Too bad most of the "hurricanes are examples of global warming" crowd haven't read this rather interesting article in Reason. Too much to expect, I guess. Anyhow, it dismisses the notion that big storms have anything to do with g.w. or G.W.

And this article was fascinating: British teachers using an online site have reached the conclusion that children's names are a fairly accurate indication of what kind of student they will be. You can bet the parents were outraged at this. The good names (studious and polite) are: Kate, Gregory, Sean, Charlotte, Jamie, Daniel, Lucy, Isobel, Ben, Sam, Harpreet, Imran, Asam, Alice and Joseph. The bad names (rude and disorderly) are: Bobbi-Jo, Kloe, K'tee, Kristopher, Jayne, Wayne, Charlie, Liam, Ryan.

Now, when asked to think up a list of the most violent countries in the developed world, few people come up with Scotland. But, according to the UN (admittedly a pretty bad source for anything), the Scots are commiting violent crimes at a high rate. By the way, England and Wales are #2.

The study, by the UN’s crime research institute, found that 3 per cent of Scots had been victims of assault compared with 1.2 per cent in America and just 0.1 per cent in Japan, 0.2 per cent in Italy and 0.8 per cent in Austria. In England and Wales the figure was 2.8 per cent.

And I thought gun control would solve all their problems...but apparently, in Scotland at least, there is a knife control problem. Maybe we should have registration and a waiting period on knives too.

A good looking blog, The Joy of Curmudgeonry, is on the scene. T'will be linked soon.

President James A. Garfield died on this date in 1881, the victim of assassination, leaving the White House for the inestimable Vermonter Chester Alan Arthur (right there behind Pierce, Buchanan, Fillmore, and, of course, Warren G. Harding in the heart of the Doc). Raise a glass to Garfield tonight.

And perhaps the proprietor of Zambone.com will explain to us all why he likes cows so much.

Interesting note here in the BBC, that KGB agents infiltrated the highest levels of the Indian Government in the 1970s -- "We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government," the book quotes former KGB general Oleg Kalugin as saying. "It seemed like the entire country was for sale."

Did everyone see this so-called debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway on C-Span the other night? Entertaining, but, as the WSJ makes clear, was more a red meat festival for the New York leftie crowd (or perhaps I should say soy burger festival) than an actual forum. Still, Hitch held his own admirably.

Apparently there is a move afoot to change the Red Cross emblem to something "less religious." One proposal is to change the cross to a red crystal.

Who the hell is Harold Evans over at the BBC? He claims (sounding a tad like Don Quixote, methinks) that Katrina will finally wipe the last vestiges of Social Darwinism from American shores. Read, for instance:

America has long been entranced by stories of fortunes made by hard work and perseverance without help from government. More tellingly many of them come true, truer in America than anywhere else. It is just that they are not the whole story. When people fail it leaves, exposed as a raw nerve, the question of moral duty in a civilized society.

So Social Darwinism has remained in the American psyche, sometimes submerged in the current, sometimes coming to the surface like a log in a fast-flowing river. [President Grover]Cleveland's sentiments might have popped up any time in the 1980s on Ronald Reagan's teleprompter. His remark that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" was an echo of Cleveland and many presidencies thereafter.

The log came clearly into view again when turbulence in the wake of 9/11 led to the re-election of George W Bush. His instinct for low taxes and small government has been neatly encapsulated by the evangelical tax cutter Grover Norquist: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

My judgment is that the log of Social Darwinism will disappear again under the toxic flood waters of New Orleans. The corpses floating face down in the muddy overflow from broken Mississippi levees are too shocking a sight for Americans of all classes and parties. They are too kindly a people. They will look once again for vigour and compassion in government, even at the price of higher taxes.

Apart from my amazement of his using Grover Cleveland, this is fighting paper tigers. As he readily admits, Americans are a most charitable and kindly people, itself deflating the central factor of Social Darwinism that people ought to be allowed to fail and fail hard, without much compassion and concern from the rest of us. We have the lovely mixture, which works well in a federal system, of distrust of centralized government (which has zero to do with compassion, by the way -- few things are more cold than a national bureaucracy filing paperwork and filling patronage) and individual and neighborhood acts of compassion.

We fear national incompetence -- well-established here and elsewhere over these many, many years of New Deals and Great Societies -- and embrace private initiative and the acts of those governments closest to us. When they fail, then and only then are the feds invited and welcome. Mr. Evans seeks to upend this, and make the feds welcome first on the basis of a vague, curious, and frightening "compassion in government." Governments can love us too much, and when they do they take more than give, talk more than listen, and grow at the expense of individuals and competing institutions. And soon that love is smothering, unwanted, and inescapable. This has absolutely nothing to do with Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and the host of Social Darwinists. It has everything to do with history and the track record of governments.

Yes, Bunnie, we are a bunch of derelicts, aren't we? August was vacation, but we should be back on the job now.

So.

I just love how the media is all over the President and the feds about the lateness of the hurricane response. It was late, but last I checked the first respondents in any natural disaster, and the first planners of evacuation routes, are the local and city governments, backed up by their state. 25% of New Orleans is below the poverty level, thousands do not have the automobiles to leave, and depend on local public transportation for evacuation. And yet still, Mayor Nagin screams and yells on the radio (but was quick to get some good photo ops with the President yesterday too) about late federal response. Hey, Mr. Mayor. Why are all these buses just sitting here in a flooded parking lot? Whose plans were foul? Who was unprepared?

And then they begin attacking the President about not fully funding levee reinforcement, ignoring former ACE Director Mike Parker (brilliant on CNN last night, I thought) who calmly explained that levee funding has been negligent since the LBJ Administration. And even if Bush had funded the levee reinforcements way back in 2001-2002, the current ACE Director even said it wouldn't have made much difference, and that the repairs wouldn't have been completed by now anyway.

I see that a consortium of nations is releasing 60 million barrels of oil to help the US fuel crunch, and that is admirable. I think it is also good economic policy. If gas prices remain at an average of over $3 for the rest of the year, consumers will cut back radically on spending (can you imagine what Christmas at the malls will be like? Would you like to own retail stocks right now?), and the economy will flatline. And when the US economy flatlines, it takes others around the world with it. Keeping US gas prices low is good global economics.

Here's a laugher: first the media and many pols says FEMA's late response is due in part to bureaucratic snafus, paperwork, red tape, and poor coordination. Fine, I don't disagree a bit. Then Mary Landrieu turns around and suggests creating a Cabinet-level position to coordinate disaster relief. Then another talking head on CNN yesterday said because unemployment in the Gulf States would be such a problem, perhaps we need to create a National Recovery Administration, a la the New Deal. Wait, I thought bureaucracy was the problem...

Another good one: Katrina's devastation was due to global warming. Excuse me, when hurricanes were devastating the Gulf Coast around the same time that St. Thomas Aquinas was writing the Summa, was that due to global warming too? Even the Weather Channel this week discounted the role of global warming in this disaster, and they are hardly a branch of the Republican National Committee.

David Frum has some particularly good links on the politics of Katrina over at NRO.

That should cover me for a day. O-man? Style Editor? Doc Potomac?