One for fun, three for real.

OK, I don't usually sit around watching stuff on YouTube. Really. But I recently discovered a hilarious web-based show that is tailor made for karate geeks like myself. It's called Enter the Dojo and is a great spoof of the martial arts world and especially "McDojos." If you liked The Office you just might love it.

Watch at your own risk.

OK, back to business.

WHO OWNS WEST VIRGINIA? You probably guessed it: not West Virginians. Here's info about a new study by the American Friends Service Committee and the WV Center on Budget and Policy.

SPEAKING OF WEST VIRGINIA, here's an interesting op-ed by a friend of mine on the state's political climate. The author, Perry Mann, is even generous enough to feed the trolls that lurk at the Gazette website.

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT, McDowell County, historically one of the counties from which the most coal wealth has been extracted, has life expectancies at or near the lowest in the nation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Crying wolf and falling skies

The Gentle Reader may have noticed that virtually every reform that improved conditions for low income and working people was vigorously opposed by conservative and business interests. These groups typically try to scare the public by predicting apocalyptic consequences for any piece of legislation they don't like.

A new website, the Cry Wolf Project, is a good resource for challenging and exposing this kind of rhetoric. I especially recommend the searchable quote bank section, which gives example after example of hysterical hyperbole going back to the 1800s.

A lot of the old crud sounds pretty familiar today.

FULL. I'm not always Thomas Friedman's biggest fan, but I think he may be right here.

ROCK ON. Here's more about WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's defense of Medicaid.

LIVING LONGER. OR NOT. Here's an interesting county by county look at life expectancy in the US. I noticed that women in southern WV are actually experiencing a decline, as a study of early deaths published in 2008 by West Virginians for Affordable Health Care noted.

THIS IS KOCHED UP. The Koch brothers funded, among many other vile things, a study of which states are the most free. Apparently those that are on the blue side of the political spectrum are totalitarian gulags.

WHACKADOODLES, REVISITED. Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This and that

There are a number of Buddhist ideas that I think are useful for people interested in social justice. Earlier this week, I wrote about the big three, also known as the three signs of being: suffering, impermanence and insubstantiality (dukkha, anicca and anatta).

Another one is related to all three but especially the latter. It's the basic idea of dependent origination, also sometimes called dependent co-arising. This basically means that nothing really exists in itself or is as solid as it seems. Rather, all things are dependent on a long series of causes and conditions and come into being and pass away according to those conditions.

As the Buddha put it,

When this exists, that comes to be. With the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be. With the cessation of this, that ceases.

The take home message I get from that is that the conditions that shape our world and social institutions constantly change. If we pay attention and act skillfully in accordance with conditions (or refrain from acting when conditions are inappropriate) then there is a better chance at attaining a positive outcome. Acting unskillfully or disregarding conditions is like someone trying to cross a busy street without looking at the traffic.

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER? Here's a snapshot about the effects of income on lifespan.

SIGN ON. The National Unemployment Law Project has set up a website to petition Congress to extend unemployment benefits, which are set to run out at the end of November.

SUPERMARKET SURPRISES here.

LOCKED UP SYNDROME. This Gazette editorial looks at the American tendency to warehouse way more people than most other countries.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

NOBODY HURT ME!

Odysseus and his men blinding the cyclops Polyphemus, courtesy of wikipedia.

The Goat Rope series on the Odyssey of Homer continues. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

Things aren't looking good for Odysseus and his men at this stage of the game. By day, they are locked in the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus while he grazes his goats and sheep. By night, the one-eyed wonder chomps down on Odysseus' men. The good news is that Polyphemus is feeling generous and gave Odysseus a gift: he'll be the last one to get eaten.

I prefer gift certificates...

The classical scholar Peter Meineck has argued that the story of Odysseus in the cave can be seen as an initiation story. He is separated from the ordinary world and put in a situation where he has to undergo an ordeal and learn something to make it out. His eventual emergence from the cave can be seen as a kind of rebirth. That may be true, but Odysseus doesn't seem to gain a whole lot of insight.

At any rate, he's in a situation where mere force and violence won't help much. If he and his men kill the cyclops, they're doomed to die in the cave, which is sealed by a huge stone.

You probably remember this part of the story. Odysseus gets the Big Boy drunk one night with some super-powered wine he just happened to bring. They have a conversation in which he identifies himself as Nobody. After the cyclops passes out from the wine, he and his remaining crew blind the cyclops with a sharpened pole that has been heated in the fire.

I will spare the Gentle Reader the details. Suffice it to say that Odysseus and his men don't just put it part way in for a second. They plunge it in deep and grind it over and over. The physiological details are excruciating.

When Polyphemus screams, other cyclops gather around and ask what is the problem. Polyphemus screams "Nobody hurt me!"--so they go home.

The rest of the story is also well known. Odysseus and his men sneak out the next morning hanging beneath the Cyclops's sheep and hightail it for the ship to make their escape. Everything might have gone OK had not the hero of this story opened his big mouth. Instead of just getting out of Dodge, when he's at a safe distance, Odysseus announces his real name:

...'Cyclops--
if any man on the face of the earth should ask you
who blinded you, shamed you so--say Odysseus,
raider of cities, he gouged out your eye,
Laertes' son who makes his home in Ithaca!'

Bad move! You might as well give him your home address, phone number, Social Security number and credit cards.

The cyclops, son of the god Poseidon, prays thus:

...Hear me,
Poseidon, god of the sea-blue mane who rocks the earth!
If I really am your son and you claim to be my father--
come, grant that Odysseus, raider of cities,
Laertes' son who makes his home in Ithaca,
never reaches home. Or if he's fated to see
his people once again and reach his well-built house
and his own native country, let him come home late
and come a broken man--all shipmates lost,
alone in a stranger's ship--
and let him find a world of pain at home!'

That prayer is granted. By his own lack of self control, Odysseus condemns himself to years of further suffering and his men to certain death.

He has issues...

WHERE'S THE BEEF? The US economy doesn't manufacture much and is short of ideas, says Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT. The EFCA, which would make it easier--and safer--for workers to organize into unions, received support in the Wall Street Journal, of all places.

BIG WIND. A new study shows that hurricanes and typhoons are getting stronger, apparently as a result of climate change.

LIFE IS SHORT and getting shorter for residents in some WV counties, especially women.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

St. Anthony tormented by demons, by way of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is understanding human evil, along with links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Most normal people have internalized moral norms about how other people should be treated. However, under certain conditions, these moral restraints can be shut off. The result is what psychologist Albert Bandura called "moral disengagement" and it is often a key feature in acts of violence and cruelty. Here's a link to an essay of his on the subject.

This is the abbreviated Goat Rope version:

Under normal conditions, people have both inhibitive and proactive moral tendencies. Inhibitive means we understand it's not nice to hit little Tommy with a sledge hammer. Proactive means that if little Susy falls into a pit of boiling sludge we should pull her out. That's the good news. The bad news is that people all too often have ways of tossing both out the window.

Here are a two ways that can happen:

*Reconstruing the situation or coming up with moral justifications to treat people badly. Labeling them as the enemy usually works pretty good here. So does ideology. As Voltaire once said,

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

*Using euphemisms. Orwell was all over this one:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

We don't blow away villages; instead, we use surgical strikes. We don't torture, we just use rough interrogation. We don't kill innocent civilians, although collateral damage happens.

There are other ways of kicking off the switch, about which more tomorrow.

THE WIDENING GAP between rich and poor isn't just about money; it's about life expectancy, as the latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute suggests.

OH GOOD. Inflation may be the order of the day. That's all we need during a recession...

HEALTH CARE. A new report from the Commonwealth Fund found that

the United States spends more than twice as much on each person for health care as most other industrialized countries. But it has fallen to last place among those countries in preventing deaths through use of timely and effective medical care...

A TOUGH TEA LEAF TO READ. The US is finally sending a high level official to talk with the Iranian government. With a normal administration, I'd say that was a good sign, but I trust this one about as far as I could throw it. A worst-case scenario would involve the Bush administration prematurely declaring diplomacy to be a failure in order to try to justify yet another war.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, many Americans oppose a rush to war with Iran, if anybody is listening.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Bobby Brewster pleaded guilty to charges related to the kidnapping and torture of Megan Williams and faces up to 40 years in prison.

MINE SAFETY. Federal investigators are winding up a criminal investigation related to the fire at Massey Energy's Aracoma mine that killed two workers in Jan. 2006.

URGENT EXTINCT FLYING REPTILE UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GOD'S DICE

Caption: Does this wild turkey move from choice, chance or necessity?

El Cabrero has been thinking about determinism lately. I couldn't help it...

Determinism is the idea that all things follow strict laws of nature and causality. That seems to have been a driving--if contested--force in the development of the natural sciences. After all, the apparent laws of physics seem to hold up pretty well to repeat observation most of the time. The speed of light doesn't vary a whole lot from day to day.

While most people would probably agree to the rule of law and causality in much of the natural world, it gets a little stickier in the case of living things and especially people. If strict determinism was the universal law of nature, it would be pretty odd to exempt ourselves from the rest of the world.

But is it?

The iconic physicist Albert Einstein spent much of his later career fighting a desperate rearguard action against quantum theory, which he ironically helped to launch. Quantum investigations--don't even ask me exactly what that means--seemed to suggest indeterminacy and a universe at least partially based on chance and probability.

In opposing this view, Einstein was probably more driven by temperament and philosophical preference than evidence.

In a long running and friendly debate with quantum theorist Niels Bohr, the deterministic Einstein used to insist that "God does not play dice with the universe."

Bohr countered by saying, "Who are you to tell God what to do?"

While the thoughts of Einstein and Bohr--let alone God--are far beyond this simple goatherd, I can't help believing that God loves dice--and that maybe dice-ness and God-ness are not two entirely separate things.

(Note: the contemporary physicist Stephen Hawking once said that "God not only plays dice, but sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.")

Next time: Spinoza's stone.

IF CUTTING TAXES WAS ALL THAT MATTERED, consider this.

MORE ON THE UTAH MINE DISASTER can be found here.

RE: DOMESTIC SPYING, this is not a shock.

STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT. On a global scale, the difference in life expectancy between the rich and the poor is now 30 years, which is nothing to sneeze at. Prepositional correction: at which this is nothing to sneeze.

"UNLEASHING" DISASTER CAPITALISM. Here's an item by the UK Guardian about "markets" and violence.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED.

PLACID AND SELF CONTAIN'D?

Caption: Does Venus look placid to you?

First, I'd like to apologize about the irregular posts last week. These were due to a combination of a phone/internet crash at Goat Rope Farm followed by a week on the road. El Cabrero can usually get around one or the other but both at the same time are a problem.

Now we're back to the regular schedule of six days per week (more if something really bad or really good happens). Thanks for your patience.

This week, El Cabrero is thinking about animals and the roles they play in our lives (aside from consumption). How do they fit in yours?

Walt Whitman had somewhat exalted ideas about our animal friends:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

It is obvious from this passage that Walt was a city boy and idealized critters. While it is true that they spend relatively little time on theological and other reflections (as far as we can tell), they are anything but placid and self contain'd.

UNLEASHING INEQUALITY. Here's an op-ed from Sunday's Gazette by Ross Eisenbrey on the proposals offered by the recent book Unleashing Capitalism, which has garnered quite a fan club among the WV's right wing media. He particularly takes issue with the idea that wages automatically increase with productivity. Would that it were so...

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE DARK. The agonizing wait for news about the trapped miners in Utah continues. Here's a good item by Ken Ward about the dangerous practice of mining the pillars that hold up earlier excavations.

On a related subject, the CEO of the company, Robert Murray, is long known as a foe of new safety regulations, the United Mine Workers union, and environmentalists. Here's an item about his opposition to post-Sago reforms.

On yet another related front, Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship has filed suit against the WV Democratic Party for allegedly defaming his character during the 2006 campaigns when he spent several million dollars of his own money in an unsuccessful bid to change the composition of the state legislature.

I don't know where to start with that one. Except maybe this comment: where's tort reform when you really need it?

U.S. LIFE EXPECTANCY FALLS BEHIND. This is from the AP:

Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.

For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.

Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED