Shoutout to a friend

I just finished reading an entertaining book by a friend of mine, Julian Martin. Julian, a native West Virginian unto the generations, has had an interesting life. He served in the Air Force, studied engineering at WVU, and was WV's first Peace Corps volunteer who wound up teaching for two years in Nigeria.

On returning, he taught for several years at Duvall High School in Lincoln County and has taken his lumps, sometimes literally, for social justice.

The book in question is Imagonna: Peace Corps Memories. More from Amazon here.

Imagonna, by the way, is a hillbilly term Julian's African students didn't understand. It means "I am going to..."

BAD IDEA. Here's why Senator Manchin should reconsider his health care reform delay idea.

FROM THE SAME FOLKS, food stamp or SNAP cuts scheduled for Nov. 1 will affect 48 million Americans and 350,000 West Virginians.

CHICKEN LITTLES are called out here by Krugman.

WEIRD CRITTERS TO LOOK AT here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This doesn't happen every day...

...but I'm with Bill O'Reilly on Republican efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act. There's more here about how the efforts might backfire. And E.J. Dionne makes a great point here as well: the real fear on the right isn't the failure of  "Obamacare"--the real fear is that it will succeed.

THE OTHER BAD THING about the last two days is the vote in the US House to cut food stamp benefits. Here's a look at what the program means to WV.

CRAZY? Paul Krugman here wonders about the sanity of certain factions.

A ROWDY RIFF ON RANDITE RANTINGS here.

A RINGING ENDORSEMENT for establishing a Future Fund in WV appeared in today's Huntington Herald-Dispatch.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Kant believe it

It's been a few days since I was struck by a news item from Russia, but I'm finally getting down to blogging about it. It seems that two young men there struck up a conversation about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that degenerated first into a fist fight and then into gun shots.

News reports did not specifically identify which aspect of the 18th century philosopher's work set off the quarrel.

I have a pet theory. It would be supremely ironic if the argument turned out to be over which of Kant's two main formulations of the ethical categorical imperative was best. Maybe it went down something like this:

Person 1: I believe that one should "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction."

Person 2: That's bull***t. One should "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."

Person 1: I got your end right here, you Bozo...

And so it goes. At least nobody was killed. All I can say is it's a good thing they weren't arguing about Nietzsche.

OVER COMING AN OBSESSION. How about that Pope, anyway?

SPEAKING OF WHOM, Francis would consider cutting food stamp benefits for poor Americans to be supremely tacky. Some friends of mine in WV made some noise about that yesterday.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED