The most fateful words

When it comes to public policy debates, there is a phrase that I have been taught by bitter experience to fear, especially in my beloved home state of West Virginia. Every time I hear them, I almost break out in chills. The words in question:

It's a no brainer.

HILLARY TALKS WV. Specifically, she spoke about the Reconnecting McDowell project at a gathering in  Chicago. One wonders what this signals.

IF IT'S FRIDAY, it's time for Krugman.

DO YOU THINK YOUR LIFE IS WEIRD? Check out the life cycles of these critters.

BLACK HISTORY/WEST VIRGINIA HISTORY. If you're in or around Charleston June 16-19, check out these events celebrating Black History as we lead up to WV's 150th.

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You be the judge

If you're anything like me, you are really pretty sick of hearing two words that were everywhere on the news in the weeks leading up to New Year's. Yes, I'm talking f****l c***f, as in that artificially created federal budget crisis that rhymes is ixkal zliff.

I was, however, amused when a friend told me that the vent feature in a small weekly paper in southern WV complained about the "physical clip." Was it a malapropism or a witticism? I can't call it...maybe you can.

I think the last best word on the whole thing came from The Borowitz Report. Here's an excerpt:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)--Official Washington was in celebration mode on New Year's Day after kind of averting a completely unnecessary crisis that was entirely of its own creation.

"The deal proves that if we all procrastinate long and hard enough, we can semi-solve any self-inflicted problem at the very last minute in a way that satisfies no one," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)....."This is a new year, and much work remains to be done," he said. "It's up to us to concoct entirely new optional disasters that we will have to undo at some later date in a more or less half-assed way.

In a related story, an arsonist received an award for putting out his own fire.

(Thanks to a Goat Rope reader for passing that on!)

MEANWHILE, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that the deal makes permanent 82 percent of the Bush era tax cuts. There's more on the next steps here.

WISHING. I hope this lawsuit by former WV state school superintendent Jorea Marple rocks the world of the WV Board of Education.

Oh yeah, and then there's this:

WANNA SAVE THE WORLD? Eat bugs.

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In praise of muscle memory

A chance conversation with a fellow student after karate class last night prompted me to muse once again on good old muscle memory. A karate dojo is at least in part a place where you go to develop muscle memory. Martial artists train so they don't have to think

People have all kinds of "progressive" theories of learning, but when it comes to something you are really going to use--or something on which your life or the lives of others might depend--the smart money is on drill and repetition rather than thinking. If we really did have to stop at every point and consciously deliberate over next steps, not much would get done. And a lot of it would get done badly.

Drill is a way of making something a habit. And habit is what Aristotle, "master of those who know" according to Dante, famously described in his Ethics as "second nature."

Keyboarding is a case in point. El Cabrero is ancient enough to remember when typewriters ruled the world. When I was in high school, before the personal computer revolution, I took a typing class. This was something a bit unusual for a boy to do. Thank God I did it. I'm no speed demon, but my fingers know which way to go. I can't imagine what life would have been like with the hunt and peck method. And that's just one example.

More to come.

OCCUPYING OUR MINDS. Here's NPR on the unlikely impact of an unforeseen protest movement.

AND THE WINNER IS....Here are the "insect awards" from Wired Science.

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Scaring dogs with decorations

This year's buildup to Halloween featured a first in my experience: dogs fooled by seasonal decorations.

It happened one evening during the routine dog walk, in which boxer Edith and Great Pyrenees Arpad are usually joined by mut Smiley from down the road. As we were making our way to the end of the road and back for the usual two mile stroll, Edith and Smiley stopped in their tracks, hackles raised, and they growled across the field.

It took a while to figure out what they were growling at, but it turned out to be something on the order of scarecrows. I wasn't surprised that Edith would freak about some new sight--she has been known to bark and growl for 20 minutes at an ironing board--but Smiley is more street smart.

Eventually they got over it. But it occurred to me that many of the things we are afraid of in life turn out to be pretty much the same when all is said and done.

Happy Halloween!

YET ANOTHER TAKE on the Occupy movement here. Oh yeah and here too.

WANNA EAT SOME BUGS? Some people are proposing insects as a cheap food source. I am less than enthused about the idea, but I figure we've all done it at some point unconsciously. I did deliberately try eating one spiced grasshopper in Mexico however.

SPEAKING OF BUGS, AND IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING, yes, bugs are scared of fish.

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Poor us

The Census Bureau released its poverty data this week and the results were pretty much what you would expect with a persistent recession and/or a very weak recovery further weakened by the phasing out of Recovery Act programs. Without the latter, things would have been much worse.

For an overview, here are the comments of Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and here's an article about the situation in West Virginia.

OKAY, LET'S LOOK AT SOME BUGS. Having satisfied my duties as a social justice blogger, I now suggest you check out this Wired Science post which shows close up pictures of scary monsters. Fortunately, these monsters are way smaller than we are.

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Real fear

El Cabrero just finished teaching an evening college sociology class on Deviance and Social Control. I enjoy teaching that class as it provides a chance to look at the dark side of social life, including the damage done both by those who violate social rules and the damage done by those who get to make social rules.

(In case you were wondering, the latter group has done way more harm.)

I try to make such classes as practical as possible and bring in as much good information and ideas as I can find from many sources. One book that I took another look at this time was The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, which was first published in the 1990s.

De Becker is a security expert with considerable experience, personal and professional, in dealing with violence and threats. Unlike many in that trade, he does not try to drum up business by scaring the hell out of people unnecessarily. In fact, he argues that one reason we may miss out on listening to real fear from real threats is that we waste a lot of time and energy on worry and anxiety about things that are not threats.

Real fear, he suggests, is the body's intuitive response to specific real threats or danger signals. It's not something that most of us feel all that often, but when we do it's time to listen.

I had an experience of that when I was about 13 or so and I was lucky enough to listen to it. When I was in junior high, I used to think it was really cool to hitchhike. My usual destination was an unincorporated town about five miles away which seemed cool at the time.

Don't ask me why.

Anyhow, once when hitching back, a car stopped full of older teens or young men who were rough looking. I'm taking knuckles dragging out car windows. I used to do and have done all kinds of stupid things in my life, but that time something inside me screamed "NO!" and I listened. I thanked the driver and headed off on foot the other direction.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I got in the car. I'm glad I don't know.

EXTENDING UNEMPLOYMENT is the post popular part of the deal between President Obama and congressional Republicans.

HOW'S YOUR POVERTY I.Q.? Find out here.

HEALTH CARE. It's another case of YOYOs (You're on your own people) versus WITS (We're in this together people).

ANOTHER WAR THAT HASN'T WORKED TOO WELL is the war on drugs.

COOL INSECT and other small critter pictures here.

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No crony capitalism here, boss!

Talk about a steaming load.

Lots of people are aware of Arizona's tough and controversial anti-immigration bill. NPR yesterday morning had an interesting feature about what REALLY went on behind the scenes.

It turns out a private, for profit corporation, Corrections Corporation of America, sees locking up immigrants as a potential growing new "market" for their business. CCA types and sympathetic politicians hooked up at a meeting of the conservative legislative group ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and drew up a model bill. CCA and allied groups also provided campaign contributions to most of the sponsors.

The idea was that the immigrants to be locked up by the new law would be detained at a private prison run by CCA.

It's just business. And perfectly legal.

It does kind of make one wonder, however, what the next stunt to increase market share might be...

SPEAKING OF STEAMING LOADS, here's a piece on Wall Street's effort to shift the blame for the economic meltdown to poor people.

BALLOT INITIATIVES. Here's a look at a few that are on the menu around the country. I'm so glad WV doesn't do this stuff.

LOOKING AHEAD. Here's one gloomy prognostication.

HEALTH CARE REFORM. WV Senator Jay Rockefeller was a champion of health care reform and he's not running away from it now.

EARLY HUMANS may have hit the road earlier than had previously been thought.

NATURE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW DEPARTMENT. Assassin bugs have a neat trick for making a meal of spiders.

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Time and chance

Venus the goat is pretty random.

In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that a person's view of the world is more a matter of biography than of logic and conscious reasoning. He wrote

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir...

Today, some people might go even farther in arguing that worldview is shaped by temperament which itself is to a significant degree the result of genes.

Sorting through that question is beyond El Cabrero at the moment, but for whatever reason I've always tended to see the world as a place ruled in large part by chance, luck and randomness. There is a part of me that is kind of surprised that the same math problems yield the same results on different days. As far as the "laws" of nature are concerned, I tend to view these more as habits or recurring patterns.

Of course, this leads to all kinds of disagreements with my deterministically-inclined friends who tend to follow Einstein in saying that God doesn't play dice with the world. For me, cosmic dice playing might be another name for God.

At any rate, I'm with the author of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, who said

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

SPEAKING OF A CHANGE OF FORTUNE, the economic crisis has many people rethinking Reaganomics. Here's a similar item from Newsweek as well.

THE MORTGAGE MESS and how to fix it is the subject of this item.

SPEAKING OF MESSES, here's a book review discussing the cost of the Iraq war.

YOU MUST CHECK OUT THIS PICTURE of the world's longest insect. We're talking over one foot.

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WRITING FOR A CHANGE

A friend of El Cabrero's recently asked me to help out in a workshop on the topic of writing for social change. The invitation prompted many thoughts and this is as good a place as any to unload them.

First up, over the last 20 years, I've been involved in several campaigns aimed at improving conditions or making things less bad for workers, children, and low income people and some of them have been successful. And some kind of writing by some people has played a part in just about every one of them.

It does seem that those who are able to craft and convey messages effectively, which at some point means writing, have a big advantage over those who aren't, all things being equal. However, all things usually aren't equal and writing by itself usually isn't enough to make something good happen or keep something bad from happening. That usually involves coalitions, social capital and networking, strategy, research, civic engagement, etc.

Writing won't get you all the way there, but you probably won't get there without it.

More tomorrow.

ONCE UPON A TIME, one income was enough to raise a family. What happened? Here are economist Jared Bernstein's reflections.

BELT TIGHTENING. From changing habits to meal planning, the recession is hitting home all over.

SUPPLY SIDE SNAKE OIL. Here's another nail in the coffin of the idea that tax cuts "pay for themselves."

DE COLORES. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree. It's pretty colorful.

DIAL A BUG WITH A PLANT. I'm not sure what relevance this item has to the topic at hand, whatever that may be, but recent studies by ecologists suggest that above ground and underground insects communicate with each other using plants "like telephones."

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ACTING

Photo credit: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, by way of the Library of Congress.

Welcome to Eugene Debs Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post. Brief recap: a few years back, I got the chance to portray the character of labor and socialist leader Eugene V. Debs for a history program of WV's Humanities Council.

When asked why I wanted to portray the character of Eugene Debs, I had two ready replies.

First, I didn’t have enough hair to be anyone else.

Second, the part of Booker T. Washington was already taken.

But seriously, we have a problem of historical amnesia in this country, particularly with the history of the labor movement and other marginalized groups. This is even true in West Virginia where so many great labor struggles have taken place.

Most people these days have never heard anyone say the kinds of things Debs said and have little awareness of the titanic struggles of workers for decent wages and conditions. It was that struggle itself that radicalized Debs.

Also, I began doing the character in the midst of the buildup to the Iraq war and the Bush crackdown on civil liberties. That in itself gave some of the issues a contemporary flavor. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for opposing U.S. involvement in WWI, which led him to comment that it was a dangerous thing to use your constitutional right to free speech at a time when your country was making the world safe for democracy. It seemed like the time.

There were rules to the humanities program presentations. First, the character would speak for a time about his or her life and work and then take questions from the audience in character. After that, time permitting, the performer could step out of character and take questions.

It was another rule that the character spoke from a time frame in which he lived. That means, for example, that you couldn’t ask Lincoln what he thought of Roosevelt. Or Debs what he thought of Bush, although that would have been pretty easy…

More tomorrow.

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? War, that is.

SWARM. What's the difference, if any, between us and a bunch of insects? Click here.

SICK DAYS. A new campaign is shaping up in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia around the need for paid sick leave for workers.

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SWIM BIKE RUN

Caption: A good triathlete is something of an amphibian.

El Cabrero has been thinking about endurance in sport and life this week. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

When most people think about triathlons, they think about the Iron Man, a grueling race of truly epic proportions that began in Hawaii in the 1970s: a 2.4 mile swim, followed by 112 miles on a bike and topped off with a marathon run of 26.2 miles.

A Half Iron Man is the same, divided by two.

No, I can't say I've done either one and won't get there in this lifetime. But it would have been kind of cool.

(Such things are much better to have done than to actually do in the present tense.)

Most triathlons are a good bit shorter, thank God. The Olympic distance (it became an official event in 2000) is 1.5 meter swim, 24.8 bike, and 10K (6.2 mile) run. Shorter ones are called "sprints," although most are a far cry from sprinting.

In El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, there's a nice one in Nicholas and Greenbrier counties that includes 1/2 mile in the icy waters of Summit Lake, 17 bike miles (mostly uphill) and a 10K at Cranberry Glades.

There's another one each year near Huntington at Beech Fork in Wayne County, which offers an Olympic distance and a "sprint" of 1/2 mile in the late, 24.8 miles on a bike and 3.1 on the hoof. That's the one I'm going to try Sunday.

Assuming one doesn't drown or have a bike wreck, triathlons of a reasonable distance (say Olympic or less) are actually easier on the body than long runs since you're not punishing yourself in the same way all the time.

My problem is that I swim only slightly better than a rock and have the kind of body that water apparently feels no obligation to hold up. My technique is only a little better than a dog paddle. Plus, swimming in a lake is a lot different than doing laps in a pool.

The one time I did an Olympic distance event, I could barely finish the mile in the deep dark waters of Beech Fork. The only thing that saved me was the fact that one of the rescue guys who followed us in a boat was on my fire department and I knew that if he fished me out I'd never hear the end of it.

I've tried one triathlon since having all the heart troubles and didn't finish. The waters of Summit Lake where cold and I couldn't seem to get enough air. Here's hoping for better luck Sunday. I figure if I make it out of the water, I'll be good to go.

MORE ON HIGHER ED. Here's a good editorial from the Bluefield Daily Telegraph about the need to boost WV's educational attainment and make it easier for adults to access higher education. Here's the punchline:

In light of the recent reports, West Virginia must review its programs that promote and assist high school and non-traditional students in getting a college education and, if need be, overhaul them.

If officials are serious about improving the economic environment then educational opportunities and training for adults must become a top priority.

The Mountain State will never be truly “open for business” if we don’t have the qualified manpower to fill the ranks of incoming industry.

GIANT BUGS NOT AN OPTION TODAY. In case you were worrying about this, the current atmosphere of the earth would not support the huge flying insects that used to live here. You can scratch that off your list.

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