Random observations

Here are a few:

*It's a bit ironic that while congress is finally talking about dealing with mass incarceration, Democratic leadership is MIA.

*Someone else dropped the F-bomb.

*Meanwhile, back at the state capitol, the wrecking crew still hasn't come up with a budget even though we're less than a month from a government shutdown. This Gazette editorial is a day or so old but it sums things up pretty well. And this op-ed doesn't pull any punches.

*Urgent Neanderthal update here.

Another plus

Believe it or not, there are a lot of good things going on in West Virginia (he said, to reassure himself). One of them is the growth of the local food movement and the spread of community gardens and farmers' markets.

Disclosure: we have a garden and I actually planted a good bit of it and it actually grew, but working in it is not my favorite thing, I'm sad to say. I like them better conceptually than when you have to do weeding.

Anyhow, this story from WV Public Broadcasting tells how some folks in Charleston are using community gardens built on vacant lots on the West Side to build their entrepreneurial skills.

I'm all for that and wish them well. But based on my experience at Goat Rope Farm, I wouldn't advise anybody to quit their day job.

YOU KNOW IT. If there's a news story about Neanderthals, you'll find it here.

All that from a toe

You can always count on Goat Rope for the latest developments in Icelandic elves, zombies, dinosaurs, Neanderthals, and such. Oh yeah, and sometimes social justice stuff.

But let's get back to Neanderthals. Another story that broke over the holidays was one about sequencing the entire Neanderthal genome from a toe bone of a female that lived around 130,000 years ago.

This specimen revealed a lot of in-breeding but also a lot of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans and another early group called Denisovans. It's not clear whether the inbreeding was common to all Neanderthals or just this batch from Siberia.

As for the inter-breeding....how can I say this? Let me just say that assuming I was younger and single, I think I'd have to be pretty anxious for a date to ask a Neanderthal out.

Now, if they'd just sequence the Icelandic elf genome...

JUST ONE OTHER LINK and, this being Friday, it's Krugman on the economy of fear.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The new face of coal?

For 10 years or more, Don Blankenship was, or tried to be, the face of West Virginia's coal industry.  It looks like there may be a new contender for that gig. I was kind of hoping the vacancy would last longer.

WOULD THAT IT WERE SO. This writer predicts that 2014 will be a year of economic populism. I'm not sure I'm that optimistic.

LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD? Neanderthals didn't.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A sampler

Here are a few items that caught my eye today...

A PLACE AT THE TABLE. Lately I've blogged several times about WV's new law that aims to ensure nutritious meals to all state schoolchildren. Here's the website about a new film on food insecurity that helped nudge the state legislature along. The movie should be widely available soon and is being shown in some theaters. It's by some of the same folks who made Food Inc., which is really worth seeing if you haven't yet.

ALL IN A CHART. Here's a look at what's messed up about our tax system.

URGENT NEANDERTHAL BREASTFEEDING UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A wart and a wen

This time of year is the political equivalent of deer season in West Virginia. During this busy time, this blog has been focusing on the life and work of 19th century American literary giant Ralph Waldo Emerson. At the moment, the focus is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which was a bit over the top for his initial audience.

To tell the truth, parts of it are over the top for me. Although I am no pillar of ecclesiastical conformity, I do have a moments of orthodoxy and some of Emerson's glib delusions of spiritual grandeur seem pretty loopy to me.

One such idea that I have always had trouble with is the idea that God dwells within us. Emerson loved that kind of thing, as expressed in statements like this one:

That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever.

 To which I am tempted to reply, we are warts and wens, Ralph. Suck it up.

UNIONS FOR THE ARTSY? Why not?

NEANDERTHALS AND US. Apparently Neanderthal brains were more about things like vision than social networking. I guess this means they weren't big Facebook users.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

An ancient occupation

 Despite the fact that history is a pretty bloody affair, there have been plenty of examples of successful nonviolent action from ancient times on.

 As I mentioned earlier, I'm taking another swim through Plutarch's Lives, which recounts popular biographies (rich in legend) of prominent ancient Greeks and Romans. Currently, I'm on the life of the Roman general and aristocrat Coriolanus, which became the basis of Shakespeare's play of the same name and a recent movie version I haven't got around to watching yet.

 According to Plutarch, in the early days of the Roman Republic, somewhere around the 5th century BC, the lower classes were severely exploited by the elite, with debt being a major issue (good thing that never happens any more, huh?). The poor responded by engaging in what may well be history's first sit down strike...or, if you prefer, occupation:

...the poor commonalty, therefore, perceiving there was likely to be no redress of their grievances, on a sudden collected in a body, and, encouraging each other in their resolution, forsook the city with one accord, and seizing the hill which is now called the Holy Mount, sat down by the river Anio, without committing any sort of violence or seditious outrage, but merely exclaiming, as they went along, that they had this long time past been, in fact expelled and excluded from the city by the cruelty of the rich; that Italy would everywhere afford them the benefit of air and water and a place of burial, which was all they could expect in the city, unless it were, perhaps, the privilege of being wounded and killed in time of war for the defence of their creditors.

Since the aristocrats needed the lower classes both for work and war, serious negotiations ensued which resulted in the creation of the office of tribunes or elected officials to serve as "protectors for those in need of succor."

Not too shabby. We might need to dust that one off before its over with.

 (Coriolanus himself, by the way, was a bit of a jerk to the poor, which resulted in his own undoing.)

DID NEANDERTHALS INVENT PAINTING? Maybe.

WANT TO OWN A VINTAGE VAMPIRE SLAYING KIT? Here's your chance.

THE SCIENCE ON CAT PEOPLE AND DOG PEOPLE discussed here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Causes and reasons

I've frequently heard people say "everything happens for a reason." Often when people say this, they seem to imply that there is a greater purpose behind apparently unrelated events.

It would be more accurate to say that everything happens due to causes, although we are not always able to ferret out what the causes are. Still, we seem hard-wired to attribute our experiences to conscious, purposeful agents or beings that are acting in some way.

(This might explain why I attribute deliberate evil intentions to a machine when it doesn't act the way I want it to. Or why some winters--like this one so far--seem to have nasty personalities.)

Evolutionary psychologists believe that this is an adaptation that has helped us survive. Among early humans and our non-human ancestors, thinking that a predator might be behind an unexpected sound would prompt defensive actions that could save a life. This tendency is referred to as agency detection.

Often we're wrong in attributing agency to things that just happen, but in evolutionary terms the consequences of a false positive are not as bad as that of a false negative. Being mistaken in trying to escape an imagined tiger isn't as costly as not trying to escape from a real one.

Some evolutionary psychologists believe that agency detection is behind belief in supernatural beings when things go bump in the night or when we have good or bad experiences. Overly active agency detection can manifest itself in paranoia or seeing conspiracies behind every that that happens.

It seems that humans are pattern seeking animals. And if we look for a pattern, we'll probably find one, whether it makes sense or not. The universe probably isn't personally out to get us and probably won't go out of its way to do us special favors either, but sometimes we see things that way.

TAXING AND SPENDING. Here is a look at the biggest right wing untruths about this perennially favorite political topic.

NOT TERRIBLY STIMULATING. Here's a pessimistic assessment of President Obama's deal with congressional Republicans on tax cuts and unemployment.

ENDING HOMELESSNESS. Here's an interesting approach that seems to be working.

OH GOOD. Forty percent of Americans believe that humans were created 10,000 or so years ago. To tell the truth, I thought it would be more.

COLD CASE. Scientists have found the remains of a 50,000 year old Neanderthal family in Spain that appears to have been the victims of cannibalism.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL

Of gardens, winter, death and life

"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Those lines from the Gospel of John have been on my mind this weekend, as four generations of my family headed to Columbus for the funeral of my favorite aunt.



(And, yes, we did hit a White Castle on the way home.)




Only a week or so before, I planted garlic in our garden. The idea that anything put under the ground in such wicked weather could sprout, grow and thrive months later seems impossible, but it happens.

I broke up the ground with a spading fork, pushed garlic cloves into the dirt with freezing fingers and covered it liberally with old hay and goat manure. Unless something goes wrong, new life will emerge from dirt and decay.

When I try to think in a purely rational way about what happens to us after the Big Checkout, I've always found it as hard to believe that nothing comes after it as it is to believe that anything comes after it.

In the absence of knowing, I'll stick with Bruce: "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact/but maybe everything that dies some day comes back."

ZOMBIE ECONOMICS. Bad ideas are hard to kill.

LEFT BEHIND. Here's a profile from the Charleston Gazette of a miner who died in Massey's Upper Big Branch mine and the widow he left behind.

NO SHOW. WV's newest senator ducked out of controversial votes on the DREAM Act and repealing don't ask/don't tell.

NEANDERTHALS apparently used human bones as tools.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

About that lion

Ask this guy.

I've always loved philosophy, but there are certain schools of it that do nothing for me. Among these are logical positivism, analytical philosophy and schools that focus on things like grammar and language. Life's too short.

One person who has connections to those schools enjoys a huge international following: Ludwig Wittgenstein. I don't get the attraction.

A while back, someone loaned me a copy of what many people consider to be his masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations. I dutifully waded through it in hopes of changing my mind. It didn't happen, although there were a few good lines here and there.

I'm about to take issue with one of the most famous of those. In that book, Wittgenstein said, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." That might be true of things like sea cucumbers, but lions are mammals and we share a lot of similarities in the brain with them, especially in those regions of the brain that have to do with emotions.

I don't think that lions particularly need to talk, although one could argue that they already do non-verbally. But if they did, I think it would be pretty clear. I also have a feeling that most of what they would say would take the form of commands and declarative statements.

They probably wouldn't ask a lot of questions. Or need to.

CUTTING ALONE WON'T DO IT. People concerned about deficits would do well to think less about across the board cuts than about promoting economic growth, according to this analysis in the NY Times.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. Here's an interesting twist in the Massey mine disaster investigation.

PREJUDICE. Scientific research suggests it may be more ingrained than we like to think, but there are ways of countering it.

WANT TO BE HAPPIER? Try focusing. Wandering minds apparently gather negative thoughts.

MORE ON THOSE NEANDERTHALS. Maybe the human edge over our Neanderthal cousins had something to do with our slow growth to maturity.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

We are not amused

A while back I listened to an interesting series of lectures from The Modern Scholar series on literary journalism, or what used to be called "the new journalism." Some of the names associated with it are people like Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese et al.

I decided to give Thompson's famous Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream a try. It was interesting in the same way that one has trouble not looking at a car wreck, only much creepier.

It mostly consisted of two grown men acting worse than nightmare teenagers, doing such charming things as operating motor vehicles on public roads while under the influence of every imaginable drug, trashing things, and terrorizing waitresses and hotel maids.

I don't get it. Maybe I missed something. But if one of the themes of the book involves wondering what became of the American dream, maybe narcissistic and self indulgent behavior like that had something to do with it.

SIDELINED. Here's a look at long term unemployment in the wake of the Great Recession.

ONE TO WATCH, METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING. NPR is beginning a new series this week on the state of the American middle class.

MORE JOBS, LESS WAR is an approach to the economy recommended here.

ANNALS OF COMPASSION. It looks like Neanderthals had it before we did.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Survival of the what-est?

Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." He doesn't look all that fit to me.

It is a great irony of contemporary politics that social Darwinism is alive and well amongst political conservatives who believe in a literal six day creation.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Darwin's ideas--or what people thought were Darwin's ideas--were first seized upon by people on the political right. Such people were quick to draw public policy conclusions from the "survival of the fittest."

As the idea was popularly conceived, evolution worked for the good of all--or at least all the survivors--by weeding out the weak. Therefore, any aid to people who were poor or otherwise disadvantaged was counter-evolutionary.

What is missing from this picture is the fact that one thing that has enabled humans to survive and thrive is our tendency to care for the sick and weak. After all, every human is born pretty helpless and stays that way for several years. Women in or near childbirth are pretty much out of the game and anyone at any time may become sick or injured and require the help of others.

There is even some interesting archaeological evidence along this line from our human ancestors. A severely deformed skull of someone at least five years of age was found dating back to around 530,000 years ago. This finding suggests that early humans at least some of the time cared for the disabled members of their group despite deformities.

This suggests that at least some early or pre-humans knew some things that some modern humans have forgotten.

SPEAKING OF EVOLUTION AGAIN, one researcher thinks our Neanderthal cousins were smarter than generally thought.

MILESTONE. Today marks six months since the passage of health care reform. Some key changes kick in today.

UNEMPLOYMENT. West Virginia's unemployment insurance system could avoid going broke by making key reforms.

TALKING REDNECK. Here's an excerpt from Joe Bageant's new book about the white underclass.

REALLY NOT WANTING TO TALK. Massey Energy officials have filed suit to keep from being interviewed in the Upper Big Branch disaster investigation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This could explain a thing or two

A new genetic and statistical study suggests that some early humans and Neanderthals mated after all, something that had previously been doubted. The New York Times reports that the team conducting research into the Neanderthal genome concluded that "concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals."

GOING LOCAL. Re-booting local economies could make us less lonely.

A FALSE CHOICE. AFLCIO president Rich Trumka told attendees at a Green Jobs/Good Jobs conference that we need both now.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Round about the cauldron go

Painting by William Rimmer by way of Wikipedia.

I've always subscribed to the view that a mind is a terrible thing not to mess with--especially a young one. This was inherited from my late father, who read a lot of Poe to me when I was a little kid, scaring the bejesus out of me to my immense delight.

When my turn came, I attempted to pass on that tradition by reading aloud and making my kids listen to all kinds of things that are not standard kiddie fair. Depending on their age, these have included things like the poetry of William Blake and Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, about which they said things like, "Let me get this straight: this guy just got turned into a giant bug and he's worried about being late for work?"

Shakespeare found its way into the unofficial curriculum by means of a comic book full text edition of Macbeth. Both kids were fond of it, but it was a particular favorite of my oldest, who had large sections of it memorized at an early age. The witches of course were a particular favorite, but she also liked things like "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."

There is something endearing about hearing a little kid go around babbling "Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed..."

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. Here's more from the AFLCIO blog on the need for jobs and what the US Senate can do about it.

ARE YOU FEELING APOCALYPTIC? Lots of people are.

NEANDERTHALS may have been smarter (and more artistic) than we thought.

URGENT BIG SPIDER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

When a god comes to town, be nice

Modern Chinese sculpture of Dionysus. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

"...he will know too late Dionysus, god most benevolent to mortals, yet if his blessing is scorned into curse, god of inhuman terror."--the Bacchae

Goat Rope's series on Everything You Always Wanted to Know (or not) about Greek Tragedy continues. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts. If you're just interested in links and comments about current events, scroll on down.

Earlier posts in the week looked at the background of tragedy and Dionysus, the god at whose festival these were performed. It only seems fitting to start looking at specific tragedies with one in which he has the starring role. That would be the Bacchae, which may have been the last play written by Euripides, the most recent of the three tragedians whose work survives.

In it, Dionysus is newly arrived from Asia to Thebes, the home of his mother Semele. The former king of Thebes was Kadmos, Dionysus' grandfather, who was pious enough to recognize that Zeus was the new god's father and to honor his mother with a shrine. Semele's sisters, however, disbelieve and have spread rumors that his father was human.

The new ruler of Thebes is Kadmos' grandson Pentheus, who is...well...a bit of a wanker: young and arrogant, he is dismissive of the new cult and prepared to suppress it.

Dionysus, looking like a dissolute and androgynous youth, strikes the women of Thebes with his divine mania. They abandon their homes and revel in the mountains, tearing calves to pieces in their frenzy. Pentheus tries to arrest the youth, but you can't arrest a god. The city is destroyed by an earthquake. Not able to take a hint, Pentheus threatens to send soldiers to suppress the revelers.

Still, he kind of wants to watch. Dionysus tempts him by offering to lead him to a safe place to view the scene. The wild women or maenads, lead by his mother Agave, see him and think he is a mountain lion. They tear him to pieces in their mania and triumphantly bring the remains back to the city in triumph. Only when the madness fades does she realize what she has done.

"Humility and respect for the gods is the only wisdom. Yes, and for us mortals, the only weapon in hand--if only we used it."

GOOD LOOKS can boost your paycheck.

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. This is the article about the mismatch between new jobs and workers seeking work that I meant to link yesterday.

NEANDERTHALS may have been pretty smart after all.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Theory wars

The Greek god Hermes, presumably the patron of hermeneutics. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero did not realize it at the time, but apparently a tempest raged in academic teacups in the 1980s and 1990s about literary theory of all things. It even had political overtones, as long as you strip the word "political" of most practical meanings.

And, while partisans marched on the English department, the right wing was taking over the country. Nice job, guys.

Anyhow, for a hoot I went on a jag of reading about literary theory a few years back. Aside from traditional, Marxist, and Freudian schools of interpretation, there was all kinds of wild stuff. There was structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, semiotics, deconstructionism, post-colonial criticism, identity-based theories, cultural studies, hermeneutics and more. I even tried reading a little Derrida.

It was kind of fun, as long as you treated it like science fiction.

Some "texts" were found guilty of things like logo-centrism and, God forbid, phallo-logo-centrism. It is a truth universally acknowledged that when people talk about works of literature as texts, the better part of valor is to retreat immediately.

I think it worked like this. Late at night the literary police would pound on the door of a Jane Austen novel. The suspect would be interrogated and tortured until its author was convicted of not being an anti-imperialist revolutionary.

Well, no $%*#. I don't think there were any anti-imperialist training camps open to English women circa 1815.

Anyhow, I found the world of literary theory a nice place to visit but no place to stay. The stories, however remain.

I PREFER COFFEE TO TEA, CONTINUED. Here's an analysis of the astroturf tea party tendency.

UNEMPLOYMENT. Some are hit harder than others these days.

INEXCUSABLE. Here's the latest court decision on the 2006 Aracoma mine fire which resulted in two fatalities at this Massey Energy subsidiary.

CELEBRATE (NEANDERTHAL) DIVERSITY. There may have been several sub-groups of them.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fudoshin

This pyramid at Teotihuacan has some fudoshin going on. It would be kind of hard to turn it over.

Today is the final day of Cool Japanese Words Week at Goat Rope. Each day has looked at a word or concept from the martial arts and/or Zen tradition that may be of interest to people who want to make the world less nasty. You'll also find news and links about current events.

Today's word is...fudoshin (rhymes with judo shin), which means "immovable mind."

As you might expect by now, the idea needs some unpacking. It does not mean dogmatism, rigid thinking or fixed ideas. Instead it implies a rooted mental state or level of determination as well as equanimity. Fudoshin in that sense is a necessity for anyone committed to working to improve things over the long haul.

In karate there is a posture called fudo dachi or immovable stance. It looks like a cross between a horse stance and a forward stance and has a low center of gravity. Things and/or people with high centers of gravity are easy to trip, throw or turn over.

Think of the song "We Shall Not be Moved."

I had a fudoshin moment a few years ago when I got summoned to the office of a high state official who was upset about things I'd written in newspaper columns about the shabby way poor people had been treated at the time. I'm not sure what the intent was, other than to "get my mind right" a la Cool Hand Luke. When I got the call, I agreed to go and was very polite, but all the while I was thinking, "Fudoshin, dudes. Deal with it."

In looking around to see what others have written about fudoshin, I found a pretty good summary in wikipedia. I'm not sure whether it's a quotation from another source or one written for the entry, but it works for me:

A spirit of unshakable calm and determination,
courage without recklessness,
rooted stability in both mental and physical realms.
Like a willow tree,
powerful roots deep in the ground
and a soft, yielding resistance against
the winds that blow through it.

WHAT PASSED. Here are some key ingredients of the economic recovery package agreed to by the conference committee. A vote in the House is likely today, with the Senate to follow possibly this weekend. While the bill isn't perfect, as Paul Krugman points out here, there are lots of good things in there and some bad things are taken out.

Some wheeling and dealing continued after the agreement had been reached. Final votes in both houses may occur today.

THE SHOCKING TRUTH. Here's an account of a revisitation of Milgram's famous experiment on obedience to authority.

TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO REMEMBER. Science finds a strong link between sleep and memory.

URGENT NEANDERTHAL UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ENTERTAINING THE CIVILIANS

Athena telling Diomedes to chill out. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The Goat Rope series on the Odyssey of Homer continues, along with links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

It is a fact of life that war has for thousands of years been a kind of entertainment, particularly for those not engaged in it at the time. This is also true when Odysseus finally makes it to his next-to-the-last stop on his lengthy journey home from the Trojan War.

He is hosted, pretty graciously, by the prosperous and peaceful Phaeacians. His hosts even offer games in his honor, although not those involving the fighting arts. As his host the ruler Alcinous put it,

We're hardly world-class boxers or wrestlers, I admit,
but we can race like the wind, we're champion sailors too,
and always dear to our hearts, the feast, the lyre and dance
and changes of fresh clothes, our warm baths and beds.

While they're not much for fighting, they love hearing about it. The blind bard Demodocus (see yesterday's post) enthralls his listeners, although his all-too-realistic songs of the Trojan War cause cause the battle-weary Odysseus to hide his face and cry.

As Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, put it,

The gulf between Odysseus and his civilian hosts is visible in their drastically different responses to the songs of Demodocus. This bard is the genuine article--the Muse whispers the truth of the war at Troy in his ear when he composes his songs. His songs, narrative poems like the Iliad, reduce Odysseus to tears, which he tries to hide. Afterward he proclaims that Demodocus sings with the truth of someone who was there himself. The Phaeacian civilians love these epic poems of war...--along with the harper's dance music and his bedroom farces...It's all the same to them. It's all entertainment. But for Odysseus, the truth-filled stories of the Trojan War open the gates of grief.

The Phaeacians aren't bad people. They just don't get it. Shay uses an example from the present to make his point:

Picture this scene: A Vietnam combat veteran goes to a family wedding some ten years after his service. (Odysseus is ten years out from Troy.) The band plays a Jimi Hendrix piece that reminds him of a dead friend, blindsiding him with emotion. He tries to conceal his tears, but a rich relative notices and says, "Why aren't you over that Vietnam stuff yet?..."

The song of Demodocus causes Odysseus to reveal himself and he finally begins to tell his own tale of the long way home. About which more tomorrow.

SPEAKING OF HOMER, here's an item on the evolutionary psychology of the Iliad and one on its use of humor.

POVERTY DAY. Yesterday the Census Bureau released information on poverty, income and health coverage for 2000. Here's some commentary by Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, along with a link to the Census data and here's an analysis of state data from the WV Center on Budget and Policy.

Short version of the data: poverty didn't change much. There was a small increase in median incomes and a small drop in the number of people without health coverage--BUT, and this is a big but--the numbers don't reflect the effects of the current recession. Also, if 2007 was the peak year of the economic expansion, the health care and poverty numbers are still worse than those of 2000.

AN ECONOMY FOR EVERYBODY? Three out of four Americans think the economy is getting worse. Here are some options for getting there.

MONKEY EMPATHY. Capuchin monkeys enjoy giving to other monkeys. Could it be the monastic influence?

URGENT NEANDERTHAL UPDATE. They might have been smarter than we thought.

MEDICAID. West Virginia's redesigned Medicaid program, called Mountain Health Choices, continues to be controversial. This Gazette article discusses a survey that showed most people in the program don't understand the two-tiered program, which offers a Basic and Enhanced set of benefits. Many people wind up in the basic program, which limits services and prescriptions, by default.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FAMILY VALUES, OLYMPIC STYLE

Zeus and Hera in a less rocky moment, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme lately is the Odyssey of Homer, but you'll also find links and comments about current events.

Several Olympic gods are major characters in this story so it might be time to meet the family, starting with the older generation and the "royal family."

At the pinnacle of power is the sky god Zeus, who is associated with the thunderbolt and also the guardian of oaths and the laws of hospitality. He is married to his sister Hera, who gets the credit (or blame) for having invented that institution. The marriage is a bit rocky given Zeus' many infidelities with other goddesses and humans.

Zeus and Hera have two children, Ares, the despised god of war and Hephaestus, the lame god of the forge. He got that way after his parents flicked him off Olympus and he fell to earth. A master craftsman, he is known to use the tools of technology to even the score.

Hephaestus is married to "laughter loving Aphrodite," goddess of love and sexual desire, who has an ongoing fling with Ares (love and war--what can you say?) In Homer, she is referred to as Zeus' daughter although according to Hesiod she is older than the Olympic gods, having arise from the foam of the sea where the titan Kronos threw testicles of Uranus after castrating him. Kronos was in time overthrown by Zeus.

Intergenerational conflict seems to be an issue in this family...

Zeus shares dominion with two of his brothers. Poseidon is the god of the sea and is associated with earthquakes. He is extremely quarrelsome and unpredictable and is known to hold grudges--such as the one against Odysseus after the latter blinds his son Polyphemus the cyclops. Hades is god of the dead and the underworld. Theoretically, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades share the earth in common but Zeus is clearly the main dude.

Hades doesn't get out much, although he famously kidnapped the goddess Persephone, daughter of the earth and grain goddess Demeter, which led to the seasons of the year. Persephone divides her time between the underworld (winter) and Olympus.

You don't hear much about Hestia, sister of Zeus and virgin goddess of the hearth and domestic life, but she was central to private religious life in the home.

Some of the more interesting gods were the children of Zeus from his extramarital wanderings. More on them tomorrow.

A BLUNT INSTRUMENT. Here's more commentary on the RAND Corporation report that says military force is not a solution to terrorism:

"Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended: It is often overused, alienates the local population by its heavy-handed nature and provides a window of opportunity for terrorist-group recruitment."

SWIPE THIS. Is credit card debt the next economic bubble?

POWER OF PRIDE/SHAME ON YOU. Some researchers believe that human gestures of pride and shame or victory and defeat may be universal and inherited. At Goat Rope Farm, you could pick them up by copying the roosters...

URGENT NEANDERTHAL UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

IS THAT AN ARCHETYPE IN YOUR POCKET OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE?

Reynard the Fox, a trickster figure, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero is musing this week about the ideas of Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As I mentioned before, when I first ran across Jung in my youth, I was very impressed, although that wore off pretty quickly. Still, I find myself thinking about his ideas every so often. Here are a few of his main ones:

GOING DEEP. Jung believed that the unconscious included not just repressed memories and sexual desires a la Freud but also a deeper layer shared by all people. He called this the collective unconscious.

ARCHETYPES. The collective unconsciousness, according to Jung, manifested itself in the form of primordial images or archetypes that showed up in dreams, art, religion, legends, fairy tales, mythology, etc. He wrote that the idea of archetypes were

derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the myths and fairy-tales of world literature contain definite motifs which crop up everywhere. We meet these same motifs in the fantasies, dreams, deliria, and delusions of individuals living today.

Examples might include the trickster, the wise old man or woman, the child, the mother or father, death and rebirth, etc.

(There is no doubt that such recurring motifs exist, but there are probably other and better ways of accounting for them and they don't always mean the same things.)

PERSONALITY. Jung had a complicated theory of personality, which included conscious and unconscious aspects. When I first read about his ideas, it almost seemed like lots of other folks are living inside us. He called the part of ourselves that we present to the world the persona, which is derived from the Latin word for mask. The darker side of ourselves which we tend to deny and repress he called the shadow. He believed that men had a mostly unconscious female aspect to the personality which he called the anima. Likewise, women were believed to have a male aspect, which he called the animus. The deepest layer of the personality was the Self,

which is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.

TYPES. Jung developed an elaborate system of classifying psychological types. Two of his terms that have entered into wide usage are extroversion and introversion, in which individuals orient themselves primarily to external people and objects or internal ones.

INDIVIDUATION. The goal of Jungian psychology is individuation or self-realization, which involves the integration and balancing of various aspects of the personality so that a person becomes "a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole.'"

There's a whole lot more, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime but that'll have to do for now.

THE SURGING LONG TERM COST OF THE SURGE is the subject of this article from Foreign Affairs.

PRISON NATION. According to the NY Times,

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

SOUNDING LIKE A NEANDERTHAL. An anthropologist studying the vocal tracts of Neanderthal remains has simulated what they may have sounded like. It looks like they didn't hear or speak the same way we do.

SPEAKING OF LANGUAGE, there's a longstanding debate about the extent to which it shapes perception. It ain't quite resolved yet.

FOR MY FELLOW CLASSICS DORKS, here's an article from the New Yorker about Herodotus, the Greek "father of history." He's showed up here at Goat Rope a time or two if you feel like dumpster diving.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED