On God, Nature, and Government

This morning on nola.com I read that the 172 miles of canals in New Orleans were designed to essentially fail despite any and all reassurance from governmental agencies. No one checked the previous works or investigated the history of the canal system in a long time. The failure spans centuries and several agencies. Do we blame them all or just the two most modern incarnations - the Army Corps of Engineers and the Orleans Levee Board? Seems like there is a lot of blame to be spread around.

But it had also become one of the most dangerous. The seeds for that failure had been sowed by the hubris of city planners who attempted to use the system to change the city’s ecosystem, by the wave of political entities created to help manage the system and by some simple engineering oversight.

God loves hubris. Nature loves weakness and inaction. And humans love beauracracy. All things tend toward entropy, right?