Bad for business

You may have heard this rant from me before but here goes again. Around here, the coal industry and its supporters, including most of WV's elected officials, follow flawless logic when it comes to climate change. It goes like this:

1. Anything which goes against the perceived interest of the coal industry cannot possibly be true.

2. Acknowledging the truth of climate change and the permissibility of trying to do something about it goes against the perceived interests of the coal industry

ERGO...

Climate change cannot possibly be true and nothing should be done about it.

Q.E.D.

Not everybody associated with the coal industry is buying it. Michael Morris, President of American Electric Power supports climate change legislation.

As a matter of fact, the US Chamber (Pot) of Commerce is taking some hits from major corporations for its opposition to climate change legislation. A number of companies have either withdrawn from the Chamber or expressed their differences. This interesting item from the New Yorker compares the Chamber's response to that of Massey Energy. According to James Surowiecki, while many companies in the past may have parroted the party line, things are different now. The new attitude

...may reflect a calculation that global warming is simply too big an issue to get wrong, both economically—few companies are really going to benefit from the melting of the polar ice caps—and from a public-relations point of view. It’s also probably no coincidence that these resignations have come at a time when the Chamber’s anti-regulatory zeal looks not just outmoded but self-defeating. Had the Chamber supported tougher regulation of financial and housing markets, after all, the myriad small businesses it represents would undoubtedly be better off today. And it’s far from clear that across-the-board hostility to regulation is really in the best interests of the free-enterprise system. We assume that lobbies always recognize what’s best for their members. But they don’t, and, in the case of climate change, they may very well be missing what the companies that have resigned in protest have seen: global warming isn’t just bad for the planet; it’s bad for business.

WHACKADOODLE DANDY. Here's another item on our old pal political paranoia.

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE and some of it is a mess.

ELECTIONS HAVE (HORMONAL) CONSEQUENCES. Testosterone and voting...who'd have thunk it?

ANOTHER TWIST. Here's the latest in the Megan Williams story.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Well...

Note: I'm not sure what this picture is doing here.

I've said this before and will say it again: if I was the president-elect of the United States (God forbid!), my first act would be to demand a recount. The actual person in question, however, seems to be of a different mind, so here's wishing him and us all the best.

It is the policy of this blog to stay out of the election business and instead focus on issues. Having said that, the changed political landscape means that some things may be possible that haven't been before.

Here are some things from my wish list (they've been frequent topics here for the last two years):

*The Employee Free Choice Act, which makes it easier and safer for workers to join unions, could be the most significant piece of social legislation in decades. Once the freedom to organize without fear of retaliation is restored, a lot of other problems facing working families would take care of themselves.

*Expanding access to health care. Need I say more?

*Enacting a meaningful and targeted economic stimulus package that includes aid to states and help for those hardest hit by the recession.

*Investing in infrastructure, education, green jobs and clean energy.

*Getting serious about dealing with climate change.

*Making access to higher education more affordable.

*Acting to reduce and ultimately eliminate extreme poverty.

While we're at it, ending the war in Iraq and a saner approach to international affairs and conflicts might not hurt either.

In general, the more I learn about the current state of the nation and the world, the more I'm convinced that we have a relatively small window of opportunity to get our act together if the future is going to be even marginally tolerable.

SNARKY WEST VIRGINIA COMMENTS. Every so often, some extremely wealthy groups or individuals attempt to purchase certain state products. I'm referring to things like the supreme court, the attorney general's office, the legislature and other such commodities.

El Cabrero is utterly heartbroken to find that the state and national Chamber Pot of Commerce was not able to close the deal despite have spent lots of out of state money. I need to pause to compose myself...

OK, I'm back.

MASSEY TRIAL TO BEGIN. Widows of miners who died in the Aracoma mine fire in 2006 could get their day in court soon.

MUSHROOMS AND CLIMATE CHANGE. Who would have thought there would be a connection?

CIVILIAN CASUALTIES in Afghanistan are mounting.

WHERE THE RUNNER HITS THE ROAD. Do joggers have road rage issues? (That's a new one for this long timer.)

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: INDETERMINATE

PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS

Caption: Zeus, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero is musing this week about the history of early Christianity. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

The religious climate in the Mediterranean world in the first century of this era was a lot different from anything we're used to. Most people these days, for example, believe in one God (sometimes less).

In the Roman empire, atheism was virtually nonexistent and monotheism was a minority viewpoint. Jews, the main monotheists of the time, made up maybe seven percent of the Roman empire--and many of them weren't too happy about being part of it.

Polytheism was the rule and it seemed as natural then as it does weird today. In fact, worshipping one god to the exclusion of all others was considered a kind of impiety. In classical Greek religion, the gods were like a deck of playing cards--one only made sense within a system of relationships with other ones.

There were gods and gods. Some pagans imagined one very remote supreme god, with other major gods and goddesses below that level and a host of lesser ones. Kind of like a divine pyramid. There was a divine division of labor whereby you turned to one or the other god to deal with this or that problem.

There were many views about what happens after death (ranging from nothing to a lot), but the main focus of pagan religion was on meeting temporal needs. Pagan worship consisted mainly of prayers, sacrifices and festivals designed to keep the gods happy or at least placated. They didn't require a whole lot of attention.

Here are some things about pagan religion that seem strange today. First, it didn't really matter what you believed about the gods. There was no pagan Bible or creed. The gods didn't care much what you thought about them as long as you didn't tick them off or neglect their sacrifices.

Second, ethics weren't a big part of pagan religion. It wasn't that pagans were less moral than non-pagans. Rather, questions of ethics were considered important in their own right and were more a part of philosophy or wisdom.

Third, pagan religions were pretty tolerant. Becoming a devotee of, say, Isis, didn't mean you had to neglect Zeus or couldn't be initiated in the Mysteries of Demeter.

Christianity stood out from all the other contenders as being everything paganism was not.

El Cabrero is no pagan, although I do admit to a soft spot for the Olympians. But there is something kind of nice about a pluralistic approach to the universe in an era of all too common fanaticism.

EMOTIONS AND HEALTH. There's a big connection.

SPEAKING OF HEALTH, here's an item on health care as market failure.

HELL HOLES, JUDICIAL AND OTHERWISE. Social scientists at WVU took a close look at WV's legal system and found the claims of the Chamber of Commerce about our "hellhole" status don't hold up. Here's the full report and here's a link to a report by Scott Finn from WV Public Radio. You may have to scroll down.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. Here's Gazette coverage for a rally held last night in Charleston.

GIANT RAT UPDATE. They found some in Indonesia five times the size of a city rat.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WALT WHITMAN, DHARMA BUM

Caption: Venus is a big Leaves of Grass fan.

Greetings to first time readers. Here's the Goat Rope drill: this blog generally comes out daily (once on weekends) and deals with social and economic justice issues. Usually, each weekday post has links and comments about current events and ideas and a guiding thread or theme that ties the week together.

This week, the thread is a poem of Walt Whitman's titled "Song of Prudence." If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

(I will skip over the fact that good ol' Walt wasn't always the most prudent of people. Good though.)

This poem of Whitman's appeared in the 1856 second edition of Leaves of Grass and is not one of his better known works. It is vast in spirit (but could have used some judicious editing).

I first discovered this poem not in Leaves of Grass but in an obscure and largely forgotten book of D.T. Suzuki's on Mahayana Buddhism. If memory serves, and it may not, Suzuki overheard someone discussing the poem and thought it was an exposition of Mahayana Buddhist teaching.

Actually, there were some interesting connections between early American writers like Emerson and Thoreau and Asian religion, although relatively little was known here about the topic at the time. We know that these writers influenced Whitman, who later influenced many American poets, particularly the Beats. For an entertaining survey of the history of Buddhism in American, see Rick Fields' enjoyable but "early" (1981) How the Swans Came to the Lake.

Next time, we'll break it down.

MORE ON THE U.S. CHAMBER OF GIBBERISH. A great source of information for WV current events is Lawrence Messina's Lincoln Walks at Midnight, a "just the facts" blog. Check the above link for a great summary of the bizarre jihad the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is waging against El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, which seems to be embarrassing local chambers of commerce. I don't think the US Chamber would be happy unless we abolish the whole civil justice system. As the link shows, basic fact-checking shows their propaganda to be, shall we say, factually challenged.

THE TALIBANIZATION OF IRAQ. Here's an item from Ms. Magazine about the declining status of women and the growth in violence against them in Iraq.

SPEAKING OF GRATUITOUS ANIMAL PICTURES, for a look at some really weird undersea critters, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE WISEST BOOK

According to an old legend, one of the wisest books ever written came about by accident.

Lao Tzu, or Laozi in pinyin , lived in the 6th century BC and was a archivist during the Zhou dynasty. When he became tired of the artificialities of court life, he gave up his post and retreated westward to the wilderness.

At a frontier post, a gatekeeper asked him to write down his teachings so they would not be lost to the world. The result was the Tao Te Ching, or the Classic of the Way and its Power, a short work of 5000 characters and 81 brief chapters.

Actually, none of this probably happened and there may never have been a Lao Tzu, but it doesnt' matter. We have the book. If I could, I'd give everyone in the world a copy of it.

The Tao or Dao that gives the book its name is usually translated as the Way, meaning the ultimate principle or natural order of things. We can observe and infer things about it but ultimately it is something beyond name and form, as the Tao Te Ching states in its opening lines:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

Although some people have read it as a mystical work, I think it's the most practical book ever written. Its insights can be useful in all aspects of public and private life. Short version: people can live in harmony with the nature of things (including people) or not. The correct answer is the former.

More on this later.

NOT IN HARMONY WITH THE TAO. A basic idea of the Tao Te Ching is that aggression provokes resistance and feeds violence. If you want to see a perfect example of an anti-Taoist, look no further than the White House. If you want to see the consequences, look at the world. The latest tragic example comes from a Pentagon survey of the mental health of U.S. troops serving in Iraq. The NY Times reports that the results of the survey

suggested that extended tours and multiple deployments, among other policy decisions, could escalate anger and increase the likelihood that soldiers or marines lash out at civilians, or defy military ethics.

ON THE OTHER HAND, the same paper carried this item on the growing political clout of some anti-war groups.

CHAMBER CONTINUES WAR ON WV. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce continues to flood the airwaves with ads attacking WV's legal climate. This doesn't seem to be getting them anywhere. This is from today's Gazette. Here's hoping they spend it all.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE TRAIL OF THE HUMAN SERPENT

Caption: This is him.

This week, in addition to whatever else comes up, El Cabrero has been pondering how people make sense of the world and the uncertainty of our knowledge. If this is your first visit, please scroll down to the earlier entries.

Professor James Hall of the University of Richmond comes up with quite a list of the different ways we try to gain knowledge of the world in his Teaching Company course "Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World through Experience and Reason."

His list includes experience, memory, association, pattern recognition, reason, invention, and experimentation. None of these are infallible or completely reliable ways of getting at The Truth, although in combination they might get us closer to it.

One reason it's hard to get there is that we can't step outside of ourselves. We're creatures not only of reason but of passion and interest and we see the world as we are rather than as it is. As William James put it, "The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything."

There are two extreme schools of thought on the subject of truth these days. One is that of the post-modernists, who are sometimes kind of irritating. They hold that there is no truth, only different perspectives and narratives.

The other school is that of the authoritarians, who are sometimes kind of homicidal. They think Truth is their sole possession.

I try to compromise. My theory is that there may well be such a thing as Truth but we can't quite get to it from here, though we may get closer. Final truths are elusive. This may be just as well--we probably couldn't handle it.

WEST VIRGINIA RANT. Here's the lead of a rant I posted yesterday in WV Blue:

Is anyone else out there as tired as El Cabrero and the critters at Goat Rope Farm re of the ceaseless barrage of commercials from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about what a terrible legal climate we have here?

They love to harp on a survey of the corporation-backed American Tort Reform Association that claims to show that WV is a "judicial hellhole." Most likely, they surveyed members, corporate defendants and their attorneys.

Scientifically, methinks it's almost as good as asking eighth graders whether algebra sucks and using the results as a basis to evaluate that branch of mathematics. Here's an evaluation of the "judicial hellhole" rankings from The Center for Justice and Democracy.

The rest is here.

DYING TO WORK. The AFLCIO recently released the latest edition of Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, which covers deaths and injuries in the workplace for 2005 (the latest year for which full data is available). The good news is that the number of deaths declined. In 2005, 5,734 workers died from workplace injuries, compared with 5,764 in 2004. However, the number of injuries went up, as did fatalities among Hispanic and foreign-born workers.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED