Quick question (and more of a tweet)

Is this the latest embarrassment to West Virginia to appear in the media lately or have I missed one? Or more?

It's so hard to keep up these days...

The wheel turns

If there is any upside to the current economic crisis, it is that it gives us a chance to realize something together that we're sooner or later going to realize on our own one of these days.

That lesson is that Fortune is a wheel that turns. When we're on the upswing, we often tend to think that we enjoy life's good things--health, wealth, power, prestige, looks--as a matter of merit and that the universe has to recognize our property rights to them.

It doesn't.

The temptations of arrogance and hubris are probably strongest for the powerful. As Simone Weil said,

Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.

The book of Ecclesiastes nailed it:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Time and chance.

Anyone can experience a reversal and we're all bound to at one time or another. A time like this can make those of us who may have been spared some of fate's harder blows realize that misfortune isn't just for those other people or for those who somehow deserve it.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls and all that.

One of the most powerful parts of Shakespeare's dark tragedy of King Lear comes when the arrogant king is himself dispossessed and exposed in a brutal storm that forces him to recognize things he'd ignored before:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

KEEPING UP APPEARANCES after a reversal is the subject of this article.

THE RISING. This op-ed from the Baltimore Sun calls the Employee Free Choice Act a stimulus from the bottom up.

A STATE MESS. The solvency of WV's unemployment fund has been the cause of a major dust up in the legislature. It's also taken up a bit of El Cabrero's time lately.

WHAT THE...? In a battle between coal companies and the preservation of one of WV's most significant historical places, the smart money is probably on the coal companies. Come to think of it, if state government had to choose between the Second Person of the Holy Trinity and the coal companies, the same would probably be the case.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FAMILY VALUES, OLYMPIC STYLE

Zeus and Hera in a less rocky moment, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme lately is the Odyssey of Homer, but you'll also find links and comments about current events.

Several Olympic gods are major characters in this story so it might be time to meet the family, starting with the older generation and the "royal family."

At the pinnacle of power is the sky god Zeus, who is associated with the thunderbolt and also the guardian of oaths and the laws of hospitality. He is married to his sister Hera, who gets the credit (or blame) for having invented that institution. The marriage is a bit rocky given Zeus' many infidelities with other goddesses and humans.

Zeus and Hera have two children, Ares, the despised god of war and Hephaestus, the lame god of the forge. He got that way after his parents flicked him off Olympus and he fell to earth. A master craftsman, he is known to use the tools of technology to even the score.

Hephaestus is married to "laughter loving Aphrodite," goddess of love and sexual desire, who has an ongoing fling with Ares (love and war--what can you say?) In Homer, she is referred to as Zeus' daughter although according to Hesiod she is older than the Olympic gods, having arise from the foam of the sea where the titan Kronos threw testicles of Uranus after castrating him. Kronos was in time overthrown by Zeus.

Intergenerational conflict seems to be an issue in this family...

Zeus shares dominion with two of his brothers. Poseidon is the god of the sea and is associated with earthquakes. He is extremely quarrelsome and unpredictable and is known to hold grudges--such as the one against Odysseus after the latter blinds his son Polyphemus the cyclops. Hades is god of the dead and the underworld. Theoretically, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades share the earth in common but Zeus is clearly the main dude.

Hades doesn't get out much, although he famously kidnapped the goddess Persephone, daughter of the earth and grain goddess Demeter, which led to the seasons of the year. Persephone divides her time between the underworld (winter) and Olympus.

You don't hear much about Hestia, sister of Zeus and virgin goddess of the hearth and domestic life, but she was central to private religious life in the home.

Some of the more interesting gods were the children of Zeus from his extramarital wanderings. More on them tomorrow.

A BLUNT INSTRUMENT. Here's more commentary on the RAND Corporation report that says military force is not a solution to terrorism:

"Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended: It is often overused, alienates the local population by its heavy-handed nature and provides a window of opportunity for terrorist-group recruitment."

SWIPE THIS. Is credit card debt the next economic bubble?

POWER OF PRIDE/SHAME ON YOU. Some researchers believe that human gestures of pride and shame or victory and defeat may be universal and inherited. At Goat Rope Farm, you could pick them up by copying the roosters...

URGENT NEANDERTHAL UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED