The Smithian

…volunteers help clean out [a] mobile home near Shawnee, Oklahoma…

An infusion of Sandy-related dollars from Congress will help the National Weather Service upgrade two supercomputers that are used in virtually all U.S. weather predictions. That, in turn, could close…an embarrassing gap between the primary U.S. and European computer models. The European model has…been more adept at forecasting the…intensities of major storms, and that pattern held last October when the European model projected the lethal westward turn by Sandy even as the early U.S. model showed it drifting to the east harmlessly, toward open ocean.

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…many who would…support more regulations and enforcement in the face of a foreign terrorist threat would suddenly scoff at more regulations and enforcement in the face of unsafe workplaces. Why the double standard? That’s the troubling question raised by the reaction—or, really, lack thereof —to last month’s catastrophic explosion in West, Texas…Texas promotes an “antipathy toward regulations” as “the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage” and a place where many counties “cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.”

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“This…event is proof of the consequences of continuing forced evictions in Haiti,” Javier Zuniga, a special advisor to Amnesty International, said…about the standoff. “They have been living in camps with appalling living conditions. As if this were not enough, they are threatened with forced evictions and, eventually, made homeless again.”

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[a policeman looks] on as rescue workers try to save people from a burning building in central Lahore, Pakistan, on May 9, 2013.

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“Our climate is changing, the weather is becoming more intense…It’s going to cost a lot of money and a lot of lives…The big issue (is) how do we adapt…because it doesn’t look like the people who are in charge are going to do what it takes to really slow down this climate change, so we are going to have to adapt. And adapting is going to be very, very expensive.”

— California Governor Jerry Brown

…in an airplane hangar filled with trucks, airplanes and helicopters used by the state to fight fires.

[meaningful glance]

…made of shoes worn in The Boston Marathon…

Google is…one of the most influential nonstate actors in international affairs, operating in security domains long the purview of nation-states: It tracks the global arms trade, spends millions creating crisis-alert tools to inform the public about looming natural disasters, monitors the spread of the flu, and acts as a global censor to protect American interests abroad. Google has even intervened into land disputes, one of the most fraught and universal security issues facing states today, siding with an indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon to help the tribe document and post evidence about intrusions on its land through Google Earth…Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt has traveled to North Korea against State Department wishes.

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From questionably reliable information dissemination to…the voluntary foregoing of freedoms for safety…

In The Dark Knight…Gotham police faced a similar situation to that faced by the FBI in Boston last week, needing to find an unpredictable killer hiding somewhere in the city. Batman pitches in by creating a device that secretly uses every cell phone in the city as a form of sonar, allowing him to constantly surveil everything. Even our superhero considers this device so terrible and potentially destructive to the liberties of the people he’s sworn to protect that he designs it to be used only once—by someone other than him—and then to destroy itself…Bruce Wayne could have saved himself quite a bit of money just by asking people to submit their cell phone photos. Who knew that people would not only not protest, but would…eagerly participate?

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