Don't bee a stranger

When I was a small child, our family lived next to the kind of people who probably don't exist anymore. They were an elderly couple, the Richmonds, and they were what I can only describe as bedrock Appalachians, real mountain people. They knew all the old ways and skills of survival.

The man, Hinton, knew where to find fish in the river. He hunted for ginseng in the hills. And he claimed--and I believed--that he could follow honeybees to their hives. Hinton attempted to educate me about the benefits of honeybees. I was a hard sell since these creatures seemed to have been designed specifically to sting my feet when I played barefoot outside.

It took me a while to get the memo, but eventually I became a bee fan. I was sad to learn of the recent unprecedented decline in the bee population due to a mysterious syndrome known as colony collapse disorder. This was bad news not just for bee-keepers but for the many plants and crops that the bees pollinate.

Eventually, this hit home. For the past two summers, I don't recall seeing a single honey bee at Goat Rope Farm. I am pleased to announce that they are back and were as welcome to me as the return of a long lost friend. I hope they stick around.

TALKING SENSE. Here is Paul Krugman doing battle with bad economic ideas.

FAUX NEWS. Here's a look at 14 propaganda techniques used by a certain "fair and balanced" news network.

FROM EVIL TO HEROISM. Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist of prison experiment fame, is trying to see whether heroism can be taught. (Search Goat Rope archives in upper left hand corner for several posts on Zimbardo's work.)

A SENSE OF FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE may be innate in humans. Too bad some people apparently didn't get the memo.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

It's hard not to cuss these days

From the AFLCIO:

While 25 million unemployed and underemployed U.S. workers are drowning, CEO pay skyrocketed by 23 percent, for an average salary of $11.4 million in 2010, according to the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch. Released today, data compiled at PayWatch also show CEOs have done little to create badly-needed jobs, instead sitting on a record $1.93 trillion in cash on their balance sheets.

The 2011 Executive PayWatch features the compensation of 299 S&P 500 company CEOs and provides direct comparisons between those CEOs and the median pay of nurses, teachers, firefighters and others. For instance, while a secretary makes a median annual salary of $29,980, someone like Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf rakes in $18,973,722 million—632 times the secretary’s salary. The pay gap between Wall Street and Main Street has widened egregiously—as recently as 1980, CEOs made 42 times that of blue-collar workers.

There's more here and the full report is here.

And let's not forget the fact that the very wealthy are paying less in taxes. And there's a bit more here and especially here on the same subject.While we're at it, this article provides a good account of how things got to be this way.

El Cabrero grew up in a cussing family and I know a thing or two about obscenity. Trust me, it's obscene to talk about gutting Medicare and Medicaid and other programs that help low income and working people in the name of deficit reduction while continuing to cut taxes on the wealthy in a time of growing inequality.

OFF TOPIC BUT INTERESTING. I missed this Washington Post item when it first came out. It's an interesting take on how Glenn Beck kind of lost it.

TALKING SENSE. WV Senator Jay Rockefeller suggest that the US needs to get out of the current wars.

INTERESTING QUESTION. Ken Ward asks in Coal Tattoo whether WV's political leaders believe in science.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Drop everything...

...and read this column by E.J. Dionne Jr. from the Washington Post.

He makes the point that I tried, much less eloquently, to make here last week, namely that the American republic is being deserted and betrayed by elements of its ruling class.

The sad thing (one of many sad things) is that if they succeed, in the long run they will lose, along with the rest of us.

MAKE IT PLAIN. Krugman suggests it's time to draw the line.

WHO PAYS? Not these corporations.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Lost in a tale

El Cabrero has been musing lately about how literature can enrich daily life (as well as working for social justice). In fact, I often feel like I'm experiencing aspects of this story or that.

To give an example I mentioned last week, watching the tide of a policy battle surge back and forth in my state legislature reminded me of a comic version of the Iliad. I've also seen things in public and private life that remind me of various comedies and tragedies.

Of course, you can run anything into the ground. It can be kind of dangerous sometimes to confuse literature with real life.

The two best examples of that come from...literature. The thing that makes Cervantes' Don Quixote both funny and sad is that he can't tell the difference between the world he lived in and the romances he read. Another example might be Flaubert's Madame Bovary, who got ramped up on another kind of romance writing and messed up the lives of several people, including her own.

There are plenty of other stories of that kind of thing. Come to think of it, it's stories all the way down.

WHILE THE ECONOMY TANKS, CEO pay is doing just fine.

CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE. Here's a Newsweek profile of Harvard law professor, author, and bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren. She was way out in front on the whole debt crisis. El Cabrero strongly recommends checking out her books.

IT MUST BE HARD TIMES. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship got a pay cut.

TAXES. Animals collect them too.

COMPASSION ON THE BRAIN. Its roots go deep.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Chips and blocks

Roosters are not generally known for their conflict resolution skills.

Lately, Goat Rope has been exploring the cultural influences that shape how different people tend to think about violence and fighting.

My own family has deep roots in the gizzard of Appalachia. This is a nice place, but some of us around here descend from long lines of...shall we say...spirited Scotch-Irish people and even more spirited Celts. Some of the really crazy ones were on my father's side.

Those people were interesting, fun and colorful characters. They could be extremely generous and very gracious hosts and could really turn a phrase (provided you didn't mind some artful profanity). But many of them had what we might call a liberal attitude about scrapping when provoked.

There was even a saying in one branch of my family that people would say when someone displayed a lack of courage or spirit: "Where's your fightin' Gillespie?"

I wonder about the force of tradition and heredity. I am generally speaking a peaceful person. My day job consists of working for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization tolerant enough to hire me and even let me do this blog. I've spent a lot of time working on various ways of non-violently resolving conflict.

However, I've spent decades studying and practicing the fighting arts and would do it all the time if I could get away with it, bad knees and all. I love a good tussle, although generally of the non-physical variety.

My daughter (La Cabrita), a Ph. D. student in psychology, observed that I seemed prouder of her when she recently defeated a more advanced opponent at a karate tournament than for anything else she'd done. What can I say?--her kicks were awesome! My son (El Cabrito) could relate similar stories.

When they were little kids, La Cabrita out of the blue kicked El Cabrito across the room with a picture perfect side thrust kick. I am embarrassed to say that the first words that escaped my lips were "Good kick!"

That was something my great grandfather might have said...

Anyhow, I've recently read some interesting social science research on that might explain how some cultures (such as my own) got to be that way. As I've frequently argued, those who want to make the world less violent would do well to understand the things that contribute to violence. About which more tomorrow.

DADDY, WHAT'S A TRAIN? was a Utah Phillips song my kids enjoyed when they were little (and weren't kicking each other). On that note, here is an interesting take on the auto bailout currently being discussed and a call for investments in mass transit.

UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM on taxes and economic growth here.

ARACOMA. Widows of two men killed in the Massey Energy mine fire in 2006 settled their suit yesterday.

GRATUITOUS ANIMAL VIDEOS here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The blind seer, and an action alert, and more

The shade of Tiresias appears to Odysseus after the latter offers a sacrifice.

The theme here lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. If this is your fist visit, please click on earlier posts. Right now were on his voyage to the land of the dead.

To recap, the goddess Circe tells Odysseus that if he wants to make it home after years of fighting at Troy and wandering the seas, he has to visit the underworld to consults with the shade of the seer Tiresias, who is one of the most fascinating figures of Greek mythology.

A prophet of the city of Thebes, he had the distinction of spending several years as a woman as punishment from Hera for whacking a pair of copulating snakes with a stick. Note: while El Cabrero is opposed to whacking snakes, let it be noted that it didn't take much to tick Hera off.

After changing back into a man, he was called upon by Zeus and Hera to settle an argument over whether males or females enjoyed sex the most. (Zeus said women did and Hera vice versa.) When he basically answered that women get 9/10s of the pleasure, Hera struck him blind as punishment. Zeus couldn't do anything about that but did give him foresight.

(Important safety tip: if you are ever called upon to resolve a dispute between Olympian gods, decline the honor.)

In the myth of Oedipus, Tiresias is summoned by that tyrant to explain the source of a mysterious plague ravaging Thebes, which was actually caused by the Oedipus himself who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother.

The confrontation between the two is the focal point of Sophocles' great tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus. The parallelism between the two is striking: Tiresias is blind but sees what is happening. Oedipus can see but is blind to what he did--and when he sees it he blinds himself.

At this point in the Odyssey, Tiresias will tell its hero what lies ahead and what he must do if he is to make it home. The news isn't good:

A sweet smooth journey home, renowned Odysseus,
that is what you seek,
but a god will make it hard for you--I know--
you will never escape the one who shakes the earth,
quaking with anger at you still, still enraged
because you blinded the Cyclops, his dear son...

Still they have a slim chance, provided that when they land on the island of Thrinacia he and his men don't eat the cattle of the sun god Helios. If they do that, his men will die

And even if you escape, you'll come home late
and come a broken man--all shipmates lost,
alone in a stranger's ship--
and you will find a world of pain at home,
crude, arrogant men devouring all your goods...

And even if he deals with that, he must make one more journey to appease Poseidon, by carrying his oar so far inland that people mistake it for a winnowing fan and there make appropriate sacrifices.

If, and it's a big if, he does all that, he can expect to die peacefully in old age in his home with his family.

We'll see how that works out.

ACTION ALERT. The American Friends Service Committee and allied groups are urging people to call their senators and representatives today toll free at 1-888-245-0215 to urge the passage of a second economic stimulus package targeted at those who need it most before Congress goes home.

The package should include extended unemployment benefits, an increase to food stamps and home heating assistance, aid to states for Medicaid, job creation through investments in infrastructure and youth employment programs. Obviously the $720 million we are spending each day in Iraq isn't helping either...

SUNDOWN ON THE GOLDEN CALF of market fundamentalism? Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks so.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here are two reports aimed at driving some nails in the coffin of supply side economics and related but contradictory bogus dogmas on tax cuts as the cure for all things.

DEPRESSION OR SADNESS? The tendency to medicalize emotions makes it hard to distinguish between the two.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MEET THE KIDS

Athena, courtesy of wikipedia. She can make a really good friend, but don't get on her bad side.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with news and comments about current events. The series started Aug. 4. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

Yesterday we met some of the older generation of Olympic gods and the children of the "royal family" of Zeus and Hera. Below are the rest of the gang.

Several gods are the result of Zeus' various liaisons. He fathered Apollo and Artemis from the titan Leto. Apollo is a youthful archer god associated with healing, sudden death, music, poetry, and prophecy while Artemis is the virgin goddess of wild things, the hunt and women in childbirth. Later Apollo would be associated with reason, moderation and individuation.

Hermes was the son of Zeus and the earth goddess Maia (several goddesses were manifestations of an earth divinity). An interesting character, he is a divine messenger and is associated with borders, exchanges, merchants and thieves. He also guides the spirits of the dead to the underworld. Over time, Hermes became associated with the art of interpretation, hence the term hermeneutics.

The main goddess of the Odyssey is the virgin warrior goddess Athena, who was conceived by Metis (goddess of cunning or wisdom). Fearing that her offspring would overthrow his rule, Zeus swallowed Metis. Later he got a bad headache, which Hephaestus cured by striking him in the head with an axe. Athena was born full grown from the head of Zeus and is daddy's little girl. She is associated with wisdom, courage, strategy, and weaving.

(Saftey tip: don't tell her you can weave better than she can unless you want to get turned into a spider like Arachne.)

The wine god Dionysus came from another part of Zeus' anatomy and was the result of a liaison between Zeus and the human Semele. When she asked to see Zeus in his natural form she was incinerated, but Hermes sewed the fetus into Zeus' thigh, from which he was eventually born. He is the god of the vine, of wine and his worship is associated with ecstasy, frenzy and collective joy. In later times, he even seems to have displaced the elder goddess Demeter as a patron of fertility. Nietzsche would later contrast the Apollonian or rational with the Dionysian or wild.

There were other minor players but that's the main lineup.

NOTHING LIKE FAIRNESS. From the AFLCIO blog:

Most corporations, including a large majority of foreign companies doing business in the United States, pay no income taxes, according to a report released today.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that two-thirds of both American and foreign companies doing business here end up avoiding all income tax obligations to the federal government, despite corporate sales totaling $2.5 trillion.

There's more with sources and links here.

CHANGING TRENDS. Most (admittedly feeble) anti-poverty efforts in recent years have focused on women and children. Now more voices are calling for directing more attention to men.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? According to this NY Times article, more and more Americans are marrying to gain health benefits. (In terms of the Greek gods discussed this week, this could lead to a jurisdictional dispute between Hera, Aphrodite and Apollo.If they ask you to settle it, run.)

MOST READERS ALREADY KNEW THIS, but research suggests a good book can be just as thrilling and stimulating to the brain as watching a movie.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GROUP ABSOLUTION

Greek phalanx, courtesy of wikipedia.

There are any number of tragic features of human life, but one of the main ones is the duality of our social nature.

One the one hand, people can only become fully human and develop their potential in and through society. Infants raised in social isolation suffer devastating consequences. Even adults who are subjected to social isolation develop serious mental problems.

On the other hand, groups often bring out the worst in human nature. As Konrad Lorenz once said "man is not a killer, but the group is."

Group identification and absolution is a factor that Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing, identifies as a factor that can contribute to violence and killing.

He notes that

A tremendous volume of research indicates that the primary factor that motivates a soldier to do the things that no sane man wants to do in combat (that is, killing and dying) is not the force of self-preservation but a powerful sense of accountability to his comrades on the battlefield.

When people are powerfully bonded under stressful conditions, peer pressure is amplified and an individual can come to care so much for members of the group and what they think that they would rather kill or die than let them down. The 19th century French officer and military theorist Ardant du Picq considered this factor, which he called "mutual surveillance," to be of decisive importance on the battlefield. This tendency increases with identification with and proximity to the group.

The group effect, however, is not limited to organized warfare but can also occur with gangs, mobs, and other kinds of groups, which can give people a sense of anonymity and permission to do things they would never do alone.

Nietzsche may not have been far off the mark when he said that "Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

TAX DAY. The American Friends Service Committee is urging people to call Congress today to ask that resources now spent on the war in Iraq be redirected to meet human needs.

SPEAKING OF TAXES, here's a snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute that shows how corporate taxes have declined over the last 60 years.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, a new report by Citizens for Tax Justice shows that Tax Day has become easier for the wealthiest Americans.

LOW DOWN. Here's Jim Hightower on the damage the Bush administration has done to the U.S. economy.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, here's last week's Nightline coverage of the WV Supreme Joke--I mean Court.

THE GROWING GAP between the wealthy and everyone else is bigger in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia than many other states.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SOMETIMES A TRAIN IS JUST A TRAIN

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The theme for this week's Goat Rope is dreams and what they may or may not mean. You will also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

No discussion of dreams would be complete without spending a little time with Old Man Sig. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams made a huge splash in 1900 and is still worth a look all these years later. He also wrote a shorter, more accessible book titled On Dreams in 1901.

Freud's basic idea here is that dreams are more or less disguised wish fulfillment's usually originating from unconscious desires. Sometimes this is all too obvious and the desires are too, as when hungry people dream of food or lonely people dream of company (take that any way you want it).

In other cases this isn't so obvious. Some dreams seem scary or just senseless. He believed that dreams have both a manifest and a latent content which together make up what he called the dream work. The manifest content of a dream might involve say a house. The latent or hidden idea behind this image could mean something else entirely, for example the body.

The process of interpreting dreams for him involved breaking down the manifest or obvious content into its component parts and analyzing the things the dreamer associates with them. Dreams are tricky critters and employ a number of ruses, including metaphors and similes, condensation, substitution and other ways of disguising their meaning:

The dream thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, images resembling those of poetic speech. (On Dreams, ch. 6.)

Why bother with all the imagery? For Freud, people have unconscious desires, often of a sexual nature, which are repressed most of the time. When we sleep, the repression eases up enough for the varmints to get out, but they pass through what he called a "dream censor" which disguises them so as not to disturb sleep or the sleeper. A nightmare is a really disguised wish in which one part of us wants something the other parts would be creeped out by.

For Freud, dreams aren't the only way the unconscious pokes out, if you'll pardon the expression. Slips of the tongue, mistaken actions, and symptoms are other ways.

Later in life, after studying the nightmares of many World War I veterans suffering from what we might now call post-traumatic stress disorder, he came to partially modify his theory in the book Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In that 1920 book, he developed his theory of the death instinct.

Even if we can't go all the way with Sig, he does deserve great credit for getting the study of dreams on the agenda of psychology. The problems with his theory is its reductionism. Some dreams really are Freudian, but others not so much.

I remember once waking up after a classic Freudian dream--flying, trains, tunnels, all that--and wanting to write a nasty letter to my unconscious saying "How trite! How cliched! Couldn't you come up with something a little more original?"

THE MISSING PIECE. Washington Post columnist Marie Cocco states the obvious about the need to expand unemployment benefits in a recession. Stating the obvious is necessary in these 2+2=5 days.

SMIRK OF THE UNION. More comments and links about the recession and the receding state of the union can be found here.

ANOTHER BAD IDEA would be extending the arms race into space.

YOUNG VOTERS, already saddled with debt and worried about health care and a declining middle class, are the subject of this Business Week article.

LEGISLATIVE PARADOX. Any time someone proposes that the WV legislature proposes some action benefiting working folks, they can expect to be asked "How are we going to pay for it?" Fair enough. But not too many of them seem to be saying the same thing about proposed cuts to corporate taxes.

WV INSPIRES GRISHAM. Popular courtroom novelist John Grisham's latest novel--about a rich businessman who buys a judge's election--was inspired in part by WV's 2004 Supreme Court election when Massey CEO Don Blankenship spent millions of his own dollars to elect the politically unknown Brent Benjamin.

On a similar front, Benjamin has consistently refused to recuse himself from cases involving Massey (he's usually on their side), including a pending lawsuit for $220 million. Chief justice Spike Maynard, who was photographed vacationing with Blankenship did recuse himself from the case in the wake of recent publicity.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

RIDING THE BIG RED TRUCK

The guiding thread for this week's Goat Rope is fire fighting and El Cabrero's fond memories thereof, although many other topics are covered.

If this is your first visit, please scroll down to earlier entries.

In my days as a volunteer, I was very impressed by the skill and dedication of fire fighters, many of whom are working people trying to balance jobs and family with the many unpaid hours they give to the community.

As a newcomer, I had some revolutionary ideas that didn’t go anywhere. One was just for PR and involved installing a baby on each fire and rescue truck so that we could whip it out and pretend to save it in case the media showed up.

Another was proposed legislation to the effect that, if we had to respond to a motor vehicle accident in bad weather at an ungodly hour and the passengers had the bad manners to get out of their cars themselves, we would get to play with our toys and cut up their cars anyway.

I think the failure of my innovations was due to an irrational conservatism and something about liability.

Before closing, I must address the proverbial elephant in the room. I am referring, of course, to the cat question, an issue that lingers just beneath the surface in any discussion of firefighting. To wit: do we now or have we ever rescued an old lady’s cat from the top of a tree?

The official answer I am supposed to give is probably “No,” although the real answer is that we probably would if we were bored enough. In that case, we might even put the cat up there to start with...

To my dying day I will regret not responding to a call that involved getting a cow down from the second floor of a rickety barn after it partially fell through. I still don’t know how our guys got it out unscathed, but I’m reasonably certain they didn’t plant it there.

My volunteer firefighting career came to an end due to heart problems. I miss it. There is really nothing that can take the place of riding the big red trucks.

St. Paul famously said that when I was I child I spake and acted as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things. In this instance, I must beg to differ. Every little kid knows that fire trucks and fire stations are cool.

And every little kid is right.

THE LATEST REMINDER of the risks both career and volunteer firefighters face is the recent death of Ceredo WV firefighter Christopher Jaros, who died Saturday in an auto accident in his private vehicle while responding to a call. Here's the report from the Huntington Herald-Dispatch about his funeral.

MORE ON THE REAL WALTER REED SCANDAL. The Hightower Lowdown sums up the real issues of the Walter Reed story. Here's an excerpt:

The gross mistreatment of our wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is disgusting, but there also appears to be a scandal behind the scandal.

The Army Times reports that the head of the center warned last year that "patient care services are at risk of mission failure." Why? Because under George W's "competitive sourcing" directive, the Pentagon has been pushing to privatize as much of its work as possible. And in 2006, top officials awarded a $120 million contract to turn the facilities management over to IAP Worldwide Services, run by two former senior Halliburton officials. IAP, which brags that Dan Quayle is on its board, is the contractor that botched the delivery of ice to New Orleans during the Katrina fiasco.

ON A RELATED NOTE here's an item about the damage the Bush administration has inflicted on the Army itself.

TAX DAY. Here's a breakdown from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities about where tax dollars go. Here's a rant on taxes and trickles by Antipode. And here's a comment from the Coalition on Human Needs about the effects of the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy:

The federal tax cuts enacted starting in 2001 have failed both to preserve an adequate amount of revenue and to collect it fairly. The deficit for FY 2004 is estimated at $422 billion. The tax cuts have added more to the deficit than all other new federal legislation combined since 2001. If made permanent, they will cost more than $1.6 trillion over 10 years. Such massive reductions in revenue strangle the government's capacity to meet the nation's needs. Further, the tax cuts worsen the gap between the rich and everyone else. In 2004, half of the combined value of all the tax cuts passed since 2001 will go to the richest one percent. The bottom 20 percent will receive only 1.3 percent.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HAPPY OR LUCKY?

Caption: It's hard to say if this couple is happy, but they're probably going to get lucky pretty soon.


You can find lots of topics in this week's Goat Rope but the guiding thread is a story about happiness from the Histories of Herodotus. If this is your first visit, please scroll down to the earlier posts.

The story goes that when the very wealthy King Croesus of Lydia (in modern Turkey) entertained the Athenian sage Solon as guest, he had his servants display his vast wealth and then asked Solon who was the happiest of men.

He was fishing for a compliment, as La Cabra sometimes says (although she's not above doing that herself).

And, like many fishermen, he was disappointed. As discussed in the last two posts, Croesus wasn't a winner or even a runner up on Solon's list. Finally in anger, he said

That's all very well, my Athenian fried; but what of my own happiness? Is it so utterly contemptible that you won't even compare me with mere common folk like those you have mentioned?

Solon replied

My lord, I know God is envious of human prosperity and likes to trouble us; and you question me about the lot of man. Listen then: as the years lengthen out, there is much both to see and to suffer which one would wish otherwise...You can see from that, Croesus, what a chancy thing life is. You are very rich, and you rule a numerous people; but the question you asked me I will not answer, until I know that you have died happily. Great wealth can make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue in prosperity to the end. Many very rich men have been unfortunate, and many with a modest competence have had good luck...mark this: until he is dead, keep the word "happy" in reserve. Till then, he is not happy but lucky...

Look to the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him.

Croesus sent Solon on his way, convinced that he was a fool. But that wasn't the end of the story, as we'll see tomorrow.

GRATUITOUS ANIMAL FEATURE FILM: Fresh from Goat Rope Studios, here is a brief feature film called Dueling Peacocks. (Fear not, the duel involves voices rather than pistols or sabres.) By the way, this is a talking picture. Just don't turn it up too loud.

TAX PROPAGANDA. Don't tell him I said anything nice about him, but Antipode had a good post about "Tax Freedom Day" in his Mountain State Review blog.

EXPANDING THE MIDDLE CLASS is an idea that resonates with many Americans. According to Shawn Fremstad and Margy Waller of the virtual think tank Inclusion, the best way to do that is to improve low wage jobs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LABOR CALLS FOR IRAQ SOLUTIONS

Caption: Time to get out of the web.

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

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

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

And here's one from the middle:

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

And here's one from the end:

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

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

Works for me.

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

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

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

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

Who'd a thunk it?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED