Minor Wisdom

An unlucky day for Dollar Bill

On Friday the 13th, “Dollar Bill” Jefferson gets 13 years. As John Lennon once sang, “Instant karma’s going to get you.”

You call this “blight”?

If you haven’t already done it, please check out Inside the Footprint. There, Brad V and Curtis P parade the lovely homes in the Mid-City neighborhood that would be destroyed if the LSU-VA Medical Center is built where currently planned.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I watched a DVD of the documentary Faubourg Treme. It’s the story of a vital neighborhood that, for about 150 years, has been hit with one mortal blow after another. Please, let’s learn from our mistakes. Let’s not repeat them.

Science marches on: The Ig Nobel Prize winners for 2009

Everyone’s talking today about President Obama’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize and wondering what he did to earn it. They should be talking about the Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded a mere eight days ago. For instance:

• The Peace Prize went to Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for conducting experiments to determine whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
• The Medicine Prize went to Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California. Unger wanted to know whether knuckle cracking causes arthritis. To find out, he spent 60 years cracking his left-hand knuckles daily, while not cracking his right-hand knuckles.
• The Physics Prize went to Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, for their analysis of why pregnant women don’t tip over.
• The Biology Prize went to Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for proving that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from giant pandas’ poop.

For the run-down of all winners’ accomplishments, you know where to click.

73% of doctors are extremist, left-wing, socialist, communist, ....

Yesterday I had the misfortune of being forced to overhear a well-known propagandist (initials R.L.) attach pejorative labels to people and ideas he disagrees with, and repeat the attachment ad nauseam. (As I said, he’s a propagandist.) The subject happened to be health-care reform. I pity people who have surrendered their critical thinking to people like him.

But never mind that propagandist. Here’s an NPR item saying that 73% of doctors like the idea of a public option. This includes 63% who like availability of both public and private options, and 10% who want a public-only option (I think that means “single payer”). So who’s mainstream here, and who’s on the fringe?

Unhappy anniversary

About a week ago, I wrote a post responding to those who question New Orleans’ right to exist. In a nutshell: this city did not come into existence because 1 million or so people made a lifestyle choice to live in a swamp vulnerable to hurricanes. This city came into existence because the Mississippi River happens to empty into the Gulf of Mexico near here. The site where the city was founded happens to be the highest ground anywhere near the mouth of the river. New Orleans became an American city (sort of) because Thomas Jefferson recognized the economic and strategic importance of America’s having a port city located right here.

That was last week’s history lesson. This week, I want to correct what seems to be a widespread misunderstanding about what happened here four years ago. This city did not flood just because a hurricane passed close by. It flooded because of engineering failures. The levees failed to perform according to spec, breaking in several places along the outfall canals. Result: instead of the canals emptying into Lake Pontchartrain, the lake emptied through the broken canal levees into the city.

I thought everyone knew these facts. But I’ve seen too much stuff on TV lately talking about how the hurricane did all kind of bad stuff to the city, with no mention of the levee failures. Katrina certainly did some bad stuff all by herself near New Orleans (e.g. Slidell, St. Bernard Parish, Plaquemines Parish, the Mississippi gulf coast). But the city itself would have escaped with little worse than widespread wind damage if the levees had done what they were supposed to do. Instead, the levees broke, the city drowned, and around 1,000 people died who otherwise would have ridden it out okay.

These facts are uncomfortable. Why? Because if New Orleans is here because America needs it here, and if New Orleans drowned because of American engineering failures, then America is responsible for what happened here four years ago. Hence the urge to deny the facts and concoct an alternate reality, one that redirects the responsibility elsewhere—mainly to the victims.

Rising Tide postscript and some facts about New Orleans (#rt4 for Twitter)

Lately I’ve been reticent about expressing my opinions on this blog. I’d like to say that’s been due to humility. The truth is that it’s easier to be disengaged from what passes for the debate in this country, plus being disengaged is probably better for my mental health.

The disengagement may change, thanks to yesterday’s Rising Tide IV conference, which inspired me to resolve to be a bit more outspoken. Let’s begin with some facts about New Orleans.

Apparently there are some people out there who don’t understand why New Orleans is located where it is. “Why would anyone live in a low-lying, hurricane-prone area?” they wonder. Here’s why. New Orleans is a port city, and ports have to be located on the edge of a body of water. This particular port city is located near the mouth of the Mississippi River. The Mississippi River is vital to the nation’s economy, and a port city located near the mouth of the river is a strategic and economic necessity. Anyone who does not understand these facts should have all their diplomas and college degrees revoked, and should be made to return to the 6th grade to repeat those history and geography classes that they apparently slept through.

Quotations of the day

Two quotations on the blogosphere today bear repeating:

“All we can do now is give cars away, or give US citizens free money to buy them — which we are obviously already doing with ‘Cash for Clunkers’ — which is additionally hilarious in the same nation that is deeply paranoid about the government giving anybody free health care. What a nation of morons we have become.” —James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation.

“People believe what they want to believe, crediting information that reinforces those beliefs and rejecting information that challenges those beliefs. Many of these beliefs are inextricably intertwined with people’s fears about the world and their place in it. Today’s intense anxieties about economic well-being leave people easily moved to share their fears, with demagogues standing by to exploit them.” —John E. McIntyre, You Don’t Say.

Bad stuff in 3s

I know that “bad stuff happens in threes” is B.S.—three of anything will happen if you wait long enough. But Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett (the ultimate 70s poster girl—see left), and Michael Jackson in 3 days? Spooky, especially for someone like me, who came of age in the 1970s.

Who knew?

Professor John Guillebaud (University College, London) claims that the main cause of population growth is sex. (Hat tip to Improbable Research.)

1968

April 3:

April 4: