Support these troops

Fall view from the ridge.

Yesterday was Veteran's Day. No doubt many speeches were given extolling veterans for their service, which is only right. I wonder though if many of them dealt with problems such as this:

A research team at Harvard Medical School estimates 2,266 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance and thus had reduced access to care. That figure is more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died (911 as of Oct. 31) since the war began in 2001...

The Harvard group analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2009 Current Population Survey, which surveyed Americans about their insurance coverage and veteran status, and found that 1,461,615 veterans between the ages of 18 and 64 were uninsured in 2008. Veterans were only classified as uninsured if they neither had health insurance nor received ongoing care at Veterans Health Administration (VA) hospitals or clinics.

Typically, veterans in this situation, like millions of other Americans, are too poor to buy private insurance and too "rich" to qualify for public programs such as Medicaid. One good thing about proposed health care reform in Congress is a massive expansion of the Medicaid program and subsidies to help people buy insurance, although that would still leave some people out.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE. Here's more on the scarring effects of the recession on children.

STATE AID. This paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls on Congress to extend fiscal aid to states to avert major cuts in jobs and services.

SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE but not so much in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, according to a study that ranks several states using different criteria.

WORLD POVERTY. According to the United Nations, 2.7 billion people around the world survive on less than two dollars a day, while one billion live on less than a dollar a day. Here's more from Democracy Now.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH, DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU SAY. Here's a Gazette op-ed about how thuggery is suppressing free speech in coal controversies.

URGENT WOOD-EATING DEEP SEA CRAB UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The song, the sigh of the weary

Stephen Foster, 1826-1864.

Stephen Foster was something like the Bruce Springsteen of the generation leading up to the Civil War. His songs were treasured North and South alike. One of them, Hard Times, seems particularly appropriate for today.

The chorus goes:

Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.

Here’s a live version by Dylan by way of YouTube.

I’m not a big fan of motivational speakers and writers who offer cheap pep talks to people who are down. Such people often minimize misery or promote the fantasy that all wrongs will be righted. That won’t happen in this world, which is the only one we have direct knowledge of.

(Sorry about the preposition thing.)

Suffering of one kind or another is a part of life. Ancient Buddhists counted six major forms of it: birth, death, sickness, old age, having what you don’t want, and wanting what you don’t have. If you think about, that covers a pretty good bit.

Much of the suffering in the world today is unnecessary and could be vastly reduced or eliminated with more just social arrangements. Getting rid of that should be a top priority in public as well as private life.

But as Albert Camus wrote in a quote you may have seen here before,

“Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered. He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering of the world will remain and, no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage. Dmitri Karamazov’s cry of “Why?” will continue to resound…”

Still, that's no reason not to do what could be done.

GOOD NEWS FOR WV. Governor Manchin is calling a special session of the legislature to extend unemployment insurance by 20 weeks for those who have exhausted them. By acting now, the entire cost will be paid for by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This will bring over $30 million to the state's economy and help those who need it most.

ASTROTHUGS. If you have high speed Internet and about 10 minutes, here's Rachel Maddow on the "grassroots" movement to kill health care reform. And here's more on the same from the Center for American Progress. And, while we're at it, here's more from the AFLCIO blog and yet more from Paul Krugman's blog and latest column.

A GOOD SUMMARY of what's at stake for health care can be found here.

IF YOU'RE FEELING AS IF YOU'RE CAUGHT UP IN A VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY, you can generate a Kenyan birth certificate for anyone you like here.

LOOKING BACK AT VIETNAM. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes From Under the Fig Tree, with a not so nostalgic look back at the 1960s.

META, El Cabrero is going to be furloughed for the next two weeks. Goat Rope will continue to appear on a regular basis but posts will have been prepared in advance and won't have links, comments or anything reflecting current events.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Got chickens?

El Cabrero for once was on the cutting edge of a hot new trend. From the New York Times:

As Americans struggle through a dismal recession, many are trying to safeguard themselves from what they fear will be even worse times ahead. They eat out less often. They take vacations closer to home. They put off buying new cars.

And some raise chickens...

I think we're looking at the convergence of virtue and necessity. Lots of people are understandably squeamish about our industrialized food system, which isn't sustainable in lots of senses. Many have been inspired or at least made aware through books like Barbara Kingsolver and family's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. And then there are the folks who doing things like this just to make ends meet.

El Cabrero became a footsoldier in the local food revolution the honest way. I got married. Things happen when you do that. My sister-in-law even wrote a book about chickens.

There are all kinds of benefits from having chickens around. One of the biggest for me has been the insight that roosters offer into much of the behavior of the human male.

UNEMPLOYMENT ACTION. Yesterday's post talked about how WV take advantage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to extend unemployment benefits to those who have exhausted them. To qualify, the state needs to pass enabling legislation by the end of the year. To make it reach the people who need it, the legislation should be made retroactive through June of this year. Here's more info about the option from the WV Center on Budget and Policy.

TOO MUCH TEA? This article from The Nation discusses the increasingly shrill and racist noises coming from the far right and its connection to the health care debate.

THUG LIFE. On that note, hard right groups are using thug tactics to disrupt public forums on health care reform. (Have they been talking to some people round here?)

SMALL BUSINESS. Here's Dean Baker taking a comparative look at the status of small business in the US and...horrors!...Europe in the context of the health care reform debate.

TRUE GRIT or what my maternal unit called stick-to-itiveness could be a major key to success according to recent research. I know from 36 years in the martial arts that one major secret of getting better is to keep coming back. There is much to be said for taking one's lumps.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED