Silly is the new serious

I have always had a distaste for the strident, which can be an occupational hazard (no pun intended) among people who work for social justice. That's why I find the levity in recent Occupy Wall Street protests refreshing, one example of which involves people parading around dressed as zombies. As this article, titled "Gandhi Meets Monty Python" suggests, there's a lot of that kind of humor going on these days all over the place.

Regular readers of Goat Rope will perhaps recall similar silly actions with a point in West Virginia. A few years back, when the then governor was messing with Medicaid, several of us held a bake sale for Medicaid that made around $100 bucks. That was silly enough, but then we got a big check printed and arranged a ceremony, with media in attendance of course, in which we presented the proceeds of the sale to the state treasurer's office.

This summer, on the anniversary of the Bush tax cuts, we held a Bake Sale for the Really Rich, complete with street theater. The state AFLCIO liked the idea and held hot dog sales around the state on the anniversary of the creation of Social Security. Dogs were sold at 1935 prices to raise federal revenue in order to spare the very wealthy from having to pay their fair share. After that, another event was held in which the hot dog proceeds were delivered to the Bureau of the Public Debt in Parkersburg.

You can't be silly all the time, alas, but it is good to break things up and act in unpredictable ways.

JOBS, BRIDGES AND BOMBS discussed here.

IS THE CONVERSATION CHANGING? Maybe.

THE SEVEN BILLION THING discussed here.

PET LOVING AND MEAT EATING pondered here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Crying wolf and falling skies

The Gentle Reader may have noticed that virtually every reform that improved conditions for low income and working people was vigorously opposed by conservative and business interests. These groups typically try to scare the public by predicting apocalyptic consequences for any piece of legislation they don't like.

A new website, the Cry Wolf Project, is a good resource for challenging and exposing this kind of rhetoric. I especially recommend the searchable quote bank section, which gives example after example of hysterical hyperbole going back to the 1800s.

A lot of the old crud sounds pretty familiar today.

FULL. I'm not always Thomas Friedman's biggest fan, but I think he may be right here.

ROCK ON. Here's more about WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's defense of Medicaid.

LIVING LONGER. OR NOT. Here's an interesting county by county look at life expectancy in the US. I noticed that women in southern WV are actually experiencing a decline, as a study of early deaths published in 2008 by West Virginians for Affordable Health Care noted.

THIS IS KOCHED UP. The Koch brothers funded, among many other vile things, a study of which states are the most free. Apparently those that are on the blue side of the political spectrum are totalitarian gulags.

WHACKADOODLES, REVISITED. Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A Malthusian future?

Now that's a crowd. Image from the 2008 Olympics by way of wikipedia.

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, Darwin's idea of natural selection was shaped by Thomas Malthus' ideas on population. Simply put, he argued that humans tend to multiply faster than resources do, which leads to hunger and scarcity and all kinds of nasty checks on population.

This turned out not to be the case for industrial societies, which have been able to dramatically increase production and maintain growing populations. There is also a tendency for population growth to slow as living standards rise. But Malthus might have been at least partially right. There have been numerous cases where pre-modern civilizations collapsed due to over-stressing their environment and growing beyond its carrying capacity. Jared Diamond's book Collapse gives several examples and is a compelling read.

The scary part is that if we don't work towards a sustainable approach to economy, energy, ecology and population, we might head that way ourselves. If that happens, it will be more due to our doing wrong than to Malthus being right.

BIG CHANGES. The Recovery Act is making big changes in technology and clean energy, most of which have been under the radar, as Time Magazine reports.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Recovery Act has lowered unemployment by up to 1.8 points in the last quarter. The problem is that it wasn't big or targeted enough, as Paul Krugman again argues here. Now things have gotten to the point were firefighters are being laid off in many cities.

NOT THE BEST PR DEPARTMENT. The Manhattan Mosque controversy might not be sending the best message around the world.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING WHY FISH IN THE ARCTIC DON'T FREEZE, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Malthus, population and politics

A member of the "surplus population" breaks stones in a Victorian workhouse.

I've been musing on Darwinian themes here lately. If you like that kind of thing click on earlier posts.

Charles Darwin derived his idea of evolution by means of natural selection from Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population. The irony is that Malthus wrote it about humans and was mostly wrong and that Darwin applied to to the natural world and it was mostly right.

Moving from science to politics, Victorian era conservatives loved Malthus. They took his argument to mean that if workers got better wages, they'd only have more kids, for which there wouldn't be enough to go around, which would make them worse off than they were before. Give them jails and workhouses instead!

That has pretty much set the pattern for most arguments on the right against most progressive policy measures: anything that is aimed at helping poor folks would only hurt them, so the best way to really help them is to stick it to them.

Malthus turned out to be wrong about humans, at least for the period of the industrial era into our own. Advances in science and technology in the period since 1800 have made possible an expansion of population and an improvement in living standards for many people. And people tend to have fewer children as living standards rise and children are more likely to live to maturity, which is known as demographic transition.

In the modern world, hunger and starvation are more matters of politics than of population as such, more about distribution than demographics--although that might not always be the case in the future as we stress the environment and push the limits of the earth's carrying capacity.

EVIL, DANTE AND ALL THAT. Here's a shout out to a friend and fellow WV blogger over at Esse Diem for a post about the science of evil, a perennial favorite topic of El Cabrero.

ONE OUT OF FIVE AMERICANS believe some strange stuff.

SO MUCH FOR SUPPLY SIDE ECONOMICS. We have a problem with demand.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. The first settlements have been reached in wrongful death lawsuits as a result of Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine disaster, as Ken Ward reports in today's Gazette.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED