First steps

I'm feeling pretty grateful at the moment. For the first time in something like three months, I actually jogged first one mile, then two, over the last couple of days.

I'd been having a great running year (for me), including some longish trail runs and a half marathon. I started working on speed, a relative thing, and ran my best miles in 10 years. Then it happened. I came down suddenly with plantar fasciitis, which is the next best thing to having a nail in your heel.

Running was out of the question. Some days, especially in the morning, I could hardly walk. Other forms of exercise, like skipping rope or kicking a heavy bag, were also no-nos reinforced by serious pain.

Some things you just have to wait out. I think yoga helped, especially sun salutations where you hold the downward facing dog for several breaths.

I'm not better yet, but the nail in my heel is now something like a thumbtack. And, while my running may look like walking or even a zombie shuffle to others, I'm glad to have it back.

For those who aren't runners, it's hard to explain, but there really is no substitute. Anything else is just making do until you can do it again.

WHACKADOODLES who want to shut down the government aren't polling too well these days.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. In some countries, extreme poverty is declining.

THINK ABOUT THIS. "Poverty is more harmful to children than gestational exposure to cocaine," according to a recent study.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Forget the Venus flytrap

While I was traveling this weekend, a friend sent me a link to one of the weirdest science stories I've ever seen. No doubt the reader is familiar with carnivorous plants, which typically gain some kind of nutrients from  insects or small critters.

How about one that "eats" sheep?

According to the BBC, this Chilean oddity

 ...uses its sharp spines to snare and trap sheep and other animals, which slowly starve to death. 

The animals then decay at the base of the plant, acting as fertiliser.

(Apparently the Brits spell fertilizer with an "s". Good thing we had that revolution.)

Yeesh. I'm going to try to be nicer to plants.

IT'S ABOUT TIME. The Fair Labor Standards Act, a major piece of New Deal legislation, turns 75 this year. Among other things, that bill gave us the minimum wage. We should celebrate the anniversary by raising it.

MORE ON MEDICAID EXPANSION and who will qualify here.

IS LESS MORE? Here's a look at recent controversies in the study of exercise and its effects.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Target practice

I admit it. There are few things in the world that I love whacking more than the bull****... I mean ideology of Ayn Rand. By chance last week, I stumbled upon this article from the Parthenon, campus paper at my alma mater Marshall University, about the controversy still surrounding its acceptance a few years ago of a million or so dollars from the big bank BB&T to teach an economics class in Randian garbage.

I couldn't help but respond in the following letter to the editor:

 I read with interest the Parthenon article discussing the controversy of Marshall’s acceptance of BB&T money to indoctrinate students in Ayn Rand’s “philosophy.”

There are any number of ironies here. First, Rand didn’t believe that places like Marshall should exist at all. In a 1964 Playboy interview, she stated that “My position is fully consistent. Not only the post office, but streets, roads, and above all, schools, should all be privately owned and privately run.” She also would have opposed the several kinds of publicly provided financial aid that Marshall students receive.

It also establishes a disturbing precedent. Suppose some other billionaire or corporation wants to plop down another million or two to establish a chair to advocate for, say, white supremacy or female circumcision or any other loopy ideology. Is money the only thing that matters? Should Marshall cave every time somebody waves some cash? If so, there’s a word for that and it isn’t education.

I wish I could have been a little nastier in the letter, but 20+ years of working for a Quaker organization kind of ruined me.

AUSTERITY is overrated.

UNEMPLOYMENT, its costs and possible remedies are discussed here.

SITTING  is bad for your health.

WAY TO GO, BOB. Dylan is a winner of the presidential medal of freedom.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Unleashing the beast

I try to be a fairly not too terrible person most days, at least when people are looking. But certain things unleash the beast within, effecting a Jeckyll and Hyde transformation in a matter of seconds.

One such thing is the game of Scrabble. Now it so happened that this weekend we had a house full of kids who  asked to play the game. One had played it before but two second graders, including my grandson, were new to the game. I explained to my grandson that in this family Scrabble is not a game but a martial art in which no mercy or quarter is shown to one's opponents. Although I didn't use these exact words, I indirectly implied something to the effect that the goal is to crush one's opponents and drink from their skulls, metaphorically speaking.

We played a game and I attempted to instruct the beginners and help them with their words along the way. But when the scores were tallied...what can I say? In Dylan's words, "I can't help it if I'm lucky."

The other adults present pointed out that I was exulting in the defeat of two 8 year olds and a 12 year old. I pointed out, however, that this is the same mathematically as defeating a 28 year old. Besides, it was Scrabble.

Which means it was on.

POVERTY, WELFARE REFORM AND EVERYTHING AFTER discussed here.

A HUNTING WE DID GO. Early humans, that is.

PLATO AND EXERCISE discussed here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Travel gods

I have always felt an affinity for Odysseus. Not that I sacked Troy or blinded a cyclops or anything that dramatic. It's just that

1. much of my life involves the use of cunning (or at least attempts thereof);

2. I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get home; and

3. he and I both seem to have offended the travel gods at some point in the past. In his case, it was Poseidon. I'm not sure which Olympian has jusrisdiction over air travel.

Today, I'm hoping to make it home through what promises to be stormy skies. I hope it won't take me 10 years like it did him.

AN INTERESTING QUESTION was raised by Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo today. My guess is the answer would be no.

GOOD HEALTH ADVICE: keep moving.

URGENT FLYING DINOSAUR WITH COOL TEETH UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Feeling good is optional

I have always felt that there is a lot to be learned from physical exertion. An example of that occurred to me after I started training for and running (or limping) in races again after knee surgery this summer.

Here is the life lesson I learned: there is absolutely no necessary connection between feeling good and doing OK. By that I mean that one can feel totally miserable and still meet or exceed goals. In one recent 5 mile race, my legs felt like broken dead sticks, my lungs burned and my feet hurt with every step. But I finished a few minutes ahead of my goal (though admittedly way behind most other people).

It would be nice to feel good when you're up against a challenge. It may even have happened to me at some point in the distant past, although I can't recall it. But it's not required. What is required is to keep going.

OPTIMISM, ANYONE? Paul Krugman seems to see sun shining through the economic clouds.

FEEDING THE TROLLS. Here's an op-ed by yours truly on why WV needs an office of minority affairs to address racial disparities.

AN UNFORTUNATE MEME: the welfare queen.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Post bad book victory lap

It seemed to take forever plowing, through hundreds of pages of small print and bad prose, but I finally made it through Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

The main reason I decided to read it was that it seemed more sportsmanlike for me to take whacks at her ideology if I read some of her major works. It didn't take me too long to discover that my time would have been just as well spent taking whacks at her literary style.

What to say about it? Uhhh, it was about an architect or something.

The characters were pretty cardboard. It was a kind of morality plan pitting the Heroic Individual against the Conniving Collectivists. The relationships were really weird, including the "love"/hate connection between the architect Roark and his eventual wife Dominique. The man crush between Roark and the news magnate Wynand was even weirder, not that there was anything wrong with that.

I'm still not clear how other people messing with one's design justifies dynamiting a building that didn't belong to the dynamiter in question. And I get the feeling that the whole purpose of the book was to set up Roark's lengthy courtroom speech at the end. The character of Roark was pretty interesting when he was just an architect who wanted to do his own thing but toward the end he just became the author's mouthpiece.

I guess this was supposed to be Rand's answer to John Steinbeck. I prefer the Joads.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. Here's a Washington Post editorial on mine safety.

TAXES AND DEFICITS. If hedge fund managers paid more of the former, we'd have less of the latter.

FOR MICE AND MEN AND WOMEN TOO, here's some research about why exercise makes us feel better.

URGENT CHIMPANZEE AND DOLPHIN UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Philosophical dead ends

I have a great love of philosophy, although certain schools of it don't do anything for me. Some of the ones I have no use for are logical positivism, analytical philosophy, and the philosophy of language.

I have a new one to add to the list: the philosophy of mind. There is something inherently absurd to me about conscious people intentionally spending a lot of time arguing about whether consciousness and intentionality exist. Another favorite topic of such thinkers is whether consciousness is entirely physical and whether mental phenomena, if they exist, can influence physical phenomena. It occurs to me they could ask any doctor about that one.

If I'm going to spend any time reading about the mind, whatever it is, I'll probably try to stick either to the sciences devoted to such things or to real philosophers like Kant and Hegel, who may not have been right but were at least interesting. The main point of philosophy is not so much to be right as to be interestingly but creatively wrong.

Of course, I could be wrong about all this.

BIG LIES about government spending, according to Robert Reich, are hiding the bigger truth about growing inequality.

GREEN JOBS aren't just for blue states.

LANDMARK. Massey Energy reached a settlement in a lawsuit with the Labor Department over major safety problems in a Kentucky mine. Too bad something like this didn't happen at Upper Big Branch before last April.

NO COMMENT. Could exercising make you want to drink more alcohol?

TWO FOR THE BIRDS. Crows...the other tool using animal. And, while we're at it, some ancient flightless birds apparently used wings as clubs. Would that count?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Snow bunny

The winter of 2010-2011 hasn't even officially arrived yet and there are already ample signs that it is taking itself entirely too seriously. I think I've already had enough, although the Spousal Unit has not.

Somewhere in one of Gore Vidal's historical novels, someone observes that southerners always experience winter as an unpleasant surprise. I think that applies to many Appalachians as well.

There is, however, at least one creature at Goat Rope Farm who loves winter best of all.

DONE DEAL. After a late night vote in the House, the tax cut/unemployment bill passed and is headed towards President Obama's desk. Half empty or half full?

THE NEXT BIG FIGHT? President Obama's deal with congressional Republicans and pressure from ideologues and deficit hawks could put Social Security back in the crosshairs.

REWRITING THE NARRATIVE. So much for the financial crisis' "teachable moment."

THIS EXPLAINS MY PROBLEM. People look more attractive when they've had enough sleep.

HOWEVER, if you get up early enough to exercise before breakfast, you might avoid putting on holiday pounds.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

For this relief much thanks

A vote in the US House yesterday means good news for tens of thousands of teachers and other workers who would otherwise have faced layoffs as states continue to struggle with the recession. The US House approved the measure 247-161. The bill will provide $26 billion in aid to states, which are still reeling from the recession while much of the money from the Recovery Act has been spent.

This is something many groups and individuals have been trying to get done all summer. It's not enough to really kickstart the economy but it's a step in the right direction.

ARISTOTLE WOULD PROBABLY AGREE with this article on the importance of the middle class and not letting it die.

DON'T GET MAD, GET MOVING. Exercise may help moderate anger. I knew that.

URGENT ANCIENT SEA MONSTER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hillbilly health club, revisited

Our latest exercise equipment.

From time to time, this blog highlights offerings from the Goat Rope Hillbilly Health Club, which features such high tech exercise equipment as chain saws, sledge hammers, splitting mauls, dirty barns, pitchforks and wheel barrows.

On display now is little Edith Ann, one of our aerobic training devices. Longtime viewers of this blog will recognize her but may not realize that a dog might be better than a treadmill when it comes to exercise. A study in Great Britain found that dog-owners who regularly walk their beasts get more exercise in than the average gym-goer.

(Besides, I have a theory that it is an offense against whatever gods may be to use a treadmill on a pretty day.)

In little Edith Ann's case, it's two miles early in the morning and two more at night. At a year old, Edith is pretty high energy but we also have Arpad, a slower model for beginners:



It is not recommended for the same person to walk both at the same time as this can overstretch the arms.

"THE IDIOCY ABOUT UNEMPLOYMENT" is shown no mercy here.

TAKE OUR JOBS, PLEASE! The United Farm Workers union, responding to immigrant bashing, is urging Americans to take some of these low wage, back-breaking jobs. Not too many takers have taken advantage of the opportunity.

ONE NATION. A new umbrella group hopes to counter the Tea Party.

SPEAKING OF WALKING, did bi-pedalism give early humans the edge they needed?

GOOD PARENTS/NOT SO GOOD KIDS. The author of this article suggests some unpleasant personality traits may be more a matter of genes than parenting.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A king may progress through the guts of a beggar

Goat Rope is meandering through Hamlet these days, although you'll also find links and comments about current events below if Shakespeare isn't your thing.

Things really start falling apart at the end of act 3. The play did indeed catch the conscience of the king but Hamlet bungled his attempt to whack him. Then follows a highly charged and kind of Freudian confrontation between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude, during which the former kills Polonius as he hid behind a tapestry, thinking him to be the king.

By this point, Hamlet seems to be beyond ordinary human empathy, merely telling his mother at the end of their meeting that he'll "lug the guts" to a neighbor room.

There follows an amazing exchange between Hamlet and his uncle Claudius about the murder of Polonius which is full of dark humor:

KING CLAUDIUS Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

HAMLET At supper.

KING CLAUDIUS At supper! where?

HAMLET Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain
convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your
worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all
creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for
maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but
variable service, two dishes, but to one table:
that's the end.

KING CLAUDIUS Alas, alas!

HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a
king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

KING CLAUDIUS What dost you mean by this?

HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a
progress through the guts of a beggar.

KING CLAUDIUS Where is Polonius?

HAMLET In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger
find him not there, seek him i' the other place
yourself. But indeed, if you find him not within
this month, you shall nose him as you go up the
stairs into the lobby.

KING CLAUDIUS Go seek him there.

(To some Attendants)

HAMLET He will stay till ye come.

By now, Hamlet's feigned madness is getting kind of close to the real thing.

BUBBLES. Here's Paul Krugman on the need for real financial reform.

ARE THE VOTES THERE for comprehensive health care reform? Maybe.

INEQUALITY matters.

SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF. Exercise helps reduce anxiety among the chronically ill by 20 percent.

IF SPRINGTIME EVER COMES, here are several reasons to consider growing some of your own food.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Dying for a job

Seventeenth century painting by Philippe de Champaigne.

An article in Wednesday's Washington Post highlighted the Obama administration's efforts to grapple with rising unemployment in the midst of signs of an expanding economy. Both the administration and congress are going to have try to balance the need for action with concern over federal deficits.

Based on some pretty hard social science, there's one thing we know about recession-related unemployment: some people are going to die earlier than they would have because of it.

As British epidemiologist Michael Marmot summed up research on unemployment in Britain in his book The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity, "people who became unemployed had 20 percent higher mortality than those who remained employed at the same social class level."

Obviously, lots of factors could be at work here, including greater stress and anxiety, which are known to have health consequences. Poverty could play a part, but Marmot argues that

it is useful to distinguish the two senses of poverty: a lack of basic material conditions for life; and insufficient resources, private or public, to participate in society. The first is unlikely to be the sole explanation, as unemployed professionals, who might be expected to have some saving,s have worse health than those still employed in the same occupational social class. This is not to say that financial problems are irrelevant. Far from it. Financial strain appears to be the complaint most associated with worse mental health in the unemployed. I would ague that this is consistent with poverty in the second sense--inability to participate fully in society. Whether initially well-off, or poorly off, deterioration in economic circumstances will cause real hardship.

Add to the mix another known factor related to health: being involuntarily unemployed also reduces one's sense of autonomy and control over one's life. Taken together, loss of control and inability to fully participate in society are a poisonous mix.

Economist John Maynard Keynes famously commented that "in the long run we are all dead." For some of the unemployed, the long run is getting shorter.

ON THAT SUBJECT, Congress approved an extension of unemployment benefits yesterday. And while we're at it, here's a call for public jobs creation along the lines of the New Deal.

RAMPAGE. It was a terrible day at Ft. Hood.

IS CLIMATE CHANGE happening in the Senate? Maybe, but we're not there yet. Here's Coal Tattoo on the subject.

EXERCISE AND WEIGHT LOSS. There is a connection, but it's not all that simple.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

May Ceiling Cat be with you

Wu is a true believer.

Off and on lately, Goat Rope has been monitoring the progress (perhaps regress would be a better term) of the Conservative Bible Project, which is attempting to remove its "liberal bias."

(It might be easier with different deities.)

Anyhow, a friend was chasing down related links and came across yet another endeavor, the "lolcat Bible Translation Project," which attempts to translate the same into "kitty pidgin," i.e. the imagined language of cats.

Maybe I've been living under a rock, which is a separate issue, but this was new to me. I've seen some of the lolcat pictures but it never occurred to me that someone would try this. I can't say I've read the whole thing, but I did check out Genesis and the Sermon on the Mount.

Here are the first few lines of the creation story, in which Ceiling Cat makes the world:

Boreded Ceiling Cat makes the world.

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

The website also contains such items as proofs for the existence of Ceiling Cat.

El Cabrero is not officially sanctioning or recommending this version as canonical. However, the picture of Ceiling Cat making the world is worth a look.

Flying Spaghetti Monster, watch out!

MEANWHILE, Bigfoot fans are searching for Sasquatch in WV's Dolly Sods.

MISMEASURING THE ECONOMY. GDP (gross domestic product) can be a misleading measure, according to top economists.

ALL FRINGE, NO BENEFITS. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows the continuing erosion of employer-provided health insurance.

COAL CONCESSIONS. The Senate climate change bill has some, but it's unclear whether these will be enough to garner coal state support.e

SICKNESS UNTO DEATH. What would a day be without pondering Kierkegaard and spiritual despair?

HURTS SO GOOD. This item discusses how athletes can deal with the pain of exertion. I've tried some of these tricks and they seem to help.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DID THEY BELIEVE IT?

Raphael's School of Athens, courtesy of wikipedia.

(Note for first time visitors: The theme here lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.)

The American writer H.L. Mencken defined puritanism as "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Puritanism as a turn of mind has been around a lot longer than the dissenters from the Church of England in the 1600s.

It was a major factor in some schools of Greek philosophy, especially that of Socrates and Plato (judging by what we know of the former from the latter). Along with some other killjoys, these people criticized Homer and other poets and purveyors of Greek myth and tragedy for teaching immorality by portraying the gods as behaving badly.

They just didn't get it. As noted previously, several of these gods were at least in part personifications of natural forces: storms, the sea, wild animals, sexual desire, earthquakes, etc. And nature is not known for being moralistic. For that matter, the whole point of many myths is that humans should not try to overreach or act like gods lest they bring about their own destruction.

Socrates liked to torment lovers of myths and poetry by asking them logic-chopping questions and dismissing them if they had trouble answering...as if the whole point of art, song and story was not to speak to the conscious and unconscious and rational and irrational parts of the human psyche. And as if it was all taken literally.

Plato went farther than his teacher. In the Republic, he wanted to ban poets and only teach edifying state-approved stories to its citizens, something that has been the dream of tyrants through the ages.

Goat Rope verdict: there is arguably more enduring and useful wisdom in the Greek tragedies than the whole of Plato's corpus. Get over it, dudes, or drink the hemlock.

For many Greeks, however, there was little room for doubt. To experience awe over storms or fear over breaking oaths and mistreating hosts or guests was to experience Zeus. To experience desire was to experience Aphrodite. To cultivate the land was to honor Demeter and receive her gifts. To drink wine was to experience Dionysus. And so on.

Some of the other gods were derived from and represented human experiences, such as marriage, sickness and healing, exchanges, music and poetry, metal-working etc.

Athena, the main divine character of the Odyssey, is a special case. In that story (and to a lesser extent in the Iliad), she is experienced either openly or, more often, in disguise. Directly or indirectly, she is who/what restrains people from taking rash actions and who/what brings hope, stength and wisdom to people who were tired, forlorn or hopeless. Next time you get a boost when you need it, consider that an Athena moment.

All these examples are derived just from daily life, not counting sacred festivals or holidays. All religions make sense from the inside, and Greek religion was no exception.

ILLUSIONS OF WAR. Here's Krugman on what the war in Georgia might mean.

WAL-MART: EVERYDAY WORKER INTIMIDATION. Labor groups are urging the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether the retail giant broke any laws by telling employees the world would come to an end if they voted the wrong way.

HOME FORECLOSURES are up 55 percent from this time last year.

BAD BALLOON. Meanwhile, inflation is at its highest rate in 17 years.

VERY COOL HOT IDEA. Researchers think they've found a way to turn roads and parking lots into solar energy collectors.

IT'S OFFICIAL. Joggers live longer than people who don't exercise (most of the time).

IS THAT A BIGFOOT IN YOUR FREEZER or are you just happy to be here? Two searchers in Georgia claim to have found a dead one.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I DIDN'T MAKE THIS UP

Since the theme at Goat Rope this week has been religion in America, I can't think of a better way to end it than with an example of a sign of the times.

As you may have noticed, apocalyptic religion is big these days. Millions of Americans have read the Left Behind series and other such stuff and await the Rapture, which some believe to be an event in which Christians of the preferred variety will physically disappear and be snatched up to heaven before things go really south for everyone else.

This is an odd religious idea totally absent from historical Christianity--Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant. It was promoted by John Nelson Darby in the 1830s and caught on among some literalists. In the early 1900s, it gained a mass audience with the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible. This version of eschatology appeared in its marginal notes, so it looked like it was "in the Bible." It really became popular with the publication of Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth (a frequently revised work) in the 1970s. (Search the Goat Rope archives for "apocalyptic religion" for more.)

Anyhow, a new website--http://www.youvebeenleftbehind.com/--allows people, for a modest $40 fee, to send email messages and key information to those who didn't make the team while you are bodily eating pie in the sky.

For a whole lot of people, this endlessly revised end time scenario is pretty much what religion is all about.

Houston, we have a problem...

RETHINKING THE "WAR ON TERROR." The RAND Corporation reports that policing, intelligence and policy are more effective in anti-terrorism efforts than brute military force.

CONFUSED BY FINANCIAL JARGON? This devil's dictionary may help.

700 YEARS AFTER THE FACT, the Italian city of Florence is still trying to make up for exiling Dante.

TAKE YOUR EXERCISE PILL. It may actually work.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS FROM WV. The Children's Health Insurance Program will expand health coverage to children living in households earning up to 250 percent of the federal poverty level. It was 220 previously. Lots of groups, including AFSC, have supported this.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ON BEING CAREFUL WITH PRAYER

Eos chasing Tithonus in happier times. Urn courtesy of wikipedia.

It is pretty well established that one should be careful in what one asks for when petitioning the gods for a favor. One should also be specific.

Take the case of Tithonus in Greek mythology. He was the lover of Eos or Dawn. Eos asked Zeus to grant him immortality, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth. He kept getting older and older but wasn't able to die. According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,

... when the first strands of gray hair started growing
from his beautiful head and his noble chin,
then the Lady Eos stopped coming to his bed.
But she nourished him, keeping him in her palace,
with grain and ambrosia. And she gave him beautiful clothes.
But when hateful old age was pressing hard on him, with all its might,
and he couldn’t move his limbs, much less lift them up,
then...she thought up this plan, a very good one indeed:
she put him in her chamber, and she closed the shining doors over him.
From there his voice pours out—it seems never to end—and he has no strength at all, the kind he used to have in his limbs when they could still bend.

In another version, he shrivels up and turns into a cicada who constantly begs for death.

Doh! I hate it when that happens.

When El Cabrero was younger, I petitioned the gods to let me be a writer. The petition was granted, sort of. I've written a lot of stuff, some of which may have been marginally useful in a few smallish campaigns but none of which is particularly memorable.

I should have been more specific....something like "Let me be as good a writer as Melville in his prime but more commercially successful and with a much less miserable personal and family life than he had...Oh, yeah, and let some of it make a difference."

That would have been awesome.

YOU SOO ALREADY KNEW THIS. The economy is like bad or something.

VENGEANCE IS WHOSE? Jared Diamond, author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel reflects on the drive for revenge in this New Yorker article.

FALLEN IDOL. The International Monetary Fund, which Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research calls a "creditors cartel," has seen better days...which might not be such a bad thing. Economist Jeffrey Sachs is quoted in this piece as saying that "the IMF has become the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country."

HUNGRY PLANET. This item from The Nation discusses the global food crisis.

GET MOVING. Exercise, dammit.

URGENT FROZEN COLOSSAL SQUID UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

INTRODUCING THE HILLBILLY HEALTH CLUB, AND LOTS MORE

At this time of year, lots of people join gyms. El Cabrero is all set to cash in on this trend. I hereby announce the founding of the Hillbilly Health Club. It's all right there in the perty picture.

It has the latest in exercise equipment--including sledge hammer, wedge, splitting maul, wheel barrow and sycamore stumps--and offers a comprehensive exercise program with the following elements:

*Resistance. Splitting and chopping wood. Sycamore is all about resistance.

*Flexibility. Bend over, pick up the split wood, and put it in the wheel barrow. If you are anything like El Cabrero, this can be the hardest part, especially after an hour or so of splitting and chopping.

*Aerobics. Push the wheel barrow to the woodpile.

Holistic health--Appalachian style!

Annual memberships are now available, with special discounts to Goat Rope email subscribers. Ask about special family rates.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED. El Cabrero would like to round out the week of New Year by mentioning three 2007 books that are worth a look. Today's choice is Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her basic thesis is that economic, political, and ideological elites have taken advantage of human-made and natural disasters to impose an extreme version of unregulated capitalism on populations that would otherwise have rejected it.

Klein does an interesting job of weaving the history of shock therapy and other efforts at mind control with the rise of the Chicago School of economics as represented by Milton Friedman until his recent death. Friedman opposed unions, social programs, public education, business regulations, safety laws, etc. in the name of the "free" market.

He acknowledged that most people would find this distasteful, and said that

only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Friedman got the chance to put his ideas into action when General August Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile in 1973 and imposed a military dictatorship. Then, with the help of mass murder, repression, and torture, he was able to advise the regime on how to impose the blessings of the "free" market.

Klein's book looks at several examples of disaster capitalism in the U.S. and around the world. Katrina was a classic case in point, as was the development of Iraq's "Emerald City" as a free market utopia under the direction of Friedman disciple Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq. Both of those went over real well...

It's interesting that in WV, some advocates of "Unleashing Capitalism" have tried to create a climate of panic and crisis in the hopes of pushing through a political agenda which includes attacks on union membership, worker safety rules, etc.

SAD NEWS from Kenya.

PUBLIC OPINION ON IRAQ is at odds with the views of many presidential candidates, according to this item.

THE STATE OF THE NATION in the Bush years is the subject of this New Year's Eve NY Times editorial.

LABOR UNDER ATTACK. Here is some info on the anti-union bias of the Bush Labor Department.

TWO YEARS AFTER SAGO, mine safety is still an issue. As Ken Ward reports in today's Gazette, 67 US miners have died since that disaster.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BODIES, BUDDHISM, BIG BOX RETAIL STORES, PIRANAS, AND MASSEY

Caption: Seamus McGoogle practices tiger style.

Yesterday's post on the late great Bruce Lee--may he rest in activity--got me thinking about the best lessons I learned from a life in the martial arts.

Here's a basic one: live in your body.

It's sad these days to see that so many people--especially children and young people--don't.

I remember times when perfectly healthy kids were absorbed playing basketball or even martial arts games on a video game when they could easily have been doing the real thing. That's become an all too common post-modern moment.

I remember a healthy neighbor boy whose sole activity consisted of riding a four wheeler...

Not living in one's body exacts a high social cost in terms of obesity, illness, bad health, mental problems, and general well being. The way our society approaches sports and activity does a great disservice to many people: sports and physical activity are too often things you watch rather than do or are only done by a few people for a few years.

The first martial arts legend I learned as a kid went something like this...

The arts that were eventually known as karate and "kung fu" (not a good term but a popular one) trace themselves to Buddhist monks who both sought enlightenment and were committed to nonviolence.

It was said that Bodhidharma, the Indian monk who is credited with bringing Chan (Japanese "Zen") Buddhism to China, settled at the famous Shaolin Temple and began to teach. The other monks, however were too physically weak to make any progress.

Zen teaching is opposed to dualistic thinking. The world of suffering (samsara) and the state of enlightment (nirvana) were not to be thought of as separate from each other. Much less body and mind...

Bodhidharma (known in China as Ta Mo and in Japan as Daruma) believed that one could not make spiritual progress if the body was neglected. He began teaching a series of exercises that eventually the monks would use to defend themselves without weapons on their travels.

That was legend; it probably didn't happen quite that way, but the point is valid: we should try to use and develop body and mind throughout the course of a lifetime.

That lesson was a keeper.

MAINE PASSES BIG BOX STORE LEGISLATION. This is from the AFL-CIO blog:

Maine is the first state to take a stand against big-box stores like Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot that often swagger into a town, pushing out small businesses while harming the environment and sucking up municipal services. Gov. John Baldacci (D) last month signed into law the Informed Growth Act, which holds big-box corporations accountable and gives citizens a real voice in development decisions.

Specifically, the new law—which was strongly backed by working families and small businesses—requires developers of retail stores exceeding 75,000 square feet to conduct studies gauging a project’s impact on municipal services, the environment and local businesses. The proposed store can’t be approved if the studies find it is likely to cause a quantifiable “undue adverse impact” in any of these areas.

Although Maine is the first state to take this action, similar legislation has been introduced in six other states in the past two years. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that states such as Montana and New Jersey have or are considering similar adverse-impact laws. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) vetoed a big-box impact law last year.

LIKE MANY BULLIES, PIRANAS ARE WIMPS. That's the verdict of a recent study on the fish.

MASSEY SUIT. It looks like our dear friends at Massey Energy had a bad day yesterday, when a jury awarded Wheeling-Pitt $219 million in a case over a contract dispute.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED