Riggsveda is horrified by the commentary at Jane Galt:Friday, September 02, 2005Do These People Live On My Planet? From the weblog of the objectivistly-named Jane Galt, here is the worst of American reaction to the New Orleans disaster in a nutshell. Below find samplings of statements that reveal a seemingly bottomless capacity for churlish, selfish, callous, racist cruelty by self-congratulatory blog barnacles who coolly watch the NOLA tragedy...

From John DiIulio's famous memo: [the] remarkably slapdash character of the Office of Homeland Security, with the nine months of arguing that no department was needed, with the sudden, politically timed reversal in June, and with the fact that not even that issue, the most significant reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense, has received more than talking-points-caliber deliberation. This was, in...

Having been dumped by Uzbekistan, is the United States looking to Turkmenistan for a rebound? Curzon and Nathan Hamm interpret recent events differently.Curzon says: "There are precious few totalitarian regimes left in Eurasia, but Turkmenistan is one of them. Eurasianet says the US may be exploring a base deal with Turkmenistan. I really, really hope not."So do I. Is the US really so stupid as to squander whatever gains it got by getting tough...

AFP: Merkel attacks defensive Schroeder in head-to-head German debateReuters (UK): Schroeder edges Merkel on TV, but no knock-out blowPostwar German reconstruction was clearly a success: the Germans still favor defense over offense.

Nice post at the Glittering Eye. A small snippet:The disaster that has occurred in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is enormously larger and will, undoubtedly, be significantly more costly than any of the disasters above. The size of the area affected is hundreds of square miles. We don’t yet know how many people were killed.There are several key factors that were present in all of the disasters reviewed above:Civil order was maintained...

Dan's absolutely right about progressivism, which among other things led us to the situation that we had for much of the twentieth century in which the role of the government involved providing services for citizens in need. The nature of the social contract was altered by such initiatives as Social Security, income taxes, and the Federal Reserve system: government became a way to coordinate resources so as to roughly equalize social...

I haven't posted much, in part because I've been at APSA. But I also have trouble bringing myself to write anything more about Katrina. We lived in New York on September 11th, 2001; for all the horror of that day, the slow unfolding of the disaster in New Orleans, the gross incompetence of our government and our elected officials, and the bestial situation people faced in the refugee pens (what else are we supposed to call the Superdome,...

If you want to read a followup dispatch from New Orleans by Dr. Greg Henderson, I've found one and posted in on my blog. It's a holiday weekend, so I don't know how many people will be reading or searching. However, "Greg Henderson pathologist" has become a very popular search term for those finding my space in blogtopia. Filed as: Greg Henderson

This is the first year I've actually enjoyed APSA. The quality of the international-relations panels I attended was higher than I'm used to. The conference organizers did a great job of making sure that related panels were close together. I didn't have to do a lot of hopping between distant hotels.We had the usual SNAFUs. A number of panels with similar target audiences ran at the same time, making for hard choices about what to attend. The...

This is a message I received in email from a third party. It was written in New Orleans by Dr. Greg Henderson, a pathologist who recently moved from Wilmington:Aug. 31, 2005I am writing this note on Tuesday at 2 PM. I wanted to update all of you as to the situation here. I don't know how much information you are getting but I am certain it is more than we are getting. Be advised that almost everything I am telling you is from direct observation...

From Leviathan:From this equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end (which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only) endeavour to destroy or subdue one another. And from hence it comes to pass that where an invader hath no more to fear...

Today's New York Times reports the results of a current Pew Forum poll:The poll found that 42 percent of respondents held strict creationist views, agreeing that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time." In contrast, 48 percent said they believed that humans had evolved over time. But of those, 18 percent said that evolution was "guided by a supreme being," and 26 percent said that evolution occurred...