Maggie's Farm

NYT Honors 9-11 Victims

by noting the clamor for "answers" re Abu Ghraib. Clamor from whom? Besides them? Perhaps the two issues are "moral equivalents"?

Kinsley on Disasters

Kinsley appears to represent a return to sanity:

"You never gave five seconds of thought to the risk of flooding in New Orleans until it became impossible to think about anything else? Me neither. Nor have I given much thought to the risk of a big earthquake along the West Coast — the only one of the top three catastrophes that hasn’t happened yet — even though I live and work in the earthquake zone.

Of course, my job isn’t to predict and prepare for disasters. My job is to recriminate when they occur. It’s not easy. These days the recriminations business is overrun with amateurs, who are squatting on all the high ground. The fetid aroma of hindsight is everywhere."

The European Social Model

Dead or alive?