Who'd a thunk it?

I must admit to being a bit surprised that a bill ending workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation passed the US Senate 61-30. Not sure how it will go in the Reptile Room  US House of Representatives though. WV's junior senator Joe Manchin had one of his good days.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on poverty.

URGENT PHOTOGENIC WEIRD LIFE FORM PHOTOS here.

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Shorter than a blog post, longer than a haiku

Here's yet another reason why West Virginia needs to create a Future Fund from severance taxes on natural resources.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on poverty.

URGENT GOBLIN SHARK UPDATE here. You've got to check out how this dude eats.

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There is no defense...

...against a summer squash attack.

WORTH A LOOK. Here's USA Today about waiting for the Affordable Care Act in WV. Notice working people wanting coverage versus political posturing by others.

WEIRD STORY ABOUT RAT CONSCIOUSNESS AFTER DEATH here.

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Just who's a bird brain?

Since I began spending time with birds here at Goat Rope Farm, I've been struck by how smart, emotional, and parental they can be. The more I see, the more the term bird brain doesn't seem to fit. However, recent research suggests that the label might well apply to all of us.

AFFORDABLE CARE FOR REAL. There's been quite a bit of noise on the right about how the Affordable Care Act will make health care unaffordable for many Americans. Not that reality matters much to that crowd, but it looks like individual health premiums in New York might fall by 50 percent next year as the reforms kick in.

CLIMATE CHANGE is expensive.

URGENT BIG-NOSE HORN-FACE DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

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Try that today

I love Unitarians. The only thing I like more than Unitarians is a good Unitarian joke, which is one reason I've decided to remain a fan of Garrison Keillor. I mention all this because the theme at Goat Rope these days is the life and thought of 19th century Transcendentalist sage Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, New England went through a theological sea change from the days of settlement in the 1600s to the 1800s. Originially, a hard core Calvinistic Puritanism prevailed. Over time however, the theological fever cooled and Unitarianism gained ground. Emerson himself was a former Unitarian minister.

One of his most famous, and notorious essays/lectures was the 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, in which he pulled off a feat that would be hard to replicate today. He gave a talk in which his views were so unorthodox that even many Unitarians couldn't take it--and as a result, he wasn't invited back to talk to his alma mater for 30 years.

(If it was too much for them, imagine what the Baptists would have thought!)

This week, we'll take a look at what set them off.

JUST DO IT. Here's another good article on why WV Governor Tomblin should expand Medicaid.

DEFICIT HYSTERIA is unnecessary, according to Krugman.

POLITICS ON THE BRAIN. I find articles like this one interesting, but think there's a danger in essentializing a contemporary trend. People seeking a genetic basis for our current polarization may be forgetting that this probably isn't an eternal fact of human nature but rather something that changes over time.

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Who's next?

The latest development in the criminal investigation of Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine disaster is the sentencing of a former mine superintendent. Here's hoping there's more to come.

TOTALLY OFF TOPIC. El Cabrero has always considered it unsportsmanlike to boil such creatures as lobsters and crabs alive. While I remain in the omnivore camp, and have been known to dispatch a creature or two to what I devoutly hope will be a pleasant rebirth in the Pure Land of Amida Buddha, I consider it but common decency to refrain from either cooking or eating a live creature.
I have been told by several people that these animals don't feel pain, to which I always want to reply, "How the hell do you know?" Anyhow, according to this NPR story, it would appear that they do feel pain after all. So there.

FROM THE SAME PLACE, but on a more pleasant topic than that of boiling sentinient beings alive, here's a look at how music can bliss out your brain.

BRIEFLY PUT. Bliss yes, boil no.

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Frack-a-delic

"Externalities" is an economics term that is often forgotten by worshipers of the market god. An externality is a kind of market failure, an example of a situation in which markets aren't efficient. The most troubling kind is a negative externality, which occurs when the costs of a particular kind of business aren't borne by either the buyer or seller and don't show up on the bottom line. Instead, they are passed on to someone else, often the public, which typically has to clean up the mess if it is going to be cleaned up at all.

I kept thinking about negative externalities while driving around Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling in northern WV. One example are the roads that are chewed up by heaving trucks hauling equipment in and out. Then there is the carbon emitted from the wells and drilling and transport process. Then there are all the nasty chemicals that show up in air, water, and solid waste. Then there is the noise pollution and diminished quality of life for people who live near the operations. Then, what kind of health effects are going to show up down the road? Etc.

People--lots of people--who didn't benefit from the market transaction are going to be paying for this for a long time to come. I know this drilling is going to be done, but I don't think we've gone far enough in regulating it and I don't think anyone yet has any idea what the long term consequences are going to be.


WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? Support for the war in Afghanistan is at an all time low.


A PARADIGM SHIFT in global economic thinking? Maybe, but it hasn't hit here yet.

IN POLITICS, who needs facts?

WHAT ABOUT GOLIATH? An archaeological dig in Israel may shed like on biblical King David's time.

I WANT ONE. Scientists have discovered fossils of a "mini-mammoth" that stood about three feet high.

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Of monkeys, people and religion

Hanuman, the Indian monkey god.

El Cabrero spent a good part of the week careening around West Virginia. For entertainment and edification, I listened to a recording of primatologist Frans De Waal's book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society.

In it, he made an interesting point that never had occurred to me, i.e. that religions that developed in places where people lived in proximity to monkeys and/or apes didn't separate humans from the rest of the natural world. Presumably it would be harder to do so when there were little furry human look alikes running around.

Dude has a point. Compare and contrast Hinduism and Buddhism with Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

FRACK PICTURES to come next week.

POLITICS, GENES AND BRAINS discussed here. Comment: as interesting as books on that topic are, they don't explain why things are so polarized today.

GET OUT THERE AND JOG if you want to live longer.

MORE TO DENY here.

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Speaking in a foreign tongue

For the longest time, learning a foreign language seemed like an insuperable obstacle for me. I started with Latin in high school, but our teach specialized in telling stories about her life rather than the language in question. Then I tried French more than once in college. I really admired many French writers but it seemed at the time (and still kinda does) that the pronunciation system in that language was an elaborate practical joke.

As I mentioned before, eventually I made more progress with Spanish, although I adopted drastic means which I wouldn't recommend to everyone. To wit, I married a Spanish teacher.

Anyway, I got a lot out of it, aside from a new collection of cuss words and the ability to drive native Spanish speakers to tears in a matter of minutes. I think learning a new language does something new and kind of cool to the brain.

And here's some scientific evidence for that.

Que bueno.

99% SPRING AND EVERYTHING AFTER discussed here.

CALLING BS. Here's my friend Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo calling for just a little tiny bit of truth and rationality on coal issues. Holy Kantian heteronomy, Batman!

WANT BUGS? Check here.

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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.

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This and that

Ready or not, here comes the week. Here are a few items that caught my eye.

POLITICS, MORALITY AND THE BRAIN discussed here.

A NEW PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT? Economist Jeffrey Sachs thinks so. I'm not so sure yet.

ZOMBIE "PHILOSOPHY" here's NPR being unnecessarily nice to bad ideas.

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Too bad...

...about autumn views in West Virginia. My seasonal good deed for the day was rescuing a torporous snake on the road today after the sun began to go down. I can't be sure but I think it was a copperhead.

El Cabrero is about to hit the road for a bit so posts may be irregular. Here are a few items that occupied my attention:

LEONARD PITTS ON THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT here.

10 WAYS TO SUPPORT IT here.

POLITICS ON THE BRAIN discussed here.

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A la carte

El Cabrero is about to hit the road for a few days but here are some items that caught my eye:

ROCK ON, ROCKEFELLER. West Virginia's senior senator Jay Rockefeller takes on plans to arbitrarily cut the federal budget at the expense of working and low income people.

NO LOVE FEAST. Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) found his plan to torpedo Medicare was a tough sell on a tour of his home state.

THE BACK DOOR PLAN. Here's more on the splendidly bad idea of global caps on federal spending.

AFTER OSAMA. Will scaling back military engagements and spending be on the agenda?

FAIRNESS ON THE BRAIN. A sense of justice (however apparently dormant at times) seems to be innate. Scientists may even have found its location in the brain.

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TCB

Random animal picture, this one being of Little Edith Ann at Halloween, yet another reason why dogs hate that holiday.

The lame duck session of Congress that begins today has some serious business to take care of, provided it has the guts and will. Around two million Americans are going to exhaust unemployment benefits in December. In West Virginia, the number is around 11 thousand. The numbers will only get worse in 2011.

This needs to happen, given that there are around five jobless workers for every new job that opens up. And economists are expecting sluggish job growth for the next year or two, maybe longer. Ideally, the extension should last for a year.

Ever since the 1950s, Congress has acted to extend benefits when unemployment was 7.2percent or higher and we're way about that point now.

This extension has to happen in the lame duck session because the new majority in the House is not likely to do it. I'd really like to be wrong about this, but I think it's a good bet that the new majority will be hostile to anything that benefits working people, the unemployed and people in poverty. And for all their talk about fighting deficits, you can bet that they'd like nothing more than to extend Bush era tax cuts for the rich indefinitely.

There is something we can do about this. Tomorrow, Nov. 16 is a national call-in day to Congress to extend unemployment. The WV AFLCIO is urging people to participate in the call-in campaign tomorrow and has provided a toll free number: 1-877-662-2889.

Please take a minute to make the call. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH, here's yours truly on the need for the WV legislature to take some action of its own on unemployment insurance modernization.

CAVING (METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING). The White House, that is. Maybe.

SPEAKING OF METAPHORS, they seem to live in certain regions of the brain.

ANOTHER FIGHT IN THE WORKS is preventing repeal of health care reform.

SOMETHING ELSE TO DENY. Melting glaciers. It might be a bit harder to deny rising sea levels in the future though.

UN-WELL BEING. West Virginia takes the lead again.

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Quiet desperation

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."

A MODEST PROPOSAL. Robert Reich has a simple--and timely--idea about green jobs: put young and jobless people to work dealing with BP oil mess.

LISTEN TO THE MINERS. This editorial in the NY Times speaks approvingly of WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's call for coal mine safety reforms that protect whistleblowers and hold corporate executives more accountable for safety violations.

THIS IS REALLY WEIRD, but El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia isn't doing all that badly, at least compared with most other states, in dealing with the recession.

THIS EXPLAINS A LOT. Adolescent brains seem to be wired for risk-taking.

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Almost gone

The real Mr. Miyagi. Chojun Miyagi (1888-1953), founder of the Goju-ryu style.

Ever since I began formally practicing karate in jr. high, I dreamed of going across the water to study it. The original "plan" called for going right out of high school but that didn't happen.

At the time, I was practicing the Shotokan style, which was headquartered in Tokyo. The longer I trained and the more I learned, however, the more I wanted to go to the source, i.e. Okinawa, where it was born.

The art now know as karate (for "empty hands") is probably the result of a combination of the indigenous Okinawan fighting art of te (meaning hand)and the Chinese martial arts popularly known as kung fu.

A poem written by the scholar Teijunsoku, born in 1663 includes these lines, which also reflect the values of karate:

No matter how you may excel in the art of te,
And in your scholastic endeavors,
Nothing is more important than your behavior
And your humanity as observed in daily life.

Over time, two major streams evolved which were named after cities in Okinawa, Shuri-te and Naha-te (Naha has since pretty much absorbed Shuri). Shuri-te is often described as being quick and light, while Naha-te is said to emphasize strength development and uses special breathing and dynamic tension methods in training. The leading Shuri-te styles today include Shotokan and Shorin ryu, while Naha-te is represented by styles like Goju-ryu and Uechi-ryu. A neutral observer would recognize both as being karate but also as being different.

Most of my background is in the Shuri-te tradition, so I'm hoping to round things off a little this trip.

Goat Rope posts will appear as usual through the weekend. After that, I'll try to blog from across the water but on a different time schedule.

THIS IS THE BRAIN on politics, revisited.

CEO PAY. Firms that received TARP money don't seem to be adhering to CEO pay guidelines.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. After a back and forth that has gone on for some time, funding for a program that helps people with disabilities and the elderly stay in their homes has been increased in WV. Not too many states are doing things like that these days.

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Wonky but important (with a Homeric digression)

"The Rage of Achilles" by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Aristeia is a great Greek work that I'd like to see enter the English lexicon. It's usually associated with the Homeric tradition and refers to a hero's best moment.

In the Iliad, an aristeia scene might begin with the hero putting on his armor and speaking words of encouragement to his men before going out to open a major can of whoop-ass on his opponents. He might not always prevail in the end, but people knew he was there. If the Gentle Reader has ever been involved in major struggles, metaphorical or otherwise, he or she will know that sometimes you're on and sometimes you're not. An aristeia is one of those rare times when you're really on a roll.

I'd say that the current struggle over health care is WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's aristeia. He's been a champion of health care issues all along, but I'd say this has been his best fight. Lately, he made national headlines for his (so far unsuccessful) fight to include a public option in the Senate bill.

His latest effort was more successful and deserves recognition. In most versions of health care reform proposed so far by Congress, the Childrens Health Insurance Program would have been phased out. The idea was that the need for it would diminish as more families gain access to other health care plans.

Plenty of people, including me, were not happy about this and wanted the program extended. After all, it was only this year that the program was reauthorized by Congress and the bill that passed included several improvements to the program. We wanted to make sure the program survived intact long enough for states to improve their plans and to make sure that all the bugs had been worked out of whatever reform bill finally passed.

Also, it would have been hard to persuade state leaders to make improvements in CHIP if they thought it wasn't going to be around much longer. Among the changes now possible under the reauthorized program are extending benefits to families earning up to 300 percent of the poverty level; reducing waiting periods for enrollment; expanding oral health benefits; and eliminating the five year waiting period for children of legal immigrants.

Late last week, the Senate Finance Committee voted in favor of one of Rockefeller's amendments which would extend CHIP until at least 2019. As the Charleston Gazette points out, CHIP covers around 14 million children nationwide and at least 25,000 in West Virginia. The issue isn't resolved yet, since this version of the bill will have to be reconciled with others, but my guess is that this amendment has a good chance of surviving.

CHIP is a popular program that benefits working families and it needs to be around as long as there's a need for it.

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. This editorial from the Sunday NY Times about the job situation speaks my mind. No doubt the stimulus has kept things from getting worse, but more action is needed to address the still deteriorating employment situation. As the Times puts it,

Congress and the administration also have not done enough to directly create jobs. That could be done with more stimulus to spur job creation, or a large federal jobs program, or tax credits for hiring, or all three. Or surprise us. Just don’t pretend that the deteriorating jobs picture will self-correct, or act as if it is tolerable.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on religion.

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Game on

A street action in favor of health care reform in Huntington, WV this Saturday.

Goat Rope is back in regular operating mode this week following a two week furlough. Thanks to people for the comments and emails over the last stretch about the favorite books series. I haven't responded yet as I wasn't supposed to have access to email and such during those two weeks.

One thing I didn't do was take a break from the struggle over health care reform. In WV as around the country there have been many town hall meetings and public events and actions.

This season may well be remembered as Whackadoodle Summer as astroturf crowds tried to shout down public meetings and bizarre conspiracy theories about the diabolical idea of covering all Americans grew like mushrooms after a summer rain.

It all kinda reminded me of a famous essay by historian Richard Hofstadter titled The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which is alive and well.

All of which is to say, if want to have something to say when your grandkids ask you what you did in the big fight over health care, now would be the time to speak out, write letters, contact your congressional delegation, participate in forums and actions and all that.

BULL COOKIES. Here's a bull cookie-free op-ed on health care by one of the most progressive members of the WV legislature.

THE GHOST OF REAGAN still haunts the land.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN under stress.

VODKA AND GOALS don't mix very well.

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Rage

I recently listened to a recorded version of Temple Grandin's book Animals Make Us Human. Hers is an interesting story. Diagnosed with autism as a child, she was able to use her experiences to great advantage as an animal scientist.

In the book, she discussed core emotions for animals (including us). One of these was rage, which some scientists believe to be a response to extreme restraint, such as a situation of being captured and held immobile by a predator. It occurs to me that poverty, which Earl Shorris once described as a "surround of force" is a similar kind of extreme restraint.

As I mentioned in earlier posts this week, this month marks 20 years for me of working on economic justice issues for the American Friends Service Committee. But before all that, I spent several years in involuntary poverty, a situation that can make you feel like a hunted animal.

El Cabrero is a big fan of Simone Weil's essay The Iliad or Poem of Force, where she describes force as that which turns a human being into an object, either literally as a corpse or metaphorically as one who loses freedom. Poverty can do that too. At times it makes you feel more like the object of others or of impersonal forces than an active subject.

And it can produce rage. I felt it then and I still do when I see poor people degraded and abused. The experience seems to have made me a bit edgier. After living that reality, I'm grateful to have had the chance to do something about it when the opportunity arises.

(And, speaking purely as an animal, it is way more fun to hunt than to be hunted.)

All human motivations are complicated and ambiguous, but part of mine, frankly, is payback.

THE ECONOMY AND THE DEFICIT. Here's economist Dean Baker's advice to deficit hawks who are missing the point.

THE BUDGET. The main priorities of President Obama's budget may survive congressional changes. It wouldn't hurt to give your senators and representatives a nudge.

WHITHER CAPITALISM? Will it morph into a kinder, gentler variety in the wake of the global economic crisis?

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on receiving "expert" financial advice.

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Information and improvement

This conversation improved and entertained both participants (although the one on the right has since shuffled off this mortal coil).

Goat Rope has recently been spending time in the company of Benjamin Franklin. Well, actually with his autobiography, but you get the idea.

Franklin achieved remarkable success in many of his endeavors thanks in no small measure to his skill in dealing with other people. As noted in yesterday's post, he made it a habit to avoid not only arguing with and directly contradicting others but also to state his own views in a modest and unassuming way.

If, as he believed, conversation is about informing others and being informed in turn and pleasing and being pleased by others, then stating opinions in a dogmatic way tends to shut things down. He said,

For, if you wish to inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix'd in your present opinions, modes, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire. Pope says, judiciously:

Men should be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown propos'd as things forgot...

Many years before Franklin, Lao Tzu put it like this:

A good soldier is not violent.
A good fighter is not angry.
A good winner is not vengeful.
A good employer is humble.
This is known as the Virtue of not striving.
This is known as ability to deal with people.
This since ancient times has been known
as the ultimate unity with heaven.

GOT THE DIPLOMA. NOW WHAT? This isn't the best of years, economically speaking, to graduate from college.

HUNGRY COUNTRY. The nation's food banks may need a bailout if things continue as

DREAM ON. Research suggests that people interpret their dreams selectively.

RELIGION ON THE BRAIN. Adaptation or accident?

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Blenko Glass plans to resume limited production after closing earlier this year.

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