Looking back

 There's been a lot of ink (and pixels?) spilled during the last few days on the anniversary of 9/11. It's hard to believe that 20 years have gone by, although in some ways it seems even longer.

When I first heard the news I looked out from the little house we were renting (less than two weeks into our marriage) and saw donkeys playing and rolling on the ground. The contrast between that bucolic scene and the horror elsewhere was stark.

I was not among those who believed that the US would make no response. To me, that would have been naïve in the extreme. But I certainly didn't anticipate a 20 year Afghan war. Or that a group of neocon ideologues would use the fear and anger the attacks aroused to successfully push for an invasion of Iraq, a regime which, however repressive, had nothing to do with the attacks. 

I did know that we were in for a world of trouble when then-defense secretary talked about "leaning forward." To be forward leaning is to be aggressive and off balanced, a situation that often sets up disaster. 

(In judo, ju jitsu, aikido and other martial arts, you always want your opponent to be leaning forward. That makes it easier to throw them.)

According to the Associated Press, the war in Afghanistan alone killed 2,448 American service members, 3,846 US contractors, 66,000 Afghan national military and policy, 1,144 allied service members, 47,245 Afghan civilians, 444 aid workers, 72 journalists, and 52,292 Taliban and other fighters.

Brown University's Costs of War project estimates that the " global war on terror" cost the lives of at least 897,000 people, displaced at least 38 million, and cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including an additional $2 trillion in health care and disability coverage for veterans in the future.

And after all that, the world isn't exactly full of REM's shiny happy people.

Economists often talk about "opportunity costs," which are defined as the loss of potential gains from other alternatives when one is chosen. It boggles my mind to think of the possibilities, alternatives and lives that were lost among the many roads not taken.

Ten years out

I remember a morning 10 years ago when the weather was beautiful. It was on the cusp of the change of seasons, when the onslaughts of August had been beaten back but the chill winds of Autumn hadn't yet begun to blow.

I was sorting through different details and trying to figure out a week's hectic schedule when I made a phone call to a friend who broke the news of major destruction in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

I looked out the window to a field where a neighbor kept donkeys who were playing in the sun and rolling in the grass. I was struck by the contrast between that idyllic rural scene and the death and devastation that had just happened. And I wondered about what was to come.

There's been a lot of water under that bridge since then and a lot of twists and turns--many of them wrong turns. It's always tempting to wonder what if this or that had gone down differently, if different choices would have been made in the wake of the attacks. Or how different things might have been if they would have been foiled. Too bad that history doesn't give us the chance to rewind and try again.

You can't unring a bell, as Dylan sang. But you can control which bells to ring or leave unringed as we move ahead.

Wonk holiday

Random animal picture.

In case you missed it, yesterday was a major policy wonk holiday. It was "Poverty Day," a movable feast during which the Census Bureau release a report on incomes, health insurance coverage and--you guessed it--poverty.

If you didn't observe it, you have El Cabrero's permission to take today off.

As one might expect during a major recession, the news wasn't good--and this was just 2008. Next year's report will show the effects of the recession at its presumed height and will be much worse.

Here's an overview of the report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. One key point for the current health care reform debate is that private health coverage declined as more people lost work-based insurance.

West Virginia saw a 6.7 percent increase in the number of uninsured residents, according to West Virginians for Affordable Health Care. Those without care jumped from 254,000 to 271,000, an increase of 17,000.

Here's a good overall interpretation by CBPP's Robert Greenstein. Here's his conclusion:

Moreover, the expected increases in 2009 in poverty and in the number and percentage of uninsured people would be substantially greater if not for the economic recovery law that the Administration and Congress enacted earlier this year. Just seven provisions of that law — including tax credits for working families, expansions of unemployment insurance and nutrition assistance, and one-time payments to senior citizens, veterans, and people with disabilities — will prevent an estimated 6.2 million Americans, including 2.4 million children, from falling into poverty, according to an analysis the Center issued yesterday.[1] Moreover, these figures understate the poverty-preventing effects of the recovery act because they do not capture other provisions of the law, such as increases in housing, child care services, or the law’s effects on preserving or creating jobs. In addition, the law’s increases in medical assistance are preventing hundreds of thousands more from becoming uninsured.

Finally, today’s disquieting health insurance figures underscore the need for comprehensive health care reform. The decline in job-based health coverage is leaving millions of Americans uninsured or underinsured. As noted above, the new Census data show that last year’s economic decline did not fuel an even greater drop in overall insurance coverage only because of the expansion in coverage by public insurance programs.

Health reform bills that Congress is considering would help to address this problem by covering tens of millions of Americans who lack insurance. They would strengthen employer coverage and Medicaid, offer new health insurance choices for Americans, and prevent insurance companies from denying coverage or charging exorbitant amounts to people with medical conditions. The bills also seek to slow the growth of health care costs, which is essential to expanding coverage and sustaining progress in reducing the ranks of the uninsured over the long run.

EIGHT YEARS AGO today the US and the world received a shock that's still being felt.

EAT IT. The grassroots food revolution is still going strong. In this item, author Michael Pollan credits Wendell Berry for helping to start it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Men into pigs

Circe offers the cup in this painting by John William Waterhouse by way of wikipedia. Think before you drink!

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

After a serious losing streak of one disaster or danger after another, Odysseus and his men get a little bit of a break on the island Aeaea, home of the beautiful nymph Circe.

It gets off to a rocky start though, when she encounters a recon party sent from the ship. When they visit her house, she welcomes them and offers them a meal, while slipping them the proverbial Mickey:

She opened her gleaming doors at once and stepped forth,
inviting them all in, and in they went, all innocence...
She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,
then she mixed them a potion--cheese, barley
and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine--
but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs
to wipe from their memories any thought of home.
Once they'd drained the bowls she filled, suddenly
she struck with her want, drove them into her pigsties,
all of them bristling into swine--with grunts,
snouts--even their bodies, yes, and only
the men's minds stayed steadfast as before.
So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing
as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast,
common fodder for hogs that root and roll in mud.

No doubt many female readers of this story over the ages probably wouldn't consider this to be much of a feat...

One man, Eurylochus, escapes and warns Odysseus, who heads in with his sword. This time, he gets a little help. The god Hermes warns him to take the herb moly with him as an antidote to her spells. When she brandishes her wand, he is to threaten with his sword. When she offers to share her bed, he must make her swear by the River Styx--the sacred oath of the gods--that she will not hurt him and will turn his men back into humans.

That's pretty much the way it goes down. After that, she tells him,

'Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, man of action,
no more tears now, calm these tides of sorrow.
Well I know what pains you bore on the swarming sea,
what punishment you endured from hostile men on land.
But come now, eat your food and drink your wine
till the same courage fills your chests, now as then,
when you first set sail from native land, from rocky Ithaca
Now you are burnt-out husks, your spirits haggard, sere,
always brooding over your wanderings long and hard,
your hearts never lifting with any joy--
you suffered far too much.'

So begins a year of R&R: great food and wine, comfort and baths, not to mention daily dalliance with a goddess. Not a bad gig, all things considered.

Holy male fantasy, Batman!

This part of the story can be interpreted lots of ways. Peter Meineck, who has produced some excellent lectures on the classics for The Modern Scholar, suggests that at this point Odysseus needs to get in touch with the feminine after years of male violence. Staying for a year also means getting grounded and connected again to the cycle of the seasons.

Another way of looking at it is to note that it doesn't take much for Odysseus to forget all about his homecoming and his wife and child who have been waiting about 11 years by now. As Jonathan Shay notes in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, many of the veterans he worked with

went through periods during the first decade after returning form Vietnam when they apparently did seek the solace that Circe specifically offers in wine, good food, and great sex.

Often, however, fantasy and reality don't quite match and the result is disappointment and disillusionment:

A real-world woman, in America, meeting a haggard combat veteran, might have been as understanding as Circe, but unlike Circe had no staff of serving women, had to consider how to pay to keep up the household, had a life with her own family and friends apart from the veteran.

At any rate, it sure beats getting eaten by a cyclops...

SEVEN YEARS AGO. I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but the anniversary of 9/11 reminds me of the victims but also makes me wonder where we'd be now if the US had pursued a wiser course in its wake.

JOBS VS ENVIRONMENT? Not really. Investing green technology and infrastructure could create 2 million jobs, according to a new report.

A NEW LOOK AT RELIGION. Here's an interesting take on religion based on a study by two anthropologists studying religious behavior and communication. Short version: it tends to promote social cooperation and childlike acceptance of validity claims.

STRESS. A Cambridge (UK) study found the West Virginians had the highest percentage of stressed out people in the nation.

DID YOU TAKE YOUR MORALITY PILL TODAY? A British psychiatrist has proposed the use of morality-enhancing medication.

DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER--MASS HYSTERIA. Israeli researchers have been studying how well cats and dogs get along when introduced in the same home. Each animal has a different set of body signals but some can learn to "read" the other's. I could have told y'all that.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SPINOZA'S STONE

Caption: These guys are all about free will.

El Cabrero is not a determinist, but some of my favorite people are. One such is the great (excommunicated) Jewish philosopher Baruch or Benedict Spinoza, who lived from 1632 to 1677.

Spinoza's masterpiece was The Ethics, which is a little misleading as a title. It's really about God, the universe, and everything--which, at the risk of oversimplifying, were all pretty much the same thing for him. It was written in the style of Euclidean geometry, with axioms and proofs.

Spinoza's universe was like the one Einstein wanted to live in, fully determined:

In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way...

Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced.

Spinoza's God acts from the necessity of (fill in the appropriate pronoun) own nature. Needless to say, he believed that necessity applies to the rest of us as well. He once wrote to a friend that if a stone thrown through the air became conscious, it would think it was doing so of its own free will.

To be exact, he said,

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.

For that matter,

an infant believes that it desires milk freely; an angry child thinks he wishes freely for vengeance, a timid child thinks he wishes freely to run away. Again, a drunken man thinks, that from the free decision of his mind he speaks words, which afterwards, when sober, he would like to have left unsaid. So the delirious, the garrulous, and others of the same sort think that they act from the free decision of their mind, not that they are carried away by impulse.

For him, freedom consisted largely in becoming aware of necessity.

Far be it from me to dis Spinoza, but I'm not convinced that the universe is that tightly wrapped. I think we have a little wiggle room...

SIX YEARS AFTER. Six years after 9/11, this editorial from the Charleston Gazette looks at where we've been and where we're stuck.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL MINING has been getting a lot of national attention. This is from Wired.

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS. The good news is that the federal minimum wage has finally been raised. The bad news is that it doesn't buy what it used to. Here's what is was worth in the past in constant 2007 dollars:

*1950 - $6.48
*1968 - $9.58
*1997 - $6.68
*2007 - $5.85


ANOTHER POST-MODERN MOMENT. IBM workers in Italy are going on a virtual strike in Second Life.

ALEX THE TALKING PARROT died at age 31. The African gray parrot astounded scientists with his vocabulary of over 100 words and apparent ability to do some basic counting and recognize colors and shapes.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED