Urgent baby bird picture edition (including green herons)

OK, so 2016 has been a downer year for humanity so far. No arguing that. On the other hand, it's been a pretty good year for baby birds at Goat Rope Farm. Earlier this sprint, a baby great horned owl was hatched up on our hill.

Last week, five baby phoebes who had nested in our goat barn fledged. This took some intervention by the Spousal Unit, who had to intervene to persuade a black snake to seek meals elsewhere.

Even better, we've noticed for a good while that a green heron was hanging around our pond a lot. How cool was it to see that she hatched four babies (big uns at that!):

On top of that, we discovered that a broody hen managed to hatch two baby turkeys, one of which is shown below. The other didn't recognize a photo op when it had one.

So there's that anyhow.

New resident

We interrupt Goat Rope's regularly scheduled program to announce a new resident/visitor to the farm.

It's a green heron that built a nest in a tree beside our pond. It's the heron equivalent of a hillbilly living by Golden Corral. Photo credit: the Spousal Unit.

"Feathered primates"

Image by way of wikipedia.

Years of living on the farm where wild and semi-domesticated birds abound--and being married to a birder--have caused me to realize that the term "bird brain" isn't very apt when intended as a put-down. Quite a few of them seem pretty sharp to me and some exhibit emotions and parental behavior that reminds me of mammals.

Crows seem to be particularly intelligent. There are some extended families in our holler and they seem not only to stay busy but to have a good time as well. For some reason, they remind me of a merry band of pirates, minus the ocean and ships and all.

Recent research has shown that crows are even smarter than previously believed. In fact, their use of tools, memory and complicated social behavior has led some biologists to refer to them as "feathered primates."

I'm not sure whether crows would be flattered or insulted by that.

FROM THE WORLD OF WHACK, here are some recent right wing rants. The pope in particular seems to set them off these days.

JUST SAY NO.  The first part of this statehouse Gazette column by Phil Kabler mentions WV's current flirtation with private for-profit  prisons. El Cabrero devoutly hopes this union won't be consummated.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Just who's a bird brain?

Since I began spending time with birds here at Goat Rope Farm, I've been struck by how smart, emotional, and parental they can be. The more I see, the more the term bird brain doesn't seem to fit. However, recent research suggests that the label might well apply to all of us.

AFFORDABLE CARE FOR REAL. There's been quite a bit of noise on the right about how the Affordable Care Act will make health care unaffordable for many Americans. Not that reality matters much to that crowd, but it looks like individual health premiums in New York might fall by 50 percent next year as the reforms kick in.

CLIMATE CHANGE is expensive.

URGENT BIG-NOSE HORN-FACE DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Small change

In lieu of a real blog post, here's...

...a look at great and not so great one liners;

...more on the whole bird/dinosaur thing, a topic I think about frequently when watching the turkeys and peacocks at Goat Rope Farm;

...some good coverage of the events celebrating the African American contribution to WV in the Charleston Daily Mail, including this editorial and this news story;

...and another whack at my perennial favorite target, Ayn Rand-ism.

God's foot upon the treadle of the loom

I've been blogging off and on lately about the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with an initial focus on his seminal essay Nature. As I've said before, parts of it seem memorable while others are a bit cloying. That's especially true for me of his overly optimistic view of the universe and his belief that everything in nature corresponds to the soul in some kind of dreamy and positive way.

A good antidote to Emersonian optimism is good old Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. In that work, a deep encounter with nature doesn't necessarily lead to transcendental bliss, although it sometimes does. It can also lead to madness and destruction.

This comes out loud and clear in the story of Pip, the black child who sails on the Pequod and is briefly abandoned at sea during a whale chase. Pip's encounter with nature pretty much fries his brain:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyless, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects  that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's food upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at least to the celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Next week: The American Scholar.

SEQUESTRATION. Here's a look at what it means. And, by the way, I'm getting sick of government by artificially manufactured crisis.

AND THE "SEQUESTERS" are dissected here by Robert Reich.

MORE ON THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MASSEY at Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo.

BIRDSONGS AND HUMAN SPEECH discussed here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

An ugly little spud. Loud too.

If anyone was worrying that we had a shortage of critters at Goat Rope Farm, allow me to assure you that you can cross that one off your worry list. A case in point is little Cedro, a baby chimney swift that fell or was exiled from his home nest and was rescued by the Spousal Unit. Little Cedro apparently didn't get the memo that little creatures should be cute in order to ensure survival. He seems to rely on loudness instead when he calls out for food at very short intervals.  

And what, you may ask, do you feed such a creature? In his case, freeze dried mealworms seem to be a hit.

(But I wonder who on earth came up with the idea of freeze drying mealworms?)

JOB GROWTH is slow, thanks largely due to austerity imposed by the majority in Congress. But if there was a political will, there are plenty of ways to improve the employment situation.

TWO WV ISSUES that are in the news these days include bad cuts to child care for working people by the Tomblin administration and prison overcrowding.

SPEAKING OF CHILD CARE CUTS, click here to do something about it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I SOOO thought I was done with zombies for a while

...but a friend sent me this link.

Here's a thought. What if zombies, due to bad oral health,which is endemic in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, didn't have teeth? Would they just gum people? That would be a disgusting nuisance but something short of an apocalypse.

Just saying.

IN CASE YOU MISSED KRUGMAN, click here.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Obesity is the new malnutrition.

ARE YOU GLAD THERE AREN'T MANY GIANT BUGS? Thank a bird.

NOTE: El Cabrero has to be everywhere all the time this week so posts may be irregular.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Command performance

El Cabrero has been an irregular blogger this week due to running around a lot. Here are a few items that have caught my eye lately.

THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE IT. This Gazette story from a couple of days ago provides great insight into the politics of coal in WV. This week the industry is having a series of taxpayer funded pep rallies in which the Obama administration and the EPA will be ritually denounced. Coal is a jealous god and everybody who is anybody has to show up and burn some incense and join in the maledictions.

MORALITY AND TAXES. Here's a look at the moral sentiments that often lie behind opposition to taxes.


WHO'D A THUNK IT? Birds and turtles are cousins.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Dirty institutions

Rosa Parks, 1955. Image by way of wikipedia.

Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience didn't make much of a splash when first written, but it was destined to have a major worldwide impact. The events that led to the essay took place during his stay at Walden Pond.

Here's how he laconically describes what happened in Walden:

One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone into the woods for other purposes, But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckle-berries on Fair-Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who represented the state.

Of course, people have been resisting unjust laws and governments since ancient times--the Greek tragedy Antigone is a literary example of ancient civil disobedience. The histories of Josephus provide examples of Jewish non-violent resistance against the Romans under Caligula and Pilate. But Thoreau was one of the first to articulate it clearly and his essay about an almost accidental encounter would have a much greater influence than anyone at the time might have dreamed.

It's amazing what people can do sometimes even when they're not trying.

LIVING ON EARTH devoted a program to the changing view of the late WV Senator Robert Byrd on coal issues.

BAKER'S DOZEN (minus ten). Here are two good columns by economist Dean Baker. The first is about the politics of unemployment, while the second is about the growing inequality that is at the root of the economic crisis.

ANOTHER INTERESTING TAKE on the economic crisis can be found here.

GETTING EMOTIONAL can have its benefits.

BIRD BRAINS. They are more similar to those of mammals than previously thought. Having watched the complex behavior of the feathered inhabitants of Goat Rope Farm, I can't say I'm surprised.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The art of democracy

Leo von Klenze's 1846 painting of what classical Athens may have looked like. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The polis or city state of ancient Athens can lay claim to being the world's first self-styled democratic state (although there were no doubt other ancient societies that had democratic and egalitarian features). It also gave us the word.

It definitely had some features that strike us as undemocratic, including slavery and the exclusion of women from public life (with a few notable exceptions). But to the extent that it was democratic, it was very democratic.

It is an interesting fact that democracy and tragedy grew together and that the latter was considered to be an important part of the former. As mentioned before, attendance at tragic performances was a duty of citizenship. Judging the relative merits of tragedies was also democratic, as the audience would vote for the winning author of three competing poets.

As Paul Woodruff wrote in First Democracy: The Challenge of An Ancient Idea,

The early defenders of First Democracy are mostly lost to us, except for one magnificent set of writers--the tragic poets. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were poets of the people, proud to be Athenian, writing for prizes in contests that were decided, in effect, by popular opinion. It should be no surprise that the poets who won the prizes were champions of democratic ideas....

In ancient Athens, the citizens shared a continuing education at religious festivals. They could all see plays in the theater of Dionysus; in the fourth century the city covered the cost of theater attendance (by means of the theoric fund). In plays by Sophocles or Euripides, Athenians saw dramatizations of political dilemmas...The experience of such theater must have made the audiences more thoughtful about politics than they would otherwise have been. It was as if the whole city were following the TV series The West Wing.

In contrast, the whole of America watches only the Super Bowl. The theater of Athens was about freedom and tyranny, law and religion, power and language, even gender and difference. The theater of America is about winning. Can we do better than that?

INTERVENTION. Here's a mini-debate on government intervention in the economy from Business Week.

WHY WE STARE AT THE ELEVATOR FLOOR. Here's an evolutionary perspective.

TOOL USING ANIMALS. That is to say, birds.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Not a god

The theme here lately is the failure of "conservative" economic policies, which is one of those topics where figuring out where to start is harder than figuring out what to say. The reader will also find links and comments about current events below.

One main feature of the failed economics of the past is a cult like worship of "markets," which are endowed with some kind of supernatural intelligence by true believers. In the real world, there are all kinds of ways markets can fail, as even the most mainstream economics textbook will say. Here are a few:

*Imperfect competition. Adam Smith famously said in The Wealth of Nations that

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

But one big difference between Smith's day and our own is the eclipse of small independent butchers, brewers and bakers and the rise of giant corporations which often dominate markets and distort prices. Some forms of imperfect competition are monopolies or oligopolies (domination of an economic sector by a few businesses).

*Externalities. In an ideal market situation, which generally only exists inside the heads of true believers, prices "tell the truth," so to speak, about the costs of the products. Often however, there are social costs passed on to the public or to individuals which don't show up on any corporation's bottom line. Climate change is a classic example, but so are the numerous cases of people and communities damaged by sickness, pollution, etc. as the result of economic activity. The tendency is to socialize the costs while keeping the profits private.

*Information asymmetries. Market transactions can also go awry when one party has more or better information than another and is thus able to take advantage of the situation. Imagine, hypothetically, that some people made big bucks (for a while) selling mortgage based derivatives and other such "financial instruments" to people who got burned in the process. Golly, good thing that never happens...

Another problem with markets is that they don't do a good job of providing for public goods like roads, bridges, schools, fire and police protection, etc.

I won't even go into crony capitalism, i.e. the use of political influence to win profits and advantages for big businesses. Imagine, for example drug company lobbyists writing a prescription drug benefit bill or credit card companies writing bankruptcy legislation. Good thing that never happens, either...

All of this isn't to say that markets are evil and should be banned. It's just to point out that there are lots of ways they can mess up and melt down, which is why there is also a need for a degree of regulation. The market=God idea is one that is long overdue for a decent burial.

HOW'S THE WEATHER? El Cabrero and the gang at Goat Rope Farm were without phone, water, electricity and email since Tuesday. Here's hoping the Gentle Reader made it through the storm. I'm scheduling this post early in case the power is gone tomorrow. If anything really bad happens between now and then, please accept our condolences. If anything really good happens, please accept our congratulations.

STIMULUS PASSES. The US House passed the stimulus package yesterday along party lines.

A BETTER BAILOUT is discussed here by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.

SPORTS AND SUCH are the subjects of the Rev. Jim Lewis' latest edition of Notes from under the Fig Tree.

ANTIWHAT? Here's a list of five world leaders accused of being the Antichrist. (Personal note: those who picked #5 might have been onto something. )

BIRD BRAINS outlasted the dinosaurs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Make new friends but keep the old

This may be a bronze of the ancient Greek bard Hesiod. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

It is the immemorial custom at this blog (for the last couple years anyway) to reserve the last week or so of the year to discussing items from the Goat Rope book shelf. This involves giving a shout out to some of this year's best reading material, although little if any of it was written in 2008.

(Note: While El Cabrero is pleased to discuss selected books, I cannot divulge the total number of books consumed this year lest my employer realize what a slacker I am.)

This first installment consists of classics, many of which have been revisited after years since the previous perusal.

So here goes, starting with the ancients. The ancient Greek bard Hesiod was no Homer, but he had his moments. I started 2008 with another run through the Theogony, his account of the origin of gods, the universe and everything. As he put it,

In the beginning there was chaos.

Come to think of it, there still is.

Then came another look at Plato's Symposium, a dialogue on the nature of love. For some reason, I liked it better the last time I read it. Followers of this blog will not be surprised that the Odyssey of Homer got another look, since I spent a couple of months taking the long way home with its hero.

I also took another look at Rome's answer to the Homeric epics, the Aeneid of Virgil. Virgil was a more elegant writer than Homer although I prefer the latter. One difference between the work of Homer (whoever he was/they were) and Virgil is that the Homeric epics grew while Virgil's was self-consciously written. Good though.

I love these lines from Aeneas' visit to the underworld (which make a great mission statement):

...your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.

That works for me...

On the borderline between ancient and medieval literature lies Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy, a wonderful book by a man who was unjustly accused by the Powers that Were and which was composed while he prepared for a particularly nasty death. His musings on the nature of Fortune inspired this year's series on luck and randomness. It's definitely worth a look.

HEARTS OF DARKNESS, then and now, form the subject of this elegant rant by Chris Hedges. El Cabrero is a sucker for Joseph Conrad references.

LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO CUT SPENDING? There is quite a bit of indefensible "defense" spending which is really just corporate welfare.

EVERYBODY HURTS, but we hurt more if we think people are deliberately inflicting it.

PARLEZ USTED PAJARO? Here's an item on deciphering the songs of birds.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE DRUGGED MARRIAGE

Just one look/that's all it took. In this ancient vase, Menelaus is stopped from killing his unfaithful wife Helen by one look at her beauty. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The Goat Rope Odyssey series continues. If you like the classics, please click on earlier posts. You'll also find news and comments about current events.

When you're in a bad way, sometimes you feel better if at least you have a plan to try something. When things are bad for Odysseus' son Telemachus--his mother's suitors are devouring his substance and threatening his life while his father is apparently dead--the goddess Athena gives him a boost. She inspires him to take a sea voyage to visit his father's comrades at Troy to seek for news.

He receives great hospitality but not much news from Nestor, king of Pylos. He then proceeds to visit Menelaus, king of Sparta, and his wife Helen, who was a major cause of the whole Trojan War. Menelaus tells of an encounter with the minor sea god Proteus who told him that Odysseus was still alive. The most interesting part of the story, though, is that of the very troubled marriage of Menelaus and Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world.

Back in the proverbial day, all the leading men of Greece courted her and swore to uphold the marriage when Menelaus prevailed. But when the Trojan prince Paris visited Sparta, he abducted Helen, not altogether unwillingly, and took her to Troy. This wasn't just bad manners--it was sacrilege, a terrible violation of xenia, the sacred guest/host relationship. According to the myth, this was what led the Greeks to invade Troy and fight there for 10 long years.

Paris is killed towards the end of the war. When the city is finally taken, Menelaus nearly kills Helen but is overwhelmed by her beauty and brings her back to Sparta where they try to get back to normal.

Now every marriage has issues, but this one is way over the top. There's not just infidelity, there's also a war that brought disaster on thousands of people on both sides. How do they deal with all those bad memories and recriminations? The answer is...drugs.

Then Zeus's daughter Helen thought of something else.
Into the mixing-bowl from which they drank their wine
she slipped a drug, heart's-ease, dissolving anger,
magic to make us all forget our pains...
No one who drank it deeply, mulled in wine,
could let a tear roll down his cheeks that day,
not even if his mother should die, his father die,
not even if right before his eyes some enemy brought down
a brother or darling son with a sharp bronze blade...

(There have been times when El Cabrero wouldn't have refused a swig of that mix.)

Then as now, people who have gone through war and other traumas often seek to dull the pain through self medication. It's probably not the best way of dealing with such things. In fact, as Jonathan Shay points out in his discussion of the Odyssey, it often causes people to miss or lose their homecoming.

But with a couple like that, what are you going to do?

DOES ANYBODY ELSE SEE A TINY BIT OF IRONY IN THIS STATEMENT by Condoleezza Rice about how invading another country can make a bad impression?

The behavior of Russia in this most recent crisis is isolating Russia from the principles of cooperation among nations of the communities of states when you start invading small neighbors, bombing civilian infrastructure, going into villages and wreaked havoc and wanton destruction of this infrastructure [emphasis added] .

HUNGRY PLANET, AGAIN. Here's another take on the global food crisis.

NOT A GOOD SIGN of the health of the economy, here's the latest on a key economic indicator.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS about environmental innovations can be found here.

THE MIRROR STAGE. Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror. Discuss.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PICKING THROUGH THE RUBBLE

Everybody has a shadow side. Poster courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme around here this week has been the psychology of C.G. Jung. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

To sum up, the official Goat Rope verdict is that Jung was more of a shaman, cult leader or philosopher than a psychologist or social scientist. Many of his ideas, while interesting and entertaining, wouldn't hold up to serious investigation. Part of the problem was Jung's tendency to reach universal conclusions about the psyche on the basis of an individual's dreams, fantasies, or artwork.

And, as was noted yesterday, the dude had some serious political problems.

Still, I have to admit that every few years I go back and take another look and there are some things there that I think may be both true and useful. I remember an old saying that even a wild hog will occasionally dig up something good.

Such as...

*The unconscious. As far as I know, nothing in recent scientific research has discredited the idea that we have unconscious cognition and emotion. In fact, some of the latest seems to indicate that we're kind of unconscious even when we're conscious, as in running on automatic pilot. I think Jung was right over Freud in thinking of the unconscious not just as a cesspool of repression but a wellspring of creativity.

Some of the best advice I've had has come from dreams. And sometimes where I'm trying to figure out how to do something challenging, I deliberately try to push the problem out of my conscious mind so that the "it" down there can work on it. Usually it does better than I would have.

As for archetypes and all that, I'd say Jung was partly right and partly wrong. Undoubtedly basic images and motifs exist and show up time and time again in stories, art, etc. But you could make the argument that strong stories often repeated create archetypes rather than vice versa.

I don't think there's much room to doubt that the human mind is wired not only for language, but also for narrative and metaphor and there's probably a limited stock of both. And the structure of human life--day/night, seasons, birth/death, major life events--is bound to generate recurring themes. We're likely to learn more about that as brain and cognitive science develops, but it's a safe bet we're no blank slate.

*personality. Jung's theory of the various almost autonomous parts of the personality (the anima, persona, shadow, Self, etc.) make for an entertaining story, but are unlikely to be accepted by anyone who isn't a member of the club. Still, I like his idea of individuation or self-realization as integrating the various aspects of the personality (although he neglects the social dimension). As Nietzsche said,

What does your conscience say? — "You shalt become the person you are."

*the shadow. I have a particular fondness for Jung's idea of the shadow, that part of ourselves that we dislike and disown and often project onto other individuals and groups. Jung said

The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly...

I'll give him that one. I think we all have a darker side which we would do well to recognize and integrate into our conscious personality. People who deny their own shadow side and project all evil onto the Other are dangerous...especially like if they happened to be president or something.

DEATH ON THE JOB. According to the AFLCIO, 5,840 workers died on the job in 2006, up from 5,734 the previous year:

each day in 2006, 16 workers were fatally injured on the job and more than 11,200 were hurt or made sick. But the price workers pay for toiling in dangerous jobs climbs even higher when the tally includes the 50,000 to 60,000 workers who die every year from occupational diseases.

West Virginia, by the way, has the third highest death rate.

BAREFOOT may be better.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER. This article about mountaintop removal mining appeared in the Sunday Washington Post.

STARCHER VOWS TO STAY. WV (real) Supreme Court Justice Larry Starcher said that he intended not to recuse himself in a future case involving Massey Energy. He did so in the past in the hope of setting an example for "justice" Brent Benjamin, who owes his seat to vast spending by Massey CEO Don Blankenship. Benjamin couldn't take the hint. On the bright side, the WV Supreme Joke--I mean Court is making WVU look like a pillar of integrity.

URGENT DINOSAUR UPDATE. It's official. The dinosaur T. Rex has been proven to be genetically related to modern birds. In fact,

the scientists said, T. rex shared more of its genetic makeup with ostriches and chickens than with living reptiles, like alligators.

The chickens, peacocks, and turkeys at Goat Rope Farm will be insufferable when they read that...

SPEAKING OF THE FARM, it looks like the human race almost bought it 70,000 years ago.

Y'all have a good weekend!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED