Where is everybody?

 

Image by way of wikipedia

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with UFOs, then known as “flying saucers.”

It was a thing at the time, with UFO crazes that sprang up and disappeared like mushrooms every few years. Flying saucers were featured in news stories, science fiction, movies and popular songs.

In 1959, toward the end of his life, the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung wrote a book about them titled, “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.” He thought such sightings were psychological projections symptomatic of our lost sense of wholeness.

I don’t know about that, but my kid self gobbled it all up and scanned the sky, desperately trying to convince myself I saw something.

For a while, I read dubious books that speculated about ancient astronauts. I got over that, although you must admit that the “wheel in a wheel” the biblical prophet Ezekiel saw “way up in the air,” as the song goes, was pretty trippy.

During a UFO craze when I was in junior high, a friend of mine and I wrapped up in aluminum foil and walked on Interstate 64 at night trying to appear as space aliens. We were hoping to freak out drivers, thereby obtaining eternal glory. (I guess I peaked early. And I’m assuming the statute of limitations has expired on such offenses.)

Interest nationally in UFOs has persisted over the years, and not just in the “X Files” crowd. This summer, the Pentagon released a report acknowledging some weird things way up in the air but casting doubt on their extraterrestrial origins. Meanwhile, the search for intelligent life on other worlds has shifted to radio telescopes, such as the one at Green Bank, in Pocahontas County, so far with no luck.

Saucers aside, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t life of some kind out there somewhere. After all, in our own solar system, we know there’s life on Earth, such as it is, with some serious scientific speculation about microbes on Mars and Venus, and maybe even something under the ice on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. A number of potentially habitable exoplanets have been discovered beyond our system that might support life as we know it. Then there’s the possibility of life as we don’t know it. After all, the universe is big.

Still, a question remains that is sometimes known as “the Fermi paradox,” which got its name when physicist Enrico Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?” In a universe so vast, it seems that at least some beings are likely to have become technologically advanced enough to send signals out into space to other worlds. So far, we haven’t found any.

There are lots of reasons that might account for this, one of which is a real downer.

Astrophysicists Tom Westby and Christopher Conselice have written: “Perhaps the key aspect of intelligent life, at least as we know it, is the ability to self-destroy. As far as we can tell, when a civilization develops the technology to communicate over large distances it also has the technology to destroy itself and this is unfortunately likely universal.”

Sometimes, I think we’re starting to resemble that remark. On Earth, even relatively low-tech complex civilizations tend to have limited shelf lives, as geographer Jared Diamond demonstrated in his bestselling book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Diamond defines collapse as “a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.” He argues that this has often been driven by environmental and climate changes, as well as related social factors.

Among the examples he discusses are some Pacific Islanders, Mayans, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, Vikings in Greenland and more recent societies pushing their luck.

According to a recent estimate, we’re consuming the resources of around 1.8 Earths, and we only have one. The effects of climate change are already bad but could get much worse if unaddressed, with rising temperatures and sea levels, extreme weather events, extinctions, food shortages, epidemics, massive displacements, conflicts over resources and related societal stresses.

Climate change, by the way, isn’t that hard to understand. Most people know that insulating a house helps keep heat in longer. To test this hypothesis, all you need to do is leave doors and windows open on a cold night. The greenhouse gases we’ve been burning since the Industrial Revolution began in the early 1800s have added way more insulation than we need, with potentially disastrous consequences.

And we’ve wasted decades when we had no time to spare to deal with it.

Fortunately, there are some concrete ways to address climate change in infrastructure bills now under consideration and in further legislation likely to be proposed soon.

West Virginia has much to gain in terms of transitioning to a stronger, more sustainable, and more just economy — and our senators will have a big say in whether any of that happens.

Considering the alternatives, I’d prefer that we take steps now to ensure that we and our grandkids and their descendants can stick around longer — maybe even long enough to find some real alien life forms.

After all, I’m getting too old to wrap up in aluminum foil and run around on interstates.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazatte-Mail.)

How cool is this?...or cheap is the new green

It has been my practice at Goat Rope these days whenever possible to blog about positive things in West Virginia (and, yes, here are some). The latest such example is a recent gathering on sustainability, health and environmental education in Charleston.

The Charleston Gazette reports that Mark Swiger, a school official from Marshall County, could boast of an estimated savings of $7 million since 2000 due to reducing energy and water use and improving other environmental practices.

Swiger, the  sustainability contact for Marshall County Schools, says his 13-school district has saved an estimated $7 million since 2000 through limiting energy and water use and improving environmental sustainability in other ways.

“With 55 counties doing this, think of those savings,” Swiger said. “ ... Sustainability should have no ideology. It is conservative, it is progressive, it is everything. When you’re saving that kind of money, everyone wants that.”

Roger that.

Short Friday rations

I'm on the road battling a weird internet connection so this will be short. Here are two items that caught my eye:

THE RELATIVITY OF VICTORY AND DEFEAT. Wisconsin may be a case in point.

ATTACKING THE ENVIRONMENT. The first wave was turned back, but there will be more.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Sins of left and right

I mentioned in yesterday's post that the political terms left and right are the result of which side of the room people happened to sit on in the early days of the French Revolution. The terms aren't particularly apt, but the difference between perspectives is real by whatever names they are called.

Using the old terms for now, it's probably safe to say that people on the right have been more supportive of the existing or old order and particularly of hierarchy, while those on the left have advocated a more egalitarian position, although I can imagine any number of arguments with that statement.

It seems to me that both perspectives have their own characteristic errors or excesses. People on the "right" have tended to believe that existing inequalities are something like facts of nature that cannot be changed. People on the "left" from the French Revolution onward have made a different kind of error by viewing human nature as a blank slate which can be changed given different conditions.

I think the reality is a bit messier. We probably do inherit a bit of evolutionary baggage which can get in the way of an egalitarian society. For example, many animals--especially but not exclusively males--strive for status all the time and many of both sexes are biased in favor of their own offspring. But that doesn't mean that any particular system of inequality--monarchy, feudalism, plutocracy--is a feature of nature that can't be changed.

THIS IS WHAT I'M SCREAMING. Here's a call for more action to get the economy moving by a member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

TO LOAN OR NOT TO LOAN? Some banks are thinking about the environmental impact of their lending practices.

WHERE THE RUBBER HITS THE ROAD. Health care reform passed Congress (finally) last spring. Now a lot of the action is happening at the state level. Here's an article about how things look in West Virginia.

CLEANLINESS is next to self-righteousness.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Shiny happy people

As I mentioned yesterday, Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, is a real hoot. In it, she traces America's penchant for positive (and sometimes magical) thinking from roots in the 19th century, where it began as a reaction against the dour Calvinism that was such a strong ingredient of early American life.

In Calvinism, each soul has been predestined from the beginning of the world for either damnation or salvation, with most of us getting the former. There is nothing we can do about it, nor can one be totally sure one is among the elect. Believers were often urged to continually examine their consciences in fear and trembling.

That could be a bit of a downer. No wonder people sought for some kind of relief. One version that emerged in the late 1800s was called the "New Thought." According to this view, the universe was largely seen as a mental construct willing and waiting to come to our aid if we only got our minds right, to borrow a phrase from the classic movie Cool Hand Luke.

The first half of the twentieth century saw the popularity and commercial success of such enduring best-sellers as Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People and Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, which in turn inspired many similar efforts.

While the popularity of positivity is hardly new, modern Americans have consumed and have often been force fed a steady diet of motivational speeches, prosperity "theology," and magical thinking--even while living standards have gotten worse for millions.

Purveyors of this viewpoint sometimes promote the view that one's status and level of material success and health are primarily a matter of mental attitude, which means that people are getting pretty much what they deserve at any given time.

While clearly there's nothing wrong with having a cheerful outlook on the world, once an ideology dismisses other social factors that can hit us no matter how positive our attitude is, then it becomes just another justification for inequality.

If you buy all that, then the 10.2 percent of Americans who are jobless or the 47 million who lack health insurance or the 45,000 or so who die prematurely each year because they don't have it don't need better policies--they just need think positively.

As the saying goes, whatever.

FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH, here's an interview with Ehrenreich about the book.

STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS are facing shortfalls which could compound the recession, reduce jobs, and cut vital services in the absence of additional aid.

SAVING THE PLANET. Here are some weird ideas about how to do that.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The Fellowship of the Ring

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and some practical insights it offers about working for social justice. As I've argued here before, one mark of a good story is that it is one you can find as well as lose yourself in.

I remember reading somewhere that at least some leaders and participants in the Civil Rights movement--including the great Robert Moses--drew inspiration from Tolkien's trilogy for their work in the Deep South.

It makes perfect sense to me. Whatever Tolkien's shortcomings might or might not be, The Lord of the Rings makes perfect sense when you're engaged in a struggle against the odds for social justice. Over the next few days, I'm going to talk about some examples of this.

The first on is all too obvious. If you're going up against the latest version of the Dark Lord or Saruman, you need some strong and diverse coalitions.

Getting there isn't easy. In the trilogy, the good guys don't have much use for each other in the beginning. The humans from Gondor and Rohan, once allies, mistrust each other. Elves and dwarves have issues from way back. And nobody important cared about hobbits. It makes getting coal miners and environmentalists to work together on issues seem pretty simple. But it can be done, at least sometimes.

Sometimes things get so bad you have to either form coalitions or just give up. But coalitions, which tend to be at the organizational level, are only held together by relationships at the personal level, as exemplified in the story by the small band that sets out to try to destroy the ring.

In a small place like El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, where nothing is ever forgotten, relationships are everything. One state politician once quipped "In West Virginia, everything's political except politics and that's personal."

If I had to choose between winning a big one and damaging coalitions and relationships versus losing a big one and maintaining them (and I have been there), I'd probably prefer the latter. Struggles come and go, and victory or defeat often depends on conditions you don't completely control. Relationships take a long time to build and are hard to repair when damaged.

Winning and keeping them would be my first choice though.

AFTER THE FALL. This NY Times article discusses Obama's post-recession (assuming we get there) vision for capitalism.

LOCAL FOOD makes sense in lots of ways, but it can be a pretty complex issue.

TAXES. Here's economist Dean Baker's contribution to a debate on the merits of progressive taxation.

WASTED. Bill McKibben discusses our wasteful habits and the possibility of changing them.

DOWN TO THE WIRE. For addicts of the late lamented HBO series The Wire, here's a lengthy interview between Bill Moyers and Wire creator David Simon.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The little sacrifice of vanity

Benjamin Franklin, whatever else you can say about him, possessed a lot of social intelligence which he used to great effect in pursuing his various interests.

Yet another example of this can be found in how he approached gaining support for a lending library. At first, when he solicited subscriptions, he presented the library as his own idea (which it kind of was). But...

The objections and reluctances I met with in soliciting the subscriptions, made me soon feel the impropriety of presenting one's self as the proposer of any useful project, that might be suppos'd to raise one's reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's neighbors, when one has need of their assistance to accomplish that project.

From then on,

I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading. In this way my affair went on smoothly, and I ever after practis'd it on such occasions; and, from my frequent successes, can heartily recommend it. The present little sacrifice of vanity will be amply repaid.

According to Lao Tzu,

...the sage works without recognition.
He achieves what has to be done without dwelling on it.
He does not try to show his knowledge.

CLASS WARFARE? Jim Hightower thinks conservatives don't have a clue about it.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's another take on it.

GOING TO WASHINGTON. El Cabrero just finished and highly recommends Van Jones' book The Green Collar Economy. I just found out he's on his was to DC to work with the Obama administration. Here's an interview.

FORECLOSURES were up in Feb. over last year's levels.

HEALTH CARE. A business group issued a report that shows the US health care system is a liability.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

One step, then another

The Andes Mountains. Not the best place to crash land. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is hard times and how to get through them, a topic to which I will return next week.

Speaking of which, if you think you've got troubles, I highly recommend Edward E. Leslie's Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors. It is from that book that I came across the Best Advice Ever for dealing with tough times, one that I suggest committing to memory. It makes a pretty good mantra when you need it.

The words come from Henri Guillaumet, a pilot whose plane ran out of fuel in a snowstorm in the Andes. He managed (barely) to survive pain, cold and lots of other nasty stuff. Speaking from bitter experience, he gave this advice:

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.

LESS IS MORE. Getting by with less stuff may not be a totally bad thing.

PRIMING THE PUMP. Here's economist Dean Baker on president-elect Obama's economic stimulus plan.

MISTAKES WERE MADE. In this article, economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz outlines the bad economic policies that led to the current mess.

LET THEM EAT NASTY STUFF. Some possible good news: bacteria that like to eat toxic gunk could help revive dead zones in the world's oceans.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE DRUGGED MARRIAGE

Just one look/that's all it took. In this ancient vase, Menelaus is stopped from killing his unfaithful wife Helen by one look at her beauty. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The Goat Rope Odyssey series continues. If you like the classics, please click on earlier posts. You'll also find news and comments about current events.

When you're in a bad way, sometimes you feel better if at least you have a plan to try something. When things are bad for Odysseus' son Telemachus--his mother's suitors are devouring his substance and threatening his life while his father is apparently dead--the goddess Athena gives him a boost. She inspires him to take a sea voyage to visit his father's comrades at Troy to seek for news.

He receives great hospitality but not much news from Nestor, king of Pylos. He then proceeds to visit Menelaus, king of Sparta, and his wife Helen, who was a major cause of the whole Trojan War. Menelaus tells of an encounter with the minor sea god Proteus who told him that Odysseus was still alive. The most interesting part of the story, though, is that of the very troubled marriage of Menelaus and Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world.

Back in the proverbial day, all the leading men of Greece courted her and swore to uphold the marriage when Menelaus prevailed. But when the Trojan prince Paris visited Sparta, he abducted Helen, not altogether unwillingly, and took her to Troy. This wasn't just bad manners--it was sacrilege, a terrible violation of xenia, the sacred guest/host relationship. According to the myth, this was what led the Greeks to invade Troy and fight there for 10 long years.

Paris is killed towards the end of the war. When the city is finally taken, Menelaus nearly kills Helen but is overwhelmed by her beauty and brings her back to Sparta where they try to get back to normal.

Now every marriage has issues, but this one is way over the top. There's not just infidelity, there's also a war that brought disaster on thousands of people on both sides. How do they deal with all those bad memories and recriminations? The answer is...drugs.

Then Zeus's daughter Helen thought of something else.
Into the mixing-bowl from which they drank their wine
she slipped a drug, heart's-ease, dissolving anger,
magic to make us all forget our pains...
No one who drank it deeply, mulled in wine,
could let a tear roll down his cheeks that day,
not even if his mother should die, his father die,
not even if right before his eyes some enemy brought down
a brother or darling son with a sharp bronze blade...

(There have been times when El Cabrero wouldn't have refused a swig of that mix.)

Then as now, people who have gone through war and other traumas often seek to dull the pain through self medication. It's probably not the best way of dealing with such things. In fact, as Jonathan Shay points out in his discussion of the Odyssey, it often causes people to miss or lose their homecoming.

But with a couple like that, what are you going to do?

DOES ANYBODY ELSE SEE A TINY BIT OF IRONY IN THIS STATEMENT by Condoleezza Rice about how invading another country can make a bad impression?

The behavior of Russia in this most recent crisis is isolating Russia from the principles of cooperation among nations of the communities of states when you start invading small neighbors, bombing civilian infrastructure, going into villages and wreaked havoc and wanton destruction of this infrastructure [emphasis added] .

HUNGRY PLANET, AGAIN. Here's another take on the global food crisis.

NOT A GOOD SIGN of the health of the economy, here's the latest on a key economic indicator.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS about environmental innovations can be found here.

THE MIRROR STAGE. Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror. Discuss.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TO AN UNKNOWN GOD

El Greco's version of Paul, courtesy of wikipedia.

When the apostle Paul visited the city of Athens, he noticed an altar dedicated "to an unknown god" and chided the Athenians for worshipping what they didn't know. (Acts 17:23)

According to Boston University professor Stephen Prothero, modern Americans don't come off much better. Prothero is author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--and Doesn't.

In the opening pages of that book, he describes a conversation with a visiting professor from Austria about American students:

They are very religious, he told me, but they know next to nothing about religion. Thanks to compulsory religious education (which in Austria begins in elementary schools), European students can name the twelve apostles and the Seven Deadly Sins, but they wouldn't be caught dead going to church or synagogue themselves. American students are just the opposite. Here faith without understanding is the standard; here religious ignorance is bliss.

He notes a deep paradox about American religiosity:

Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion. They are Protestants who can't name the four Gospels, Catholics who can't name the seven sacraments, and Jews who can't name the five books of Moses. Atheists may be as rare in American as Jesus-loving politicians are in Europe, but here faith is almost entirely devoid of content. One of the most religious countries on earth is also a nation of religious illiterates.

When Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, it was a laugh line when Tom guessed that David and Goliath were the first two apostles. These days, y'all don't even want to know how many Americans think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife or that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife...

In a world in which religion plays such a major role (not always for the good), that's not just unfortunate; it's kind of dangerous. In fact, I'm not sure which is more dangerous: ignorance about other people's religion or unthinking acceptance of one's own.

More on that tomorrow.

CASH FOR CLUNKERS? Here's an interesting idea about an eco-friendly approach to stimulating the economy.

READING AND THE WEB. Is one killing the other?

THE NEXT WAR? More and more Americans are trying to stop a possible war with Iran.

GIVEN ALL THE NASTY POSSIBILITIES ON THE HORIZON, some people think survivalists aren't that crazy after all.

DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING--SIT THERE. Mindfulness meditation has been show to slow the progress of HIV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CAMERA OR RIFLE?

Caption: You'll put your eye out.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is writing for social change or social conservation, whichever is appropriate at the time. There are also links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

El Cabrero had an interesting dream a few weeks ago. No, it wasn't the recurring one about trains and tunnels. It was about writing.

In the dream, I was given something that looked like a rifle but could take pictures like a camera. Point and shoot, just like a firearm. Then I found out it could also function as a rifle if I flipped a switch.

My first thought was that this could be really dangerous and the results could be tragic if you didn't know exactly what you were doing at the time. As the gun safety folks say, one should assume every firearm to be loaded and presumably that goes for every dream camera/rifle too.

(Full disclosure: although there are a couple firesticks at Goat Rope Farm and I can shoot fairly straight, I'm not a big gun person. I don't bitterly cling to them anyway...Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.)

((OK, I know there are some smirking Freudians out there shouting "phallic symbol!" That's fine, since I'm an occasional Freudian smirker myself, but it really didn't seem to be about that. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes a dream camera/rifle is just a dream camera/rifle.))

When I woke up, I knew right away the dream was about writing. Here's why. Writing for positive change (or positive conservation) takes different forms. Sometimes it involves directly attacking injustices, making arguments, etc. That would be rifle.

At other times, it's important just to capture an image of what is going on,tell a story, state the facts, present credible research that would hold up to critical investigation, or just accurately convey information. That would be camera.

Of course, there's some overlap. A good argument (rifle) should be backed up with facts and clear reasoning (camera). And sometimes just presenting the facts (camera) can help improve an unjust situation. But the message I got from the dream was that I needed to know what I was doing when I picked that thingie up.

There have been plenty of times when I've attacked policies head on in print (rifle) and I'll probably do it again pretty soon. But that isn't always what the situation requires.

For example, El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia just overhauled a major public health care program and the changes are confusing to lots of people. Not jumping through the right hoops can mean not being able to get some important services. I've just about finished writing a consumer's guide to the new system. In it, I tried to just state the facts as clearly as possible, keeping my opinions out of it. Yep, camera.

Doing research about public policy should be mostly camera as well, even if you have strong beliefs about what should be done. You want the results to be as reliable as possible, meaning that other people looking at the information would find the same things, and you want it to be valid, meaning that the conclusions you draw follow from the data.

The main thing is to know what you're doing when you're doing it.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY? The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute points out that

In a selection of 19 countries with comparable per capita income, the United States provides the fewest maternity leave benefits in both length of leave and paid time off (see chart). This is considered separate from any disability insurance for which one may qualify. In fact, the United States falls two weeks short of the International Labor Organization's basic minimum standard of at least 14 weeks general leave. It is also the only country not to guarantee some amount of leave with income.

LABOR'S REVIVAL? This article suggests it's closer than we may think.

URGENT DUCK-BILLED PLATYPUS UPDATE. Their genes are weird too.

EVANGELICAL MANIFESTO. Here's yet another sign that the religious right doesn't have a lock on the opinions of evangelical Christians.

CONSUME THIS. In a National Geographic-sponsored survey of 14 countries, US consumers ranked last in terms of environmentally-aware buying habits.

MAGICAL THINKING. Ancient people sacrificed to appease the gods. We buy insurance.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

OPPRESSED AND BROKENHEARTED

Harriet Beecher Stowe, courtesy of wikipedia.

"I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and brokenhearted, with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity, because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath." So spoke Harriet Beecher Stowe about the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

If you have any doubts that writing can make a difference, check out the impact of that book in the mid 1800s.

Today it is not regarded as great literature, with some justification, but she wasn't going for art for art's sake. Stowe was an abolitionist who saw slavery up close when she lived in Ohio, just across the river from the slave state of Kentucky. She drew heavily on slave narratives in composing the work, particularly that of the Rev. Josiah Henson.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in serial form in 1851, had a huge impact on national as well as international opinion about slavery. It was even widely read, though widely hated, in the American south, where it clearly hit a nerve. There's even a story that when Abraham Lincoln met with her, he said "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

That's a bit of Lincolnian hyperbole--and it took more than a book to end the institution of chattel slavery in this country--but if he really said that (which I don't doubt), he had a point.

One reason why the book had such a huge impact goes to the heart of a special kind of writing: narrative or story. The power of story is of a different order than that of essay. Story works at an emotional level, in which a person can vicariously experience--to a small degree anyway--things that happen to other and different people. Story can lead by way of empathy to morality.

This era was a time of sentimentality in tastes and manners among those who could afford to be aware of such things. UTC wasn't the only book that played on the heart's sympathy strings--the French author Victor Hugo's Les Miserables came out at about the same time.

This was also a time when many middle class Americans came to revere and idealize the home and family as a haven in a heartless world. Stowe's novel played on that expertly, driving home to readers the fact that slaves had families too. And, sadly, part of its success may have come because white readers were more willing to absorb the message from a white writer than directly from the narratives of former slaves.

In the 20th century, the term "Uncle Tom" became a pejorative term for African Americans who were subservient to whites, although when I read the book it seemed pretty clear to me that the character Uncle Tom was no "Uncle Tom." At the end of the book, he encourages other slaves to run away and is beaten to death for refusing to divulge details of their escape.

Whatever literary and other shortcomings the book may have from the perspective of 150+ years later, in terms of sheer impact on public opinion it would be hard to think of very many others that even came close.

Can writing do it all? Probably not. Can writing make a difference? Hell yes.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. After a decade of decline, welfare rolls are beginning to climb again, as USA Today reports.

LET THEM EAT ETHANOL. Here's a good background piece on the global food crisis from the Washington Post.

TRAVEL MUG OR TREES. According to this item from Alternet, North American goes through 50 million trees a year for paper cups.

THAT'S THE TICKET. Here's an interesting item on the science of lying and exaggeration. I read it this morning. After I did 50 million pushups.

MOST ANIMALS CAN LEARN, but it doesn't always do them much good.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JUNGER DAYS

The cover of the new edition of MDR, courtesy of wikipedia.

When I was very young, I had a brief and passing infatuation with the psychological ideas of Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychologist. It didn't take too long to outgrow it, but I have to admit that every few years I take another look at it.

It's a sporadic bad habit of mine, like occasionally gorging on Cheetos or secretly listening to Abba--which I will always publicly deny.

I hadn't thought about Jung for a while until I stumbled on Deirdre Bair's 2003 Jung: A Biography, a 647 page mammoth (not counting notes) that took me months to get through. Bair didn't have any particular axes to grind, which is not often the case with this subject. I also revisited Jung's "autobiography," Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which was largely written with the help of his follower Aniela Jaffe, and Man and His Symbols, his last work which also contained contributions by various followers.

Jung books tend to come in at least two main flavors: hagiography as written by followers and de-bunking by others. The best example of the latter is Richard Noll's The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung and The Jung Cult, both of which were a hoot. Noll focused on Jung's alleged Nazi sympathies and described Jung's ideas as a carefully disguised "Aryans-only cult of redemption and rebirth."

Jung was born in 1875, the son of Swiss Reformed pastor Paul Jung and the former Emilie Preiswerk. Jung was named for his paternal grandfather, a prominent physician and professor. He also did nothing to deny rumors that he was an illegitimate descendant of the German writer Goethe. His mother's side was the most interesting; they were what my hillbilly ancestors would have called a little "tetched" or "keen," given to spiritualism, seeing ghosts, and telling strange stories.

Jung became a physician himself and specialized in psychiatry, working for a number of years at the Burgholzli, a mental institution. He became a correspondent and ally of Sigmund Freud, who was interested in gaining non-Jewish converts to psychoanalysis. For a while, Jung was the "crown prince" and heir-apparent, but the alliance fell apart with some bitterness.

There are two main versions of the split. Jung's would be that he was uncomfortable with Freud's dogmatic insistence on the central importance of sexuality or the libido. The other side was Freud's determination to prevent psychoanalysis from being contaminated by "the black tide of mud," i.e. Jung's tendency towards occultism.

For what it's worth, I think they were both right...

After the break with Freud, Jung's ideas definitely tended towards the weird, as he pondered through mythology, alchemy, astrology, and various sources of arcane lore for what he considered to be their psychological insights. In time, he gathered quite a cult following (in almost every sense of the word).

He wrote voluminously and largely (in my opinion) unintelligibly, although towards the end of his life he was able to reach a wide public audience through the two books mentioned above and appearances on the BBC.

I'll try to summarize what I think his basic ideas were tomorrow.

IRAQ WRAPUP. Here's a good summary of the various strands of the Iraq war mess.

EQUAL PAY DAY is today, but many women are doing worse as the economy tanks.

ENVIRONMENTALISM, VOLUNTARY OR OTHERWISE. This item from Alternet suggests you may start acting like one soon, like it or not.

E. COLI INDIVIDUALISM. Genes may not determine everything, even for bacteria.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

AN ENLIGHTENED MIND

Welcome to Spinoza Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post. You'll also find the usual mix of links and comments about current events.

As mentioned yesterday, Spinoza's unorthodox and rationalist views led to his excommunication from the Jewish community. His views on religion and politics, most fully expressed in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus were very advanced for his time. And maybe ours.

Most controversial at the time was his interpretation of biblical stories as metaphorical and designed to inspire ethical conduct. He wrote that "Scripture does not aim at imparting scientific knowledge," a point lost on fundamentalists of all stripes. He rejected miracles as supernatural events. And his view of God, as we'll discuss later, was fairly pantheistic, meaning that he came pretty close to identifying God with the universe rather than as an anthropomorphic figure outside it.

His work was a plea for religious and philosophical toleration. He wrote

Freedom of thought and speech not only may, without prejudice to piety and the public peace, be granted; but also may not, without danger to piety and the public peace, be withheld

and

That state is freest whose laws are founded on sound reason, so that every member of it may, if he will, be free; that is, live with full consent under the entire guidance of reason.

and

Everyone is by absolute natural right the master of his own thoughts, and thus utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions.

He was an early defender not only of democracy but of the view that the state had a responsibility to guarantee a degree of economic justice for the poor and disadvantaged. As he wrote in his masterpiece The Ethics

Men, moreover, are won over by open-handedness, especially those who have not the wherewithal to purchase what is necessary for sustaining life. However, to give aid to every poor man is far beyond the power and the advantage of a private man. For the riches of a private man are far too little for such a thing. Moreover, the ability of one man is far too limited for him to be able to unite all men to himself in friendship: for which reason the care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole, and looks to the general advantage only.

Not too shabby for the 17th century. Or the 21st.

A TIDAL WAVE. This article looks at the massive misery and displacement caused by the Bush administration's unnecessary war in Iraq.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, a new study by the Rand Corporation commissioned by the Pentagon finds "U.S. military intervention and occupation in the Muslim world" is "at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible."

GREEN JOBS, GOOD JOBS. Labor unionists and environmentalists are increasingly working together to promote green jobs to benefit working people and the world they inhabit.

MORTGAGE MESS. The nation's housing and debt crisis is spreading beyond sub-prime loans.

MIMICRY WORKS pretty well when it comes to persuasion.

CAN I HAVE ONE? Scientists have discovered a cute little pterodactyl with a wingspan of about a foot. You gotta click the link to see it. If I can have one, I promise to feed it every day and make sure all the other critters at Goat Rope Farm are nice to it. Except maybe the goats.

PHILOSOPHY AND POPULAR CULTURE are the topic of this essay.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED BUT IT WOULD COME WAY DOWN IF I GOT A CUTE LITTLE PTERODACTYL

AN EDUCATED MAN

Statue of Carter G. Woodson, "The Father of Black History," in Huntington, WV.

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is Black History and its many connections with West Virginia. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

The fact that people anywhere are celebrating or thinking about the history of African Americans this month is largely due to the efforts of Carter G. Woodson, who lived from 1875 to 1950.

Woodson was born in Buckingham County, Virginia to parents who were former slaves. He and his brother moved to West Virginia to find work in the coal mines and his family eventually moved to Huntington in 1893.

One thing that he particularly enjoyed as a young man was listening as friends read aloud from newspapers and books and discussed current events. He said

In this circle the history of the race was discussed frequently, and my interest in penetrating the past of my people was deepened and intensified.

Woodson eventually attended and graduated from Douglass High School in Huntington. He attended college in Berea, Kentucky and went back to Huntington to serve as Douglass' principal. He traveled extensively and continued his studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Chicago and earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1912. Although he wasn't the first African-American to do so, he was the first son of slaves to reach this goal. In addition to other academic posts, Woodson served as Dean of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, now West Virginia State University.

Woodson was at various times active in the NAACP and collaborated with Marcus Garvey, but the passion of his life was the study and preservation of black history. In 1915, he was involved in the creation of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and published several books on various aspects of black history, including the influential textbook, The Negro in Our History. He also founded the Journal of Negro History in 1916. He paid for much of his historical activities out of his salary as an academic.

He campaigned with eventual success to have the second month of February set aside for the observation of black history. It has since grown into the whole month.

Interestingly, Woodson's passion for preserving African-American history was picked up by a contemporary scholar with West Virginia origins, Henry Louis Gates Jr., who with Kwame Anthony Appiah edited the Encyclopedia Africana.

CANADIAN BOOGEYMAN. Opponents of universal health care love to tell horror stories about the Canadian system. Here's a little de-bunking.

CITIES are struggling to be more green.

THE CHICKENS of Goat Rope Farm have it REAL good compared to these guys.

COLUMBUS was guilty of many things, but apparently not of bringing lice to the "New World," Peruvian mummies indicated.

CIVILIZING THE SAVAGE TODDLER. This doctor claims to know how.

SURFACE OWNERS have introduced a bill to restrict the damage done by oil and gas drillers in WV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THAT OF WHICH YOU NEED A BUSLOAD

Caption: Venus is a goat of little faith.

One of El Cabrero's favorite Lou Reed songs is from the album New York. The point of this very dark song is that there's not a whole lot to depend on in this life and that "you need a busload of faith to get by." Here is is by way of YouTube.

Assuming that to be true, what is faith anyway?

There is a classic definition by Mark Twain:

faith is believing what you know ain't so.

The unknown author of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews famously said that

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

On the other hand, as Nietzsche observed:

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

The great Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber in his book Two Types of Faith distinguished between faith as trust, expressed by the Hebrew word emunah, which he believed was the approach of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus, and faith as belief in the truth of certain propositions, as expressed in the Greek word pistis, which he argued was the approach of Paul and dogmatic forms of Christianity.

One of the most interesting approaches to faith was that of the great 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who laid it out in a powerful little book The Dynamics of Faith. He had a way of looking at theological concepts in a way that could speak to anyone regardless of religious background or lack thereof.

About which more tomorrow.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY is observed today, almost a week after his real birthday. It took a busload of faith for he and the millions of others who struggled for civil rights to get as far as they did. So here, again by way of YouTube, is his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

All kinds of events are going on today across the country to observe this occasion. El Cabrero will be attending the third annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Breakfast with amigos. Three years ago, we used it as the occasion to kick off a successful effort to raise the minimum wage in West Virginia. The focus still is on economic justice, with a special focus on keeping working families healthy and a campaign for paid sick days for workers. As Dr. King said,

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American [worker] whether he is a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer.

BUSHWHACKED. Here's a good critique of Bushonomics by Larry Beinhart.

TARGET IRAN? One would hope not, but I wouldn't put it past our current clique.

LABOR ON STIMULATING THE ECONOMY. The AFLCIO recommends an economic stimulus package that includes the following:

*Extension of unemployment benefits.

*Increased food stamp benefits.

*Tax rebates targeted to middle-income and lower-income taxpayers.

*Fiscal relief for state and local governments to avoid the economically depressing effect of tax increases and budget cuts.

*Acceleration of ready-to-go public investment in school renovations and bridge repair.

SPEAKING OF BRIDGES, here's the AP on America's hugely neglected infrastructure.

FUN WITH SCIENCE (IF YOU'RE NOT AN ANT). Nature is one clever Mother. According to this Wired Science item,

a newly discovered parasite makes its ant hosts turn red and swollen, like berries. Berry-loving birds then eat the ants, and spread the parasite in their droppings.

The ants were unavailable for comment. However, a parasite spokesperson issued the following statement: "Na na na boo boo! Take that, ants!"

WV IN THE NEWS. The fallout from the WV Supreme Court/Masseygate story along with a major fine for Massey Energy has drawn a good bit of national media attention the last few days. Here is one from the NY Times about the fine and one about the Court from the same source. Here's the Washington Post on the fine. On a related note, here's Ken Ward from the Charleston Gazette on how the state has dropped the ball on environmental enforcement.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PILLARS OF SUPPORT

Lately, El Cabrero has been musing on how the study of strategy and conflict can help make the world a less violent and more just place (with help from Sun Tzu). If this is your first visit please click on yesterday's post. There's more in last week's posts as well.

Here's another quick review from Sun Tzu (repetition is good sometimes):

*The highest level of skill is to accomplish goals without a struggle.

*In a conflict, attacking one's opponent is one of the least effective approaches. It's far better to neutralize an opponent's strategies, which keeps them from being able to harm you to start with.

*Next best, is to weaken the opponent's alliances, as discussed yesterday.

A basic tenet of the theory of nonviolent action is that power is not monolithic but depends on many sources of support from many people and institutions. If one deprives the opponent of these sources of support, the power fades.

Good tactics are those which win people to your side and away from that of the opponent. As mentioned yesterday, this has been called removing the "pillars of support."

A classical example of this is involved the nonviolent tactics of the civil rights movement. Their example, combined with the fierce repression unleashed on the demonstrators, won public sympathy to their side. Even some people who were not inclined to support the movement had no stomach for the violence of the defenders of the status quo.

Most of the time, however, winning public support (and depriving one's opponent of it) are less dramatic. Some methods of doing this in America today would include such simple things as public education, coalition building, outreach, and working with the media.

Sometimes, all that is necessary to correct an injustice is simply to draw attention to it. I can think of two recent examples in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia:

*A while back, the recently privatized workers' compensation system here started a policy of cutting off promised benefits for widows and widowers of workers killed on the job at the time when the deceased worker would have retired. This also happened to be in clear violation of state law. (The WV Chamber of Commerce, by the way, supported cutting off the widows.)

In the wake of the Sago disaster and the Aracoma mining fatalities, not too many people were in the mood to see widows and orphans jerked around. The more people learned about it, the more outraged they became. The pillars of support for this policy were removed and the noise level increased. In the end, Gov. Manchin ordered the benefits restored.

Score one for Sun Tzu.

*Something similar happened when the state Medicaid program began cutting off in-home services for seniors with disabilities. This program helped people stay in their homes and was much less expensive to the state than nursing home care. People who cared about the seniors drew public attention and the attention of the legislature to what was happening. Many people were outraged. The pillars of support for this policy collapsed and the cuts were reversed.

Score two for Sun Tzu.

CASUALTIES. The World Health Organization estimates Iraqi casualties since the invasion to be over 150,000. Some estimates from other sources are higher.

THOSE CRAZY COSMOLOGISTS are the subject of this article.

GREENER LIVING. Here are some steps you can take.

TWO WV ITEMS. First, the economy and state revenue growth may be slowing. Second, some are drawing attention to the connections between a state Supreme Court justice and Massey CEO Don Blankenship. Massey recently won a decision there. The story even made the NY Times.

URGENT DINOSAUR UPDATE. Here's one with a crocodile-like head.

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

PARTHIAN SHOTS

Caption: Seamus McGoogle is a Nietzschean Uber-Cat.

This week's Goat Rope has featured nuggets from Nietzsche along with link and comments about current events. Even though he was way out there sometimes, he had his moments.

If memory serves, the English phrase "parting shots" is derived from the term "Parthian shots." This refers to the tactic of ancient Persian cavalry to turn and shoot unexpectedly when appearing to flee.

El Cabrero had trouble coming up with a single parting shot from Beyond Good and Evil to close out the week, so here are a few to ponder:

One is punished most for one's virtues.

The belly is the reason man does not so easily take himself for a god.

Who has not for the sake of his reputation- sacrificed himself?

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.

One ought to depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausicaa--blessing rather than in love with it.

CHIP GAINS VOTES BUT NOT ENOUGH to override Bush's veto. Here's how they voted. I guess the president wanted to save the money for a worthier cause such as his unnecessary war in...

IRAQ. This neat video against the war was reportedly produced by a 16 year old.

MAKING SENSE. This op-ed on the global economy by WV delegate Nancy Guthrie is worth a look.

HEARTBREAKING...NOT. From AP's Lawrence Messina's recent story about Massey CEO Don Blankenship:

Don Blankenship believes he cannot remain chairman, CEO and president of Massey Energy Co. and stay involved in West Virginia politics ---- unless he prevails in his federal lawsuit against Gov. Joe Manchin, his lawyers contend in the pending case.

The mere contemplation of such a loss causes El Cabrero to grow faint. Excuse me whilst I revive myself with smelling salts...

OK, I'm back.

IT'S EASY BEING NOT GREEN. El Cabrero is not usually a big fan of state rankings by business magazines like Forbes. But I believe this one...

EVERYBODY CAN RELAX:

The Internal Revenue Service recently released its fun-filled report on 2005 individual income taxes. The headline is that the super-rich were even more super than in any year since 1986 when the IRS first had comparable data. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal duly took note, but not many others did.

The top 1 percent of all taxpayers earned 21.2 percent of all the money that individuals in the country earned in 2005. So one-hundredth of the taxpayers earned one-fifth of all income. (The data are available here.)

That's a relief, huh? The rest of the story is here.

MORE ON CENSORSHIP from John Milton:

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's Image: but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were, in the eye.

That one goes out to WV's domestic Taliban for its latest book banning stunt (see yesterday's post).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ALTISSIMA

A NATURALIST'S TALE AND (WHY NOT?) AN ITEM ABOUT THE LOCH NESS MONSTER ((and the WV Supreme Court))

Caption: Can you find the ants in this picture? E. O. Wilson could.

This has inadvertently turned into Darwin week at Goat Rope so I may as well stay the course and recommend a good but not terribly recent book, Edward O. Wilson's 1995 autobiography Naturalist.

While El Cabrero was never a huge fan of sociobiology, one of Wilson's many brainchildren, it's hard not to like Wilson himself (no known relation). Before and after he moved into evolutionary grand theory, he was--and remains--a naturalist's naturalist, turning over rocks and logs in search of nature's wonders.

And he has become a real leader among scientists in defending the environment, recently calling for Christians to join the fight to preserve the natural world.

Wilson ignited quite a controversy in the 1970s with his suggestions that genes influence human society to a degree largely unimagined. He was attacked--sometimes unfairly--for promoting an ideology which some said could justify inequality, male dominance, xenophobia, war, etc.

In fact, he didn't believe biology was destiny and was not much of a political animal, describing himself as a "Roosevelt liberal turned pragmatic centrist." One could do worse--much worse.

The debate over the role of biology in social life is destined to go on for a long time, but his other contributions both to natural science and protecting the environment are beyond question.

Here's sample from Naturalist about his beloved ants:

They are everywhere, dark and ruddy specks that zigzag across the ground and down holes, milligram-weight inhabitants of an alien civilization who hide their daily rounds from our eyes. For over 50 million years ants have been the overwhelmingly dominant insect everywhere on land outside the polar and arctic ice fields. By my estimate, between 1 and 10 million billion individuals are alive at any moment, all of them together weighing, to the nearest order of magnitude, as much as the totality of human beings.

He left out the part about them getting in your pants and making you dance, but otherwise the book is a keeper.

DROPPING ALL PRETENCE OF SOCIAL RELEVANCE, Goat Rope is sticking to the theme of weirdness this week. In case you missed it, here's a recent item on a possible sighting of the Loch Ness monster, complete with a video clip. After more than 6 years of the Bush administration, nothing seems weird to me anymore...

WHATEVER... This is inside baseball for West Virginians. The masterful "just-the-facts" blog of all things pertaining to El Cabrero's beloved state is Lincoln Walks at Midnight, which has this item about state Supreme Court justice Brent Benjamin in which he claims that he won in 2004 not because of coal baron and Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship's money but rather due to the mistakes of his opponent, Warren McGraw.

Far be it from El Cabrero to deny that his opponent made a mistake or two, but I find the whole Loch Ness thing MUCH easier to believe.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: UNDER THE WATER