A great meaty Binks post full of fresh links awaits

Lots of commentary on many issues, from the Crusades and Byzantium, to a student suspended for making a "racist" remark and the Costa Concordia.   An appetizer:

What happens when the local, state, or national bills can’t be paid? When the prices keep going up, wages down, and the unemployed or debt-laden employed can’t pay the bills, or feed themselves & the kids? As the still-deferred reckoning of the 2006-2008 financial collapse continues to unfold?
We’re living on borrowed time– the ship has hit the rocks, and water is pouring in, and the officers are playing about as if it’s all just fine, no worries, go back to your cabins and wait for instructions type thing. The captain & officers will mostly save their own hides, so they’re not overly concerned about the expendable passengers.
So, WWYD?
It is often said that nobody knows how they might act in an emergency. Only partly true, in my experience. If you’re a douchbag/ette, you may surprise yourself with unsuspected resources of courage and suchlike in a disaster.. but you’ve also left it up to luck, maybe, who knows.
The time to prepare for an emergency is before the emergency– just as the way to deal with temptation is to practice virtue and stick to your promises with God’s help before the particular juicy opportunity saunters by. Thinking about what you’d sacrifice– or lay down your life for– best happens ahead of time, not while you find yourself kicking everyone out of the way to save your all-precious ass.. if not your self-respect or basic humanity.
Jeez: Move It, Granny!
Suddenly, we find ourselves pushed back on basics of self & civilization. A cornerstone: unselfish love. The Golden Rule, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” [ Luke 6:31 ] How about John 15:13 – “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.“
.. Or a weaker person, or a pregnant mother, a child, a granny, an elderly person, your spouse or child, a stranger needing saving. The passengers on the Costa Concordia (Or “Peaceful Coast”) found out what happens when civilization loses faith, and when “self and individuality and did I mention my all-awesome self?” is all I really believe in. Some charitable souls have tried to explain the recent disaster by pointing at Italians. As Steyn points out, nice try, but MV Estonia in the Baltic saw the same damned ugly scenes, of panicky men clambering over the weak, and not using their strength to save others.

Kathy Shaidle has often said, in the context of mass shootings such as the Montreal Massacre, that if you comfort yourself by saying, one never knows what one would do in that situation, "you make cowardice the default position."

So I think her principle can be expanded to these Costa Concordia situations----so that this kind of disgraceful scrambling is not the default position.