a peacock. The writer says that this gift "Provides the double benefit of being both the ultimate symbol of excessive extravagance and extremely difficult to care for."

OK, so they are extravagant, presuming we're talking about the male's tail feathers in the spring and early summer. But you can't really blame the bird for that--you'd have to blame sexual selection, which is to say, peahens. The males have big tails because having one helped their male forebears to reproduce.

And they're not that hard to take care of. They eat the same things as chickens and pretty much take care of themselves, provided you don't have more than one male and provided you don't mind listening to them scream during mating season. They're pretty quiet otherwise.

I don't even think of them as being domesticated the way chickens are. They're more like loud, romantic, decorated, seasonal dinosaurs.

DEAL OR NO DEAL. Here's a statement from the National Employment Law Project on the Obama administration's "deal" with congressional Republicans (which may or may not happen). And here's Paul Krugman's latest column on the same.

FOR SALE. A sale of Massey Energy looks more likely now that former CEO Don Blankenship has announced retirement.

MONEY AND POLITICS. There seems to be some connection.

URGENT ANCIENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE. It looks like they had giant storks for company.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Strong tie, weak tie

In the early 1970s, Gil Scott-Heron came up with his classic song "The Revolution Will Not be Televised." Those were the days before culture went postmodern, back when real things mattered more than images of things. These days, people probably wouldn't bother with making a revolution unless there was some way of recording it and putting images of it up on the web.

Today, images seem to have become more important than the real things they were originally intended to represent. Things have almost gotten to the point where they're not considered real unless images and/or sound recordings are broadcast, televised or posted on the internet. And the connection between the image and the original person or thing is getting more and more slippery.

Political activism has gone postmodern as well. Lots of people seem to think that virtual activism via social networking is a viable substitute for the traditional mammalian practice of getting out there and interacting with (real) others.

In this interesting piece from the New Yorker, writer Malcolm Gladwell looks at the limits of this kind of activism. Short version: clicking on a Facebook button in support of a cause is qualitatively different from putting your body on the line. Weak connections can be very useful, but Gladwell argues that it takes strong bonds with real people to really push the proverbial envelope (whatever that means).

I love the subtitle. In a nod to Heron, it says "The revolution will not be tweeted."

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's a dissenting view on the same subject.

WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED? A survey on religious knowledge found that atheists and agnostics are better informed about religion than many believers.

TALKING ENVIRONMENT. Here are tips from cognitive scientist George Lakoff.

URGENT ANCIENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT CONTROVERSY UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating

Goat Rope is still plowing, albeit not in a straight line, through Hamlet. We're all the way to one of my favorite parts, the gravedigger scene at the beginning of Act 5. If Shakespeare doesn't do it for you, you can scroll down to the links and comments section below.

Harold Bloom has noted that Hamlet plays Falstaff to himself, meaning that he provides his own comic relief. In fact, there's only one person in the whole play who can hold his own with him in a verbal sparring match and that person is a gravedigger. Here's some banter between the digger and his companion before Hamlet and Horatio arrive on the scene:

First Clown : ...There is no ancient
gentleman but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers:
they hold up Adam's profession.

Second Clown: Was he a gentleman?

First Clown: He was the first that ever bore arms.

Second Clown: Why, he had none.

First Clown: What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the
Scripture? The Scripture says 'Adam digged:'
could he dig without arms?

I suppose every profession has its own pride of place, but our friend makes a strong case for his own:

First Clown: What is he that builds stronger than either the
mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?

Second Clown: The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a
thousand tenants.

First Clown: I like thy wit well, in good faith: the gallows
does well; but how does it well? it does well to
those that do ill: now thou dost ill to say the
gallows is built stronger than the church: argal,
the gallows may do well to thee. To't again, come.

Second Clown: 'Who builds stronger than a mason, a shipwright, or
a carpenter?'

First Clown: Ay, tell me that, and unyoke.

Second Clown: Marry, now I can tell.

First Clown: To't.

Second Clown:Mass, I cannot tell.

First Clown: Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull
ass will not mend his pace with beating; and, when
you are asked this question next, say 'a
grave-maker: 'the houses that he makes last till
doomsday.

I think he may have a point.

SPEAKING OF GRAVES, a lot more people will be in them if we don't reform health care. Here's a report on this from Families USA and here's some WV coverage of the same issue.

GOT FIGS? Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree. I see he's got a little Shakespeare of his own going on this time.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, there's seems to be a drop in children's bullying.

THE BUTLER DIDN'T DO IT, an asteroid did.

URGENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Marching on--updated

Note to email subscribers: I apologize for flooding your mailbox, but a reader pointed out that some of the phrasing in the original needed some work.

Also, I like to encourage readers to contact their senators to support the health care vote scheduled for tomorrow which would bring the bill to the Senate floor. The bill itself is far from perfect, but there will be time to improve it later and doing nothing would be worse.

For contact information, click here. If you can't get through on the DC number, please consider calling their local office.)

Here's the original and edited post:

"Against an enemy. How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!"--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. Health care reform faces a crucial vote in the Senate this weekend.

SQUANDERED TRUST. Being too nice to bad banks may have more than financial costs.

THIS COULD BE AMUSING. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is set to debate Robert Kennedy Jr. in January. My guess is that this won't be the only entertainment that night.

URGENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Tragic flaws and all that

This man had tragic flaws which led to his undoing.

It's kind of easy to tell one of Shakespeare's comedies from one of his tragedies. In the former most everyone gets married, while in the latter, most everyone is dead on the stage.

It's a little harder to define what makes a Greek tragedy what it is. It's easier to say what it's not. Good guy beats bad guy, gets girl would not be a tragic formula. Nor would bad guy wins after all. Nor would good guy gets blasted by the cosmos for no apparent reason.

Aristotle, who is not the last word on the subject but was one of the first, had several ideas about what made one. Good aristocrat the he was, he believed that the main characters should be people of high status and usually well known from myth and tradition. He blamed Euripides for bringing common people to the state. Second, he believed one should involve some change of fortune, usually for the worse. He especially liked it if there was a major reversal and if late in the game there came some major recognition.

Conflicts in a tragedy should not pit conventional enemies or indifferent people against each other; he thought it was more powerful if rather the conflicts occurred within the same family or between people who had some kind of connection, even if they protagonists didn't realize it until it was too late.

The tragic hero in his book should be neither a perfect person nor a complete jerk. Rather,

There remains, then the character between these two extremes--that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous--a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families.

To sum up his version of a good tragedy,

A well-constructed plot should, therefore, be single in its issue...The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad. It should come about as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty, in a character such as we have described, or better rather than worse.

The tragic hero, in other words, should be like most of us, except on a grander scale. The subject of tragedy should not be a retelling of something that definitely happened but rather should show what could happen given certain circumstances; hence its power. Often it's not about good versus evil but rather competing and conflicting goods and ills in which people are caught up in a long chain of events.

As I've said before here, a Greek tragedy is a different kind of story than an action movie. But however mythological the themes may be, the tragic is often closer to real life.

GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS. Here's another look at the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, where they have another way of keeping score.

IT'S ON. The struggle for health care reform, that is. One critical piece of real reform is a public insurance option.

STILL TICKING. Pete Seeger turned 90 Sunday and is still singing, albeit not as loud.

URGENT ANCIENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE. They had long, flat feet.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Anyone for a goat song?

El Cabrero has gone for a pretty long time at this blog without a big jag on Greek mythology. I think it's been since last autumn.

Having said that, I feel my self control starting to wane. Maybe it's because I've recently resolved to read or re-read all existing Greek tragedies. Some of them I revisit fairly regularly, like Sophocles' Oedipus plays or the Orestia of Aeschylus. But there are a bunch that I've either missed altogether or haven't looked at in a long time.

My first stop was Euripides' Bacchae, which I always thought would make a good movie or at least an extended old-school Twilight Zone episode. It's about the less-than-friendly welcome the god Dionysus received on visiting his mother's home town of Thebes. Take home message: if a god comes, roll out the red carpet--or else.

But first, here's a little cheery nugget from my old pal Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. One of his main ideas in the book is that the ancient Greeks had a deep pessimistic streak but managed to say yes to life in spite of it, thanks in part to the help of art. Here goes:

"There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: 'Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. Bet the second best for you is--to die soon."

Gee, I feel better already.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL. The Obama administration indicated it wants to reverse some Bush-era policies but it's not clear what that means.

ANTS AND SUCH. We know they're social animals, but what about the individuals?

ANCIENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE here.

ABANDONED PETS are on the rise in the wake of foreclosures and a tanking economy.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Adding on

The human race should have learned by the end of the 20th century that goats are a pain in the tuchis.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I've decided to start making a list of Things The Human Race Should Have Figured Out By the End of the Twentieth Century.

A Goat Rope email subscriber sent in the following contribution:

*that violently attacking your enemies to “teach them a lesson” does not make you safer, does not cause them to fold their hands and desist in attacking you, and while it does cause some people to admire you, these are the people you don’t want to turn your back on.

*that giving money and tax breaks to the rich does not lift all boats and increase the size of the pie, and the only thing trickling down smells bad.

Here's my latest item:

*The excessive intermingling of government and religion doesn't generally lead to better government but it does lead to worse religion.

Note: Sorry, this post came out late due to a typo. My bad.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE of the economic mess, many states are questioning the mania for building more prisons and filling them as rapidly as possible.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. More Americans are skipping needed prescriptions as the economy tanks.

WATER, WATER (NOT) EVERYWHERE. Here are some thoughts on the new oil.

TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON which is starting about two days earlier as the climate changes.

A GREEN COLLAR ECONOMY is already taking root in some surprising places.

TRICKSY INDONESIAN HOBBITS may not have been human, recent skull research suggests.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: YO NO SE

MYTH-TAKES

The theme at Goat Rope lately is myths and what they mean. You will also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on the week's earlier posts.

As discussed previously, myths are the Big Stories that convey deep meanings.

One interesting aspect of mythology is that most cultures don't recognize their own myths as myths. Rather, they are seen as stories that convey how things really are.

On this fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's unnecessary war in Iraq, I've been thinking about the myth used to justify it. It's a very old myth, one that theologian Walter Wink has called "the myth of redemptive violence," which underlies and tries to justify every system of domination. The myth, expressed in Babylonian mythology in the story of Marduk, who overcomes and kills Tiamat and creates the world from her body, involves the overcoming of primordial forces of chaos by an act of violence that establishes order.

Thus violence is seen as part of the natural order of things, the savior god that makes social life possible and which demands obedience.

According to Wink,

This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today...

It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo. The gods favor those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must have the favor of the gods. The common people exist to perpetuate the advantage that the gods have conferred upon the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood. Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat. Any form of order is preferable to chaos, according to this myth. Ours is neither a perfect nor a perfectible world; it is a theater of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war; security through strength; these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the Domination System is founded in every society.

This myth was powerfully invoked by this administration in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to justify the invasion of a country which had nothing to do with the attacks and the results have been disastrous for the country and the world.

THE MYTH OF REDEMPTIVE VIOLENCE IN ACTION in Iraq is the theme of this review.

MORE ON THE CREDIT/HOUSING MELTDOWN can be found here.

MASSEY ENERGY was cited in an incident related to the death of a coal miner in Kanawha County.

BE NOT ANXIOUS. It's often easier said than done, as this book review notes.

URGENT ANCIENT HOBBIT UPDATE here.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CHOOSING TO ACT

People in groups have a bad tendency not to take action to help others. In some cases, being in a group seems to keep people from acting in their own interest. That in a nutshell, Gentle Reader, has been the theme of this week's Goat Rope.

Previous posts this week have looked at real life incidents, such as the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, and at psychological experiments that also studied the issue in a less violent setting. Please check them out if this is your first visit.

So what are the conclusions of the research? Darley and Latane drew five conclusions from their experiments (both of which are discussed earlier this week) about helping behavior. As summarized in Lauren Slater's entertaining and informative book Opening Skinner's Box, they are:

1. You, the potential helper, must notice an event is occurring.
2. You must interpret the event as one in which help is needed.
3. You must assume personal responsibility.
4. You must decide what action to take.
5. You must take action.

Bystanders have great potential for good or evil. In his excellent study Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Roy F. Baumeister notes that

bystanders do not have to provide active support to the perpetrators of evil and violence. If they merely do nothing, and in particular if they fail to protest or object, than evil and violence are likely to spread.

He also notes that in many cases

the perpetrator might be sensitive to the moral judgements of bystanders. If bystanders say nothing, the perpetrator may believe that they did not see anything to criticize.

In a more positive way, he argues that

Bystanders do have a responsibility to protest evil, because it will grow unchecked if they do not. Whatever the press of one's own concerns or the appeal of minding one's own business, it is nonetheless true that the victims of evil and violence depend on bystanders to bear witness to what is happening and take a stand against it. It is the only way.

SPEAKING OF INSIGHTS FROM THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, here's a diverting mix from the Boston Globe.

MORE ON THE COST OF WAR. Here's former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz on the cost of the Iraq war. Short version: the big winners are oil companies and defense contractors. Who saw that coming?

SPEAKING OF THE WAR, a new poll shows that may Americans are confused about the human costs of that unnecessary war.

ECONOMY. The NY Times reports on a veritable witch's brew of bad economic news.

PRISON NATION/PRISON STATES. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows the drain caused by an exploding prison population on state budgets and investments in things like higher education.

COUNTING things is the theme of Jim Lewis' latest edition of Notes From Under the Fig Tree.

COMPARE YOUR LIST. From Campus Progress, here's a list of 99 problems with the Bush administration.

URGENT ANCIENT HOBBIT UPDATE here.

WV ROUNDUP. A confusing array of new state Medicaid rules has been challenged in court. The feds are investigating WV's supreme court Masseygate affair. Two sentences were handed down yesterday in the Megan Williams case.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY

The theme this week at Goat Rope is a look at what psychology can tell us about the dark side of human nature (you will also find links and comments about current events). Monday's post was about the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, which became a legendary example of the failure of people to intervene to help someone in trouble.

As the story was widely reported, over 30 people witnessed more than one attack on Genovese, yet no one intervened. Subsequent investigations have called some of the details into question, but clearly things like this happen all too often.

Yesterday's post was about a famous psychological experiment by Darley and Latane which tried to recreate a similar situation and got similar results. The bottom line is that there is something about groups which seems to inhibit individual helping action.

This is something that most of us have experienced in one way or another. If your car breaks down, you are probably more likely to get help on a little traveled country road than on I 95 at rush hour.

The term for this is "diffusion of responsibility." As Lauren Slater wrote in Opening Skinner's Box,.

The more people witnessing an event, the less responsible any one individual feels and, indeed, is, because responsibility is evenly distributed among the crowd. Diffusion of responsibility is further compounded by social etiquette so strong it overrides even life-and-death situations; it would be terrible, after all, to be the only one to make a fuss, and perhaps for nothing as well. Who is to say what's a real and what's a false emergency.

The fact that we often doubt ourselves doesn't help much either in this arena.

But a further experiment by Darley and Latane shows that the presence of others can even keep people from acting in their own interest. More on that tomorrow.

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? Having it both ways is increasingly unlikely. Here's a good item from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

LABOR AND CLIMATE CHANGE. Here's yet another item on how unions are getting more engaged in the climate change issue. Speaking of which, WV legislators were recently urged to come up with a climate plan.

VIRTUES AND INTERESTS. This article summarizes some interesting cross cultural results from experiments about cooperation and self interest.

URGENT HOBBIT UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LIKE A WHEEL IN PERFECT BALANCE TURNING

You may have heard the saying "Everybody wants to go to Heaven but nobody wants to die." In Dante's Divine Comedy, that wasn't the case, although the pilgrim had to literally go through hell to do it.

Dante's trip to Heaven is the topic for this last post in a two week series on the Comedy aimed at encouraging you, Gentle Reader, to give it a try. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts. You will also find links and comments about current events.

After being purified of his sins in Purgatory (see yesterday), the beloved Beatrice guides Dante on a tour of Heaven, with plenty of help from other blessed souls, including St. Bernard.

Holy light show, Batman! The souls of the blessed just love dazzling Dante as he ascends through several spheres of Heaven, which correspond to what was known about astronomy. As with hell and Purgatory, there are different levels in Heaven, according to the capacity of the souls. Everybody is blissed out, but some get better seats.

The spheres Dante and Beatrice ascend include the moon (where people who broke their vows abide), Mercury (for those who desired fame), Venus (people motivated by love), the Sun (the wise), Mars (those who fought for the faith), and so on. He has many encounters with various saints, kings, and famous people, including Cacciaguida, his great-great grandfather.

Cacciaguida gives Dante good advice for bearing up to the sorrows to come. He is told that he will have to live in exile and know what it's like "to climb another's stair" and "how salty is the bread of strangers." Cacciaguida advises him not to be consumed with the typical exile's bitterness and scheming to return. Neither should he give way to the excessive partisanship that devastated Italy, but instead become "a party of yourself" and carry out his mission of writing of what he has experienced.

As was the case with Inferno and Purgatory, Dante's Heaven has interesting characteristics. On the one hand, it seems to go up and up through successive and widening spheres. However, this is just an illusion to make it more comprehensible to the pilgrim. In reality, Heaven is like an atom with God at the very center and with all the souls of the saved surrounding and gazing in awe and wonder at the beatific vision.

At the very end, after passing a quiz by some apostles, Dante is given a chance to look at God, which is indescribable. Here are some lines from Longfellow's translation:

Thenceforward, what I saw,
Was not for words to speak, nor memory's self
To stand against such outrage on her skill.
As one, who from a dream awaken'd, straight,
All he hath seen forgets; yet still retains
Impression of the feeling in his dream;
E'en such am I: for all the vision dies,
As 't were, away; and yet the sense of sweet,
That sprang from it, still trickles in my heart.

I love the last line:

...like a wheel in perfect balance turning, I felt my will and my desire impelled by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Wouldn't it be nice to wind up like that at the end of the road?

THE MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE. Here's an interesting item from the Campaign for America's Future about the growing economic crisis many families are experiencing. And here's Paul Krugman's latest column on the possible role of the economy in the coming election.

GREEN JOBS are a major goal for unions.

AND THE HORSE THEY RODE IN ON. Here's an interesting book review on proto Indo-European culture, critters and languages.

WEST VIRGINIA VIEWS. In this op-ed, Ted Boettner and Renate Pore make the case for public investments in health, education and infrastructure. And in this one, state AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Larry Matheney discusses the Worker Freedom Bill, which threw organized business in WV into a hissy fit.

URGENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE. Remember those fossilized little guys they found over there? They may have been humans with a severe iodine deficiency.

I GOT ALL EXCITED ABOUT THIS ONE. The headline from this Science Daily item mentioned fossils of giant bats, but the biggest only weighed half a pound. I'm sure that's very respectable for bats and proud we are of all of them, as Maude Lebowski would say. But still it was kind of a letdown. I was hoping for maybe a 20 foot wingspan and all I got was a half-pounder...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

REBELLION AND MODERATION

Caption: These guys are rebels.

Some of the wisest words ever were carved on the ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Nothing in excess" and "Know thyself."

(Unfortunately, the ancient Greeks weren't always that great at taking the advice...me neither come to think of it.)

The French philosopher Albert Camus, who is on the menu at Goat Rope this week, managed to do something pretty rare: combine rebellion with moderation.

Rebellion is the subject of his book The Rebel (so it isn't just a clever name). For Camus, rebellion springs from the urge for justice and freedom. It involves saying No to oppression, servitude, or degradation.

But rebellion itself must have its limits. All too easily it can and has mutated into fanaticism, totalitarianism, nihilism and terrorism:

Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion is in itself moderation, and it demands, defends, and re-creates it throughout history and its eternal disturbances.

He believed that it is not given to us to remake the world from scratch or to fundamentally change the human condition with all its inevitable tragedies and absurdities:

Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered. He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering of the world will remain, and no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage. Dimitri Karamazov's cry of "Why" will continue to resound; art and rebellion will die only with the last man.

But he argued that we can, here and there, with luck and skill and fortitude make improvements, end abuses, and reduce unnecessary suffering:

He who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again.

Him did talk pretty too.

CHIP SHOWDOWN. Congress could vote today on expanding the Childrens Health Insurance Program. President Bush has threatened a veto. Here's a good critique of Bush's position from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and here's the latest from the NY Times.

El Cabrero and amigos will have a press conference in support of CHIP this afternoon. It'll show up here (assuming we get any press) tomorrow. That will be today's moderate rebellion.

INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE: Click here.

DIRTY TRICKS DEPARTMENT. Here's an item on the art and science of union busting and one more reason why we need the Employee Free Choice Act.

WHAT HE SAID. WV Senator Robert C. Byrd on Iraq:

The best way to support our troops is to bring them home, and the only way to get them home may be to somehow restrict the funds for this disastrous war. ... This senator will support no more blank checks for Iraq.

BEST OF LUCK to the GM United Auto Workers members in getting a decent contract. El Cabrero is a member of that branch of the UAW that doesn't know how to change the oil.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PROVERBS OF HELL

Caption: "The lust of the goat is the bounty of God."--Blake (Note: God was not available for comment.)

Welcome to William Blake Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

As mentioned yesterday, one of Blake's strongest and oddest works is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

To put it mildly, Blake had a unique way of looking at the world. He saw Heaven as representing passivity and reason and hell as representing energy and activity. He thought we needed some of both.

Some of his oddest sayings from this work are called The Proverbs of Hell. Yesterday's post included a few of these. Here are some more:

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Expect poison from the standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Listen to the fools reproach! it is a kingly title!

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.

Some of the rest are even odder than these. Check them out and enjoy!

And here's a parting shot:

One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression

ANTHROPOLOGY UPDATE. El Cabrero is still reeling from the fact that anthropology is actually a practical college major these days. Back in the Paleozoic era of my days at (we are) Marshall, being an anthropology major meant you weren't thinking too hard about a day job. Recently, as blogged here, social scientists and ethnologists have been recruited both by major corporations (from science to marketing) and by the military.

However, a new ad hoc group has formed called the Network of Concern Anthropologists. They have issues a statement urging fellow social scientists not to participate in the war in Iraq. Excerpt:

The War in Iraq has created a dangerous situation not only for the nation but also for the discipline of anthropology. The Department of Defense and allied agencies are mobilizing anthropologists for interventions in the Middle East and beyond. It is likely that larger, more permanent initiatives are in the works.

I think our so-called leaders might be a little less inclined to imperial hubris if they had a better understanding of other cultures and of social science generally, but I doubt that social scientists could play a critical role if they just another part of the system.

TENS OF THOUSANDS of people converged on Jena, Louisiana protesting the treatment of the "Jena 6" high school students by the criminal justice system after a series of racial conflicts was sparked after white students hung nooses from a tree.

IN CASE YOU EVER WONDERED how baby sea turtles spent their formative years, the answer is here.

SPEAKING OF THE IRAQ WAR, which was a really bad idea, the number of internal refugees there is now estimated at 2 million.

I KNOW THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN ECONOMIC JUSTICE BLOG, but remember those Indonesian "hobbit" bones found a few years back? Well, on the basis of more discoveries, they appear to have been a distinct species that branched off from our kin around 800,000 years ago and lived in caves 120,000 to 10,000 years ago.

SPEAKING OF GOAT ROPES, here's an article on WV's "revamped" Medicaid program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED