Sweet talk

This week's Front Porch podcast is about sugar and its role in public health. Or rather, undermining public health.

Otherwise. a slow political weekend, huh?

Two for a Tuesday

First, here's downer unless you are one of the world's wealthiest: the richest one percent will soon own more than all the rest of the world's population. Oh yeah, and the richest 80 individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of the world's population of 3.5 billion people.

On a more positive note, research on the benefits of expressive writing suggests that if you change your story you can change your life.

Overdetermined

Here's an interesting post from the Washington Posts's Wonkblog about why Central Appalachia's coal industry is declining. The conventional "wisdom" offered by the ruling class of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia is that all problems of the industry are caused by a black guy with an African name, but this article points out other factors, including competition from gas and cheap Western coal.

To be fair, some of the proposed new regulations on energy will impact mining, and with it tax revenues and jobs. But the biggest factor by far is the market, which the same ruling class tends to worship as a god when it's convenient to do so.

It's not going to be pretty here. I do wish the federal government would step up with plans and programs to assist mining regions hard hit by these changes.

AUSTERITY BLUES. Here's Krugman on our failure to address long term unemployment.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. Here's just one of many examples of how West Virginians are trying to promote health and wellness. For more on that, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Infernal real estate

I'm sure my beloved Dante enjoyed parceling out real estate in Hell for the first canticle of his Divine Comedy. Some days, I'd kind of like to hand out the real thing. Some of the prime lots would go to people who cheated sick coal miners out of the black lung benefits they deserved.

ROBIN HOOD. Here's  an idea that makes way more sense than austerity.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. Here are some creative ways West Virginians are promoting wellness in their communities.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A man is made Providence to himself

The theme at Goat Rope these days, aside from occasional rants when things get on my last nerve, is the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. At this point, I'm on his Harvard Divinity School Address, which managed to tick off even Unitarians.

As I've mentioned before, Emerson and Thoreau were both forerunners of American Buddhism. In this essay, Emerson expounds a subtle idea of karma whereby people become more like what they invest themselves in. Compassionate people get better at compassion. Greedy people get better at greed. He sees this as working like a law of nature:

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie--for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own violition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.

To which I can only say, with Hamlet's friend Horatio, so have I heard and do in part believe it. Or I'd like to  anyway.

COAL COUNTIES AND DEATH RATES seem to go hand in hand.

PLEASE CHECK OUT THIS WEBSITE to learn more about Medicaid expansion, whether you can qualify for coverage, and how you can take steps to make sure it happens here.

I CAN HANDLE BATS EATING SPIDERS, but the thought of spiders eating bats kind of grosses me out. Maybe it's a mammalian solidarity thing.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Abstract thoughts

I used to think that there were two kinds of people: those who were comfortable in courthouses and those who weren't. I fell into the latter category. This could be because I mostly go into mine to deal with things like taxes on cars and such and have to go through a metal detector to do that.

Lately, however, I've been spending a good bit of time in courthouses around the state talking to county commissions and economic development authorities about the need to create a Future Fund for West Virginia from natural resource severance taxes. I've found that some of them are really nice and welcoming. As in friendly places without metal detectors.

One kind of creepy thing that I've heard about and have seen in some courthouses, however, is a real sign of the times in the Marcellus Shale boom areas, to wit, swarms of abstractors scavenging tax and property records to find victims ...I mean landowners who may or may not own mineral rights to the places they live on. It can often the first step in ruining the lives and health of some inoffensive rural family.

It reminds me of the old stories about how unsuspecting farmers were swindled out of their land in the early days of the coal boom 100 or so years ago.

I think a lot of local people have the same reaction I do to the swarm. Here's one anecdote: while eating at a local restaurant in one north central county with a friend on the Future Fund trail, a waitress gave us a good looking over and tentatively said, "Y'all aren't abstractors are you?" I assured her that we weren't and that they gave me the creeps too. She said she was concerned about the quality of life in the area and was worried about how things would change if and when a major land grab got going there.

I can't say I disagree. I do hope that at least this time around we find away to limit the damage and get something out of it.

MY FINGERS ARE CROSSED. There have been some interesting developments in the federal investigation of Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch disaster that might signal prosecutions moving up the corporate ladder.

IT WASN'T JUST YOUR IMAGINATION. The Great Recession was really bad.

UP WITH THE CHICKENS?  You may be happier.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hammer time

There is an old saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We tend to get pretty attached to our hammers and use them whether they make sense or not.

(The problem with thinking everything can be fixed with a hammer, as any West Virginian can tell you, is that it leaves duct tape out of the equation altogether. But I digress.)

This is yet another thing I find useful in Buddhist thought, especially for people interested in social justice. Activists can get stuck in ruts--or sometimes time warps--doing the same things over and over. I love rituals--but not ritualism.

The Buddha taught that "attachment to form is a hindrance," which means that having fixed ideas about how things are or what to do can get in the way of getting anything done. Every day, every situation, every conflict is unique and demands a unique response, which may or may not look like anything that went before it.

CLIMATE CAPITALISM? Maybe so, maybe not. Read more here.

OKAY. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship reports having "a totally clear conscience" about the Upper Big Branch mine disaster.

IN CASE YOU PLAN ON LIVING A LONG TIME, here's some advice.

OR, IF NOT, here's something on near death experiences.

ON THE SUBJECT OF DEATH, sitting a lot could make it happen quicker.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hojo undo

It was sometime in February when I decided to go to Okinawa for a karate seminar. At the time, April seemed like an eternity away and I didn't think it would ever stop snowing.

I did a little digging into traditional Okinawan training methods and quickly realized I needed to get busy so I would be a bit less of a total disgrace when I got there.

The Okinawan approach to karate is different from the typical American or even typical Japanese methods. Even the more tradition-minded schools outside Okinawa tend to focus on kihon or basic movements, kata or prearranged formal exercises, and kumite or practice fighting, in that order. As martial artist and author Michael Clarke noted in the book pictured above, in Okinawa the focus is often on warm up exercises or junbi undo, followed by supplementary strength-building exercises called hojo undo, then kata, then bunkai or applied kata.

The hojo undo really caught my eye (look it up on youtube if you're curious). Among other things, it involves lifting, swinging, throwing and catching various improvised heavy objects to build the power to make techniques work. I didn't have those traditional items but improvised and have spent a portion of each day swinging around heavy mallets and sledge hammers as well as throwing and catching dumbbells a couple hundred times a day.

I also doubled up on regular weight training and calisthenics and on alternate days either jog an hour or do intervals of jumping rope, shadow boxing, hitting and kicking the heaving bag and katas. I cover about 35 foot miles per week between jogging and dog walking, have taken in my belt a few notches and eat ravenously (blaming it on my karate tapeworm). My body feels like it is cooking itself most days.

All this with a heart that is pretty much dead.

I'm not sure whether I'm bragging or complaining but am looking forward to the trip now because I need some rest. I'm sure I'll still be a disgrace when I get there but I hope maybe a little less of one.

TALKING SENSE. Here's a good editorial about health care reform and unintended consequences from up New England way.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here are some interesting reflections on health and personal responsibility.

JAMIE OLIVER'S FOOD REVOLUTION is hitting close to Goat Rope Farm. The British chef was inspired to try to change eating habits in Huntington, WV after a report identified it as the must unhealthy area in American. The first episodes aired last Friday on ABC and are available here.

SPEAKING OF WV. This is weird but personal income here actually went up in 2009. This is largely due to public spending.

HAPPINESS AND SUCH are discussed in the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from under the Fig Tree.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Some vicious mole of nature?

Image by way of wikipedia.

One disadvantage of growing up in the scenic Mud River valley of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia is that there's not a whole lot of live Shakespeare going on. I've seen several on stage but for Hamlet have had to rely mostly on the printed page and the screen.

My favorite film version has to be Kenneth Branagh's mammoth movie, which pretty much sticks to the original play. I mean no disrespect to the dead, but I wasn't that crazy about Olivier's version, which he both directed and starred in (sorry about the preposition thing).

In his version, "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind." I'm not sure that's entirely fair. Admittedly, the whole thing might have gone smoother if he would have just whacked Claudius in the beginning, but that wouldn't have been much of a play. I've always thought part of Hamlet's charm was that he recognized that he could just be wrong or plain crazy.

The literary critic and philosopher Rene Girard once pointed out that you'd want anybody sitting with his finger on the nuclear button not to be too trigger happy. And as I've said before, our erstwhile President W could have used a bit more Hamlet in him in the buildup to the Iraq War.

Jacques Barzun has some interesting observations on this topic. As he put it in his monumental and delightful book Dawn to Decadence, his character should be seen in the context of the political hardball of the Renaissance:

...The common notion of Hamlet is that he vacillates. In Olivier's film, the play is called "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind." That the play is first and foremost political is ignored. Everybody since Coleridge has concentrated on Hamlet's character and forgotten his situation. It is true that his character is finer than that of his entourage; he has a conscience and does not kill first and think afterward. Killing a king accepted by the populace is not a bagatelle. Laertes is the impetuous boy, put in to make the contrast clear. Hamlet has to think and watch, because from the outset he is in danger, a threat to the usurper and his aides; all conspire against him, including, unwittingly, his betrothed. And he has his mother to consider. His soliloquies show him superior to his barbaric times, but what he thinks must not be taken for what he does. He wipes out the hired killers sent with him to England; he comes back resolved by wary and fails only by treachery.

I'll leave the last quote to Fortinbras, who spoke highly of him at the end of the play,

Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.

Good night indeed, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

HEALTH CARE CLIFFHANGER, continued.

AND HERE'S ANOTHER CALL FOR REFORM from a Kanawha County labor leader.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, younger Americans are likely to have more health issues.

RESULTS ONLY WORK ENVIRONMENT? Here's an interesting item from yesterday's Morning Edition about some welcome changes in the workplace.

WORKERS WALKING WOUNDED? Sorry about the alliteration thing, but this article looks at the aftershocks of the recession on America's workforce.

URGENT JUPITER RED SPOT UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A heat-oppress'd brain

El Cabrero is in Shakespearean mode lately with a special emphasis on Hamlet. As mentioned earlier this week, self consciousness has been a major theme of the "modern" period, which as strange as it may sound is often considered to have begun around 1500. You can see it in paintings (like Las Meninas), in literature (like Don Quixote) and even in philosophy (Descartes' "I think, therefore I am").

Hamlet himself has got to be one of the most self conscious characters in all literature (with the possible exception of Spider-Man). This shows up in all kinds of ways, the most obvious being his long solitary speeches or soliloquies.

I find it interesting that Shakespeare has him before the action of the play studying at Wittenberg, birthplace of the Luther's Reformation (Protestantism is all about individuality and self-consciousness). Like Horatio, he has obviously been trained in philosophy, although he admits that there are more things in heaven and earth than it might imagine.

This shows up particularly in his capacity for self doubt. Even after seeing his father's ghost in the presence of witnesses on the battlements in the beginning of the play, he continues to question its veracity. As he says in Act 2, scene 2,

The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.

I've always found one of his most endearing traits was the fact that he knew he might be wrong, although he might have taken it too far. Hamlet may have had a bit too much self consciousness and self doubt, while George W. Bush could have used a bit more. The Golden Mean is difficult to attain.

ONE DOLLAR/ONE VOTE. The US Supreme Court overturned a previous ruling on contributions to political campaigns.

HEALTH CARE. It looks like the US House won't pass the Senate version of reform.

BIT THE BULLET. Krugman's latest op-ed urges the House to do just that.

WHATEVER HAPPENS, here are 10 things you can do to improve your own health care.

IN THIS CORNER...Here's coverage from the Charleston Gazette about a debate between Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship and environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Houses and sniffles

A Rhinovirus, courtesy of wikipedia. I think they magnified it a time or two.

There is a large and growing body of scientific research about how things like inequality, class and social status engrave themselves into our bodies. Generally speaking, people in higher social positions are less likely to develop conditions like heart disease or diabetes than those in lower positions. The same affect seems to apply to infectious diseases as well.

In a fascinating study, healthy adults first answered questions about their socio-economic status (SES) and that of their parents when they were growing up. They were then exposed to one of two forms of rhinovirus (aka common cold viruses) and kept in quarantine to monitor the symptoms.

Here's a surprising finding:

For both viruses, susceptibility to colds decreased with the number of childhood years during which their parents owned their home...This decreased risk was attributable to both lower risk of infection and lower risk of illness in infected subjects. Moreover, those whose parents did not own their home during their early life but did during adolescence were at the same increased risk as those whose parents never owned their home. These associations were independent of parent education level, adult education and home ownership, and personality characteristics.

The researchers concluded that "A marker of low income and wealth during early childhood is associated with decreased resistance to upper respiratory infections in adulthood. Higher risk is not ameliorated by higher SES during adolescence and is independent of adult SES."

In other words, poverty or relative deprivation during early childhood can have negative health affects throughout a lifetime. That's something to think about now, as the recession has driven more families on a downward economic spiral.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Half of all US children and 90 percent of African American young people do or will receive food stamps, according to a new study.

THIS NEEDS FIXED. The House version of health care reform would phase out the Children's Health Insurance Program. Senator Rockefeller is not amused. Nor is El Cabrero. This needs to be fixed in conference.

A FAMOUS UNREADABLE (FOR ME ANYWAY) ANTHROPOLOGIST has died at the age of 100.

HOW SMART ARE DOGS anyway?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Untangling a knot

He did it with a sword. "Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot," by Jean-Simon Berthélemy (1743–1811)

When it comes to health and well being, there are a lot of issues to untangle. Obviously one is the lack of health care at all, which is a serious problem in the US and one that is getting worse in the wake of the recession. In yesterday's post, I linked a recent news item about a report that found that 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year because they don't have it.

Obviously, moving towards universal health care is way overdue. But there are some things about health and longevity that go beyond mere health coverage. As I've mentioned in the last several posts, status matters. People in higher social positions enjoy better health and longer lives than people in lower positions.

Typically, people try to explain this in terms of bad habits of people down the status scale, particularly among poor people, but this is missing a major point. According to Michael Marmot, author of The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity, two key factors are autonomy and social participation:

...social conditions affect the degree of autonomy and control individuals have and their opportunities for full social engagement. These needs, for control and participation are more adequately met the higher your social position. As a result, health is better.

Conversely,

Lack of social participation and inadequate control over your life, in the sense of not being able to lead the life you want to lead, will lead to chronic stress, which in turn increases risk of a number of diseases, heart disease among them.

Marmot argues that this lack of control and full participation may lead to behaviors that are bad for health in the long term, but those things seem like small potatoes when one is just trying to get by in the short term.

ON THAT NOTE, here's another take on the link between health and social conditions.

RECESSION NATION. The latest Census data shows that the recession has had a major impact on Americans.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE PARANOID RANCH. Here's an interview between Bill Moyers and Max Blumenthal about today's rabid right and here's former religious right leader Frank Schaeffer on far right versions of politicized religion.

HOW WE GONNA KEEP HIM DOWN ON THE FARM NOW? Gazette reporter and uberblogger Ken Ward of Coal Tattoo fame was featured on NPR's Living on Earth.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Art or propaganda?

Plato (left) and Aristotle in a detail from Raphael's The School of Athens. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Goat Rope has been spending time lately with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, especially with his theories about literature, poetry and tragedy.

The contrast between Aristotle and his teacher Plato is often pretty striking and that is particularly the case with regard to what we would call literature and what they would call poetry.

Aristotle felt at home in the world of matter and the senses while Plato did not. Humans had their place in the natural order of things and art had its origin in human nature.

In his Republic, Plato argued, with the voice of Socrates, that poetry had a great power to do good or ill. He believed that works of art should be carefully controlled, sanitized and censored in the interests of public morality and social order. Needless to say, tyrannical regimes, closed societies and authoritarian movements throughout history have agreed.

(I think Socrates wasn't such a good influence on him after all.)

Aristotle's Poetics, on the other hand, isn't all that interested in art as propaganda. He views it as something important for its own sake and instead focuses on what made a particular kind of literary work great.

I think Aristotle won that one. With maybe a few exceptions, works of propaganda make lousy literature. They're not usually even all that effective as propaganda.

JOBS. The NY Times reports what may be the beginning of good news about the economy.

HEALTH ED. Researchers suggest the poor health of many West Virginians is related to low educational attainment.

GETTING SERIOUS. Here's a look at the far right's first 100 days.

APPALACHIA. Here's a call for turning the nation's sacrifice zone into a sacred zone.

BABY NAMES have bubbles too.

BEING BULLIED as a child can lead to serious psychological effects, according to this research.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Where will it end?

Athena, courtesy of wikipedia.

We're almost done with a long series on the Odyssey of Homer. You'll also find links and comments about current events. When I started writing about what this timeless classic had to say to us today, I never thought it would last this long. What can I say? Homer is the man (or maybe, as some have speculated, the woman).

For many readers, the least satisfying part of the book is the ending. Odysseus, Telemachus and some faithful servants finally wreak terrible vengeance on the 108 suitors and the unfaithful maids and servants. In a contest, Odysseus strings a bow as only he can do and a massacre ensues.

(The goat herder Melanthius comes to a particularly nasty end. El Cabrero's one complaint about the bard is that he was a little rough on a fellow goat herder. I'm not sure you can really blame the guy for being such a jerk: this is an occupational hazard of hanging out with goats. But I digress...)

The people of Ithaca are not happy about this slaughter. Nor are they particularly pleased with a commander who loses every single one of his 600 men after the war was over.

A fresh conflict is about to ensue between Odysseus, son Telemachus, father Laertes, and servants and a mob of Ithacans when the gods intervened. Athena cries out

"in a piercing voice that stopped all fighters cold,
"Hold back, you men of Ithaca, back from brutal war!
Break off--shed no more blood--make peace at once!"

With that,

...Terror blanched their faces,
they went limp with fear, weapons slipped from their hands
and strewed the ground at the goddess' ringing voice...

At her command, they made a pact of peace.

It is kind of hard to believe (even in an epic with all kinds of gods and monsters and wonders). But it does raise this point: how does the spiral of violence come to an end, with one provocation being answered by yet another with no end in sight and with all sides feeling justified in doing what they do?

Homer seems to suggest that we do need some kind of divine intervention for that to happen. If it's on the menu, I'll take it. Another reading is to say that our only hope is in what the goddess Athena embodies: wisdom, craft and strategy.

Or maybe they're the same thing.

THE END OF AFFLUENZA? Maybe.

PAYBACK. Here's an interesting item on our innate sense sense of justice, the desire to punish cheaters, and capacity for forgiveness.

THE RECESSION AND YOUR HEALTH. Economic downturns can have some interesting effects.

GET THE PICTURE on climate change? If not, click here.

WARM BLOODED. Half of all mammal species are in decline and one fourth are headed for extinction, according to this report. Here's more on the topic.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Getting in isn't the problem

Nice puppy! William Blake's version of Cerberus, the dog that guards the realm of the dead.

Goat Rope is trailing the journey of Odysseus these days and the next stop is the underworld. If you scroll down, there are also links and comments about current events.

One of the pivotal moments of Homer's Odyssey is the visit its hero paid to the land of the dead. Only a few others in Greek and related myths were able to get there and go back again.

One such was Theseus of Minotaur fame, who went there with a buddy as part of a hare-brained scheme to capture Persephone, wife of Hades, the lord of the dead. That didn't work out so well and he was stuck in a chair there until rescued by Heracles, who visited the land of the dead when stealing Cerberus as part of his 12 labors.

The musician Orpheus visited the underworld after the death of his beloved Eurydice. His musical talents were such that Persephone allowed him to bring her back to the land of the living if he didn't look back on the way out. He did and she didn't. Another mystery cult (see yesterday's post) developed around Orpheus which also promised to provide advantages after death and seemed to include ideas of reincarnation.

Toward the end of his Republic, Plato tells the tall of Er, a soldier who dies and tours the underworld before returning to life. He saw various kinds of rewards and punishments being dispensed as well and learned about the process of reincarnation

In the Roman epic the Aeneid of Virgil, the hero Aeneas has to visit the underworld to consult the shade of his father and learn about the destiny of Rome which he is fated to found. As with Plato, souls destined for rebirth on earth had first to drink from the river of Lethe or forgetfulness so they wouldn't remember their previous lives.

Early Christian converts from paganism were fascinated with what happened to Jesus between his death and resurrection and developed charming traditions about "the harrowing of hell," in which the victorious Christ liberated the souls of Adam, Eve and other figures from the Hebrew Bible before rising on Sunday morning. According to 1 Peter 4:6,

For unto this end was the gospel preached even to the dead, that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.

One line from the Apostle's Creed states of him that "he descended into hell," which helped to inspire speculation. The harrowing of hell was the subject of some apocryphal gospels.

Last but not least, the Italian poet Dante's Divine Comedy tells of that poets tour through Hell, Heaven and Purgatory (check Goat Rope archives for an earlier series on that).

The consensus of the ages seems to be that getting there isn't the problem for most folks--getting out again is.

ON A RELATED NOTE, a report from the World Health Organization calls social justice a matter of life and death.

WORST DAY ON WALL STREET since 2001. Let's hope tomorrow's headlines don't say 1929. Thought for the day: isn't it a good thing we didn't let President Bush privatize Social Security?

THE RIPPLE EFFECT. From the Sept. 22 print edition of Business Week:

Losing a job isn't just a career setback, it can be a permanent blow to the community, a recent study finds. Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which tracked 4,000 high school graduates over 45 years, researchers at UCLA and the University of Michigan studied the community involvement of workers aged 35 to 53. Their finding: After being laid off, employees were 35% less likely than before to participate in community or church groups, charitable organizations--even bowling teams. And few returned once they got new jobs. Instead, they focused their energies on professional and political groups--in the belief, hypothesizes UCLA sociology professor Jennie Brand, that both could have an impact on finding and keeping work

.

HOLY KARMA, BATMAN! After years of lobbying--to the tune of $40 million--for tougher bankruptcy laws, lenders are now starting to feel the pain of getting what they asked for. My heart breaketh...

THIS CAN'T BE TRUE because it would be inconvenient for the coal industry. QED.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GOING FOR THE GROSS-OUT

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. We're in the middle of the encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus right now. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if one is attempting to make the acquaintance of a possibly cannibalistic one-eyed giant, then breaking into his house uninvited and eating most of his cheese is not the best way to start. For that matter, one would be well-advised not to visit the island of the cyclopes at all unless driven by dire necessity.

As Dylan once sang,

The moral of this story, the moral of this song, is simply that one should never be where one does not belong.

Odysseus, alas, was a little impulse-driven and not given to taking such sage advice. When he and his men are busted in the act, he begs for hospitality:

...we're at your knees,
in hopes of a warm welcome, even a guest-gift,
the sort that hosts give strangers. That's the custom.
Respect the gods, my friend. We're suppliants--at your mercy!
Zeus of the Strangers guards all guests and suppliants:
strangers are sacred--Zeus will avenge their rights!'

Polyphemus is unimpressed and not particularly religious:

'Stranger,' he grumbled back from his brutal heart,
'you must be a fool, stranger, or come from nowhere,
telling me to fear the gods or avoid their wrath?
We Cyclops never blink at Zeus and Zeus's shield
of storm and thunder, or any other blessed god--
we've got more force by far.
I'd never spare you in fear of Zeus's hatred,
you or your comrades here, unless I had the urge...'

And by the way, he doesn't have the urge.

Lurching up, he lunged out with his hands toward my men
and snatching two at once, rapping them on the ground
he knocked them dead like pups--
their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor-
and ripping them limb from limb to fix his meal
he bolted them down like a mountain-lion, left no scrap
devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all!

Not only is he a cannibal--he's got bad table manners! At one point, as his culinary adventures continue, he even gets drunk, passes out and vomits up the remains of his supper. Odysseus and his men would like to kill the monster--but they are locked up in his cave by a massive stone so large that

no twenty-two wagons, rugged and four-wheeled
could budget that boulder off the ground...

This could be a setback... More tomorrow.

NO DIRECT CONNECTION TO THE TOPIC AT HAND, but Massey Energy has been ordered by a federal judge to rehire 85 union workers who lost their jobs in 2004 after the company acquired a formerly union mine.

HOMECOMINGS. One theme of the ongoing series on the Odyssey is the difficulty combat veterans face in going home. The health care injured veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan isn't helping.

ALL IN THE MIND...or at least some of it. Here's an interesting item on the connection between mental attitudes and health.

MACHIAVELLI made the Wall Street Journal recently.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A DELICATE SITUATION

Frederick Leighton's painting of Nausicaa, princess of the Phaeacians and rescuer of Odysseus, courtesy of wikipedia.

The Goat Rope series on the Odyssey of Homer and what it has to offer today continues. If you like classics, please click on earlier posts. You'll also find news and comments about current events.

Imagine that you're a middle aged man who has been shipwrecked and lost at sea for days and that you've washed up on the shore of a strange place. You look and feel like hell and you have to introduce yourself to a beautiful young girl and gain her help without scaring the daylights out of her.

One other thing: you're totally naked.

That would be a job for someone known for strategy and cunning (Greek metis). Somebody like Odysseus.

After he left Calypso's island, everything goes OK...for a while. But then the grudge-holding sea god Poseidon gets wind that his old enemy is at afloat again and destroys his raft. (In one of his more famous adventures, Odysseus blinded the cyclops Polyphemus, Poseidon's son.) He finally makes it to the island of Scheria more dead than alive. When he returns to consciousness he asks himself

"Man of misery, whose land have I lit on now?
What are they here--violent, savage, lawless?
or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?..."

Nudged by Athena, the beautiful Nausicaa and her maids are washing clothes near the shore. She is about 14 years old--ripe for marriage by ancient Greek standards. He grabs a tree branch to cover his private parts and approaches the girls. All run but Nausicaa.

This is a dangerous moment for everyone. She is no doubt wary of sexual assault, just as he is wary of provoking the islanders whose help he needs. He comes up with a pretty good trick:

When in doubt, ask a woman if she is a goddess.

Keeping a respectful distance, he says

"Here I am at your mercy, princess--
are you a goddess or a mortal? If one of the gods
who rule the skies up there, you're Artemis to the life,
the daughter of mighty Zeus--I see her now--just look
at your build, your bearing, your lithe flowing grace...
But if you're one of the mortals living here on earth,
three times blest are your father, your queenly mother,
three times over your brothers too. How often their hearts
must warm with joy to see you striding into the dances--
such a bloom of beauty..."

You gotta admit it, he's pretty slick. Comparing her to Artemis was an especially reassuring touch since that powerful goddess was a perpetual virgin whom no mortal man would dare to pursue.

His words did the trick. He gained the help of Nausicaa. She will introduce him to her parents, who will offer excellent hospitality (xenia) and send him home to Ithaca at last.

More to come.

THE SENSIBLE CENTER. A poll by the Drum Major Institute of self-identified middle class Americans finds strong bi-partisan support for universal health care, the Employee Free Choice Act, paid sick days, and more.

DOING WITHOUT HEALTH CARE is a reality for many working families as costs rise.

THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE. Here's an amusing item on things women do to make themselves attractive to men. I'm eagerly awaiting the other side of the story.

BLOGGING AND HEALTH. From the Boston Globe, here's an article about how blogging has become part of the treatment for some cancer patients.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

He meant to do that.

In the 1950s, members of a UFO cult were convinced that the world as we know it was about to end at a given date (sound familiar?) When the date came and went, members were in a quandary.

They were in the distinctly uncomfortable situation of holding two conflicting ideas at the same time. On the one hand, they believed strongly that the aliens were going to come at a given time--except that the aliens didn't show.

They could have said, "Jeez, what was I thinking?"--but they didn't. Instead, they began to proselytise aggressively for their new religion, something they had never done before. After all, the saucer people were nice enough to spare us, right?

You can read about all this in psychologist Leon Festinger's engaging book, When Prophecy Fails.

Festinger called that conflicted state of mind "cognitive dissonance." It's a complicated idea but a commonplace reality. Here's the abbreviated Goat Rope version:

People don't like to think they were really, REALLY wrong about something and, as a way of avoiding that situation, they often construct elaborate rationalizations to justify things.

Let's take a hypothetical case. Suppose a national leader led his country to an unnecessary war and it turned out that the justifications for it were bogus. (Remember, this is just a hypothetical situation.) The leader could say "My bad." That would be a gutsy leader. Or, more likely, he could hold forth about "staying the course."

(Aren't you glad stuff like this never really happens?)

To use another scenario, suppose you have rounded up a bunch of prisoners and have begun to abuse them. Most people would be very uncomfortable thinking that they were abusing a random assortment of folks. It's a lot easier when you tell yourself and the world that these are dangerous terrorists.

For that matter, it's a lot easier to justify enslaving a group of people if you can construct an ideological justification for it. For this reason, some researchers have argued that slavery led to racism rather than vice versa.

In any case, cognitive dissonance and our attempts to escape from it contribute vastly to the world's violence, evil, and misery.

I'LL TAKE ONE! A British think tank is calling for a "Green New Deal" to confront the world's economic and environmental woes.

BULLY FOR YOU (NOT). Investigators have found a link between bullying and being bullied and suicide in children.

A SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC MOMENT? From the AFLCIO blog, here's a report from Netroots Nation about how the US may be on the edge of progressive reform.

NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the US is slipping on the development index in terms of life expectancy, health and other factors.

MIRROR, MIRROR. Take a look.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR

Have you ever noticed that when people do things that irritate us we tend to think they do it because they're jerks? And that when we mess up, we usually excuse ourselves by saying that something caused us to act that way?

In psychology, this is called fundamental attribution error and it was classically demonstrated in an experiment in which subjects were asked to read essays for and against Fidel Castro. The writers were told in advance which way to slant their essays. The readers tended to believe that those who were assigned to write pro-Castro essays really were pro-Castro, even though they were only carrying out an assigned task.

In other words, they didn't recognize that it was the situation of the writers that caused them to write that way.

We often tend to attribute the actions of others to their disposition rather than the situation--especially the actions we don't like. But when the roles are switched, we change the rules. The dog ate our homework! If a driver cuts into our lane, they're an idiot. We, on the other hand, had to get over there and were under a lot of pressure.

In war, the enemy--whoever it is at the time--deliberately kills innocent civilians. We occasionally inflict collateral damage. When "they" do something bad, it's because they're evil. When our side does it, mistakes were made.

Fundamental attribution error seriously inhibits our ability to understand and deal with human evil by causing us to ignore the situational factors that encourage evil behavior. It also blinds us to our own potential for evil.

I don't mean to get preachy, but this is probably why Jesus--who knew a thing or two about a thing or two--told people to take the log out of their own eye before trying to remove the speck from their neighbor's. Whether we're religious or secular, it's always easy to locate sin in the other.

INEQUALITY, HEALTH AND MORE are the subject of this interesting piece from Harvard Magazine.

"FREE" TRADE, REVISITED. This item from the UK Guardian looks at NAFTA's casualties.

CHENEY KNOWS BEST. The VP who puts the "vice" in vice president tried to muzzle climate change testimony.

BRAINWASHING. Those old enough to have lived through the Cold War may remember the widespread fear of Communist "brainwashing." That turned out to be pretty much a dud, although the Bush administration tried some of the tricks of that trade in its dalliance with torture.

THERAPISTS OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS have their own problems, according to this NY Times item. That's life in Richistan.

CAUGHT ON THE WEB. Has the internet cut into your reading time...you know...with real books?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CONNED

Caption: Seamus McGoogle does not like to be conned.

El Cabrero is winding up New Year's week by highlighting some important books about current events published last year. Today's pick is The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics. The title is kind of self-explanatory. The author is Jonathan Chait, one of El Cabrero's favorite writers at The New Republic.

The book is one of several with the how-did-we-get-in-this-mess theme. Here are the first two paragraphs by way of a teaser:

I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what's happening in American politics--I mean what's really happening--I wind up sounding a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not. My politics are actually quite moderate. (Most real lefties, inf fact, think I'm a Washington establishment sellout.) So please give me a chance to explain myself when I tell you the following: American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possible insane. (Stay with me.)

The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda. Notions that would have been laughed at a generation ago--that cutting taxes for the very rich is the best response to any and every economic circumstance, or that it is perfectly appropriate to turn the most rapacious and self-interested elements of the business lobby into essentially an arm of the federal government--are no so pervasive they barely attract any notice.

Chait does a good job of tracing the rise of supply side economics from the fringes to center stage and suggests that the main thing that has changed about US politics over the last few years is that the right wing has moved from a moderately conservative position (think Eisenhower) to an extreme position. That's the key to our current so-called polarization. He does a good job of lambasting the media for not noticing this and attempting to portray moderates as people who split the difference between yesterday's consensus and the far right.

It's worth a look. Here's a link to the NY Times review.

SPEAKING OF THE WHOLE BUSINESS LOBBY THING, the lobbyist-written Medicare Part D prescription drug plan is about to stick it to seniors this this year.

MORE ON MINE SAFETY is here.

THE HEALTH GAP. According to new research,

the relative advantage in child mortality rates and health associated with social and economic advantage was about the same at the end of the 20th century as it was at the beginning of the 20th century. People with more money, more education and higher status jobs experience consistently better health and lower child mortality rates.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED