As awful as things look now, they are certain to look even worse -- at least for the short term. However, I predict that five or ten years from now, New Orleans will be restored to much like it was before.

Tying this to a SciFi theme, I feel like I have "seen" this before, in my mind's eye, while reading Lucifer's Hammer, in the descriptions of the post-impact flooding. The looting, the rapid loss of civilization.

Also, I remember David Brin (a very good, albeit leftist, SF author) writing in Earth about the futility of holding back mother nature:

...The Big Easy had class all right. In decline, there remained an air of seedy blaisance, and even the inevitable bandit types believed in courtesy.

He listened to the barge horns and thought of the manatees that had inhabited this area, back when La Salle's men first poled their way through endless marshes, trading ax heads for furs. The manatees were long gone, of course. And soon...relatively soon...so would New Orleans.

The dying of any city begins at its foundation....

Logan had inspected hundreds of kilometers of embankments, thrown up in forlorn efforts to save the doomed shore. More tall levees contained the river, whose gradient flattened over time. Suspended silt began falling out even north of Baton Rouge. Soon the sluggish current no longer held back the sea. Salinity increased.

Upstream, the Mississippi fought like an anaconda, writhing to escape. The contest was one of raw power. And Logan knew where it would be lost....

Fortunately, Claire would move away long before the Mississippi burst through the Old River Control Structure or some other weak point, spilling into that peaceful plain of cane fields and fish farms....

In effect, he could only pray the Corps' new barriers were as good as they claimed. It was possible....

But rivers see decades, even centuries, as mere trifles.

The Mississippi rolled by. And, not for the first time, Logan wondered if Daisy might be right after all. I try to find solutions that work with Earth's forces. I like to think I've learned from the mistakes of past engineers.

But didn't they, too, think they built for the ages?

He remembered what Shelley had written, about an ancient pharaoh:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

...Can we build nothing that lasts? Nothing worth lasting?

Logan sighed. He had been away too long. He turned away from the patient river and took the rusted, creaking iron stairs back into the ancient city.

Posted by: JohnL at 10:57 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Jeff at Gravity Lens points us to a nice gallery of famous paintings featuring MST3K characters.

Very funny. I loved that show.

Posted by: JohnL at 11:06 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Princess Cat emailed me a link to Virginia Tech's statement regarding the recent Saudi visit during which classes were segregated by sex.

Here's the nut of the statement:

Separation by gender in an instructional setting is not compatible with Virginia Tech policies and procedures. There is clearly a disconnect between our fundamental commitment to non-discrimination based on gender and our commitment to a climate for work and learning based on mutual respect and understanding.

Or, in other words, "our commitment not to discriminate based on sex conflicted with our commitment not to discriminate based upon culture."

That's the trick, isn't it? How do we maintain ourselves as an open, liberal culture in the face of backwards, closed cultures?

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Having recently completed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I can endorse without any reservation whatsoever this hilarious, accurate, and spoiler-filled condensed version of the story: Part 1. Part2.

(Via GeekPress).

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Check out this interesting play on the before-and-after meme.

Take scenes from Hitchcock's 1958 movie Vertigo and retrace them in modern-day (2003) San Francisco with camera in tow.

I've posted a representative pair of pics grabbed from the site in the extended entry. Go check out all the others.
more...

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Via James Taranto, I learned that the American Political Science Association will hold its annual convention in Washington, D.C. in just a few weeks. On the program is a panel discussion entitled "Is It Time to Call It Fascism?"

Do you think the good scholars will finally take an honest look at the parallels between the Ba'ath Party in Syria and the NSDAP in Germany?

Oh, don't be silly. The email forwarding the conference announcement states:

The panel, which is cosponsored by the Conference Group on Theory, Policy, & Society, the Latino Caucus, New Political Science, and the Women's Caucus, emerged from a question that Kathy Ferguson started asking last winter-spring (at ISA and WPSA) to focus on both substantive aspects and strategic/tactical ones: is there theoretical-definitional grounding to make a claim for the present US administration as fascist, and is it useful, critically, to use that language at this point in time? One of the original intentions was also to create a teaching tool out of this discussion--a handout that presents these questions and offers relevant information to students to think about it for themselves. (Emphasis added).

I would love to get my hands on one of those handouts. I wonder just how much they will encourage students to "think about it for themselves."

Here's a political science experiment: Establish how long a culture can survive philosophical poison like this.

Too bad we live in the experimental society and not the control group.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:41 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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What happens when you inject a medieval culture into a modern one?

(Hat tip: Bryan).

Remember how VMI was made co-ed last decade? Why don't the same principles of law apply here? Where's NOW now?

Simple. Cowardice. An academic and political left that has become so accustomed to blaming western culture for all the ills of the world, it cannot find the indignation required to condemn a backwards, misogynistic society.

Shame on Virginia Tech. Shame.

For a lighter perspective on this dead-serious issue, check out Iowahawk.

Update: Lest you think I paint with too broad a brush, check out the words of Abd Al-Sabour Shahin, head of the ShariÂ’a faculty at Al-Ahzar University, the most prestigious academy in Sunni Islam. He is a lecturer at Cairo University, and not some cave-dwelling terrorist firebrand.

Remember that shari'a is the legal system that our enemies want to subject us to. The same system that requires the separation of the sexes.

And note how closely the good professor's rhetoric tracks the fevered paranoia of the loony left - blame the Jews -- it's all about the oil. Do you think perhaps our cowardly leftist politicians, academics, and journalists have provided rhetorical cover for this kind of garbage? What can we do?

Just asking.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:37 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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(From the latest edition of Movie Monkey, via Owlish).

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I note with some pleasure that John Hood, a contributor to National Review Online's Corner expressed exactly the idea I framed last week about "brain life" being a way to start to untangle the emotional mess around abortion.

Not surprisingly, the dynamic half of the dogmatic duo, Ramesh Ponnuru (the other half being the grammaticaly-challenged but equally dogmatic Katherine Jean Lopez) leapt into the fray to defend the life-begins-at-conception idea. He did acknowledge the possibility that there is a distinction between human "life" and human "personhood" and even gave a nod to the idea that the key issue in Hood's (and my) proposal is a functioning cortex, though he wouldn't want to go too far down that road.

An emailer to "K-Lo" then criticized the whole concept of "brain birth" as fetishization of the brain. The same mailer later stated through Lopez that (paraphrasing) defining humanity based on brain function would lead to harvesting organs from people in comas. This is typical emotionally-charged sentimentalism that the mystics use to oppose human cloning and embryonic stem cell research (e.g., likening the harvesting of stem cells from a blastocyst to carving up people for spare parts).

In any case, National Review's pundits have taken up the issue and there is a good deal of civil, well-stated discourse. Just click to Hood's original post and scroll up.

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I have yet to see Firefly, though it is in my Netflix queue. I would like to check it out before going to see Serenity, which is getting a great deal of buzz on SF and libertarian blogs.

Today an article about Serenity at Reason's Hit and Run led to some very interesting commentary about the libertarian themes in the original Firefly series. I am really getting psyched, and eagerly await the movie.

More fun than that, though, is this hilarious look at a fictional libertarian film festival, linked by Stevo Darkly in the comments there: Oscar Shrugged: The First Galt's Gulch Film Festival. You probably won't get it if you haven't read Atlas Shrugged.

If, however, you have. Click over there NOW. It is hilarious (and also led to me adding about 7 more movies to my queue).

Posted by: JohnL at 10:38 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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My oldest son is really into calligraphy. He is mastering several different types of formal script. Who knows, maybe he will design a new font someday.

Today, fonts seemed to be a recurrent theme in my blog-surfing.

God, how twee is that? “Slightly irritated by a typeface.” Put that on my tombstone.

- James Lileks, 8 August 2005 Bleat

Lynn muses about the emotional impact of fonts on a reader. She is seeking some input on what fonts you like, what color, size, style. Leave her a comment and let her know what you think.

I like sans-serif fonts the best. I use Verdana for most everything I write. It makes for wonderfully readable legal forms, not too busy and easy to fax or scan without too much clutter. For web style, I prefer dark text on light backgrounds, though there are some well-executed blogs that pull off the opposite.

If I had to use a serif font, I would choose alatino, 'Palatino Linotype';font-size:150%;">Palatino, which is simply beautiful. I don't care for Times New Roman, as I associate it (and Courier) with poorly-drafted legalese. I see way too much lawyer work-product drafted in Times New Roman 12 pt., 1.25 inch margins (i.e. MS Word default settings).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Lemuel reveals himself to be a sans-serif man. I would think he would be a sans-blog man by now, since he keeps threatening to delete the thing.

On a wholly-unrelated note, I wonder whether anyone can guess the source of this post's title?

Posted by: JohnL at 11:06 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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