Sep 3, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
Amid the self-doubt and anti-Americanism paralyzing the nation after 9/11, neoconservative intellectuals appeared self-confident and pressed for military action. Since then they have become architects of United States foreign policy. They support the Bush administration's campaign to plant "freedom" in the Middle East. To secure our "national interest," they argue, America must assert its unrivaled military power throughout the world. Despite their tough-sounding policies, however, neoconservatives in fact reject the moral need to pursue only America's self-interest, and instead urge us to sacrifice ourselves in order to bring "democracy" to the world. While U.S. troops are dying in the campaign to "liberate" Iraq, ominous threats to our security are left to fester: Iran, the arch-sponsor of Islamic terrorism, is chasing nuclear weapons with undiminished vigor. And the grisly terrorist bombings in London—like those in Madrid last year—portend further suicide attacks on United States soil.
Who are the neoconservatives, and where are they leading us? In this talk Dr. Brook critiques neoconservative foreign policy, exposes the real meaning of their vaunted patriotism, and argues that their policies will lead to failure in America's war against Islamist totalitarians.
On Monday, September 12, the Ayn Rand Institute Lecture Series 2005 Presents: Neoconservatives Vs. America: A Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy Since 9/11 By Yaron Brook. Event is free and open to the public. Details: Monday, September 12, 2005. Hyatt Regency Irvine 17900 Jamboree Road (at the 405 Freeway) Irvine, California. $6 for self-parking, $10 for valet. Bookstore opens: 6:30 PM Presentation: 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM Q & A: 8:30 PM to 9:30 PMSep 3, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
Penetrating analysis by Robert W. Tracinski (with some help from his wife Sherri) at TIA:
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong. The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
[...] What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
[...] What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them. ["An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State", TIA, Sept. 1 2005]
As Tracinski explains, one thing people with values do require is a government that protects their rights. Alas, "...in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency." Read the full article.Sep 2, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
From AFP: Looters worsen hurricane crisis in New Orleans.NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - Rescuers raced to reach stranded survivors of Hurricane Katrina as authorities battled to stop looters taking control of the stricken city of New Orleans. With authorities estimating hundreds of dead from Monday's storm -- and not even bothering to recover bodies from the floods, news that floodwater levels had stabilised offered scant relief as the enormous scale of the crisis became apparent. ...
US National Guard troops early Thursday girded for a mission to stem rising anarchy in looting-hit New Orleans, as authorities tried to stop the situation spiralling out of control. "The National Guard is quickly hoping to turn its mission to more law enforcement," Bob Mann, spokesman for Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, told reporters in a late night briefing.
Sep 2, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Peggy Noonan:
As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. [...] There seems to be some confusion in terms of terminology on TV. People with no food and water who are walking into supermarkets and taking food and water off the shelves are not criminal, they are sane. They are not looters, they are people who are attempting to survive; they are taking the basics of survival off shelves in stores where there isn't even anyone at the cash register. Looters are not looking to survive; they're looking to take advantage of the weakness of others. They are predators. They're taking not what they need but what they want. They are breaking into stores in New Orleans and elsewhere and stealing flat screen TVs and jewelry, guns and CD players. They are breaking into homes and taking what those who have fled trustingly left behind. In Biloxi, Miss., looters went from shop to shop. "People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they're Santa Claus," the owner of a Super 8 Motel told the London Times. On CNN, producer Kim Siegel reported in the middle of the afternoon from Canal Street in New Orleans that looters were taking "everything they can."
Comments CM writer Don Watkins III:
This story from the AP describes the scene.
With much of the city flooded by Hurricane Katrina, looters floated garbage cans filled with clothing and jewelry down the street in a dash to grab what they could. In some cases, looting on Tuesday took place in full view of police and National Guard troops. At a Walgreen's drug store in the French Quarter, people were running out with grocery baskets and coolers full of soft drinks, chips and diapers. When police finally showed up, a young boy stood in the door screaming, "86! 86!" - the radio code for police - and the crowd scattered. Denise Bollinger, a tourist from Philadelphia, stood outside and snapped pictures in amazement. "It's downtown Baghdad," the housewife said. "It's insane. I've wanted to come here for 10 years. I thought this was a sophisticated city. I guess not."
Around the corner on Canal Street, the main thoroughfare in the central business district, people sloshed headlong through hip-deep water as looters ripped open the steel gates on the front of several clothing and jewelry stores. One man, who had about 10 pairs of jeans draped over his left arm, was asked if he was salvaging things from his store. "No," the man shouted, "that's EVERYBODY'S store."
Looters filled industrial-sized garbage cans with clothing and jewelry and floated them down the street on bits of plywood and insulation as National Guard lumbered by. Mike Franklin stood on the trolley tracks and watched the spectacle unfold. "To be honest with you, people who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society," he said. A man walked down Canal Street with a pallet of food on his head. His wife, who refused to give her name, insisted they weren't stealing from the nearby Winn-Dixie supermarket. "It's about survival right now," she said as she held a plastic bag full of purloined items. "We got to feed our children. I've got eight grandchildren to feed."
What's interesting about this story is what it reveals about man's need for a moral sanction. Men will not act without some sense that what they're doing is right. I don't mean that men automatically act according to what they believe is moral -- I mean that even when they act against their knowledge of the good, they have to evade that knowledge and find a rationalization to justify it. (Notice, here, the usefulness of altruism in providing such rationalizations.) Man's psychological need for a moral sanction is so strong that even criminals can't escape it. The most vicious criminals, rapists and child molesters included, will go to fantastic lengths to convince themselves that their actions are in some sense noble.
[P]eople who are raiding stores for food and other necessities in order to survive during an emergency are doing nothing wrong. That's true, but even there, once life returns to normal, they have an obligation to repay the stores (or at least offer to). The same holds true for any emergency. It is proper to do what you have to do in order to survive, but if that involves violating someone's rights, then once you have weathered the emergency, you owe them the appropriate restitution.
Sep 2, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
President Bush, along with prominent Republican Senators, advocate the teaching of what they call "intelligent design" in public schools. "Intelligent design," in case you don't already know, is another term for creationism, the idea that a supernatural being created the world in 7 days.
The rationale for teaching what amounts to fundamentalist religion in taxpayer-funded public schools? According to Bush's friend, Senator Bill Frist, the point is to make our society more "pluralistic" and diverse.
Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean shot back that the Republican Party is anti-science. Dean, of course, is correct. But by what means are Republicans undermining the value of science? By the same means that Democrats do with their own agenda of secular political correctness: diversity for the sake of diversity.
I have predicted, for years now, that once the religious elements of the Republican Party took over--and clearly now they have--that the old rationalizations Democrats used for years to prop up their own anti-freedom policies would come back to haunt them. It's happening.
In a nutshell, conservative religious Republicans are using the welfare state originally created by liberal Democrats to spread the very ideas and policies liberal Democrats hate the most. This is bad news for freedom right now.Sep 2, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From TIA Daily:
The key question every time there is a natural disaster is not, "How did this happen?" Nature is dangerous, and it is always causing a disaster for someone, somewhere. Nor is the question, "Who is to blame?" There is always something more that could have been done to protect this or that place--at an expenditure of millions or billions, against a risk that could not be predicted. The only really important question after a disaster is: "How are we going to recover?" [...] The 1900 Storm is still the deadliest natural disaster in US history, with estimates of lives lost ranging between 8,000 to 12,000. It utterly destroyed and almost entirely flooded the island city of Galveston, Texas, and killed 6,000 of its inhabitants. This is the story of the rebuilding of Galveston after the storm.
"For while the story that began Sept. 8, 1900, is one about the fate of people at the hands of nature, it's also one about people altering their own fates by changing the face of nature.... Despite the unimaginable devastation and what must have been a hard realization that it could happen again, the city immediately began pulling itself out of the mud....Residents of Galveston quickly decided that they would rebuild, that the city would survive, and almost as soon, leaders began deciding how it would do so."
"The two civil engineering projects leaders decided to pursue--building a seawall and raising the island's elevation--stand today and are almost as great in their scope and effect as the storm itself.... The feat of raising an entire city began with three engineers hired by the city in 1901 to design a means of keeping the gulf in its place.... Along with building a seawall, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and HC Ripley recommended the city be raised 17 feet at the seawall and sloped downward at a pitch of one foot for every 1,500 feet to the bay.... The first task required to translate their vision into a working system was a means of getting more than 16 million cubic yards of sand--enough to fill more than a million dump trucks--to the island.
[...] McComb sums it up about as well as it can be: "Human technology made it possible - for the city of Galveston to remain on such unstable land. The city did not flourish. Houston - left the island city far behind. Galveston simply survived. "The public defenses against nature came at a high cost, but they succeeded for the most part. Its struggle for survival against nature through the application of technology represents the strongest tradition of Western civilization. Galveston's response to the great storm was its finest hour." [http://www.1900storm.com/rebuilding/]
From AFP: Looters worsen hurricane crisis in New Orleans.