Three for the road

It looks like Congress is stuck on the all drama all the time channel, which means a pretty dismal 2013. Here's an analysis by Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the dangers ahead.

DENY THIS. No climate change around here, boss.

RACIAL STEREOTYPES AND CREATIVITY. Pick one or the other. They don't go well together.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A soft landing?

According to projections, coal production in southern West Virginia is likely to go down in the coming years. However, this may not have the same long term impact on jobs. As this blog post from the WV Center on Budget and Policy points out, there is some chance that employment may actually rebound or even increase over the long term.

Going after highly priced but relatively scarce metallurgical coal, most of which is underground, may require more "miner hours," which adds up to more work for miners.

Of course, all of this is speculation. Southern West Virginia is headed for a rough transition regardless and it makes sense to prepare for that by convening an economic transition task force and by creating a Future Fund so that West Virginians in the years to come will enjoy some of the fruits of the extraction of non-renewable resources.

Blaming the president and the EPA for problems that go way beyond either, which is the sport of many of WV's political leaders, is intellectually and morally dishonest. And it just plain won't work in the long term. Whether southern WV is in for a hard or soft landing, we need to prepare.

CHILDHOOD NEGLECT is bad for the brain.

STRANGENESS may improve creativity. That explains a lot.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

No moral, just story

How good is your kung fu? Image courtesy of wikipedia.

As a rule, El Cabrero tries to keep a healthy distance between himself and our insect friends. But some of them are pretty cool.

My personal favorite is the praying mantis (even though the mating behavior of the females strikes me as totally unsportsmanlike). I even had the honor of being beat up by one of them once.

As I've mentioned many times here, I've long enjoyed practicing the martial arts. I've dabbled in several but spent the most time with Okinawan/Japanese karate, which traces itself back in legend anyway to Shaolin kung fu.

Now, if the Gentle Reader has watched the proper measure of Chinese movies, he or she will know that many Shaolin styles are based on the movements of animals. Five big ones are tiger, crane, snake, leopard and dragon.

(Don't ask me how they researched the dragon part...)

There are several other animal styles, including praying mantis. According to that legend, a monk who lost many matches gained insight by studying and emulating the movements of that insect.

One day several years ago, I was going with Rob, a karate buddy of mine to Parkersburg, WV to meet with community folks about how to respond to hate group activity. When we stopped at the sacred Milton Go Mart, there was a big beautiful mantis on the wall.

I asked my buddy if he thought this one knew his stuff. I thought they were bluffing. To find out, I picked a blade of grass and gingerly poked it at him. KAWHAM! He/she flew at me so fast that I was startled and tripped and hit the ground.

I've been stung and bitten by many insects in my day, but that was the first time I lost to one in a fair fight. I just felt like sharing that today.

OK, back to business...

INEQUALITY can be bad for your health.

READING can be good for your morals.

DARWIN, DARWIN EVERYWHERE, including in art and human creativity.

MORAL SENTIMENTS. David Brooks writes here about the evolutionary origins of morality and its basis in emotion. But the Scottish Enlightenment people like Hume and Smith got there first.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHO'S IN THE SADDLE?

You know who, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme this week at Goat Rope is the economy and how we think about it. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts. There are also links and comments about current events.

One irony about the economy is that while people make it, we often act like it made us and rules over us. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in the 1800s when America's market revolution was in full swing, "things are in the saddle and ride mankind." Henry David Thoreau made similar observations in Walden.

Marx called this "the fetishism of commodities" in Das Kapital. He believed it was pervasive when goods are produced primarily for exchange rather than use. You don't have to buy his whole package to see his point:

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor...To them their own social action takes the form of the action of things, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.

Picture an auto worker getting her car repossessed because nobody is buying cars because there are too many cars...

The idea of human creations getting away from their creators and doing damage is an image that has haunted the western world since the early days of the industrial revolution. A classic example of this is Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein (search this blog for an earlier series on that), but the theme (meme?) is alive and kicking in the post-modern imagination, as films like Blade-Runner and television series like Battlestar Gallactica show.

Again, it doesn't have to be that way. While command economies have proven to be failures, people do have the ability to make conscious economic decisions at the individual and group level and to set up the groundrules and policies under which markets operate.

OIL EATING FOOD. This is a good summary of the problem with biofuels and how these impact poor people around the world.

CREATIVITY. Here are some suggestions for boosting yours.

ARE YOU A MIND READER? The answer is probably yes, with no psychic abilities needed. The trouble is, we're not very good at it.

THE SCIENCE OF SARCASM explained here.

GREAT NEWS! Red wine may slow aging. That being the case, El Cabrero needs to come up with a plan for the next 100 or so years.

NEED MORE COWBELL? You got it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED