11.05.12
Flabbergasting
Good news, lads, good news! Walmart is the best agency to respond to superstorms, calamitous climate brought on by global warming, and earthquakes, too, probably.
Recitation of William L. Shirer needed:
Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
There can be no reasoning with people who cannot accept any truth in the world when it goes against their ideologies.
From today’s WaTimes, Big government intervention not needed for natural disasters:
While it is true that FEMA under President George W. Bush responded to Katrina with, to borrow a term from Mr. Obama, a “suboptimal??? performance, the burden of first response should have been shouldered by Louisiana. The media obsessively scrutinized FEMA’s sclerotic emergency management, neglecting the unheralded heroes of that crisis: Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi …
Similarly, the unsung protagonist of the Hurricane Irene disaster was the private sector: Retailers like Walmart and Home Depot reapportioned their resources, at considerable cost to themselves, to funnel supplies to those who needed them most. Let’s lob a rhetorical question back at the editors of the Times: Does anybody really think the federal government would be more efficient in responding to a natural disaster than a local Walmart?
Walmart? One is rendered speechless.
How do you even pitch that idea to an opinion page unless every one of the editors and all the readers are insane?
“I’m going to argue that Walmart is better for dealing with catastrophic acts of God than government!” Wild applause.
“Emergency budgets,” the writer opines, “predictably expand like a rising yeast.” The “collective vigilance” of the people is needed to stop it.
The enemy, and why the result tomorrow is utterly critical.