Humble Pie

The New York Times has an article detailing the tenuous connection between diet and cancer prevention. There have been many studies conducted that attempt to explre the link between, for example, diets rich in fat and breast cancer, or fiber and the risk of colon cancer. But the evidence is, at best, mixed:

And there lies a quandary for today's medicine. It is turning out to be much more difficult than anyone expected to discover if diet affects cancer risk. Hypotheses abound, but convincing evidence remains elusive.

Not only that, it looks like there's a strong behovioral component, as people assuage their fears by taking some degree of control - even if it's illusionary:

Meanwhile, patients and those worried about cancer are adopting their own idiosyncratic dietary paths. Many know that the evidence is not solid, but they would rather take a chance that their diets will make a difference than wait helplessly for their fates to play out.

Even some of the researchers are changing their diet while knowing that the truth remains ambigous. Gallons of green tea or a head of broccoli a day may amount to little more than a genuflection at the alter of preventative medicine but this doesn't stop them from making the leap of faith.

All of which draws a bright line around the uncertainty of fundamental science. We understand many things about how nutrition impacts the human organism, but the systems are so complex that even the best researchers can't draw unimpeachable conclusions. Yet when it comes to bigger and even more complex scientific matters, such as the structure and purpose of the universe, I regularly hear my friends among the secular athiests explain that they know the truth.

Movie Review: Serenity

The best science fiction plays with compelling ideas that couldn't be explored in any other mode of fiction. Imagine a planet full of rose bushes that share a common mind - or a civilization that lives forever, and travels slowly between stars. Outlandish concepts, if paired successfully with good storytelling can be a innovative way to root around in some deep ideas about humanity and the universe. (See 2001 or Blade Runner.)

But the second best mode science fiction takes familiar concepts off the shelf - say, a renegade band of travelers on the run through space - and pairs this up with very capable storytelling and a good durable plot. If done well, this can be immensely satisfying, like a home-cooked dish of comfort food from a chef that knows their way around the kitchen.

Serenity is movie that meets that second standard with an appealing blend of pulpy sci-fi and western motifs. Swords, sixguns, starships, and attractive girls making roundhouse kicks - you've seen it all before. But director Joss Whedon knows how to put all of the components in motion with a compact storyline that hits all of the right beats - a moment of action, a moment of plot development, a wry bit of dialogue. Rinse and repeat. His TV experience is on display, with the Buffy and Angel TV series under his belt, and, of course, the short-lived Firefly on which Serenity is based.

The disappointments here are minimal. Serenity, like so many action movies, resolves the story with too many coulda-seen-it-coming coincidences in the final 30 minutes. And the dialogue, which serves up many zingers, sometimes takes the down-home Oklahoma patter a little too far. And in the mouth of Nathan Fillion, who plays primary rogue hero, words sometimes sound grunty and glib. I just can't always reckon what this space cowboy is saying.

The crass commercial question for Universal Pictures is - how wide is the audience appeal? Certainly they've nailed the otaku, who showed up at the premiere last night with comp tickets, ready to whoop at the action and hum along with the theme music. And I'm a convert too. I think Serenity deserves audiences - but I walked away from the theater wondering how Hollywood bungled it with Firefly. This is rollicking, great sci-fi of the pulp variety, with an ensemble cast and solid story underpinnings. It should be appointment TV viewing.

Update: Apparently everybody loved this movie. I clicked though reviews from other bloggers invited to the preview screenings across the country, and many of them were delirious. Also - I can't get a solid answer on whether or not a series could return to TV. There are those who claim it's contractually impossible.

Kafka on the Beach

One of the recently added members of my household has a weakness for sugar. The arrival of this member was followed a few weeks later by the appearance of teeny little kitchen ants. She claims there is no connection, since she usually uses Splenda™. Unless there are such things as South Beach ants, she tells me, they simply must be attracted to something else. ("Like what? Our tasteful book collection?" I think, but do not say.)

Nonetheless, they arrived. As you prepare to chop a rutabaga or pour your morning Cheerios they scamper out, as if ready to perform an amusing little dance with a straw hat and a cane.

But now they're dead. We bought some toxic ant goo, squirted it on a panel of cardboard and dropped it near the crack from which the ants seemed to emerge. To them I think it must have smelled like Sexy Lady Ant, because they sure seemed excited. Within moments there were dozens of them doing the backflip into the goo, paddling around, and whipping each other with little towels. And then later, in their ant barracks, the toxins begin to take effect. "Hey, what's wrong with Lefty? Talk to me buddy." The whole team collapses in spasms of coughing, and soon enough they have pilfered their last grain of Splenda™ artificial sweetener.

But in death I suppose they look really terrific, having finally broken the cycle of glycemic addiction.

Bongos of Hegemony

Much attention has been paid to this DailyKos post which offers advice to protesters who planned to attend the antiwar rally in Washington DC this past Saturday. Actually, 'attention' is a polite way of putting it, since the primary form of reaction from the conservative side of the crowd has been doubled-over laughter. This is because the post consists of earnest pleading against protest actions such as drum circles, the wearing of gas masks and spiraling dissertations about Palestine or the 9/11 conspiracy.

The idea was simply to keep the focus on the cause that united the folks who turned out - the urgency of ending the war in Iraq.

But these fixations, along with many others, made it into Saturday's protest march anyway (blog citations too numerous to mention). The crowd couldn't resist a kitchen-sink list of add-on causes, from gay rights to the crusade against Zionism to mermaid herstory. Participants might agree with several of them, but they were forced to order everything on the menu. I suspect a plurality of people agree that the war in Iraq is a bad idea, but if they went to DC to express this opinion they were forced to share the bus with the anarcho-vegan gentleman with the matted whiteboy dreadlocks - and no amount of patchouli will cover his level of stink.

Making a clearly dilineated, supportable argument is not very important for rabble rousers. Instead we have sweater-thread politics, where one pull elicits a string of collective causes. One-stop political shopping - plus a defensive stream of logical fallacies in the event they are challenged - this is a very comforting, self-affirming place for people to live, espcially those who won't bother to think for themselves.

Buzztastic Movieblogging

The folks behind the upcoming sci-fi movie Serenity have shrewdly decided to take advantage of the virtues of Internet-speed marketing by offering bloggers a chance to see an advance screening in exchange for notice on their weblog. Instapundit posted this Friday, and I got the lucky golden ticket in my Inbox yesterday.

After seeing the movie I am expected to write a review - good, bad, or indifferent. In return the representatives of Universal Pictures have asked for a link to the official Serenity site, a graphic, and the following synopsis:

---

Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.

---

Fair enough. In the interests of full disclosure I've always been an easy mark for good science fiction. I usually get my fix in books though, since movies and TV seem to rarely deliver the same quality (with some exceptions). I never caught the "Firefly" series - which Serenity is a continuation of - when it was on TV, but I certainly remember the uproar from the fans when the show was canceled. I think I can manage a fair minded review afterwards.

Is there an integrity issue here, since I'm basically helping to spread the word about the movie? Good question. Regular readers of this weblog know (I hope) that I'm upfront in my opinions and biases. I will admit to being immensely satisfied that Hollywood has recognized that buzz in the blogosphere is at least as valuable as the old-guard newspapermen and MSM reviewers that are also on the guest list. So I guess the film synopsis - about rogue outcasts engaged in a larger struggle - has some appeal. Let's see if the cinema delivers.

Fierce Pancake Hunting

One of my favorite obscure bands is an Irish outfit by the name of 'Stump' which recorded briefly in the late 1980s.

They fell through the cracks between dance music and the widespread discovery of 'alternative' music in the following decade, but their sound is still unique. The rubbery fretless bass, quirky instrumentation and even-quirkier vocal subjects (Charleton Heston / put his vest on) reveal an Irishman's love of wordplay and clever originality. Their definitive album, 'A Fierce Pancake' - Dublin street slang for a good record - is almost impossible to find. (This webpage by the former bassist Kev Hopper tells the whole Stump story. Precious little else exist about the band on the Internet.)

Nobody before or after sounded like Stump. It seems like originality is in short supply these days - not passion, technical skill, or ambition. Try listening to The Stone Roses self-titled original, or My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and there's a consistent and distinct creative style that pulls together the music. Sure, I'm just an old relic railing about the past, before the newfangled file-swapping and i-Nano whatzits. But all of this magnificent technology is a waste of time if the content delivered is warmed-over corporate pablum.

... said the funny little man on the way to the office.

On a related note, the Midpoint Music Fest is underway here in Cincinnati. It's a minor plus for a city with an undeserved national reputation in the arts. Rock, Jazz, Latin - there's an avalanche of music on the menu, including (if I heard correctly, though my ear horn) many buzzworthy groups. If anyone can recommend something fierce and original from the lineup drop me an email.

Mister Big Smartypants

Men and women, in general, are different.

This alone shouldn't be a controversial statement. But for many people we are already taking the first steps towards goose-strutting around and oppressively pinning labels on everyone. For these hypersensitive types any overt attention paid to differences may contain a covert threat to our equality - which, it should be noted, has always been seen by sensible constitution-writers as a matter of how we started off in this world, not how we end up. In other words all bets are off when the cells start splitting, or it's time to turn in your homework, or otherwise fork out a section of wealth and/or fulfillment.

So the "Free to Be You And Me" generation is caught in a pickle. In increasingly defensive tones they will point out the omni-present exceptions: Sally wants to be a firefighter. Bobby plays dress-up. And uncle Tommy has man-boobs. See, see! And plus, are you saying that men's interests are somehow better than women?!

This is the conversation that devolved when I recently pointed out that men and women bloggers, in general, have different areas of interest. My intention was to point out the need for more issue oriented blogs written by women* - especially here in Cincinnati. Breakup poetry and pictures of the dog are equally legitimate. But why is it all of the boys think their opinion matters so much? And likewise -- I was never able to make this point, because the shreiking had commenced -- many men should write more reflectively about their interior lives** and reflect on their relationships in life. I've always thought that some of this actually builds credibility; it reveals more about the person behind the big smartypants opinions.

But, in general, we can't talk reasonably about these things.

-----
* I just saw GroupThinkers, written by "mean girl" - a spinoff from Cincinnati Black Blog. Best of luck - and let's hope we see more. (But where are all the nice girls?)
** A notable exception is Joe Wessels - a local with a journalism background who takes on public issues and news, sure, but also writes thoughtfully about his friends, family, and experience. I met Joe at a panel discussion last night. He's a good guy. Visit his weblog.

Westchester Tea Party

Thoughtful discussion on a local weblog: Nixguy and Mike Meckler discuss taxation and voting rights for city workers who live outside of town (original post, and follow-up). The central issue is Dave's concern that the city benefits from his income while offering him no participation in local decision-making.

Not that they would want it, practically-speaking. Nixguy - I hope this is fair to say on his behalf - is like many who resides in the areas outside the city limits; he's more conservative. Obviously an influx of like minded voters, even on referendums, would cause massive amounts of disruption to urban retail politics, which are mostly Democratic in all American cities. (Witness the balance tipped by the evacuation of New Orleans.)

As the saying goes, all politics is local. We vote with our feet when we decide where to live. If federal and state elections could be "de-coupled" it would disrupt the massive grassroots machines of both parties, create an administrative nightmare, and open the door wider for election fraud. When our country was built and these laws were written nobody envisioned that we could live so far from the locale where we work. Although it is an engaging thought exercise to imagine how the founders would have tackled that problem (I think they would be surprised that the institution of modern government requires so much income in the first place.)

As to the specifics of state and local taxation, it seems like the primary stakeholders are the corporations, period. We are all at the mercy of their decisions, and the deals they work out with local officials are the fiduciary equivalent of prison rape. Data is almost impossible to attain since corporations are not required to disclose their state taxes. But many watchdog groups, who admittedly have an axe to grind, suggest some in the Fortune 500 pay don't pay any tax.

I'm guessing the chief financial officers of any big companies in Cincinnati have one key action item in their Franklin planners: Once a year paying all expenses to fly in the mayor of Denver, Portland, or Kansas City and strolling right past city hall, arm-and-arm, while wearing a big, girlish grin.

Catfish All Day

So many packaged media messages surround us - advertising campaigns, logos, storefront signage and promotions. Each one of them consists of safe, sanitized pieces of capitalist communication. And each one, you can be sure, had "sign off" from a bobsled of corporate vice presidents who demanded maximum market penetration without offending any demographic.

Still you can see home-grown public writing here and there, the hand-lettered marquees and chalkboard lunch specials that seem more like folksy haikus. For weeks now I've driven past "Catfish All Day" on the sign of a local buffet, and seems suggestive of something greater than a heap of fried protein on a steam tray - like it could be a lost Robert Jordan instrumental - a hint of something more subtle in the stripmall wasteland.

Shoptalk in Local Orbit

I have been asked to appear at an event sponsored by the Cincinnati Programmers Guild and The Women's Circuit. It's a panel discussion about weblogs, and the other participants are a mix of personal and corporate bloggers. I’m looking forward to it, but it's given me pause to reflect on what exactly I have been doing here with Spacetropic.

It’s tricky to find a niche. Other blogs offer partisan red meat for Left and Right. National behemoths like Instapundit offer astonishing link aggregation on a daily basis. Cincinnati Blog and The Dean of Cincinnati have a more comprehensive take on local politics and infighting. And a million others write funnier stuff about the day-to-day of children, families and the dog according to the Dooce model of blogging.

My blend of earnestness, ironic humor, and fed-up centrism seem to be an acquired taste, based on the response I see on e-mail. But I think about Joel Hodgson, who was once asked about his offbeat approach to comedy “Don’t you ever wonder if people will get it?” He quickly responded “No. We just assume the right people will get it.” That freewheeling philosophy appeals to me. I’d rather shoot for Mark Twain with a twist of Stephen Jay Gould than try to pretend to be a chump-change, small city David Brooks or PJ O’Rourke.

Too much talking about myself is dull. Hopefully, given the nature of the audience at this event the discussion will trend toward the technical aspects of blogging. It will be nice to talk shop with other geeks about issues that fire up the Slashdot demographic – privacy, Microsoft, digital rights, etc. Maybe I can even cop some advice on my bluetooth woes, or bum help with web design.

Help which, were it to be offered, might more likely to come from the Women's Circuit. I hate to drag sex into it - but if the Guild is, conversely, a bunch of dudes, than a quick comparison of the websites will convince you of the pervasiveness of gender differences. The Guild has sparse gray HTML tables. The Women's Circuit has drop shadows, nice pictures, and a pleasant color palette. If these were rooms in a home one would look like a page from Pottery Barn while the other would be decorated with Frito Lay products and an X-Box.

Cincinnati Programmers Guild Events

Cincinnati Programmers Guild Events

Salty Brit Smackdown

I'm beside myself. Tomorrow at 7PM George Galloway is debating Christopher Hitchens. The first is an unrepentant liberal aristocrat and the second is a unabashed progressive turncoat who now sticks up for conservatism. Both of them are shrewd, razor-tongued men of England, and based on the strength of their convictions and their dexterity with language I expect that by the end of the debate there will be viscera scattered in the first few rows of the venue. I don't know about the upper class version of smack talk but maybe they will lapse into crafty cockney rhyming slang.

We're talking Ali Vs. Frazier Pt. 3 for the political junkie crowd. Unless you have bypass surgery planned at this time I suggest tuning in. I might prevail upon the missus to get a cooler of Guinness and a bowl of crisps and sit for a while in the lawnchairs with the PC speaker propped up in the window. The neighbors know we're eccentric.

Article here. Broadcast here. Hat tip Vodkapundit.

Telephone Free Victories

Lately VoIP is all of the rage. For those of you buried under a glacier, the rough translation is "voice-over Internet telephony", a technology which sends phone calls through an Internet connection for no extra cost. It seems simple, but it has already started to transform several industries - why pay for land lines when VoIP is much cheaper and more flexible? Imagine your phone following you around like you Internet-based email.

In fact, VoIP made a guest appearance in the mayhem that occurred in the days immediately after Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast. On Tuesday August 30th Mayor Ray Nagin's office was trapped in a Hyatt without power while floodwaters were rising and looters were literally at the doors. A resourceful geek from his staff instructed the cops to break into an Office Depot to "borrow" a server, and used a VoIP hookup on a battery-driven laptop to get a connection between Nagin (who had wet himself, and was rocking back and forth) and Bush (who was on Air Force One, enjoying a barbecue sandwich and watching WWF on the plasma).

Okay, I made up that last part. But the story of the Hyatt and the techie is not apocryphal, and made the (unlinkable) Wall Street Journal last week. We know in general that disasters, wars, and terrorist attacks are inadvertent showcases for new technology - usually gadgets that had been on the periphery prior to the breaking news. Savvy observers will note that even while we add items like VoIP to our pile of neat gizmology, there is one principal vulnerability points in terms of infrastructure that make a robust and redundant network. Can you guess?

The answer is power, in the form of electricity. The juice was off in NOLA on August 30th - and the diesel backup generator had been (predictably) stocked with very little fuel. Without that laptop battery the whole rig wouldn't have worked. You are encouraged to worry about the key need for reliable power - but try not to get distracted with fanciful talk about the need to transform our economy overnight into one powered by duck flatulence and rainbows.

Meanwhile, back in the marketplace, investors are hopping around because eBay just purchased Skype, a company which provides free VoIP telephony among it's users (and charges a pittance to call "out" to regular phones). But in the larger marketplace there's a mini-gold rush of looming IPOs for companies hawking VoIP-related offerings. So fire up the Smashing Pumpkins and Odelay! It could be the late 90s all over again, and we can trade stocks in our 'jammies.

Usability Not Detected

Are the streets of Redmond, Washington overflowing with psychotic vagrants? Are thousands of men and women, driven from their senses by difficulties with simple computer tasks, waiting at the security entrances to the Microsoft campus, waving baseball bats, shouting, smashing bottles of scotch and wearing explosives on their chests?

I close my eyes. I picture developers, project managers, and 'Windows Evangelists' peering up from their cubes at the approaching sound of gunfire, as Hattie McPherson of La Jolla, CA picks her way though the building, leaving a trail of dead and dying in her wake as payback for the 'My Pictures' folder filled with images of her grandchildren that was rendered suddenly, inexplicably useless because of an automatic Windows update.

My 'Texas Tower Moment' came over the weekend, when I was doing battle with a "Bluetooth" wireless connection. (And for the record, the last thing I will say before the SWAT team places the red laser dot on my forehead will be "Known incompatibility with some VIA chipsets?!") You see, I inherited an iPAQ Pocket PC, the Windows flavor personal digital assistant. The kicker is, I actually like the device quite a bit, which is why I decided to try out the wireless capability. But a maddening nest of problems cropped up with my desktop operating system, leading me though a maze of prompts and wizards, as the two devices tried but failed, spectacularly, to communicate with each other, like a college freshman couple after a few drinks.

It shouldn't be more complicated than getting a wireless phone to talk to it's base unit, but without a team from NASA and the combined engineering might of MIT, Caltech and their marching bands I don't think it can be done. Yes, I've Google searched it out the wing-wang. Yes, I've read every FAQ, tips, and 'Knowledge Base' article. Yes, I know Apples and Linux are superior, but I have neither a fat pile of cash for the first nor the desire to code my own device drivers for the second. No, I'm not buying a bus ticket to Redmond yet, but I'm on my last freaking nerve with these Microsoft characters.

Gilligan and Rehnquist: A Speculative History

Seven castaways. Nine judges.

The deaths this week of TV’s Gilligan, Bob Denver, and Chief Supreme Court Justice William “Hubbs” Rehnquist suggest a long and curious connection between these two mixed-up, inventive, and sometimes inept groups of people. In their ceaseless struggles to “get off the island” or “interpret the constitution” they reflect the many challenges faced during the upheavals of post-World War II America.

Flashback to the 1950s. At the time Denver was playing a whacked-out beatnik named Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Rehnquist had graduated from Harvard, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson and was raising children with his young wife Natalie in the Phoenix suburbs while working at a private law practice. Did William and Natalie gather at the small black and white television in their home and have a few laughs in the evening at Maynard’s hilarious hi-jinks?

More importantly, did they recognize in those early days that the bongo-playing TV character was a harbinger (albeit one sanitized by the entertainment industry) of a counterculture that would have a profound impact on American society, down to the bedrock values of the judiciary, where principles of "equal protection" would be employed by progressives to promote activist social change in the decades ahead?

The connections run deeper. When the original Gilligan's Island aired in 1964, the ship which struck ground had been christened the 'SS Minnow' by legendary TV producer Sherwood Schwartz. This was a subtle yet telling jape at the expense of Newton Minow, head of the FCC, who had famously remarked that television was "vast wasteland". This may have been the opening volley in a long battle between the forces of regulation and entertainment, a struggle which continued in various forms through Rehnquist's tenure, with landmark rulings such as MGM vs. Grokster as late as this year.

Likewise the Skipper and Gilligan - "friends" from the Navy - were ostensibly in command of a motley group of castaways from all walks of American society. What more suitable metaphor could be found for the generation of WWII veterans to which the reigns of power were given in the 50s and 60s? They, like the Supreme Court of the 60s, were confronted with a society in upheaval though the forces of feminism and civil rights. We wince at the stereotypes portrayed by Gilligan's cohorts - the "Indians", the plight of Mary Anne - but they reflect, by way of high farce, the forces that were set loose in America in that tumultuous decade.

The show went off the air in 1967. But the legacy continued.

In 1981 the Harlem Globetrotters visited Gilligan’s Island for a one-time special. By then Rehnquist had served on the U.S. Supreme Court for almost 10 years. It was a time of transition for both our favorite fictional castaways and the nation’s highest judiciary body. Not only were basketball superstars "Geese" Ausbie and Clyde “The Glide” contending with the challenges of bamboo huts and coconut telephones, but in 1981 the formerly all-male cloakroom had a new member, the Reagan-nominated Sandra Day O’Conner.

Few people may have noticed, by then, how far we had come. And fewer still could appreciate this long and storied connection between one of TV's most-beloved characters and the highest judge in the land. Like Lear and the Fool, they told us who we were - and are - wisdom we were loathe to accept, but also longed to hear during the calamity of changes that befell our American kingdom.

In Defense of Stoicism

If Jean-Paul Sarte is right, and hell is other people, then the ninth circle is other people at the gym who won't stop talking. I made this discovery one day after fogetting my digital music player. As a result my cardio workout consisted of listening to Talky Chuck on the treadmill to my left. He carried on a hyper- animated conversation with his next-door neighbor, Chatty Denise.

They talked about a mutual friend who had difficulties following a separation; Chuck talked about the pros and cons of psychological pharmacology; Then Chuck talked about what milk did to his system. Both went on at length about their spouses, kids, and public schools. And there was no pretense of flirtation.

After several minutes of this inane twittering I my eye became drawn by the glimmer of hand barbells on a nearby rack. I wondered if I could deliver a blow that would stun but not paralyze.

I read it somewhere that in moments of doubt men should ask themselves "What would Clint do?" - referring, of course, to the famous cinematic stoicism of the actor who brought us Dirty Harry. This is solid wisdom. Despite what my readers may perceive from this sometimes-loquacious weblog, I'm usually content to say, verbally, very little. My wife observes that my tendency is to remain polite but distant until the point in the conversation when I can land a dry remark. After that contribution strangers feel reassured that I might not be a madman.

And I'm thinking Hemmingway is a worthwhile model too, a writer absorbed with hunting, fishing, and constructing taut, clean sentences - words that seemed almost self-aware that too much expression is unmanly. Then again, based on the way things ended, Old Hem might have benefited from sharing his feelings just a bit more, or at least considering non-alcoholic forms of medication.

Ours is an Oprah-tized society. We share incessantly with text messaging and weblogs; now families, churches, and communities trap each other on a 'cc' list for email. In this environment we should pause amidst the noise and confusion to recognize the virtue of listening and observing, saying things only when necessary - and otherwise remaining mercifully silent.

Politics And Festival

Labor Day weekend in my neighborhood is celebrated by the annual Fall Festival at Nativity Parish. You participate by standing around, giving out money to the children for the rides, maybe gambling or bidding at the booths, enjoying a mettwurst and drinking a beer or two while the sun sets and the music thumps away from in a nearby karaoke booth.

The politicians turn out for this seasonal rite with their buttons, and signs, and volunteer undergrads in poli-sci from the local university. And David Pepper turned out, looking poised and a little campaign-weary; although he did remember our previous meeting, and said hello. Chris Bortz had campaign staff left and right plastering everyone with stickers. David Crowley seemed confused and distracted, but otherwise enjoying himself. And Paul McGhee was there with his trusty campaign truck, which can often be seen with the big green 'McGhee' on the streets of my neighborhood. He, of all of them, seems to have an honest passion for public service.

Funny how party affiliation breaks down at the local level. The more I meet and discuss with these characters, the more I want somebody honest, competent, and tireless in their support for this city. Those are the primary qualifications for service.

I like to live in a place that's small enough that politicians can be seen - at least during election season - drinking a draft beer at a community event. I try to be evenhanded in my discussions about the neighborhood-versus-subdevelopment issues that pervade this region (and many others) - but it's events like a parish festival that sway the balance for me. The city belongs to the homeowners who stayed for long hours afterwards to sweep up, and it belongs to the little old lady who asked me for a dollar as I was walking back to my car.

The Wisdom of Insecurity

The next time it could easily be a disease outbreak. Or a terrific earthquake on the Western coast. Or even, perhaps, a massive terrorist attack from an international network of extremists. Regardless of the specifics we can be certain that another disaster will befall the United States in the next number of years, and the collective federal might of the United States government will be called upon to respond.

The Apollo missions to the moon, the Berlin airlift, the World War II mobilization - even the Panama Canal debacle and the recent cleanup of southern Manhattan in the wake of 9/11; these episodes are a testimony to the logistical prowess we are capable of in our best moments. The are situations (often precipitated by disaster) when we got our collective act together and moved forward with startling ingenuity and resolve. We planned around the problem.

We're all shocked and distraught by the suffering in the South-central states, and it's easy to get distracted by blame exercises and pointless sidebar discussions about race, global warming, or any of the flavor-of-the day causes that animate political partisans. The fact is we have to act fast, act cleverly, and act in cooperation to mitigate the worst effects of this disaster before they case several waves of shock to out national well-being.

And we need a grim imagination, and a group of government officials who spend all day wargaming disaster response. Where in St. Louis would you house 10,000 anthrax victims? Where would be a staging area to deploy water in the even the supply was poisoned in Charlotte? Where can we get 300 helicopters if the roads are impassable around Phoenix? As soon as disaster strikes many of these plans will be overtaken by events, or will need adjustment - but we will have trained our agencies in the practical arts of readiness.

As you watch the news, are you pleased with the capabilities of our government today? Because it really could be you there in New Orleans or Mississippi, homeless, overtaken with hunger, and faced with the possibility of disease. Basic human compassion asks us to imagine us in their shoes. But wisdom and foresight demand that we recognize the need to act preventively, to be more prepared in the future.

Two New Orleans hospitals plead for help - Hurricane Katrina - MSNBC.com

Two New Orleans hospitals plead for help - Hurricane Katrina - MSNBC.com: "“Hospitals are trying to evacuate,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, spokesman at the city emergency operations center. “At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them. There are people just taking pot shots at police and at helicopters, telling them, ’You better come get my family.”’"

Think About The Future

A million spreadsheets are quietly being updated today.

Thousands of companies have a line-item in their pricing models for transportation expense. It may be the cost of sending trucks inland from the ports on the coasts that receive products manufactured overseas. Or it may be shipping parcels with the companies that handle air freight. Or it might be the cost of putting hundreds of repair trucks on the road to deliver service.

Thanks to Katrina, that line item is being jacked. We know the ripple effects from this disaster on our economy are simply massive, but we can't see very far down the road. Still we can be sure that the average consumer will be hit in several places beyond the gas pump.

And as I was sitting on a porch yesterday evening overlooking the city - a friend and I were talking about neighborhoods, development, and demographic trends. As we discussed these topics in light of this oil shock, it seemed very possible that one potential impact could be on the proliferation of outlying exurbs. There might be more value in living in central locations, near work and key services. When we contemplate an endless future at $4 a gallon there may be some charm in concepts like light rail through vital neighborhoods, and development corridors that consolidate growth.

Some of the worst mistakes we make as a society seem to extend from the assumption that things will never change; that the seas will always be calm, or that we can always "ride it out".