Hurricane Harvey Notes

We made a donation today to relief for victims of Hurricane Harvey. We picked the Samaritan’s Purse organization, but there are various good choices out there such as the Red Cross. I hope many people will make donations.   I would suggest avoiding any organization controlled by Sylvester Turner or any other politicians or officials in Houston’s city government for the obvious reasons that hack  politicians usually cannot be trusted with money in amounts larger than thirty cents.

As was predictable some have tried to find political advantage in the disaster.  Devotees of the green religion in the media and politics have painted the hurricane as a dire result of global warming, ignoring the both the fact that hurricanes have occurred  in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico as long has people have kept records and the fact that there has been recent lull in hurricanes hitting the US.  One leftist cartoonist managed to ridicule Christians, Texans, libertarians, and conservatives all at once with a vulgar cartoon of a buffoonish Texan with a “secede” placard  being rescued from a flood and attributing his good fortune to divine providence when it is actually due to his omni-benevolent (except for Trump) federal government.  After being criticized the cartoonist waffled and claimed he was really only wanting to insult secessionists and not Texans in general. Well, one can wait and see if he produces something similar featuring a Calexit favoring leftist the next time that state has a natural disaster. That’s probably not the way to bet.

Of course conservatives made their political points as well. One on the radio, noting the large number of black people getting rescued, wondered why the Black Lives Matter crowd was nowhere to be seen in a situation where others of all races were pitching in to help their fellow Americans and suggested that actual black lives in themselves may not matter too much to BLM. It was a rude observation but not an unreasonable one.  

The dumbest comments came from some in the traditional media who, while not disputing  the substantive  things the administration is doing, fretted that Trump was not emotional and schmaltzy enough and did not deliver a sufficient amount of made-for-TV  “empathy”.  I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that most victims would prefer ten cents of actual assistance to fifty bucks worth of a politician's empathy any day. In their position, I certainly would.