The minimum wage: who would win from a raise

Here's a good infographic about the minimum wage from the WV Center on Budget and Policy. If you have trouble reading it, click here.

THE WRECKING CREW. Here's a look at the real costs of the government shutdown, including lost economic growth.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. Here is the Charleston Daily Mail and WV Public Broadcasting on the farm to school movement in WV.

CONSOLATION. It's not just for humans anymore. It never was.

URGENT 18 FOOT OARFISH UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Okay...

I admit it. Some of the turkey boys on our farm may not be the brightest crayons in the box.

 Here are our two oldest males again chasing each other around a grill and posturing to try to impress each other and their own reflections. Round and round and round.

They seem more obsessed with each other than with the females. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The whole grill thing, however, is kind of sad.

THE ANTI-WAL-MART. Here's a comparison between wages and benefits at Costco, Wal-Mart, and Wendy's.

MORE GOOD TIMES from the WV Attorney General's office.

REAL APES don't dog paddle.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The glorious imaginary library of *******

One of the weirdest writers I've ever read is the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. His work is very surrealistic. One frequent quote about it is that it embraces "the character of unreality in all literature." The words supernatural realism come to mind, minus the realism.

For example, in a one-paragraph short story, he tells of an empire where the art of map-making was so precise that one map of the empire was the exact same size as the empire itself and "coincided point for point with it."

Anyway, out of the blue I was struck by a story idea right up his alley, one that wouldn't be much longer than a paragraph itself. It would be about an imaginary library so fantastic that people come from all over the world to admire it. I must have been channeling Borges' ghost. Alas, I don't think I have what it takes to write it.

Maybe I'll read it someday. In that imaginary library.

THE POLITICS OF HEALTH CARE REFORM. This could be interesting to watch.

OF APES AND ANGELS. Here's the latest from primatologist Frans De Waal about evolution, apes, ethics and religion.

ANIMALS THAT OUGHT TO BE. Here's a whimsical look at composite critters we wish really existed. There are probably books about all of them in that glorious imaginary library.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I keep, and pass, and turn again

Say what you want about the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he gave me an easy topic to blog about during a busy couple of months. For that I'm grateful, anyway.

For the last month or two I've been looking at some of his most influential essays or lectures, but it turns out that what Waldo really wanted was to be a great poet. I'm not sure he hit the mark, but it wasn't for lack of trying. One line from an 1837 Fourth of July poem about his town of Concord during the American Revolution became quite famous, as in "the shot heard round the world."

I can't claim that I've read all his poems but I did find two that I really liked. Today's feature is the poem Brahma, which was published in 1857. It reflects his interest in the spiritual literature of India and was heavily influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. The poem also captures some of the monistic (as in all is One) and pantheistic (as in all is God) themes of Transcendentalism.

Here goes:

Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

IGNORANCE is alive and well, according to this writer.

MONKEY TALK. Did human speech develop from this kind of primate communication?

ARE WE ALONE? Here's an interesting item on the search for extraterrestrial life.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of monkeys, people and religion

Hanuman, the Indian monkey god.

El Cabrero spent a good part of the week careening around West Virginia. For entertainment and edification, I listened to a recording of primatologist Frans De Waal's book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society.

In it, he made an interesting point that never had occurred to me, i.e. that religions that developed in places where people lived in proximity to monkeys and/or apes didn't separate humans from the rest of the natural world. Presumably it would be harder to do so when there were little furry human look alikes running around.

Dude has a point. Compare and contrast Hinduism and Buddhism with Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

FRACK PICTURES to come next week.

POLITICS, GENES AND BRAINS discussed here. Comment: as interesting as books on that topic are, they don't explain why things are so polarized today.

GET OUT THERE AND JOG if you want to live longer.

MORE TO DENY here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A friend for life

I first became a Shakespeare fan in high school when we read Macbeth. What more could you ask for? Witches, murder, ghosts, not to mention cool plot devices like Birnam Wood and Macduff not being of woman born. I think I might have done Julius Caesar at about the same time.

It was also around then that I first read Hamlet. This was the beginning of my tragic existentialist phase, from which I have not entirely emerged, and I especially liked the "to be or not to be," "oh that this too too solid flesh would melt," and "now could I drink hot blood" parts.

I was probably hooked from the beginning, but I really only came to know his works years later as a way of coping with the recession that smacked down West Virginia in the 1980s. Actually, depression would be the better word, with massive unemployment (17 percent in 1983) and plenty of misery to go around.

One way I coped with poverty, hopelessness and struggling to feed my kids was by reading classics. It was cheaper than drugs, less risky than crime and less harmful to my health than suicide. I'd recommend the same to everyone.

THE BIG ISSUE OF 2010, at least domestically, is unemployment.

YOU KNOW YOU'VE BEEN WONDERING what kind of tattoos scholars get. Click here to find out.

MONKEY TALK? Kind of sort of but not really.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LIKE CAPTAIN AHAB BUT NOT AS COOL

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Every so often, you hear about the dream of writing the Great American Novel. Sorry, but it is the opinion of El Cabrero that that one has already been scratched off the list for over 150 years. To quote from the great song-poem Tweeter and the Monkey Man,

There ain't no more opportunity here, everything's been done.

I am, of course, referring to Moby-Dick. I'm re-reading that jewel for the umpteenth time and it just keeps getting better and better. I'm not about to go on a long Moby-Dick jag just yet (although that probably will happen before too long), but there is a connection between that classic and the topic at hand at Goat Rope the last few weeks, i.e. violence and how we might be able to reduce it.

If you recall anything about the story, it may well be that Captain Ahab of the Pequod lost a leg to the Great White Whale in an earlier voyage and, to put it mildly, kinda took it personally.

Dr. James Gilligan, author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, refers to the character of Ahab several times in his 1996 work in discussing the tragic nature of violence and the typical American response to it:

Probably no American novel speaks more powerfully to the tragic flaw of violence in the American character than does Herman Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick. In the novel, Captain Ahab, who embodies the purest, most extreme example of one strain in our national character, becomes convinced that Moby-Dick, the great while whale, is the embodiment of evil. Ahab pursues Moby-Dick in the mad conviction that if only he can find him and kill him, he will have attained justice and destroyed evil. The voyage of Ahab and his men, aboard the Pequod, is the story of that tragic quest when ends in the destruction of Ahab and his entire crew, except for Ishmael; it is he alone who returns to bear witness.

Gilligan finds that of Ahab in the American drive to punishment and retributive justice, which hasn't worked all that well in practice:

When I think of the mentality that is willing to sacrifice even rational self-interest, not to mention concern for others, for the sake of some abstractly conceived notion of justice and the punishment of evil, I can only think of Captain Ahab. Like any tragic hero, Ahab was convinced that he knew the difference between good and evil, he knew that Moby-Dick was evil, and he knew that if only he could kill Moby-Dick he would destroy evil and restore justice to the world. In exactly the same way, we know that "criminals" represent and symbolize evil, that if we can only kill or immobilize them all, we will have destroyed evil and attained justice. What else are our endless, futile, and self-defeating crusades, called the "War on Crime" and the "War on Drugs," [the Gentle Reader may think of other wars as well] but our version of the voyage of the Pequod? What else has "Crime" (or "Drugs") come to symbolize, in the American mind, that wasn't already contained in Ahab's image of that symbol of absolute evil, the great white whale, Moby-Dick? And where else are we sailing our ship of state except toward exactly the same kind of tragic and self-destructive shipwreck to which Ahab sailed the Pequod?

Here's one more for the road:

What is the nature of our tragic flaw as a nation, the flaw that has resulted in our uniquely high levels of criminal violence? I think it is the same as Captain Ahab's, which is why he is the my model of our flawed American character. I would describe the flaw as a Puritanical kind of moralism and punitiveness, which is generated by the illusion that "we" have a monopoly on the knowledge of good adn evil (conveniently forgetting what happened to the last couple who ate the fruit of the tree of that name), and that we know that "we" are good and "they" are evil. And lest it be thought that since Ahab was a man he represents only the male minority in the population, it is worth remembering that unless the female majority voted as it did, the Captain Ahabs of this country would never attain power.

I would only disagree to the extent of saying that Melville's Ahab was way cooler than some of the people we've elected.

IT'S A GUY THING...the recession, that is, as Business Week reports.

BACK TO THE MONKEY MAN. Here's an interesting NY Times item on some differences between apes and humans and pros and cons of group behavior.

CLEAN COAL? Don't hold your breath.

DEFINITELY NOT AS COOL AS AHAB. Here's The Nation of former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan on the propaganda leading up to the war in Iraq.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED