Garlic!

I don't have a green thumb but I do my time in the garden. This year, ours is not terribly ambitious but it has been a pretty decent year so far. First came lettuce, arugula, radishes and spinach, then peas and the occasional hot pepper. Tomatoes are coming in now, along with an eggplant or two.

One crop I take a particular interest in is garlic, something I consider to be a welcome addition to almost any recipe, with the possible exceptions of breakfast cereal and deserts. We usually plant ours after the first frost but before the ground gets too hard. This time we did it on Christmas Day (the power was out so that provided our entertainment), putting the clove sections about finger deep and covering them with mulch from the goat barn.

Garlic is pretty low maintenance. In early summer, the plants develop bulbs or scapes that we cut off (they are edible). Then just wait until the leaves start turning brown and dig them up, being careful not to damage the bulbs.

This weekend I dug up our crop, which turned out pretty good. I'm hoping it will get us through most of the coming year. As for the rest of the crops, how's that rain coming?

STALLED. Two million jobless Americans have lost unemployment benefits due to congressional inaction.

ELIMINATE THE MIDDLE MAN. Here's a novel approach to global poverty.

WALTHER REUTHER. Any op-ed that favorably mentions a great West Virginian and labor leader has a place here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Support these troops

Fall view from the ridge.

Yesterday was Veteran's Day. No doubt many speeches were given extolling veterans for their service, which is only right. I wonder though if many of them dealt with problems such as this:

A research team at Harvard Medical School estimates 2,266 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance and thus had reduced access to care. That figure is more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died (911 as of Oct. 31) since the war began in 2001...

The Harvard group analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2009 Current Population Survey, which surveyed Americans about their insurance coverage and veteran status, and found that 1,461,615 veterans between the ages of 18 and 64 were uninsured in 2008. Veterans were only classified as uninsured if they neither had health insurance nor received ongoing care at Veterans Health Administration (VA) hospitals or clinics.

Typically, veterans in this situation, like millions of other Americans, are too poor to buy private insurance and too "rich" to qualify for public programs such as Medicaid. One good thing about proposed health care reform in Congress is a massive expansion of the Medicaid program and subsidies to help people buy insurance, although that would still leave some people out.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE. Here's more on the scarring effects of the recession on children.

STATE AID. This paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls on Congress to extend fiscal aid to states to avert major cuts in jobs and services.

SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE but not so much in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, according to a study that ranks several states using different criteria.

WORLD POVERTY. According to the United Nations, 2.7 billion people around the world survive on less than two dollars a day, while one billion live on less than a dollar a day. Here's more from Democracy Now.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH, DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU SAY. Here's a Gazette op-ed about how thuggery is suppressing free speech in coal controversies.

URGENT WOOD-EATING DEEP SEA CRAB UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FEAR AND TREMBLING

Caption: This man has been overcome with it.

This is Haint Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

(For the un-hillbilly, haint is Appalachian for that which haunts.)

Whatever haints may or may not be, one reason many people have believed in them over the ages is no doubt the feeling of fear or awe that sometimes strikes us in the apparent absence of an ordinary cause.

The 20th century German theologian Rudolph Otto referred to this feeling as the "mysterium tremendum." In his classic book The Idea of the Holy, he suggests that this feeling of awe lies at the basis of both religion and many superstitions:

The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at least it dies away and the soul resumes its 'profane', non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy.

This feeling can take many forms:

It has wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of--whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.

The biblical Book of Job has a great description of this unbidden feeling of awe or dread:

“Now a word was brought to me stealthily, And my ear received a whisper of it. Amid disquieting thoughts from the visions of the night, When deep sleep falls on men, Dread came upon me, and trembling, And made all my bones shake." (4:12-14)

Otto believed that earlier, more "primitive" manifestations of this feeling had a dark side and generated belief in ghosts and demons:

Its antecedent stage is 'daemonic dread' (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive offshoot, the 'dread of ghosts'. It first begins to stir in the feeling of 'something uncanny', 'eerie', or 'weird'. It is the feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the start-point for the entire religious development of history. 'Daemons' and 'gods' alike spring from this root, and all the products of 'mythological apperception' or 'fantasy' are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified.

From a purely psychological point of view, these unbidden feelings of awe and dread are the stuff of which haints are made.

POVERTY AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT is the theme of the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. One item of interest deals with the possibilities of micro-loan programs to alleviate poverty and improve health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa.

CHANGE TO WHAT? It's been two years or so since some unions split from the AFLCIO to form Change to Win. Here's an item from In These Times about what's changed, what hasn't and what might.

DEATH PENALTY. Yesterday's Supreme Court decision could mean a temporary moratorium on executions.

LATEST PRESS ON MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH includes this item from the Daily Mail about Malik Shabazz,one of the march's organizers, and this item from the Charleston Gazette about the decision of the Charleston NAACP not to support the march, a decision shared by several other predominantly African American groups in WV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED