Update 3: "The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages"

Update 3

I have added two new posts below these but these lead into them in that they deal with violence and the welfare /nanny / government will look after you state. This is what it has wrought. There used to be the poor, but what you will read here is different in intensity, and I think, much too pervasive to ignore. It is time to reconsider how much citizens want government in their lives; if government were not so busy gerrymandering the fine details, people might be able to find their own solutions. What is happening now in North America is not working. If I see another photo of a politician coddling / cuddling another little black child, I shall chunder. Get out of the photo, Hillary, Jesse, and all the rest. Stop trying to convince all of us you give a hoot about anything other than getting elected. What they advocate--throwing more money which perpetuates the same sorry situation--has NOT worked. It doesn't work there, nor in Canada.

Read some solutions suggested just below this post. NJC



Update 2:

Unbelievable! -- Man's Inhumanity to Man

More from the Times Picayune on Katrina's aftermath -- or on NOLA


Don't miss the incomparable Mark Steyn weighs in on Katrina -- via this excerpt from Steyn



Remember: Where to send help for Katrina victims

End of Update 2




Update 1:

This seemed apropos, concerning what I wrote below about educating children:

Stephen Spender: An elementary school classroom in a slum

(bumped up)

Also, I read yesterday that gun sales have risen in a shop in Mississippi (I think) because people fear the lawless group who might land there. Can we blame them? There is a reason I mentioned educating the children while their parents look for work and shelter; it is important to get to the children and to encourage--even force--them to learn and, despite themselves, to achieve success. It won't happen with Dalton McGuinty's plan to lower standards in Ontario so the statistics look better in that more will appear to pass. Children respond to high expectations, not lowering them. They know you're a fool when you do that; children see through that kind of thing.

Also, the link for Bill Whittle: Tribes A must read article. -- via Newsbeat1.

End of Update 1




An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State by Robert Tracinski, The Intellectual Activist, Sep 02, 2005, via Jack's Newswatch

[. . . . ] The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies [. . . . ]

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

[. . . . ] "The projects," [in the South Side of Chicago ] as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.] [There are links for "here" on the website. . . . ]

All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. [. . . . ]

Search: an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian [Nasty, brutish -- society's net snaps -- Every-man-for-himself ethos serves Americans poorly in times of crisis when people must pull together, DOUG SAUNDERS writes, Sept. 2, 05]

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