Metaphorical rule of life short enough to be a tweet

Don't put on the tee shirt until after you finished the race.

JUST ONE LINK. It asks a good question, with lots of good discussion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: SHORT

One big onion

I have soft spots for several individuals and organizations beyond the realm of bourgeois respectability. One such group is the Industrial Workers of the World, a radial union founded in 1905 to join skilled and unskilled workers into One Big Union.

The Wobblies, as they were known, got pretty well smashed in the wake of World War I but a remnant is still around today. I was pleasantly surprised to find this article about Wobbly or Wobbly-inspired inroads to organizing in the food chain.

Some of the Wobbly approaches to organizing pioneered among mobile harvest or lumber workers just might be useful today in trying to organize workers unprotected by traditional unions.

I wish em luck.

HOLY OVERWORKED METAPHOR, BATMAN! Here's George Lakoff on why the fiscal cliff metaphor sticks and here's something local organizers did about it in WV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Zombie fever

I think I know what it's like to become a zombie now. Well, maybe not the dying and coming back and eating people part, but the part that happens after you get bit by one. As all the zombie movies and The Walking Dead series show, then follows a period of high fever, severe body pain, and periods of chills.

That has pretty much been my reality most of this week. I can't find any zombie bites on me, but in case I do croak, somebody should probably do the head thing.

There is one thing I've learned from this experience: when one is subject to periods of extreme chills and shivering, it is probably best not to watch movies about Alpine mountain climbing. I learned that the hard way while watching the German film North Face, about an unsuccessful attempt on Eiger.

JUST ONE LINK TODAY. Metaphors matter. Consider the implications of whether we view the economy as a garden or a machine?

OK, MAYBE TWO. Congratulations to community members of Charleston' West Side, who are on the verge of winning a victory that was months in coming. It looks like the Kanawha County Board of Education is about to vote to add the name of prominent African American educator Mary C. Snow to the West Side Elementary School. Here's a post from back in February about how the community mobilized on this issue.

CONFESSION. In the last post I said I was going to try to stop trolling, i.e. parodying right wing rants on news websites. On reflection, that's probably not going to happen. It's just too much fun.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TCB

Random animal picture, this one being of Little Edith Ann at Halloween, yet another reason why dogs hate that holiday.

The lame duck session of Congress that begins today has some serious business to take care of, provided it has the guts and will. Around two million Americans are going to exhaust unemployment benefits in December. In West Virginia, the number is around 11 thousand. The numbers will only get worse in 2011.

This needs to happen, given that there are around five jobless workers for every new job that opens up. And economists are expecting sluggish job growth for the next year or two, maybe longer. Ideally, the extension should last for a year.

Ever since the 1950s, Congress has acted to extend benefits when unemployment was 7.2percent or higher and we're way about that point now.

This extension has to happen in the lame duck session because the new majority in the House is not likely to do it. I'd really like to be wrong about this, but I think it's a good bet that the new majority will be hostile to anything that benefits working people, the unemployed and people in poverty. And for all their talk about fighting deficits, you can bet that they'd like nothing more than to extend Bush era tax cuts for the rich indefinitely.

There is something we can do about this. Tomorrow, Nov. 16 is a national call-in day to Congress to extend unemployment. The WV AFLCIO is urging people to participate in the call-in campaign tomorrow and has provided a toll free number: 1-877-662-2889.

Please take a minute to make the call. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH, here's yours truly on the need for the WV legislature to take some action of its own on unemployment insurance modernization.

CAVING (METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING). The White House, that is. Maybe.

SPEAKING OF METAPHORS, they seem to live in certain regions of the brain.

ANOTHER FIGHT IN THE WORKS is preventing repeal of health care reform.

SOMETHING ELSE TO DENY. Melting glaciers. It might be a bit harder to deny rising sea levels in the future though.

UN-WELL BEING. West Virginia takes the lead again.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED