Act now to protect West Virginia's future

WV Governor Jim Justice has issued a call for a special session of the legislature to start on May 4 to work on the state budget. The governor seems confident that a deal is within reach, having told those attending a press conference that “I think we’re on a pathway to pass a budget that’s going to be really special,”

Of course things could be "special" in all kinds of ways. While I appreciate the governor's attempt to reach a deal with the Republican legislature, I hope he doesn't reach a "compromise" that would hurt working families while giving a tax cut to the wealthy and causing more serious fiscal problems down the road. You can read more on that here and here.

This is a time when revenue increases are needed to preserve the things we value most: schools, higher education, infrastructure, kids, seniors, veterans, parks, recreation, etc. That's one thing. But making the tax system more unfair to low income families while giving a break to the well off is just wrong.

As my friend Sean O'Leary from the WV Center on Budget and Policy recently tweeted, "If WV is going to increase taxes on working families, it should be for investing in schools, roads. Not to pay for tax cuts on the wealthy."

If the Republicans want to force the issue--and they have the votes--then so be it. Let them own it. All of it.

So what can you do about it? Several things, including:

*Call the governor's office and say something like, "Thank Gov. Justice for fighting for a budget that's good for all West Virginians. But please don't accept a compromise that hurts working West Virginians and makes our problems worse in the future."

*Contact your legislators. You can find out who they are here. The legislative website is here.

*Learn more by watching this Facebook Live presentation by Sean Monday, May 1 at 5:30.

*Show up at the capitol on Thursday, May 4 at 9:00 to stand up for The People's Budget.

Game on. And for real.

Feeling witchy?

Image by way of wikipedia.

If you are, maybe it's because tonight is Walpurgisnacht, which in some northern European countries was a festival accompanied by bonfires, dancing and pagan overtones. The name comes from the fact that May 1 is the feast of St. Walpurga, an English missionary to the Franks in the 700s.

Walpurga herself wasn't witchy, of course, but the time of year was, as in exactly six months from Halloween or All Saint's Day. In German folklore--and in Goethe's Faust Part I--it is the night of the witches' sabbath, where they knew a thing or two about partying.

While we're on a literary jag, Walpurgisnacht is also mentioned in Bram Stoker's eerie story Dracula's Guest, which didn't make it to the novel. Some weird things happened then too.

Alas, the weather is pretty wet at Goat Rope Farm today, so I wouldn't hold out much hope for a bonfire.

And don't forget: if tonight is Walpurgisnacht, that means tomorrow is the Celtic holiday Beltane!

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY? Click here.

INFOGRAPHIC? Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: FLYING ON A BROOM

An idea whose time has gone

Austerity was all the rage and still is in some circles, especially those that favor government by artificially created crisis, like the fiscal cliff, debt ceiling blackmail and the idiotic sequester.

Here are several looks a why austerity in a weak economy is a bad idea and why more people are walking away from it. Note: some of these are wonky but you'll have that some days.

First, it isn't doing that great in Europe.

Second, groups like the Center for American Progress are walking away from the idea of a "grand bargain"/bad deal, something they had previously supported.

Third, here's why they're calling for a reset to the fiscal debate.

Fourth, it makes more sense these days to be an infrastructure hawk than a deficit hawk.

WILL HE LISTEN? Here's E.J. Dionne's advice to the president.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. WV's high school graduation rate is improving and has now caught up to the national average.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FORTUNE OR FAME?

Lady Fortuna and her wheel (in pre-game show days), courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately has been writing for positive social change, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

How you approach writing for social change depends on where the accent is. If your main interest is on writing, you might approach it one way. But if you're mostly after results, another approach might work better. For me, the latter has more appeal.

As Bob Dylan put it,

Up on Housing Project Hill
It's either fortune or fame
You must pick up one or the other
Though neither of them are to be what they claim

Both would be nice, but I guess I'd prefer fortune.

The main difference between fortune and fame is that people who want fame like to be front and center, whether with bullhorns or bylines. The problem with this is that the message sometimes gets all mixed up with the messenger. If it's fortune you're after, while there may be times when you'll be visible if that would help move things along, that's not the main goal. Some of the most important and effective work takes place behind the scenes.

This is also true when it comes to writing. Some of the most useful kinds are the alphanumeric equivalent of grunt work: alerts, talking points, reports, letters to the editor or officials, issue briefs. In fact, some of the most important kinds of writing involve getting other people to write.

More on that tomorrow, but first...

FIVE YEARS, THOUSANDS OF LIVES AND A GAZILLION DOLLARS LATER...


You-know-who-you-know-when, once again courtesy of wikipedia.

Senator Byrd had this to say about that.

NEXT STOP: IRAN? Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, thinks the Bush administration may try to make a bad situation much worse. One can hardly wait for the next aircraft carrier photo op. McGovern spoke Tuesday at WV State University at an event sponsored by Seneca 2. I meant to blog that yesterday. My bad.

BIG PAYOFFS. Investments in our crumbling infrastructure make sense for all kinds of reasons.

URGENT COLOSSAL SQUID UPDATE. They have eyes 11 inches wide, bigger than a dinner plate. Check out the picture.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DEEP DREAMS

Image courtesy of fromoldbooks.org.

The theme for this week's Goat Rope is dreams and what they may mean. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

Carl Gustav Jung is something of a cult figure these days, which might not altogether be a good thing. He had a tendency to take dips into what Freud considered the "black tide of...occultism." Still he had some interesting ideas about dreams and it would be hard to leave him out of a discussion of them.

Jung is remembered today for several of his ideas, but one of the main ones is that of the collective unconscious. Freud admitted the existence of a personal unconscious, but Jung argued that there was a deeper layer of instincts and archetypes, which are inborn images and motifs which we inherit.

Fittingly enough, Jung claimed that a dream helped him develop this concept. As described in Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he dreamed of a house he recognized as his own. It was a little old fashioned, but OK otherwise. But when he went down a flight of stairs, the rooms were much older, darker and medieval. A stone stairway led to a cellar dating from ancient Roman times. When he lifted a slab on this floor, it led to an ancient cave with scattered bones, broken pottery and two human skulls.

Here's his interpretation:

The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became. In the cave, I discovered the remains of a primitive culture, that is the world of the primitive man within myself--a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness. The primitive psyche of man borders on the life of the animal soul, just as the caves of prehistoric times were usually inhabited by animals before men laid claim to them.

Elsewhere, he wrote that

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness may extend... All consciousness separates, but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. Out of these all-uniting depths arises the dream, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral.

El Cabrero is no Jungian, but sometimes dreams are too deep and weird to fit any reductive scheme. I remember one I had as a young adult that stuck with me. I stood on a hill watching my home town being devastated by a horrible flood. We got flooded a lot for real, but this was way worse and way different. It was a disaster of biblical proportions.

I remember looking in the water and seeing a drowned woman floating upside down. Suddenly she turned face up and I was horrified to see that she was clutching a drowned baby to her breast. That was bad enough, but then I heard a voice say, "Alas, poor baby. We could give you everything but peace."

I'm still trying to shake that one off.

STRESS AND TRAUMA. A new study suggests that stress may be more of a factor in the problems of some veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan than brain injury. If that proves to be the case in light of further research, that would be good news. Stress-related problems are easier to treat than neurological ones.

WE'RE AN INSPIRATION! The WV Supreme Court goat rope just keeps getting better and better. The latest twist is novelist John Grisham's latest effort was inspired by the (largely Don Blankenship-funded) election of Brent Benjamin to the state supreme court in 2004. Here's an extract from a conversation between Grisham and Matt Lauer about his new book on the Today Show:

"Basically, it involves a chemical company,” Lauer said. “They contaminate the water in the community. There’s a cancer outbreak. People die. And there’s a $41 million jury award against this company. And the head of the company says, I’m not gonna pay it. What I’m gonna do is avoid paying it by stacking the court that’s eventually gonna hear the appeal on this case. Far fetched?”

“It’s already happened,” Grisham said. “It’s already happened.”

“It’s a long term calculation,” Lauer said. “You have to be pretty sure about the money you’re investing in this.”

“Well, it’s happened,” Grisham said. “It happened a few years ago in West Virginia. A guy who owned a coal company, got tired of getting sued. He elected his guy to the Supreme Court, it switched 5-4 back his way. Now he doesn’t worry about getting sued. So it happens. It’s already happened.”

And here's more from WV Public Radio.

CRUMBLING ECONOMY, CRUMBLING INFRASTRUCTURE. There's a connection.

HIT THE ROAD, JACK. If you want to stay strong as you age, that is.

UNEMPLOYMENT. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute illustrates why a boost in unemployment benefits is good for workers and the economy.


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

IN PRAISE OF HICKS

Caption: Orthodox icon of John the Baptist.

A while back, El Cabrero was challenged by a Goat Rope reader to write about the five things I most admire about Jesus. It took me a while to respond since I haven't found anything not to admire.

(He didn't seem to think much of goats if Matthew 25 is right, but that could be a mark of supreme wisdom.)

Anyhow, that's the theme this week. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

The second thing I'm going highlight about Jesus reflects my personal prejudice as a hick from West Virginia. According to our pals at Wikipedia,

Hick is a derogatory term for an unsophisticated person from a rural area.

One of the few things the Roman and Jewish ruling classes would have agreed on was that Jesus was a hick. And a dangerous one at that. Indeed from the point of view of anybody who was anywhere in the ancient world, Jesus was a nobody from nowhere.

For sophisticated pagans, Rome was the place to be, and if you couldn't be there, you should be at a nice estate in the countryside worked by slaves or someplace like Athens or Alexandria. For Jewish rulers at Jerusalem, Galilee was a rural backwater whose residents were religiously suspect.

Then factor in social class. Both pagan and Jewish elites lived off of the labor and sufferings of the lower classes, whether of peasants or slaves or others teetering on the edge of oblivion. The gospels refer to Jesus as a tekton, which has traditionally been translated as carpenter but can mean any kind of manual laborer.

In a world where food security was not a given for most people and was tied to the land, a tekton would often be a landless peasant living a life even more precarious than that of those who tried to scratch a life from the soil and had to render up their surplus--and often their necessities--to the ruling classes.

Jesus knew all about living on the edge. He pretty much stayed there all his natural life.

Then factor in official credentials. Not only was he considered to be a lower class hick, but he had no official sanction to do the kind of stuff he was doing. Over and over in the gospels, people keep wondering "Who is this guy anyway? What's he think he's doing talking and acting this way?"

So the next time you get called a hick, smile, thank the person, and say you're in some pretty good company.

THE WORKER IS WORTHY OF HIS HIRE. According to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research,

Unionization substantially raises wages and benefits even in typically low-wage occupations, according to "Unions and Upward Mobility for Low- Wage Workers", a report released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Inclusion.

The report, which analyzed 15 of the lowest-paying occupations in the United States, found that unionized workers earned about 16 percent more than their non-union counterparts. Unionized workers in these same industries were also about 25 percentage points more likely to have health insurance or a pension plan.

For workers in these low-wage industries, unionization raised their wages, on average, about $1.75 per hour. In financial terms, the union effect on employer-provided health insurance and pensions was even larger.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN... Here's an elegant response from Paul Krugman to the right wing attack on the Children's Health Insurance Program.

BUILT ON SAND. Excerpt from a long but good article in the New Republic about our neglected infrastructure:

Here is Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: it is the "duty of the sovereign or commonwealth" to erect and to maintain "public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain." Infrastructure is the classic public good that the free market does not and cannot provide. On the scale that is necessary, only the federal government can make the difference.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THINGS START SMALL

It's sad to realize that ancient Greek civilization self destructed at the height of its creativity, but that's pretty much what happened.

Fifty years after diverse city states united to fend of the massive Persian invasion, a war began between Athens and Sparta and their allies which would rage off an on for 27 years between 431 and 404 BC.

That was a long time ago but there's something modern about the war. It also had the first "modern" historian, the Athenian general Thucydides, who attempted to write a neutral and objective account of the debacle, although he died before he completed it. He was aiming for posterity, writing in it that

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.

I don't know about the "forever" part but it has done pretty well for the last 2,400 years.

The story of this extended goat rope is long and complicated. Interested people not inclined to wade through Thucydides 600+ pages may want to check out some novels about it, such as Mary Renault's Last of the Wine and Steven Pressfield's Tides of War.

People often imagine it as a conflict between democratic Athens (the good guys) and authoritarian and militaristic Sparta (the bad guys), but that doesn't work very well. Both societies owned slaves. To the extent that Athens was democratic, it was very democratic, but Sparta itself had a mixed government that combined two kings with republican features such as a council of elders and a citizen's assembly. Spartan women were probably the freest in all Greece.

Athens was democratic but imperialist. Its empire began as a league against the Persians, with allied states contributing ships and men. It became an extractor of tribute. And while the Athenians often supported popular governments, they were not averse to massacring and enslaving those who resisted them.

Spartans were authoritarian and warlike but they disliked long wars and had no far flung imperial ambitions. They had long ago conquered neighboring Messinians who became an oppressed class of helots which might revolt at any time. Given the choice, Spartans didn't like to be away for too long.

The Athenian position was basically this: we got an empire by fair or foul means and we'd be stupid to give it up--deal with it. As Thucydides narrates it, an Athenian leader put it this way to Spartan envoys seeking a resolution of a dispute involving cities that attempted to revolt from Athens:

We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human nature in accepting an empire when it was offered to us and then in refusing to give it up. Three very powerful motives prevent us from doing so--security, honor, and self-interest. And we are not the first to act this way. It has always been a rule that the weak should be subject to the strong; and besides, we consider that we are worthy of our power.

Attitudes like that are not conducive to conflict resolution. The die was cast when the Athenians rejected arbitration. Sparta made the first military moves, but Athens seems to El Cabrero to be the moral aggressor.

And they would pay a terrible price.

ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SUBJECT, Reuters reports that:

More than half of top U.S. foreign policy experts oppose President George W. Bush’s troop increase as a strategy for stabilizing Baghdad, saying the plan has harmed U.S. national security, according to a new survey.As Congress and the White House await the September release of a key progress report on Iraq, 53 percent of the experts polled by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress said they now oppose Bush’s troop build-up.

Ninety-one percent believe the world has grown more dangerous for Americans and the United States, up 10 percent from February. More than 80 percent of the experts said they expected another major terrorist attack over the next decade. Fifty eight percent of those polled expected that the Middle East would still be reeling from the negative effects of the war a decade from now. Only 3 percent believed Iraq would be "beacon of democracy" in the next 10 years.

WE'LL CROSS THAT BRIDGE. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute focuses on declining investments in infrastructure, which can be lethal.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH DEPARTMENT. A Texas couple arrested for protesting at an appearance by President Bush in West Virginia in 2004 won $80,000 from the White House. What makes the whole thing really interesting is the administration's "sensitive" manual that provides instructions on how to stifle free speech.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ANYONE FOR NEUTICLES?

Caption: This man just ordered his...

El Cabrero was originally inspired to write about animals this week for two reasons.

First we had a week on the road away from the menagerie here, aside from dogs. The weird thing is, I kind of missed the little buggers. Even the goats...

Then, catching up on accumulated magazines, I came across a really good article in Business Week about "The Pet Economy."

Unsolicited product endorsement: of all the magazines I peruse, I'd have to put BW at the top of my list. It has no particular axes to grind and is often full of useful and cool stuff.

The basic point of the article is that Americans are nuts about pets. In fact, we spend around $41 billion per year on them.

How crazy can it get? Check out the lead paragraph:

If there's still any doubt whether the pampering of pets is getting out of hand, the debate should be settled once and for all by Neuticles, a patented testicular implant that sells for up to $919 a pair. The idea, says inventor Gregg A. Miller, is to "let people restore their pets to anatomical preciseness" after neutering, thereby allowing them to retain their natural look and self-esteem. "People thought I was crazy when I started 13 years ago," says the Oak Grove (Mo.) entrepreneur. But he has since sold more than 240,000 pairs (a few of which went on prairie dogs, water buffalo, and monkeys). "Neutering is creepy. But with Neuticles, it's like nothing has changed." Nothing, except there's a fake body part where a real one used to be.

THE MATRIX REVISITED. In The Coolest Book Ever Written (Moby-Dick, of course), Ishmael muses that

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.

According to this NY Times article, some people are apparently seriously speculating that we may not be so much the objects of a practical joke as simulations in somebody's computer game. It quotes one Oxford philosopher as saying

“My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that...is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

That would explain a lot...

A BRIDGE TO WHAT? Here's a good item from The Nation about the price we're paying for neglecting our infrastructure. This is something the market god won't provide.

IRAQ. It was recently brought to El Cabrero's attention that the U.S. has been involved in the unnecessary war in Iraq for a longer period of time than it was actively engaged in fighting WWII.

WHO GETS WHAT. The Economic Policy Institute reported in an August 1 Snapshot that:

Economic growth in the current recovery has been very unbalanced, with all of the income growth from 2001 to 2005 (the latest available data) accruing to the upper 5% and, in particular, the upper 1% of households. In fact, the bottom 90% of households experienced a 4.2% decline in their market-based incomes... representing a loss of $1,293 per household on average from 2001 to 2005 (the latest year data is available). Had income growth been shared equally during this recovery, the bottom 90% would have been $2,071 better off than they actually were in 2005 (with a $778 income gain, instead of a loss).

To borrow an expression from Goat Rope visitor Brecht (see yesterday's post), this is an example of "tinkle down economics." But they're telling us it's raining.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DO IT AGAIN

Gichin Funakoshi (1868-1957), widely regarded as the founder of modern karate.

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is endurance, physical and otherwise. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries. It is El Cabrero's thesis that making a practice of endurance activities can pay rich dividends in all aspects of life.

Although they might not be the first to come to mind, martial arts are another form of physical activity that stress endurance.

If you just watch the movies about it, you may get the idea that this kind of training involves having a wise teacher show you new and cool stuff. That may happen on rare occasions but the reality is much more prosaic. It's usually about doing the same basic things over and over and over again, often in the company of three old friends: boredom, fatigue, and pain.

Traditional martial arts training violates every rule of progressive pedagogy. The short version is "shut up and drill," at least most of the time. Old stories tell of students who spent years sweeping the training hall and cleaning toilets before anyone even spoke to them and then spending years more on one technique or kata (a prearranged series of techniques which can be performed solo but have practical applications).

Gichin Funakoshi, regarded as the founder of modern karate do and particularly the Shotokan style, describes the old days of training in Okinawa when karate was still an underground activity and he studied under master Yasutsune Azato:

Night after night, often in the backyard of the Azato house as the master looked on I would practice a kata ("formal exercise")time and again, week after week, sometimes month after month, until I had mastered it to my teacher's satisfaction. This constant repetition of a single kata was grueling, often exasperating and on occasion humiliating. More than once I had to lick the dust on the floor of the dojo or in the Azato backyard. But practice was strict, and I was never permitted to move on to another kata until Azato was convinced that I had satisfactorily understood the one I was working on...

Although considerably advanced in years, he always sat ramrod stiff on the balcony when we worked outside, wearing a hakama, with a dim lamp beside him. Quite often, through sheer exhaustion, I found myself unable to make out even the lamp.

After executing a kata, I would await his judgment. It was always terse. If he remained dissatisfied with my technique, he would murmur, "Do it again," or "A little more!" A little more, a little more, so often a little more, until the sweat poured and I was ready to drop: it was his way of telling me there was still something to be learned, to be mastered. Then, if he found my progress satisfactory, his verdict would be expressed in a single word, "Good!" That one word was his highest praise. Until I had heard it spoken several times, however, I would never dare ask him to begin teaching a new kata.

Funakoshi was a big believer in the value of tempering the body and spirit. In his master work, Karate Do Kyohan, he quoted the ancient Chinese sage Mencius (Mengzi, c. 4th cent. BC):

When Heaven is about to confer an important office upon a man, it first embitters his heart in its purpose; it causes him to exert his bones and sinews; it makes his body suffer hunger; it inflicts upon him want and poverty and confounds his undertakings. In this way it stimulates his will, steels his nature and thus makes him capable of accomplishing what he would otherwise be incapable of accomplishing.

So here's to the strenuous life. Within reason.

WV'S DELEGATION STANDS FOR CHILDREN. Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 225-204 to expand health insurance coverage for children with the CHAMP Act. I'm pleased to say that WV's entire delegation supported the measure. Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito was one of only five Republicans to support the bill. Here's more. Congratulations and thanks to all our representatives.

Yesterday, the Senate passed its version of the bill by a veto-proof 68-31. The Senate version increases funding by $35 B over several years, compared to $50 B in the House version. Reconciliation of the bills should be interesting.

A PAINFUL REMINDER. The Minneapolis bridge disaster is a reminder of the importance of investing in and maintaining infrastructure. This is from Joshua Holland via Alternet:

...skimping out on infrastructure investments in the name of a low tax burden is a triumph of ideology over commonsense, but it goes beyond that. Conservative philosophy stresses limited government, not bad government, and nothing can change the fact that the public sector remains the only way to organize collectively when there's no profit involved. So nobody seriously believes that the the hidden hand of capitalism is going to step in and inspect and repair bridges that are open to the public. When lawmakers don't fund that work, they know full well that it won't get done.

What's more, the evidence that infrastructure investments result in increased economic productivity is fairly conclusive; some studies have estimated that every dollar invested in public infrastructure yields 104 percent return through increases in productivity (PDF).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GHOST STORIES AND RUNAWAY MONSTERS

Public domain image courtesy of www.moviewallpapers.net.

One dark and story night in Switzerland in 1816, the story goes, a bunch of high strung artsy types decided to write a ghost story. If you were making odds at the time, the smart money would have been on the poetic host, Lord Byron, or his best known guest, the romantic poet Percy Shelley.

Score one for girl power instead. The hands down winner in the eyes of the ages was the work of Percy's young wife Mary, who gave us Frankenstein, which has become the source of many movies, cartoons, comic books, songs, toys, spoofs, etc.

According to Mary, the inspiration came from a waking dream:

I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some power engine shows signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful it must be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

Maybe one reason why the story of Frankenstein's monster has such (anonymously "donated") legs is that it was a prescient metaphor for modern life, when our own creations and actions sometimes get away from us and do a lot of unintended damage.

At the very least, it ought to help fill up a week's worth of blogging...

SPEAKING OF UNLEASHED MONSTERS, if you haven't already seen Newsweek's "After Bush" item, here is a little sampling:

Today, by almost all objective measures, the United States sits on top of the world. But the atmosphere in Washington could not be more different from 1982. We have become a nation consumed by fear, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world, we see ourselves besieged and overwhelmed. While the Bush administration has contributed mightily to this state of affairs, at this point it has reversed itself on many of its most egregious policies—from global warming to North Korea to Iraq.

In any event, it is time to stop bashing George W. Bush. We must begin to think about life after Bush—a cheering prospect for his foes, a dismaying one for his fans (however few there may be at the moment). In 19 months he will be a private citizen, giving speeches to insurance executives. America, however, will have to move on and restore its place in the world. To do this we must first tackle the consequences of our foreign policy of fear. Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast, alone, unilaterally and pre-emptively, we have managed in six years to destroy decades of international good will, alienate allies, embolden enemies and yet solve few of the major international problems we face.

HIGH ROAD OR LOW ROAD? There's been a lot of talk among WV's anti-labor right wing about "unleashing capitalism." I think they are at least 100 years late. Also, I'm not aware of too many people here who advocate for state ownership of the means of production or the collectivization of agriculture (although the possibility of having the goats around here confiscated sounds pretty good at times). The real question is, how can we promote high quality economic development for West Virginia in a way that benefits its people?

The economic royalists want a war on labor, starting with pushing for so-called "right to work" laws, which are more like right to work for less, as I argue here. That would be the low road.

There is a better way, one which might actually work:

West Virginia’s future economy is dependent primarily on one thing — investment in people, said Tom Witt, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University.

“We need to keep an eye on this ball,” he told the Charleston Rotary Club on Friday. “This is going to affect our long-term economic development.”

Investing in people means more education, on-the-job training and health care, so people can become productive in the labor market, Witt said. People must also be encouraged to take part in the economy by actively seeking jobs and/or education, he said.

That would be the high road.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED