The Dish

A reader writes:

Forget the gulf for a moment, but only for a moment. Have you noticed what happened  to Nashville this weekend? The town is in ruin, thousands displaced, 28 dead and counting. A 1000 year flood according to TVA and no one in the national media cares.  Sigh.

Another writes:

Since you are a vocal proponent of the usefulness and impact of social media – in some cases being far greater than that of the mainstream media – I thought you should know that the same has been true during this weekend's flooding in middle Tennessee. 

While we experienced 25% of our average annual rainfall in two days, the Cumberland River continues to rise, entire neighborhoods (including half of my own) are underwater and Naomi Judd's buffalo are running wild (…yes, really). The Weather Channel is the only cable outlet covering this (though I think we've gotten a couple seconds on CNN and MSNBC).  Local news has been strong, from what I watched, but several stations had to evacuate their newsrooms due to flooding downtown, and even NPR has been off-air today because of power loss. 

Meanwhile #nashvilleflood, #othersituation2010, #nashlantis and other tags have been outstanding compilations of pictures, eyewitness reports and volunteer coordination.  In particular local blog Nashvillest (@nashvillest) and @NashTraffic have gone to heroic efforts to keep even those of us without power but with smartphones apprised of road floodings/closings, shelter lists and other important and up-to-date information that has been invaluable through the storm.  Perhaps most importantly, though, it made those of us who could follow and contribute on computer or phone feel like more of a community than watching television ever could.

(Video via Mashable. Photos of the flooding here.)

Avent's take on the oil spill:

Existing fuel prices do nowhere near enough to price in the externalities of oil consumption on the environment and human health. (Lisa Margonelli tells Ezra Klein: "The American Lung Association estimated that every gallon of gas costs us 50 cents in the asthma rate for children. You have the greenhouse gas question, leakage, spills, explosion, cancer risk from benzene, economic risk from the volatility of the prices, the military cost, and we do not account for all this.") But one can expect that investors' and insurers' reactions to the discovery that they are effectively on the hook for many billions of dollars in case of a deep-sea blowout will help to price in some of that risk.

Wife In The North can’t wait for the election to be over:

My “you’re-beginning-to-annoy-me” list includes:

*The Camerons curled-up together waiting to be called to govern the country.(Sorry Sam, but yuk.)
*Cameron telling us that it’s not as though he’s complacent about the results, it’s just he can’t wait to get started. (Hubris, dear boy, hubris).

*Nick Clegg sitting down to tea with Colin Firth for a heartthrob-to-heartthob chit-chat. (“You’re very beautiful.” “No, you’re very beautiful.” “I honestly think you’re more beautiful than me…” etc.)

*Politicians holding forth on tactical voting. (Do they think the voters are idiots that they have to be instructed where to put their cross?)

*Lord Mandelson. I don’t know about anyone else but I’ve definitely heard enough from the spin-meister. (He’s going to be around forever isn’t he? Forever and ever?)

Felix Salmon doesn't think it will work:

[T]he prospects of an imminent default seem to have eased: Greece will almost certainly have the money to roll over the debts coming due in a couple of weeks. But this is not a solution to the Greek problem, even if Greece successfully implements all the austerity that it’s promising. Which it won’t.

Joshua Tucker uses a chart to explain why EU and IMF are bailing the Greeks out.

Hmmmm.

It seems to me that those of us who believe in the unfettered rights of our opponents to speak their minds – especially within the context of sincere religious faith – should be decrying what just happened in Britain:

Dale McAlpine was charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” after a homosexual police community support officer (PCSO) overheard him reciting a number of “sins” referred to in the Bible, including blasphemy, drunkenness and same sex relationships…

Mr McAlpine, who was taken to the police station in the back of a marked van and locked in a cell for seven hours on April 20, said the incident was among the worst experiences of his life.

“I felt deeply shocked and humiliated that I had been arrested in my own town and treated like a common criminal in front of people I know," he said. “My freedom was taken away on the hearsay of someone who disliked what I said, and I was charged under a law that doesn't apply.”

Britain doesn't have a First Amendment, a lack which makes it much easier to police and intimidate speech. This shows it could do with one.

National Review is still for drilling, but even they refuse to repeat the Palin mantra:

“Drill, baby, drill,” has lost whatever usefulness it may have had as a slogan.

I can perfectly well understand the cost-benefit analyses of off-shore drilling and in purely economic terms, I'm inclined to believe that National Review is broadly correct. But I have to say that watching this ghastly slick spread over the Gulf makes me pause. Even if it makes economic sense to keep drilling for the time being, even if a growing economy will require carbon fuels for decades, even if we have yet to find a way to develop non-carbon energy that can easily replace carbon at a reasonable price … does not the sight of this wound in the deep sea prompt us to look again at the models we simply assume about life on this planet?

I'm not talking here about the logic once one has conceded the modern world's attempt to master the earth as a resource so as to create the fantastic wealth and technology and health many human beings now have access to. I'm talking about a humbler view toward the moral and ethical cost of such an achievement. In the words of T.S. Eliot,

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God . . . . It would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live on this planet.

This planet is clearly resilient. But we know now in ways we didn't know at the beginning of this era of mastery of our global domain (a split second in the entire history of humanity) that it is not invulnerable to humankind's ambition and selfishness. We can debate the costs and benefits of a carbon tax or a cap and trade regime, we can hope for a medium term arrest in the global population, we can hope for a technological miracle, we can reassure ourselves by examining far greater ecological and environmental shifts and ruptures in the ancient past, we can see how economic growth may be the only way to mitigate the damage of economic growth … and yet unease persists.

These wounds, these temperatures, these destructive weather patterns are symptoms of a planet in distress. At some point, those of us who see our relationship to the natural world as something more than mere economics – as something sacred – need to face up to the fact that our civilization is not taking this sacredness seriously enough. When do we ask ourselves: by what right do humans believe we can despoil the earth for every other species with impunity? By what self-love have we granted ourselves not just dominion over the earth but wanton exploitation of its every treasure?

Is there no point at which we can say: this is enough? 

(Photo: A dead turtle lies in the surf as concern continues that the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may harm animals in its path on May 3, 2010 in Bay St Louis, Mississippi. It is unknown if the turtle died due to the oil spill. Oil is still leaking out of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead at an estimated rate of 1,000-5,000 barrels a day. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

The man who voted to allow the CIA to do to prisoners what the Vietnamese once did to him now favors shredding any constitutional rights for an American citizen suspected of a terror attack. Yes, he picked Sarah Palin. And why not? When you're as cynical and as power-hungry as McCain, what else matters but whatever works for now?

Fisher rounds-up what we know about the suspect. Goldblog destroys the non-alleged link to settlements in East Jerusalem, but does not claim Stephen Walt was behind the botched terror attack.