Times-Picayune Bugging Out
To Register for Homes for Katrina Victims
Please register at http://katrinahomes.billhennessy.com
The information you provide will be used exclusively for coordinating this effort, should your kind services be required. In the meantime, we are praying that no one needs our help.
Sincerely,
Bill Hennessy
With Lake Pontchartrain continuing to pour into New Orleans, the city’s major daily newspaper has ordered an evacuation of its building and its reporters.
As of 9:40 AM:
Water continues to rise around our building, as it is throughout the region. We want to evaucate our employees and families while we are still able to safely leave our building.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon hopes to stop the growing levee burst with sandbags, according to Drudge. Officials plan to drop 3,000 lbs. sandbags from helicopters into the Lake to stem the breech.
Historic French Quarter, which survived the hurricane proper in relatively good shape, is now flooding according to witnesses. With news media abandoning the city, though, official reports are hard to come by.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Open Homes for Katrina Victims
To Register for Homes for Katrina Victims
Please register at http://katrinahomes.billhennessy.com
The information you provide will be used exclusively for coordinating this effort, should your kind services be required. In the meantime, we are praying that no one needs our help.
Sincerely,
Bill Hennessy
UPDATE: I am experience technical difficulties with my database server. (Of all nights.) In the meantime, Nancy has graciously enjoined us to coordinate any kind of efforts on her wiki. Please do what you can there. In the meantime, will notify everyone who’s contacted me via e-mail or comments when I have the site up. Not sure when that will be.
(Original post)
As I have begun recieving gracious offers of open homes for Katrina Victims, I will launch the web site tonight. In the meantime, I have contact FEMA, the American Red Cross, and the Salvation Army to find out how we can coordinate with them to get displaced families and individuals into safe, dry, private homes until their lives can be restored.
Here’s the text of my letter:
Sir or Ma’am,
In response to a proposal on my blog (http://www.hennessysview.com), I am receiving many offers from people, like myself, willing to open our homes to long-term displaced persons who lose their homes and livelihoods as a result of the hurricane in the Gulf states.
I am going to set up a web site on which others who would like to open their homes to victims may securely post their contact information. Please let me know how we can work with you. Though many of us are several hours’ drives from the Gulf Coast (I live in St. Louis, MO, others are in Florida, southern Missouri, Arkansas, and various locations), if a person or a family faces complete loss, they may need to temporarily relocate outside of the disaster area. Consider us distant relatives, even to these strangers.
I will also contact the Salvation Army and the American Red Cross regarding our offers. You may contact me at [phone] or by replying to this e-mail address.
Cordially,
Bill Hennessy
The people who are huddled in the SuperDome as their material lives are torn to shreds are, of course, the poorest of the poor among the richest in history. They need our help. As in so many disasters, this is an opportunity for long-term good. As Fulton Sheen taught, the rich need the poor more than the poor need the rich. The poor need the rich for material goods, but the rich need the poor for salvation.
Thanks and God bless those have already responded. Thanks to InstaPundit and to Michelle Malkin for drawing attention to this effort.
May Almighty God bless them and keep them close to his fatherly heart, and may He send forth the Holy Spirit to give them strength and to open our hearts to renewal through loving charity.
God Bless the People of New Orleans
I know that everyone with a heart is watching prayerfully as the Katrina prepares to make New Orleans a piece of Americana history. If the worst of the predictions comes true, there could be several hundred thousand refugees.
To Register for Homes for Katrina Victims
Please register at http://katrinahomes.billhennessy.com
The information you provide will be used exclusively for coordinating this effort, should your kind services be required. In the meantime, we are praying that no one needs our help.
Sincerely,
Bill Hennessy
Perhaps we fortunate souls in the rest of the country should begin a ring of volunteers willing to put up a displaced person or family until they can get back on their feet. I’m sure the government will help relocate folks. While St. Louis isn’t exactly Louisianna’s backyard, our door is open to such a family in need.
If anyone else in reasonable proximity to New Orleans would like to extend such an offer, please e-mail me at mail@billhennessy.com. I can fire up a website to coordinate these private shelters in 24 hours, but only if there’s interest. Click here for lastest on Open Homes
Why the gloom? Because New Orleans may be under water for . . . months. Here’s a cross-sectional view of the city
(click for larger view)
As you can see, the city is below water level. A 20-foot storm surge on Lake Pontchartrain could (with Dan Ratheresque emphasis) — COULD — put much of the city under 12-20 feet of water. The pumps which discharge each gallon of rain water from New Orleans run on electricity with diesel backup. They don’t work if flooded, and they don’t have enough diesel fuel to return the lake to its banks. Add in the trillion dollar price tags, and try to find a re-insurance company willing to insure a building. Thus, New Orleans may cease to be a major city. The displacement of persons might be permanent, causing a northward migration not seens since the end of the Civil War.
At 9:00 CDT, our family will say a Rosary for the people in New Orleans. Please join us.
UPDATES:
The Rosary has been said. The Glorious Mysteries, of course. God’s will be done, and may the Holy Spirit give the people of the Gulf Coast the strength, faith, and courage to rise above nature’s fury. May their faith guide them to, one day, stand before the Lord Who tells them, “Well done!”
Tonight, I’m linking to some blogs that I’ve never seen before, as well as familiar ones. I wanted to catch the words and thoughts of prayers of those in the path of the storm or with loved ones therein.
Never Misunderestimated headlines with the perfect line from CCR
WhenYouSpeak has family from New Orleans visiting a place of safety.
Andy Penner says goodbye New Orleans
Echoing my lovely and perceptive wife, ProsAndCons speaks of the Wrath of God
South Florida Bible Talk, knocked off the air due to Katrina, prays for New Orleans
Raven’s Rant is a sad, good read from the path of the storm
Michelle Malkin has a running Katrina entry, and she points us to a very sobering report on Storm Digest blog that questions the integrity of the SuperDome, where more than 30,000 of New Orleans’ poorest, neediest, and most unfortunate are gathered to ride it out. I thought the same thing myself. But what choice do those poor people have.
And, just to prove all is still right with the world, the liberals have already blamed the hurricane on George W. Bush.
UPDATE: FoxNews reports that the roof of the SuperDome is leaking.
Firefox: Worse than Opera
Anyone who has anything nice to say about Mozilla’s Firefox browser has such because of emotional bigotry, not objective analysis.
I have been running Firefox on both Linux (SuSE’s latest) and Windows (XP Pro SP2) since beta days. With each release and each patch, I expect the uncountable list of problems to abate. Instead, the list grows only longer.
On Windows, Firefox has plenty of plug-ins, though not enough. It freezes constantly. It is unable to interprest RSS or RSS2 from most sites where other browsers, including the crappy Opera, have no trouble.
On Linux, Firefox is even worse. It is hideously slow and has very few plug-ins. Those it does support–RealPlayer, for example–do not work as expected.
By comparison, the generic Mozilla browser is wonderful. All of its plug-ins work flawlessly without hours of administrative tweaking. It is fast, clean, and handles javascript errors better than any browser I have tested.
For usability, though, IE is still champion. (In case you’re wondering, until I can afford dual P4 3.0 ghz processors, I will not install Netscape, perhaps the worst commercially produced software ever written.) IE is fast, it has intelligent and configurable caching, and allows developers to do the things users demand. Its security problems are exclusively the result of its popularity.
Firefox 1.0 had numerous, serious security holes. I can only assume that the rest of the application is so awful as to prevent its popularity from making it a target for hackers. Unless a 2.0 version comes that actually works, Firefox’s developers need not worry about that scenario.
Update: Here’s Firefox lover who has started a blog about problems with Firefox.
Roman Catholic Frat
In the continuing story of the resurgence of Roman Catholicism, Newsweek online reports on an orthodox Catholic frat at Franciscan University: Knights of the Holy Queen.
Many on the Catholic right have long argued the church’s decline began with Pope Paul’s misguided reform of the Holy Mass in 1968. During the 1970s, Catholic dioceses and parishes in the Western world purged their sanctuaries of Christ, the Crucifix, the Blessed Mother, God, prayer, reverence, and holiness, replacing these “relics” with worship of the profane, the creature, the created. The Church put the created before the Creator, man above God, our passions above His Passion. In the process, she swelled the pews of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant sects which preached a bit more fire and brimstone, even if their theology was sophomoric.
Now, thanks in part to John Paul the Great’s so-called conservatism, a new generation of young Catholics has taken up the crozier of the Christian warrior. These young folks can see the disconnect between the Church’s true beliefs, as expressed in the Catechism, and the lives of modern Catholics, especially the Baby Boomers in America.
As Newsweek’s story puts it:
But now, as the generation raised under the more orthodox Pope John Paul II comes of age, some young Catholics are searching for a more rigorous form of faith. They’re reviving old rituals and hewing to strict doctrine. Franciscan University, with 2,300 students in the old steel town of Steubenville, Ohio, is a haven for these faithful. This is one of the few colleges in America where a “Hail Mary” isn’t just a last-minute football play.
The Newsweek story goes on to cast doubt on the numbers and longevity of the Stuebenville types, hinting that the Church at-large isn’t ready for their kind of reconversion to the Way of the Cross. I disagree.
In the past year, more than a dozen churches in some of the most liberal dioceses in America have restored Christ on the Cross and the tabernacle to the center of the sanctuary. (In the 70s, it became fashionable to replace the Crucifix with a dove and move the tabernacle out of view.) This trend continues. Morevover, the empty refrigerator churches, such as the one near my house, are beginning to fill up with iconography reflective of Christian desire to be reminded of those who led exemplary lives, and of the One who died that we might live.
Now, if only we could inspire a reconversion of our Baby Boomer priests.
Michael Moore (no, not that one) at LiveJournal has a great apologetics examination of Newsweek’s many errors.
Of course, Jay Anderson scooped me as usual.
-
Recent Readers
Misc
Polls
Loading ...