Who got a raise?

Random animal picture featuring Arpad and Mini-me.

Earlier this week, I mentioned the increase in the federal minimum wage that took place last Friday. Here's a little information about who will benefit.

An analysis of national data shows that

*Around 10 percent of the workers (430.000 individuals) who will receive an increase are single parents with children under 18 years of age. 2.2 million children will benefit;

*More than three quarters of affected workers are adults aged 20 or over;

*About half of these (47 percent) work full time and another third (34 percent) work 20 to 34 hours a week;

*Most of those who benefit (63 percent) are women;

*Proportionally more members of minority groups will benefit from the increase. While African Americans make up 11 percent of the workforce, 18 percent will be affected by the raise. For Hispanics, the rates are 14 and 19 percent, respectively.

While the increase is good news for those who get it, the minimum wage (perhaps like the ole gray mare and some of us) ain't what it used to be. When adjusted for inflation, the 2009 minimum wage is 17 percent lower than in 1968. As a general trend, the purchasing power of the minimum wage was higher in the period between 1960and 1980 than it is in 2009.

There's more from the Economic Policy Institute about the issue here.

WHAT DO YOU WEAR AT AN "EXTINCTION EVENT?" Maybe whatever we have on now.

RACIAL PROFILING. Here's an op-ed by a friend of mine, the Rev. Matthew Watts, on some possible good things that could come out of the incident in which WV native and Harvard professor Skip Gates was arrested (aside from the beer at the White House thing).

HEALTH CARE. And here's an op-ed about health care from another friend, Marshall psychology professor Joseph Wyatt.

YOU'VE HEARD OF RENT TO OWN. Here's Dean Baker on "Own to Rent" as a step towards solving the foreclosure crisis. It makes way more sense.

IF YOU THOUGHT DRINKING AND DRIVING WAS BAD, check out texting.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Excellence and fragility

The classical scholar Martha Nussbaum opens her book The Fragility of Goodness with a quote from the ancient Greek poet Pindar, who made a career for himself writing odes for victors in the Olympic and other sacred games. He wrote:

...human excellence
grows like a vine tree
fed by the green dew,
raised up, among wise men and just,
to the liquid sky.
We have all kinds of needs for those we love--
most of all in hardships, but joy, too
strains to track down eyes that it can trust.

In other words, most of the good things or qualities we have are not inherently ours--even if they are things we've worked hard to achieve or attain. They depend on many other and external conditions, all of which are changeable and subject to loss and reversal.

Nussbaum expounds on Pindar thus:

The excellence of the good person, he writes, is like a young plant: something growing in the world, slender, fragile, in constant need of food from without. A vine tree must be of good stock if it is to grow well. And even if it has a good heritage, it needs fostering weather (gentle dew an drain, the absence of sudden frosts and harsh winds), as well as the care of concerned and intelligent keepers, for its continued health and full perfection. So, the poet suggests, do we. We need to be born with adequate capacities, to live in a fostering natural and social circumstances, to stay clear of abrupt catastrophe, to develop confirming associations we other human beings.

We are all, in other words, subject to fortune and reversal. One of the functions of Greek tragedy, the theme these days at Goat Rope, is to remind us that no one is immune and to warn us against assuming that fleeting good luck is something we own.

50 HERBERT HOOVERS. This NY Times editorial talks sense about the fiscal crisis many states are facing.

GOD ON THE BRAIN. Here's a link to a recent NPR series on science and spirituality.

RELIGION IN THE WAR ROOM. Here's an item about how briefings for for former president Bush were laced with biblical language.

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? Here's an item from Wired Science about why we stare.

TEXTING could be bad for teenagers'
health.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED