The Goat Rope

Short rations again

2009-11-10T05:11:00.005-05:00

No time for rants today, other than a wish that the Good Fairy, pictured above, grants everyone a good day. In the meantime, these things struck my eyes:

WHAT'S IN THE HOUSE HEALTH CARE REFORM BILL for us? Click here.

UNLEASHING CAPITALISM? Unregulated capitalism didn't do too well in a recent global poll.

DOA? Some say climate change legislation isn't likely this year or next. Here's a summary of info from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo.

IT'S OFFICIAL. Not only are pigs smart, but they like mirrors.

NEED A SPIDER FIX? Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

One mile at a time

2009-11-09T05:35:00.000-05:00

A random animal picture in which Arpad explores his feminine side.

The long-running fight over health care reform reached a milestone Saturday as the House of Representatives narrowly passed its version. It has a lot of good features, including a major expansion of Medicaid, a public option, regulations on the insurance industry and subsidies to help people purchase insurance.

I would have preferred that it would have left the Children's Health Insurance Program intact, something WV Senator Jay Rockefeller amended into the Senate bill, but maybe that will be resolved in conference after--if--the Senate passes its version.

This has been a long, tiring fight, with plenty of drama and melodrama--and we're far from done. A lot of effort will be required to get something through the Senate and to arrive at some kind of compromise between the houses.

It reminds me of running a marathon. Having completed a few of those (none too rapidly, let it be admitted), I've found it to be a good strategy not to focus on running the whole 26.2 miles. Instead, focus on the mile you're running. Once you finish that one, focus on the next.

We just passed another mile marker. Now let's focus on the next.

HEALTH CARE WHACKADOODLE-ISM. Here's a mini-encyclopedia of it.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's Krugman on the same.

STATE BUDGET WOES. West Virginia has its share, although so far it hasn't been as hard hit as many states.

ODYSSEUS LIVES! Long time readers of Goat Rope know that El Cabrero has a great deal of fondness for the epics of Homer and what they can still teach us today (search Iliad, Odyssey, Homer in the top left corner for earlier series on them). Here's an op-ed from the NY Times about the Odyssey and what it can teach us about the difficulties and dangers for veterans on their homecoming.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Keats' trifecta

2009-11-07T05:00:00.000-05:00

GIVE me women, wine, and snuff
Untill I cry out "hold, enough!"
You may do so sans objection
Till the day of resurrection
:
For, bless my beard, they aye shall be
My beloved Trinity.--John Keats, 1795-1821

Dying for a job

2009-11-06T05:50:00.000-05:00

Seventeenth century painting by Philippe de Champaigne.

An article in Wednesday's Washington Post highlighted the Obama administration's efforts to grapple with rising unemployment in the midst of signs of an expanding economy. Both the administration and congress are going to have try to balance the need for action with concern over federal deficits.

Based on some pretty hard social science, there's one thing we know about recession-related unemployment: some people are going to die earlier than they would have because of it.

As British epidemiologist Michael Marmot summed up research on unemployment in Britain in his book The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity, "people who became unemployed had 20 percent higher mortality than those who remained employed at the same social class level."

Obviously, lots of factors could be at work here, including greater stress and anxiety, which are known to have health consequences. Poverty could play a part, but Marmot argues that

it is useful to distinguish the two senses of poverty: a lack of basic material conditions for life; and insufficient resources, private or public, to participate in society. The first is unlikely to be the sole explanation, as unemployed professionals, who might be expected to have some saving,s have worse health than those still employed in the same occupational social class. This is not to say that financial problems are irrelevant. Far from it. Financial strain appears to be the complaint most associated with worse mental health in the unemployed. I would ague that this is consistent with poverty in the second sense--inability to participate fully in society. Whether initially well-off, or poorly off, deterioration in economic circumstances will cause real hardship.

Add to the mix another known factor related to health: being involuntarily unemployed also reduces one's sense of autonomy and control over one's life. Taken together, loss of control and inability to fully participate in society are a poisonous mix.

Economist John Maynard Keynes famously commented that "in the long run we are all dead." For some of the unemployed, the long run is getting shorter.

ON THAT SUBJECT, Congress approved an extension of unemployment benefits yesterday. And while we're at it, here's a call for public jobs creation along the lines of the New Deal.

RAMPAGE. It was a terrible day at Ft. Hood.

IS CLIMATE CHANGE happening in the Senate? Maybe, but we're not there yet. Here's Coal Tattoo on the subject.

EXERCISE AND WEIGHT LOSS. There is a connection, but it's not all that simple.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Either binary or not

2009-11-05T05:40:00.000-05:00

Portrait of the anthropologist as a young man. Claude Levi-Strauss in the 1930s. Image by way of wikipedia.

A few years back, and for reasons that now escape me, I went on a reading jag of books about anthropology, semiotics (the study of signs), structuralism, and literary theory.

I think I must have been really bored.

It was kind of amusing as long as I didn't take it too seriously. The Spousal Unit was probably right when she said to pretend like it was science fiction.

One person whose work I grappled with was French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who recently died at the age of 100. Not that I read all the way through his major tomes--even El Cabrero has his limits--but I read some snippets and several secondary works.

I probably missed a lot, but it seems to me like he was right about one of his major ideas (assuming I'm getting this right). The human mind seems to kind of like a fishing tackle box and we seem to be hardwired to classify things and put them in different compartments. Each culture seems to have its own classification system but the urge to classify remains the same.

The systems themselves are kind of arbitrary from the outside, with each part only having a meaning in relation to others within it. To use an example from linguistics, there is nothing about the symbols c-a-t that necessarily refer to a feline; it only does so within the context of the system of modern English.

We seem to be especially disposed towards binary categories: us/them, good/bad, raw/cooked, etc. Even when we try to break away from our cultural conditioning, we seem to substitute a different binary system for the old one.

As someone once said, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who break things into two major categories and those who don't. Like it or lump it...

DYING FOR HEALTH CARE. A new study from Johns Hopkins Children's Center found that uninsured children were 60 percent more likely to die after entering a hospital than those with insurance. This is probably because the uninsured typically don't receive preventive care and wait to seek treatment until there is a crisis.

TV NATION. Young children who watch a lot of television may be more disposed to aggressive behavior.

STATE BUDGET. West Virginia may be looking at budget shortfalls in excess of $100 million, although it is doing better than many other states. This highlights the need to make maximum use of funds available from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Houses and sniffles

2009-11-04T05:25:00.000-05:00

A Rhinovirus, courtesy of wikipedia. I think they magnified it a time or two.

There is a large and growing body of scientific research about how things like inequality, class and social status engrave themselves into our bodies. Generally speaking, people in higher social positions are less likely to develop conditions like heart disease or diabetes than those in lower positions. The same affect seems to apply to infectious diseases as well.

In a fascinating study, healthy adults first answered questions about their socio-economic status (SES) and that of their parents when they were growing up. They were then exposed to one of two forms of rhinovirus (aka common cold viruses) and kept in quarantine to monitor the symptoms.

Here's a surprising finding:

For both viruses, susceptibility to colds decreased with the number of childhood years during which their parents owned their home...This decreased risk was attributable to both lower risk of infection and lower risk of illness in infected subjects. Moreover, those whose parents did not own their home during their early life but did during adolescence were at the same increased risk as those whose parents never owned their home. These associations were independent of parent education level, adult education and home ownership, and personality characteristics.

The researchers concluded that "A marker of low income and wealth during early childhood is associated with decreased resistance to upper respiratory infections in adulthood. Higher risk is not ameliorated by higher SES during adolescence and is independent of adult SES."

In other words, poverty or relative deprivation during early childhood can have negative health affects throughout a lifetime. That's something to think about now, as the recession has driven more families on a downward economic spiral.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Half of all US children and 90 percent of African American young people do or will receive food stamps, according to a new study.

THIS NEEDS FIXED. The House version of health care reform would phase out the Children's Health Insurance Program. Senator Rockefeller is not amused. Nor is El Cabrero. This needs to be fixed in conference.

A FAMOUS UNREADABLE (FOR ME ANYWAY) ANTHROPOLOGIST has died at the age of 100.

HOW SMART ARE DOGS anyway?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

That's a relief

2009-11-03T05:30:00.000-05:00

Chamber pots. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

A while back, I posted an item about how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was losing members due to its policy of denying climate change and opposing measures to address it. Last week, the Huntington WV Chamber held an event with a similar theme.

I guess that settles it.

On the other hand, I imagine they'd deny the Pythagorean theorem, the law of gravity, the War of 1812 and the virtue of their mothers if they thought it might inconvenience a corporation or two.

SICK DAYS. The fact that 40 percent of US workers lack paid sick days is contributing to spreading a pandemic.

GIRL POWER. Investing in them pays off for everybody.

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND statistics.

DID YOU HEAR THE LATEST about gossip?

IS IT A TANK or a dinosaur?

HUMMING. Bears do it when they're content. Speaking of which, a neighbor said he saw one on our road recently.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Ghosts

2009-11-02T05:19:00.004-05:00

I let Halloween come and go without picking up on the theme. Until, that is, I saw this article in the Gazette about ghosts and how people reconcile belief in them with more conventional religion.

I take no position on whether such things exist, but it seems that West Virginia has more than its share of if not ghosts then at least stories about them. I guess our history--what with the Civil War and other armed conflicts, feuds, industrial disasters, and other mayhem--is a good climate for generating them.

I think it's interesting that in most ghost stories that I know about, the apparitions don't tend to be free rangers. Rather, they seem to be tied to particular places where certain things happened.

Sometimes I do think that events can leave a mark on places. Some places I've been to seem to be more loaded than others. I'm thinking about places like Harpers Ferry, the old state mental hospital at Weston, the old state prison at Moundsville, and an old family farm in Tazewell, Virginia.

There are, after all, more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

NOT ENOUGH OF A GOOD THING. It looks like the stimulus helped pull the US economy back from the brink--up to a point. Here's another argument for another one.

SELF DESTRUCTIVE HABITS. Gazette columnist Perry Mann ponders unbridled capitalism here.

SEALING THE DEAL. Here's E.J. Dionne on the future of health care reform legislation.

SPEAKING OF HAUNTED PLACES. Here's an item about a scientist who artificially designed one.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Lines on ale

2009-10-31T05:00:00.000-04:00

Happy Halloween!

Fill with mingled cream and amber,
I will drain that glass again.
Such hilarious visions clamber
Through the chamber of my brain —
Quaintest thoughts — queerest fancies
Come to life and fade away;
What care I how time advances?
I am drinking ale today.--Edgar Allan Poe

Who'd a thunk it?

2009-10-30T05:40:00.000-04:00

I don't know about you, but the struggle over health care reform seems to have gone on forever. Watching it and participating in it whenever I could has often reminded me of the Iliad as the tide of battle went first this way and that. At crucial points in Homer's epic, Zeus would bring out his golden scales and weigh the fate of mortals in its balance.

During August and September, it looked like the scales went against the public option and maybe the whole shebang. Those were strange days, with bizarre rumors of death panels and rampant paranoia and conspiracy theories. I attended a few of those contentious town hall meetings and they were as weird in person as they were on TV. It was all Whackadoodle all the time for a while.

I've mentioned this before, but my strangest memory of the fight is something that happened at a public meeting in southern West Virginia hosted by Congressman Nick Rahall. When a priest was giving the opening prayer and saying something obviously Bolshevik about caring for our brothers and sisters, a teabagger heckled, saying something like "How much are you getting paid?"

But the tide finally turned again. Across the country, people worked hard to push for real reform. Getting the public option back on the table has been a real victory, although anything could happen.

The House plan was revealed yesterday and votes are still being counted on the Senate's version. I guess the goal at this point is to getting something passed by Christmas.

There is going to be plenty more work to do to make this happen, but there is some motion in the right direction.

AND KRUGMAN SAYS SO too.

RECESSION AND RECOVERY. Here's Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com on the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and what remains to be done.

I RESEMBLE THAT REMARK. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia ranks last for getting enough sleep.

THIS WOULD EXPLAIN A LOT. Is there a gene for bad driving?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: UP THERE WITH CEILING CAT

May Ceiling Cat be with you

2009-10-29T05:40:00.000-04:00

Wu is a true believer.

Off and on lately, Goat Rope has been monitoring the progress (perhaps regress would be a better term) of the Conservative Bible Project, which is attempting to remove its "liberal bias."

(It might be easier with different deities.)

Anyhow, a friend was chasing down related links and came across yet another endeavor, the "lolcat Bible Translation Project," which attempts to translate the same into "kitty pidgin," i.e. the imagined language of cats.

Maybe I've been living under a rock, which is a separate issue, but this was new to me. I've seen some of the lolcat pictures but it never occurred to me that someone would try this. I can't say I've read the whole thing, but I did check out Genesis and the Sermon on the Mount.

Here are the first few lines of the creation story, in which Ceiling Cat makes the world:

Boreded Ceiling Cat makes the world.

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

The website also contains such items as proofs for the existence of Ceiling Cat.

El Cabrero is not officially sanctioning or recommending this version as canonical. However, the picture of Ceiling Cat making the world is worth a look.

Flying Spaghetti Monster, watch out!

MEANWHILE, Bigfoot fans are searching for Sasquatch in WV's Dolly Sods.

MISMEASURING THE ECONOMY. GDP (gross domestic product) can be a misleading measure, according to top economists.

ALL FRINGE, NO BENEFITS. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows the continuing erosion of employer-provided health insurance.

COAL CONCESSIONS. The Senate climate change bill has some, but it's unclear whether these will be enough to garner coal state support.e

SICKNESS UNTO DEATH. What would a day be without pondering Kierkegaard and spiritual despair?

HURTS SO GOOD. This item discusses how athletes can deal with the pain of exertion. I've tried some of these tricks and they seem to help.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Cockadoodle don't

2009-10-28T05:35:00.000-04:00

Stop the presses! Our economic problems are solved!

Just when you thought it was safe to open a newspaper, what should appear on the cover of yesterday's Charleston Gazette than a story about a group that wants to legalize cockfighting in West Virginia and ultimately in all the states.

According to a spokesman for the group, "It's only illegal now because of the puritan sense of a few people who don't find it an appropriate sport."

Earlier this week, a member of the group who identified himself only as "Chicken" dressed in a similar costume and handed out fliers in Charleston.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that bill to pass, although stranger things have certainly happened. However, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that we have several free range roosters on Goat Rope Farm and that they occasionally have a dust-up. Usually it ends with one running off, which is the rooster equivalent of the ju jitsu tap out.

A friend of mine and fellow goat herder sent me a hilarious email yesterday with a number of great potential bumper sticker slogans about the topic, most of which involve a synonym for rooster (hint: think NRA). Since this is a G rated blog, I'll quote a different one from his selection:

My president is Andrew Jackson.

WHAT THEY SAID. I'm down with this NY Times editorial on the need for more stimulus.

PEOPLE POWER kept the public option in health insurance reform alive, says economist Dean Baker.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL is the subject of this editorial from USA Today. Thanks to Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo for pointing this out.

"GRAND THEFT JESUS." I wish I would have come up with that phrase to describe the conservative attempt to rewrite the Bible. Here's more on that developing story.

TRAMPS LIKE US, maybe we really were born to run.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fish tales

2009-10-27T05:36:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, I used to love fishing, although for some reason I lost the habit as I got older. I have several fond memories of times spent along river banks.

Once when I was pretty little, I took my Zebco reel out to what we called "the Mud River dam" (this was way before the real one was built in Lincoln County). It consisted of some rocks and metal that created a waterfall of something like two feet. It was huge at the time, however.

There was a sandbar below the "dam" that I chose for a fishing spot. After casting in the line, something took the bait and tore all along the river bottom. My heart pounded and I was sure I was about to land The Big One. I gradually reeled the monster in to the river bank.

It turned out to be a crawdad. There's probably a deep significance to that.

Anyway, one thing I remember as a kid were all the stories about giant monster catfish that were said to haunt the Ohio and Kanawha. It turns out that those stories were right. The high point of my weekend newspaper reading experience was this Gazette-Mail story about a Sissonville fisherman, Dustin Hagy, who caught a four foot long, 60 pound cat in Dunbar.

You've got to see the picture to believe it.

Congratulations to Hagy, who got it weighed and photographed before turning the beast loose once again, apparently none the worse for the wear.

Some get the big cats; some get the crawdads. That's life.

THE LONG WAY HOME. Here's a veteran's powerful first hand account of dealing with post-traumatic stress problems after returning from the war in Iraq.

ALMOST THERE on health care.

GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS. The recession may be officially over, but not the parts of it that hurt people. It's like being cured of a disease but having the symptoms linger and even get worse.

DEBUNKING THE DEBUNKERS on climate change, by way of Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo.

IF YOU WANNA GET TO HEAVEN, get in line.

URGENT MANTIS SHRIMP UPDATE here. The picture is worth a click.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Strip mining for Jesus

2009-10-26T05:40:00.001-04:00

You never know what you're going to find when you browse through the vent lines in the local paper. Occasionally, however one comes across a real gem. Here's one from the Saturday Charleston Gazette-Mail:

Jesus will be awfully angry when he comes back and we didn't use the resources and the coal in the mountains that his Father, God in Heaven, put there for us

.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, enviros!

Sad to say, but that may not be an unrepresentative sample of the state of theological end ecological opinion amongst the "friends of coal."

PUBLIC OPTION. Reports of its death appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

AFTER REFORM--WHAT? Here's Paul Krugman looking ahead on health care.

WE HAPPY (NOT SO) FEW. Historians are reassessing the battle of Agincourt, made famous by Shakespeare's Henry V. The new research may be right, but I like the Bard's version.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Autumn: A Dirge

2009-10-24T05:00:00.000-04:00

The warm sun is falling, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth is her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling.
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black and gray;
Let your light sisters play--
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.--Percy Bysshe Shelley

Demand and control

2009-10-23T05:50:00.000-04:00

Edith is stressing out the turkeys.

El Cabrero has been blogging off and on about how social status affects health and longevity. As mentioned previously, there's a really clear social gradient that seems to work all up and down the scale.

Those in the highest status positions are healthier and live longer than those with "only" high status positions, who live longer than those with moderate social status positions, and so on.

One key factor in all this, according to British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, is having a sense of autonomy and control over life and work. This tends to increase as you climb the ladder and decreases as you descend it. In The Status Syndrome, Marmot cites research that finds that high demand/low control work situations are particularly toxic.

This problem isn't limited to the workplace however. A typical low income person in the US can face control/autonomy issues all the time, i.e. by living in an unsafe neighborhood and/or in bad housing; facing economic insecurity, from juggling bills to dealing with evictions or foreclosures; and dealing with conflicts with landlords, neighbors, bill collectors, etc. These kinds of experience trigger the body's stress reaction and change body chemistry and hormone production.

And here we face an evolutionary lag. Our bodies developed the stress response (or fight or flight syndrome) to deal with short term dangers and threats. If the stress is chronic, this can trigger all kinds of problems, ranging from heart disease to mental disorders such as depression...all of which explains why diseases and early mortality are as unequally distributed as wealth and status, albeit in the other direction.

PUBLIC OPTION. Here's the latest on health care reform in the Senate.

OUCH. The US economy has lost over 5 percent of jobs since Dec. 2007. The numbers are much higher in some areas than others.

KING SOLOMON DON'T LIVE 'ROUND HERE. This analysis from the Charleston Daily Mail talks about how hard it will be to find "balance" in current coal controversies.

THE LATEST TWIST in the Megan Williams saga is here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Bad for business

2009-10-22T05:35:00.000-04:00

You may have heard this rant from me before but here goes again. Around here, the coal industry and its supporters, including most of WV's elected officials, follow flawless logic when it comes to climate change. It goes like this:

1. Anything which goes against the perceived interest of the coal industry cannot possibly be true.

2. Acknowledging the truth of climate change and the permissibility of trying to do something about it goes against the perceived interests of the coal industry

ERGO...

Climate change cannot possibly be true and nothing should be done about it.

Q.E.D.

Not everybody associated with the coal industry is buying it. Michael Morris, President of American Electric Power supports climate change legislation.

As a matter of fact, the US Chamber (Pot) of Commerce is taking some hits from major corporations for its opposition to climate change legislation. A number of companies have either withdrawn from the Chamber or expressed their differences. This interesting item from the New Yorker compares the Chamber's response to that of Massey Energy. According to James Surowiecki, while many companies in the past may have parroted the party line, things are different now. The new attitude

...may reflect a calculation that global warming is simply too big an issue to get wrong, both economically—few companies are really going to benefit from the melting of the polar ice caps—and from a public-relations point of view. It’s also probably no coincidence that these resignations have come at a time when the Chamber’s anti-regulatory zeal looks not just outmoded but self-defeating. Had the Chamber supported tougher regulation of financial and housing markets, after all, the myriad small businesses it represents would undoubtedly be better off today. And it’s far from clear that across-the-board hostility to regulation is really in the best interests of the free-enterprise system. We assume that lobbies always recognize what’s best for their members. But they don’t, and, in the case of climate change, they may very well be missing what the companies that have resigned in protest have seen: global warming isn’t just bad for the planet; it’s bad for business.

WHACKADOODLE DANDY. Here's another item on our old pal political paranoia.

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE and some of it is a mess.

ELECTIONS HAVE (HORMONAL) CONSEQUENCES. Testosterone and voting...who'd have thunk it?

ANOTHER TWIST. Here's the latest in the Megan Williams story.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

That's just the stress talking

2009-10-21T06:30:00.001-04:00

Workplace stress is probably not a major issue for this green heron.

Goat Rope has been running an off and on series lately about the links between social status health. The short version is that there is a big connection between the two and that people's health tends to be better the higher up the social ladder they are.

It's not just that people who are poor and/or have relatively low social standing get sicker and die younger, although that is true as far as it goes. Rather, it's like a social gradient that works all the way up or down. People who have very high status are healthier than people who just have high status. And so it goes.

British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, who has spent decades studying this, identifies some key components that might explain the gradient. One big one has to do with autonomy and a sense of control. This is especially true in the workplace.

While most people on the job talk about stress, research indicates that not all stresses are created equal. As Marmot puts it,

Ask more successful people if they are stressed at work and they will tell you, in slightly macho fashion, about how many e-mails they receive a day, how much in demand they are, how many different tasks await their attention, about their deadlines. If you ask about stress, they are unlikely to tell you that work is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; that they die a little when they come to work each day because their work touches no part of them that is them. But this is the reality of many jobs; and the lower the status, the more likely that is to be so. Ask the people with all the e-mails which job they would rather be doing, the high-status job with continuous demands, and the company BMW and the firm's credit card, or the soul-destroying job with tasks that ask for little use of skills, that are completely determined by others, and, oh yes, that offer little in the way of self-fulfillment, financial rewards, or status enhancement. There are not too many high-status people who would swap their "stressed" place in the boardroom for a place on the production line.

More on that to come.

HEALTH CARE REFORM. A new poll shows strong support for a public option.

TWO CENTS MORE. Here's economist Dean Baker on the same.

CHILD WELFARE. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia doesn't come out too well in this report.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. There's been another strange turn of events.

URGENT GIANT SPIDER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A little Elizabethan trivia

2009-10-20T05:30:00.000-04:00

Quick, apply the makeup!

El Cabrero has been reading and thinking a good bit about social status these days, a subject that can be both funny and sad. Today I'm going for a little of both.

It was during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England that sugar first became widely available, at least to those who had the money to buy it. Given that people weren't too big on dental hygiene then, lots of folks who ate a lot of it had teeth go bad and turn black.

But one difference between then and now was that then black teeth were cool--they showed you could afford to eat lots of sugar. Some people not "fortunate" enough to have the real thing cosmetically blackened their teeth to look like they did.

Thinking about that--and about the political economy of sugar plantations in the "New World"--gives a whole new meaning to the phrase about being "slaves of fashion."

You can find lots more Elizabethan and Jacobean tidbits in Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage.

CLIMATE CHANGE. While the coal thugs around here are all singing the same tune, the NY Times reports that energy companies are all over the place on proposed climate change legislation in the Senate.

HOLY MARKET FAILURE, BATMAN! A new study looks at the hidden costs of coal. Will this set off another coal-fired hissy fit or are they already too busy having one?

NATURAL SELECTION in real time here.

FOOD FIGHT. Here's another salvo from the food revolution.

GOD, MONKEYS AND MORALS. Here's another item by my favorite primatologist.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Been there, done that

2009-10-19T06:20:00.000-04:00

The Gadarene swine take a dive in this Anglo-Saxon tapestry.

Well, I guess I can scratch "contract swine flu" off my to-do list. My case must have been a mild one, but it seems to have passed and I've been fever free since Friday (sorry about the alliteration in the last part of that sentence, although Anglo-Saxons were kind of into that).

Here's the official Goat Rope verdict on H1N1: if it doesn't kill you, it's not that bad. I guess you can say that about lots of things, but in this case it fits. IF your fever doesn't spike and IF you don't develop trouble breathing, it's pretty much like any other flu. The thing I remember most about it is how it made my body feel like I'd been in a pretty decent car wreck, which is something I'm pretty used to as a martial arts person.

I learned one thing from the experience: blogging can be good for your health. After mentioning symptoms in a post last week, a friend and co-worker emailed me about a medicine that could help if taken within 48 hours. I tried it and it helped. Thanks to her and to others who send good wishes.

On the down side, I missed a couple of events I'd been looking forward to. On the bright side, I got to sleep a little more and finish season 5 of The Sopranos.

Now, once more unto the breach...

DEMOGRAPHIC UPDATE. Among those swelling the ranks of the homeless are those who lost everything due to foreclosures.

WAGES are taking a dive.

ARDI'S POLITICS. A leading primatologist ponders human origins here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Pigging out

2009-10-16T10:18:00.002-04:00

It's official. El Cabrero has been diagnosed with swine flu. So far it's not that bad, at least in comparison with having one's chest split open or getting a catheter you know where.

I had a whole bunch of things scheduled for yesterday into the week ahead but sometimes you get a time out. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, because I could not stop for it, it kindly stopped for me.

Regular posts to resume soon.

The prodigal returns

2009-10-15T07:40:00.000-04:00

We interrupt our regular program to announce that our Great Pyr Arpad, aka Vanilla Iceberg, was located after spending two nights in an undisclosed location. The Spousal Unit found him while checking out some backroads, when he heard the car and ran out of a garage. He even jumped into the car, an action that usually requires an act of Congress.

The gentleman who had been hosting him said "I ain't never seen a dog that big. I been calling him Snowball."

We are glad to have him back and devoutly hope that the 170 wanderer didn't eat anybody important.

Meanwhile, El Cabrero seems to be developing flu-like symptoms, not necessarily of the swinish variety (although others may have their own opinions). It's always something. If posts are sporadic over the next few days that might be why.

NEXT STOP...public option?

CORRECTING THE BIBLE. Here's another item on the conservative effort to excise "liberal bias" from a certain book.

JOHN BROWN'S BODY. Here's the Washington Post on the man who lit the spark.

CHIMPS HELP, especially when they're asked.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

One hurdle cleared

2009-10-14T06:18:00.004-04:00

Random animal picture. Arpad, the big white boy on the right, has been missing since Monday.

Health care reform efforts cleared a major hurdle yesterday, when the Senate Finance Committee approved its plan to revamp the system. While the bill is way better than nothing, it could still be improved. Here is the introduction to an analysis by Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The Senate Finance Committee’s approval of an ambitious health reform plan marks a major step toward enactment of legislation to extend health care to tens of millions of people who lack it, strengthen insurance protections for millions more who are underinsured or face exorbitant charges, and begin to address the nation’s most serious fiscal threat — the relentless rise in health care costs.

The Congressional Budget Office has reported that the bill would modestly reduce the budget deficit both over the next ten years and beyond. This is a fiscally responsible bill that would redirect federal spending and tax subsidies from less productive uses elsewhere in the health care sector. (Read: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2920)

While the committee package represents a vast improvement over the current health insurance system, it has some serious shortcomings that likely would limit its effectiveness in certain areas. Because the health reform bills approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee and three House committees are stronger in those areas, policymakers should blend the best provisions from these bills as they move forward.

The rest is worth a look.

THIS IS GOING TO GET UGLY. A public hearing on changes to the mountaintop removal mining permit process got loud and nasty in Charleston. As I've said before, I really hope I'm wrong but it wouldn't surprise me if somebody gets killed before all this is over.

A LITTLE MORE CIVIL was this public forum on health care reform the same night.

PAY CUTS are another feature of working life in the Great Recession.

A VISIT WITH THE DOCTOR. That is, bluegrass legend Dr. Ralph Stanley.

WHO ORDERED THE GIANT SNAKES? They're here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

It's easy for this guy to be green

2009-10-13T05:40:00.000-04:00

Today is a long day on the road, so in lieu of the usual rant here's a picture of a green heron that showed up at the farm the other day. He was not quite as majestic as his great blue cousin who showed up yesterday when I didn't have a camera handy. In fact, he seemed kind of goofy looking at times, but a heron is a heron and I'll settle for any of them.

And here are some things I found to be interesting...

IT'S FICTION, DUDES. This brief item examines the Ayn Rand cult.

AND HERE'S ONE REASON WHY. This New Yorker piece looks at why unrestrained markets can be so crisis prone--and why real reform is needed.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, let's take another look at trade deals.

A MISSTEP? An insurance industry report aimed at derailing health care reform may have missed the mark.

URGENT VEGETARIAN SPIDER UPDATE here.

YOUR FEET'S TOO BIG. The world's biggest dinosaur footprints (so far) were found in France. They were something like a 1.5 meters in diameter. I'm not even going to guess what shoe size that would be.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ASK THE HERON

Be ye lamps unto yourselves

2009-10-12T06:45:00.001-04:00

El Cabrero has often fessed up here to his soft spot for Buddhism, for both family and personal reasons. As world religions go, it seems to be a good bit less bloodthirsty than most, particularly those of the monotheistic variety--and I say that as a member of one of the latter.

One of the things I like about it is the way the historic Buddha told his students not to accept anything on the basis of faith or authority but to investigate things for themselves. On his deathbed, he assembled the monks and told them that the important thing was the dharma or teaching, not the teacher. He urged them to be lamps and refuges unto themselves.

I just finished reading a book about a self-identified Buddhist community that seemed not to have gotten that memo. Here's a short version: a leader of a New Age group was "recognized" by a visiting Tibetan lama and was said to be a tulku or reincarnation of a spiritual teacher. The group set up a community that was more of a personality cult than a Buddhist center. Families were broken up; money misappropriated; at least one student was physically abused (not to mention questionable conduct by the leader who was regarded by members as a holy being who could do no wrong).

The saddest part wasn't that the person in charged abused authority. After all, there are spiritual as well as sexual predators (and often they are one and the same). The saddest part was that otherwise intelligent people surrendered their critical thinking in unquestioned obedience to a leader whose every action, no matter how arbitrary, was said to be have been undertaken to "save sentient beings." Kind of like a domestic abuser who only hurts family members "for their own good."

And for all the talk of saving sentient beings from suffering, it didn't seem like a whole lot of that was done in any practical sense.

The problem with this kind of unthinking obedience to any human or human institution (even those claiming to be divine) is that once you give it, it's only a matter of the luck of the draw whether one obeys a Hitler, a Stalin, or the Dalai Lama--and I'm pretty sure the Dalai Lama would agree. You've thrown away the only thing that can distinguish between them.

I feel another Dylan quote coming on--one the real Buddha would have approved of. It's called Trust Yourself and it's from Empire Burlesque. Here it is:

Well, you're on your own, you always were,
In a land of wolves and thieves.
Don't put your hope in ungodly man
Or be a slave to what somebody else believes.

FROM BAPTISM TO AFGHANISTAN. It's all there in the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes From Under the Fig Tree.

SCHOOL OF COAL. Here are two items on the controversy over Marsh Fork Elementary School and Massey Energy

SHOPPING AND/OR CITIZENSHIP? Here's an item on ethical consumption and its limits.

CHEW ON THIS. British chef Jamie Oliver is bringing his reality TV show to Huntington WV, just a half hour or so away from Goat Rope Farm, after that city was declared the most unhealthy in America. Two things that jumped out at me were the 15 pound hamburger from Hillbilly Hot Dogs and the person who had this show confused with American Idol.

NOT THAT ANYONE HAS ASKED FOR MY OPINION, but as President Obama mulls over the future of US involvement in Afghanistan, I keep thinking about Alexander the Great's exit strategy: marry a princess, declare victory, and get the hell out of there.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED