More on Blowing Up Levees

The Army Corps does this more often than I thought:

Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh — the man ultimately responsible for the decision to go through with the plan- has indicated that he may not stop there if blasting open the levee doesn't do the trick. In recent days, Walsh has said he might also make use of other downstream "floodways" — basins surrounded by levees that can intentionally be blown open to divert floodwaters.

Among those that could be tapped are the 58-year-old Morganza floodway near Morgan City, La., and the Bonnet Carre floodway about 30 miles north of New Orleans. The Morganza has been pressed into service just once, in 1973. The Bonnet Carre, which was christened in 1932 has been opened up nine times since 1937, the most recent in 2008.

"Making this decision is not easy or hard," Walsh said. "It's simply grave — because the decision leads to loss of property and livelihood, either in a floodway or in an area that was not designed to flood."

Officials in Louisiana and Mississippi are warning that the river could bring a surge of water unseen since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

The corps has said about 241 miles of levees along the Mississippi River between Cape Girardeau, Mo., and the Gulf of Mexico need to be made taller or strengthened.


George Sills, a former Army Corps engineer and levee expert in Vicksburg, Miss., said the volume of water moving down the river would test the levee system south of Memphis into Louisiana.

"It's been a long time since we've seen a major flood down the Mississippi River," Sills said. "This is the highest river in Vicksburg, Miss., since 1927. There will be water coming by here that most people have never seen in their lifetime."

The 1927 flood is featured in the book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America.  It features a lot of history of New Orleans and Mardi Gras, a lot about hydraulics and hydrology of the Mississippi River, a lot about the history of the Army Corps and levees, and a good bit about race relations in the Mississippi Delta.  Herbert Hoover makes an appearance, and a levee is blown up to save New Orleans.  It is a great book, and I highly recommend it.

Why Do Christian Conservatives Like Ayn Rand

In his review of the box office failure of Atlas Shrugged, Mark Howard asks the same question (h/t naked capitalism):

The affinity for Ayn Rand by the Tea Party has always been a bit of a mystery. Sure, there is a shared hostility for government, particularly when it endeavors to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to provide for the general welfare. Both Rand and the TP’s despise efforts to aid society’s less fortunate, whom they believe deserve to suffer. But how do predominantly Christian, patriot, Tea Partyers justify their idolization of an anti-American, atheist who regards compassion as evil and selfishness as the pinnacle of human values?

Ironically, a key theme of the book and the film is the rejection of society by the wealthy business class who mysteriously disappear. There is a correlation to that plot point in contemporary America as we have already witnessed the disappearance of business luminaries like Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff, Dennis Kozlowski, Bernard Ebbers, and John Rigas, to name a few. It doesn’t appear that society has suffered from their absence. Yet there is another industrial titan who not only hasn’t vanished, he is masquerading across the airwaves as a presidential candidate. I’m not sure Ayn Rand would approve of this, however, the popularity of Donald Trump at Tea Parties is perfectly understandable. He is the ultimate manifestation of Randian politics: a greedy, conceited, selfish bully. But for every Tea Party supporter there are probably twenty other Americans who wish that Trump would “go Galt.”

It would be nice if the Tea Party were to go Galt.  Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to cut it on their own, they depend way too much on government support.

Was President Bush Curious?

Daniel Larison:

But I think people caricatured the president, and the only thing that I couldn’t understand is why this man with such a curious mind, who in briefings always asked the question you wish you thought of, why that quality didn’t come across. And I fully admit that it didn’t come across. ~Condoleeza Rice

I suppose it’s possible that George W. Bush could have had “such a curious mind” and still made all the terrible decisions that he did, but one of the reasons that he received a reputation for being incurious is that he overlooked such obvious, glaring flaws in his administration’s policies that someone with “such a curious mind” should have noticed. He wasn’t very good at demonstrating that he knew or cared to know very much about things. If Bush were as curious as Rice claims, he did an amazing job of hiding it.

I would have to side with Daneil.  Bush didn't strike me as a person who wanted to hear what the other side of the issue was, and consider whether his opinion might not be correct.  He seemed to me to consider rather who the person holding the other opinion was, and if it was somebody he already didn't care for, he'd dismiss it out of hand.  His circle of advisors gave him his information, and nobody else could break through that.  We only got decent policy discussions when his advisors didn't agree, and he had to choose between them.  Sometimes he chose well, (Rice versus Cheney and Rumsfeld in his second term) and sometimes poorly (Cheney and Rumsfeld versus Powell on troop levels to invade Iraq).  I guess at times I can dismiss an argument out of hand, but I try to read opposing views on occasion.  For instance, I want to read Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, to take a look at her attack on the success of the New Deal, but I don't really want her to benefit, so I'll probably get it at the library.  I flipped through it at the library the other day, but I just couldn't put that money in her pocket.  I mad that mistake with Larry Schweikart's A Patriot's History of the United States, and I won't make that mistake again.

Making Medicine Better

Ezra Klein reviews Atul Gawande's book, Better:

The chapter on treating injuries of war makes this point nicely. In the Revolution War, 42 percent of the injured died. In the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, 24 percent died. But in the current wars, only 10 percent have died. And those gains have come “despite having no fundamentally new technologies or treatments since the Persian Gulf War.” The difference has been the application of things we already knew, not the development of treatments Gulf War-era doctors could never have imagined.
The chapter on childbirth that makes a similar point: “Doctors in other fields have always looked down their noses at their obstetrical colleagues,” Gawande writes. “They didn’t think they were very smart — obstetrics had long had trouble attracting the top medical students to their profession — and there seemed little science or sophistication to what they did. Yet almost nothing else in medicine has saved lives on the scale that obstetrics has ...do those of us in other fields of medicine use these measures anywhere near as reliably and as safely as obstetricians use theirs? We don’t come close.”
One other plug for Gawande: He’s enormously good at explaining why things that seem simple don’t happen the way they theoretically should. The fact that doctors don’t wash their hands enough, despite the fact that doing so could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars, seems insane. But it makes more sense if you understand that washing their hands “enough” would mean “a third of staff time spent just washing hands” — and that’s assuming a swift, minute-long cleanse. Similarly, the fact that cesarean sections don’t show better results than forceps makes the reliance on cesarean sections seem insane. But it makes more sense when you read Gawande’s explanation of how few people are actually able to use forceps effectively, versus how many doctors are capable of performing a cesarean.

The Pale King

David Foster Wallace's final novel is to be released April 15:

After struggling with depression for most of his adult life, writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Sept. 12, 2008 at age 46.
In one of his final acts, he tidied up the manuscript of a novel he'd been working on. The book was to be a follow-up to his 1996 masterwork, Infinite Jest. He called it The Pale King, and many said it would be a monumental contribution to contemporary fiction.
The manuscript was unfinished, but Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor at Little, Brown and Company, felt it was too important not to make the work available to the public, finished or not.
So The Pale King will hit the bookstores later this month, incomplete but still a window into the mind of a writer considered to be one of the most gifted of his generation.
"We chose to publish on April 15 as a way of casting a comic light on a novel that has a lot of darkness surrounding it," Pietsch tells All Things Considered weekend host Guy Raz.

I found Infinite Jest to be very interesting, but ultimately frustrating, and LONG.  This should top it in each way.

Salinger and College

From the NYT:

Then Jon Volkmer, an English professor, had what Holden Caulfield would have called a goddam terrific idea. They could establish an annual J. D. Salinger Scholarship in creative writing for an incoming freshman, and as a bonus the winner would get to spend the first year at Ursinus in Salinger’s old dorm room. “Any college could offer money,” Professor Volkmer said. “Nobody else could offer Salinger’s room.”
On Jan. 19, 2006, the college announced the $30,000-a-year Salinger scholarship, and within a week, the writer’s literary representatives were demanding that his name be removed. In retrospect, this was not a big surprise. All his life, Salinger had done everything possible to protect his privacy from the same stinking phonies who’d so unnerved Holden Caulfield. He removed his photograph from the jacket cover of “The Catcher in the Rye” and successfully sued a biographer to prevent the publication of his personal letters.
“Salinger’s representatives sent us a warning; it was only one paragraph, but it was blunt,” Mr. DiFeliciantonio said. “They may have used the word ‘exploit.’ ”