A meme is born

For someone who has been blogging for several years, I'm pretty behind on social media. One thing I have recently resolved to do is to learn to make memes for Facebook and such. I mean hard hitting social justice memes. But today, just to see if I could make one at all, I resorted to a gratuitous animal picture of Edith and her toys. Hard hitting social meme content to come. Just probably not today.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMM. Here's more on possible conflicts of interest involving drug companies and WV's attorney general.

ANNALS OF URBAN AGRICULTURE. A while back the city of Charleston WV passed an ordnance allowing city residents to own chickens and such. Here's one nice success story. Meanwhile, the hens at Goat Rope Farm have either permanently retired from egg production or have gone on strike.

It's not all bad

With all the negative numbers and news stories coming out of WV these days, not to mention the ruling class hissy fit regarding Obama, the EPA and the so-called "war on coal," it's good to be reminded that the state is doing some things really well.

One thing that WV gets right, and is getting better with, is child nutrition. When it comes to school breakfast, lunch, snack nutrition standards, and to innovative ways of increasing participation, the state is a national leader. Much of that is due to the leadership of my friend Rick Goff, who heads the state Office of Child Nutrition. Goff was just invited to the White House for an event promoting child health with Michelle Obama.

West Virginia also is a leader in participation in the Community Eligibility Provision, which allows free meals for all kids in schools with a high percentage of kids living in poverty.

SPEAKING OF FOOD, here are some interesting things folks in Wheeling are doing to promote local foods and help revive the local economy.

A growing movement

It's really not all bad news these days. One encouraging trend is the growth of the local food movement, which can be a way to rethink our relationship to the basics and to revitalize our communities. An AFSC program run by my co-worker in Logan WV gets young people involved in a community garden. The kids are even becoming junior master gardeners.

Two recent items in the Charleston newspapers provide some other examples. The Daily Mail recently reported about the Growing Jobs Project of KISRA (Kanawha Institute for Social Research and Action), which teaches former prisoners gardening skills while also providing fresh and healthy produce for the community.

In an article from today's Gazette, there's a story about an ordnance moving to Charleston city council which would encourage urban farming. Among the features of the ordnance are provisions allowing city residents to own up to to six laying hens as well as backyard beehives. It also encourages community gardens.

It didn't, alas, make any provision for goats.

THE RACIAL WEALTH GAP just keeps getting bigger.

LOCKING THE BARN AFTER....retired US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor now seems to think the Supreme Court's decision to take up the Bush v. Gore case may not have been the best idea to roll down the pike. As the Spousal Unit likes to say in such cases, what was her first clue?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Git r done

It's still too soon to tell whether there will be enough support to move health care reform forward in the US House, but a vote could happen by Sunday.

Here's more on one of yesterday's surprise switches from no to yes.

One drawback of the current bill is that the perceived political risks are immediate, but most of the benefits--such as the expansion of Medicaid and subsidies to help people buy insurance--will take a few years to reach people. However, here are some positive features that would take effect within the first year of passage.

For a full breakdown of how many people will benefit from the fully enacted program by congressional district, click here.

Meanwhile, this cartoon says it all.

URBAN HARVESTERS. This idea makes as much sense in good economic times as bad ones.

COAL. From Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo, here is a post on a recent study of mountaintop removal mining's effects.

URGENT CANINE HISTORY UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

No arrow from a bow

The murder of Aegisthus by Orestes. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Greek tragedies are about as far removed as you can get from the standard modern fare of action movies, where good guys fight bad guys and usually win. In tragedies, the good guys are often flawed and the bad ones often have their reasons.

In tragedies, people are sometimes just overwhelmed and destroyed by circumstances or are caught up in a chain of events they don't understand or control. Sometimes, the harder protagonists try to avoid some awful outcome the more surely they bring it about.

And sometimes they are forced to do things they don't want to do or are caught up in situations where they are confronted with competing ethical and religious claims that can't possibly be reconciled.

That kind of dilemma characterizes the plays Goat Rope is looking at these days, the Orestes trilogy of Aeschylus. Agamemnon in the play of the same name has a sacred duty to lead an army to Troy to punish the sacrilege of Paris in violating xenia or hospitality by abducting Helen of Troy. All the leaders of Greece had sworn a holy oath to uphold the marriage and punish anyone who defiled it. If he doesn't fulfill this sacred duty, he and everyone else will suffer terribly.

But the goddess Artemis, protectress of defenseless things, foresees the slaughter of the innocent when Troy is destroyed. She withholds winds unless and until Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia. As Martha Nussbaum summarizes, "If Agamemnon does not fulfill Artemis's condition, everyone, including Iphigenia, will die." No easy way out. He does and seals his fate.

In the second part of the trilogy, The Libation Bearers, his son Orestes is under an oracle by the god Apollo that requires him to slay his mother and her lover Aegisthus in revenge for their murder of Agamemnon. If he refused, "no arrow from a bow could touch such peaks of agony" that he would undergo. No easy way out.

While most of us in a normal week are not required by deities to sacrifice or murder family members, that kind of tragic conflict between competing valid but irreconcilable claims--usually on a less gory scale--is all too common in public and private life.

Most of us don't like to think about that kind of thing or imagine that there's always some easy escape. The ancient Athenians had the courage to make it the cornerstone of their greatest public works of art.

WHO'DA THUNK IT? Urban farming might become a career path.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, cooperation is growing between the labor and environmental movements.

WHAT HE SAID. Here's Dean Baker on health care reform and the return of Harry and Louise.

A NOVEL WAY TO COPE WITH THE RECESSION: professional wrestling!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED