Castles in the Air

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal continues to tout his sand berm scheme as a panacea for stopping the invasion of the Louisiana coastline by the BP/Halliburton Catastrophe. Others disagree with his assessment, and the evidence to date appears to bear them out. I'll leave it to the experts to debate the merits of the berms -- although Jindal scorns scientific expertise in particular -- but the entire notion has had a castles-in-the-air aura about it from the get-go.

Software development (which I do know something about) is not civil engineering, but I'd bet an investment banker's bonus that they share two key principles when it comes to scheduling and delivering:

1. Engineers will provide an overly optimistic delivery date based on confidence in their skills (a confidence that, in my experience, is usually justifiable), a strong desire to develop the project, and the natural optimism that infuses the beginning of any endeavor. However, all of this inevitably results in initial schedule estimates that to succeed require near perfect execution with few unanticipated impediments.
2. If the project has never been tried -- and on this scale, the berms have not been -- then all bets are off, and I mean all bets. The end result, if the project actually reaches completion, is as likely to be a counterproductive boondoggle as it is to accomplish anything positive. And in any case, it will not live up to its advance billing because the decision-makers will cut corners to avoid further delay.

The optimism of the engineers proposing the project is understandable: It's the nature of the beast. But Boob Bob Jindal has an obligation to be skeptical, to drill down (as it were) on the project milestones, to understand the pitfalls and push the engineers to prepare for them, to seek outside expertise, and -- above all -- to inject a note of realism into the proceedings. On these counts, he has failed dismally (although failure implies a degree of effort not evident in Boob Bob's approach to this project).

It's not like he hasn't been warned. Marine scientist Dr. Len Bahr has publicly questioned Jindal's the berm strategy on nine grounds:

1. Absence of science
2. Questionable justification
3. Opportunity cost
4. Environmental cost
5. Changes to natural flow regime: A technical argument that the berms could well suck oil into the estuaries they are designed to protect
6. Lengthy construction time
7. Fragility
8. Dubious benefits
9. Better use of funds

Jindal originally estimated that the berms could be completed within six-month; now, I believe they are talking about nine months. No matter: This project is a minimum of two years out.

Jindal will blame delays on the federal bureaucracy as surely as a liberal governor would blame BP. But the project itself is always the primary source of delays; that, too, is the nature of the beast. In the case of the berms, the likely source of delay is predictable: Boob Bob's Glenn Beck-like disparagement of science will come back to haunt him and the Louisiana coast.

For a project like the berms, marine scientists and ecologists must play an instrumental role in helping the engineers identify and prepare for setbacks. Jindal has dismissed their concerns. When these concerns are inevitably realized, the engineers will have no contingency plan in place or expertise to fall back on. They'll be groping in the dark, with all of the missteps and delays that that implies.

By then, Boob Bob won't care much, as he'll be too busy running for president to worry about something as insignificant as sand berms.

The Wind Is In From Africa

Just A Little Green. Paul Krugman writes that President-elect Obama must learn from Franklin Roosevelt's errors as much his successes:

The economic lesson [of the New Deal] is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little...

Put On Some Silver. E. J. Dionne agrees that Obama must ignore the voices that claim America is still a "center-right" nation and act boldy: "Timidity is a far greater danger than overreaching, simply because it's quite easy to be cautious..." I don't think that the United States is defined by its political orientation so much as a preference for solutions, wherever they come from. If Obama and the Democrats get things turned around, the amount of people who describe themselves as "conservative" will drop until only the wingnuts remain...

My Old Man. Monday, Obama meets with John McCain to discuss issues on which they can cooperate. One thing you gotta say about our guy: He doesn't hold a grudge.

Fancy French Cologne. Meanwhile, world leaders have plenty of advice for the President-elect, who plays it cool...

We Don't Need No Piece Of Paper. The entire contents of The New Yorker election issue (see brilliant cover illustration above) are available free on-line. But since you can't display that cover on one of your kitchen cabinets without buying the news stand issue, you might want to pick up a copy of the 20th Century version. Especially worth reading is literary critic James Woods' assessment of Obama's victory speech, which unearths the speech's rhetorical roots in Lincoln and Martin Luther King...

All Romantics Meet The Same Fate Someday...Mark Illa explains how intellectual conservatism in effect turned on itself:

But their [intellectuals] function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them...

...Cynical And Drunk And Boring. Harold Meyerson tells Fox News to keep on doin' what it's doin' -- things are working out just fine:

Your work remains dangerous and disintegrative to the nation. But it is also, more narrowly, tactically, for now, a great gift to liberals and Democrats. You ensure the ongoing Palinization and marginalization -- electorally, the terms are synonymous -- of the Republican Party. And to think that you're doing all this not on the Democratic National Committee's dime but on Rupert Murdoch's...

Blow This Damn Candle Out. "Our aim should not be more government, it should be smarter government." George Bush actually said this. Yesterday. Had he figured that out eight years ago, John McCain might be our next president...

Friday's Choice. Discerning readers of a certain age may have inferred that we've been listening to Blue, Joni Mitchell's 1971 classic. With a nod to John and Cindy, here's Joni singing "My Old Man" at a 1970 BBC session:

This Land

I've been working that Pittsburgh steel, I thought you knowed

I've been a dumpin' that red-hot slag, way down the road

I've been a blasting, I've been a firin', I've been a pourin' red-hot iron

I've been hittin' some hard travelin', lord

-Woody Guthrie, "Hard Travelin'"

Do singers in other countries sing as much about traveling and the road, getting from one place to another whether by air, train, car, truck, or feet? In Ireland, singers often sing about a place, but it's generally with a sense of either exile or nostalgia. It's hard imagine Germans singing about goin' down to Stuttgart town, but maybe they do. I can't think of many songs by the Beatles or Stones or Who about traveling ("Goin' Mobile" does come to mind), but Bob Dylan's epic  "Blood On The Tracks" is a litany of place names. And that's just one album.

Americans sing less about the joys of moving on and more about the necessity of it -- what Canadian Joni Mitchell called the urge for going. Willie Nelson sang that "still is still moving to me," which captures the urge for going about as well any song I've heard. Maybe the greatest American song of all -- "This Land Is Your Land" -- is not only about the road and the land, but how it belongs to all of us -- how we are it and it is us. 

This morning, I discovered this wonderful photoessay written in 1935 by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov for Pravda. Every time they found a place that they thought represented America, the residents assured them that it did not: "They said that the genuine America was the southern states, while others affirmed that it was the western ones. Several didn't say anything but vaguely pointed a finger into space." That sounds about right...

Woody sings "This Land Is Your Land":