Iowa 2008 v. New Orleans 2005 - the un-Katrina flood response.

If the new media does its job, the Iowa floods will finally accomplish what 3 years and the truth could not accomplish - remove Hurricane Katrina from the talking points of the MSM/DNC.

Iowa 2008


In Iowa, 83 of the state's 99 counties have been declared disaster areas (according to NBC this morning). While no Iowa city is as large as New Orleans, the devastation is no less thorough throughout the entire state.

Consider the differences between the Iowa floods of 2008 and Katrina (2005):

• No one is trapped in a convention center or other public building.


• Evacuations were not delayed by incompetent local officials.


• Instead of looting, the citizens are volunteering to provide sandbags and protect their homes and cities.


• We see no corrupt politicians on TV crying about invented stories.


• We don't see corrupt politicians trying to blame the President.


• We don't yet see MSM/DNC outlets coaching guests to be angry (give that one some time - the crisis is still young).


• We have not seen parking lots full of buses that could have been used to evacuate the victims.


• We don't hear cries of racism or conspiracy theories.


• We have not yet seen celebrities making a big show of doing nothing.


• We have not yet seen Senators making a big show of doing nothing.


• We have not yet seen reporters making a big show of doing nothing.


• We have not seen local officials more concerned with the racial make-up of their city than solving the problem.

volunteers sandbagging the water instead of "journalists" sandbagging the viewers.


AP












The bottom line is, we are seeing more self-reliance and less complaining in Iowa. The citizens evacuated themselves instead of waiting for someone to rescue them. Iowa will not become a political football as did New Orleans. But it may show the contrast that will deflate the Katrina football and deprive the MSM/DNC of another weapon.

update - Sunday evening:

Lagniappe's Lair posted something very similar yesterday.

Arhooley comments thusly:

. . . . another underreported story was the San Diego wildfires of a few months back. With no assistance from the government (none asked and none provided), private citizens and businesses oversaw the best-organized refuge center in our Qualcomm Park that a person could imagine. Pets were taken care of, translation services provided, medical facilities set up, kids' entertainment provided, blankets and beds donated in plenty. With KOGO radio talking several times an hour with the refuge center's organizer, it generally took about 15 minutes from the time a need was announced on the air to the time a truck was pulling up outside the stadium. San Diegans volunteered all over the county to open their homes and staff assistance centers. Oh yes, and Barbara Boxer did fly in to Qualcomm to denounce George Bush for depriving San Diegans of National Guardsmen and firefighters for his war for oil. What would we have done without her?

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update - Joe Soucheray gets it.

Robert Fulton steamboat anniversary; Clermont

While the MSM/DNC spent the past few weeks memorializing the Katrina tragedy, another, more important, anniversary went almost unnoticed.

200 years ago last month [August 17, 1807], Robert Fulton began the maiden voyage of the Clermont up the Hudson river. This voyage has been recognized as the first successful test run of a steamship. [Others, including Fulton, had tested steamships before, but those tests were not entirely successful.] [The unreliable Wikipedia contends that the Clermont was not the actual name of Fulton's steamship, but that name stuck through the years.]

Clermont - H/T Gutenburg. org

On September 4, 1807, Fulton began the first commercial voyage of any steamship in history. Charging $7.00 per passenger, Fulton made a profit on that first journey. It was that voyage that proved that steamships could be a commercial success. Fulton's work revolutionized transportation. Before long, Fulton was operating ships on the Hudson as well as the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Fulton's activities produced a few ironies:

• The first Fulton steamship to sail the Mississippi was named the New Orleans.
• Fulton's attempts to build and operate steamships on the Ohio and Mississippi met with interference from floods and earthquakes - yet no one claimed that global warming was about to destroy the planet.
• Fulton also attempted to invent a submarine. He believed that the introduction of the submarine would make naval warfare difficult and would be an instrument of peace. Apparantly, Fulton did not get the MSM/DNC memo that disarmament is the only way to achieve peace. While Fulton's submarine was not successful and while later submarines did not have the effect of ending war, the submarine did vastly reduce the old method of fighting wars on the surface of the water.
• More progress in steam transportation had been made in the 20 years prior to Clermont's maiden voyage than in the multiple centuries since steam power was first discovered in the ancient world - thus demonstrating the value of the capitalist system.
  

Fulton's invention came only after much trial and error and many failures (Fulton's failures and those of his predecessors). Fulton learned the difficulty in conquering the water with man made steam power. But apparently today's political establishment has not learned the difficulty or foolishness of trying to construct and preserve an underwater city.