Demand and control

Edith is stressing out the turkeys.

El Cabrero has been blogging off and on about how social status affects health and longevity. As mentioned previously, there's a really clear social gradient that seems to work all up and down the scale.

Those in the highest status positions are healthier and live longer than those with "only" high status positions, who live longer than those with moderate social status positions, and so on.

One key factor in all this, according to British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, is having a sense of autonomy and control over life and work. This tends to increase as you climb the ladder and decreases as you descend it. In The Status Syndrome, Marmot cites research that finds that high demand/low control work situations are particularly toxic.

This problem isn't limited to the workplace however. A typical low income person in the US can face control/autonomy issues all the time, i.e. by living in an unsafe neighborhood and/or in bad housing; facing economic insecurity, from juggling bills to dealing with evictions or foreclosures; and dealing with conflicts with landlords, neighbors, bill collectors, etc. These kinds of experience trigger the body's stress reaction and change body chemistry and hormone production.

And here we face an evolutionary lag. Our bodies developed the stress response (or fight or flight syndrome) to deal with short term dangers and threats. If the stress is chronic, this can trigger all kinds of problems, ranging from heart disease to mental disorders such as depression...all of which explains why diseases and early mortality are as unequally distributed as wealth and status, albeit in the other direction.

PUBLIC OPTION. Here's the latest on health care reform in the Senate.

OUCH. The US economy has lost over 5 percent of jobs since Dec. 2007. The numbers are much higher in some areas than others.

KING SOLOMON DON'T LIVE 'ROUND HERE. This analysis from the Charleston Daily Mail talks about how hard it will be to find "balance" in current coal controversies.

THE LATEST TWIST in the Megan Williams saga is here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Bad for business

You may have heard this rant from me before but here goes again. Around here, the coal industry and its supporters, including most of WV's elected officials, follow flawless logic when it comes to climate change. It goes like this:

1. Anything which goes against the perceived interest of the coal industry cannot possibly be true.

2. Acknowledging the truth of climate change and the permissibility of trying to do something about it goes against the perceived interests of the coal industry

ERGO...

Climate change cannot possibly be true and nothing should be done about it.

Q.E.D.

Not everybody associated with the coal industry is buying it. Michael Morris, President of American Electric Power supports climate change legislation.

As a matter of fact, the US Chamber (Pot) of Commerce is taking some hits from major corporations for its opposition to climate change legislation. A number of companies have either withdrawn from the Chamber or expressed their differences. This interesting item from the New Yorker compares the Chamber's response to that of Massey Energy. According to James Surowiecki, while many companies in the past may have parroted the party line, things are different now. The new attitude

...may reflect a calculation that global warming is simply too big an issue to get wrong, both economically—few companies are really going to benefit from the melting of the polar ice caps—and from a public-relations point of view. It’s also probably no coincidence that these resignations have come at a time when the Chamber’s anti-regulatory zeal looks not just outmoded but self-defeating. Had the Chamber supported tougher regulation of financial and housing markets, after all, the myriad small businesses it represents would undoubtedly be better off today. And it’s far from clear that across-the-board hostility to regulation is really in the best interests of the free-enterprise system. We assume that lobbies always recognize what’s best for their members. But they don’t, and, in the case of climate change, they may very well be missing what the companies that have resigned in protest have seen: global warming isn’t just bad for the planet; it’s bad for business.

WHACKADOODLE DANDY. Here's another item on our old pal political paranoia.

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE and some of it is a mess.

ELECTIONS HAVE (HORMONAL) CONSEQUENCES. Testosterone and voting...who'd have thunk it?

ANOTHER TWIST. Here's the latest in the Megan Williams story.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

That's just the stress talking

Workplace stress is probably not a major issue for this green heron.

Goat Rope has been running an off and on series lately about the links between social status health. The short version is that there is a big connection between the two and that people's health tends to be better the higher up the social ladder they are.

It's not just that people who are poor and/or have relatively low social standing get sicker and die younger, although that is true as far as it goes. Rather, it's like a social gradient that works all the way up or down. People who have very high status are healthier than people who just have high status. And so it goes.

British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, who has spent decades studying this, identifies some key components that might explain the gradient. One big one has to do with autonomy and a sense of control. This is especially true in the workplace.

While most people on the job talk about stress, research indicates that not all stresses are created equal. As Marmot puts it,

Ask more successful people if they are stressed at work and they will tell you, in slightly macho fashion, about how many e-mails they receive a day, how much in demand they are, how many different tasks await their attention, about their deadlines. If you ask about stress, they are unlikely to tell you that work is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; that they die a little when they come to work each day because their work touches no part of them that is them. But this is the reality of many jobs; and the lower the status, the more likely that is to be so. Ask the people with all the e-mails which job they would rather be doing, the high-status job with continuous demands, and the company BMW and the firm's credit card, or the soul-destroying job with tasks that ask for little use of skills, that are completely determined by others, and, oh yes, that offer little in the way of self-fulfillment, financial rewards, or status enhancement. There are not too many high-status people who would swap their "stressed" place in the boardroom for a place on the production line.

More on that to come.

HEALTH CARE REFORM. A new poll shows strong support for a public option.

TWO CENTS MORE. Here's economist Dean Baker on the same.

CHILD WELFARE. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia doesn't come out too well in this report.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. There's been another strange turn of events.

URGENT GIANT SPIDER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Something positive

If these walls could talk...

Back in 2007, news flashed around the country and the world about a horrific torture case involving an African American woman, Megan Williams, in Logan County WV.

At the time, many people in Logan, black and white, were horrified by the event and determined to do something to show that this didn't represent their community. They held an inter-racial prayer vigil at a church near where the crime took place after a white preacher offered to host the event.

But that wasn't all. Community members and groups like the American Friends Service Committee decided to do something with a more lasting impact. They joined together across lines of class and race to build a home for two elderly sisters in the county who lived in an unsafe and inaccessible house.

The whole process took a long time to complete and wasn't pretty at times, but it got done. This weekend, that home is being dedicated.

You can read or hear more about it from WV Public Radio here.

Sometimes, with hard work, patience and luck, people can bring about something positive in the wake of something negative.

Hard times, come again no more

Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," courtesy of wikipedia.

"Hard times, come again no more," goes a line of a famous song by Stephen Foster--but it looks like they have.

(By the way, here's Dylan doing it live.)

The economic downturn and recent research El Cabrero and friends did for a study of The State of Working West Virginia over the last 30 years reminded me of the Dark Ages of the 1980s. It was a time when globalization and Reaganomics hit my state like a tsunami. As I mentioned in Friday's post, unemployment was in the double digits for most of the 1980s and early 1990s.

At the time, I had yet to finish college, was working a low wage job and had two small children. It was bad. Real bad.

Like the guy said in the Big Lebowski, some days you eat the bear and some days (decades?) the bear eats you. And help was not on the way. Hope, which the divine Ms. Emily Dickinson described at "the thing with feathers" seemed to have flown the coop.

I hope this time there might be a little help on the way, but long ago I took to heart the words of the great Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi:

"Pay your respects to the gods and buddhas, but never rely upon them."

So here's the question I'm going to be dealing with for the next little stretch: how does one, on a purely personal level, endure hard times when the cavalry isn't going to come and when there is no social movement to save you?

Sneak preview: tenacity helps.

FREE FALLIN'. The US economy dropped over half a million jobs in November and more than 1.2 million in the last three months according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

SITTING IN. Here's an update about a sit-in by union workers in a closed Chicago factory.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. All seven people accused of torturing Megan Williams in Logan County have been convicted. Here's an overview.

PAID UP. Massey Energy paid Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel $267 million after the US Supreme Court overturned a previous decision by the WV Supreme Court. Previously, the state court overturned the verdict against Massey, with Justice Brent Benjamin casting the deciding vote. Benjamin, a political unknown, was elected to the court after Massey CEO Don Blankenship spent more than $3 million to defeat his opponent.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS can make you happier.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE. The recession has taken a severe toll on recycling efforts.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

St. Anthony tormented by demons, by way of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is understanding human evil, along with links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Most normal people have internalized moral norms about how other people should be treated. However, under certain conditions, these moral restraints can be shut off. The result is what psychologist Albert Bandura called "moral disengagement" and it is often a key feature in acts of violence and cruelty. Here's a link to an essay of his on the subject.

This is the abbreviated Goat Rope version:

Under normal conditions, people have both inhibitive and proactive moral tendencies. Inhibitive means we understand it's not nice to hit little Tommy with a sledge hammer. Proactive means that if little Susy falls into a pit of boiling sludge we should pull her out. That's the good news. The bad news is that people all too often have ways of tossing both out the window.

Here are a two ways that can happen:

*Reconstruing the situation or coming up with moral justifications to treat people badly. Labeling them as the enemy usually works pretty good here. So does ideology. As Voltaire once said,

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

*Using euphemisms. Orwell was all over this one:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

We don't blow away villages; instead, we use surgical strikes. We don't torture, we just use rough interrogation. We don't kill innocent civilians, although collateral damage happens.

There are other ways of kicking off the switch, about which more tomorrow.

THE WIDENING GAP between rich and poor isn't just about money; it's about life expectancy, as the latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute suggests.

OH GOOD. Inflation may be the order of the day. That's all we need during a recession...

HEALTH CARE. A new report from the Commonwealth Fund found that

the United States spends more than twice as much on each person for health care as most other industrialized countries. But it has fallen to last place among those countries in preventing deaths through use of timely and effective medical care...

A TOUGH TEA LEAF TO READ. The US is finally sending a high level official to talk with the Iranian government. With a normal administration, I'd say that was a good sign, but I trust this one about as far as I could throw it. A worst-case scenario would involve the Bush administration prematurely declaring diplomacy to be a failure in order to try to justify yet another war.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, many Americans oppose a rush to war with Iran, if anybody is listening.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Bobby Brewster pleaded guilty to charges related to the kidnapping and torture of Megan Williams and faces up to 40 years in prison.

MINE SAFETY. Federal investigators are winding up a criminal investigation related to the fire at Massey Energy's Aracoma mine that killed two workers in Jan. 2006.

URGENT EXTINCT FLYING REPTILE UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THIS MOUNTAIN IS LIKE NO OTHER

We're heading down the home stretch of Goat Rope's Fun With Dante series. That's been the main item on the menu this week and last, although there are also daily doses of links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

After Dante and Virgil have gone through hell (literally), they come up on the other side of the world at an island which is the site of Purgatory, a place where souls destined for salvation atone for sins before they rise to Heaven.

Here's a little background on the idea of Purgatory for the catholically impaired. Medieval theologians wrestled with the problem of what happens to people who died in good standing with the church but still had unabsolved sins and the idea of Purgatory, a sort of cleansing place for the soul, provided a neat solution.

Those who die "in friendship with God," i.e. free from mortal sin, but who were still tainted with venial sins were believed to undergo a temporary period of purgation or cleansing that was generally imagined to involve suffering. It was also widely believed that prayers and masses offered by the living as well as the intercession of the saints would speed the passage of the soul through Purgatory.

This is the site of the second volume of the Divine Comedy. Purgatory is a seven storey mountain (hence the title of Thomas Merton's autobiography) where the taint of the seven deadly sins are removed. There are some striking things about Dante's Purgatory:

*First, the drill sergeant in charge is the Roman Cato the Younger, who was a pagan opponent of Caesar who committed suicide, i.e. not what you would expect to find. Purgatory and Heaven have other surprises too, which are probably meant to remind us that while the divine Mind isn't irrational, it is beyond our ability to comprehend.

*Second, some people get a major time-out before climbing the mountain. These are those who delayed repentance or "made God wait."

*Third, unlike in hell, people are nice to each other here.

*Fourth, Purgatory is all about time. Souls are told "Think that this day will never dawn again."

*Fifth, unlike many mountains, Purgatory gets easier the farther you go. Dante is told in Canto IV,

This mount is such, that ever
At the beginning down below 'tis tiresome,
And aye the more one climbs, the less it hurts.90

Therefore, when it shall seem so pleasant to thee,
That going up shall be to thee as easy
As going down the current in a boat,

Then at this pathway's ending thou wilt be;
There to repose thy panting breath expect;
No more I answer; and this I know for true.

Still, it's no cakewalk. As in hell, the punishment fits the crime. The sin of pride, by which we lift ourselves too high, is purged by carrying heaving stones and facing the ground. Dante, who goes through it in the flesh, at one point has to go through a fire so hot that he says he would have gladly thrown himself into molten glass to cool off.

At the beginning of his ascent, Dante receives seven P's (from peccatum, the Latin word for sin) on his forehead. These are removed as he purges the sin in question. It is at this point that Dante comes to his own and stops relying on Virgil. Virgil for his part as a pagan is out of his league now.

As Dante matures spiritually, Virgil declares his independence by saying "I crown and mitre you lord of yourself." Virgil becomes more silent and eventually disappears at the upper level. This means that reason and human effort can only take you so far and divine grace is needed to ascent closer to God.

At the summit, when his sins are cleansed, he is told he can do whatever he wishes since his will is now aligned with God's. He reunites with Beatrice, whose prayers made his journey possible. Before beginning the journey to Heaven, he drinks from two river: Lethe, the river of forgetfulness so that he will no longer remember his sins and bad tendencies, and Eunoe (from the Greek for "good mind.")

Next stop: Heaven.

MORE ON THE COST OF THE IRAQ WAR: It's worse than we thought.

PRISON NATION. Here's an item on the growing costs of our prison-industrial complex.

TORTURE. It's more common than we'd like to think. Here's more than you wanted to know from Mother Jones.

WEST VIRGINIA ITEMS OF INTEREST. A report by the WV Center on Budget and Policy about the impact of proposed state corporate tax cuts made USA Today yesterday.

Here's the latest on the WV Supreme Court mess, the Megan Williams torture case, and the surprising success (so far) of a bill that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. The bill passed the state Senate, the House Judiciary Committee and now moves to the full house.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

STARS

Welcome to Goat Rope's Fun with Dante series. You will also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

El Cabrero's goal for all of this is to encourage you, Gentle Reader, to give the Divine Comedy a try, whether it's for the first or fifteenth time.

Here's how it's structured. There are three main canticles or parts (often published as separate volumes): Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, which describe the Pilgrim's guided tour of the afterlife. I heard once that all three had a total of 14,000 lines in the original, although I've never stopped to count.

Each canticle has 33 cantos, which are like chapters. Inferno has one extra one by way of introduction. In the original Italian, the canticles all rhymed and had the same meter. English translations vary.The canticles are fairly short, so it's no big deal to get through one a day.

Each of the three volumes or canticles ends with the word "stars." After going all the way through hell and coming up on the other side of the world, Inferno ends with "And we stood once more beneath the stars."

After climbing the mountain of Purgatory in that volume, the Pilgrim is "eager now to rise, ready for the stars" as he prepares to tour Heaven.

Finally, after gaining a vision of God at the highest heaven (or at least as much as he could handle), he describes himself as fully in tune with "the love that moves the sun and the other stars."

You'll probably be seeing stars as well by the time you make it through. El Cabrero sure did.

One other thing about the main characters of Dante, Virgil and Beatrice. They are themselves, but they are also more. Dante the poet is a character in his poem, but he kind of represents all of us. Virgil is the great Roman poet, but he also represents human reason and effort. As a pagan who died before Christian revelation, he lacks supernatural grace but is still pretty awesome. Beatrice, on the other hand, was a real woman in life but as a character in Heaven represents divine grace.

The point seems to be that to gain the vision of God in Paradise, we need divine grace but we also have to use our reason and make our own efforts. Reason can't get us all the way there, just as Virgil can't cross the threshold to Paradise, but it is important and can help us on the way. In fact, Virgil describes the souls in hell as "those who lost the good of intellect."

Next week: the tour continues.

MORE ON THE COST OF THE IRAQ WAR. How does $3 trillion sound?

"THE SURGE IS WORKING." Or is it? Here's a critical view.

CAPTIVE AUDIENCES. West Virginia's Worker Freedom Bill was highlighted on the national AFLCIO blog. The bill would prohibit employers from requiring workers to attend meetings where management discusses unions, politics, or religion.

PRISON NATION. From the NY Times:

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. Here's the latest coverage from WV Public Radio.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS

Caption: Zeus, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero is musing this week about the history of early Christianity. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

The religious climate in the Mediterranean world in the first century of this era was a lot different from anything we're used to. Most people these days, for example, believe in one God (sometimes less).

In the Roman empire, atheism was virtually nonexistent and monotheism was a minority viewpoint. Jews, the main monotheists of the time, made up maybe seven percent of the Roman empire--and many of them weren't too happy about being part of it.

Polytheism was the rule and it seemed as natural then as it does weird today. In fact, worshipping one god to the exclusion of all others was considered a kind of impiety. In classical Greek religion, the gods were like a deck of playing cards--one only made sense within a system of relationships with other ones.

There were gods and gods. Some pagans imagined one very remote supreme god, with other major gods and goddesses below that level and a host of lesser ones. Kind of like a divine pyramid. There was a divine division of labor whereby you turned to one or the other god to deal with this or that problem.

There were many views about what happens after death (ranging from nothing to a lot), but the main focus of pagan religion was on meeting temporal needs. Pagan worship consisted mainly of prayers, sacrifices and festivals designed to keep the gods happy or at least placated. They didn't require a whole lot of attention.

Here are some things about pagan religion that seem strange today. First, it didn't really matter what you believed about the gods. There was no pagan Bible or creed. The gods didn't care much what you thought about them as long as you didn't tick them off or neglect their sacrifices.

Second, ethics weren't a big part of pagan religion. It wasn't that pagans were less moral than non-pagans. Rather, questions of ethics were considered important in their own right and were more a part of philosophy or wisdom.

Third, pagan religions were pretty tolerant. Becoming a devotee of, say, Isis, didn't mean you had to neglect Zeus or couldn't be initiated in the Mysteries of Demeter.

Christianity stood out from all the other contenders as being everything paganism was not.

El Cabrero is no pagan, although I do admit to a soft spot for the Olympians. But there is something kind of nice about a pluralistic approach to the universe in an era of all too common fanaticism.

EMOTIONS AND HEALTH. There's a big connection.

SPEAKING OF HEALTH, here's an item on health care as market failure.

HELL HOLES, JUDICIAL AND OTHERWISE. Social scientists at WVU took a close look at WV's legal system and found the claims of the Chamber of Commerce about our "hellhole" status don't hold up. Here's the full report and here's a link to a report by Scott Finn from WV Public Radio. You may have to scroll down.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. Here's Gazette coverage for a rally held last night in Charleston.

GIANT RAT UPDATE. They found some in Indonesia five times the size of a city rat.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE BUDDHA IN THE BOAT

Welcome to the final day of Heart of Darkness Week at Goat Rope. What can I say? It seemed like a cheery holiday theme and I happened to be in Washington DC. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

As mentioned previously, Conrad's novel is recounted by the seaman Marlow to friends sitting at twilight on a boat. Marlow is described more than once as sitting like a Buddha.

I'm not sure how well-versed Conrad was in Buddhism, but that image really fits for this story. Particularly in the Mahayana tradition, it is the essence of a Buddha to overcome the delusions of dualistic thinking, which is the all-to-human tendency to classify the world through binary opposites like self/other, good/bad, us/them.

Dualistic thinking is also at the root of imperialist ideologies, with such pairs as civilized/barbarous, white/black, progress/primitivism, etc. Like Guatama, Marlow has gone beyond these dualities. As much as anything else, this story seems to me to be about setting up many polarities and then relativizing or demolishing them.

Two prominent examples would be colonizer/colonized and light/dark.

When the book was published (1902), Britain was near the apparent summit of its imperial power. It was a place where "the sun never set" and where a popular poet wrote of "the white man's burden."

But as the group gazes at the lights around the Thames, the recounting of the tale of the journey to the Congo begins thus:

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth...

"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago--the other day..."

He imagines what this "dark" country seemed like to a Roman colonizer intent on extracting tribute

Imagine him here--the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke...going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,--precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falerian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in the wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay--cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death--death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush...

Land in a swamp, march through the wood, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

...They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind--as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.

Light and dark are relative and power an accident of history.

A little later, Marlow describes the European city which rules the Congo as "a whited sepulchre," borrowing an image from Jesus' attacks on the Pharisees. The "whiteness" of the imperial city is a superficial layer, concealing darkness, decay and rot within--and we haven't even made it to Africa yet.

Final comment. In a week's worth of writing about this book there's been scarcely a mention of the mad and enigmatic Kurtz who becomes the object of Marlow's quest. The Gentle Reader knows where to find him. He's up the river. Waiting.

WHAT RETIREMENT? Millions of workers, particularly younger ones, have no retirement savings:

More than one out of every three American workers born in 1990 will have zero dollars in a 401(k)-style plan at retirement, a government report said Tuesday, an ominous sign considering many businesses are dumping pension plans.

One step towards a solution would be the creation of universal voluntary accounts that workers could take from job to job and which could help them build the needed savings. Some folks in WV are working to establish such a system at the state level.

SHOUTING HEADS. A new study tells us what we kinda suspected:

Television can encourage awareness of political perspectives among Americans, but the incivility and close-up camera angles that characterize much of today’s “in your face” televised political debate also causes audiences to react more emotionally and think of opposing views as less legitimate.

COUNTING THE COST of the Iraq war is the theme of this op-ed from Madison, WI.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. Here's the latest on the planned rally in Charleston.

DEATH PENALTY. New Jersey became the first state in over 40 years to abolish the death penalty, a step that foes of capital punishment hope will signal a larger trend. It is interesting that something seems to be happening at the cultural level. Even in the Bush era, the number of executions has declined dramatically.

URGENT DINOSAUR UPDATE. They found a new one in Antarctica.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A TAINT OF DEATH

Caption: The truth behind the lie. Native workers during King Leopold of Belgium's reign of terror in the Congo who failed to meet production quotas were punished by mutilation. Photo courtesy of wikipedia.

Reading Joseph Conrad is always challenging for me. (If this is your first visit, please click on this week's earlier posts for background on the writer and his short novel Heart of Darkness.)

Part of the reason for that may be that Polish rather than English was his first language. On the other hand, I'm not sure he'd be a cakewalk in the original either. But part of the difficulty comes from the truths he related through his fiction.

Heart of Darkness has an odd narrative device. It is told by an unnamed narrator who presumably recounts the story verbatim as told by the well-travelled and world weary Marlow, who is like an Odysseus without a home to strive for.

The setting for the storytelling is liminal. It takes place among a group of old acquaintances on a boat at twilight on the Thames near enough to the sea to feel the tides. Many of the listeners are now landsmen, though all had been to sea in the past. As the silence settles in, Marlow, who is sitting "in the pose of a meditating Buddha," begins the tale of his journey to the "Belgian" Congo which was the site of almost unimaginable colonial brutality 100 years ago (see Monday's post).

There's way too much to the story to do more than indicate here, but here are some choice nuggets from Marlow about imperialism and the ideology that tries to justify it:

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but and idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to...."

At the bottom, though, the idea/idol is a lie:

You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies--which is exactly what I hate and detest of the world--what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose...

The lie and the taint of death that accompanies it are still with us.

EXPORTING JOBS. The US has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs since 2001, with no end in sight, according to EPI's latest snapshot.

CALL UP THE RESERVES. Cognitive reserves, that is. They may be the key to maintaining mental abilities as we age.

ANOTHER VETO on CHIP yesterday.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Here's the latest, from yesterday's Gazette. It seems that publicity is more important for some people than the outcome of the trial.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CAPITALISM UNLEASHED

Caption: King Leopold II of Belgium, who claimed the Congo as his personal property, courtesy of Wikipedia.

A recent Business Week cover story asks the question, "Can Greed Save Africa?"

Far be it from me to deny that investments and enterprise have a role in development, but the snarky response that occurred to me was, didn't they try that before?

I'm thinking about the horrible atrocities perpetuated upon Africans by more economically developed countries over several centuries, and particularly about the Belgian plundering of the Congo in the 19th and 20th centuries. This vast area was the personal property of King Leopold II (1835-1909).

As the BBC put it awhile back,

While the Great Powers competed for territory elsewhere, the king of one of Europe's smallest countries carved his own private colony out of 100km2 of Central African rainforest.

He claimed he was doing it to protect the "natives" from Arab slavers, and to open the heart of Africa to Christian missionaries, and Western capitalists.

The result was a massive forced labor system for the extraction of things like ivory and rubber. The BBC estimates the death toll at 10 million, although some estimates are higher. Torture and mutilation were common. It was a human, epidemiological, and ecological disaster.

The atrocities committed there were so over the top that they were condemned by other imperialist powers, much as was the case with Spanish cruelties in the heyday of its empire centuries before.

One missionary was so horrified that he wrote the following to Leopold's agent:

I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit.

The murder and mutilation in there revved up the ire of Mark Twain, who wrote the scathing King Leopold's Soliloquy in 1905.

This was also the setting for Joseph Conrad's short novel, Heart of Darkness, about which more tomorrow.

HEALTH CARE. Here's a good item from a medical journal about universal health care.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. It looks like out of state groups plan another event related to this case. The Logan County prosecutor has expressed concerns about the impact of such events in the case against those police say kidnapped and abused the young African-American Woman.

WORKER FREEDOM BILL. If we're ever going to try to expand the ranks of the middle class in this country, restoring the right to organize is an obvious step. Here's an op-ed by one of El Cabrero's buddies, WV AFLCIO secretary-treasurer Larry Matheney about a bill that will be introduced in the 2008 legislative session. Dubbed the Worker Freedom Bill, it would prohibit employers from requiring workers to attend mandatory meetings in which their bosses rant on politics, religion, or the evils of a free labor movement.

CHAMBER OF YOU-FILL-IN-THE-BLANK-CAUSE-MINE'S-UNPRINTABLE. Here's a link from Wired Science about the US Chamber of Commerce's commercial about the evils of doing something about global warming. Tell us another story!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PSYCHED OUT

Photo credit: Dave Hogg, courtesy of EveryStockPhoto.

It used to be a joke that every college freshperson wanted to be a psychology major. That is the age when people are trying, generally with very limited success, to figure out themselves and other people.

El Cabrero fit that pattern back in the previous geological age. I had somehow stumbled on to Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche in high school and imagined that psychology classes would be that cool.

Would that it were so.

To my horror, I seemed to have stumbled in to a den of behaviorists. If there is one ideology I like even less than Stalinism or economic libertarianism, it's gotta be behaviorism.

I would probably have a lot less trouble learning that a good friend was a cannibal than I would to learn that he or she was a fan of B. F. Skinner. Actually, that happened recently and I'm still trying to deal with it.

Clarification: by behaviorism, I don't mean attempting to study behavior in measurable ways. That's fine. I mean metaphysical behaviorism, where people pretend that there's no such thing as conscious or unconscious mental activity and that we're all balls of stimulus response conditioning.

I remember some professors ridiculing the idea of consciousness, mind, and similar ideas and thinking "These people are idiots."

It seems to me the height of loopiness for beings who are only aware of the world through their own consciousness to deny that it exists. And I think there's something evil about reductionism, the attempt to reduce the complexity of human life to any simple deterministic factor, whether it's conditioning, genes, economics, "rational choice," etc. We're way too messy for that. Sometimes I wish we weren't.

As Dmitri Karamazov said in Dostoevsky's classic novel,

Yes, man is broad, too broad. I’d have him narrower. The devil knows what to make of it!

That was the end of my psych major.

Fortunately, it appears that the discipline has recovered from this mental disorder, thanks in part to research from many quarters, including brain science, evolution, ethology, etc., not to mention common sense.

SHOCKING IRAQ. Here's a video segment of Keith Olbermann discussing the application of the "shock doctrine" in Iraq with Naomi Klein.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS. Corporate lobbyists, nervous about 2008, are pressing to grab all they can in the months ahead.

MINE SAFETY then and now, courtesy of the Gazette's Ken Ward.

TWISTS AND TURNS. There have been some strange developments in the Megan Williams case lately. First, the WV Attorney General Darrell McGraw's office declined a request of the Logan County prosecutor to offer an opinion on pressing hate crimes charges in the case. Then the AG expressed a desire to take over the the case. Both moves were not well received by prosecutor Brian Abraham.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CONTAINING A THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE ON GRATITUDE

Caption: Seamus McGoogle is overcome with gratitude.

Since Thanksgiving is coming up, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is gratitude.

Sneak preview: El Cabrero is all for it. Not just for all the little kindnesses people do to each other all the time, but also for all the times when things are actually good or at least not as terrible as they could be.

This is a truth worthy of consideration: everything is not all bad all the time. For which I am profoundly grateful.

While I probably wouldn't pass too many tests of theological orthodoxy, I totally down with St. Thomas Aquinas on this one: ingratitude is a sin. To be exact, the Angelic Doctor said that

a debt of gratitude is a moral debt required by virtue. Now a thing is a sin from the fact of its being contrary to virtue. Wherefore it is evident that every ingratitude is a sin.

The same point was also elaborated by the character Shug in Alice Walker's The Color Purple:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

Next time: what the ungrateful get in Dante's Inferno.

REHAB, POSTMODERN STYLE. Holy sign of the times, Batman. In S. Korea, there's a boot camp for people addicted to cyberspace. El Cabrero is a collector of postmodern moments and this is one of the best.

THAT'S ENOUGH! Here's another gem by Perry Mann, my favorite WV op-ed writer, on knowing when enough is enough.

MINE DISASTERS, old and new.

SPEAKING OF DISASTERS, ignoring climate change could be the biggest ever.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. Here's coverage of a local event at WV State University in support of stronger hate crime laws.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A FREE SOUL IN PRISON

Photo credit: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, by way of the Library of Congress.

Welcome to the last day of Eugene Debs Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

Despite his status as a national spokesman for labor and the socialist movement (not to mention a perennial candidate) Debs did not aspire to be a conventional "leader" but rather encouraged ordinary people to take the lead:

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else would lead you out. YOU MUST use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourselves out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads, and your hands.

His biggest brush with the Powers that Were came in the wake of the First World War, which many socialists and others believed was a disastrous slaughter driven by imperialism--a view that many later mainstream historians came to endorse.

In a famous 1918 anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, he said:

...that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.

Making an ant-war speech at that time carried considerable risks given repressive wartime legislation. He noted that

...it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world... I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.

(Golly, it's a good thing we don't have to worry about restrictions on liberty during wartime any more, isn't it?)

Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1919 for that speech. Never one to pass on a chance to make a statement, he saved some of his best for the trial. This is what he told the judge during his sentencing hearing:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs eventually had his sentence commuted by Republican President Warren G. Harding in 1921 after serving time in Moundsville, WV and the federal prison in Atlanta. He lived until 1926, but was unable to regain his own vitality or that of the movement he dedicated his life to serve.

Wartime repression dealt organizations like the Socialist Party and the IWW a blow from which they never recovered. In addition to persecution and defection, a rival communist movement sprang up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, about which the staunchly democratic Debs became more and more critical.

While in some respects the ending was tragic, Debs remains an inspirational figure for his courage and idealism. And indirectly, many of the reforms he and his comrades supported were eventually enacted into legislation. Finally, he inspired the next generation, including such labor leaders as WV's own Reuther brothers.

Requiescat in pace.

PROTESTING THE NLRB. El Cabrero was in DC this week and drove by one of the protests against the Bush National Labor Relations Board described here. I wanted to hop out and join them.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Here's the latest.

DINOSAUR UPDATE. They found a new one that ate like a cow.

IT'S NOT JUST US. It looks like cockroaches also have conformity and peer pressure issues.

CENSORSHIP UPDATE. It looks like Pat Conroy's novel Beach Music has survived an attempt of censorship at Nitro High School. I'm sure there is gnashing of teeth in the domestic Taliban camp.

MORE ON ARCHIVEGATE, the WV tempest about the bizarre and unjust firing of a state archivist and future plans for the state archive can be found at the Uberblog of WV news, Lincoln Walks at Midnight. A protest is planned for today.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TRAGIC OPTIMISM

Photo credit: This photo of Auschwitz is by betauser courtesy of everystockphoto.com.

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is some reflections on Victor Frankl's classic book, Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl, who lived until 1997, lost most of his family in the Holocaust and barely survived the concentration camps himself.

In this his most popular book, he recounts his experiences and observations and explains his view of psychology, which he called logotherapy from the Greek words for reason and healing.

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

The last section of his book contains a little gem of an essay called "The Case for a Tragic Optimism." He maintains that it is possible to say yes to life in spite of its "tragic triad" of pain, guilt and death, all of which are pretty impossible bullets to dodge in this life.

He argues that

life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are the most miserable.

And by optimism, he means making the best of whatever the situation might be and however bad it might be. He believed that people had the potential for dealing with the tragic triad by

(1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.

Each of these approaches offers a sense of meaning. Specifically, he mentions three ways of arriving at meaning in life. One is by creating or accomplishing something. Another is by "experiencing something or encountering someone," i.e. through love and relationship. And the other is by facing hopeless situations with courage and dignity:

even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by doing so change himself.

Frankl also suggests that the past should be seen not as something that is hopelessly lost but rather as a source of consolation:

In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.

Check it out--it's worth it.

OPPOSITION TO WAR AT ALL TIME HIGH (BOTH THIS WAR AND THE NEXT ONE). From CNN:

Opposition to the war in Iraq has reached an all-time high, according to the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Thursday morning.

Support for the war in Iraq has dropped to 31 percent, and the 68 percent who oppose the war is a new record, up slightly from last month. The last time a majority supported the war was in 2003, when 54 percent answered affirmatively...

But wait, there's more:

The public also opposes U.S. military action against Iran. Sixty-three percent oppose air strikes on Iran, while 73 percent oppose using ground troops as well as air strikes in that country.

Seventy percent said they oppose any military strike on Iran, slightly higher than a 2005 number of 66 percent but significantly higher than 2002's 23 percent.

SPEAKING OF PUBLIC OPINION, a new survey shows that more Americans are interested in ending poverty and hunger.

NEW SHADE OF GREEN. Here's an interesting item from The Nation about the growing link between practical environmentalism and social justice groups.

CATCHY TITLE. El Cabrero had trouble passing up an article with the title "Torture: the New Abortion." Maybe you will too.

UPDATE ON THE MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. The prosecutor in Logan County is requesting a hearing to appoint a guardian ad litem for Megan Williams.

EXERCISE YOUR BRAIN with crossword puzzles? According to this op-ed, you may do even better by going to the gym or out for a jog. (Reading Goat Rope, however, has been proven improve just about everything.)

THIS JUST IN: Japanese scientists have designed a mouse that isn't afraid of cats.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GONNA CHANGE MY WAY OF THINKING

Photo credit: Image courtesy of everystockphoto.com.

The theme for this week's Goat Rope is the late Viennese physician and psychologist Victor Frankl's classic work Man's Search for Meaning, which describes his experiences in several concentration camps in the Nazi era and the lessons he learned from them. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

According to Frankl, the ordeal suffered by the inmates of the concentration camps forced a change in thinking:

What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life--daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

That's a thought.

COAL CHINA STYLE. There's been a lot of local stuff about China and coal in the wake of WV Gov. Joe Manchin's visit there. This was interesting.

DEADLIEST YEAR. While the Bush administration keeps chanting its the-surge-is-working mantra, 2007 is already the deadliest year for US troops in Iraq.

LABOR ON THE WAR. The AFLCIO has taken a strong stand against the Iraq war. For more, check here.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE: here's WV Public Radio on Saturday's March and here's post-march coverage from the Gazette.

RX=OD. West Virginia Public Radio and the Charleston Gazette have teamed up to cover some bad news for WV: we lead the nation in drug overdoses and prescription drugs are a main culprit. This is part of an ongoing series so check back at Public Radio and the Gazette for more.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HOWS AND WHYS

Caption: Auschwitz. Photo credit: Photo by betauser courtesy of everystockphoto.com.

Recently I renewed my acquaintance with a classic book, Man's Search for Meaning by Dr. Victor Frankl (1905-1997). The book is his account both of his experiences as an inmate of Auschwitz and other concentration camps in the Third Reich era and of his psychological theories. It has had a huge impact, with millions of copies in print.

Frankl's book contains his ordeal and that of many others in the most extreme and dehumanizing conditions as well as his insights into how to remain human in spite of it all. Fortunately, one doesn't have to be in an extreme situation to benefit from his basic ideas.

Prior to his imprisonment, Frankl was a Viennese physician and psychologist who had me Freud and Adler. In 1942, Frankl, his wife, and parents were deported to Thereisenstadt, where, in spite of everything, he gave lectures on mental health and related topics. He was later shipped to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Turkheim.

Frankl lost almost his entire family in the Holocaust, with the exception of a sister who escaped to Australia.

After the war, he resumed his practice in Vienna, where he developed his insights into a method he called logotherapy, from the Greek words for reason and healing.

In a very real sense, his work was a practical commentary on a line from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols:

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

About which more tomorrow...

HEALTH CARE BLUES. According to Business Week, a new survey shows that more Americans want a total overhaul of the health care system than do citizens of six other industrialized nations.

FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS...NOT. Also from Business Week, this interesting article shows that big financial institutions are still collecting from consumers whose debts were supposedly cancelled by bankruptcy.

MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH. Here's Charleston Gazette coverage for a march organized by Black Lawyers for Justice yesterday. The march was peaceful, although name-calling continued. A number of local organizations, including branches of the NAACP, the Charleston Black Ministerial Alliance, the Logan County Improvement League, and West Virginians United for Social and Economic Justice did not support the event, in part due to concerns about its possible impact on the case against her alleged attackers.

WHAT WOULD SUSTAINABILITY LOOK LIKE? Here's a suggestion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A "GHOST" STORY?

Today is the last day of Haint Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

Haint, by the way, is Appalachian for that which haunts. In addition to comments on current events, posts this week have deal with the belief in ghosts, the allure of "haunted" or sacred places, the feeling of weirdness, and the Day of the Dead. It seemed a fitting theme for Halloween.

El Cabrero has refrained from taking a position on the existence or non-existence of such things but I will tell about something that happened to me.

A dear friend and co-worker of mine died a little over two years ago. We fought a lot of battles together and did pretty good for a while there. But what I most miss were our conversations. When not in predatory mode, we talked about all kinds of things: life, literature, philosophy, religion, science, you name it.

One thing we disagreed about was death and everything after. She tended to think it was the end and I was never able to convince myself that was the case. Not that I was particularly happy about that; at times, total extinction sounds pretty good to me.

A while after her death from a debilitating and cruel disease, I had a strange experience. I was not asleep but not completely awake, in a kind of liminal state between the two. I had the clear and unmistakable experience of her passing right through my core. It was like a very warm greeting. There was nothing visual or auditory about it, but as far as I'm concerned it was her and it was good.

Was it a sleeping or waking dream or an example of wish fulfillment? My official statement is the same as Hamlet's:

"O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound."

DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THE WEATHER. A powerful coalition of religious groups, including evangelicals, is pressing congress to take action on climate change.

HEALTH CARE. Here's a NY Times editorial stating the obvious: we need universal health care. Note: stating the obvious is a virtue these days.

MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH UPDATE. The Student Government Association at WV State University plans an anti-hate rally for Nov. 17. The student group joined the NAACP, Black Ministerial Alliance, West Virginians United for Social and Economic Justice, the Logan County Improvement League and others in not endorsing a Nov. 3 march organized by out of state groups. Here's more.

Meanwhile, the Logan County prosecutor has urged Williams to refrain from making public statements as it may damage the case, as the AP reports.

Here's the latest on the march. And here's background on hate crimes law from the AP.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DAY OF THE DEAD

Welcome to Goat Rope's official Haint Week. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

"Haint" is Appalachian for that which haunts, which is a pretty good theme for Halloween week.

A Mexican custom of which El Cabrero is a big fan of is the Day of the Dead, which corresponds with All Saints Day in the Church calendar. Halloween, you recall, is All-Hallows-Eve or the day before. Similar customs are observed elsewhere, but it is the official Goat Rope verdict that this is the coolest.

The celebration likely has pre-Christian roots. During the Aztec month of Miccailhuitonli (say that 10 times while spinning around), there was a festival presided over by the "Lady of the Dead" which was dedicated both to children and the dead. Originally, this was celebrated in the summer, but there was an understandable post-colonial shift.

Now the festivities usually continue for the first two days of November and include acts that symbolically welcome the dead back into their homes and visiting family graves. There's special food including "pan de muerto" or bread of the dead. Family altars and gravesides are decorated with religious objects and symbolic offerings of food flowers and even alcohol and cigarettes.

I think the basic idea is right on, i.e. that the living and the dead are connected. That idea is enshrined in the ancient creeds of Christianity, which speak of "the communion of saints."

Maybe that's because the dead aren't quite as dead as we tend to think or the living aren't as alive as we tend to think. I'll leave that to the reader's discretion...

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN... Here's a sobering item on climate change and global warming.

NO FEAR? Consider reconsidering.

A FAIR DAY'S WORK FOR--WHAT? Here's a call for decent wages and conditions for all.

BOOK BATTLES. The recent efforts by some Kanawha County parents to ban Pat Conroy's novels from AP English classes reminds some folks of an epic book battle that took place more than 30 years ago.

MINE SAFETY LEGISLATION MOVES IN US HOUSE. A House panel approved stronger mine safety measures, a step that the industry and Bush administration will oppose.

MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH UPDATE. Here's the Daily Mail interviewing the Rev. Matthew Watts, a member of the Charleston Ministerial Alliance, about a march planned for this Sunday by out of state groups. Several WV groups have declined to support the event.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED