Vox populi

Not that many people in positions of power seem to care, but the majority of Americans strongly oppose the radical agenda being pushed by the right wing in Congress.

Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America's Future notes in the Huffington Post that most people in this country

•oppose cutting benefits for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients;

•reject the idea of raising the age of eligibility for these popular programs;

•hate the proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher or privatize Social Security;

•support taxing the rich and corporations to close the deficit and fund needed investment;

•favor cutting military spending for both obsolete weapons systems and current wars;

•and, while acknowledging the need to reduce deficits, place a higher priority on creating jobs and getting the sputtering economy growing.

DESTROYING MEDICARE IN ORDER TO SAVE IT here.

I'M GAME. Robert Reich calls for federal budget ju jitsu.

JAY VERSUS JOE. Here's a good Gazette editorial on the budget debate and how West Virginia's two senators find themselves on opposite sides. Please step away from the Dark Side, Senator Manchin.

A NEW CHARGE has been filed against a Massey Energy security officer. Meanwhile, tomorrow the independent investigation of the Upper Big Branch disaster ordered by then governor Manchin will be released tomorrow.

THE STATE OF THE STATES. Not good (although WV is doing fairly well for a change).

MY NECK OF THE WOODS didn't come out too good in a survey of well-being.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Short rations again

El Cabrero has been running around too much to put together a decent post today. However the following items caught my bleary eye this morning:

REMEMBERING REAGAN. If we must, let's get it right.

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES, and especially those represented by unions, are major targets on the right.

LIBERAL MEDIA? Here's an article on what that might actually look like.

PUBLIC OPINION ON THE FEDERAL BUDGET discussed here. Again, there's no mandate for massive slashing.

STATE OF THE STATES. For most, not good.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The biggest loser?

Pyrrhus of Epirus, one of many who lost by winning.

One of the things like makes life and history different from sports and games is that in the former, you can't tell right away exactly who the winners and losers are. Sometimes an apparent victor is a long term loser and vice versa.

A classic example of losing while winning is that of a Greek king named Pyrrhus who fought the Romans nearly 300 years BC. He won, but at a terrible price. As Plutarch put it,

The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.

On the other hand, one could make a good case for saying the South won the American Civil War. Yes, the cause of an independent Confederacy was lost, but after a few years of Reconstruction, old elites were able to re-establish themselves and institute a system of racial segregation and exploitation that lasted for nearly a century.

It might be too soon to say who the real winners of the 2010 election cycle were. Yes, one party lost a majority and another party gained one in the House, but it might be that the real victory of the last two years was ending the worst of a catastrophic recession, making some financial reforms, and, as this item argues, passing a historic comprehensive health care reform bill. The author argues that "The bill was more important than the election."

Time will tell. First, the new law will have to survive Republican attempts to choke off its funding.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's another take on the health care struggles ahead.

JOBS VS DEFICITS. This is likely to be one of the other major policy fights over the next few years.

TAKING IT TO THE STATES. New Republican majorities in many states plan major cuts to jobs and services.

UPPER BIG BRANCH UPDATE. Two federal grand juries are investigating Massey's mine disaster. Also, Massey stock prices went up Friday amidst rumors of a buy out.

TO END ON A POSITIVE NOTE, congratulations to Edison Pena, the rescued Chilean miner who completed the New York marathon yesterday!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A good gig

I have always been a big Darwin fan. I've been both fascinated by his big ideas and his personal life and habits. He had a lot of things going for him, starting with luck. As Cervantes said, "To be lucky in the beginning is everything."

How many people in life get the chance for a perfect job right out of school? The budding natural historian (as people interested in life science were then called) was a reluctant clergyman-to-be on completing his studies. He was saved from a life as a minor character in a Jane Austen novel by an offer to travel around the world as a scientist on H.M.S. Beagle on a five year voyage.

It was the mother of good gigs.

He then had the tenacity and persistence to work methodically through his specimens, observations and ideas for years to come as he developed his theory of natural selection. He could go micro as well as macro, not only pondering the evolution of all life but getting down to the nitty gritty studying humble creatures like barnacles and earthworms.

He was also a devoted family man, truly in love with his wife Emma and a doting father to his children. The kids even got into the act. There are delightful anecdotes about his children playing musical instruments to the earthworms to see whether they responded to such stimuli (they didn't as far as anyone could tell).

More on this to come.

ONE, TWO, MANY HERBERT HOOVERS. Job losses at the state and local level are threatening the economic recovery.

FALSE CHOICES. Dealing with the joblessness crisis will require overcoming deficit mania--at least until the economy improves..

WHACKADOODLE NATION. Here's a look at the top 10 conspiracy theories on the far right.

OFF THE HOOK. Here's what happens when a group of scientists go unplugged in the wilderness to study the effect of technology on the brain.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

For this relief much thanks

A vote in the US House yesterday means good news for tens of thousands of teachers and other workers who would otherwise have faced layoffs as states continue to struggle with the recession. The US House approved the measure 247-161. The bill will provide $26 billion in aid to states, which are still reeling from the recession while much of the money from the Recovery Act has been spent.

This is something many groups and individuals have been trying to get done all summer. It's not enough to really kickstart the economy but it's a step in the right direction.

ARISTOTLE WOULD PROBABLY AGREE with this article on the importance of the middle class and not letting it die.

DON'T GET MAD, GET MOVING. Exercise may help moderate anger. I knew that.

URGENT ANCIENT SEA MONSTER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The power on the page

Juno is a serious reader.

On my current pile of books lately is a gift from a friend titled A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel. It's a pretty wide ranging tome, interspersed with quotes from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

While reading it, I stumbled on some eloquent lines about the power of literature to help people deal with life and all its injustices and challenges. Here goes:

There may be no poem, however powerful, that can remove one ounce of pain or transform a single moment of injustice. But there may be no poem, however poorly written, that may not contain, for its secret and elected reader, a consolation, a call to arms, a glimmer of happiness, an epiphany. Something there is in the modest page that, mysteriously and unexpectedly, allows us, not wisdom, but the possibility of wisdom, caught between the experience of everyday life and the experience of literary reality.

Him write pretty but me think him right.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. I've blogged a lot this summer about the need for Congress and the Senate in particular to pass some additional fiscal relief to the states. Yesterday, the measure finally passed with a vote of 61-38. The House will be called back into session probably next week to finalize the bill.

The downside, as I mentioned yesterday, is that the package includes a rollback of expanded food stamp or SNAP benefits from the Recovery Act which will take place in 2014. But we can fight that one out another day.

ANOTHER UNLIKELY AGREEMENT. Things are really getting weird. Now I'm agreeing with former Reagan budget director David Stockman on letting Bush era tax cuts expire.

UPPER BIG BRANCH UPDATE. Here's an interesting item from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo about the latest twist in the investigation. This item from AOL News suggests that Massey's aggressive defense tactics have not been too well received.

DREAM ON. We all do it. But should we try to manipulate our dreams?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Once more for luck

Random animal picture.

For two months or so, the US Senate majority has been trying to pass a bill that would extend the fiscal aid to states from the Recovery Act to prevent further layoffs and a double dip recession. As Paul Krugman put it over a year ago, the effect of massive public sector layoffs will be like that of "50 Herbert Hoovers."

Today, the Senate may vote again. This time, the measure is fully offset from other cuts in spending so it would be deficit neutral (not that that matters very much when you have massive unemployment and sagging demand). Alas, some of that offset comes from cutting other vital programs, including SNAP or food stamps.

It's always something.

Still, it is my opinion that this bill is worth passing--we can fight again another day on the SNAP front. If you haven't--and especially if you live in states like Maine, Massachusetts, or Ohio--please call your senators (two in Maine, and one each in Ohio and Massachusetts).

UPPER BIG BRANCH. In the latest development in the ongoing investigations, the state of West Virginia is taking a rare step by issuing subpoenas in the disaster investigation. Here's more from Coal Tattoo.

SPEAKING OF COAL, here's the first in a series of blog posts from the WV Center on Budget and Policy about coal and the future of West Virginia.

OH YEAH, AND THIS. The coal industry is poised to spend millions in the next election. This is what they'll be paying for.

WHO NEEDS US? Corporations and the wealthy are doing fine. It's just ordinary people who aren't doing so great.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Blues and greens

El Cabrero is not overly superstitious most days, but I do believe it's good luck to see a great blue heron, if only because herons are cool. I saw two great blues flying yesterday during a long road trip, which I took to be a good sign.

Yesterday evening, however, who should appear at Goat Rope Farm but a green heron who has been known to hang out here from time to time, our creek being one of his favorite dining establishments.

It remains to be seen whether the good luck portended by the flying blues was seeing the green or if seeing both kinds means that things are about to go really great. Judging by current events, it may well be the former.

THE NEW NORMAL. Are we supposed to just get used to high unemployment rates and government inaction?

MEANWHILE, BACK IN WV, economic signals are mixed.

STOP THE PRESSES. I agree with Alan Greenspan about something.

IMPORTANT VOTE TODAY. The US Senate may vote today (again) on an important measure which would extend fiscal aid to states through the federal Medicaid match (FMAP). This measure has been narrowly defeated several times in the past by Republicans. If you want to do a good deed today, try calling yours bright and early, especially if they are on the fence. State layoffs and budget cuts could turn a lackluster recovery into a double dip recession.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The missing piece in the climate debate

Random picture of the official Goat Rope vegetable garden.

Yesterday I linked to a website devoted to worker justice and environmental sustainability issues. If there's ever an issue that needs to be addressed in an energy state like West Virginia, this is it.

On the site, there's an interesting white paper with the title Climate Legislation Must Provide a Just Transition for Workers, which speaks to that condition.

Here is just a teaser from the executive summary:

1. Fear of job loss is a major reason people oppose climate protection legislation.

2. The worker protection strategy of current climate bills is flawed and inadequate.

3. Climate protection advocates need a bold program to ensure that every worker, retiree, and community impacted by climate legislation can count on a secure future.

4. Rightwing politicians and self-serving business interests are exploiting the inadequacy of worker protection provisions to gut or defeat climate legislation.

There's a lot worth looking at here (this isn't even half of the executive summary) and these are the kinds of issues that need to be addressed if we're ever going to get this right.

TODAY COULD BE THE DAY the US Senate finally helps the 2.5 million Americans who have exhausted unemployment benefits, thanks to the vote of newly appointed West Virginia Senator Carte Goodwin. Yesterday, this was the subject of a speech by President Obama.

THE NEXT THING I hope Congress moves on is extending aid to states. Without it, the recovery will be slower and weaker.

SPY ON THIS. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

PASS THE RECOVERY, PLEASE. Corporate profits are up but hiring isn't.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The fuel that heats twice

There is a room at Goat Rope Farm that was large, damp and inhospitable for much of the year until we added a wood stove. Now, in those seemingly distant days of cold, it's the best place to be on a chilly evening. I totally understand the pagan veneration of the hearth and have poured my libations to Hestia, the goddess who presides over such things.

It also provides year round opportunities for exercise and scavenging. I spent a good part of the last Christmas holiday cutting up some trees that fell from our hill to a neighbor's yard (while the Spousal Unit was kayaking in a warmer clime, incidentally). I didn't really mind though, as long as I could get the chainsaws started. I looked upon it as a kind of weight training boot camp.

The wood was removed in pieces to our yard, where I'm still chopping it up. The wood pile is getting bigger and bigger, although I can't really tell that the pile of yet to be cut wood is getting any smaller. As a martial artist, I view chopping wood as a kind of hojo undo, or supplementary exercise.

I found this passage in Walden that speaks to my condition:

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work....they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were in the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.

Chopping wood in the summer has the added value of reminding me that change is inevitable, and that even the raging summer is destined to wane in time.

BYRD'S SHOES are likely to go unfilled, whoever occupies his seat in the Senate. Here's Ken Ward in Coal Tattoo looking at his legacy of rationality and realism in coal and climate controversies.

STALEMATE. As noted in earlier posts, efforts to help the unemployed and prevent further layoffs have been stymied in Congress.

DOUBLE DIPPING is a real possibility with the Great Recession, especially if conservatives and deficit hawks continue to block action to help the recovery.

IF THAT HAPPENS, chalk it up to a coalition of "the heartless, the clueless and the confused."

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The wild and the good

Many people, past and present, have written eloquently of the human need for nature and the wild, but Henry David Thoreau was one of the most eloquent and influential. Here's a little nugget I've missed before in my several passes through Walden:

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

The wild, alas is getting harder to find these days. Hmmm...could the same be said about the good?

SPEAKING OF THE GOOD, it looks like West Virginia's memorial service for Senator Robert C. Byrd will have a cast of thousands--including President Obama and Vice President Biden. I plan on attending, but getting there may be a challenge.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here are memories of Byrd from those who knew him in Washington.

STATE OF THE STATES. It isn't good, thanks in part to the refusal of conservatives in Congress to extend fiscal aid to states.

BETTING ON THE PRIVATE SECTOR to drive the recovery is risky business.

WHICH WAY? Here's an interesting take on the current political landscape for progressives.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Company and solitude

Solitude and loneliness are two entirely different things. It has often occurred to me that human contact and time alone are two more things that don't seem to be well distributed among the population. So many people are starving for human contact, while so many more are being driven crazy by too much of it.

Henry David Thoreau, with whom Goat Rope has been spending time, was a (kind of) social animal who loved solitude. Here's a great line from Walden:

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.

He tries to make a bit more serious point about how we can wear out each other's welcome:

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications...

Needless to say, Thoreau was never married.

STATE OF STATES. If congress refuses to extend some programs of the Recovery Act, many states will take a hit.

BLOCKADE. Here's a post from the AFLCIO blog that calls for breaking the blockade on unemployment benefits.

WHAT'S AT STAKE. Here's a good summary of why a Senate vote to extend Recovery Act provisions matters.

AND GUESS WHAT? Yesterday the bill failed in the Senate for the third time as Republicans once again united to oppose it.

FIGS. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree. This one's about shakeups, tipping points, Afghanistan and something strange to do with stamps.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Now and here

El Cabrero has been spending time with Henry David Thoreau lately. I'm the first to admit that he was a bit of a crank and that if I spent a week with him on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, I might have pitched him overboard.

But still...he really has his moments. I love the ones where he basically smacks the reader upside the head and challenges him or her to pay attention, something I am only sporadically capable of doing.

Here's today's sample:

Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.

WE ARE NOT AMUSED. The US Senate fell a few votes short of 60 on an important vote that would have extended unemployment benefits and fiscal relief to states and helped preserve jobs.

1937 BLUES. The victory of the deficit hawks, as in the vote above, could likely extend the slump, as Paul Krugman argues here.

AND BESIDES, a new Gallup/USA Today poll shows public support for more spending to create jobs.

HOW BAD IS IT? According to the Working America blog,

If the 15 million unemployed workers in this country stood side-by-side, literally shoulder to shoulder, they would stretch from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California… and back again.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: REALLY ELEVATED

Of drownings and shoestrings

El Cabrero has long been intrigued by the Taoist idea of wu-wei, which is usually translated as "non-action." It doesn't mean not doing anything but is more like doing what is timely and appropriate when conditions are right without a lot of hoopla or wasted energy.

My guess is that this is something the world's most effective people have always known, even if they didn't think about it in exactly those terms.

I think Henry David Thoreau came up with one of the best expressions of that concept in Walden. It's pretty short and sweet:

Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings.

SPEAKING OF RESCUING THE DROWNING, the White House has called on the Senate to extend COBRA benefits so that jobless workers can afford insurance and urged an extension of fiscal aid to states via the federal Medicaid match. These issues may be up for a vote this week. Last week I urged people contact their senators to support these steps. If you haven't done so yet, this would be the time.

WHACKADOODLE FEARS. Here are 10 things that people on the far right are scared of.

A RARE EVENT. It doesn't happen at this blog very often, but I found this op-ed by Thomas Friedman to be worth a link.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Targets

I think one of the things that people have liked about Thoreau's Walden is that it challenges the reader. Throughout its pages, the author continually argues that we can all do and be so much more than we ever thought possible:

...man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.

One well-known passage puts it this way:

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

I've always loved that quote. It has inspired me now and then to push things a little farther than I thought I could.

(It would be downright nitpicky of me to point out that it isn't literally true and that people hit all kinds of unintended things--as in "friendly fire" and "collateral damage." Last fall, for example, when trying to sight in the old 12 gauge, I hit a strand of our electric fence while aiming at a can, which is another reason why I should probably stick to karate.)

However, I'll concede the main point.

The question is, what, exactly are we aiming at?

STATES WILL BE IN A PICKLE unless the Senate amends H.B. 4213 to extend the federal Medicaid match (FMAP) to states. Also, unemployed people will need a COBRA extension to keep benefits.

If you haven't already done so, please call your US senators and say something like:

"Please amend HB 4213 to extend COBRA benefits for jobless workers and the Medicaid FMAP aid to states.” A toll free number to the US Senate has been provided for this purpose by Families USA: 1-888-340-6521.

WHAT RETIREMENT? The recession has taken a big bite out of workers' retirement savings.

URGENT DOLPHIN COMMUNICATION UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Problems and conditions

Seamus McGoogle has problems.

The theme at Goat Rope this stretch is how laws and policies get made, a process that Bismarck famously compared with sausage making.

One factor that seems to affect whether an issue will gain any traction in the policy arena has to do with how it is seen. As John Kingdon, author of Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies suggests, it makes a big different whether something is seen as a problem or a condition. In his words,

There is a difference between a condition and a problem. We put up with all manner of conditions every day: bad weather, unavoidable and untreatable illnesses, pestilence, poverty, fanaticism... Conditions become defined as problems when we come to believe that we should do something about them. Problems are not simply the conditions or external events themselves; there is also a perceptual, interpretive element.

To use climate change as an example, opponents of addressing either tend to deny it altogether or else to claim that it is not happening as a result of human activity, which would make it a condition rather than a problem.

Defining exactly what is and isn't a problem is a game with high political stakes. As Kingdon put it,

...Some are helped and others hurt, depending on how problems get defined. If things are going basically your way, for instance, you want to convince others that there are no problems out there.

Conversely, if things are not going your way, it makes sense to "define the problem in such a way as to place the burden of adjustment elsewhere, and to avoid changing one's own patterns."

From an advocacy standpoint, one of the most important tasks is to work to raise an issue from something seen as a condition to something seen as a political problem, one that has a solution. The unequal treatment of African Americans, for example, was seen as a condition in much of the country until the civil rights movement elevated to the level of a political problem.

But getting something to be seen as a problem on the public agenda is only part of the struggle. The next phase has to do with sorting out the specific alternatives, about which more later.

SPEAKING OF PROBLEMS, President Obama laid out his proposals for stimulating employment yesterday.

SPEAKING OF JOBS, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that plenty of those will be lost without additional aid to states.

HEALTH CARE. Wheeling and dealing galore is going on in the US Senate. Some good things on the table now are further expansions of Medicaid and a Medicare buy-in for workers 55 and over. The latter measure is one long proposed by WV Senator Jay Rockefeller and would help meet a huge need. Here's hoping both of those survive. Here's the latest as of late Tuesday night.

RANT ALL YOU WANT about those intercepted emails, but climate change isn't slowing down to fit the news cycle.

PERSONAL NOTE. El Cabrero is headed to DC the rest of the week for a conference on state fiscal policy. I'm such a geek that this is one of the high points of my year. The coolest part is that I plan on taking a train to get there. Trains are cool. Goat Rope should continue to appear as usual.

Also, this post was scheduled for publication late Tuesday. If anything bad happens between now and Wednesday, please accept condolences.

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

Support these troops

Fall view from the ridge.

Yesterday was Veteran's Day. No doubt many speeches were given extolling veterans for their service, which is only right. I wonder though if many of them dealt with problems such as this:

A research team at Harvard Medical School estimates 2,266 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance and thus had reduced access to care. That figure is more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died (911 as of Oct. 31) since the war began in 2001...

The Harvard group analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2009 Current Population Survey, which surveyed Americans about their insurance coverage and veteran status, and found that 1,461,615 veterans between the ages of 18 and 64 were uninsured in 2008. Veterans were only classified as uninsured if they neither had health insurance nor received ongoing care at Veterans Health Administration (VA) hospitals or clinics.

Typically, veterans in this situation, like millions of other Americans, are too poor to buy private insurance and too "rich" to qualify for public programs such as Medicaid. One good thing about proposed health care reform in Congress is a massive expansion of the Medicaid program and subsidies to help people buy insurance, although that would still leave some people out.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE. Here's more on the scarring effects of the recession on children.

STATE AID. This paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls on Congress to extend fiscal aid to states to avert major cuts in jobs and services.

SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE but not so much in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, according to a study that ranks several states using different criteria.

WORLD POVERTY. According to the United Nations, 2.7 billion people around the world survive on less than two dollars a day, while one billion live on less than a dollar a day. Here's more from Democracy Now.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH, DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU SAY. Here's a Gazette op-ed about how thuggery is suppressing free speech in coal controversies.

URGENT WOOD-EATING DEEP SEA CRAB UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Mediscare

This is what can happen when you don't have health care.

Opponents of a pubic option for health coverage have been trying to scare people with the prospect of a government run health care system. As noted in yesterday's post, it isn't working.

There are any number of reasons for this but here's a big one: millions of Americans already receive health coverage from one form or another of public insurance. Consider:

Medicaid in 2006 covered almost 59 million Americans, mostly those with low incomes and/or disabilities.

Medicare in 2008 covered almost 45 million Americans, mostly the elderly.

TRICARE, a health program for military personnel and retirees, covers more than 9 million Americans.

And this doesn't count the many other kinds of health coverage directly or indirectly provided by federal, state, and local governments. What the country needs is a public insurance option to compete with private plans for those not eligible for the programs listed above.

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's Paul Krugman again on health care. He's worried that some senators want to party like it's 1993.

COAL'S COSTS outweigh its benefits, according to a new study. Here's Ken Ward's story from the Sunday Gazette-Mail and more from Coal Tattoo.

STATES FEEL THE PAIN of the recession as they make painful cuts or look for ways to raise revenue.

SOCIAL COMPETITION in early humans may made our brains get so big.

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. El Cabrero has been busted more than once for yesterday's post which made a play on words about ducks when in fact geese were pictured. As one correspondent put suggested, a better caption might have been “We’re tired of getting goosed on health care.”

HAS ANYBODY NOTICED that I've managed to go four days without posting anything about Greek tragedy? It's really tough.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Excellence and fragility

The classical scholar Martha Nussbaum opens her book The Fragility of Goodness with a quote from the ancient Greek poet Pindar, who made a career for himself writing odes for victors in the Olympic and other sacred games. He wrote:

...human excellence
grows like a vine tree
fed by the green dew,
raised up, among wise men and just,
to the liquid sky.
We have all kinds of needs for those we love--
most of all in hardships, but joy, too
strains to track down eyes that it can trust.

In other words, most of the good things or qualities we have are not inherently ours--even if they are things we've worked hard to achieve or attain. They depend on many other and external conditions, all of which are changeable and subject to loss and reversal.

Nussbaum expounds on Pindar thus:

The excellence of the good person, he writes, is like a young plant: something growing in the world, slender, fragile, in constant need of food from without. A vine tree must be of good stock if it is to grow well. And even if it has a good heritage, it needs fostering weather (gentle dew an drain, the absence of sudden frosts and harsh winds), as well as the care of concerned and intelligent keepers, for its continued health and full perfection. So, the poet suggests, do we. We need to be born with adequate capacities, to live in a fostering natural and social circumstances, to stay clear of abrupt catastrophe, to develop confirming associations we other human beings.

We are all, in other words, subject to fortune and reversal. One of the functions of Greek tragedy, the theme these days at Goat Rope, is to remind us that no one is immune and to warn us against assuming that fleeting good luck is something we own.

50 HERBERT HOOVERS. This NY Times editorial talks sense about the fiscal crisis many states are facing.

GOD ON THE BRAIN. Here's a link to a recent NPR series on science and spirituality.

RELIGION IN THE WAR ROOM. Here's an item about how briefings for for former president Bush were laced with biblical language.

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? Here's an item from Wired Science about why we stare.

TEXTING could be bad for teenagers'
health.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED