Alertness

Woody Allen said that eighty percent of success is showing up. I think that's about right. I'd say most of the other twenty percent is paying attention and being ready. The remainder consists of striking skillfully when an opportunity occurs, which itself only takes up a fraction of the overall time (although learning how to do that may take years).

One reason why I've been strip mining Thoreau's Walden these days is that I've really found some of the ideas he expresses to be of great value in trying to change things that need to be changed or preserve things that need to be preserved.

Here's a great line in a great passage. Because it's so good, I want to highlight the key line before the whole passage:

No method nor discipline can supercede the necessity of being forever on the alert.

Here's the rest of it:

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, now matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

By way of qualification, I don't think this means being hyper vigilant all the time, which can be a kind of mania and is impossible in any case, but at the very least tracking things the way so many animals do, watching changes, observing trends, moving when appropriate.

I never throw a scrap of food into the yard without seeing a some chickens responding right away. Our lazy cats seem to zone out most of the time but tune right in when there's something to see. The goats notice the least little change. Dogs track motion. Maybe we'd be more successful in our undertakings if we were better animals.

GOOD FOR A LAUGH about something that isn't funny: here's Jon Stewart on America's endless quest for an energy policy. Thanks to Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo for including this link.

SOMETHING ELSE THAT ISN'T FUNNY. Here's an interesting blog post from the NY Times Economix about how people think about unemployment.

A HOLE IN THE WORLD. Here's Naomi Klein on the BP Gulf oil disaster.

SLIP-SLIDING AWAY? Here's Bob Herbert from the NY Times on missed opportunities for greatness.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Meanly, like ants

In this age of multi-tasking, a dose of Thoreau really clears the palate. If he felt out of place in the mid 1800s, what would he think of an era in which people listen to music, carry on a conversation and send text messages while driving a car?

...we live meanly, like ants...Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

That's a tall order for an ADHD nation.

IMPORTANT SENATE VOTE. The vote to extend key provisions of the Recovery Act--including unemployment insurance extensions and aid to states--is likely to take place today. It has been scaled back further after a failed vote yesterday. If you haven't contacted your senators, please do so today and urge them to vote yes on "the extender bill." Click here to get started.

MAKING THE CASE. In testimony before Congress, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute urges more aggressive action to deal with unemployment.

THE COMMON DENOMINATOR between BP and Massey Energy is greed, according to union leaders Cecil Roberts and Leo Girard.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

To live deep

I remember having a discussion with some young people about Thoreau's Walden a while back. One person pointed out that he didn't really rough it or live totally off the land, as if he cheated by having occasional dinners at a friend's house.

I tried to point out as tactfully as I could that he didn't go to the woods for commando or survival training. It was more of what we might call today an extended spiritual retreat.

In some of his best known words, he explained his reasons this way:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had never lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau is at his best in passages like that which challenge the reader. It would be terrible thing to discover at the end of life that one had never lived at all.

CUTTING CORNERS. That would be BP. Here's the Washington Post on the president's speech while we're at it.

STATING THE OBVIOUS. Here's Dean Baker on the obtuseness of some of his fellow economists.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO boredom?

A DEAL? It looks like the dispute which cost the Rev. Jim Lewis his license to function as a priest in WV is close to resolution.

MAKING EYES. Caterpillars, no doubt after a careful study of The Art of War, make false ones to scare off predators.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Quiet desperation

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."

A MODEST PROPOSAL. Robert Reich has a simple--and timely--idea about green jobs: put young and jobless people to work dealing with BP oil mess.

LISTEN TO THE MINERS. This editorial in the NY Times speaks approvingly of WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's call for coal mine safety reforms that protect whistleblowers and hold corporate executives more accountable for safety violations.

THIS IS REALLY WEIRD, but El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia isn't doing all that badly, at least compared with most other states, in dealing with the recession.

THIS EXPLAINS A LOT. Adolescent brains seem to be wired for risk-taking.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The nick of time

The Persistence of Time, Salvador Dali.

Thoreau's Walden rambles all over the place, but it continually challenges the reader by returning to the topic of time, especially that part of it which is happening right now:

As if you could kill time without damaging eternity.

I guess one could say that this is a main theme of the book. Here's just one sample:

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe the line

.

It sounds easy, but it's one of the hardest things to do.

GULF DISASTER. Here's Jim Wallis on the BP mess. And by the way, Halliburton's political donations are up these days. Could there be a connection?

YOU PROBABLY REALLY DON'T WANT TO LOOK at these pictures of animals caught in the spill.

NOT THE BEST PR MOVE. Here's a statement by the American Friends Service Committee on the attack by Israel on a ship bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza. While we're at it, here's Kristof's NY Times op-ed on the subject.

PETS AND HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS. The way we deal with the former may not be bad for the latter.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Modern Times

It seems like one of the lessons of history is that capitalism is an enormously powerful, adaptive, productive and often destructive system. It can accomplish amazing things--even Karl Marx sang its praises in The Communist Manifesto--but it has the habit of melting down every so often.

One reason why the system hasn't seen a meltdown as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s (even though it's come close) is because of various reforms and regulations that have been enacted since that time.

Yet for 30 years or so, right wing ideologues who claim to be defenders of capitalism have been busy trying to undo the regulations and safeguards that help to stabilize the system--and they had a lot of success.

Yet when you consider that the wealthy and powerful have a much greater stake in it than anyone else, it seems odd to me that many of them have pushed for measures that would place it at risk.

It's like watching people trying to saw off the branch they're sitting on. The whole Goldman Sachs thing is a case in point. As E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote in a recent column,

Marx's predictions about the inevitable collapse of capitalism have been wrong so far because the system has worked reasonably well, thanks to the rules and redistributive programs established after the Great Depression.

The lesson is that the surest way to save capitalism is to regulate it in the public interest.

WHEN SORROWS COME, they come not single spies, but in battalions. The BP oil rig disaster that killed eleven workers threatens to eclipse the Exxon Valdez as an ecological disaster. Two more miners were killed in a Kentucky accident. The AP reports that Massey Energy will offer $3 million to the families of each of the 29 miners who died earlier this month.

THE ALTERNATIVE TO HEALTH CARE REFORM? Bartering with chickens. Why didn't I think of that?

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's something on the reform we got. And even Arnold likes it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: NOT GOOD