In case you needed some more depressing news...

...here's something about the assault on labor unions.

WHAT WAS HIS FIRST CLUE? It seems that economist and Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson may have gotten the memo that some people may not be all that happy with the current state of the economy.

ONE WV BRIGHT SPOT is progress on child nutrition, especially in schools. This article features my friend Rick Goff, director of the state Office of Child Nutrition. The good news is that breakfast participation is going up in the wake of the passage of the 2013 innovative Feed to Achieve Act.

SPEAKING OF FRIENDS, another pal, the Rev. Jim Lewis, was featured in a nice spot on WV Public Radio yesterday. It's worth a look.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Oh good

Congressman and former vice presidential candidate Paul "Ayn Rand" Ryan was in West Virginia recently campaigning for Shelley Moore Capito in her bid for the seat of the retiring Senator Joe Rockefeller.


According to Ryan, Capito will help get rid of the Affordable Care Act, which  has brought Medicaid coverage to around 134,000 working West Virginians since Jan. 1, not counting another 40,000 or so who got coverage under the ACA in other ways. In fact, the law that Capito will presumably get rid of has made WV one of the state's with the lowest rate of uninsured residents, as noted in yesterday's post and resulted in huge savings for the state's largest hospital system..


Nice. Let them eat Atlas Shrugged.


FIGS, ANYONE? Here are the latest musings of my friend the  Rev. Jim Lewis at Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

The generosity of the universe

Arpad (pronounced Ar-pod), our Great Pyrenees and security chief for Goat Rope Farm, loves this time of the year. As deer hunters hit the woods, they often leave behind such tasty offerings as legs and spines, sometimes both all joined together. These are sources of delight for a good month or two starting when the leaves start to turn.

The above picture shows his treasure haul for the day. And the season is still young.

For Arpad, it's proof that the universe is bountiful and generous. It's all good. The Pod abides.

HOW BOUT THOSE POLLS? It looks like the government shutdown/hostage crisis thing hasn't worked out too well for House Republicans.

A GRIEF OBSERVED. My friend the Rev. Jim Lewis recently lost his wife Judy after a long battle with cancer. Here are some of his reflections on dealing with loss.

ELEPHANTS get the point. Too bad some people don't.

ENDING THE (REAL) HUNGER GAMES. Here's a look at some recent reforms that provide free meals for all schoolchildren. We're working on that in WV.

WE KNOW FROM "OKLAHOMA" that the farmer and the cowman should be friends. Apparently, it wasn't that easy even thousands of years ago.

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Love and death

Many Goat Rope readers from West Virginia are doubtless familiar with my friend the Rev. Jim Lewis, a "retired" Episcopal priest and tireless fighter for justice. And if you know Jim, you also knew Judy, his beloved wife with whom he shared a strong connection for 59 years.

With absolutely no disrespect intended to Jim, Judy was the toughest one. Judy recently passed after a decades-long battle with cancer.

Jim regularly publishes his "Notes from Under the Fig Tree," which I have frequently linked here. The latest edition is a very moving tribute to Judy.

Whether you knew her or know Jim or not, it's a very moving meditation on love, marriage, death and all those things. It moved me and I'm not easily movable. You can read it here.

It reminded me of some lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickles' compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me proved,
  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

That's all for today.

This and that

The most interesting tweet I've read for a long time is this one written in response to the carnage in Connecticut:

One guy tries to use a shoe bomb = everyone at the airport takes their shoes off. 31 school shootings since Columbine = nothing we can do.

The carnage was so bad that even longtime NRA supporter Joe Manchin thinks something has to give.

RACHEL WEEPING FOR HER CHILDREN, Holy Innocents, weapons, and nonviolence are discussed in the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

MORE ON CLIMATE CHANGE here.

URGENT TWO-TONGUED VENOMOUS PRIMATE here.

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Nothing funny about it

Arcadia S. Venus, pictured above, is another admirer of Brother Larry.

Last week I was asked to participate in the retirement roasting of Larry Matheney, a good friend who has served for years as secretary treasurer of the WV AFL-CIO. At such events, one is generally expected to say something funny about the occasion…which was precisely the challenge.

 As a rule, I can find the humor, however grim, in just about any circumstance. When my late father was full of wires and tubes in intensive care, I told him not to bother getting up when I visited him. (He marshaled the strength to perform an obscene gesture in my general direction.)

My daughter recently reminded me that when I was being wheeled away to open heart surgery, I could be heard saying “They’re not gonna get my uterus.”

I have made jokes about any number of misfortunes and disasters.

But I could find absolutely nothing funny about the retirement of Larry Matheney. He is irreplaceable. Larry is a fierce and fearless voice for social justice. Coming from the United Steelworkers, Larry is a social unionist cut from the same cloth as that other native West Virginian labor leader Walter Reuther.

 He’s the kind of person you want on your side in any serious fight for justice, whether it takes place in the streets or the halls of the legislature. He has always stood on the side of the disadvantaged, downtrodden and oppressed and he has always done whatever he could not just to make oppression bearable but to end it.

 I’m not the only person to feel this way. I know plenty of people who as irreverent as myself who view Larry as a hero.

I wish him all the best in retirement. But mostly I wish he was still in the thick of the fight.

SPEAKING OF BROTHER LARRY, here's his latest rant in the Charleston Gazette. I love the cat food bit.

ONE GOOD RANT DESERVES ANOTHER. Here's another friend, the Rev. Matthew Watts on prison overcrowding.

AND HERE'S ANOTHER from the Rev. Jim Lewis. There's a great pun in there about generals and privates.

IN THE SPIRIT OF FAIR PLAY, here are a few words in praise of parasitic worms.

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I felt so symbolic

We interrupt Goat Rope's regularly scheduled Moby-Dick series to celebrate a nice little victory. As noted earlier in this blog, members of Charleston WV's African American community and many white allies mobilized over the last year to add the name of Mary C. Snow, a prominent black educator, to the new West Side Elementary School.

This post from February shows what it's like when hundreds of people turn out for a school board meeting to make a stand. And this post from July celebrates the fact that community members overcame resistance and converted former opponents to support the name change.

On Tuesday night, I was back in the neighborhood and was thrilled to see that it had actually happened. A friend had previously circulated a picture, but I thought it might have been photo-shopped. Like doubting Thomas of old, I had to experience the reality for myself. And it was sweet.

Yes, it was primarily a symbolic victory. Yes, we have much bigger problems to deal with. As a general rule I prefer hard targets (as in policy wins) to symbolic victories, but it occurs to me that humans are, after all, creatures of sign and symbol. And that symbolic victories are sweet as well.

(I am reminded of the lyrics of my favorite song from the 1990s, Mr. Jones by Counting Crows: "I felt so symbolic yesterday.")

POLLS, JESUS, POLITICS AND ALL THAT are discussed in the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

THE RAW AND THE COOKED. Was cooking the trick that helped early humans develop such big brains? Maybe.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING what was up with former Massey CEO Don Blankenship after Frodo melted the Ring he retired from the company, click here.

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RIP runner ducks

It's always nice to find on returning from a journey that approximately the same number of animals are alive as there were when one departed. We've been lucky the last few trips, but this time not so much. Our two runner ducks, probably the cutest animals on the farm, were killed by a predator, possibly a weasel or skunk. Arpad appears to have been slacking.

Two other chickens died as well. Oh well.

TWO FOR THE FUTURE. I've often written here about how WV would greatly benefit by creating a future fund from mineral severance taxes to create a permanent source of wealth for the state. Here's an article on the subject and there is also a Facebook page I encourage you to "like" and check up on regularly.

FISCAL FACTS. I don't always agree with the Charleston Daily Mail's editorials, but this one is right on.

GOOD QUESTION. Why not end poverty?

GOT FIGS? Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

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The lion in summer

Pictures of Arpad, Great Pyrenees and security chief at Goat Rope Farm, have often graced this blog. During the winter, he looks pretty regal, reminding me of the noble lion Aslan from C.S. Lewis' Narnia books. In the summer, however, not so much.

Because his hair is so think, he gets miserable when temperatures rise. So, around late may or early June we break out the clippers and attempt to give him a bit of a shave.

Let's just say the results aren't pretty and it takes several assaults to make a real dent in the old fuzz bucket. A neighbor described the shorn version, not too unjustly, as "the biggest white rat I ever saw."

But he still looks like an angel to me.

HOW MUCH LONGER? Here's an item by a co-worker on how family members of miners who died in Massey's Upper Big Branch disaster and still urging Congress to move on mine safety.

THE POLITICS OF COAL  are the topic of this post from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo.

GOT FIGS? Here are the latest musings on war, peace, drones, gardens and such from the Rev. Jim Lewis.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Another proof

Some people are convinced of the generosity of the universe. They believe that everything was pretty much put there for their convenience. As a pretty strict Darwinian, I have my doubts.

But there is someone on Goat Rope Farm who has no doubts whatsoever. That would be Arpad, our (sort of) Great Pyrenees and general security chief. Arpad is about as close as you can get to a canine incarnation of the Dude on The Big Lebowski.


He abides.

And he is utterly convinced that the universe set things up just for him. In his mind, further proof, if any were needed, came in the form of yet another  partial deer skeleton he he found in the woods which appeared at the proper time.

I really wish he was right about this.

FIGS. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

JUST SOS YOU KNOW. More Americans believe in witchcraft than agree with the Supreme Joke's...I mean Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

BUT WHAT DID IT LOOK LIKE? An amateur paleontologist in Ohio found a weird sea beast.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Class warfare, revisited

Right wingers frequently accuse people of class warfare any time anything related to inequality is discussed, but they are the best ones at waging it. Here's just one example: due to federal budget cuts pushed through last year have resulted in Legal Aid of West Virginia laying off 15 case handlers and closing the office in Logan County.

Legal Aid served over 24,000 West Virginians in 2010.

Similar cuts are taking place around the country. Add to that efforts to restrict access to the ballot and shred safety net programs and the truth becomes a little clearer.

I'd like to be able to call down some kind of cosmic retribution on the perpetrators, but I'm afraid my clout doesn't reach that far. I guess it's up to us.

THE SAFETY NET: WHO NEEDS IT? Lots of folks.

COMFORT FOOD is the theme of the latest edition of Notes From Under the Fig Tree by the Rev. Jim Lewis (disclosure: I gave the woman mentioned in the second part of the newsletter his telephone number).

SIDESHOWS. Here's Ken Ward with more on the tenuous connection between mine safety and drug tests.

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Social media: rethinking the limits

About a year ago, popular New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell published an article in that magazine about the limits of social media like Facebook and Twitter in movements for social change.

I was pretty impressed with his argument at the time. If memory serves, he talked about how weak ties such as those from an online community could help in accomplishing some things, these would not be enough when push came to shove. The US Civil Rights movement, for example, relied on strong ties based on trust and commitment.

Then came the events of the "Arab spring" earlier this year and the success of the Occupy Wall Street movement in which social media played a major role. It might be time to rethink Gladwell's argument. Obviously, it's not a case of either/or but social media has turned out to be more of a game changer that I would have expected.

Here's a little anecdote about the impact of social media from the Occupy efforts in Charleston, WV. Yesterday, a wet and miserable day for occupying anything, an official connected with the city apparently came by the Occupy site and told people they'd need to take down their tarps and signs.

Word got out via Facebook right away. People jumped in, made calls, contacted the media, etc. In the end, a compromise was achieved. That's not exactly a case of turning back the tanks but it was interesting.

FRAMING THE OCCUPATION. Here are some suggestions from George Lakoff on messaging for the movement.

THE END OF THE WORLD, AGAIN. Oct. 21 is the latest predicted date for the end of the world. Here's a look a predicted apocalypses of the past. There seems to be a common theme...something about not happening.

OCCUPYING THOUGHTS. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

URGENT ZOMBIE WASP UPDATE here. And it's really creepy. This would make one hell of a gross out horror movie if it happened to people.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

What he said, revisited

Hats off to billionaire investor Warren Buffett for his recent op-ed in the New York Times titled "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich." Here's a sample:

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

And here's the conclusion:

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Does that make him a socialist?

MIRACLES, MATTER AND MORE. Here is the latest version of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

WORK SHARING makes sense as an alternative to mass unemployment.

MOTHER NATURE has her moments when it comes to engineering.

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Double dipping

Lots of people have been talking about the disappointing job numbers released late last week. The private sector added only around 54,000 jobs, even while governments at various levels are laying people off.

Deficit mania, which has taken precedence over job creation, could well lead us back to a double dip recession. As many people have noted, something similar happened in 1937, when FDR cut back on public spending and wound up prolonging the Depression by several years.

THIS IS SWEET. Ayn Rand groupie Paul Ryan, would be executioner of Medicare, is getting some pushback from religious groups.

DESTROYING MEDICARE in order to "save" it.

MASSEYLAND. Ken Ward takes a hard look at Massey Energy's board of directors here.

MARCHING TO BLAIR. I hope nobody gets hurt this week.

WAXING ROMANTIC. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

THE MAGIC NUMBER for friends may be 150.

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Who the cap fit

Russian Orthodox icon of Isaiah, by way of wikipedia.

Since this is Holy Week for many Christian communities, I thought I'd trot out a passage from Isaiah (10:1-3) and send it out to Congressman Paul Ryan.

Ryan, if you recall, is the Ayn Rand devotee who came up with the proposal to gut Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and other domestic programs to pay for more tax cuts for the rich in the name of deficit reduction.

Here goes:

Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
and robbing the fatherless.
What will you do on the day of reckoning,
when disaster comes from afar?

I don' think you'll find that in Atlas Shrugged. Oh yeah, and one more thing: the real Atlas is the working class.

GIRD UP THY LOINS is biblical for "get ready to rumble." Literally, I think it meant something like "put on your protective groin cup--things are going to get nasty." In any case, it's time to do that. Even though Ryan's plan may not fly, there's a good chance his allies are going to try to push it through the back door during the upcoming vote on raising the debt ceiling.

They will probably try to push through a global spending cap, which would do all the same nasty things and leave out all the real things that need to be done. Here are some good talking points against this idea. Please take a look and start talking.

GETTING READY FOR GREEN. Here's an item from Forbes about a West Virginia based company that is getting ready for the solar boom.

EASTER BUNNIES AND MORE can be found in the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Going bad

I've been blogging lately about Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as a work of social realism that has a lot to say about working for social justice. This is installment #5.

In Philip Zimbardo's fascinating book on human evil, The Lucifer Effect, the author examines the many different ways otherwise good people can be induced to cross a line that is hard to see at first. In chapter 12 of that work, he quotes C.S. Lewis about the human desire to be part of the in crowd, the powerful set:

I believe that in all men's lives at certain periods, and in many men's lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside...Of all the passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

Zimbardo writes that

a powerful force in transforming human behavior, pushing people across the boundary between good and evil, comes from the basic desire to be "in" and not "out." If we think of social power as arrayed in a set of concentric circles from the most powerful central or inner ring moving outward to the least socially significant outer ring, we can appreciate his focus on the centripetal pull of that central circle.

In LOTR, we see this happening in the case of the wizard Saruman, who started out as leader of the Wise but is drawn to the power of Sauron the Dark Lord. Saruman tells Gandalf

A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Numenor. This then is the one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in means.

In other words, he wants to be one of the big dogs at the center of things. Sure, he may not go along with all of it, but he might have a chance here or there to make some things happen, all the while telling himself he isn't really changing. It sounds like an ambitious person today going to work for a powerful politician or a major CEO.

That's a well-trod path, unfortunately.

ZOMBIE ECONOMICS is alive and well.

BASEBALL SEASON just started. Here's economist Dean Baker going to bat for Social Security.

ANOTHER MEASURE. What does it really take to be (fairly) economically self-sufficient?

FRESH FIGS. Here is the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

IRAQ. It isn't even safe to breathe there.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Union busting

The struggle in Wisconsin by union workers and their supporters continues to draw national attention. It is likely to be the first of several state-level struggles to defend workers rights. It's too soon to see what effects this may have but at least the workers there have decided not to go down quietly. Solidarity events are taking place today in many places, including West Virginia.

In the words of Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, what's happening there is a case of "pure, unadulterated union-busting."

It is likely, alas, to be an interesting year.

(Goat Rope's ongoing series on Beowulf should resume tomorrow.)

THE COSTS OF COAL are the subject of a new study, as Ken Ward reports in Coal Tattoo.

ASHES, MOLES, FORTRESSES AND SUCH are discussed in the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from under the Fig Tree.

ALICE! Cooper, that is.

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Keenest to win fame

Goat Rope is all about Beowulf these days, although you will also find links and comments about current events. For more, click on earlier posts.

The Beowulf poet and the society he or she (or they) came from knew nothing about Greek tragedy, but it doesn't take much looking to find some tragic themes there. For many people, especially those influenced by Aristotle, tragic art involves a noble character brought low by some flaw or mistake of lack of insight. That kind of works for Beowulf, although the flaw in question is as much a part of the society it came from as it was of the hero.

Beowulf as a young man was all about winning fame. Hence, the trip to the land of the Danes to kill the monster Grendel. Before all that,

...He had been poorly regarded
for a long time, was taken by the Geats
for less than he was worth: and their lord too
had never much esteemed him in the mead-hall.
They firmly believed that he lacked force,
that the prince was a weakling; but presently
every affront to his deserving was reversed.

He got fame alright, but never quite lost the thirst for it. He eventually became king and ruled well over the Geats for fifty years until someone stirred up the wrath of a dragon, which he vowed to kill single handedly. As the last lines of the poem go,

They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

You could say that the tragic flaw of Beowulf was the conflict between the first part of the sentence and the last four words. Had he been less keen to win fame, he would have delegated the dragon slaying to younger men and continued to rule justly over the Geats and kept them in safety. Instead, he died in the effort, leaving his people to the nasty fate anticipated by a grieving woman, who

...sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement.

As Dylan pointed out in a song, sometimes it's either fortune or fame, though neither are what they claim. Beowulf chose fame. I think I prefer fortune.

HOLY JUDICIAL ACTIVISM, BATMAN! A federal judge in Florida may have been overly caffinated (or something) when he ruled on the constitutionality of health care reform.

THINGS THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT CAPITALISM. Here's an excerpt from a new book about that topic.

OF WRITERS, RELIGION, EXILE, POLITICS AND SUCH. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW. If memory serves, a labor dispute in Egypt a few thousand years ago led by an agitator named Moses kicked up some dust. Here's an item from the AFLCIO blog on the role of Egyptian unions in the struggle for reform.

CORPORATIONS AND THE COMMONS. This entrepreneur calls for a balance between the two.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Jackpot!

We interrupt Goat Rope's regularly scheduled program for this animal update.

Everybody has a favorite time of the year. If you are anything like me, that would be one of the warmer ones. But Arpad, Goat Rope Farm's trusty chief of security, loves this time of the year. Not only is it cold enough (he likes it under 30), but thanks to dear season, there are all kinds of tasty treats to be found in the woods.

Just yesterday, he showed up with this rancid deer hide. Judging from the sheer rankness of the trophy, I'd date it from bow season. As you can see, things couldn't get much better for him.

Some days, I like to give my little 150+ pound angel baby a big hug. But I think I'll pass for a day or two.

TALKING VIOLENCE. Here's more on overheated political rhetoric.

DEAD SKUNKS AND MORE are among the themes of the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

THOUGHTS ON QUITTING here.

GOT CULTURE? Lemurs do.

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Sweet revenge

We hit a seasonal milestone at Goat Rope Farm this week with the first lighting of the wood stove. As hot as this summer and fall have been, it didn't seem like that day would come.

This year, I am deriving particular gratification from throwing wood in the fire. Usually, our woodpile is collected here and there on a casual basis, but last year it got personal when some trees of ours fell on a neighbor's yard.

I have engaged in single combat with those suckers since the Christmas holidays, chainsawing, hand sawing, lifting, loading, splitting and generally making little ones out of big ones. Those trees had some really knotty parts and were hell to split. I'm pretty sure that I expended more energy on the chopping some of them than they will yield in the burning.

It is probably not an admirable personal trait to hold grudges against no-longer-animate objects, but I derive satisfaction from singling out the toughest pieces and tossing them in the stove with a farewell greeting along the order of "I've got you now, you ___________."

AIN'T WE GOT FUN. The Rev. Jim Lewis goes Gatsby in his latest edition of Notes from Under the Fig Tree. (As I mentioned before, we have a few fig trees here and it would be hard for a cat to get under them--I don't see how he does it.)

GETTING ATTENTION. The weird race to fill the late Senator Byrd's seat caught the attention of the New York Times.

UNSAFE. This Washington Post article from earlier this week looks at mine safety--or the lack of it.

WORKING ON A MYSTERY. New clues have emerged in the great honeybee die-off.

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