"Feathered primates"

Image by way of wikipedia.

Years of living on the farm where wild and semi-domesticated birds abound--and being married to a birder--have caused me to realize that the term "bird brain" isn't very apt when intended as a put-down. Quite a few of them seem pretty sharp to me and some exhibit emotions and parental behavior that reminds me of mammals.

Crows seem to be particularly intelligent. There are some extended families in our holler and they seem not only to stay busy but to have a good time as well. For some reason, they remind me of a merry band of pirates, minus the ocean and ships and all.

Recent research has shown that crows are even smarter than previously believed. In fact, their use of tools, memory and complicated social behavior has led some biologists to refer to them as "feathered primates."

I'm not sure whether crows would be flattered or insulted by that.

FROM THE WORLD OF WHACK, here are some recent right wing rants. The pope in particular seems to set them off these days.

JUST SAY NO.  The first part of this statehouse Gazette column by Phil Kabler mentions WV's current flirtation with private for-profit  prisons. El Cabrero devoutly hopes this union won't be consummated.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

INTRODUCING THE HILLBILLY HEALTH CLUB, AND LOTS MORE

At this time of year, lots of people join gyms. El Cabrero is all set to cash in on this trend. I hereby announce the founding of the Hillbilly Health Club. It's all right there in the perty picture.

It has the latest in exercise equipment--including sledge hammer, wedge, splitting maul, wheel barrow and sycamore stumps--and offers a comprehensive exercise program with the following elements:

*Resistance. Splitting and chopping wood. Sycamore is all about resistance.

*Flexibility. Bend over, pick up the split wood, and put it in the wheel barrow. If you are anything like El Cabrero, this can be the hardest part, especially after an hour or so of splitting and chopping.

*Aerobics. Push the wheel barrow to the woodpile.

Holistic health--Appalachian style!

Annual memberships are now available, with special discounts to Goat Rope email subscribers. Ask about special family rates.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED. El Cabrero would like to round out the week of New Year by mentioning three 2007 books that are worth a look. Today's choice is Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her basic thesis is that economic, political, and ideological elites have taken advantage of human-made and natural disasters to impose an extreme version of unregulated capitalism on populations that would otherwise have rejected it.

Klein does an interesting job of weaving the history of shock therapy and other efforts at mind control with the rise of the Chicago School of economics as represented by Milton Friedman until his recent death. Friedman opposed unions, social programs, public education, business regulations, safety laws, etc. in the name of the "free" market.

He acknowledged that most people would find this distasteful, and said that

only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Friedman got the chance to put his ideas into action when General August Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile in 1973 and imposed a military dictatorship. Then, with the help of mass murder, repression, and torture, he was able to advise the regime on how to impose the blessings of the "free" market.

Klein's book looks at several examples of disaster capitalism in the U.S. and around the world. Katrina was a classic case in point, as was the development of Iraq's "Emerald City" as a free market utopia under the direction of Friedman disciple Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq. Both of those went over real well...

It's interesting that in WV, some advocates of "Unleashing Capitalism" have tried to create a climate of panic and crisis in the hopes of pushing through a political agenda which includes attacks on union membership, worker safety rules, etc.

SAD NEWS from Kenya.

PUBLIC OPINION ON IRAQ is at odds with the views of many presidential candidates, according to this item.

THE STATE OF THE NATION in the Bush years is the subject of this New Year's Eve NY Times editorial.

LABOR UNDER ATTACK. Here is some info on the anti-union bias of the Bush Labor Department.

TWO YEARS AFTER SAGO, mine safety is still an issue. As Ken Ward reports in today's Gazette, 67 US miners have died since that disaster.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CAMUS

Caption: Seamus McGoogle is all about existentialism.

There are thinkers and philosophers hold up better than others over time. Some--say Sartre, Foucault or Derrida--might be worth a quick intellectual fling at a certain stage of life or a brief perusal. Others--my short list includes people like Aristotle, William James, and the French writer Albert Camus--seem to have more staying power.

I've been thinking about Camus again since re-reading his novel The Plague for the umpteenth time.

El Cabrero first stumbled on the Algerian/French writer and philosopher Camus (1913-1960) while prowling the stacks of my hometown public library about the time I finished high school. The work was "Reflections on the Guillotine," his classic essay against the death penalty.

My beloved state of West Virginia didn't have the death penalty then and still doesn't, but I'd never seriously thought about it before. His eloquent, passionate but rational approach made a permanent impression on me. I went on from there to read his novels, essays, plays (not his best work), and non-fiction works.

Here's a post on the subject from last year, written on the occasion of George Bush's encounter with his novel The Stranger.

Camus had credibility with me because he wasn't naive about the evils of the world--in fact he was fully engaged against them. He was active in the French Resistance and spoke in defense of human rights whether these were threatened from the right or left.

In this week's Goat Rope, I'm going to highlight some of his nuggets.

Here are a couple of sample quotes from The Rebel to start with:

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

...it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests.

More to come.

WHO OWNS ADAM SMITH? Here's an op-ed of yours truly that appeared in yesterday's Gazette Mail. To my surprise, it was accepted at Common Dreams as well.

DISTURBING READING. For those following the Megan Williams torture and kidnapping case, here is a transcript of an early interview with police shortly after she was freed from captivity. Warning: this is extremely graphic.

NEW NOTES. And here's the latest edition of Jim Lewis' Notes from under the Fig Tree.

FEDERAL MINE INSPECTIONS CUT. What the ...? In spite of all-too-recent mine disasters in Utah and West Virginia, MSHA is behind in its safety inspections. This is from Ken Ward's story in the Gazette yesterday.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A POISON TREE

A while back, El Cabrero received a suggestion from a Goat Rope reader and generally shady character to spend a week writing about the radical mystical English poet William Blake, who lived from 1757 to 1827 (along with links and comments about current events).

I figure you could do a lot worse...

I first stumbled on Blake while browsing through my hometown public library decades ago. I thumbed through a book of weird illustrations and almost nursery-rhyme type poems that hit hard and fast.

The first one that I laid my eyes on was about the fruits of nurturing anger and hatred:

A POISON TREE

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree

I was pretty much hooked after that and remember asking "Who is this guy?" I've waded through a biography or two sense then but keep going back to that question. Suffice it to say that he was a really strange and revolutionary artist who regularly had visions of angels, devils, fairies, ghosts (including the ghost of a flea), and the divine.

Blake left quite a body of poetry and art, much of it very dense and obscure, but I've found enough to mull over for this lifetime anyway in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience and a very strange short work titled "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."

To quote Bob Marley, they were "light like a feather/heavy as lead."

SPEAKING OF POISON, HATE AND ANGER, people in West Virginia and Logan County in particular are still stunned by the brutality visited on Megan Williams, an African American woman who was kidnapped, sexually abused and tortured for a week. Six arrests have been made in the case and all the suspects are white. For background, check the links in last week's posts.

This Saturday, I attended a public meeting at Cora in Logan County about the case. Speakers included representatives of the national, state and local NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Logan County Improvement League, the Charleston Ministerial Alliance, and others. Here's the Gazette report.

Some community residents were concerned over the apparent decision of the prosecutor not to pursue hate crime charges against the suspects. However, representatives of some of the groups listed above met for three hours with the prosecutor Friday and were satisfied that the suspects would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and that for technical reasons a stronger case could be made for kidnapping, sexual assault, and other charges. Kidnapping alone can carry a maximum sentence of life under WV law.

Short summary of the speakers' key points:

*The law enforcement system worked in this case. Sheriff's deputies investigated as soon as they received a report that a woman was being held against her will. Six arrests were made within 24 hours.

*A $100,000 cash bond has been set for the suspects and it is considered unlikely that they will be able to meet this.

*This action was the depraved crime of a few individuals and not an indictment of the people of Logan County or West Virginia.

*The sheriff's department has established a fund to assist the victim and another fund is likely to be set up soon in Charleston, probably with the help of representatives of the Charleston Ministerial Alliance.

*Local residents should try to unite to respond positively to this tragedy and try to bring about positive changes.

MINING POLL. A new poll shows that two thirds of Americans oppose the Bush administration's rule change favoring mountaintop removal mining.

UNLEASHING WHATEVER. Here are two good op-eds criticizing the cult of the market god as advocated in Unleashing Capitalism. The first looks at its idealized picture of life in the coal camps and the second slams its tax cut mania.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

KANT STAND IT

Caption: Lily is completely Kantian

This is official Immanuel Kant Week on Goat Rope. El Cabrero has long been a fan of this somewhat obscure Prussian philosopher who lived between 1724 and 1804. He was famous for his contributions to moral philosophy, enlightened political theory, and epistemology or the theory of knowledge.

He didn't get out much, being pretty much a fixture of Konigsberg, where he lived a life of such regularity that it was said you could set your watch by the time of his daily walks.

Although I can't claim to have made it all the way through his major work, The Critique of Pure Reason, I'm pretty convinced by its main argument. Basically, it's this: we don't see the world as it is but as we are. The mind is not a passive blank slate or tabula rasa on which sensory experience makes its mark.

Instead, it actively organizes our perceptions into mental categories like space, time or causality. Although our knowledge can be fairly secure within that sphere, we can really only know the world of phenomena or appearances, not the numina or things in themselves.

He also believed that we couldn't know metaphysical things like whether God or immortality exist through pure reason alone, since we could make equally convincing arguments on both sides of any issue. He postulated that such beliefs could be inferred instead through practical reason such as the moral sense.

The part of Kant that I'm going to brood about this week is his philosophy of history and human destiny, which he lays out in a pretty clear (for him) essay called "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View."

About which more next time.

LABOR RALLY IN HUNTINGTON, WV. I didn't make it to this one, but it sounds like fun. Hundreds of union members rallied in Huntington Saturday against so-called "right to work" (for less) legislation. The rally was called when state Republicans announced that a speaker from the National Right to Work Committee would speak there July 14. The speaking engagement was cancelled but the rally proceeded.

Labor organizers stressed that the target was right to work (for less) rather than the party itself.

Recently the issue, long dormant here, was raised again with the favorable publicity in the right wing press given to the book Unleashing Capitalism, which among other things supports right to work (for less), opposes minimum wage, and is opposed on principle to government regulation of things like worker and coal mine safety.

If the right wing wants to stir up a hornet's nest trying to make this happen, an event that seems unlikely now, this could be fun.

ANYTIME. This is old news by now (from Saturday), but for what it's worth, the Prime Minister of Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said U.S. troops could leave that country "anytime they want."

LAST WEEK I WANTED A GIANT SLOTH BUT THIS WEEK, it's a wooly mammoth. They found one in Siberia that's pretty fresh and we're getting close to being able to do that stuff now...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED