Nature and nurture: the rematch

Jean-Jacques Rousseau tended to blame human ills on social corruption.

One of these days, I want to go on a long blogging jag about the dangerous territory where biology and society overlap. I call it dangerous territory because many earlier efforts to go there have led to bad results in various forms of social Darwinism. On the other hand, a great deal of harm has been done by those who deny that we have any kind of biological human nature and view people as blanks slates.

In fact, I'd say that both the right and left are prone errors on this question. Conservatives tend to see hierarchy and systemic inequality (the old Great Chain of Being) built into nature itself, thus making it impossible to do anything about it. Some on the left in the past have denied that there is such a thing as human nature and viewed all negative human traits to be due to bad social conditions--and the results of acting on this belief have been pretty bad.

It seems to me that there is a growing body of evidence that we do carry around some evolutionary baggage which probably made sense for a lot of human history but can cause problems now. Some of that baggage might include a tendency towards binary in-group/out-group views; kin favoritism; striving for status, particularly among males; the capacity for aggression; and so on.

That doesn't mean we're fated to any given kind of social arrangement. It just means we have to work with the materials at hand. Human nature isn't some kind of Silly Putty that can be molded into any conceivable shape, but it is remarkably adaptable.

WALL STREET ON THE MOON. The Dow is up while millions of Americans are down. Here's Robert Reich on the subject.

WHICH IS WHY it's a good thing the US House voted again to extend unemployment benefits for 13 weeks.

THE COST OF DOING NOTHING about health care is too high, as this op-ed argues.

TORTURE ON THE BRAIN. Brain research reinforces the widely held conclusion that torture does not lead to reliable information, aside from the whole moral repugnance factor.

URGENT WEIRD SHARK UPDATE here. (Teaser: it looks like this kind is into kinky sex.)

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Tragically hip

The Greek theater at Epidaurus. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Welcome to Goat Rope's latest series on Everything You Always Wanted to Know (or not) about Greek Tragedy. You'll also find links and comments about current events below. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

As mentioned previously, Greek tragedies were originally performed during the spring festival of the god Dionysus. Attendance was a civic and religious duty for Athenian citizens. It involved a contest between three playwrights who produced three more or less related plays and a lighter and cruder satyr play.

What's really tragic is that so few Greek tragedies have survived. Of the three tragedians whose work survives, we only have

*seven by Aeschylus (circa 525-455 BC) out of 70-90;

*seven by Sophocles (circa 496-406 BC) out of more than 100; and

*eighteen or nineteen by Euripides (circa 480-406 BC) out of more than 90. The authorship of one of these is disputed.

The works of other tragedians has been completely lost. There's only instance of a trilogy surviving intact, the Orestes plays of Aeschylus.

Many of the ones that do survive are really, really good. It makes you wonder about what we lost.

If you read the works by author and compare, you'll notice that they seem more recognizable as plays as time goes by. Euripides seems really "modern" compared to Aeschylus.

People at the time were crazy about the stuff. It is said that the very few Athenian soldiers who survived that disastrous invasion of Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War were the ones who had memorized the latest by Euripides.

Who said this stuff wasn't practical?

WHEN UNEMPLOYMENT GOES UP so does poverty.

SPEAKING OF UNEMPLOYMENT, here's one by Barbara Ehrenreich on what to do with the extra time.

SPEAKING OF THE RECESSION, here's Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz on where we are now.

WV ITEMS. State advocacy groups called for minimizing state spending cuts. At Coal Tattoo, Ken Ward looks at the impact of mountaintop removal mining on recent flooding in southern WV.

TORTURE. Here's an analysis of how Americans think about it.

WEIGHT LOSS. It's no picnic.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The world in a grain of sand

El Cabrero sometimes teaches a night class in sociology somewhere comfortably off the campus of Marshall University. The most recent semester, now in finals week, I taught Deviance and Social Control.

Mostly I do it to get to use the library, wherein I can find all kinds of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore with which to regale the Gentle Reader.

I often find myself bringing works of literature and poetry to class because these can often get to the heart of the matter more quickly and clearly than reams of statistics. In the last few weeks of this class, I've brought in or referred to works by William Blake, Shakespeare, Herman Hesse, Herman Melville, and others.

William Blake's poem London, for example, speaks volumes about his time (and ours) in four short stanzas.

Aristotle noted the power of poetry for this kind of thing 2,400 years ago. In the Poetics, he discusses the difference between poetry and history. In modern terms, what he called poetry would include novels, plays and other works of literature, whereas history would include most kinds of nonfiction. He puts it this way

The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. [emphasis added]

SINKING LIKE A ROCK. Stagnant or falling wages can make the recession worse, according to Paul Krugman.

WHICH GOSPEL IS THIS IN? A Pew survey found that regular churchgoers were more likely to support torture than those who were less observant.

THE FIRST GARDEN continues to attract attention.

SPEAKING OF FOOD, the ancestor of the current swine flu now sweeping parts of the world has been traced to US factory farms.

ANIMAL UPDATES. Fish may feel pain in ways similar to us, according to a recent experiment. And while we're at it, animals that are capable of voice mimicry also seem to be capable of keeping a beat.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Poetic instincts

The English word poetry comes a real workhorse of a Greek word. Poesis means something like "making" and is by no means restricted to works of literature. The word shows up in all kinds of prosaic (no pun intended) contexts in the Greek language and is kind of like the Spanish word hacer, which also means to make.

It's interesting how a word of such broad usage in Greek came to have such a limited meaning in English, but I'll think about that tomorrow, as Scarlett O'Hara said.

Anyhow, the philosopher Aristotle believed that the source of poetry in the English sense of the word has its origins in human nature itself:

Poetry in general seems to have spring from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.

Note: he uses imitation in the broadest possible sense, which would include narrative. Both Aristotle and Plato seemed to view all arts as imitative--even music, which is something I never quite got. He goes on...

Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for "harmony" and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry.

Not too shabby. From the viewpoint of 2,400 years later, he seemed to nail it. Narrative or story seems to be hardwired into human nature and the universal sense of rhythm, which manifests itself differently in various times and places, seems to grow out of our biological heritage. Nature is one big rhythm band after all.

TAKING A DIVE. Economic signals don't look pretty. Here's a snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute about the latest bad news.

BUDGET WIN. Congress passed President Obama's budget, which represents a clear change in priorities from the Bush years.

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT can drive people crazy.

TORTURED ETHICS. This article looks at the role played by psychologists in designing torture techniques.

THE LATEST on all things Massey can be found at Coal Tattoo.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Turkey babies!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to announce the hatching of Goat Rope Farm's first baby turkey. If all goes well, there could be as many as six more to come.

The proud parents are Frida (pictured above) and Diego. The father was unavailable for comment as he was busy displaying to anything he could find and attempting to mate stray feathers left on the ground.

Unlike turkeys in industrial type farms, which are over bred mutants incapable of natural reproduction, Diego and Frida are heritage breeds which retain more of the features of their wild ancestors. As a result, the baby pictured above came into the world in the time-honored fashion; that is to say with a great deal of showing off on the part of the male and a great deal of apparent indifference on the part of the female. Something, however, must have worked.

THE BANALITY OF TORTURE. Here's NY Times columnist Frank Rich on the torture policies of the Bush administration.

ON THAT NOTE, some people close to the situation have argued that Bush era torture policies were so counter-productive that they may have contributed to the deaths of many US soldiers in Iraq.

OH GOOD. Executive pay at investment banks is going up.

JOHN BROWN REVISITED. The 150th anniversary of John Brown's historic raid on Harper's Ferry in what is now West Virginia will occur this fall. Here's some new insights on this event by a history professor from Shepherd University.

MORALITY AND POLITICS. Here's a good article on the research of psychologist Jonathan Haidt on how liberals and conservatives share many key moral values but place difference emphases upon them.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The first ring

Plato got there first. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been musing this week about Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and its practical applications for people interested in social justice (short version: there are some). It occurred to me, though, that part of the inspiration for Tolkien's epic came from an ancient work of Greek philosophy.

I'm referring to Plato's Republic, a long dialogue about the nature of justice that moves from the individual to the state. It's full of memorable images and stories or myths and one of these is the myth of Gyges.

In the discussion, Glaucon, Plato's brother, imagines a situation in which it would be hard for anyone to be just--a situation in which he or she has absolute power thanks to finding a magical ring. He tells the story of Gyges, a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia in what is now Turkey:

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended.

Gyges found that the ring gave him the power of invisibility whenever he turned it on his finger. (There are times when I wouldn't mind having one of those.) Anyhow, Gyges arranges to visit the palace and with the help of the ring he seduces the queen, kills the king and becomes the ruler and ancestor of the fabulously wealthy King Croesus (search this blog for his story).

In Glaucon's view, such a ring of power would corrupt anyone:

Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point.

Sound familiar? He further argues that anyone who thinks otherwise is hopelessly naive:

If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice. Enough of this.

In the Republic, Socrates argues, unconvincingly in my book, that a truly virtuous person would not be tempted. I'm with Glaucon--and Tolkien--on this one.

But there are definitely times when a little gizmo like that could come in handy.

CLUTTER AND MORE. Here's the latest edition of my friend the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree. For some reason, this one reminds me of William Blake's poem London.

HEALTH CARE REFORM, if it's going to get things done, needs a public insurance component, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Goat Rope concurs.

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. Here's more on the ruling class hissy fit over the Employee Free Choice Act.

FOOD FIGHT. Here's Michael Pollan again on the movement for local and sustainable food.

A TORTURED CONVERSATION is well summarized here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

John Brown's body...

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Today--or rather this evening--marks the anniversary of John Brown's 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry in what is now West Virginia. Brown to me is one of the most fascinating figures in American history, someone who struck his time like some kind of karmic meteor.

The aim was to seize weapons at the armory there and distribute them to the slaves he believed would rally to his standard. From there, they would wage low key guerrilla warfare in the Appalachian mountains and provide a haven for runaways which would presumably deplete Virginia of its supply of slave labor. He had even drawn up a provisional constitution for the republic of former slaves that he hoped to inaugurate.

Like most of the specific things Brown attempted in his life, the raid in purely military terms was a disaster. Ironically, its first casualty was Hayward Shepherd, an African-American railroad baggage handler. It was over by Oct. 18, when he was captured by a military party that included Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart.

Altogether, Brown's force consisted of 22 men, 19 of which participated in the raid. Of these, five were African-American. Of these, 10, including two of Brown's sons, died during the attack. Seven more, including Brown himself, were eventually hanged.

The thing that strikes me most about that whole episode was the fact that although he failed at everything he attempted, in the end he seemed to get what he wanted. The raid further polarized North and South and seemed to drive the situation to the point of no return.

He told the court:

Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved... in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!"

Brown remains a controversial figure to this day. People still argue about whether he was a madman, a fanatic, a killer, a martyr, or a freedom fighter. I'm leaning toward "some combination thereof."

He reminds me of some cryptic lines from Bob Dylan's song "Idiot Wind:"

There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door,
You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars
After losin' every battle.

HOW'S THAT STIMULUS COMING? The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute finds that underemployment is at a 14 year high.

WATERBOARD SURFING. This item from the Washington Post reports that the Bush White House explicitly endorsed interrogation techniques that people who don't torture the English language would refer to as torture in 2003 and 2004.

GRUNTING FOR WORMS. No, I'm not going to explain what that means. You need to click here to find out.

ADVICE FOR THE NEWLY POOR can be found here.

URGENT FOSSIL FISH UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A BEGINNING, MIDDLE AND END. SORT OF

The Goat Rope Odyssey cruise continues, along with the usual links and comments about current events. If you like mythology, click on earlier posts.

Aristotle said that every story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. That's true of Homer's Odyssey, although it's not told in a chronological way. It begins near the end, shortly before Odysseus' long-delayed homecoming after 10 years of fighting at Troy and 10 more years of wandering and getting stuck.

Here's a skeletal outline for now:

The goddess Athena asks her father Zeus to give Odysseus a break and help him go home. He's been stuck on the island of the goddess Calypso for seven years. It doesn't sound like a bad gig: sun, sand, surf, and sex with a goddess (most of whom were considered to be hot), yet he cries every day out of homesickness. Zeus agrees to cut him some slack.

The story then cuts to the Old Home Place at Ithaca. Things are bad. Swarms of suitors are swarming around his wife, the faithful Penelope. Most people think her husband is dead and she is under great pressure to marry. The suitors are insolent, bullying his son Telemachus and eating the family out of house and home.

Athena then goes to Ithaca to give Telemachus a boost and suggest a plan of action that gives him something positive to do and gets him out of harm's way for a while. He visits the homes Odysseus's' old comrades Menelaus and Nestor seeking news of his father and gaining a good repute.

We don't get to the main character until book 5, when the god Hermes (see last week) visits the island of Calypso and tells her she needs to let him go and help him on his way. Odysseus sails off with her help but is shipwrecked by the sea god Poseidon, who holds a grudge for Odysseus' blinding of his son Polyphemus the cyclops.

Eventually he makes it to the land of the Phaeacians, where he receives hospitality and eventually reveals himself. It's there that we hear from the man himself the well known stories of the cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis and the other disasters that befell him on his way home.

(There's a lot of irony in this story. One example is the fact that Odysseus is a totally unreliable narrator who has a great deal of trouble telling the truth. Was he or wasn't he?)

The Phaeacians deliver him safely to Ithaca where after many ruses he and Telemachus open a major can of smackdown on the suitors and he is reunited with Penelope. The carnage is severe but the gods again intervene to make peace.

Next time: greatest hits.

KNOW NOTHINGS. Has ignorance become a badge of honor?

ORWELL AND STRAUSS. A philosophy of fear underlies much of current politics.

LEAVING WAR TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR. Here's a good editorial from the Gazette.

TOUGH QUESTIONS ABOUT QUESTIONINGS. Psychologists are debating whether assisting in military interrogations is a violation of professional ethis.

DOING GOOD AND DOING WELL. Socially responsible investment funds are catching on.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

VLAD, OR THAT'S "MISTER THE IMPALER" TO YOU

Welcome to Day Four of Dracula Week at Goat Rope. Along with links and comments about current events, the theme is the character and the real person behind it, the former being by far the nicer of the two.

Yesterday's post covered the outline of Vlad III's "career." In a way, he shared many traits with other rulers of the time, particularly a ruthless drive to gain and retain power. But his methods were so brutal and sadistic that he makes many contemporaries seem like humanitarians.

After all, one does not acquire the title "the Impaler" by acts of charity.

Since this is a family-friendly blog, I won't go into all the gory details, although you're probably heard about them. But in outline, here are some of the events of his longest reign.

*Forced labor and liquidation of the opposition of the nobility. Shortly after gaining power for the second time, Dracula purged the ranks of the nobility with mass impalements and forced labor.

*He is said to have invited the beggars of his kingdom to a feast, after which he had the doors sealed and burned them alive.

*He waged a terror campaign against Saxon merchants in Transylvania, making copious use of his preferred method of execution, in addition to various other means, some of which may have been just as bad.

*When foreign diplomats visited who refused to remove their caps or turbans (there are versions of this happening to Italians as well as Ottoman envoys), he had them nailed to their heads.

*Ottoman armies invading Wallachia were sickened by a "forest" of impaled Turks.

I could go on and on. Estimates of the deaths caused by Dracula go as high as 100,000, although that is probably an exaggeration. Let's just say it was lots and lots.

The moral to the story is not just that truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes it's worse.

TORTURE FROM THE TOP DOWN. A recently released memo suggests signals that led to Abu Ghraib came from the top.

HOWARD ZINN ON EMPIRE here.

THE ART OF LOVE, octopus style.

BAD IDEA. Here's yet another item on the Bush administration's unnecessary war and the strain it's causing US armed forces.

WILL POWER. Is self control a matter of the mind or blood sugar levels? Maybe both.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THIS MOUNTAIN IS LIKE NO OTHER

We're heading down the home stretch of Goat Rope's Fun With Dante series. That's been the main item on the menu this week and last, although there are also daily doses of links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

After Dante and Virgil have gone through hell (literally), they come up on the other side of the world at an island which is the site of Purgatory, a place where souls destined for salvation atone for sins before they rise to Heaven.

Here's a little background on the idea of Purgatory for the catholically impaired. Medieval theologians wrestled with the problem of what happens to people who died in good standing with the church but still had unabsolved sins and the idea of Purgatory, a sort of cleansing place for the soul, provided a neat solution.

Those who die "in friendship with God," i.e. free from mortal sin, but who were still tainted with venial sins were believed to undergo a temporary period of purgation or cleansing that was generally imagined to involve suffering. It was also widely believed that prayers and masses offered by the living as well as the intercession of the saints would speed the passage of the soul through Purgatory.

This is the site of the second volume of the Divine Comedy. Purgatory is a seven storey mountain (hence the title of Thomas Merton's autobiography) where the taint of the seven deadly sins are removed. There are some striking things about Dante's Purgatory:

*First, the drill sergeant in charge is the Roman Cato the Younger, who was a pagan opponent of Caesar who committed suicide, i.e. not what you would expect to find. Purgatory and Heaven have other surprises too, which are probably meant to remind us that while the divine Mind isn't irrational, it is beyond our ability to comprehend.

*Second, some people get a major time-out before climbing the mountain. These are those who delayed repentance or "made God wait."

*Third, unlike in hell, people are nice to each other here.

*Fourth, Purgatory is all about time. Souls are told "Think that this day will never dawn again."

*Fifth, unlike many mountains, Purgatory gets easier the farther you go. Dante is told in Canto IV,

This mount is such, that ever
At the beginning down below 'tis tiresome,
And aye the more one climbs, the less it hurts.90

Therefore, when it shall seem so pleasant to thee,
That going up shall be to thee as easy
As going down the current in a boat,

Then at this pathway's ending thou wilt be;
There to repose thy panting breath expect;
No more I answer; and this I know for true.

Still, it's no cakewalk. As in hell, the punishment fits the crime. The sin of pride, by which we lift ourselves too high, is purged by carrying heaving stones and facing the ground. Dante, who goes through it in the flesh, at one point has to go through a fire so hot that he says he would have gladly thrown himself into molten glass to cool off.

At the beginning of his ascent, Dante receives seven P's (from peccatum, the Latin word for sin) on his forehead. These are removed as he purges the sin in question. It is at this point that Dante comes to his own and stops relying on Virgil. Virgil for his part as a pagan is out of his league now.

As Dante matures spiritually, Virgil declares his independence by saying "I crown and mitre you lord of yourself." Virgil becomes more silent and eventually disappears at the upper level. This means that reason and human effort can only take you so far and divine grace is needed to ascent closer to God.

At the summit, when his sins are cleansed, he is told he can do whatever he wishes since his will is now aligned with God's. He reunites with Beatrice, whose prayers made his journey possible. Before beginning the journey to Heaven, he drinks from two river: Lethe, the river of forgetfulness so that he will no longer remember his sins and bad tendencies, and Eunoe (from the Greek for "good mind.")

Next stop: Heaven.

MORE ON THE COST OF THE IRAQ WAR: It's worse than we thought.

PRISON NATION. Here's an item on the growing costs of our prison-industrial complex.

TORTURE. It's more common than we'd like to think. Here's more than you wanted to know from Mother Jones.

WEST VIRGINIA ITEMS OF INTEREST. A report by the WV Center on Budget and Policy about the impact of proposed state corporate tax cuts made USA Today yesterday.

Here's the latest on the WV Supreme Court mess, the Megan Williams torture case, and the surprising success (so far) of a bill that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. The bill passed the state Senate, the House Judiciary Committee and now moves to the full house.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WEAPONS OF THE WEAK

Caption: These guys have the resistance thing down pat.

One of El Cabrero's favorite passages in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas goes like this:

His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?" Jesus said, "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."

The point is that when people are only looking for some big dramatic event, they are missing the things that are going on around them all the time. I think that's true in a lot of areas.

If you look at human history, much of it sadly involves one group oppressing and exploiting another. Outright rebellions are few and far between, and when they occur, the results are often suicidal and make a bad situation worse. But that doesn't mean that nothing is happening--if you have eyes to see it.

That's the basic thesis of Yale social scientist James C. Scott, who wrote such books as Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Throughout much of history, oppressed groups have had to rely on indirect forms of resistance to the "official transcript" of the powerful.

Speaking truth to power in a society based on slavery or serfdom can get you killed. It can even get you in trouble in a democracy. But over the ages, peasants and other members of the lower classes have always engaged in indirect forms of resistance, such as gossip, rumors, using the ideology of the rulers to assert their own rights, working to rule, quiet mutual aid, poaching, pilfering, acting stupid when they're not, taking advantage of "moral" and other holidays, creating their own folklore, music and culture, etc.

As the saying goes, when the cat's away, the mice will play.

To use an example from American history, slaves in the American South and elsewhere seldom violently rebelled--but they would often work slowly, "accidentally" break things, pretend to be unintelligent in the presence of the masters, run away, and/or find any number of ingenious ways to assert their dignity. This low intensity resistance also tests the limits of the possible and can spill over into massive disobedience when conditions permit--which happened when they deserted in mass to Union lines in the Civil War when the opportunity occurred.

There is always more to the story than what the "official transcript" of the powerful presents--or even knows about. And at certain times in history, the "hidden transcript" of the oppressed becomes visible to all. An example of that is the sudden massive disobedience that seemed to appear out of nowhere during the collapse of some states in the old Soviet block. But such big, dramatic events would be unthinkable without the constant, low-key, almost invisible everyday resistance.

Scott suggests that these lessons should give us all the more reason

to respect, if not celebrate, the weapons of the weak. All the more reason to see in the tenacity of self-preservation--in ridicule, in truculence, in irony, in petty acts of noncompliance, in foot dragging, in dissimulation, in resistant mutuality, in the disbelief in elite homilies, in the steady, grinding efforts to hold one's own against overwhelming odds--a spirit and practice that prevents the worst and promises something better.

COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO SELF-HELP FOR DUMMIES. Here's an interesting item on changes in this perennial genre of books. Speaking of idiocy, some authors suggest we've been drifting in that direction lately.

BLOWING BUBBLES. This article has some interesting things to say about the growing financial crisis.

ANOTHER BAD ECONOMIC SIGN is the fact that more Americans are having to tap into their retirement accounts.

AN ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVE to tinkle-down economics and financial or housing bubbles might involve serious investments in infrastructure.

WATER TORTURE is an old story, as this New Yorker article shows.

CAESAR'S WIFE DON'T LIVE 'ROUND HERE. WV Supreme Court justice Brent Benjamin refuses to recuse himself from Massey Energy cases because of "innuendo." Fair enough, but what about doing for the fact that $3 million in Don Blankenship's money got him elected?

QUESTION FOR CAT LOVERS: If your beloved kitty weighed 300 pounds, would you still be alive? We'd be dead meat here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DREAM WEAVER

Image credit: fromoldbooks.org.

Aside from the usual assortment of links and comments about current events, the theme of this week's Goat Rope is dreams and what they may or may not mean. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's posts.

When I was a little kid, I had an odd dream that stuck with me until the present. In it, I was sitting alone at night among old stone ruins. Though it was dark, there was some light from the moon and stars. The odd thing is that I wasn't afraid; awe might be a better word.

That dream kind of set the tone for me. I've always been drawn to things that are ancient or at least old enough to withstand the tests of time. While it's important these days to keep up with current events and the latest in science and research, I don't look much to the present for wisdom. I find all I can handle--and more--in Greek tragedy, Homer's epics, myths, the Bible, and ancient Western, Buddhist and Chinese philosophy.

Speaking of which, there's probably little in human history more ancient or universal than a fascination with dreams and what they mean. Dreams play a part in the folklore of many cultures and are mentioned in many ancient texts from places as diverse as Egypt, ancient Greece, Mesopotamia and China.

Dreams are prominent in several biblical stories, with several major ones in Genesis. During a time of troubles, the patriarch Jacob dreamed of a ladder to heaven with angels ascending and descending. A little later in the book, dreams and their interpretation both get Joseph into trouble with his brothers and into the good graces of Pharaoh.

The prophet Daniel was also portrayed as a great interpreter of dreams--even when he wasn't told what the dream was. It was written that God appeared to King Solomon in a dream offering him anything he wished. Famously, he chose wisdom.

Dreams are also frequently discussed in the Talmud, a collection of rabbinical writings and commentaries. One rabbi said there that "An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter" and another that "A man is shown in his dreams what he thinks in his heart."

Dreams play a major role in the early chapters of the Gospel attributed to Matthew. Joseph is warned in a dream to accept Mary as his wife though she is with child; to fly with his family to Egypt to avoid the wrath of King Herod; and to return from Egypt when Herod dies. The "wise men" were warned in dreams not to tell Herod of the child. Later in the gospel, Pilate's wife has a dream about Jesus and warns her husband to have nothing to do with him.

In ancient Greece, dreams were a major part of healing. In a practice known as dream incubation, a patient would sleep in a temple of the healer Aesculapius and the dream they received there was used as the basis of treatment.

In the second century BC or BCE, a Greek named Artemidorus wrote five volumes about dreams in a work called Oneirocritica, which described and attempted to interpret 3,000 different dreams. Although his interpretations strike us as odd today--for example, the thought it was good luck to dream of having a well-shaped nose (Holy Tristram Shandy, Batman!)--the work is still in print.

Of course, even in ancient times, there were those who dismissed dreams as stuff an nonsense (which admittedly many are). The Roman politician, writer and orator Cicero wrote

Let us reject...this divination of dreams...For, to speak truly, that superstition has extended itself through all nations, and has oppressed the intellectual energies of all men, and has betrayed them into endless imbecilities.

Whatever the case may be, we get one or more free indie movies every night.

COMMENT ON THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS: Whatever. That was mine. Here's The Nation's.

ALGORITHMS OF LOVE? Has a mathematical computer program figured out compatibility? This would have vastly simplified Pride and Prejudice.

MATH AND GOD. This is a fun one on religion and mathematicians, complete with this great line from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg:

With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.

TORTURE AND DEMOCRACIES have often co-existed.

HEGEMONY CRICKET. Here's a long one from the NY Times magazine about the changing status of the US in the world during the Bush disaster.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE WEEPING PHILOSOPHER AND THE CHINESE SAGE

Heraclitus, by way of wikipedia.

It may be that a person's choice of worldview is as much a result of temperament as rational persuasion. El Cabrero inclines to a view of the world as something in constant flux, with things colliding and combining all the time.

I don't think it's all chaos. Instead, it seems that much of the art of life consists of trying to understand the patterns of change and the array of forces and working with them.

That's probably why one of my favorite philosophers is the ancient Greek sage Heraclitus, whose enigmatic teachings only survive in fragments.

He is perhaps best known for cryptic sayings like "you can't step in the same river twice" and "the way up and the way down are the same thing."

Two of his signature statements are panta rei--all things flow--and polemos panton pater--war is the father of all things (note: my Greek is pretty pathetic). He was using the term war metaphorically. Strife would probably be a better term. He also said dike eris--strife is justice, meaning that harmony arises from the interaction and conflict of forces.

All this is another way of saying that understanding the nature of strife and how to deal with it wouldn't be a bad idea for even the most nonviolent people. Scott Ritter makes the same argument in his book Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement:

I start with the premise that life is conflict, given that I define conflict as the existence of friction created when two or more forces interact...Conflict is constant, and ongoing. Conflict is life... Accept this and you're on the path to dealing effectively with conflict.

Strife doesn't have to be violent or even nasty. It's pretty much the norm. I think the more we learn about it the less nasty it will be.

One ancient text dealing with conflict is Sun Tzu's Art of War. It has been studied for centuries not only by warriors but by people in many walks of life engaged in peaceful pursuits. About which more tomorrow.

THE MIDDLE CLASS. Speaking of ancient Greeks, El Cabrero's amigo Aristotle stressed in his Politics that republics are most stable when the middle classes make up the majority of the population. The role of unions in creating and sustaining the middle class was the subject of a recent talk by economist and columnist Paul Krugman. A major step on the road to rebuilding the middle class is restoring the right to organize by the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

SPEAKING OF LABOR, here's an item from The Nation about the anti-labor NLRB and possible ways around it.

RESPONDING TO RECESSION. As signs of a recession increase, there is more talk about some kind of economic stimulus. This new paper from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities lays out a rational approach-one that is timely, temporary and targeted to bring the most bang for the proverbial buck (in the parlance of our times). Sneak preview: more tax cuts for people who don't need them aren't going to get it.

WV MEDICAID FLAP. Some readers may remember the struggle in 2006 to restore cuts in-home care for elderly Medicaid recipients. Here's a summary of the coverage of a recent legislative audit from Lincoln Walks at Midnight.

TORTURE is the subject of this Gazette op-ed by Carli Mareneck.

WHERE'S WALLACE? The British scientist and co-discoverer of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace, that is.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ART OF DARKNESS

Caption: Author Joseph Conrad. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

This week, El Cabrero is attending a conference in DC. I'm savoring the irony of writing about Heart of Darkness within view of the Bush White House.

Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness and many other works, was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian-dominated Poland in 1857. His father was convicted by the Czarist government of revolutionary sentiments. The family, including Jozef, was deported to northern Russia, where his mother soon died.


Note: while his parents truly were opposed to Russian rule, one didn't have to work to hard to be convicted of being a revolutionist by that government.

Before he was 20, he signed on as an apprentice on a ship and spent much of the next 20 or so years at sea. Like the narrator Marlow in Heart of Darkness, he sailed the Congo River in 1890 and personally witnessed some of the imperial brutality described in his novel.

I think of Conrad as writing about the apparent apex of colonialism much as Graham Greene wrote about the era of its apparent decline. The story was not intended to be primarily a work of political propaganda, which may have had the odd effect of making its political statement stronger.

But Conrad's concerns were not limited to the political. The darkness that he delved was existential and even cosmic. He seems to be asking what kinds of creatures we are who can do this kind of thing to one another.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's an item from Common Dreams about torture, death squads and disappearances from Central America to the Middle East.

OFF BASE. Iraq's government says the US cannot have permanent military bases there. I wasn't aware that they had a choice...

WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE AND FOUND WANTING. That's the verdict of a new study of the Bush administration's Labor Department.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SOCIAL PSYCH

Caption: Venus the goat, left, is all about Adlerian psychology.

Aside from news and links about current events, this week Goat Rope is looking at one of psychology's lesser known Old Guys, Alfred Adler. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As a psychologist as well as a Social Democrat, one of Adler's main ideas was about the importance of social interest or community feeling, so it's not surprising that he was also concerned about the need for social reform. He basically had a public health approach to psychology.

Living as he did during the rise of Nazism, he was aware of the dangers of prejudice:

Those who have travelled have found that people everywhere are approximately the same in that they are always inclined to find something by which to degrade others. Everyone seeks a means which permits him to elevate himself at little cost.

Economic hardships could make social hostilities increase:

Difficulties in earning a livelihood, bad working conditions, inadequate educational and cultural facilities, a joyless existence, and continuous irritation, all these factors increase the feeling of inferiority, produce oversensitivity, and drive the individual to seek "solutions." To an individual in this state of mind any outside interference appears as a threat to his security and rouses him to active or passive self-defense. Motives of hatred appear most clearly in the economic disturbances of our time.

War and group idolatry (my term, not his) were examples of how our natural tendency to social interest could be abused:

...the psychologist must work against nationalism when it is so poorly understood that it harms mankind as a whole; against wars of conquest, revenge, and prestige; against unemployment which plunges people into hopelessness; and against all other obstacles which interfere with the spreading of social interest in the family, the school, and society at large.

He also had an acute understanding of the pitfalls of power that echoes the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu:

The struggle for power has a psychological aspect, the description of which appears to us today as an urgent duty. Even where the welfare of the subjugated is obviously intended, the use of even moderate power stimulates opposition everywhere, as far as we can see. Human nature generally answers external coercion with countercoercion. It seeks its satisfaction not in rewards for obedience and docility, but aims to prove that its own means of power are stronger.

The results of the application of power are apt to be disappointing to both parties. No blessing comes of the use of power. In power politics the man in power wins followers who are actually his opponents and who are only attracted by the intoxication of power. And he finds opponents among those who might be his followers if they had not automatically become oppositional. Those who are excluded from power line in wait for the revolt and are reception to any argument.

Adler probably isn't read or studied much these days--but maybe he should be.

RACIAL DISPARITIES persist in the criminal justice system.

THE MESSAGE. Here's an interview about communicating social issues with Thom Hartmann, author of Cracking the Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion.

DON'T WAIT FOR THE MOVIE. The CIA apparently destroyed videotapes of some "severe interrogation" sessions.

THEM BELLY FULL BUT WE HUNGRY. I almost missed this one. The USDA recently reported that 35.5 million Americans, including 12.6 million children, are having trouble meeting their basic need for food.

FULL COURT PRESS. The Manchin administration has joined Massey Energy in opposing federal court rulings about mountaintop removal mining that may limit the ability of coal companies to do whatever they want to.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TRAGIC OPTIMISM

Photo credit: This photo of Auschwitz is by betauser courtesy of everystockphoto.com.

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is some reflections on Victor Frankl's classic book, Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl, who lived until 1997, lost most of his family in the Holocaust and barely survived the concentration camps himself.

In this his most popular book, he recounts his experiences and observations and explains his view of psychology, which he called logotherapy from the Greek words for reason and healing.

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

The last section of his book contains a little gem of an essay called "The Case for a Tragic Optimism." He maintains that it is possible to say yes to life in spite of its "tragic triad" of pain, guilt and death, all of which are pretty impossible bullets to dodge in this life.

He argues that

life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are the most miserable.

And by optimism, he means making the best of whatever the situation might be and however bad it might be. He believed that people had the potential for dealing with the tragic triad by

(1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.

Each of these approaches offers a sense of meaning. Specifically, he mentions three ways of arriving at meaning in life. One is by creating or accomplishing something. Another is by "experiencing something or encountering someone," i.e. through love and relationship. And the other is by facing hopeless situations with courage and dignity:

even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by doing so change himself.

Frankl also suggests that the past should be seen not as something that is hopelessly lost but rather as a source of consolation:

In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.

Check it out--it's worth it.

OPPOSITION TO WAR AT ALL TIME HIGH (BOTH THIS WAR AND THE NEXT ONE). From CNN:

Opposition to the war in Iraq has reached an all-time high, according to the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Thursday morning.

Support for the war in Iraq has dropped to 31 percent, and the 68 percent who oppose the war is a new record, up slightly from last month. The last time a majority supported the war was in 2003, when 54 percent answered affirmatively...

But wait, there's more:

The public also opposes U.S. military action against Iran. Sixty-three percent oppose air strikes on Iran, while 73 percent oppose using ground troops as well as air strikes in that country.

Seventy percent said they oppose any military strike on Iran, slightly higher than a 2005 number of 66 percent but significantly higher than 2002's 23 percent.

SPEAKING OF PUBLIC OPINION, a new survey shows that more Americans are interested in ending poverty and hunger.

NEW SHADE OF GREEN. Here's an interesting item from The Nation about the growing link between practical environmentalism and social justice groups.

CATCHY TITLE. El Cabrero had trouble passing up an article with the title "Torture: the New Abortion." Maybe you will too.

UPDATE ON THE MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. The prosecutor in Logan County is requesting a hearing to appoint a guardian ad litem for Megan Williams.

EXERCISE YOUR BRAIN with crossword puzzles? According to this op-ed, you may do even better by going to the gym or out for a jog. (Reading Goat Rope, however, has been proven improve just about everything.)

THIS JUST IN: Japanese scientists have designed a mouse that isn't afraid of cats.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE PROPER MEASURE

Caption: This man is overcome with pessimism.

Aside from comments and links about current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is optimism and pessimism. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

While a little philosophical pessimism is probably a good antidote to naivete, some people run it into the ground.

A case in point is the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). He was the pessimist's pessimist. Here's a sample from his essay "On the Suffering of the World"...

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

In another essay charmingly titled "The Vanity of Existence," he says

Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom by the feeling of the emptiness of life?

I bet that dude knew how to party...

Maybe the attitude that is most useful to life is one that combines some elements of pessimism and optimism. A dash of pessimism could be a check on hubris and even a spur to gratitude. When you realize how bad things could be, it makes you appreciate it when they're not. I make it a practice to try to notice and be glad when I don't have a toothache or a catheter. And since I don't expect to get everything I want, I'm grateful for little victories.

Believe it or not, things could be a LOT worse...

Nietzsche once talked about "a pessimism of strength." What we need is a view of the world that fully acknowledges its dark side, dangers and difficulties but which is willing to take action to change things.

The French writer Romaine Rolland came up with an elegant expression of that approach (later popularized by Antonio Gramsci):

Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.

WHAT HE SAID. Jonathan Chait is one of my favorite New Republic writers. Here's his op-ed on the loopiness of supply side economics from yesterday's NY Times.

PLANET JUPITER UPDATE. OK, so this doesn't' have an immediate connection with economic justice--but it's cool.

MAGICAL THINKING. We're officially against torture. So if we do it it's not torture. Any questions?

"FRIENDLY FIRE." El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, aka the Energy Sacrifice Zone, is the subject of this item from alternet.

PRISONS. A new study by the WV Council of Churches argues that a small investment on community-based corrections could save the state a lot of money and prevent other problems.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LOVE AND HATE

Caption: Sometimes these guys get on each other's nerves.

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope is social conflict and how it works. You'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

It has long been observed that there's a fine line between love and hate and that sometimes people have some of both kinds of feelings for people they are close to. Freud called it ambivalence. As he wrote in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,

Almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time--marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children--leaves a sediment of feeling of aversion and hostility, which have first to be eliminated by repression. This is less disguised in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come together in large units. Every time two families become connected by marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns, each is the other's most jealous rival.

The closer the relationship, the more occasions for conflicts of interest and often the more intense the conflicts. As Coser said,

Closely knit groups in which there exists a high frequency of interaction and high personality involvement of the members have a tendency to suppress conflict. While they provide frequent occasions for hostility (since both sentiments of love and hatred are intensified through frequency of interaction), the acting out of such feelings is sensed as a danger to such intimate relationships, and hence there is a tendency to suppress rather than allow the expression of hostile feelings. In close-knit groups, the feelings of hostility tend, therefor, to accumulate and hence to intensify.

If conflict does break out in such a group,

it will be particularly intense for two reasons: First, because the conflict does not merely aim at resolving the immediate issue which led to its outbreak; all accumulated grievances which were denied expression previously are apt to emerge at this occasion. Second, because the total personality involvement of the group members makes for mobilization of all sentiments in the conduct of the struggle.

Speaking of love and hate, one interesting feature of conflict between groups is that it can, with time, bring the opposing parties closer together.

SHAME ON PRESIDENT BUSH for vetoing expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program. In his statement on the subject, the president spoke of the dangers of a federalized health care system. Last I heard, he enjoys federal health care benefits. Yesterday, El Cabrero participated in a press conference protesting that decision. Here's the Gazette coverage.

All of WV's congressional delegation supported CHIP. Gov. Manchin issued a statement that said in part: “I have joined with other states in writing to the president to urge him to sign this legislation into law, and am disappointed in his decision to use his veto power."

NO U.S. TORTURE POLICY 'ROUND HERE. Just the same thing with a different name.

MORE ON THE LOGAN COUNTY VIGIL in support of Megan Williams can be found here.

IMAGE PROBLEM. According to this interesting item from Time, some Christians are giving Christianity a bad name. That problem has been around a while...

IF I'M READING THIS RIGHT, Massey Energy is suing two law firms that represented them and lost. So like...what will happen if the guys filing this one lose?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GOSPEL OF THOMAS: GREATEST HITS, VOL I

Caption: Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: From me all has come forth, and to me all has reached. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." Gospel of Thomas, 77

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope has been a series of musings on the apochrypal Gospel of Thomas, along with links and rants about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

By way of conclusion, El Cabrero is catholic and orthodox enough to be OK with the decision of the church fathers to exclude Thomas from the New Testament canon.

But it does deserve a wider reading. If nothing else, Thomas provides another example of how very diverse early Christian communities were. And finally, it's good to let the some of the sayings of Jesus in Thomas challenge the reader.

Here's the official Goat Rope selection of Thomas' Greatest Hits:

Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will rule over all." (2)

"Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that won't be revealed." (5)

"Fortunate is the person who has worked hard and has found life." (58)

Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you." (70)

They said to him, "Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you."

He said to them, "You examine the face of heaven and earth, but you have not come to know the one who is in your presence, and you do not know how to examine this moment."

The Jesus of this gospel always seems to push the listener/reader back to the present moment, which may not be a bad place to start.

Speaking of the present,

BOTTOM FEEDERS. Business Week has a great special report in the May 21 issue about how many businesses are squeezing more profits from the working poor. Sample quote:

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more," says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

MARINES AGAINST TORTURE. Here's a post from West Virginia Blue about two retired Marine generals speaking out against the Bush administration's policy of torture.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD: RITE ONE

Before the massacre at Virginia Tech I had planned to build this week's Goat Rope around a biblical theme.

The post that I had planned to use for today was going to be about enriching it was for me (I now realize) to grow up in the Episcopal Church, where hearing the Bible and biblical language in the liturgy was a part of every service I was dragged to.

In the wake of yesterday's tragedy, I can think of nothing better to do than start with the biblical words that open the service of the burial of the dead:

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord;
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live;
and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.

For none of us liveth to himself,
and no man dieth to himself.
For if we live, we live unto the Lord.
and if we die, we die unto the Lord.
Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord's.

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord;
even so saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors.

And the words of the committal:

In the midst of life we are in death;
of whom may we seek for succor,
but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins art justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;
shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer;
but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty,
O holy and merciful Savior,
thou most worthy Judge eternal.
Suffer us not, at our last hour,
through any pains of death, to fall from thee.

It is a beautiful and dignified service, one that I hope to go out with. Here's the full rite from the Book of Common Prayer.

AS MOTHER JONES SAID, "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." We proceed.

PSYCHOLOGY AND TORTURE is the subject of this fascinating piece by Stephen Soldz via Common Dreams.

WHAT WE KNOW AND HOW. This latest piece of research by the Pew Center for the People and the Press suggests that changes in information technology haven't had much effect on what the public knows about current events or how they find out.

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS. FamiliesUSA is urging people to call the Senate this week and urge passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act. Look for more on this here soon.