Intellectual cinema

I'm still trying to figure this one out. The Spousal Unit, aka La Cabra, has a thing about violent entertainment. She wouldn't watch Rome, The Walking Dead, or even The Sopranos. But she loved every minute of The Expendables 2. For real. I guess it's really more about the aesthetic and intellectual quality of the film.

WHAT SHOULDN'T BE FOR SALE? Here's one person's list. What would be on yours?

YUK. At least this hasn't happened in WV. Yet.

THE BIG KAHUNA in terms of real gains for social justice will be Medicaid expansion to cover low income working adults as part of the Affordable Care Act. It looks like the feds are getting a little tougher on states that are holding back from taking this step

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Has the worm turned?

Image by way of wikipedia.


I have lived most of my life in a time of widening economic inequality and have been making noise about it for a long time now. For years, it seemed like people were just getting used to it. As one of Dostoevsky's characters put it (I think it was in Crime and Punishment), "Man gets used to anything--the scoundrel."

But lately it seems like that may not be the case. More and more people are talking about it. It's front and center in political debates these days. Something weird must be up when predatory capitalism becomes an issue in the Republican presidential primary.

I think for all its quirks, the Occupy Wall Street movement deserves a lot of credit for surfacing the issue and getting it out there. The whole 99 percent/1 percent thing has become a bit of a meme, a term invented by Richard Dawkins to describe an idea or phrase that catches on.

It's still too soon to tell whether this is a sea change or a flash in the pan. But a turning worm would be nice.

THE MONEY/HAPPINESS THING discussed here.

NEED A DOSE OF ZEN? Click here.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on politics.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Those difficult gift decisions (and a half hearted defense of peacocks)

A few days ago, Alternet ran an article about what to get for that billionaire on your Christmas list. It was pretty humorous, although I have to take issue with the first item on the list, to wit a peacock. The writer says that this gift "Provides the double benefit of being both the ultimate symbol of excessive extravagance and extremely difficult to care for."

OK, so they are extravagant, presuming we're talking about the male's tail feathers in the spring and early summer. But you can't really blame the bird for that--you'd have to blame sexual selection, which is to say, peahens. The males have big tails because having one helped their male forebears to reproduce.

And they're not that hard to take care of. They eat the same things as chickens and pretty much take care of themselves, provided you don't have more than one male and provided you don't mind listening to them scream during mating season. They're pretty quiet otherwise.

I don't even think of them as being domesticated the way chickens are. They're more like loud, romantic, decorated, seasonal dinosaurs.

DEAL OR NO DEAL. Here's a statement from the National Employment Law Project on the Obama administration's "deal" with congressional Republicans (which may or may not happen). And here's Paul Krugman's latest column on the same.

FOR SALE. A sale of Massey Energy looks more likely now that former CEO Don Blankenship has announced retirement.

MONEY AND POLITICS. There seems to be some connection.

URGENT ANCIENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE. It looks like they had giant storks for company.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Useful errors

I was in an interesting conversation this weekend about the root causes of social problems, which caused me to start thinking about the slippery issue of causality. Or maybe not.

The human tendency to think in terms of cause and effect is deeply ingrained and probably has roots in evolutionary biology. Being able to infer causal patterns was no doubt adaptive in relatively the simple environments in which early humans lived.

The problem comes when we all too readily assume that causal explanations we find satisfying are true. Natural selection, that "blind watchmaker", doesn't really care about truth; it just cares about what is useful.

My old pal Friedrich Nietzsche put it this way:

Throughout immense stretches of time the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them proved to be useful and preservative of the species: he who fell in with them, or inherited them, waged the battle for himself and his offspring with better success.

Thought for the day: would you prefer truth without utility or utility without truth?

UNUSEFUL UNTRUTHS. Paul Krugman takes aim at the prevailing narrative on the economy and the recession.

CORRUPTION. Big money, sleazy politics.

SOCIAL ANIMALS. Research on twins suggests that people are socially oriented even before birth.

DEATH BY BREAKFAST. Here's a look at some unhealthy menu items.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Whatever happened to supporting the troops?

OK. I am not the biggest fan of the current US war in Afghanistan. Politics and the morality of war aside, my understanding of history as far back as Alexander the Great suggests that the country is the Mother Of All Bad Places to Wage a Counter-Insurgency.

Still and all, it boggles my mind that right wingers in American these days are pushing all the wrong buttons and making a bad situation even worse for people serving and living over there. The Manhattan mosque controversy sends a bad enough message to Muslims and puts the whole hearts and minds thing in jeopardy.

But even that is pretty mild compared with the international reaction to the plans of a "church" in Florida to mark the anniversary of 9/11 by burning copies of the Quran.

Here's how it played in Afghanistan, according to a weekend AP report:

Hundreds of Afghans railed against the United States and called for President Barack Obama's death at a rally in the capital Monday to denounce an American church's plans to burn the Islamic holy book on Sept. 11.

The crowd in Kabul, numbering as many as 500, chanted "Long live Islam" and "Death to America" as they listened to fiery speeches from members of parliament, provincial council deputies, and Islamic clerics who criticized the U.S. and demanded the withdrawal of foreign troops from the country. Some threw rocks when a U.S. military convoy passed, but speakers shouted at them to stop and told police to arrest anyone who disobeyed.

These kinds of deliberate and gratuitous provocations are likely to get a lot of Americans and Afghan civilians killed. It's little surprise that General Petraeus was not amused:

"It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort," Gen. Petraeus said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community."

As the saying goes, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

THE CLOCK IS TICKING on a program that has created 240,000 jobs unless the Senate extends the Emergency TANF provisions of the Recovery Act.

THIS COULD BE INTERESTING. A new rule by the Securities and Exchange Commission could shake up things at companies like Massey Energy.

MONEY AND HAPPINESS. Here's more on the link between the two.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A DAUNTING JOURNEY

Circe, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the Odyssey of Homer, but you will also find links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

After many ordeals, Odysseus and his men have it pretty good on the island of Circe. As he put it:

...there we sat at ease,
day in, day out, till a year had run its course,
feasting on sides of meat and drafts of heady wine...
But then, when the year was through and the seasons wheeled by
and the months waned and the long days came round again,
my loyal comrades took me aside and prodded,
'Captain, this is madness!
High time you thought of your own home at last,
if it really is your fate to make it back alive
and reach your well-build house and native land.'

Circe is cool with all that (unlike the other nymph Calypso in a similar situation). She promises to help but warns him that he must undertake yet another journey if he is ever to make it home:

'Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, old campaigner,
stay no more in my house against your will.
But first another journey calls. You must travel down
to the House of Death and the awesome one, Persephone,
there to consult the ghost of Tiresias, seer of Thebes,
the great blind prophet whose mind remains unshaken.
Even in death--Persephone has given him wisdom,
everlasting vision to him and him alone..
the rest of the dead are empty, flitty shades.'

It will be a dangerous trip, beyond the confines of the know world. It sounds like the dead "lived" underground beyond the Mediterranean somewhere in the Atlantic, which the ancient Greeks considered to be the river Oceanus. Neither he nor his men are glad to hear the news. She gives him final instructions for his task and helps him on his way.

The way you know you've really arrived as a mythological hero, by the way, is to take a trip to the land of the dead. Odysseus will join the company of Orpheus, Heracles, and Theseus. In future years, Aeneas and Dante will make the trip as well.

Come to think of it, I guess we all will, one way or another.

AMERICAN HUNGER. Here's an item from AARP on the growing problem of hunger and food insecurity in the US.

OCCUPATIONS have their problems, as economist Joseph Stiglitz discusses in this op-ed on Iraq and Afghanistan.

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT in helping the economy grow is discussed here.

PUT MONEY IN THY PURSE. Financial compatibility may be the key to a good marriage.

RELIGION ON THE BRAIN, literally.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, if you feel like a theological workout, here's an interesting paper on the history of Christian views of warfare.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

OLD HABITS ARE HARD TO BREAK

J.G. Trautmann's version of the fall of Troy, courtesy of wikipedia.

Welcome to Goat Rope's ongoing series on the Odyssey of Homer. You'll also find news and links about current events. If you like the classics, click on earlier posts.

As mentioned before, the Odyssey is in part about what it takes for someone who has spent years in warfare--ten in the case of Odysseus--to go home and be fully integrated into peacetime life. Then as now, lots of people never make it home and Odysseus himself is an example of how not to do it.

Imagine for a moment that you have spent that many at a war you didn't particularly want to participate in and it's finally over. Most people would probably picture themselves taking the shortest possible route back home.

Not our boy. When the wind blows his ships to Ismarus, he engages in a gratuitous raid on the Circones, a people who did nothing to provoke the attack. In his own words,

...There I sacked the city,
killed the men, but as for the wives and plunder,
that rich haul we dragged away from the place--
we shared it round so no one, not on my account,
would go deprived of his fair share of the spoils.

To put it mildly, he's stuck in combat mode and clearly not ready for a peaceful homecoming. Not surprisingly, the situation goes south from there. His men get drunk and disorderly:

there was too much wine to swill, too many sheep to slaughter

Soon other Circones rally to support the raided village and drive them off, after Odysseus' men suffer significant casualties.

As Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America, puts it,

...Homer shows us the first way that combat soldiers lose their homecoming, having left the war zone physically--they may simply remain in combat mode, although not necessarily against the original enemy.

Shay knows whereof he speaks, having spent many years working with Vietnam combat veterans traumatized by their experiences. He has found both that the epics of Homer shed light on the experiences of veterans and vice versa. Some of the people he worked with, like Odysseus, have trouble turning off the switch.

While the military sometimes presents itself as a vast vocational school, the skills learned in prolonged combat--such as controlling fear, cunning, skill in using lethal force and weaponry, etc.--are very real and highly specialized--they just sometimes don't transfer well to civilian life.

He quotes the World War I veteran Willard Waller:

Most of the skills that soldiers acquire in their training for war are irrelevant to civilian life...The picture is one of men who struggle very hard to learn certain things and to acquire certain distinctions, and then find that with the end of the war these things completely lose their utility...Digging a fine fox-hole or throwing hand grenades with dexterity, they are entirely valueless...

The boss, who hired and fires him, writes recommendations for him, raises or lowers his pay, and otherwise disposes of his destiny is nothing but a soft civilian. The foreman thinks he is tough...While the veteran was risking his life for his country, the boss and the foremen were having an easy time of it...The veteran cannot help reflecting that a smash of a gun-butt, ore even a well-directed blow at the bridge of the nose...might easily dispose of such a man forever.

Shay gets the last word today:

Homer put first the pirate raid on Ismarus. I take this as a metaphor for all the ways a veteran may lose his homecoming by remaining in combat mode...Everyone knows that war can wreck the body, but repeatedly forget that it can wreck the soul as well. The sacrifice that citizens make when they serve their country's military is not simply the risk of death, dismemberment, disfigurement, and paralysis--as terrible as these realities are. They risk their peace of mind--please hear this familiar phrase, "peace of mind," fresh again in all its richness! They risk losing their capacity to participate in democratic process. They risk losing the sense that human virtues are still possible. These are psychological and moral injuries--war wounds--that are no less of a sacrifice than the sacrifice of the armless, or legless, or sightless veteran. One of my former patients, a combat medic in Vietnam, has said, "Just acknowledge the sacrifice!"

WITH MY MIND ON MY MONEY AND MY MONEY ON MY MIND, I might not play nicely with others. Here's an interesting item by Peter Singer on some recent experiments showing how money affects human interactions. Holy alienation, Batman!

WHAT THE CENSUS DATA DIDN'T SHOW. Here's an item from McClatchy about disturbing economic trends.

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS are trying to combin welle doing with doing good.

URGENT GIANT SQUID UPDATE. The largest one ever caught has been described by a scientist as "a giant, gelatinous blob."

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FINANCIAL TIMES, A LA SHAKESPEARE

Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods,
I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens!
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
Ha, you gods! why this? what this, you gods? Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed,

Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: this is it
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again;

She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that put'st odds
Among the route of nations, I will make thee
Do thy right nature....

O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
‘Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,

Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible God!
That solder’st close impossibilities,
And makest them kiss! That speak’st with every tongue,

To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire!

Shakespeare, Timon of Athens