Scott @136: The reason that works in the Arctic is because for about 99% of the population, the ONLY reason to endure typical weather conditions for the area is if someone is paying you. If you seriously propose to do the same thing at a temperate latitude, the only way to prevent a Rugged Individualist from buying up a plot of land and planting a house on it is for the government to own every square inch of the U.S. Gulf Coast, and forever resist the urge to take advantage of the 300+ non-hurricane-struck days per year. Good luck with that.
I think what frustrates me most about post-disaster reactions in this country is the tendency to ignore the operation of luck. Evacuating for Rita was only a "waste" because the storm turned. (It was a clusterf*ck for other reasons.) Galveston narrowly escaped emerging from Ike as a scraped-clean sandbar because the eye came up the bay instead of 20 miles down the coast. These things did not happen because plucky humans decided to thumb their noses at nature, it was pure-D luck. Roll of the dice. And don't try to tell me it's the weathercasters' fault, they do the best they can with the information they have. Unfortunately, their models didn't account for storms like Ike, with a low-for-its-size windspeed and a high-for-its-windspeed surge, because the models were developed based on historical observation and we've never seen anything like Ike. It's an anomaly storm, in a season full of anomalies.
Lynn @133: That's terrifying, and a clear failure of the system. Now can we balance that story against all the people who were begged to leave and did not? The elderly woman referenced by Liz at comment 90 refused assisted evacuation early on Friday, and then had to be rescued later. There was assistance available, both straight-up transportation for the able-bodied and more for special-needs evacuees, and YES people took their pets. As of this morning, there are over 1200 people in the Dallas convention center, and the city's nearby pet shelter is housing 87 dogs, 9 cats, 11 birds, two lizards, a rabbit and a ferret.
And Galveston will be rebuilt because it's necessary. New Orleans is necessary. Port Fourchon and Cameron, LA, rebuilt after Rita and will rebuild again after Gustav and Ike because they're necessary. As long as we have barge traffic down the Mississippi, rigs in the Gulf, and active ports facing the Caribbean, we cannot retreat from the coast.
... I'm starting to wish we could treat hurricanes like wildfires. Even when you see video of folks who refuse to evacuate spraying down their roof with a garden hose, they never seem to expect the fire department to be standing there with them.
Wow. That's... a rather impressive failure of sense. I just saw video from Galveston, the storm surge picked up BOULDERS (possibly from the jetties) and tossed them up over the seawall and across the road. All the piers along the seawall are gone, including the Balinese Room.
I doubt this bar exists anymore.
heresiarch @304:
I can't claim THAT level of perception, I'd read of the connection between Firefly and Killer Angels :D But I still don't think the Browncoats were Confederates; the South stood for self-determination at the societal level (we get to keep holding slaves because our society is supported by it and we don't want to change), but NOT at the individual level.
Carrie S. @ 307:
Problem with that analogy is that it's pretty clearly the Alliance who are the Confederates, in all but name. It's the Alliance that allows slavery ("Shindig", called such, and "The Train Job", called "bonded servant") and has big white houses in green lawns (complete with Spanish moss on the trees) and elaborate dresses and pseudo-aristocratic titles ("Shindig" again).
Yes, exactly.
albatross @ 310:
But most of the slavery we see, and all the really brutal, cotton- and sugar-plantation style slavery, is on the outer planets. There's no indication I've ever noticed that this is because the Alliance imposed it; instead, it looks like the Alliance and many (maybe not all) outer planets have slavery, and that (as with literally everything else) it's much more regulated on core worlds.
But isn't that precisely what would have happened in the American West if the South had succeeded in spreading slavery to the territories?
(This is what I get for shutting down Google Reader for a couple days...)
So, back when you guys were discussing Firefly, had no one considered that Joss created a 'verse where the South won? It pinged me a little when it became clear in the series that Alliance worlds do practice forms of slavery, and it hit me REAL hard in "Shindig"; Kaylee's dress was such a visual shoutout to the antebellum South.
Anyway, it came even clearer when I read Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. Beyond the names Joss chose to use -- a Reynolds on the Union side, Jubal Early on the Confederate -- there's a tension in the novel that I see reflected in the series, between not just two different societies but two different views of destiny. There's a British observer with the Confederate army, and a strong implication that certain parties in England are rooting for the South and see their own society mirrored there, i.e., landed aristocracy, power-by-inheritance. Keeping in mind that this is Shaara's version of the battle and not a straight-up history, I couldn't help but read it as a struggle of man-becomes-what-he-is-bred-to vs. man-becomes-what-he-makes-of-himself. And I see the same struggle in Firefly, with the Alliance imposing an aristocratic heirarchy and the Browncoats as the army of self-made men.
Dave Bell @731:
Primeval is one of my guilty-pleasure shows. The premise is intriguing, the characters are engaging, and I have a history of putting up with a good deal of handwavium in service of those elements.
But occasionally the writing is so boneheaded all I can do is laugh at the screen in disbelief. The second season opener in particular: gur snpg gurl gbbx ba na havqragvsvrq perngher jvgu gjb xabja xvyyf va n zhygv-yriry bcra-vagrevbe fubccvat nern jvgu bayl n sbhe-crefba aba-zvyvgnel grnz jvgu gjb (2) thaf orgjrra gurz. Ubj ner gurl abg nyy QRNQ lrg? *ynhtuf*
I still enjoy it immensely, though.
Re: LiveJournal's new... policy
Journal owners can choose to designate individual posts or the entire journal as "adult concepts" or "explicit adult content," which is probably why some not-logged-in people are seeing the Cut Tags of Annoyance and some aren't: difference is in the journal viewed. As a reader, you must either include your birth year in your journal or click to affirm you're over the designated age. There's no opt-out of the filtering on the reader's end.
Also? For added FUD, posts and communities can be flagged adult or explicit by other LiveJournal members. Once a comm or post has hit a certain magic number of flags, Abuse steps in and judges whether the content must be filtered.
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