Re(2): 'Tribes', www.ejectejecteject.com, Bill Whittle
Re(3): 'Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State', www.realclearpolitics.com, Robert Tracinski
Re(4): 'The Big Easy Rocked, but didn't roll', Telegraph, Mark Steyn
Re(5): 'Bill Whittle and the Gotha Program', Belmont Club, TC Wretchard
Re(6): 'City to Offer Free Trips to Las Vegas for Officers', NYT, Joeseph B. Treaster
UPDATES - Brief synopsis of articles
HT: www.RealClearPolitics.com
HT: www.PoliPundit.com
HT: www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/weblog.php
HT: www.DrudgeReport.com
HT: www.fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/
Michael Barone ‘Rebuilding New Orleans’: (HT www.RealClearPolitics.com)
But New Orleans' heritages of upper-class complaisance and political corruption -- the result of the city's French tradition -- work against a more broadly based commercial and economic revival. Without changes in these attitudes, historic New Orleans may revive, but the city will become little more than a theme park, like Venice, and not the great commercial beehive it once was.Mr. Barone earlier links events together (me thinks subconsciously):
And some parts of that fabric are not worth restoring. The city of New Orleans has had a horrifyingly high crime rate in recent years, and after disaster hit, the reports of looting -- not just of food and necessities, but of luxury items -- have been rampant. Shots have been fired at rescue teams and police officers; supplies of food and medicines on their way to hospitals have been hijacked; gangs of criminals have stolen boats from survivors. Flooding has produced an urban riot like those of the 1960s or Los Angeles in 1992.I think the two are linked tighter than Mr. Barone does. Our republic always balances freedom and security.
When, long term, one balances security and freedom like Pataki/Giuliani you have the social structure and mores to survive devastation.
Conversely, when one balances those choices in the vein of a Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, and Louisiana than the polity will not rebuild. These are not center left, sky blue polities. These are the moonbat confederation.
It took a decade to move a moonbat NYC to the NYC that survived 9/11...
New Orleans is dead and will not be rebuilt…
They did not change with the times...
Now the hard thought:
Soft Americans are now being relocated to hard America.
UPDATE (2005/09/05 0940):
Bill Whittle - Tribes (HT: www.PoliPundit.com)
The Pink Tribe is all about feeling good: feeling good about yourself! Sexually, emotionally, artistically – nothing is off limits, nothing is forbidden, convention is fossilized insanity and everybody gets to do their own thing without regard to consequences, reality, or natural law. We all have our own reality – one small personal reality is called “science,” say – and we Make Our Own Luck and we Visualize Good Things and There Are No Coincidences and Everything Happens for a Reason and You Can Be Whatever You Want to Be and we all have Special Psychic Powers and if something Bad should happen it’s because Someone Bad Made It Happen. A Spell, perhaps.
The Pink Tribe motto, in fact, is the ultimate Zen Koan, the sound of one hand clapping: EVERYBODY IS SPECIAL.
Then, in the other corner, there is the Grey Tribe – the grey of reinforced concrete. This is a Tribe where emotion is repressed because Emotion Clouds Judgment. This is the world of Quadratic Equations and Stress Risers and Loads Torsional, Compressive and Tensile, a place where Reality Can Ruin Your Best Day, the place where Murphy mercilessly picks off the Weak and the Incompetent, where the Speed Limit is 186,282.36 mph, where every bridge has a Failure Load and levees come in 50 year, 100 year and 1000 Year Flood Flavors.
The Grey Tribe motto is, near as I can tell, THINGS BREAK SOMETIMES AND PLEASE DON’T LET IT BE MY BRIDGE.
UPDATE (2005/09/05 1010)
Robert Tracinski - Effects of the Welfare State (HT: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/)
UPDATE (20050905 1136)The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
... [ed: read the link, never accept these elipses]
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
A day after two police suicides and the abrupt resignations or desertions of up to 200 police officers, defiant city officials on Sunday began offering five-day vacations - and even trips to Las Vegas - to the police, firefighters and city emergency workers and their families.Maybe something can get done with these first responders on vacation. Remember those radio adds for a temp agency...
The idea of paid vacations was raised by both Mayor C. Ray Nagin and senior police officials who said that their forces were exhausted and traumatized and that the arrival of the National Guard had made way for the officers to be relieved.
His words were seconded by the police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, in a
separate interview. "When you go through something this devastating and traumatic," Mr. Compass said, "you've got to do something dramatic to jump-start
the healing process."
The officials were planning to send 1,500 workers out in two shifts for five days each. They are sending them to Las Vegas because of the availability of hotel rooms and to Atlanta because many of them had relatives there.
Remember those fire and police personnel vacationing the week ater 9/11.
Sounds like they all need stars and smiley faces on their school papers.
Hope these 'First Responders' get some new shoes. Apparently, theirs got wet.
I think Joeseph Trester is in the sane ballpark: 'Law Offiers Overwhelmed, Are Quiting the Force'. It really sounds like he is a mole inside Prada - trying to get the word out the best he can. Remember, he has to get his articles past the NYT 'editors'. Read between the lines.
UPDATE (20050905 2056)
Mark Steyn - 'The Big Easy Rocked, but didn't roll' (HT: www.LittleGreenFootballs.com)
My mistake was to think that the citizenry of the Big Easy would rise to the great rallying cry of Todd Beamer: "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll!" Instead, the spirit of the week was summed up by a gentleman called Mike Franklin, taking time out of his hectic schedule of looting to speak to the Associated Press: "People who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society."
Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honour of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the "oppressed" guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each arm.
Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.
UPDATE (20050906 0930)
T.C. Wretchard - 'Bill Whittle and the Gotha Program'
"From each according to his abilities. To each according to his need." Which is another way of saying that you get to the same place no matter how you start out. One of the unintended consequences of encouraging dependency is that it annihilates the life history of the dependent. For him there is no memory and no exit.
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