ScrappleFace on Katrina and Big Government

We knew Scott Ott was brilliant, as his many parodies have so deftly illustrated. But this thoughtful and non-satirical post in response to an editor’s query about a Katrina parody is something everyone should read. Ott’s reply to the editor is a sensitive, thoughtful, and damning indictment of society, government, and the media. Here’s a sample:

The victims of Katrina are not really the victims of Katrina herself. The tragedy began long before the hurricane hit.

Natural disasters have always happened and always will. While, mercifully, they don’t occur every day in every place, they are common enough that we ought to have an expectation that bad things can and will happen. We need to cultivate the inner resources in ourselves, our children and our neighborhoods to cope with the inevitable. When we cede that power and responsibility to the federal government, we surrender a part of what makes us human and leave ourselves more vulnerable to the tempest.

I can’t agree with the editor’s statement that Katrina survivors are heroes, simply by virtue of having survived a natural disaster. I think Ott’s response to her was very restrained. Many people did perform many acts of heroism during and after the storm. But I really do believe that those who stayed when they could have left, including some dear friends, were idiots, not heroes. I understand that not everyone had the capability to evacuate for various reasons, and I’m not talking about those folks. I’m talking about those who chose to “ride it out” out of some sense of personal invincibility or magical thinking. Those people were a burden that others had to carry, and I can’t call them heroes. Precious resources were spent rescuing people who could have evacuated, and others suffered because of it. And the others, who had to stay because they lacked options, are not heroes. They were victims of a natural disaster. Nothing more. To call both of these groups of people heroes cheapens the word.

A Hat tip goes to the Anchoress for this story, in a post which also includes info on the real chill wind that could silence free speech, as opposed to gasbag Tim Robbins’ chill wind.

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Unlikely Search Term O’ The Day

Someone actually got to this site by searching for masochist escort nyc. As of this writing, PH is #7 on that search.

I can understand all the “laura loves katrina” searchers, but this one is very perplexing.

Once again, I’ll try to be truly helpful. Whether you’re looking for “laura loves katrina” video or you want a “masochist escort nyc” - please click here.

Free John Piper Book

What Jesus Demands From The World is online, for free. As with all John Piper books, it’s a must-read. If you really don’t like to read on the computer screen for extended periods, and you don’t want to print 400 pages, then you can buy the dead tree version here.

Ding, Dong The Orleans Levee Board is Dead

The Orleans Levee Board is officially dismantled. Positions on the Levee Board never required any expertise or knowledge, just an “in” with the Governor or some other politician. Their mission statement was -

The Orleans Levee District is dedicated to protecting the lives and property of the citizens of Orleans Parish by constructing, operating and maintaining the Mississippi River and Hurricane Protection Flood Control Systems and to providing safe and secure facilities for aviation, marine and recreational activities.

but they did practically nothing related to the first half of that statement. Their time was almost exclusively dedicated to “providing safe and secure facilities for aviation, marine and recreational activities” and managing their extensive list of rental properties.

After Katrina, I took the time to read and summarize their meeting minutes for the year leading up to Katrina. They didn’t just take the time to manage their rental properties. They also attempted to manage their tenant’s activities. When discussing renting a property to a pharmacist, Commissioner Green worried, “what is occurring in New Orleans East with a few places that call themselves pharmacies. … a few places that opened as pharmacies and now have turned into dispensaries for pain killer medication’s, etc. On a day to day basis, it will be up to staff and Mr. Pappalardo to make sure that sort of thing does not happen here.” It’s a good thing there were no pressing issues with the levees, like the seepage at the base of a levee for a year prior to Katrina right where it broke at the 17th Street Canal, to worry about.

Voters insisted on a consolidation of all the local levee boards into two “superboards” - one for the East Bank, and one for the West Bank. In a final bit of irony, in the Board’s meeting room where the official motion was approved to dismantle the Board so the new “superboards” can take over -

On one wall of the meeting room hung a series of plaques that the Army Corps of Engineers had awarded the Orleans Levee Board almost every year since 1984 for its “outstanding” performance in maintaining the city’s levees and participating in the area’s flood-control program.

The Corps was finally forced to admit that they flooded New Orleans, not Katrina. But the Orleans Levee Board was certainly an accessory to that crime.

How is Blogging Not Public?

Jawdropper of the week - Jennifer Cutler, of Washingtonienne fame, blogged about her sex life with plenty of details about her sex partners and their activities together. When one of her sex partners objected - with a lawsuit - Cutler’s attorney had the gall to argue that Cutler never intended to make the blog public.

Good grief. How is posting something on the internet not public? I suppose if you put it behind a password, you’d have some excuse for thinking it might remain private. You’d be an idiot, but an idiot with an excuse. She doesn’t even have that.

If the case goes to trial, its outcome will be important both to bloggers and to people who chronicle their lives on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he may teach the Washingtonienne case this spring during his class at Georgetown Law School.

“Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that. It’s a different question when you reveal someone else’s private life,” he said, adding that simply calling something a diary doesn’t make it one. “It’s not sitting in a nice, leather-bound book under a pillow. It’s online where a million people can find it.”

Dhimmi Carter and His Murdering Pals

Captain’s Quarters has the story - what we all “knew” about Arafat is unequivocally true - and the State Department has had the facts for decades. There is no murdering terrorist, evidently, with whom they will not negotiate.

The State Department had proof all along that Yasser Arafat not only masterminded this attack, but deliberately plotted to kill American diplomats as a means to pressure the US out of the Middle East. In other words, the PLO/Fatah/BSO conducted a terrorist attack on American interests, murdered Americans, and got away with it. They sat on this information while the US insisted on negotiating with Arafat, even though many suspected he had planned the murders all along.

The State Department should have warned successive administrations from dealing with this terrorist and instead recommended that we capture him and try him for the murders of Noel and Moore. These men worked for the State Department themselves. I guess the lesson here is that State won’t lift a finger to bring assassins of diplomats to justice, a lesson that current diplomats may want to consider now. (via It Shines For All)

The State Department’s deliberate policies of appeasement, when there was no doubt whatsoever about the kind of person they were dealing with, are a great example of why the world no longer respects the United States. I don’t particularly care if we are liked, which is fortunate because we never will be unless it is the kind of “liking” we benefited from after 9/11. When we were wounded and bleeding, every country had “goodwill” toward us which was “squandered” the minute the bleeding stopped and we were no longer perceived as vulnerable. We don’t need to be liked, especially when the criteria for being liked is being weak.

We need to be respected, and under the current mindset at the State Department, that will never be permitted to happen. We need John Bolton to go over there and clean house, but that will never, unfortunately, happen. So all we can do, until we lose a city and quite possibly even after that, is look forward to State Department weenies insisting that giving thugs and terrorists all the time extensions they need to build weapons to use against us is the right thing - indeed the only moral thing - to do.

Map of Religion

I thought this was interesting. We often feel like the way things are, are they way they’ve always been, but that’s not true at all. There have been great movements and changes in religion over the centuries, and we are in the midst of a great movement right now. We are such short term thinkers these days (why does this blasted microwave take so long!) that’s it’s quite difficult to realize that we have an enemy who has been waging war against us since 1979, and that there is a long term and purposeful plan to apply sharia globally. It’s hard to understand that there are going to repercussions - profound repercussions - for surrendering in Iraq. In any event, this map illustrates some great waves of history so that even we short term thinkers should be able to “get it” and perhaps realize that history is still be written.

Time Magazine Gets At Least One Thing Right

Time gets one thing right, and I was very encouraged to read it:

But what is certain is that the strife-torn Horn is more divided today than ever — and is increasingly the arena for an international war between the forces of radical Islam, and the West and its allies. [emphasis added]

One of the main things I have been so frustrated with about the MSM coverage of the war is the nearly universal failure to see things strategically. No one seems to understand the value of our holding Iraq, for example, in light of the fact that it’s neighbor has been waging war on us for thirty years. All the coverage seems to be “get Bush” or if not “get Bush” at least grinding somebody’s political axe. But Islamist attacks have been occurring all over the world, and for reasons unrelated to either Israel or Iraq. It’s a refreshing change to have a major MSM player acknowledge for once that this is an international war (they don’t dare call it a “world war” yet) and that the opponents are the forces of radical Islam against the West. I hope this is a sign that the propaganda war might be turning, just a bit, in favor of reality.

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