Abstract thoughts

I used to think that there were two kinds of people: those who were comfortable in courthouses and those who weren't. I fell into the latter category. This could be because I mostly go into mine to deal with things like taxes on cars and such and have to go through a metal detector to do that.

Lately, however, I've been spending a good bit of time in courthouses around the state talking to county commissions and economic development authorities about the need to create a Future Fund for West Virginia from natural resource severance taxes. I've found that some of them are really nice and welcoming. As in friendly places without metal detectors.

One kind of creepy thing that I've heard about and have seen in some courthouses, however, is a real sign of the times in the Marcellus Shale boom areas, to wit, swarms of abstractors scavenging tax and property records to find victims ...I mean landowners who may or may not own mineral rights to the places they live on. It can often the first step in ruining the lives and health of some inoffensive rural family.

It reminds me of the old stories about how unsuspecting farmers were swindled out of their land in the early days of the coal boom 100 or so years ago.

I think a lot of local people have the same reaction I do to the swarm. Here's one anecdote: while eating at a local restaurant in one north central county with a friend on the Future Fund trail, a waitress gave us a good looking over and tentatively said, "Y'all aren't abstractors are you?" I assured her that we weren't and that they gave me the creeps too. She said she was concerned about the quality of life in the area and was worried about how things would change if and when a major land grab got going there.

I can't say I disagree. I do hope that at least this time around we find away to limit the damage and get something out of it.

MY FINGERS ARE CROSSED. There have been some interesting developments in the federal investigation of Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch disaster that might signal prosecutions moving up the corporate ladder.

IT WASN'T JUST YOUR IMAGINATION. The Great Recession was really bad.

UP WITH THE CHICKENS?  You may be happier.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fractopia

Remember these guys?

People have been talking about the Marcellus Shale natural gas boom for a few years in WV. So far, most of it has been taking place to the north of my  normal stomping grounds but I made a visit last week to see how it hit Wetzel County, which sits right at the base of WV's northern panhandle.

Aside from the Ohio River border, most of the county is pretty rural and was relatively bucolic, the operative word being was. Now the countryside has been torn up along with the highways as well pads, frack ponds, and pipelines go in all over the place.

Fracking or hydraulic fracturing is a term you hear a lot in conjunction with shale gas drilling. It refers to the practice of pumping water, sand and chemicals into horizontal wells thousands of feet underground. Actually, fracking is only one of several steps along the way.

As I understand it, the whole process consists of site preparation (they call them pads), which I've heard called "mini mountaintop removal sites." Basically it means clearing and leveling an area of several acres. Then comes the drilling, which goes down thousands of feet vertically and then moves horizontally across the layer of shale in which the gas is trapped. Then they "seal" the shaft by pumping concrete in to supposedly protect ground water and aquifers from contamination. We all know that concrete never cracks, right?

Once the well is dug, an explosive charge is detonated along the horizontal shaft to break up the shale. After that the fracking is done, in which several million gallons of water, sand and God knows what kind of toxic stuff is pumped in at high pressure to help release the gas. About half of the frack fluid stays in the ground; the rest has to find a home somewhere else.

Once stuff starts coming up the drill shaft, the next step is flaring to eliminate waste gas. Once the gas is good to go, it is pumped along pipelines with the help of natural gas  compressors. I'm sure I left out a few steps. All this involves thousands of tons of traffic on rural roads and lots of noise, besides concerns about air, water, solid waste and hazmat contamination. In a word, it's a mess. And, yes, lots of jobs are involved, but most of those go to out of state workers.

The WV legislature created some pretty good draft legislation, but it was "tweaked"--some would say gutted--by Gov. Tomblin. More regulation needs to happen if the political will can be generated. And we need to create a future fund from natural gas and other severance taxes to make sure WV gets a little something out of this mess.

PRIORITIES. Here's a good op-ed by a friend of mine which makes the connection between huge cuts in state corporate taxes and possible cuts in child care for low income working families. Unsportsmanlike conduct, I say.

HARD TIMES. Here's a sneak preview of Paul Krugman's latest book on the messed up economy.

FLEAS. Dinosaurs had em. Big ones.

SPEAKING OF GAS, the dinosaurs apparently had plenty of that too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

More gear

El Cabrero is about to hit the road for a week or so, but I would not leave you unprepared, Gentle Reader. As a parting offering, I'm pleased to share the following two links sent by a friend, which may prove useful in dealing with or preparing for a zombie apocalypse.

The first is a "splattering target" for marksmen preparing for the walking dead and the second is a selection of Kabar Zombie Killer blades, of which the advertisement says:

 These toxic green gripped blades aim to put your mind at ease should you ever be face to face with an undead enemy without a firearm. Of course they look cool! Of course they will clear brush and work hard tackling your day-to-day. But hey, you just never know when their true intentions may need to be put to use. Do you want to take that chance? Will you be prepared?

Scoff if you want--but if, God forbid, you ever do get eaten by zombies, it won't be this blog's fault.

HOW WE GOT HERE. This Gazette op-ed on the great recession caught my eye.

MINE SAFETY. Alpha Natural Resources, the company that bought out Massey Energy, plans to begin construction on a "state of the art" mine safety and training facility by June. This was part of a settlement with the US Department of Justice in the wake of Massey's Upper Big Branch disaster.

HEALTH CARE JU JITSU? Robert Reich thinks so.

NOTE: Posts will be a bit irregular over the next week or so.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Have knee will travel

After spending the summer with a blown out knee and part of the fall with one recovering from surgery, it is so nice to have a leg back. I can kick again, although I'm still not at 100 percent in that department.

The best part is the ability to run again. But first let's clarify the meaning of that word as there seems to be some confusion there. Often people have told me that they've seen me out there walking. I try to explain that what looks like walking to them is running to me. I maintain that running is subjective: if you think you're running and it feels like you're running, then you are regardless of speed.

I'm hoping now to build up speed to the point where I can hold and maintain a respectable pace for several miles. Yesterday I met a pace goal at a 5K. I hope to keep that pace at a 5 miler in January and then a 10K in February, although that will mean a lot of interval training between then and now. If that happens, who knows? Maybe a half marathon or the Charleston 15 mile distance run in the summer.

It's not that I enjoy such events at the time. I hate them. But it feels pretty good to have just finished one.

THE D-WORD discussed here.

RATS have empathy; why doesn't the 1 percent?

MORE ON THE UPPER BIG BRANCH DEAL here.

BANKING ON COAL. Here's a connection between Wall Street and a warming planet.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Feeding the trolls

I understand that it is the custom in Zen Buddhist monasteries to collect any remaining grains of rice after a meal and offer them to the hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts in the Buddhist conception of the wheel of life and death are those beings who were greedy in previous lives.

In that unpleasant state or realm, one has a huge and empty belly that is always hungry but a tiny throat that can't swallow much. Feeding them is a meritorious act of generosity.

I've come to think of writing op-eds, like this one of mine, as a similar act since putting one in the paper feeds the trolls, which in this case refers to right wingers who lurk around the web in order to attach their remarks to pieces they disagree with like lampreys latching on to fish.

I devoutly hope that this act of providing nourishment will serve me well in my next rebirth.

THE DEATH PENALTY. E.J. Dionne argues that only conservatives can end it.

CLASS WARFARE, revisited.

CHIMPANZEES are just not that into cooperation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Wrong turn

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the current economic mess the US is facing and how we got there.

Installment one is here. It traces the roots of the Great Recession to 30 years of supply side economics, deregulation, tax cuts and privatization.

Installment two is here. It's about the inadequacy of policy responses such as TARP and the Recovery Act to counter the Great Recession.

Installment three is here. It's about how shifting the agenda from the jobs crisis to the deficit isn't going to do much good to either.

One problem with the current budget debate is that all the attention is placed on cutting programs rather than raising revenue. Another problem is that the right wing approach to dealing with the budget doesn't look at what really caused it to mushroom. The main drivers of current deficits are things like the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, other increases in military related spending, the industry-friendly prescription drug Medicare benefit, and rising health care costs.

There are realistic solutions to these deficits drivers: raise revenues, end the wars, cut military spending, redo the drug benefit law and implement health care reform. Unfortunately, these ideas aren't on the table. And the jobs crisis continues to be ignored at a time when 25 million Americans are either un- or underemployed.

Instead, we have a situation in which political ideologues are willing to inflict vast harm on ordinary Americans and the global economy to protect the interests of the very wealthy.

I believe the technical term for such situations is a goat rope

A REAL LOOK A DEFICITS can be found here.

IS ANYBODY LISTENING? Here's a look at what Americans really think about taxes, spending and budget cuts from a recent poll.

INEQUALITY, REAL AND IMAGINED. There's a big difference between what Americans think the division of wealth is, what they think it should be, and the way it really is. Here's a brief discussion of the difference and here's a more detailed look.

HIGHLIGHTING AN ABSURDITY. Here's how some of El Cabrero's amigos plan to save the good old USA, one hot dog at a time.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

First put out the fire (and save lives)

The theme here lately is the current economic and political mess the US finds itself in and how we got there.

Installment one is here. Short version: 30 years of bad policy and bad (supply side) economics set up the Great Recession.

Installment two is here. Short version: the policy response to the Great Recession, TARP and the Recovery Act, might have been enough to restore very modest economic growth but weren't enough to end the jobs crisis. They were thus vulnerable to political attack.

Here's installment three. The shortcomings of the Recovery Act, especially continuing anger over high unemployment, helped fuel Republican victories in the 2010 midterm elections, shifting control of the House and weakening the Democratic majority in the Senate. But as soon as the dust of the election had settled, all that supposed concern about jobs disappeared and dealing with debt and deficits became the order of the day.

As someone said, elections matter.

While deficits and debt are important matters, there are several flaws with the right wing take on the issue. One will suffice for today: cutting government spending in the midst of a recession or very weak recovery is likely to make the recession and its related problems--like high unemployment and weak demand--get even worse, which could also make the long term debt problem worse.

After all, fewer people working and more people with reduced incomes means fewer people paying taxes and more people paying less in taxes. And cuts in public spending mean cuts in public sector jobs as well as private sector spin offs at a time when private sector job growth is very weak.

It's a bit like worrying about a new roof on the house when a fire has started in the kitchen. Fixing the roof is fine, but save lives and put out the fire first.

MORE ON DEFICIT LIES here.

MORE ON THE NEGLECTED JOBS CRISIS here.

WANT TO CUT DEBT? Raise revenues.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Too little. Too late?

The focus of this blog lately is the nation's current economic mess and how we got there. This is installment 2. Here's #1.

As I argued yesterday, the Great Recession of the last few years was facilitated by 30 years of zombie economics, which consisted of deregulating industry, privatizing services, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and eroding programs that promoted shared prosperity.

In late 2008 and early 2009, Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations enacted policies designed to correct course. First, under Bush's watch, the TARP program or Wall Street bailout was passed. Most people hated it, for good reasons, although it may have actually helped stall the slide of markets and lending institutions and wound up costing less than expected.

The second was the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better know as the stimulus. It was a big bill and a massively mixed bag, consisting of some elements that really helped boost the economy (like extending unemployment insurance, subsidizing COBRA and boosting food stamps) while others that didn't (things like tax cuts for businesses).

Here's the rationale behind it: three things drive economic growth: private spending, business investment and government spending. In a recession, the first two tend to tank, leaving the third to take up the slack.

The main problem with the Recovery Act, as several economists have argued (search this blog for more) is that it wasn't big enough and it didn't place enough focus on direct job creation. At the time it was designed, it was estimated that unemployment would peak at around 8 percent. More than two years later, the rate is still 9.1 nationwide.

The Recovery Act probably did help end the recession in at least a technical sense of helping GDP to stop falling and it did keep millions of Americans from falling into poverty, but it didn't go far enough or last long enough. Now, as it trickles to a halt, we're likely to see more and more layoffs, especially at the state and local level, and more cuts to needed programs and services.

The biggest problem with an inadequate stimulus was political: right wing opponents attempted to brand it as a failure with considerable success and use anger at slow job growth to turn public attention in another direction.

About which more tomorrow.

MORE OF SAME here.

SHOCK DOCTRINE. Don't fall for it (again).

TALKING SENSE. Here's a statement from the AFLCIO on real and bogus crises.

WHAT ABOUT THE TOOTH FAIRY? Some evangelicals are questioning the literal historicity of Adam and Eve.

WHY NOT PEOPLE? A new study suggests that chimpanzees are more generous than previously thought. Perhaps humans are less so.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

In a dark wood

It's starting to look like the United States, like Dante in the opening lines of his Inferno, is finding itself in a dark woods, having lost the true path. Three years after the worst economic decline since the Great Recession, we seem to be headed down a path that will only lead to more misery for ordinary Americans.

And, to throw in a reference to an Irish poet to balance the Italian one mentioned above, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. What happened?

Over the next few days, I'm going to try to unravel this one. Here's the first installment:

The Great Recession, which technically began in 2007 but made itself felt in 2008 was facilitated by 30 years of deregulation, privatization, supply side economic BS and the undermining of policies that promoted shared prosperity. And yet, incredible as it seems to me, the ideas that led to it and which should have been permanently discredited are still being asserted louder than ever.

MEANWHILE, how bout that stock market? Those tea baggers must be really happy now.

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. Email subscribers to this blog may have accidentally gotten a not ready for prime time version of installment 2 of this series. I apologize for filling up your inbox.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A blast from the past

In between discs of an unabridged recording of Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy, this weekend I caught this NPR story on an old musical favorite, Peter Tosh, once a member of Bob Marley's Wailers. It's worth a listen.

As an economic justice person working for an organization that is best known for advocating peace, I have to admit that I have a particular fondness for the chorus of his song "Equal Rights"

Everyone is crying out for peace yes
None is crying out for justice
I don't want no peace
I need equal rights and justice

I must admit to have mellowed a bit with age; I still want justice, but I'll take peace too if it's on the table.

CAN'T OR WON'T act to fix the economy? Mostly won't.

RETHINKING THE DRUG WAR. It hasn't worked too well.

PROTECTING THE POOR. A wide variety of WV groups have called on their congressional delegation to spare programs that are lifelines to low income people in budget deliberations.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The new normal?

Here's an interesting--and ominous--statistic: more than 42 million people last year had to flee their homes because of natural disasters. This was more than twice as many as the year before. Climate change might have a thing or two to do with that.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said the increase from 17 million displaced people in 2009 was mainly due to the impact of "mega-disasters" such as the massive floods in China and Pakistan and the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti.

It said more than 90 percent of the disaster displacements were caused by weather-related hazards such as floods and storms that were probably impacted by global warming, but it couldn't say to what extent.

It looks like 2011 is going to have some nasty numbers of its own. As this Newsweek article suggests, extreme weather is likely to be the new normal.

CLASS WARFARE FROM THE PRESIDENT? As if.

FIXING THE ECONOMY. Here are some ideas.

ANTI-WAR BIPARTISANSHIP? Maybe a little bit.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Wrecker of mead-benches

El Cabrero is having fun here with Beowulf lately, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, check earlier posts.

If one were to make a list of the qualities of a good political leader these days, the ability to wreck the drinking halls of his foes might not make it to the top of the list, but it sure did in the opening lines of Beowulf. That was one of several attributed to an early king of the Spear-Danes.

Just for fun, here are the opening lines in the original Anglo-Saxon:

HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syððanærest wearð
feasceaft funden; he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum weorðmyndum þah,
oð þæt him æghwylc ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan; þæt wæs god cyning!

Did everybody get that?

Seriously, though, it's hard to recognize that as English apart from a few words, although it was just that in second half of the first millennium AD. It still might have been if a certain Norman called William the Bastard didn't become William the Conqueror. The alphabet was a bit different, as you can tell. For example the thing that looks like a weird letter p had a th sound. I haven't got around to figuring out the other ones yet.

Here's Seamus Heaney's version of the same passage:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.

Scourging, wrecking, rampaging, collecting tribute. A "god cyning" (good king) indeed.

(My favorite phrase from the original is "hronrade," which means "whale road," i.e. the sea. I'm thinking about referring henceforth to the muddy river I grew up around as "the carp road.")

SAD BUT PREDICTABLE. Some conservatives are re-writing the narrative of the Great Recession by--you guessed it--blaming the poor.

POST-MASSEY. Will Alpha be any better? Here's Ken Ward's take on it. My guess: it would be hard to be worse.

DOING MORE FOR THE WORKING POOR. Here's a call for a state earned income tax credit.

UNCERTAINTY about Republican efforts to repeal health care reform has left many Americans in a tough spot.

GETTING REAL. Still, West Virginia is getting ready to implement reform (probably). The state insurance commission is proposing creating a state insurance exchange. Meanwhile a major expansion of Medicaid is on the horizon.

FILLING IN THE TRICERATOPS FAMILY TREE. A newly discovered ancestor of the three horned dinosaur weighed in at around 15,000 pounds and had a skull eight feet long.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Deep in their hearts they remembered hell

An illustration from the 1830s of early efforts to convert Swedes to Christianity a thousand years before.

I've been blogging about Beowulf lately, although you will also find links and comments about current events below. Another thing I find interesting about the poem is the issue of religion. It seems to me that there is a thin veneer of Christianity spread sparsely over a big pagan poem.

The narrator and some of the characters talk about God and an afterlife. There are references to the Bible, but mostly to the book of Genesis, with the monster Grendel and his ilk seen as children of Cain and with references to the Flood and to the "giants in the earth" who flourished before the deluge. But there is no explicit mention of Jesus or any New Testament theme that I could find.

The poem begins and ends with two stories of kingly burial which show more kinship to pagan funeral customs than Christian burial. Beowulf himself was right there with the boys from the Iliad in longing for fame in battle as a kind of immortality. There is little that is Christian in the overall ambiance of the epic.

It may reflect a time when the conversion process, whether of the Anglo-Saxons or the North Sea warrior societies like the Danes and Geats was early and tentative. In the poem, the Danes plagued by Grendel's predations seek help from pagan gods after all else fails:

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
offering to idols, swore oaths
the the killer of souls might come to their aid
and save the people. That was their way,
their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts
they remembered hell.

In nature, estuaries are those interesting places where salt and fresh water meet and all kinds of interesting biological things can be found. Beowulf is a sort of spiritual estuary where the pagan mingles with the Christian in an interesting way.

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, 1798 style.

I THINK WE KNEW THAT. A panel charged with investigating the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession thinks it was preventable. I think they left out the part about stagnant incomes and growing inequality however.

MORE BUZZ ON MODERNIZING WV'S UNEMPLOYMENT SYSTEM here.

IMAGINING EUROPE, but getting it wrong. Not in a good way.

REFUDIATED. Four hundred rabbis have signed a letter protesting FOX "News" icon Glenn Beck for inappropriate use of Holocaust imagery.

OUT OF AFRICA. Ancient tools found in the United Arab Emirates suggests that some early humans made the trip earlier than previously believed.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

With a friend like this...

I have this friend named Jeff who is really a nice guy. On the surface anyway. In fact, he's an ordained Methodist minister. But what kind of friend is it who knows that someone is an addicted to something and gets them going on a binge?

The addiction in question is one of several of mine, to wit reading Tolkien. It's not an everyday thing. I can go years or even decades without touching the stuff, but when something gets me started again, I can't stop myself and have to re-read the whole Ring cycle.

It all started innocently enough when we were musing, as we often do, that working for social justice in WV is a bit like being stuck in the early part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Dark lords rising, sinister forces threatening Middle Earth, damage being done that can never be undone. Many defeats and fruitless victories.

But then he tempted me with books I had not read on Tolkien's life and work and before you could say "Attercop!" (something giant spiders in The Hobbit hated to be called) I was hooked again. Now I'm several hundred pages into the whole thing again with more than that to go.

Thanks a lot, pal...

MIXED SIGNALS. Although jobless claims rose a bit last week, new job growth in the private sector surpassed expectations.

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE. Despite a serious downturn, government policies--particularly those related to the Recovery Act--kept millions of Americans from falling into poverty.

NO SURPRISE, BUT STILL IMPORTANT. The wealth gap between the richest one percent and everyone else has gotten bigger in the Great Recession.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. More water problems have been found by investigators of the Massey mine disaster.

HAST ANY PHILOSOPHY IN THEE, SHEPHERD? These may be hard times for philosophy in an age of academic budget cuts, but it seems to be doing just fine at one community college.

PLAY ON. There's a movement to bring back imagination to children's play.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Relentless empiricism

I recently finished reading (really, listening to) Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The book was a bit grim but eye opening about the plight of women in many parts of the developing world.

One phrase that stuck in my mind from the book was "relentless empiricism." In context, the authors believed that people interested in development should be driven by reality rather than ideology or rhetoric. That phrase also reminded me of another useful aspect of Buddhist thought.

The Buddha may have been the original relentless empiricist, for he counseled his followers to accept nothing on the basis of faith, tradition or scriptures but rather to test all in the light of their own experience. This saying is attributed to him:

Believe nothing on the faith of traditions,
even though they have been held in honor
for many generations and in diverse places.
Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it.
Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past.
Do not believe what you yourself have imagined,
persuading yourself that a God inspires you.
Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests.
After examination, believe what you yourself have tested
and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.

He even encouraged non-attachment to his own teachings, comparing them merely to a raft to get from the bad side of a river to the good side. Once across, he taught, there is no need to carry the raft around.

FALLING. Here are some musings by Paul Krugman on the economy, the elections, and missed opportunities.

ASTROTURF. This item looks at the big money behind a "grassroots" movement.

MORE ALONG THAT LINE here.

A MORE IDEALISTIC TIME. A first generation member of the Peace Corps (and a friend of mine) looks back on his tour of duty here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The poisoned arrow

Sometimes people, including myself, get hung up on speculative questions that don't really help much in the here and now. This reminds me of one of the Buddha's parables. According to the story (full text here), the Buddha is approached by someone interested in abstract questions about the cosmos, life after death and everything.

The Buddha responded that such questions aren't really much help in the goal of liberation from suffering. To paraphrase, he said it was as if someone who was shot with a poisoned arrow refused all medical treatment until he found out who shot the arrow, what they looked like, what his day job was, what kind of wood the arrow was made of, what kinds of feathers it had, and what the bow looked like. If that were to happen, "The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him."

IS THAT ALL? The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the US economy is short 11.5 million jobs.

SOMETHING ELSE TO DENY ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE: major parts of the world are drying up.

SPECIAL TREAT FOR LINGUISTICS DORKS here.

MEAN GIRL BLUES. Here's an interesting article on girl bullying.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fences

Robert Frost somewhere wrote that "good fences make good neighbors." Anyone who has a problem with that idea probably hasn't spent a lot of times around farm animals--especially goats--and gardens.

Farming is, after all, a kind of a game in which the farmers win if they keep critters from going where they don't want them to go and the critters win if the get there. Which is where the fencing comes in.

A few years back, we broke down and installed a five strand electric fence around our goat pasture. For a while, the goats didn't recognize its legitimacy and challenged it, shocks and all. Then they just got used to it. We hardly ever have it on now, unless Honeysuckle, the ornery kid goat, gets too frisky.

It occurred to me that the effectiveness of fences isn't really a function of how hard they are to get over or through. Fences are often more about appearance than reality. It reminds me of the famous lines from Sun Tzu's Art of War: "All warfare is based on deception." So, I'd wager, is most fencing.

Most of the time, most animals don't really make a detailed study of the fence and its weak points or even probe for weaknesses. If they did, they'd have a good chance of getting where they wanted to go.

It also occurs to me that the same is true of people. We don't challenge a lot of the "fences" that hold us in, even though it's likely they have places that are not nearly as strong as they seem to be.

ONE NATION WORKING TOGETHER. This Saturday, thousands of progressives will converge on Washington in support of a positive agenda to move the country forward. Yours truly will be among them, after boarding a bus at 3:00 AM Saturday morning (yuk). My back is hurting already.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. NPR reports that more families are "doubling up" in the wake of the Great Recession.

SOMETHING ELSE FOR THE COAL INDUSTRY TO DENY can be found here.

NO SURPRISE. The latest WV Kids Count report finds that children in the southern coalfield counties are poorer than those in the rest of the state.

MONKEY IN THE MIRROR. It looks like they see themselves, which raises questions about primate self-awareness.

WHAT MAKES A GROUP SMART? Apparently not smart individuals.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Deja vu again

It seems to me that President Obama isn't as lucky as FDR was in dealing with the last massive economic meltdown. The Crash of 1929 happened three years before Roosevelt was elected president. This gave Hoover plenty of time to own it and FDR quite a bit of leeway in dealing with it.

The Great Recession, on the other hand, started in late 2007 but it didn't really hit hard until 2008 and 2009. While it was brought on by the excesses of nearly 30 years of deregulation and supply side policies, that chain of cause and effect isn't visible to many Americans.

Paul Krugman sums things up pretty well in today's NY Times:

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

Roosevelt hit a similar rough patch in 1937 and 1938. In the end, the Depression was ended through deficit spending associated with World War II. It will probably take additional deficit spending to spur job growth, at least until the economy is firing on all cylinders. Krugman again:

The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible — indeed, necessary — for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.

The problem, of course, is that the current political situation makes that hard to do, and it will probably get harder in the future. This could lead to prolonged economic misery as well as social and political nastiness.

As Oliver Goldsmith put it in the 1700s, "Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ill a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay..."

ONE GOOD COLUMN DESERVES ANOTHER. Here's E.J. Dionne on what the labor movement has meant to the building of the middle class.

WHY NOT ONE MORE? Here's Harold Meyerson while we're at it on the state of labor (short version: it isn't good).

STUDY THIS. New research on how people learn questions some old beliefs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED