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Friday, December 29. 2006Wow!Scott Ott of Scrappleface gives up serious, sincere reportage for a moment, and tries his hand at satire. This is a must-read. (h/t, RWNews) It's about Katrina, the Federal government, and life. Maybe we will post the whole thing. Probably should.... OK, we will, since it comes so close to being a Maggie's Manifesto, here is a quote to encourage all to read the whole thing:
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Katrina is just a pretty name for winds, flooding and engineeering conceit, colored history, everyday vice and Dem political foible.
Ditto. A symbol of human vanity. An underwater city is a dumb idea, anyway.
Pretty savage quote, from Scrappleface. Wish to hell it wasn't so damn, damn true.
Thomas Sowell has written extensively of the upward arc that black Americans were making for themselves, prior to the Great Society.
But came the social workers into the communities, and soon enough the communities weren't "communities" any more. Soon evolved the "inner city underclass", and the well-known social pathologies which, should the main victims ever connect to the proper source, would finish the left wing of the Democratic party. Down with the overseers of the Liberal Plantation! Buddy:
It is true. Blacks were making progress as entrepreneurs and small business people in their own communities, albeit segregated ones, early in the 20th century. There is no reason why they could not be doing the same today, if not for the deadening hand of the Federal government. Also, with the next Katrina, or the next - possibly multiple - terrorist attacks, it is important to realize that UPS, just to take one example, loads, tracks, and unloads worldwide over twice as many vehicles in one day (some 90,000) as the Feds handled during all of Katrina. It is in the private sector - and within DOD - that the talent resides. There is in my mind no question that the country is sufficiently robust to withstand such attacks and recover. But the question in the next series of domestic attacks will be - how long will it take for the Feds to choke and some new system to be cobbled together from the Army and the private sector to take its place? How many months? For the individual, the motto should be the same as the Coast Guard's - Semper Paratus. I offer this piece I wrote yesterday on another site. It's final thrust was aimed at the Mid East but the relevance to this discussion I believe is also covered in the run up.
"The internet blogs have provided a huge positive with regard to trafficing in news,entertainment, etc. It has and I am sure will continue to have a very big impact. One easily seen lacuna in it's ubitquitious nature is what Walter Cronkite called "distortion by compression". Even within blogs there is a compelling drive to publish first and let hoi polloi filter. Here the challenge is that the filtering sometimes doesn't get done or is done poorly. Here is an example. There is a daily blizzard of positions,ideas,and criticisms on the ME. An attempt to "clarify" history as it is being made with no knowledge of what is really transpiring other than what is allowed to be known to the man on the street. Extrapolating from that conclusions are reached and positions solidified. There are no known intelligence facts known to the pundits, and the pundits are loathe to wait for any historical perspective. I mean this is the 21st century, who needs historical perspective in an age of instant communication? One still more often than not hears the mantra that WMD's were an excuse, did not exist, and therefore a giant hoax was perpetrated on the world and in particular the US citizenry. I have written previously, with heavy documentation about how Gr. Brit. France,Germany,Russian,China and other countries intelligence agencies said the were WMD's in Iraq. George Tenet told Congress and the President it was a "slam dunk" that they were there. Now the chorus of previously gung ho pundits and bloggers are wobbly at best and damn near hypothermic about what a mistake it all was. No historical perspective needed by them, just be the first one on the net with the most damning personal, ill informed critique of how it was all bad and never should have been handled the way it was. That's dime novel writing, not cogent,knowlegeable, historically based writing worthy of print or praise. But then that is one of the hallmarks of the Baby Bum Generation." One could easily replace Katrina with the ME seems to me. Skook's fouled-up Fed and Habu's Baby Bum Unthinkers--are we finally beginning to identify the Seven Heads on that 666 Beast?
Sarah Jane Moore, whose .38 Special shot at President Ford barely missed due to a bystander's arm-grab, interviewed recently (she refers to Fromme's 17 day earlier .45 caliber dry click--gun was loaded but she'd forgotten to chamber a round--from two feet away at same target):
"Am I sorry I tried?" she said. "Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished little except to throw away the rest of my life…. And, no, I'm not sorry I tried, because at the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger." In a jailhouse interview, Moore said she had not been inspired by Fromme, whom she called "insane" and described as "seeking all that attention." Katrinas, both of 'em. Quotes are from the LATimes link inside this Althouse post:
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2006/12/lynette-alice-squeaky-fromme-and-sara.html#comments Dunno why that article struck me so--I guess it's the realization, standing there dropping elephant dung on top of my head tho I'm trying to think I'm relaxing in the living room, that the nutty times are the normal times. Everything, we compare back to "Leave it to Beaver" times, the "normal" times, from which we are sadly, temporarily, estranged. But, those "normal" times lasted about 5 years, fifty years ago. And the 'deviation from normal' that so upsets us, fills in all the rest of time, before and after. This is the power of yearning--it distorts time, the very fabric of space. "No, the threat of this system is that it strips a man of what makes him a man, and turns him away from his inner resources, or the inclination to partner with neighbors to solve problems. It humiliates him, blinds him and ultimately cripples him."
Sorry. It takes two to tango. The 'man' doesn't have to reach out and take. If he's worried about his manhood, his individualism, he will find it in him to rise on his own. The Nobel prize winner in India proved this with his 'micro' financing. Trust a man to do what he is capable of doing, and most will rise up. Those who 'choose' to be dependent are most definitely our problem. But what is a government to do? Let them starve? Every capitalist democracy has to pay the underclass in order to stabilize the democracy. I don't disagree with the article, but don't put the weight on the government in totality. |