Quote of the Day.
From Ian Hamet:
Once, we were a nation of competence. We’ve become, I’m afraid, a nation of bureaucrats, middle-managers, and video game obsessives, with a few competent people holding it all together.
Month: September 2005
Awakenings III.
Even the New York Times seems to get it (though I’m sure they’ll forget very quickly):
Police and Owners Begin to Challenge Looters
The looters “are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin told The Associated Press, “hotels, hospitals, and we’re going to stop it right now.”
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said she was “furious” about the looting.
“What angers me the most is disasters tend to bring out the best in everybody, and that’s what we expected to see,” Ms. Blanco said at a news conference. “Instead, it brought out the worst.”
All sizes and types of stores, from Wal-Mart to the Rite Aid to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop, turned into bazaars of free merchandise.
Some frightened homeowners took security into their own hands.
John Carolan was sitting on his porch in the thick, humid darkness just before midnight Tuesday when three or four young men, one with a knife and another with a machete, stopped in front of his fence and pointed to the generator humming in the front yard, he said.
One said, “We want that generator,” he recalled.
“I fired a couple of rounds over their heads with a .357 Magnum,” Mr. Carolan recounted Wednesday. “They scattered.”
He smiled and added, “You’ve heard of law west of the Pecos. This is law west of Canal Street.”
Read the whole thing.
Awakenings II.
Via Mike at Feces Flinging Monkey from NOLA.com:
Managers at the Covenant Home nursing center were prepared to cope with power outages and supply shortages following Hurricane Katrina. They weren’t ready for looters.
The nursing home lost its bus after the driver surrendered it to carjackers. Groups of people then drove by the center, shouting to residents, “Get out!”
On Wednesday, 80 residents, most of them in wheelchairs, were evacuated to other nursing homes in the state.
“We had excellent plans. We had enough food for 10 days,” said Peggy Hoffman, the home’s executive director. “Now we’ll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot.”
Looters around New Orleans spent another day Wednesday threatening survivors and ransacking stores. Some were desperate for food — others just wanted beer and TVs.
Mike’s got some excellent advice, too.
Awakenings.
Reader Gunther sent me a link to this Scaggsville post. Money quotes:
No more excuses. No more waiting. Arming myself to protect my family, friends and possessions is now my new paramount concern.
—
I will not be an unarmed victim. This is the second time I’ve seen in 10 years (LA early 90’s) Americans, devoid of direct police authority, behaving in a manner unbefitting of members of a western civilization.
—
I will be ready if it happens to me. I will not loose(sic) everything I have because I relied on someone else for either protection or to respect our shared social contract. Armed response is an option I will have.
I will not go down whimpering.
I won’t beg for what’s mine.
Emphasis in original. And he’s got really good taste in armaments, too.
Welcome aboard.
Thanks for the tip, Gunther. Good post.
Please Give.
As I write this, I’m waiting for the Salvation Army’s secure server page to load so that I can donate toward disaster relief. I’m taking the slow loading as a good sign that their servers are overloaded by other people doing what I’m attempting. For reasons I won’t get into, I’m not a big fan of the Red Cross (as always, YMMV) so I want to give to organizations that I believe are trustworthy and will use the money well. The Salvation Army seems to me a good one, but by all means pick your own. They are myriad.
(Whoops! Server timed out. Gotta try again…)
If you’ve been near a radio or TV or on the web in the last couple of days, I know you know that tens of thousands of families are now homeless, jobless, and quite probably possess only that which they can physically carry. These aren’t people in some third-world country on the other side of the planet, these are our fellow citizens (who probably dug into their own pockets for the victims of the tsunami just a few months ago.) These people need our help. They’ve got next to nothing. Anything helps. There’s a couple hundred million of us. No need to give ’till it hurts.
Just give ’till it twinges a bit.
(Server timed out again. Guess I’ll try the old-fashioned way. I’ll use the telephone.)
UPDATE: Phone lines were overloaded, too. Finally got through via internet.
UPDATE, 9/1: James Lileks today:
FEMA’s list of charities is here. Note anything about what sort of organizations are doing the hard work? I keep looking for the Objectivist Mutual Aid Society, but it never pops up.
Of course not. The free market is supposed to take care of all that. The root of all evil is altruism, you know. See what I mean about James’s sense of humor?