Unspectacular and always human

"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table."--W. H. Auden

GET BUSY. Here's a "Move the Money" toolkit from AFSC about how to get involved in working for a sane federal budget

CLASS WARFARE? Elizabeth Warren rather forcefully whacks that notion here.

ONE TO WATCH. Here's a new website that aims to be a resource for state and national acting to promote shared prosperity. The name of the site says it all: buildingthemiddleclass.org.

FOR ADULTS ONLY. Wild (but probably not very hot) squid sex is discussed here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of monsters, cyclopes and the rule of law

It is a truth universally acknowledged that monsters and other giant cannibalistic humanoids get low marks when it comes to playing nicely with others and obeying the rule of law.

This was noted as far back as The Odyssey. In Homer's epic, Odysseus describes the cyclopes thus:

They live without a council or assembly
or any rule of law, in hollow caves
among the mountain tops.

(Cyclopes, by the way, is the classical plural form for the word cyclops. It has the additional advantage of looking and sounding cooler than "cyclopses.")

The monsters in Beowulf, the theme here lately, by the way, are a bit tone deaf as well when it comes to legal refinements after Grendel starts raiding the mead hall of king Hrothgar of the Spear Danes and preying on any victim he can find. The poem laments at some length the monster's lack of interest in negotiations, treaties or paying for damages:

Sad lays were sung about the beset king,
the vicious raids and ravages of Grendel,
his long and unrelenting feud,
nothing but war; how he would never
parley or make peace with any Dane
nor stop his death-dealing nor pay the death-price.
No counsellor could ever expect
fair reparation from those rabid hands.
All were endangered; young and old
were hunted down by that dark death-shadow
who lurked and swooped in the long nights
on the misty moors; nobody knows
where these reavers from hell roam on their errands.

It strikes me as a bit amusing that the narrator of this supposedly barbaric poem seems genuinely surprised and disappointed that the monster didn't play by the rules.

UNEMPLOYMENT. Jobless claims last week look better than they have since mid 2008.

AN UNUSUAL ECONOMIC INDICATOR, the divorce rate, may also signal an improving economy. Strange to say, the number of divorces tends to go down in recessions (they are kind of expensive).

A GOOD CALL. West Virginia has a new superintendent of schools, one backed by myself and many others I know. Congratulations to Dr. Jorea Marple.

URGENT SQUID SEX HORMONE UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FORTUNE OR FAME?

Lady Fortuna and her wheel (in pre-game show days), courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately has been writing for positive social change, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

How you approach writing for social change depends on where the accent is. If your main interest is on writing, you might approach it one way. But if you're mostly after results, another approach might work better. For me, the latter has more appeal.

As Bob Dylan put it,

Up on Housing Project Hill
It's either fortune or fame
You must pick up one or the other
Though neither of them are to be what they claim

Both would be nice, but I guess I'd prefer fortune.

The main difference between fortune and fame is that people who want fame like to be front and center, whether with bullhorns or bylines. The problem with this is that the message sometimes gets all mixed up with the messenger. If it's fortune you're after, while there may be times when you'll be visible if that would help move things along, that's not the main goal. Some of the most important and effective work takes place behind the scenes.

This is also true when it comes to writing. Some of the most useful kinds are the alphanumeric equivalent of grunt work: alerts, talking points, reports, letters to the editor or officials, issue briefs. In fact, some of the most important kinds of writing involve getting other people to write.

More on that tomorrow, but first...

FIVE YEARS, THOUSANDS OF LIVES AND A GAZILLION DOLLARS LATER...


You-know-who-you-know-when, once again courtesy of wikipedia.

Senator Byrd had this to say about that.

NEXT STOP: IRAN? Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, thinks the Bush administration may try to make a bad situation much worse. One can hardly wait for the next aircraft carrier photo op. McGovern spoke Tuesday at WV State University at an event sponsored by Seneca 2. I meant to blog that yesterday. My bad.

BIG PAYOFFS. Investments in our crumbling infrastructure make sense for all kinds of reasons.

URGENT COLOSSAL SQUID UPDATE. They have eyes 11 inches wide, bigger than a dinner plate. Check out the picture.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ON BEING CAREFUL WITH PRAYER

Eos chasing Tithonus in happier times. Urn courtesy of wikipedia.

It is pretty well established that one should be careful in what one asks for when petitioning the gods for a favor. One should also be specific.

Take the case of Tithonus in Greek mythology. He was the lover of Eos or Dawn. Eos asked Zeus to grant him immortality, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth. He kept getting older and older but wasn't able to die. According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,

... when the first strands of gray hair started growing
from his beautiful head and his noble chin,
then the Lady Eos stopped coming to his bed.
But she nourished him, keeping him in her palace,
with grain and ambrosia. And she gave him beautiful clothes.
But when hateful old age was pressing hard on him, with all its might,
and he couldn’t move his limbs, much less lift them up,
then...she thought up this plan, a very good one indeed:
she put him in her chamber, and she closed the shining doors over him.
From there his voice pours out—it seems never to end—and he has no strength at all, the kind he used to have in his limbs when they could still bend.

In another version, he shrivels up and turns into a cicada who constantly begs for death.

Doh! I hate it when that happens.

When El Cabrero was younger, I petitioned the gods to let me be a writer. The petition was granted, sort of. I've written a lot of stuff, some of which may have been marginally useful in a few smallish campaigns but none of which is particularly memorable.

I should have been more specific....something like "Let me be as good a writer as Melville in his prime but more commercially successful and with a much less miserable personal and family life than he had...Oh, yeah, and let some of it make a difference."

That would have been awesome.

YOU SOO ALREADY KNEW THIS. The economy is like bad or something.

VENGEANCE IS WHOSE? Jared Diamond, author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel reflects on the drive for revenge in this New Yorker article.

FALLEN IDOL. The International Monetary Fund, which Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research calls a "creditors cartel," has seen better days...which might not be such a bad thing. Economist Jeffrey Sachs is quoted in this piece as saying that "the IMF has become the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country."

HUNGRY PLANET. This item from The Nation discusses the global food crisis.

GET MOVING. Exercise, dammit.

URGENT FROZEN COLOSSAL SQUID UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

NO DOUBT

Caption: This man is no Cartesian; he didn't think, therefore he swam.

El Cabrero has been musing this week on the nature of scientific knowledge. I haven't got very far, but it is Friday, which should count for something.

There are two influential thinkers of the early modern period who are often credited with getting the ball rolling. One, Francis Bacon, was the subject of yesterday's post. Today's is about his polar opposite, Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who gave us both analytical geometry (to which I have never been formally introduced) and, indirectly, the "Matrix" movies.

As I mentioned yesterday, Bacon believed that empirical induction was the way science needed to proceed. For him, experience was the key. He was mistrustful of deductive reasoning and math was way down on his list.

For Descartes, experience and observation were problems, not solutions, since we could easily be deceived by our senses. He recommended a deductive, mathematical approach to the development of the sciences, with experiment and observation way down on his list.

However, most people remember Descartes for his famous thought experiment of systematically doubting everything in order to arrive at some kind of certainty:

I had long before remarked that, in relation to practice, it is sometimes necessary to adopt, as if above doubt, opinions which we discern to be highly uncertain, as has been already said; but as I then desired to give my attention solely to the search after truth, I thought that a procedure exactly the opposite was called for, and that I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose the least ground for doubt, in order to ascertain whether after that there remained aught in my belief that was wholly indubitable.

This included doubting the senses and even the existence of the external world:

Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.

Then he hit what he thought was bedrock:

But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.

All this is from his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences, although he develops these ideas again in a different form in the Meditations on First Philosophy.

It's there that at least one of the inspiration for the Matrix movies came from. In the course of his doubt (from which he extricates himself with a not altogether convincing ontological "proof" of the existence of God), he imagines that

some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, suspend my judgment ], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice.

In modern times, this is known as the Brains in a Vat problem (as in how do we REALLY know that we ain't?), which is one of the main ideas behind the Matrix movies.

All I know is my legs would be a lot less sore if you could just download martial arts like they do in those movies...

WHEN SQUIDS ATTACK...Jumbo squid around 7 feet long and weighing 100 pounds are becoming more common off the coast of California. And they're mean.

STICKER SHOCK. For the latest on the costs of the Iraq war (what we've paid for so far anyway), click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED