Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays to all! We've just returned from our first trip to China. It was fairly amazing. You can see some pictures from the trip on Flickr, here.

Re-entering the blogosphere

Well, it's been awhile, hasn't it? Lots has happened since my last post. I'm re-opening this blog, with no attempt to catch up with what I've missed. Just random thoughts, on random subjects...

Ah, the shoe finally drops

Via DUB, I see that the Religious Wrong has already put the proper theological interpretation to the Hurricane Katrina debacle. Way to go, guys, what took you so long?

UPDATE (10:26 PM) The Christian Coalition of America's website has no links to the American Red Cross, or any other relief organization for that matter. However, under "Today's News", you can link to an Agape Press story in which one Rev. Bill Shanks discerns God's mercy in action over the past week:

“New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now," Shanks says. "God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again."

Surely Rev. Shanks speaks from the eye of the storm, so to speak, from downtown N.O. where he's busy spreading God's love as we speak by helping the victims of the storm and its aftermath. Right? Um, well, actually...according to the article, "Shanks heeded warnings to evacuate New Orleans, and is currently staying with friends in the Jackson, Mississippi, area".

A good round-up of the predictable hate-fueled nuttiness, including comparisons of satellite images of Katrina to a fetus, appears on the (non-hateful, non-nutty) Christian Alliance For Progress' blog.

Brooks Gets It Right

This is why I can't help but respect David Brooks, with whom I disagree most of the time: from tonight's News Hour on PBS:

I think it is a huge reaction we are about to see. I mean, first of all, they violated the social fabric, which is in the moments of crisis you take care of the poor first. That didn't happen; it's like leaving wounded on the battlefield.

[...]

This is -- first of all it is a national humiliation to see bodies floating in a river for five days in a major American city. But second, you have to remember, this was really a de-legitimization of institutions.

Our institutions completely failed us and it is not as if it is the first in the past three years -- this follows Abu Ghraib, the failure of planning in Iraq, the intelligence failures, the corporate scandals, the media scandals.

We have had over the past four or five years a whole series of scandals that soured the public mood. You've seen a rise in feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.

And I think this is the biggest one and the bursting one, and I must say personally it is the one that really says hey, it feels like the 70s now where you really have a loss of faith in institutions. Let's get out of this mess. And I really think this is so important as a cultural moment, like the blackouts of 1977, just people are sick of it.

[...]

...when 9/11 happened Giuliani was right there and just as a public presence, forceful -- no public presence like that now. So you have had a surge of strength, people felt good about the country even though we had been hit on 9/11.

Now we've been hit again in a different way; people feel lousy; people feel ashamed and part of that is because of the public presentation. In part that is because of the failure of Bush to understand immediately the shame people felt.

Sitting up there on the airplane and looking out the window was terrible. And the three days of doing nothing, really, on Bush was terrible. And even today, I found myself, as you know, I support his politics quite often.

Shame, anger, sadness, fear - I never knew what it felt like to experience all these emotions at once - until now.

A National Disgrace

It seems clear now that the natural disaster that struck New Orleans Monday is being compounded and magnified by the criminal incompentence of the federal government's response. The anarchy now gripping the city is largely a result of the government's failure to respond to the disaster. What started out as perhaps the worst natural calamity in our history is quickly becoming a man-made disaster of even greater proportions. And I'm not talking about the looters, many of whom are actually starving, desperate survivors who have seen no evidence that any help is on the way. While N.O. mayor Ray Nagin issues a "desperate SOS" for help, FEMA director Michael Brown blames the "people who did not heed the advance warnings". Never mind that most of these people are the poorest of the poor, unable to leave because they don't have cars, and no public means of evacuation were available to them. Yet when it comes to his own agency's performance, he offers this rosy assessment: "Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans -- virtually a city that has been destroyed -- that things are going relatively well". Give that man a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Meanwhile, President Bush remarked Thursday that "I don't think anybody anticipated the the breach of the levees", when in fact the whole disaster scenario now unfolding was predicted with uncanny accuracy by Scientific American in 2001, the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2002, and by many others (sorry I don't have links for all of these facts, but they are well documented). This from the same guy who said it was impossible to anticipate the 9/11 attacks, while a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S" sat on his desk. Efforts to reinforce and maintain N.O.'s system of levees were severely scaled back over the last couple of years so that resources could be diverted to Bush's ill-conceived and incompetently managed war in Iraq. Part of the reason the response has been so slow is that the National Guard units that would normally be the first on the scene are halfway around the world.

Gas prices are at $6/gallon in some parts of the country. Here in south-central Virginia, they are reaching $3/gallon. And I fear that we're only beginning to see the long-term effects. It's now four days after Katrina struck, and the government has yet to deliver more than a fraction of the aid required, or indeed, even to establish basic law and order. People may soon begin to wonder about the much-vaunted might of the U.S., when it can't even be brought to bear on the desperate situation in N.O. Will this shock, coming on the heels of renewed doubts about the war and Bush's leadership in general, precipitate a more general crisis in confidence? Will the stock market go into a serious nosedive? We all hope not of course. But now, no one can say that the questions are merely academic.

You can donate to the relief effort here, among other places.

Snark O' The Day

"As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."---H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

Katrina Blogs

Some blogs on the Katrina disaster:

• DeadlyKatrina.com
• Hurricaid
  
• Kaye's Hurricane Katrina Blog
• WDSU's Katrina Blog
• Tom Planchet (from WWL)
• The Truth Laid Bear has aggregated blogs on Katrina.

Most of the major blogs are also covering Katrina developments heavily, e.g. dKos, TPM Cafe, Instapundit, Michelle Malkin. Instapundit's list of charities and bloggers is here. Donate to the American Red Cross here.

Well I Heard The News...

...there's good bloggin' tonight. For your consideration, some of my recent favorites from the grassroots:

• Out of Respect - as in "none left", and none left standing...
• Political Parrhesia - boldly saying what needs to be said. High quality site.
  
• Collective Sigh - southern culture may be on the skids, but where there's a sigh, there's hope...
• Argus - from Gilgamesh. Like me, he started blogging in August of this year. Does that mean our Astroblogical signs are the same?
• DataJunkie - just what is says, but weird.

Katrina sure blew. Donate to the American Red Cross here.

Blue Skies...

Blue Skies...
"Mission Accomplished" - George W. Bush on the Iraq war, May 2, 2003

...Smilin' at Me...
"The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." - Vice President Dick Cheney on the Iraq insurgency, June 20, 2005

...Nothin' but Blue Skies...
"I don’t use the phrase guerrilla war is because there isn’t one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world." - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the Iraq insurgency, June 30, 2003

...Do I see...
"What you have...is a new consensus between the universal principles of democracy and human rights and Iraqi traditions in Islam. And in that, it is an agreement, a compact between the various communities and it sets a new paradigm for this part of the world, a reconciliation, a consensus between the various forces and tendencies that are at work here in Iraq." - U.S. Ambassodor To Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad on the Iraq Constitution, Meet the Press, August 29, 2005

A World of Illusion

Here it comes, another screed deconstructing the lies, damned lies, and damndest lies from the Radical Wrong on the Iraq war, global warming, Social Security privatization, evolution, and (as my wife often says) everything else...

...on second thought, just check out this page (via BoingBoing), the coolest collection of visual illusions I've seen on the internets.

Real screeds on the way, though...