I guess he wasn't just happy to be there

El Cabrero scrupulously combs the web daily in order to come up with hard hitting relevant information for you, Gentle Reader. Today I hit the jackpot.

According to this AP article, a gentleman from D'Iberville Mississippi was arrested at a grocery store after leaving the store with several items in his shorts which were unpaid for, including two bags of jumbo shrimp and a pork loin.

That in itself isn't particularly noteworthy. However, also included amongst these in-shorted items (I just made that word up) were two live lobsters.

Now, I'm no legal scholar but it seems to me that the shoplifting charge should not include the lobsters. There should be some kind of general understanding that would prevent people who put live lobsters with intact claws in their undergarments from being charged with a criminal offense. Rather, it should be assumed in such cases that such people had a pretty compelling reason to do so.

WHAT HE SAID. Here's Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz on what it would take to put Americans back to work.

SPEAKING OF WORK, here's a look at green jobs in the coalfields from Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo. Short version: there are some, but there could be lots more.

JOBS OR AUSTERITY? In times like these, you can't have both.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Who the cap fit

Russian Orthodox icon of Isaiah, by way of wikipedia.

Since this is Holy Week for many Christian communities, I thought I'd trot out a passage from Isaiah (10:1-3) and send it out to Congressman Paul Ryan.

Ryan, if you recall, is the Ayn Rand devotee who came up with the proposal to gut Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and other domestic programs to pay for more tax cuts for the rich in the name of deficit reduction.

Here goes:

Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
and robbing the fatherless.
What will you do on the day of reckoning,
when disaster comes from afar?

I don' think you'll find that in Atlas Shrugged. Oh yeah, and one more thing: the real Atlas is the working class.

GIRD UP THY LOINS is biblical for "get ready to rumble." Literally, I think it meant something like "put on your protective groin cup--things are going to get nasty." In any case, it's time to do that. Even though Ryan's plan may not fly, there's a good chance his allies are going to try to push it through the back door during the upcoming vote on raising the debt ceiling.

They will probably try to push through a global spending cap, which would do all the same nasty things and leave out all the real things that need to be done. Here are some good talking points against this idea. Please take a look and start talking.

GETTING READY FOR GREEN. Here's an item from Forbes about a West Virginia based company that is getting ready for the solar boom.

EASTER BUNNIES AND MORE can be found in the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

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

This could explain a thing or two

A new genetic and statistical study suggests that some early humans and Neanderthals mated after all, something that had previously been doubted. The New York Times reports that the team conducting research into the Neanderthal genome concluded that "concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals."

GOING LOCAL. Re-booting local economies could make us less lonely.

A FALSE CHOICE. AFLCIO president Rich Trumka told attendees at a Green Jobs/Good Jobs conference that we need both now.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Sancho and Hamlet

Cervantes.

By an odd coincidence, two giants who divided the literary firmament in the early modern period died on exactly the same day (April 23 1616). I'm referring to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and William Shakespeare.

Cervantes, born in 1547, was the older. Shakespeare's birth date is unknown but he was baptised in 1564, most likely soon after birth. Cervantes seemed to have the rougher road in life, being on occasion a soldier, captive of pirates, tax collector and prisoner.

Both have one thing in common, aside from being among the greatest writers and artists of all time. Their work embodied the kind of self consciousness that scholar Jacques Barzun described as a characteristic of the modern era. Yesterday's post looked at an artistic example of this in Velasquez' painting Las Meninas, in which he inserted himself.

In Cervantes' masterpiece, you can see this in the Second Part of Don Quixote, when the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance (aka the title character) and his trusty squire Sancho find out that they are literary characters in someone else's book--and they are none to happy about it.

In Hamlet, the something similar happens with the players visit Elsinore and Hamlet gives them instructions on acting. At one point in the play, there are (real) actors portraying actors who are portraying other people in a play within the play.

Those are just small examples of the things that make such works interesting and durable.

PLAN C. In the wake of Tuesday's election, a scaled-back version of health care reform may be the next option.

WHAT NEXT? Here is one of many takes on what this means for the Obama presidency.

HAITI. Here's more on the American Friends Service Committee's efforts to relieve suffering in the wake of the recent earthquake.

COAL. A new report predicts the decline Central Appalachian coal production. Here's all kinds of info on this from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo.

GREEN JOBS. West Virginia just got a $6 million federal grant intended to create 1850 of them.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Why we need health care reform

WV, like most of the US is swamped with health care problems.

Here are some state specific factoids about the state of health care (or the lack of it) in West Virginia from Health Care for American Now:

*Health insurance premiums for West Virginia working families have skyrocketed, increasing 75 percent from 2000 to 2007.

*For family health coverage in West Virginia during that time, the average annual combined premium for employers and employees rose from $6,844 to $11,970.

*The combined cost to employers and workers of health insurance for a West Virginia family of four is equal to 30 percent of the state’s median family income. Given current trends, that share will grow to 53 percent in 2016.

*The cost of employer-sponsored health insurance in West Virginia is growing at an annual rate of 8.5 percent, compared with a 1.8 percent growth rate for income.

*About 140,000 non-elderly adults in West Virginia hold jobs that don’t offer health insurance benefits. That comprises 61 percent of all non-elderly uninsured
people.

*In West Virginia 13.8 percent of working adults reported spending 20 percent or more of their income on out-of-pocket health care expenses in 2004, a 48.4 percent increase from three years earlier.

*Between 2000 and 2007, the median earnings of West Virginia workers increased 19 percent, from $19,876 to $23,599. During that time health insurance premiums for West Virginia working families rose four times faster than median earnings.

*In West Virginia 249,384 were uninsured in 2007.

*The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 7.5 percent of West Virginia’s labor force was unemployed in April 2009.

*A recent report estimated that 62 percent of bankruptcies were directly related to medical bills; in West Virginia there were 5,133 non-business bankruptcies in 2008.

(Note: footnotes removed from the original document.)

Those are admittedly just WV numbers, but while things may be a little different here it's pretty much the same story all over the country.

Houston, we have a problem...

ON THAT NOTE, here's more on the strong support Americans have shown for a public option in health care reform.

GETTING ON THE BUS. El Cabrero and amigos will be attending what we hope will be a major rally for health care in DC that leaves at midnight. I hear that five buses will be going from WV alone.

GREEN JOBS are a growing sector of the economy.

"SYNTHETIC TREES" may be a way of capturing atmospheric carbon.

FAMILY FRIENDLY? Mother's Day and Father's Day have come and gone while the US lags behind other industrialized nations in paid family leave for parents.

A GREEK IDEA: call no one happy until they have died.

STRANGE DAYS in the coalfields.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on junk food.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

No arrow from a bow

The murder of Aegisthus by Orestes. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Greek tragedies are about as far removed as you can get from the standard modern fare of action movies, where good guys fight bad guys and usually win. In tragedies, the good guys are often flawed and the bad ones often have their reasons.

In tragedies, people are sometimes just overwhelmed and destroyed by circumstances or are caught up in a chain of events they don't understand or control. Sometimes, the harder protagonists try to avoid some awful outcome the more surely they bring it about.

And sometimes they are forced to do things they don't want to do or are caught up in situations where they are confronted with competing ethical and religious claims that can't possibly be reconciled.

That kind of dilemma characterizes the plays Goat Rope is looking at these days, the Orestes trilogy of Aeschylus. Agamemnon in the play of the same name has a sacred duty to lead an army to Troy to punish the sacrilege of Paris in violating xenia or hospitality by abducting Helen of Troy. All the leaders of Greece had sworn a holy oath to uphold the marriage and punish anyone who defiled it. If he doesn't fulfill this sacred duty, he and everyone else will suffer terribly.

But the goddess Artemis, protectress of defenseless things, foresees the slaughter of the innocent when Troy is destroyed. She withholds winds unless and until Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia. As Martha Nussbaum summarizes, "If Agamemnon does not fulfill Artemis's condition, everyone, including Iphigenia, will die." No easy way out. He does and seals his fate.

In the second part of the trilogy, The Libation Bearers, his son Orestes is under an oracle by the god Apollo that requires him to slay his mother and her lover Aegisthus in revenge for their murder of Agamemnon. If he refused, "no arrow from a bow could touch such peaks of agony" that he would undergo. No easy way out.

While most of us in a normal week are not required by deities to sacrifice or murder family members, that kind of tragic conflict between competing valid but irreconcilable claims--usually on a less gory scale--is all too common in public and private life.

Most of us don't like to think about that kind of thing or imagine that there's always some easy escape. The ancient Athenians had the courage to make it the cornerstone of their greatest public works of art.

WHO'DA THUNK IT? Urban farming might become a career path.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, cooperation is growing between the labor and environmental movements.

WHAT HE SAID. Here's Dean Baker on health care reform and the return of Harry and Louise.

A NOVEL WAY TO COPE WITH THE RECESSION: professional wrestling!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

"One sorrow for today, another for tomorrow"

The reunion of Orestes and Electra. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

"What human soul can pass through life
untouched by suffering to the end?
Oh, no, there's none.
One sorrow for today, another for tomorrow, comes."

Goat Rope's series on Greek tragedy continues. You'll also find links and comments about current events below. At this point, we're on The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus, the second part of the only surviving tragic trilogy. the theme of the trilogy is the emergence of democracy and the rule of law after a long series of violent events.

The first part of the trilogy, the Agamemnon, was discussed last week. In it, the title character who led Greek forces in the Trojan war is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus on his return. This is an act of vengeance for Agamemnon's sacrificing of his daughter Iphigenia ten years earlier at the command of Artemis to gain winds for the Trojan expedition. The couple then establish a tyranny in Argos.

The Libation Bearers is the next chapter in a long series of acts of violence. In it, Orestes, son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, returns in secret after years of exile. He has come with his friend Plyades at the command of the god Apollo, who has ordered him to kill Agamemnon's murderers or face terrible punishments himself.

He places a lock of his hair on the grave of Agamemnon then hides as a group of women approaches. They are led by his sister Electra, who was ordered by her mother to offer libations at the grave placate the spirit of Agamemnon. Clytemnestra has been suffering from bad dreams and an uneasy conscience since the murder.

Electra, who has suffered mistreatment at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, is reunited with Orestes at the graveside. Together they plot revenge, with the eager support of the chorus. He pretends to be a pilgrim coming with news of his own death and knocks at the door of the palace.

Orestes asks to see Aegisthus to bring the news and quickly kills him. The climax of the play is the confrontation of Orestes and Clytemnestra, who has dreamed of giving birth to a serpent who kills her. The serpent was Orestes.

As soon as the deed is done, Orestes is haunted and driven to madness by the Furies, dark underworld goddesses who punish blood guilt. As the play closes, there seems to be no end in sight for the curse upon this family. The last words of the chorus are:

Oh, when shall it finish, when shall it sate--
lie down to sleep--this fury bound hate?

KEEP IT UP. Voices are already calling for the Obama administration to cease recovery efforts. Paul Krugman thinks that would be a very bad idea.

THEN AND NOW. Here's an op-ed/book review by yours truly from yesterday's Sunday Gazette-Mail.

HEALTH CARE. Here's why we need a public option.

GREEN JOBS. Here's Ken Ward in Coal Tattoo discussing green jobs for the coalfields.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

"Power newly won is always harsh"

Your kindness to the human race has earned you this.
A god who would not bow to the gods' anger--you,
Transgressing right, gave privileges to mortal men.
For that you shall keep watch upon this bitter rock,
Standing upright, unsleeping, never bowed in rest.
And many groans and cries of pain shall come from you,
All useless; for the heart of Zeus is hard to appease.
Power newly won is always harsh.

Those words are spoken by the metal working god Hephaestus at the beginning of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, the first and only surviving work of a tragic trilogy.

The Titan who gave humans the gift of fire and many others was brought to a remote spot in the land of the Scythians by Strength and Violence, the unquestioning agents of the new Olympian order. The lame Hephaestus regrets his task of fastening the bonds but is afraid to violate the orders of the new ruler of the cosmos.

In Greek mythology, the early days of the universe were scenes of violent struggle. Zeus has come to power in a bloody revolution against the old order and, like many in such situations, he is all too ready to use violence to crush any challenges to his rule.

Prometheus, whose name means foresight, saw it coming:

...I know exactly every thing
That is to be; no torment will come unforeseen.
My appointed fate I must endure as best I can,
Knowing the power of Necessity is irresistible.
...For bestowing gifts upon mankind
I am harnessed in this torturing clamp. For I am he
Who hunted out the source of fire, and stole it, packed
In pith of a dry fennel-stalk. And fire has proved
For men a teacher in every art, their grand resource....

Fire was not his only benefit:

...What I did
For mortals in their misery, hear now. At first
Mindless, I gave them mind and reason. --What I say
Is not in censure of mankind, but showing you
How all my gifts to them were guided by goodwill.--
In those days they had eyes, but sight was meaningless;
Heard sounds, but could not listen; all their length of life
They passed like shapes in dreams, confused and purposeless.

He taught humans to use tools and build houses and ships, measure the seasons, do arithmetic, domesticate animals, use medicinal herbs, interpret prophecies and dreams, use minerals and more. Zeus, on the other hand, was scornful of humans and may have wished to see them wiped out and replaced by a new model.

In his agony, Prometheus is visited by the Titan Oceanus and his daughters, who form a sympathetic chorus. He has a hostile interview with Hermes, messenger of Zeus. And he meets with Io, the unfortunate woman courted by Zeus who was turned into a cow by the jealous Hera and tormented by a gadfly.

Prometheus reluctantly relates to Io the course of her future wanderings and suffering, but, like him, she is destined to eventually be released from punishment. And one of her descendants, the future Heracles, is destined to free him from bondage.

It may sound like this is a story with a simple good guy (Prometheus) and a bad guy (Zeus), but the tragic spirit is too deep for that . Aeschylus is going after something else. About which more tomorrow.

ON THE BRIGHT (GREEN) SIDE, here's a nice item from CNN about how the Veteran's Conservation Corps is helping returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan with green jobs and a healing environment.

THE FUNCTIONS OF POVERTY. In case you missed yesterday's link to a great Washington Post story on how expensive it is to be poor, here it is again. That article reminded me of this classic essay in sociology by Herbert Gans titled The Uses of Poverty: the Poor Pay All.

DIRTY POOL. Here's a look at how employers have intensified their fight against union organizing in recent years.

IT'S WHAT WE DON'T KNOW that really bugs us.

EXTREME MAMMAL UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hobbits

This week at Goat Rope, El Cabrero is fessing up to being a Tolkien dork. It is my opinion that, far from being just escapist fantasy, The Lord of the Rings has some pretty practical applications for those struggling for social justice.

Here's one for today. In contrast to epics like the Iliad or the Aeneid, in which the big dogs get most of the airspace, with Tolkien a decisive role is played by the (literally) little people or hobbits.

These are often dismissively referred to in the books as "halfings" and often are not considered worthy of serious attention by the apparently more significant (i.e. bigger and louder) characters. But without them, all would have been lost.

It's yet another riff on the ancient theme in myths, folklore and religion that, as the psalm put it, the stone that the builders refused has become the cornerstone.

And it's a good reminder that one doesn't have to be a politician or the head of some major organization to make a difference. Ordinary people at the grassroots level can have far more power and influence than anyone expects (including themselves).

THE COLOR OF JOBLESSNESS. Unemployment is hitting college-educated African Americans much harder than others with similar levels of educational attainment.

GREEN BOTH WAYS. Investing in green jobs pays of in more ways than one, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

MOVING MOUNTAINS. Here's a Newsweek interview with an award-winning anti-mountaintop removal activist.

URGENT DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Caught in another tale

Jacob practicing a little judo with the angel. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The official Goat Rope definition of a great story is that it is something you can find as well as lose yourself in.

(Sorry about ending that sentence with a preposition; that's a bad thing to end one with.)

The thing a about a great story, whether it's from the classics or folklore or something new is that it can sometimes illuminate situations in real life. Sometimes it's like you're not just reading literature, you're incorporating or enacting it or experiencing aspects of certain stories in real life.

After having spent several years sparring with various bureaucracies and their irrational policies, I feel like I haven't just read Kafka's work--I've lived it. In my more paranoid moments, I sometimes wonder whether the people who make up some of those rules are Kafka fans...

Similarly, when I'm trying to persuade people to work together to change something, I feel like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence and trying to get the other kids to do it. Enduring the worst of the Bush years was kind of like living in Oran during the plague in Camus' novel of the same title. Etc.

Sometimes, stories seem to bleed over into life easily and spontaneously. In other cases, we have to grapple with them like Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis. He held on for dear life as daylight approached and said "I will not let go until you bless me."

I think I just did the story thing again. Anyhow, the point is, it's often worth the struggle.

UNEMPLOYED AND UNCOVERED. Millions of unemployed workers aren't eligible for benefits under many state programs, but there are options from the stimulus package to expand and modernize coverage. This is something I've been working with folks on in WV. The state's unemployment rate went up again in March.

SPEAKING OF EMPLOYMENT, demand for green collar job training is growing.

STATE BUDGET CUTS could delay economic recovery.

RELIGION. Here's E.J. Dionne on the future of Christianity.

IMMIGRATION. The nation's two largest labor federations, the AFLCIO and Change to Win, have reached agreement on supporting comprehensive immigration reform.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I didn't know there was an essay contest

El Cabrero is looking back lately on 20 years this month of working on economic justice issues in WV for the American Friends Service Committee.

(Did you notice that there were five prepositional phrases in that sentence? That can't be right...My bad.)

As I mentioned yesterday, it all started by seeing a want ad for the kind of job I'd dreamed of being able to do. I was a definite long shot but, being kind of desperate, I decided to take a chance by sending in a letter of inquiry and asking for an application.

As they say in Vermont, Jeezum Crow! After a few days I got this package in the mail that contained more hard essay questions than the comprehensive sociology exam I would later take in graduate school. I didn't keep a copy of the original list, but it kind of reminded me of the questions they ask on beauty pageants, only harder and with more social content.

Lucky for me, there was no swimsuit or talent component.

I'm not sure they do that any more, but it probably served the purpose of weeding out people who weren't serious--or, in my case, desperate. I stuck in a few copies of op-eds I'd written on social justice issues, crossed myself, and dropped it in the mail.

If memory serves, I also had to get people who knew me to send in supporting documents. Needless to say, the payback was hell...

The essay contest was just a warm up for the interview I was excited to get. There was a whole roomful of people, many from outside of West Virginia. I had talked myself out of jobs during interviews on at least one major occasion but decided to be honest anyway.

It got really dicey when someone asked what the biggest influence on my life was. I told the truth that it was probably the years I'd spent studying the martial arts. It was kind of like the part in the Alice's Restaurant song where they all scooted away from me on the Group W bench. But, with a little help from a friendly interviewer, I was able to establish that these arts were practiced for reasons of cultivation and discipline rather than violence.

I also went out on a limb in talking about how things that may work in other places might not fly in Appalachia. The same interviewer, an African-American woman who grew up in Logan County, kept laughing and shaking her head, saying "I've been telling these people the same thing for years." We'd later become close friends.

I left the interview thinking I'd probably blown it, but, lo and behold, they made the offer.

Then the real fun began...

CALL ME A PSYCHIC, but I predict a genuine WV ruling class hissy fit over this.

GREEN JOBS--what are they?

BUDGET. President Obama presented his budget priorities last night. Earlier in the day, a number of WV groups including AFSC tried to make some noise in support of it.

URGENT TRICERATOPS UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Scour the anchor

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Perhaps the Gentle Reader has noticed that people who are actively engaged in doing productive things tend to be less quarrelsome that those who aren't.

El Cabrero came across a similar sentiment in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. When Franklin was working with a group of men on defensive preparations during the war between England and France in the 1750s, he noticed

...that, when men are employed, they are best content'd; for on the days they worked they were good-natur'd and cheerful, and, with the consciousness of having done a good day's work, spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome, finding fault with the pork, the bread, etc., and in continual ill-humour, which put me in mind of a sea-captain, whose rule it was to keep his men constantly at work; and, when his mate once told him that they had done every thing, and there was nothing further to employ them about, "Oh," says he, "make them scour the anchor."

GETTING IT RIGHT. Can we avoid the Mother of All Depressions? Can we make instead the Second Cousin of All Recessions? Only if we do just about everything right.

LABOR GOES GREEN. Here's a post from the AFLCIO blog on green jobs and good jobs.

ON THE SUBJECT OF READING CLASSICS, here's a cute item.

SPEAKING OF A CLASSIC, here's Nobel winning economist Amartya Sen's take on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments.

DARWIN AND LINCOLN, not necessarily in that order, are the subjects of David Gopnik's Angels and Ages. Here's an interview with the author.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A reasonable creature

They do eat other fish, after all.

There are plenty of amusing interludes in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, but one of my favorites has to do with his resolution as a young man to become a vegetarian.

He kept to his resolve pretty well for a good stretch, until he was on a boat journey from Boston when people began catching cod.

...Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I consider'd...the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter.

The problem was, those cod looked and smelled pretty good as they were being cooked. While he considered his vegetarianism as reasonable, there was this little issue:

...I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.

Here's the punchline:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Roger that.

HEALTH CARE NOW? Bring it on.

GREEN JOBS, good jobs.

MORE FUN WITH THE SUPREMES. Here's the Washington Post on the Massey Energy/Don Blankenship/Brent Benjamin/WV Supreme Court saga now before the US Supreme Court.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Alive or dead?

Photo credit: La Cabra.

El Cabrero tries not to have too many pet peeves. But some just keep peeving away.

One of my biggest has to do with the subject of planning, especially in the context of working on social justice issues. I'm not opposed to the idea of planning or even the practice of it. It's just that life is full of random and unexpected events that we can't predict in advance.

As I've ranted here before, we are not all that great at knowing the future (ditto the present and the past) and we don't control other people and institutions (and have some self-control issues as well).

In the martial arts, a good practitioner often has no idea what he or she will do 30 seconds into a fight. You may have some general ideas or preliminary plans but in practice what you do should be a function of what your opponent does.

The best chance we have of winning at many things is to pay attention and act in accordance with the situation in the moment. This means we being flexible. As Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching:

A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.

The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.

In yesterday's post I mentioned Laurence Gonzales' book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. In the context of making it through extreme situations, he writes that:

...Rigid people are dangerous people. Survival is adaptation, and adaptation is change, but it is change based on a true reading of the environment...

Those who avoid accidents are those who see the world clearly, see it changing, and change their behavior accordingly. This will not save everyone from everything. Nothing will. But it will hep a great deal in most situations.

WILL IT WORK? The Energy Department is trying to bury carbon. It's not the whole answer but it would be kind of nice if it worked.

GOOD GREEN JOBS? At some point, maybe.

THE WHEEL TURNS. The EPA may be considering reversing some of Bush's coal policies, which essentially involved letting coal companies do whatever they wanted to.

LIVING DANGEROUSLY. The young and uninsured do just that.

BABOONS MAYBE, BUT PIGEONS? Some research suggest they may be smarter than we thought.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Shoshin

Zen master Suzuki Roshi made the concept "beginner's mind" a common phrase in the US. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

There are a lot of great Japanese words that don't translate well directly into English. One that I like a lot is "shoshin," which literally kind of means "first mind" but is usually translated as "beginner's mind."

The word was made famous by Zen master Shunryu Suzuki's book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, where he said

If your mind is empty, it is ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

The importance of shoshin is another lesson that got drummed into my head and other body parts over decades of practicing the martial arts and of sparring.

In training, some of the toughest and most dangerous people to spar with are not experienced martial artists--they are new people who walk in off the street. You kind of know what to expect from people who have been training a while--there are conventions everywhere, after all. But some of these new people would do wild and crazy things that would never have occurred to me. They can really catch you by surprise--thanks to having a beginner's mind.

I've often found that I actually fought better after I'd stopped training for a while and then went back. This was because the ties of old habits got weaker in the meantime and I wasn't as stuck in old ruts. Beginner's mind again.

Sometimes the Spousal Unit, La Cabra, will attack me with totally random kicks, punches and throws that look so bizarre that I can't defend against them because I don't recognize them as legitimate techniques. Ditto beginner's mind.

It's really easier to fight somebody when you know what they're going to do because they are creatures of habit. And it's easier for you to lose if you always fight the same way. The advantage of sparring with lots of good fighters is that they will continually force you to adapt and improve, provided you don't give up.

I think people who work for social justice could benefit from trying to keep a beginner's mind and approach each situation with a fresh start, even if it's just another chapter in a long drawn-out struggle. It's easy to defeat, dismiss, and label people and groups that get stuck in the same old rut.

As Henry David Thoreau put it in Walden,

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves….The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

A GOOD DEED FOR TODAY. Call your senators toll-free at 1-800-473-6711 and urge them to support President Obama's economic recovery proposal and not to make substantial cuts in programs that could help put the country back to work. The number is provided by the American Friends Service Committee.

WHAT HE SAID. Here's Paul Krugman talking sense on the economic recovery package.

THE RECESSION AND THE ELDERLY. It's hitting pretty hard, according to his issue brief from the Economic Policy Institute.

THE CHANGING FACE OF GREEN. Here's an interview with Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Adding on

The human race should have learned by the end of the 20th century that goats are a pain in the tuchis.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I've decided to start making a list of Things The Human Race Should Have Figured Out By the End of the Twentieth Century.

A Goat Rope email subscriber sent in the following contribution:

*that violently attacking your enemies to “teach them a lesson” does not make you safer, does not cause them to fold their hands and desist in attacking you, and while it does cause some people to admire you, these are the people you don’t want to turn your back on.

*that giving money and tax breaks to the rich does not lift all boats and increase the size of the pie, and the only thing trickling down smells bad.

Here's my latest item:

*The excessive intermingling of government and religion doesn't generally lead to better government but it does lead to worse religion.

Note: Sorry, this post came out late due to a typo. My bad.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE of the economic mess, many states are questioning the mania for building more prisons and filling them as rapidly as possible.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. More Americans are skipping needed prescriptions as the economy tanks.

WATER, WATER (NOT) EVERYWHERE. Here are some thoughts on the new oil.

TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON which is starting about two days earlier as the climate changes.

A GREEN COLLAR ECONOMY is already taking root in some surprising places.

TRICKSY INDONESIAN HOBBITS may not have been human, recent skull research suggests.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: YO NO SE

Bounce back

Japanese Daruma doll. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Lately, the theme at Goat Rope has been Buddhist lore, although you will also find links and comments about current events.

For the last week or so, the focus has been on the legendary figure of Bodhidharma or Daruma, the monk who is credited with bringing the Zen tradition from India to China. He is also associated with the founding of the martial arts of Shaolin kung fu and karate.

If you're familiar with the legends about this person (see previous posts), it's clear that he's a pretty formidable character and perhaps not someone you would ordinarily invite to a party or to Thanksgiving dinner.

It is a somewhat surprising fact of cultural history that the figure (literally) of Daruma would occupy a central place in Japanese popular culture, but there you have it. This wild monk has become a beloved figure not just in works of high arts, such as calligraphy, painting and sculpture, but as a toy, spinning top, fortune telling device, good luck charm, as a figure on kites, etc.

It is a common custom for someone who wants something to happen to buy a little Daruma doll like the one pictured above and color in one eye when trying to accomplish something. Once it happens, the other eye is colored it.

One common figure is the okiagari Daruma, a little egg-shaped figure with a weight in the bottom. When you push him over, he bounces right back, a good symbol of the Buddhist virtue of equanimity. There's a popular Japanese saying that expresses the idea behind it: "seven falls, eight rises." (That's pretty much how judo is learned, by the way.)

In other words, one good way of responding to adversity is to keep on getting up.

That's kinda Zen.

RECESSION ON THE MIND. Here's an item on the psychological effects of hard times.

A GREEN STIMULUS might look like this.

ARACOMA MINE FIRE CASE. The widows of two miners who died at the Aracoma mine fire in Logan County WV in 2006 have opposed a plea deal which would keep prosecutors from taking the case higher up the Massey Energy corporate ladder.

ET, PHONE HOME. Here are the best bets for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Howling ghosts

It is the official position of Goat Rope that the coolest album of the 1990s was Counting Crows' "August and Everything After." And one of the coolest songs was "Mr. Jones."

One line from that song expresses a wish of mine: "I wanna be Bob Dylan..." Or at least I'd like to be able to use words as well or as wildly as he can. As I heard Arlo Guthrie say in a concert once, Dylan seems to fish for songs upstream from everybody else, which is why he catches so many of them.

Here's a random sample of a Dylan line, from "Visions of Johanna:"

The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.

I have no idea what that means but I wish that just once in my life I could come up with a sentence that cool.

ANOTHER CASUALTY of the recession for many Americans may be access to higher education.

STATE OF THE STATES: not good.

MORE PARTING SHOTS FROM THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION: easing rules on mountaintop removal mining.

GOING GREEN. The stimulus package being developed for next year includes a green component.

URGENT TOOTHLESS FLYING DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Story time

These dogs are arguing about politics.

El Cabrero's late father, the bad joke magnet, used to tell one about a rural resident who called the sheriff's department because there were 20 dogs carrying on in his yard.

"Are they mad?," the dispatcher asked.

"Well, 18 of 'em seem pretty upset."

No matter what happens tomorrow, some dogs are going to be upset. And one thing that will undoubtedly happen is that the post-mortem explanation industry will kick into gear to explain WHY THINGS HAPPENED THE WAY THEY DID. Most of them will be absolutely convinced of the validity of their explanation.

We can't really help it. Ever since people have been able to talk, they have made up explanations or stories--mythological, logical or otherwise--to explain things. We are driven to come up with a narrative or story that sounds good and connects events together in a way that makes sense.

That is to say, we torture the data until it confesses.

The problem is that while we're addicted to our narratives, there is absolutely no necessary connection between our explanations and what really happened.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, calls this the narrative fallacy, which

is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event.

Once again, a little skepticism is called for, not only about the stories we hear from others but our own as well.

That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

BY THE NUMBERS, here's a look at the current US economy, courtesy of the Economic Policy Institute.

WATER could be the new oil.

A GREEN NEW DEAL? Why not?

WHY DO WE BELIEVE in weird stuff?

GEORGE ORWELL gets a tip of the hat here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED