Weekly Address

This week President Obama discusses the multitude of problems and opportunities before the world through the prism of Passover and Easter:

These are two very different holidays with their own very different traditions. But it seems fitting that we mark them both during the same week. For in a larger sense, they are both moments of reflection and renewal. They are both occasions to think more deeply about the obligations we have to ourselves and the obligations we have to one another, no matter who we are, where we come from, or what faith we practice...

Len Bahr has more on LSU's termination of coastal scientist and Hurricane Katrina expert Ivor Van Heerden here. Bahr dismisses the limp lie that Van Heerden lacked experience for his position and adds that

Hurricane Katrina created a number of local and even national heroes, some of whom I am proud to know and Dr. van Heerden is high on that list. If having the cajones to blow the whistle on the most catastrophic and expensive coastal disaster in recent US history is grounds for firing, what can possibly be grounds for advancement?

In a devasting quote from a UC Berkeley Engineering Professor Raymond D. Seed, Bahr also exposes LSU's academic cowardice:

My own University (U.C. Berkeley) was also approached [by the Bush Administration] in an inappropriate manner during that same Winter of 2005-06, but such untoward pressures were simply rebuffed. That, in the end, probably goes right to the heart of what really separates a top-flight university with one of the top Colleges of Engineering in the nation (and the top-rated Department of Civil Engineering in the nation) from a university like LSU.

Academic research often leads the researcher into unknown and controversial areas. He must know that, above all else, that his institution has his back. By bowing to crude threats and dismissing such a leading and distinguished voice, LSU failed Van Heerden, itself, its students, its alumni, its faculty, and the state of Louisiana in the most fundamental way possible...

Gitmo = A loooot of fun...

What's bad for trees is good for Bank of America. For the life of me, I don't know why we should bail out banks who practice usury...