Jumat, 30 September 2005

EconoPundit- Global warming

EconoPundit

EconoPundit Unemplyment stats

EconoPundit

The Skeptical Optimist: ntl debt

The Skeptical Optimist: Rifkin's Warning

Weird Words: Tontine

Weird Words: Tontine: "A system of annuities in which the benefits pass to the surviving subscribers until only one is left.

global warming-not in antarctica?

EconoPundit

The Capital Spectator

The Capital Spectator: "April 22, 2005

THE NEW NEW GOLDEN AGE OF OPEC"

Bad Example

Bad Example: "LOVE NOTES: THE E-BOOK - UPDATED 7-18-05"

Bad Example

Bad Example: "LOOKING FOR INSPIRATION FOR YOUR BLOG NAME?"



Link

Rabu, 28 September 2005

protein wisdom

protein wisdom: "It was the luck of the imperial draw that the American project in Iraq came to the rescue of the Shiites--and of the Kurds. We may not fully appreciate the historical change we unleashed on the Arab world, but we have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab world. We have overturned an edifice of material and moral power that dates back centuries. The Arabs railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in Iraq will never let us in on the real sources of their resentments. In the way of “modern” men and women with some familiarity with the doctrines of political correctness, they can’t tell us that they are aggrieved that we have given a measure of self-worth to the seminarians of Najaf and the highlanders of Kurdistan. But that is precisely what gnaws at them.



An edifice of Arab nationalism built by strange bedfellows--the Sunni political and bureaucratic elites, and the Christian Arab pundits who abetted them in the idle hope that they would be spared the wrath of the street and of the mob--was overturned in Iraq. And America, at times ambivalent about its mission, brought along with its military gear a suspicion of the Shiites, a belief that the Iraqi Shiites were an extension of Iran, a community destined to build a sister-republic of the Iranian theocracy. Washington has its cadre of Arabists reared on Arab nationalist historiography. This camp had a seat at the table, but the very scale of what was at play in Iraq, and the redemptionism at the heart of George Bush’s ideology, dwarfed them."

Minggu, 25 September 2005

"Real Racism" by Sharon�Hughes

"Real Racism" by Sharon�Hughes: "Driessen also mentions the European Union, World Health Organization, World Bank, UNICEF, and environmental groups like Greenpeace, and others as being on the forefront of preventing the most malaria-ridden nations from using the same insecticides that eradicated the disease here in America. This begs the question: Why are the voices of human rights groups and churches silent about this ''subtle'' form of racism, and human-rights abuse? You tell me."

"Real Racism" by Sharon�Hughes

"Real Racism" by Sharon�Hughes: "Here’s an even more far-reaching form of racism: Letting Africans die because of radical environmentalist white idealogues’ activism. Paul Driessen, senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and former environmental policy advocate, talked with me about this issue on my radio show. He said what few are willing and courageous enough to talk about.



Did you know that in 2004 alone malaria took the lives of more African children than any other infectious disease, and according to UNICEF--three times more than HIV/AIDS? How about that malaria infects 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa and kills up to 2 million (half of them children) every year? Why? Primarily because of global environmental laws that prohibit the use of DDT spraying.



Paul Driessen points out in his article, ”Double Standards on Disease Control”:



“From colonial times until the 1940s, malaria was the American disease,” says Dr. Robert Desowitz, professor of tropical medicine at the University of North Carolina. At the dawn of the twentieth century, it thrived from New York to Florida, from North Carolina to California. Up to 7 million Americans were stricken by it every year until the mid-1920s, and 3,900 died in 1936. For centuries, it struck down people of all ages in England, Holland, Italy, and other parts of Europe. But by the early 1950s, it was gone, and all but forgotten. How was this possible? We used DDT, window screens and other measures to gradually eradicate the malaria parasite from its human and insect hosts. Today, we still spray pesticides (mostly by airplanes) to control mosquitoes and the West Nile virus that some carry. But we apply a vastly different standard when it comes to poor developing countries that are still wracked by malaria. “ "

Good News from the Front

Good News from the Front

Jumat, 23 September 2005

Pocatello Idaho State Journal: Is the U.S. creating cloud cover?

Pocatello Idaho State Journal: Is the U.S. creating cloud cover?



Comspiracy theories to the max!

What aout Hydrogen burning cars?

One Hand Clapping: "what about hydrogen cars? They would burn hydrogen and oxygen and emit water. How cool would that be, eh? But writer Patrick Bedard says that if by a trick of science autos had been invented using hydrogen-oxygen motors, so that everyone was driving them now,



... President’s FreedomCAR initiative would be anteing up its $1.8 billion to invent the gasoline engine. Freeing us from hydrogen would be “the moral equivalent of war,” to use the words of a long-past energy-crisis president. Gasoline would be the miracle fuel. It would save money by the Fort Knoxful. It would save energy by the Saudi Arabiaful.



The reason is that the amount of energy required to produce a kilogram of hydrogen is simply enormous, many multiples more than the energy recovered by using the hydrogen as a fuel. Where would all that energy come from?



Virtually all the hydrogen produced today, about 50 million tons worldwide, comes from natural gas. The process, called “steam reforming,” is only about 30 percent efficient, much less, he [Donald Anthrop, Ph.D., professor emeritus of environmental studies at San Jose State University] says, “than if the natural gas were simply burned” in the generating plant.



Producing enough hydrogen to replace gasoline by reforming natural gas would increase our [natural] gas consumption by 66 percent over 2002’s usage. And don’t forget the carbon emissions.



Electrolysis to produce the element carries its own toll so that the energy required to produce a kilo of hydrogen for an auto’s use is several multiple of the energy a hydrogen kilo yields in the motor.



Starting with 140.8 kilowatt-hours of energy from coal [to generate electricity for electrolysis] gives you 17.4 kilowatt-hours of electrical power from the fuel cell to propel the car, or an energy efficiency of 12 percent.



Hydrogen as an auto fuel turns out to be terribly inefficient.



Presumably, BMW knows all of this, yet it has been thumping the tub for hydrogen since the 1970s. Along with hundreds of other invitees, I attended BMW’s hydrogen hootenanny at Paramount Pictures in 2001. Mostly, it amounted to a day of corporate preening before California’s greenies. Still, BMW is famously brave in confronting technology. Does it have a plan? I summed up the science of this column, in writing, and passed it up through BMW’s official channels, along with the obvious question: Where will the necessary quads and quads of energy come from for hydrogen cars? That was nearly two years ago. BMW has not answered.



No answer, of course, is the anwer.



Like it or not, we’re stuck with internal-combustion engines for a long time to come."

Senin, 19 September 2005

One Hand Clapping � Blog Archive � Address to Gold Star families

One Hand Clapping � Blog Archive � Address to Gold Star families: "I addressed Gold Star Mothers and their families, along with many Blue Star families, at a luncheon honoring fallen U. S. Marines on Sept. 17, 2005. The luncheon was sponsored by Tennessee Marine Families, a chartered not-for-profit organization of which my wife and I are members.



Many readers will recognize that I modeled about the last half this address on Pericles’ oration at the first funeral of Athens’ fallen of the Peloponnesian War in 431 bc. You will also see an echo of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” (I cited the full quotation here) in a closing paragraph."

Jumat, 16 September 2005

The Daily Demarche

The Daily Demarche

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell: "The country does not have one dime more resources available when those resources are channeled through government. The resources are just handled less effectively by government and dispensed in an indiscriminate way that encourages people to continue locating in the known path of predictable disasters."

Rabu, 14 September 2005

HOG ON ICE new site location

HOG ON ICE

New Sisyphus - PDX

New Sisyphus - PDX

Oh Mary!

I have heard it all now. While illegally threatening the President of the United States with bodily harm on ABC's This Week, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) accused him of visiting hurricane-decimated Louisiana merely in order to stage a "photo-op." She ranted and raved hysterically during her appearance on the televised news show last Sunday, at one point bursting into tears. No doubt about it — her levee broke, big(easy)-time.

It's always something. If President Bush works out, he exercises too much. It never occurs that perhaps this is his only means of relieving the enormous stress and pressure he's under. And now comes this latest bit of antic fabrication, straight from the big brassy mouth of a bureaucratic bass caught in Katrina's rip current. If he tours the hurricane-ravaged coast, he's posing for a photo-op. If he stays away, he doesn't care, isn't "personally engaged," and is perpetrating nothing short of indirect "murder."

Why New Orleans Flooded

Why New Orleans Flooded: "Designed for the Mississippi, Not the Gulf



In an earlier September 2 story the Journal noted that in Louisiana, coastal wetlands provide some shelter from surging seawater, but more than one million acres of coastal wetlands have been lost since 1930 due to development and construction of levees and canals. For every square mile of wetland lost, storm surges rise by one foot.



'Moreover, the levees in New Orleans were built to keep the city from being flooded by the Mississippi, but instead caused it to fall below sea level. Now the Gulf of Mexico has moved into the city,' says the Journal.



As the hurricane rolled into New Orleans, scores of boats broke free or sank. In the Industrial Canal, the gush of water broke a barge from its moorings. It isn't known whose barge it was. The huge steel hull became a water-borne missile. It hurtled into the canal's eastern flood wall just north of the major street passing through the Lower Ninth Ward, leading officials to theorize that the errant barge triggered the 500-foot breach. Water poured into the neighborhood.



When the storm was over, the barge was resting inside the hole. 'Based on what I know and what I saw, the Lower Ninth Ward, Chalmette, St. Bernard, their flooding was instantaneous,' said Col. Rich Wagenaar of the Army Corps.



It didn't help that the Mississippi River, which runs along the southern border of these neighborhoods, rose 11 feet between Sunday and Monday mornings. Coastal experts say that could have worsened flooding by limiting the water's escape route."

Senin, 12 September 2005

"Katrina and Playing the Odds" by Jan�Larson

"Katrina and Playing the Odds" by Jan�Larson Katrina and Playing the Odds

Written by Jan Larson

Monday, September 12, 2005



Flood protection levees were first built around New Orleans starting in the late 1800s. Following Hurricane Betsy, the federal government stepped in with the Flood Control Act of 1965. This legislation set in motion a series of levee construction projects design to protect New Orleans [1]. All of the engineering for these projects assumed a fast-moving hurricane equivalent to Betsy, rated as category three on the Saffir-Simpson scale [2].







It has long been known that the levee system could not protect the city from a category four or five hurricane. Why would officials take such a risk when the consequences, as we’ve seen, were so devastating? Two reasons: money and probability.







The likelihood of a category four or stronger hurricane making a direct strike on New Orleans was determined to be about once every 200 to 300 years. In fact, there have only been three category five hurricanes to make landfall in the United States since records have been kept. The cost to upgrade the levee system to protect for this “worst case” was and is not insignificant. In fact, with the projected cost being in the billions of dollars and the probability so low, it is as a practical matter, politically untenable for politicians to ask taxpayers to pony up that kind of money to protect them from something that isn’t likely to happen during their lifetimes. It is especially untenable to ask taxpayers in other states to pick up the tab--which is where federal flood control money comes from.







Before disaster strikes, it is natural for people to think that it won’t happen to them. Just like the lottery, it always happens to someone else, somewhere else, and at some other time.







Commenting on the disaster in New Orleans, Rep. David Obey (D-WI) asked: “How many times do we have to see disaster overwhelm our preparedness before we recognize that we are playing Russian roulette with people's lives, with their livelihoods, and with the life of whole communities?”







The answer is, of course, just about every time. Our government didn’t protect us from terrorists crashing airplanes into buildings before September 11 and they didn’t protect the citizens of New Orleans from a catastrophic flood before Katrina.







Hindsight is always 20/20 and so in the next few months there will undoubtedly be calls to beef up the New Orleans levees to protect against the strongest hurricane likely to ever occur. But is that a good idea? After all, the probability of another category four or five storm hitting New Orleans remains at once every 200-300 years.







There are plenty of areas in the country that are at risk for a natural disaster, some on a massive scale, but hurricanes are never a surprise. If officials act appropriately and citizens act responsibly, there should never be any fatalities as a direct result of a hurricane. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in New Orleans, appropriate action by government officials and responsible decisions by citizens are not always, if ever, the norm.







We all assume risks every day. There are upwards of 35,000 traffic fatalities in the United States every year, but I’m willing to wager than most if not all of you reading this right now drive regularly. People living in New Orleans have known for years that a devastating hurricane could strike the city and that it was possible for the city to be flooded yet not only did they assume the risk of living there, but many also continued to assume that risk even as Katrina approached.







The city of Seattle sits in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, an active volcano. Much like its neighbor to the south, Mt. Saint Helens, one day it will erupt. It might be 10 years, 100 years or 1000 years, but eventually that day will come. The potential devastation from an eruption is enormous, but as is the case with hurricanes, an eruption of Mt. Rainier is unlikely to be a surprise and the residents of the Puget Sound region assume that risk. If the worst were to happen, there would be great loss of property, but hopefully the loss of life would be minimized through diligent disaster planning.







Seismologists have predicted that some day, sooner or later, a massive earthquake (the “big one”) will strike California. Again, when that day will come is anyone’s guess. Unlike hurricanes along the coast or volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, a California earthquake would likely not come with a warning and the loss of life could number in the hundreds of thousands but the odds-makers say that it won’t happen anytime soon, so millions of people are willing to take that chance.







Governments cannot protect everyone from everything that may happen and it would, in the big picture, be irresponsible of government to try. There are better ways to spend (or not spend) billions of dollars than to try to protect New Orleans from a category five hurricane, Seattle from a volcanic eruption, or California from earthquakes.







We have seen that even if government has a plan, such as the evacuation plan for the city of New Orleans that was largely ignored, the best-laid plans won’t protect everyone from disaster. It is ultimately up to each individual to choose the level of risk to assume. In the end, people are largely responsible for their own well being and as we’ve seen, to misjudge the risks or to ignore the danger when it stares us in the face can be fatal.

Senin, 05 September 2005

HOG ON ICE says

Look at the failures on the local level.



1. Locals chose not to pay for an adequate flood control system. It was well within their means, and they had THREE HUNDRED YEARS to get it done. When complaining about the President's evil refusal to foot the whole bill, and they tell us how much more money was needed, they themselves quote a figure of about sixty million dollars. Don't you dare tell me an entire state couldn't come up with sixty million dollars. They were too cheap. They preferred to risk death. Now the bill will be in the tens of billions of dollars, and thousands of people are dead. By the way, who believes that flood control improvements funded during the Bush administration would have been finished by the time Katrina arrived? Nobody except those whose careers depend on believing it.



2. After inviting disaster by refusing to pay for flood control projects, local officials failed to respond quickly enough to the threat of storm damage. Here in Florida (and everywhere else), we respond to the approach of hurricanes by notifying FEMA, setting up shelters, and issuing evacuation orders WELL in advance of landfall. The mayor of New Orleans and other local officials dragged their feet. They didn’t even open the Superdome to evacuees until noon on the day before the hurricane, and at first, they limited access to people with special needs. And the governor, who must request federal aid before Washington can come in and provide it, sat on her hands while the waters rose. Florida’s Democrat governor did the same thing after Andrew, and then he whined about FEMA’s slow response. A bureaucrat’s prime directive is “Cover your ass at all costs, and if you can blame your enemies in the process, so much the better.”



3. Local citizens refused to evacuate, ensuring that they and their children and pets would die. We’re not supposed to talk about this, because it’s “blaming the victims.” Here’s a newsflash. When a person is a victim because of his own irresponsibility, you’re SUPPOSED to blame him. Watch cable news for an hour, and you’ll see the same story over and over. A New Orleans resident refuses to leave a flooded house, days after the storm. In the driveway are one or two cars this person could have used to flee the storm. Rescuers have to argue and cajole to get the “victim” into the boat. And sometimes they still refuse to leave. This is AFTER the storm, mind you. There is no food, no clean water, no electricity, and no police protection, and these people still won’t leave. Don’t even think of telling me they behaved better when the storm was still in the Gulf.



4. The New Orleans police have disappeared. Their chief had the gall to blame the National Guard for taking two whole days to show up, and then for amusing themselves during down time by playing cards. Meanwhile, his own officers are too busy shoplifting to do their jobs. According to the National Guard, the New Orleans police department has disintegrated. I guess their French heritage is taking over. But somehow, the disorder is the Guard’s fault. Can’t you see what’s happening here? The chief’s underlings proved to be cowardly and selfish, and they abandoned their posts, and in order to avoid responsibility, he’s launching a preemptive PR strike on the very people who are now doing his job for him. It’s CYA, pure and simple.



5. Evacuation holdouts are shooting at the police and the Guard and contractors and everyone else they can draw a bead on. Call me crazy, but I think this discourages and slows down rescue efforts. Here in Miami, after Andrew, people shot looters, not the police (who stayed on the job, unlike the New Orleans cops).



Sure, the federal response could have been better. Wake up; that’s what happens when you shift your own responsibilities to the federal government. Has anyone in New Orleans or the MSM been awake during the last two hundred years? Has the federal government EVER responded to a national disaster in less than two days? The federal government is like an ocean liner. It doesn’t start and stop quickly. Local government, when it works properly, is much more responsive. You don’t call the FBI when you see a burglar in your yard. You call the local police. Similarly, you don’t sit on your ass and wait for Washington to build your floodwalls and evacuate your citizens. New Orleans had buses. It had trains and planes. There were places it could have set up temporary shelters. And the disaster should never have occurred in the first place; locals should have looked after their own flood control needs. But like I said, Uncle Sam is society’s diaper, so none of that matters.



The whole Ting'

Blog llist thsi

http://beerbrains.blogspot.com/2005/09/barfleflickle.html

ESR | September 5, 2005 | America as a Third World nation

America as a Third World nation



By Alan Caruba

web posted September 5, 2005



The haunting images of New Orleans were those of a Third

World nation unable to cope with a natural disaster. The over-

riding question in the first days following the hurricane was "What

is the government doing?"



Americans have been conditioned to look to the federal

government as the answer to all their needs. The federal

government has steadily taken over our education and health

care systems through vast programs that, in the former case, has

ruined what was once one of the best in the world and, in the

latter case, through Medicare and Medicaid, exercises control

over the way the system works and who it benefits. Social

Security has, for too many, replaced planning and saving for

one's old age.



When a portion of everything you earn is removed from your

paycheck in order to pay for someone else's senior years, how

can you be expected to put aside money you don't have to save,

invest or spend as you wish? We have been required to turn

personal responsibility for our lives over to "the government." It

sounds good on paper, but the reality is that Social Security is

going broke and the interest level in the current administration's

effort to "fix" the system is so low the President's efforts have

been met with a significant measure of indifference.



The "government's" response to the disaster that befell huge

swaths of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama suggests that

there are, indeed, limits to what it can do. It is, after all,

composed of bureaucrats who must obey the thousands of

regulations and laws affecting their agencies and that have been

imposed on our national economy, affecting all the rest of us.



One of the first actions "the government" took was the

Environmental Protection Agency announcement that it was

suspending the idiotic mandates requiring countless different

formulations of gasoline to insure that a sufficient supply was

available nationwide. In one state after another, these mandates

insure that different formulations are required in different areas of

the same state.



Mandating the use of ethanol in order to insure a bounty of riches

for corn producers while ignoring the need to drill for oil in

Alaska or ignoring enormous off-short reserves and shale oil

exposes the politics that over-rode the need for greater energy

self-sufficiency and independence from a Middle East that largely

hates America.



The looting and criminality that occurred in New Orleans also

revealed the failure of not just local people, but much of the

black community in America to take advantage of the

protections and opportunities afforded by the Civil Rights and

Voting Rights legislation enacted since the 1960s. As

Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, pointed out on

September 2nd, "New Orleans is two cities, not one, according

to census data---a relatively affluent, small, achingly lovely city

that's mostly white, and a poor, big, unlovely city that's almost all

black. Overall, the city is two-thirds African American; it ranks

as the ninth-poorest big city in the nation. It is also one of the

most violent cities in the country, now making a bid to reclaim

the ‘murder capitol' designation it held for many years."



This is repeated over and over again in many of the nation's

cities, many of whom are also falling prey to the influx of millions

of illegal aliens flooding across our southern border, bringing with

them crime and disease, replacing native-born American

workers for those jobs they might have had were it not for the

low wages the illegals will accept.



The laws fashioned to protect and help blacks have brought

about some improvements. A black middle class has emerged,

but the evidence demonstrates that too many black Americans

opted to remain mired in their own failure to take advantage of

educational opportunities, continued to produce the one-parent

families in which men were largely absent, and remained

responsible for much of the crime in the cities. In return, they

offered America a "gangsta rap" and "hip-hop" culture that

reflects attitudes immune to the values shared by the majority of

Americans. They were not marginalized. They marginalized

themselves.



The physical losses in the affected areas will be rebuilt.

Americans always rebuild after natural disasters, but the social

problems are likely to remain unless and until we begin to shut

our borders against what can only be called an invasion and until

black Americans fully integrate themselves by taking more

responsibility for their lives.



We all need to rely less on the "government", but it seems

unlikely at this point the government will allow that to occur.

Congress is too in love with the billions it can seize for countless

pork barrel projects "for the folks back home" and to insure

reelection. There are too many people dependent on the socialist

programs enacted after WWII. The mindless federal spending

has been reflected at the state level while, at the same time,

federal mandates have eroded state and local power.



We need to vastly reduce the vast matrix of economic

regulations that suck billions out of the economy while creating

obstacles to free market answers to our most pressing needs

and, as in the recent Supreme Court ruling, destroy private

property values with a ferocity matched only by natural disasters.



Life in America is going to get more expensive because "the

government" claimed it could take care of us from birth to death.

It can't. It never could.



Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs", posted

on the Internet website of The National Anxiety Center,

www.anxietycenter.com. © Alan Caruba, September 2005



Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com

Mister Snitch!: The Politics of evacuation (part one)

Mister Snitch!: The Politics of evacuation (part one): "So you think you know who screwed up, bigtime, in New Orleans?



Odds are, you don't. But you will, as these stories work their way up (down?) from the blogospehere to mainstream media."



Read about it:

Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog

Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog: "Monday, September 05, 2005"

Monday, September 05, 2005

Katrina Rescues: A Military Perspective



I'm posting a letter from Joe Roche, whose wife is doing helicopter rescue missions in hurricane-affected areas, "24/7, very tired, sometimes being shot at, facing intense heat and humidity, having spartan-to-bare sleeping conditions, with sickness and disease spreading."



Amy,



I want you to know that over the past days, our soldiers of the National Guard have quickly and readily made big sacrifices so they can get down to the Hurricane Katrina rescue mission. My wife, as you know, is with National Guard. I watched last week as they worked feverishly, being called in from their other jobs and away from their families, to get everything ready to go.



Tens of thousands of National Guard soldiers have mobilized all over the country like this. I know you have felt grief over the disaster and the issue some people have made of it. I want you to take heart and lift your spirits at what has happened with our military.



There is now a MASSIVE military response under way. It is moving very fast, in fact. So fast that it quickly and frequently overwhelmed the capacity to put it all in place and get it launched.



I understand the frustration, fear and sadness being felt, but it takes time to get such a thing going. Remember that it took many months for our military operations to get under way overseas when the decisions were made to do so. In fact, I think there was some controversy about that in both of the wars over Iraq, when it took from August to January to launch Operation Desert Storm, and even longer to get Operation Iraqi Freedom going. I well remember even having to assure people that we were going to respond after September 11th when some started worrying that weeks had passed and nothing had happened.



I believe that such comparisons actually will show that the military response to Hurricane Katrina's destruction is going at breath-taking fast speed.



Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, the commanding General of the Army National Guard, said that the thing to realize is that the rescuers who were there on the first day were also victims of the storm.



It takes time to organize the massive operation now under way. I watched my wife and her unit prepare to go, and I felt worried that they would become victims too if they didn't properly prepare. The vital thing the soldiers have to make sure of is that they are the solution to the problem, and not part of the problem. Therefore, what has happened is that a vast, truly amazing and powerfully inspiration-driven massive team of professionals has quickly and effectively set up a huge series of staging areas from which rescue operations can begin.



It is a fact that with the destruction of the storm, there were very few open and secure areas in which to set up huge military operations. Well, defying all the challenges, your National Guard soldiers have done that brilliantly!



Now we are seeing this massive military response making it's impact. Tens of thousands have been rescued, moving entire refugee populations hundreds of miles. I don't believe others ever have been able to do this, such as the Europeans in the Balkans. No, such massive population moves are normally the work of war and crime that last years. This time, bigger and faster than most in history, your National Guard has moved in, set up, and begun one of the largest rescue operations in history.



The thing that has affected me most, however, are the soldiers doing this. I have seen police officers, Vietnam Veterans, and other professionals from all sorts of jobs, dropping everything last week and getting airborne to get down there. And Amy, it is scary too.



My wife is my best friend and the best person I have ever met. Now she is doing helicopter rescue missions, 24/7, very tired, sometimes being shot at, facing intense heat and humidity, having spartan-to-bare sleeping conditions, with sickness and disease spreading. There are thousands of rescue operations to do, and there are dozens of air units and even more ground units working hard and sometimes bumping into each other. It is more dangerous than I think people realize.



Yet, amazingly and very inspiringly, I watched as these National Guard soldiers cancelled plans for college, jobs, their kids' plans for next week, basically everything that you can imagine, and instead jumped eagerly and with great determination to get ready and deploy to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.



Some of them are veterans, soldiers who have served for years in many of our wars and missions, civilian professionals who have jobs and lives and families, and all of them have set everything aside to go. Many are taking big financial hits, and their families have to make big adjustments. But you know what? They are all highly motivated and eager to get down there and do their jobs.



I know that for the victims of this storm, their suffering and tragedy is terrible and cannot be erased. I do hope we all realize, though, that the military is making a massively huge effort to rescue and help them that also involves National Guard soldiers making countless personal sacrifices.



We should have found inspiration from the determination of the people of New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to survive the long series of nightmares they have endured as a result of the hurricane. I also believe that we should now find inspiration in our great military, primarily the Army National Guard, for how they have jumped full steam ahead into this.



Be proud of your soldiers, keep your spirits and hopes high. There are some very sad and gruesome days and weeks ahead for our nation as we learn of the full scope of the disaster. Face it with the resolve, focus and determination that our military is showing us now, and we'll get through this to make a more safe future for such events and rebuild what has been lost.



Joe

Minggu, 04 September 2005

Cafe Hayek

Don Boudreaux



The American Red Cross -- an exemplary voluntary disaster-relief organization with almost 125 years of experience -- was told by the National Guard and local authorities not to go to Katrina-devastated New Orleans.">Cafe Hayek: "Government Tells the Red Cross to Stay Out of New Orleans

Don Boudreaux



The American Red Cross -- an exemplary voluntary disaster-relief organization with almost 125 years of experience -- was told by the National Guard and local authorities not to go to Katrina-devastated New Orleans."

Cafe Hayek

Cafe Hayek: "The American Red Cross -- an exemplary voluntary disaster-relief organization with almost 125 years of experience -- was told by the National Guard and local authorities not to go to Katrina-devastated New Orleans."

Kudlow's Money Politic$

add

Jumat, 02 September 2005

HOG ON ICE: The New Orleans Puzzle

HOG ON ICE: The New Orleans Puzzle: "A commenter complains that the New Orleans disaster shows that the Homeland Security people haven't done enough to prepare for terrorist attacks, which would have results similar to those caused by Hurricane Katrina.



I don't know enough about Katrina yet to form a firm opinion, but what I know so far leads me to disagree."

Kamis, 01 September 2005

Tangled Up In Blue

Tangled Up In Blue: "'I awoke last night to the sound of thunder

How far off I sat and wondered

Started humming a song from 1962

Ain'�t it funny how the night moves

When you just don'�t seem to have as much to lose

Strange how the night moves

With autumn closing in'"

Nashville Truth: Liberals Also Called For Assassination

Nashville Truth: Liberals Also Called For Assassination: "George Stephanopolous, former Clintonite and current ABC News analyst, on ABC'S 'This Week,' Nov. 9: 'This is probably one of those rare cases where assassination is the more moral course...we should kill him.'



Sam Donaldson, co-host of 'This Week,' Nov. 9: We should kill Saddam 'under cover of law.... We can do business with his successor.'"