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A sad article
Jonathan Rauch has an interesting article on the Cost-Benefit of the New Orleans levees. It would seem that the plan was to just abandon ship. Money Quote
Yet the most striking fact of the New Orleans catastrophe has received less notice than it deserves: The plan for New Orleans in case of a hit from a very powerful hurricane was to lose the city.
In other words, if a severe hurricane struck, the city’s flooding and abandonment was not what would happen if the plan failed. It was the plan.
New Orleans is built between a lake, a river, and the Gulf of Mexico, and it is lower than the surrounding waters. It was kept dry by an extensive system of levees and pumps. That system was itself contributing to the slow subsidence of the city.
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That was fast
- JusticeMyers.com is already up, made by Republican flac group it would seem.
- While I have no objection to a non-judge being on the court, Bush’s personal lawyer? Seems a bit ridiculous.
- Couldn’t they have found a better picture for her?
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Pithy quote
From an old article by Jesse Walker
But if I had to speak in terms of that map, I’d say the most successful culture warriors come from the blue states. The authoritarian conservative wants to maintain the old taboos. The authoritarian liberal wants to introduce some new ones, and he’s had a lot more success. The religious right may despise homosexuality and pornography, but the gay movement is thriving, despite last week’s losses, and porn is more freely available than ever before.
The liberal puritans, by contrast, are riding high in the media and in the courts. For many Americans, the Democrats are the party that hates their guns, cigarettes, and fatty foods (which is worse: to rename a french fry or to take it away?); that wants to impose low speed limits on near-abandoned highways; that wants to tell local schools what they can or can’t teach. There is no party of tolerance in Washington — just a party that wages its crusades in the name of Christ and a party that wages its crusades in the name of Four Out Of Five Experts Agree.
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Finally feeling better
It would seem that I caught the rare 24 hour bug. I went from feeling miserable all day today to somewhat tolerable today to hopefully better tomorrow.
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I’m hooked
On podcasts. It’s like talk radio but good.
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Watch the math sparks fly
The best commentary on the Bill Bennett comments have come from the Freakonomics guys, who did seem to start the entire thing.
Bennett’s offensive commentary
CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I’ve read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn’t — never touches this at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they’re all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don’t know what the costs would be, too. I think as — abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.
CALLER: I don’t know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.
BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don’t know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don’t know. I mean, it cuts both — you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well —
CALLER: Well, I don’t think that statistic is accurate.
BENNETT: Well, I don’t think it is either, I don’t think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don’t know. But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
Now mind you, nowhere does he point out the obvious point that even if we did successfully prohibit abortions in this country we would only move the bankruptcy date of Social Security back a few years, having not changed the pay-in to pay-out ration that much.
One point that Leavitt makes is quite interesting, to wit:
4) When a woman gets an abortion, for the most part it is not changing the total number of children she has; rather, it is shifting the timing so those births come later in life. This is an important fact to remember. One in four pregnancies ends in abortion and this has been true for 30 years in the U.S. But the impact of abortion on the overall birth rate has been quite small.
This is unsourced and I would like to see some data and theory on the matter.
Beyond that, it’s amazing how large the indignation industry is in this country. Here was a statement which, true or false, kind-hearted or malicious, did not kill or hurt anyone, and left no one richer or poorer. The fact that many people got exorcised about this empirically meaningless statement is amazing. It says a lot about the wealth we have as a society when we can afford the endless chattering classes.
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Fun with education
While it’s strange that the priests of the education establishment always maintain that the presence of middle and upper class students helps out lower-class students, what is actually most interesting about this article is that the misspellings of “lose” (as in not win) are equal to it’s correct spellings (3 apiece).
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Two unrelated things
Via Instapundit, some thoughts on profiling and lawsuits
As I recall, though, the detainees were charged with various crimes — such as immigration law violations, etc. — not simply with “being Muslim.” And, in fact, these guys were apparently guilty: “Elmaghraby and Iqbal were deported to their home countries after serving time for charges unrelated to terrorism — Elmaghraby for a counterfeiting charge and Iqbal for fraud.”
Prosecutors enjoy nearly unlimited discretion on whom to prosecute, and if federal prosecutors chose to prosecute people they feared might have terror connections for unrelated crimes I don’t see how that can make out a constitutional violation. Perhaps, though, I misunderstand the claim, as the story isn’t very clear.
And my favorite Irish band from Wisconsin, the Kissers have an interesting tour blog.
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Before anyone asks
Before anyone asks, I’m very fine with DeLay being indicted. Particularly after his “no more fat to cut” statement.
Further on that thread, see the Franklin Delano Bush by David Boaz of Cato and this column by Mark Steyn, money quote:
Big-time Republicans tell me Bush’s profligacy is doing a great job of neutralizing the Dem advantage in the spending-is-caring stakes. This may have been true initially — in the same sense as undercover cops neutralize a massive heroin-smuggling operation by infiltrating it. But, if they’re still running the heroin operation five years later, it looks less like neutralization and more like a change of management.
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Well put
From Dr Sowell
It is a shame that ancient history is seldom taught in our schools. Finding out that people thousands of years ago were basically pretty much the way they are today — people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual orientation — would reduce our chances of having Utopian hopes for big changes any time soon.