It's not all bad, continued

I've been making a conscious effort here to highlight positive things happening in WV...when they happen. And they do. Here are two related bright spots:

Try This WV is an effort by many groups and individuals to promote healthy lifestyles, real (and local) food, and physical activity. The long range goal is to pull WV's abysmal health statistics out of the nether regions. Try This is a combination website, conference, mini-grant program and movement. This year it awarded more than $100,000 to local groups working on healthy projects.

One group with Try This connections that is making a splash in the northern panhandle is Grow Ohio Valley, which educates about food justice even while promoting local health food.

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. Here's the correct link for the NY Times editorial on Don Blankenship/Massey Energy/Upper Big Branch that I mentioned yesterday but didn't properly link. My bad!

More good

I've been blogging lately about positive things going on in West Virginia. The latest example is close to home: Cabell County Schools, a true innovator in all things food-related, is not only feeding kids more local food, but some of its own kids are getting paid for growing it.

If you watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution show a few years back about his time in the Huntington area, Cabell's county seat, you probably will remember a lot of manufactured drama. In fact, the county has been way out front for years in this field, no pun intended.

It's been estimated that West Virginians spend over $7 billion on food per year annually, yet produce less than $1 billion of that. No wonder the head of the state Department of Agriculture likes to talk about a $6 billion opportunity.

It's not all bad

With all the negative numbers and news stories coming out of WV these days, not to mention the ruling class hissy fit regarding Obama, the EPA and the so-called "war on coal," it's good to be reminded that the state is doing some things really well.

One thing that WV gets right, and is getting better with, is child nutrition. When it comes to school breakfast, lunch, snack nutrition standards, and to innovative ways of increasing participation, the state is a national leader. Much of that is due to the leadership of my friend Rick Goff, who heads the state Office of Child Nutrition. Goff was just invited to the White House for an event promoting child health with Michelle Obama.

West Virginia also is a leader in participation in the Community Eligibility Provision, which allows free meals for all kids in schools with a high percentage of kids living in poverty.

SPEAKING OF FOOD, here are some interesting things folks in Wheeling are doing to promote local foods and help revive the local economy.

OK

As thousands of Boy Scouts converge on West Virginia, some conspiracy theorists apparently believe that the WV National Guard is part of an evil plot to expand government power. Some of these folks also believe that the government was behind the Boston Marathon bombings. I think the idea is that the Guard or some other conspirator would do something bad that would create a state of emergency that could be exploited.

I guess one advantage of making such predictions is that if they don't happen you can claim credit for stopping them.

LESS WHACKED BUT STILL BAD. Here's a look at some bad economic ideas that are damaging the country.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, the city of Charleston WV is on the verge of getting more farmer-friendly with a new urban agriculture ordinance. 

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Just mean

Top billing today goes once again to Paul Krugman for an op-ed on the spitefulness of those governors and legislatures who refuse to expand Medicaid for low income people in their respective states, which I think of as states that hate their poor people. He points out that this makes no economic sense and will in fact negatively impact those states in terms of jobs, money and the cost of health care.

He then adds:

...Medicaid rejectionism will deny health coverage to roughly 3.6 million Americans, with essentially all of the victims living near or below the poverty line. And since past experience shows that Medicaid expansion is associated with significant declines in mortality, this would mean a lot of avoidable deaths: about 19,000 a year, the study estimated.

Just think about this for a minute. It’s one thing when politicians refuse to spend money helping the poor and vulnerable; that’s just business as usual. But here we have a case in which politicians are, in effect, spending large sums, in the form of rejected aid, not to help the poor but to hurt them.

And as I said, it doesn't even make sense as cynical politics. If Obamacare works (which it will), millions of middle-income voters — the kind of people who might support either party in future elections — will see major benefits, even in rejectionist states. So rejectionism won’t discredit health reform. What it might do, however, is drive home to lower-income voters — many of them nonwhite — just how little the G.O.P. cares about their well-being, and reinforce the already strong Democratic advantage among Latinos, in particular.

MEANWHILE, here's an info-graphic about what Medicaid expansion will mean to West Virginians in each county. Thanks again to WV Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin for doing the righteous thing.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. Read more about how the local food movement is reaching WV here and here.


LAST WORD goes to Krugman again for this blog post.

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A growing movement

It's really not all bad news these days. One encouraging trend is the growth of the local food movement, which can be a way to rethink our relationship to the basics and to revitalize our communities. An AFSC program run by my co-worker in Logan WV gets young people involved in a community garden. The kids are even becoming junior master gardeners.

Two recent items in the Charleston newspapers provide some other examples. The Daily Mail recently reported about the Growing Jobs Project of KISRA (Kanawha Institute for Social Research and Action), which teaches former prisoners gardening skills while also providing fresh and healthy produce for the community.

In an article from today's Gazette, there's a story about an ordnance moving to Charleston city council which would encourage urban farming. Among the features of the ordnance are provisions allowing city residents to own up to to six laying hens as well as backyard beehives. It also encourages community gardens.

It didn't, alas, make any provision for goats.

THE RACIAL WEALTH GAP just keeps getting bigger.

LOCKING THE BARN AFTER....retired US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor now seems to think the Supreme Court's decision to take up the Bush v. Gore case may not have been the best idea to roll down the pike. As the Spousal Unit likes to say in such cases, what was her first clue?

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The time has come, the walrus said

I have several things on my mind heading into the weekend. First off, I'd like to acknowledge the sacrifices made by this country's veterans past and present and to express my hope that in the future fewer will have to go through the ordeal of armed conflict.

Second, one thing that really gets my goat, no pun intended, is the stupid war waged by government agencies against small farms and real food. It's ironic that laws and bureaucracies impede the local food movement while tolerating an industrial "food" system that tortures animals, exploits labor and ruins the environment.

Here's a pretty horrific example of fascism against farm and food from the state of Nevada.

Regular readers of this blog know that I often defend the role that government can play in regulating capitalism and countering its excesses--but this kind of thing doesn't really help in that department. It is this kind of outrage that turns otherwise normal people into libertarians.

Finally, I'm off this weekend to attend an intensive yoga seminar. I have a feeling it will be tougher than the karate training I did in Okinawa a while back. I did, however, have this insight on the difference between ju jitsu and yoga:

In ju jitsu, you apply painful joint techniques to your opponent; in yoga you do it to yourself.

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Rural crime ring busted!!!

A suspect was recently apprehended following a series of tomato theft and vandalism incidents in the vicinity of Goat Rope Farm. The unsub (that's crime buster lingo for unidentified subject of an investigation) refused to identify himself or to issue any statements.

Due to the absence of witnesses, formal charges were not pressed. He was, however, dropped off in the middle of a field about a half mile down the road.

SPEAKING OF FARMS, here's a dispatch by Michael Pollan on the food revolution.

CREATING JOBS. One provision of the Recovery Act has created hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide in both the public and private sector.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, a new report shows the Recovery Act aka stimulus played a major role in the economic recovery.

DENIED. The EPA rejected petitions that denied climate change, as Ken Ward reports in Coal Tattoo.

HIRE THE LADY. Paul Krugman gives the Obama administration a friendly thrashing here and urges that Elizabeth Warren be given the post of the new bureau of consumer protection. Not that anybody cares, but I concur.

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One that stuck

El Cabrero has a theologian in common with President Obama, his 2008 opponent John McCain and quite a few people across the political spectrum. That would be Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), a professor at Union Theological Seminary who was very influential in the US in secular as well as religious circles.

I guess I can claim to be a second generation student of Niebuhr. When I was in junior high, a new priest came to the Episcopal Church I was brought up in. At the time, I didn't have much use for religion in general, a periodically recurring condition with me.

I'd been involved in a civil war over this with the Maternal Unit until we agreed to a ceasefire on the following terms: I'd complete confirmation classes and go through the ceremony and after that I was on my own.

The priest taught the confirmation classes, during which I came to realize that the whole thing might not have been as stupid as I thought. The priest in question, Fr. William Kirkland, had studied at Edinburgh and later with Niebuhr himself at Union, although I didn't realize that at the time.

It was much much later, when I had begun working for the American Friends Service Committee that I really began to study his thought. I made it a habit to study social movements of the past to look at what worked and what didn't and became aware of Niebuhr's profound influence on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

It stuck with me. Lately, I've revisited his writings, which will probably show up here for the next little stretch.

OIL SLICK. Paul Krugman opines on the Gulf oil disaster and the role of government in his latest column.

MEDIA AND MORE. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree. Jim appears to be going through some static with the Episcopal bishop of WV.

EAT LOCAL. This item looks at the economics of organic gardening and local food production.

GETTING INVOLVED can make you happier.

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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.

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The whips and scorns of time

To be (right) or not to be (left).

For several years I taught pre-GED classes at Head Start centers in southern West Virginia. I used to delight in torturing my students by bringing in different literary selections, having the class read them out loud, and then discussing them.

Of course, there's no way I could have resisted bringing in the most famous lines in English literature. And since Hamlet is the theme here, there's no way I can resist even now. So here goes:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn away,
And lose the name of action...

Harold Bloom argues that "this is not a meditation seriously contemplating suicide," but rather the prince hesitating on a course likely to lead to his own death. He has been around the Shakespearean block more times than me and may be right, but I'm not persuaded. Hamlet, after all has already brought up suicide in the first act and things have only gotten worse for him since then.

In any case, while El Cabrero is not too given to depression or thoughts of self-immolation (very often, anyhow), when it did cross my mind, I've always found Hamlet's reasoning to be persuasive.

WV ACTION ALERT. If you live in WV and haven't yet contacted Gov. Manchin and your legislators about modernizing our unemployment system and extending benefits to part time workers and people dealing with domestic violence, sexual assault, and other compelling family reasons, please click here and send a message. It's easy and it's fast. As of last night, over 351 emails have been sent (150 yesterday alone). The bills to draw down $22 million in federal money to do this need to move this week so acting now is crucial.

STIMULATED. Reuters has this to say about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act:

The massive stimulus package passed last year to blunt the impact of the worst U.S. recession in 70 years created up to 2.1 million jobs in the last three months of 2009, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.

The package boosted the economy by up to 3.5 percent and lowered the unemployment rate by up to 2.1 percent during that period, CBO said.

FOOD MILES. Here's another item on local foods.

LET'S GO SQUID HUNTING. Sperm whales may hunt them in packs.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING whether chimpanzees can quantify liquids, the answer is yes. Bartenders, beware!

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Putting Descartes before the horse

Descartes.

The horse.

El Cabrero just finished reading (more accurately, listening to) a fun book, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason by Russell Shorto.

I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate (does it show?) and remember having to do a report on ole Rene in my first class on modern philosophy. I was a bit surprised at the time that the 1600s counted as modern, but could see even then why Descartes was a new departure.

In an effort to gain certain knowledge, he practiced a method of systematic doubt in which he rejected anything that couldn't be seen as certain in the light of reason. Clear and distinct ideas and all that. As most people who've ever flirted with philosophy know, the bedrock on which he started was the cogito, as in "I think, therefore I am."

(Buddhists and others would be quick to point out that the fact of thinking does not necessarily imply a permanent "I" who is doing the thinking, but that's neither here nor there.)

One legacy that Descartes partly created and partly inherited was mind/body dualism. He tended to view the human body and animals generally as operating under natural and more or less mechanical laws. The human mind/soul however was believed to be somehow immaterial.

For some strange reason, he thought the soul connected with the body via the pineal gland, which raises the obvious question, what need would an immaterial soul have of that?

One unfortunate legacy of his thought was the tendency to view animals as essentially complex machines (which tells me among other things that he was a city boy) devoid of real feelings. In fact, most complex animals probably feel things as intensely as we do, although they don't talk or think about it as much. The parts of the brain associated with human emotions are those we share with other mammals.

Forget about the inner child and the ghost in the machine. I say embrace your inner animal!

HEALTH CARE. Here's a toolkit on health care reform for aimed at religious groups.

JUNK FOOD NATION. Here's another helping.

SPEAKING OF FOOD, WV Governor Joe Manchin declared yesterday to be "Eat Local Day." El Cabrero, a patriotic son of the Mountain State, did his part by eating garlic, tomatoes, eggplant and an egg from the farm.

CASH FOR CLUNKERS. Here's a look at this popular program by the Economic Policy Institute.

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The Fellowship of the Ring

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and some practical insights it offers about working for social justice. As I've argued here before, one mark of a good story is that it is one you can find as well as lose yourself in.

I remember reading somewhere that at least some leaders and participants in the Civil Rights movement--including the great Robert Moses--drew inspiration from Tolkien's trilogy for their work in the Deep South.

It makes perfect sense to me. Whatever Tolkien's shortcomings might or might not be, The Lord of the Rings makes perfect sense when you're engaged in a struggle against the odds for social justice. Over the next few days, I'm going to talk about some examples of this.

The first on is all too obvious. If you're going up against the latest version of the Dark Lord or Saruman, you need some strong and diverse coalitions.

Getting there isn't easy. In the trilogy, the good guys don't have much use for each other in the beginning. The humans from Gondor and Rohan, once allies, mistrust each other. Elves and dwarves have issues from way back. And nobody important cared about hobbits. It makes getting coal miners and environmentalists to work together on issues seem pretty simple. But it can be done, at least sometimes.

Sometimes things get so bad you have to either form coalitions or just give up. But coalitions, which tend to be at the organizational level, are only held together by relationships at the personal level, as exemplified in the story by the small band that sets out to try to destroy the ring.

In a small place like El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, where nothing is ever forgotten, relationships are everything. One state politician once quipped "In West Virginia, everything's political except politics and that's personal."

If I had to choose between winning a big one and damaging coalitions and relationships versus losing a big one and maintaining them (and I have been there), I'd probably prefer the latter. Struggles come and go, and victory or defeat often depends on conditions you don't completely control. Relationships take a long time to build and are hard to repair when damaged.

Winning and keeping them would be my first choice though.

AFTER THE FALL. This NY Times article discusses Obama's post-recession (assuming we get there) vision for capitalism.

LOCAL FOOD makes sense in lots of ways, but it can be a pretty complex issue.

TAXES. Here's economist Dean Baker's contribution to a debate on the merits of progressive taxation.

WASTED. Bill McKibben discusses our wasteful habits and the possibility of changing them.

DOWN TO THE WIRE. For addicts of the late lamented HBO series The Wire, here's a lengthy interview between Bill Moyers and Wire creator David Simon.

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Blood veins as blue as the coal

Benjamin Franklin once famously characterized humans as tool using animals. Since then, we've found out we're not the only ones.

My modest substitute would be to say that we are story-creating animals. The human mind (and voice) secretes narratives the way the liver secretes bile. We often tend to fit things into a limited number of pre-existing story forms.

As I argued yesterday, people in the US have a tendency to see the world in terms of an action movie, with clear good guys and bad guys and usually a happy ending. The problem with this approach is that history is often more like a tragedy than an action movie, with conflicting rights and wrongs and frequent casualties. The action movie frame can show up across the political spectrum.

One thing that kind of irks me about the way some out of state environmental writers talk about controversies like mountaintop removal mining is that they often fall straight into this frame. I dislike the practice and would welcome greater regulation of the industry. But I also dislike over-simplifications.

More on that tomorrow.

JOINING THE LOCAL FOOD REVOLUTION? Here's how.

POVERTY ON THE BRAIN. It can leave scars.

GOOD NATURED. A deformed skull from a child estimated to have lived over 500,000 years ago suggests that early humans showed compassion.

A HAPPY DEATH. A bill that would have required random drug tests for people receiving various kinds of public assistance, including unemployment, died yesterday in the WV legislature (with a little help).

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Is a court-martial in order?

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately has been the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. We're almost done, but there are a few loose ends.

One of which is about Odysseus' style as a leader. It's tempting to wonder how a contemporary military officer would be treated after performing as badly as he did during his homecoming (my guess is the Bush administration would probably promote him).

To recap, he lost 12 ships and 600 or so men--after the fighting was over. As Jonathan Shay sums it up in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming reminds us,

*he loses control of his troops and suffers 72 casualties in a botched and unnecessary pirate raid on the Circoneans;

*he puts himself and his men at risk needlessly and impulsively (the whole Cyclops thing);

*he protects his own ship but loses the rest when they approach the land of the Laestrygonians;

*he can't even be bothered to count his men when he leaves the island of Circe;

*he can't control his men when they violate the command not to kill and eat the sun god Helios' cattle. (Note: all of these have been the subjects of previous posts.)

As Shay puts it after looking over the evidence from the Iliad and the Odyssey,

As a staff officer, strategist, independent intelligence operative, and solo fighter, Odysseus was brilliant. As a troop leader, he was a catastrophe. Homer's great epics show him in full depth and perspective.

One thing hasn't changed from then to now in war as well as "peace," ordinary people pay the price for bad leadership.

SPEAKING OF PAYING FOR BAD LEADERSHIP, it looks like the Senate will vote today on the Wall Street bailout bill. The new version raises FDIC depositor's insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 and includes more business tax cuts--as if blowing $700 billion on corporate welfare wasn't enough.

Many groups around the country are opposing the bailout as it now stands for its lack of support for ordinary Americans. Here's an alternate vision that a number of groups have supported. Actions opposing the bailout will occur in several states today and progressive groups have been scrambling to keep up with the latest developments.

WHILE WE'RE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT THE ECONOMIC CRISIS, we could always buy local.

HERE'S A LITTLE REMINDER that whatever happens with the bailout, there's nothing new about corporate welfare.

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT. I've said this before and I'll say it again: what if everyone's Social Security was privately invested on Wall Street? Some people, who shall remain nameless, still want to do that.

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MORAL LUCK

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero is fascinated by the idea of "moral luck." It's an idea that was first developed by philosopher Bernard Williams and later elaborated by Thomas Nagel.

I think it works something like this: We tend to praise or blame people for doing or not doing certain things as if the whole thing was up to the individuals in question. But in the real world, what people do or don't do is often as much a matter of chance and circumstances as choice.

Take the example of a soldier who commits atrocities in a war. Would he or she have done the same thing if a war never happened? Or what if people who supported a dictatorship and did bad things in its service happened to be born in a different country or under a different political system?

People who talk about moral luck often use the example of a car accident. Most of us have probably zoned out at a stop sign or two or neglected to obey a speed limit sign. Driver X runs a light and nothing happens, while when Driver Y does it, innocent people are killed. Both are blameworthy for not paying attention, but the results are vastly different. We tend to blame Driver Y more, but both their actions were the same. The main difference is luck.

All El Cabrero knows is that the main reason I didn't get into a lot more trouble as a kid than I did had more to do with luck than anything else. Virtue is often a matter of chance and opportunity.

Although he doesn't use the term "moral luck," Stanford social psychologist Philip Zimbardo (of Stanford Prison Experiment fame) sums it up pretty well in his book The Lucifer Effect:

If you were placed in a strange and novel cruel Situation within a powerful System, you would probably not emerge as the same person who entered that crucible of human nature. You would not recognize your familiar image if it were held next to the mirror image of what you had become. We all want to believe in our inner power, our sense of personal agency, to resist external situational forces... For some, that belief is valid. They are usually the minority, the rare bird, those who I will designate as heroic... For many, that belief of personal power to resist powerful situational and systemic forces is little more than a reassuring illusion of invulnerability. Paradoxically, maintaining that illusion only serves to make one more vulnerable to manipulation by failing to be sufficiently vigilant against attempts of undesired influence subtly practice on them.

So good luck!

GET HAPPY. As more economists and social scientists research the link or lack thereof between conventional economics and human happiness, some free market fundamentalists are getting nervous.

BUBBLE, BUBBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE. Here's progressive economist Jared Bernstein on "the shampoo economy."

LOCAL FOODS, LAZY OR NOT. Here's another dispatch from the growing (no pun intended) movement to consume more local food.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, food banks around the country are increasing leaning on gleanings from local farms.

WELFARE FOR THE RICH was the subject of a talk by David Cay Johnston in WV last night.

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