We might all be spared a bit of embarrassment if sex-ed courses included a segment on protocol.

At Daily Kos there’s an “exhortation” (relayed by my old friend(s) Astraea) to the effect that the drowning of New Orleans has at last exposed Republican evil for all to see. As is customary in Progressive rants, corruption is equated with free trade, and the campaign for ever more invasive government both at home (papers please!) and abroad is equated with minarchism:

Make no mistake: as we watch our fellow citizens drown, starve, and die in the street in New Orleans, its not incompetence or lack of planning that is killing them. It is willful neglect. It is the direct result of reducing the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” This is what “starving the beast” looks like.

By expanding it every year?

I’ll shed no tears if either branch of the Biparty somehow manages, despite all the Bipartisan Incumbent Protection Acts of recent decades, to destroy itself and make room for some genuine opposition. But . . argh. Can someone who isn’t a libertarian understand how frustrating it is to see all manner of ills blamed on one’s pet policies when the opposite policies have in fact been in force?

Well, anyway. It has long been observed that a region of frequent hurricanes is not a good place for a city below sea-level. (The Netherlands don’t get hurricanes.) For generations the day of reckoning has been postponed, not by “willful neglect” but by massive intervention: to fight the Mississippi’s tendency to seek a new channel, to maintain the dikes levees, and to keep the price of flood insurance low so that people don’t look at their bills every year and say hm, maybe it would be smart to move to higher ground. If the powers that be had been flint-hearted enough to neglect New Orleans, it might already be a ghost town, with no one left to drown; but what politician could resist the plea to preserve a city of history and romance? It’s not as if they’re spending their own money.

Little news has reached me about the relief efforts; but I have heard that the authorities are obstructing private relief efforts in the name of keeping order — much as they did in Florida, after a hurricane whose name I’ve forgotten, during a Democratic Presidency. [Oops! Andrew was in 1992.] In this case they’re stopping unofficial vehicles because you might have in mind to spring some of the felons being held at the Superdome. Sicherheit über alles!

Meanwhile. Some entity called Castro Valley Moms has chartered a truck to take clothing and toiletries to Houston. (On Wednesday?!) I’ve bagged a bunch of garments that I never wear.

Marcia Blake has the right idea:

If every community in the U.S. sent JUST ONE BUS to retrieve “Katrina” refugees from the unspeakably inhuman warehouses where they are suffering, bringing them to our homes for shelter, we could stop the needless misery and deaths.

I kinda wish we hadn’t got rid of that sofa.

If, instead of welcoming inquiry and criticism, the admirers of a great author accept his writings as authoritative, both in their excellences and in their defects, the most serious injury is done to truth. In matters of philosophy and science, authority has ever been the great opponent of truth. A despotic calm is usually the triumph of error. In the republic of the sciences, sedition and even anarchy are beneficial in the long run to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

—William Stanley Jevons: Theory of Political Economy, 1871

A set comprises its members; a set consists of its members; a set is composed of its members — but a set is not comprised of anything.

“Thank you for observing all safety precautions.”

Some people amuse themselves at inventing languages and scripts; that sport’s most famous player was of course Tolkien. And some avidly study whatever notes Tolkien left concerning his Elvish language family.

Tolkien invented at least three scripts: Sarati, an alphasyllabary; cirth, a full alphabet; and tengwar, used both as an alphasyllabary (in the Ring Verse) and as a full alphabet (on the West Gate of Moria). But in human history such scripts have been invented less often than syllabaries, in which no two of the symbols for ti ta ki ka are similar. (The alphabets listed are more numerous, but most of them are descended from the same Semitic ancestor and most of the alphasyllabaries from Brahmî.) So I wonder whether the T-linguists would be offended if one were to design a syllabary for Elvish.
( . . more . . )

This post from Shanghai makes me wonder how widespread is the notion of counting sheep.