God’s Mercy and Hurricane Gustav

I’m sincerely hoping I don’t end up with a “Hurricane Gustav” category like my Hurricane Katrina category. That said, I’m surprisingly calm about it. I live in Jefferson Parish, which is adjacent to Orleans. New Orleans is about ten minutes away. The West Bank of Jefferson parish, which is expected to be hit very hard, is where my mother lives. She’s thinks we’re quite nutty for believing as we do, and the fact that we’re calm now unnerves her a little bit, I believe. She’s with us now, so we can evacuate later today. I’m praying after this is all over she’ll understand us a little better and maybe even join us.

We were fortunate enough to have an abbreviated church service yesterday - still held on Saturdays because our church was destroyed by Katrina, although the new one is nearly completed. Among the songs we sang were Blessed Be The Name, How Good It Is, and I Have A Shelter.  (lyrics below the fold)  Blessed Be The Name was especially poignant, since we sang it on one memorable occasion right after Katrina - the first time our church reunited for an “official” service. The song fortified us for what is to come, no matter how it all works out.  The other choices were especially apropos - I Have A Shelter:

And here’s the sermon, if you’re interested to see how we prepared for all this.

My faith may falter. It’s happened to Mary and to many far better Christians than me. But I’m still looking for the Romans 8:28 in all this, and one thing I know for sure will be a benefit. I wrote, in between Katrina and Rita,

The mercy of Hurricane Katrina is that we were able to see how frail and temporary things down here really are. Considering that life is eternal, the length of time we can expect to spend with these material things is so much shorter, compared to the length of our lives, that they are hardly worth mentioning. I have stubbed my toe hundreds of times in my life, but I can’t remember the details of even one time. It’s a reminder to build our house upon the rock, a reminder that to have our life we must lose it. Rita is drifting northward and I find I’m really not bothered by it. We’ll evacuate, or not. Get hit, or not. Flood, or not. My God is sovereign and I am in His hands.

One of the greatest lessons I learned from Katrina is that, as Brent Detwiler said in a sermon, “pain is a magnet for God’s love.” Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. As Brent said, when trouble came, Paul said, “I delight” not “I renounce” or “I bind” or “I rebuke.”  Avoiding pain means avoiding blessings as well.  While some people are celebrating this storm, hoping for cheap political gain, I’m accepting it in the full knowledge that God will use it for his glory and for my benefit, just as He did Katrina.  As I wrote before, “Our God is sovereign, and we are in His hands. And that is a blessed place to be.”

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Yes, good, but Maverick still can’t be my wingman…

Slublog has a nice writeup on Mav’s Veepstakes winner in The Maverick Gets One Right. It’s going to hurt a lot less now. Go read it, I’ll wait… I’ve got nothing better to do, until I can figure out whether or not we have to evacuate to escape the insane Scandi. (Why isn’t Ace all over that angle?!) I really picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

Good, you’re back. So, Maverick can’t be my wingman, but his wingman could. Anytime. I thought I was going to have to settle for voting downticket, but I can push the button on a ticket with Palin on it. Probably chanting, “Yes I can!” but it’s okay, they already think I’m a lunatic at my polling station. Something about the way I danced out of the booth after voting Jindal for Governor.

So as Slublog said,

So because McCain did something I never thought he’d do, I’m going to return the favor and do something I never thought I’d do - donate to his campaign. If you’d like to join me, here’s the link.

Although my reasons certainly differ and furthermore, I don’t think it was a nod to the conservatives as much as a nod to reality. He’d have loved to shaft us (again) but he doesn’t think he can afford to do so.

I’m not donating any money to anyone until I know what Gustav and Hanna are doing and if I’ll still have a house and a business in two weeks, but later I will donate to the campaign - for Palin’s benefit. I’d love to see her get sixteen years of White House duty. And it will be hard-fought and honestly earned, unlike Hillary’s piggybacking on her husband’s career and name recognition.

The Truth About Hurricane Katrina

Well, some of the truth, anyway, but it’s a good primer to get you started, as a follow up to this post. I’m still getting my Gustav plans finalized.  Read more

The Truth About Katrina, As We Wait For Gustav

Three years ago, I sat stunned and nauseated in Dallas and watched my city flood. There are a lot of myths about Katrina, largely created by the media which hypes everything beyond recognition, and aided and abetted by politicians on both sides of the aisle and at all levels of government for their own benefit. Here are a few facts that most people don’t understand:

• Katrina was not a Category 5 hurricane when it made landfall either in the New Orleans area or the Mississippi coast. 

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When cognitive dissonance would be an improvement…

Scary stuff by zombietime via LGF - The Democratic Convention Giant Puppet Parade:

Sometimes it seemed the sign-carriers went out of their way to wear the most inappropriate clothing. Here, for example, is a man with Soviet Union shirt who was part of a group carrying signs that demanded “Universal Human Rights” and “Dismantle Empire.” Excuse me, sir: Are you trying to look like a fool?

Cognitive dissonance would be a step up for these people.  Click through for lots more inadvertently self-parodying pics.

In Gustav’s honor - The Chocolateville Song

A re-post from January 2006, since with Gustav evidently heading our way we could use a bit of cheering up - and perhaps a cautionary tale. :-)  And here’s a preemptive shush for those of you who think New Orleans should be abandoned. Read more

A preemptive Gustav shush: why we idiots don’t just leave New Orleans

There’s a decent chance that Gustav will hit southeastern Louisiana, at or near the New Orleans area. Here are two Weather Underground maps - the storm models with with 5 day forecast overlaid.  (Click for a larger image.)  There’s ample reason for concern.

Here’s a preemptive shush for anyone who says, “Why don’t you idiots just get out of New Orleans?  What kind of fool builds in a bowl below sea level anyway?” Those arguments have been debunked here and in a number of places on the web, but here’s the Reader’s Digest version: the city originally was built above sea level and a fair amount of it, including my house, is above sea level.  But developers put subdivisions on cheap, outlying, swampy land as the city grew, and so portions of the city are an average of 1-2 feet below sea level.  Those areas should not have been reopened after Katrina, but I can’t control that.  As a voter and a citizen, I did everything I could to pressure politicians to make the hard decisions with regard to zoning and rebuilding, but the race-baiters won that battle.

Before Katrina it was a good forty years since we had a serious hurricane (Betsy) and since then the Corps of Engineers delivered poorly executed levees built on faulty designs, which even they grudgingly admitted - while assuring us we were protected.  And after Katrina, they colluded with Congress to hide evidence of what they did and are still lying to this day. New Orleans is by far not the only city protected by levees, and in fact Sacramento is in greater danger of catastrophic flooding than New Orleans.  Keep in mind, too, that about $3 to $5 billion of the New Orleans metro area damage was caused by this man’s poor decision to send the pump operators far away instead of housing them locally like other emergency personnel.

As to why we idiots don’t just leave - probably for the same reason people don’t leave the Florida coast, which gets pounded regularly, the midwest, which suffers catastrophic levee breaks periodically not to mention tornadoes, and California, which has earthquakes, riots, massive fires, and Nancy Pelosi.

The nation needs New Orleans, which is already as far upriver as it can be and still accommodate ocean-going vessels.  62% of the public relies on goods which pass through our port, which is the busiest and fourth-largest in the world, and the largest in the US.  We’re also the second largest fishery in the country - and without our support for the Gulf Coast oil industry, your gas prices will rise considerably.  Remember those price spikes after Katrina?  And as to the money for rebuilding - first, Louisiana is the only state that didn’t recieve offshore royalties for DECADES - since the Eisenhower administration we poured money into the federal coffers without receiving a nickel the way other states did.  Second, the $110 billion that New Orleans supposedly got was a total sham.

Actually the $110 billion went to emergency response and administration for three storms, Hurricanes Rita, Wilma and Katrina across five states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The allocation includes almost $30 billion for FEMA’s response and Department of Defense expenses including the restoration of federal facilities. And almost $20 billion was flood insurance payouts to citizens collecting on their own private insurance claims.

/preemptive shush

As for Gustav, I’m making my preparations both to stay and to go - we’ll know better by Sunday what, if anything, we need to do.  But if he does come here, I’ll remember that there are blessings in adversity and that Romans 8:28 is true in all circumstances, not just the ones I find convenient.

Added: I don’t know why comments and pingbacks were closed; this was intended to be an open trackback post.  That definitely wasn’t part of the preemptive shush.

Zombietime sees Dan Rather at the DNC

Live from DNC: It’s Zombietime! (Day 3)

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Indeed.

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