Got to have babies

17 comments

• And if the river “decided” to change course into New Orleans? I’m no expert on the Mississippi River, but what if that is what it did? Do we allow it to overrun parts of New Orleans?

  Domenico asks a very good, very hard question. This is something that has been on my mind these last days as the news has come out about NO.

  A cold, hard place within me keeps saying, “If people are going to be foolish enough to build below sea level, then don’t come running to me when the sea decides to take its “property” back. You’re welcome to share my space in the high ground, but don’t expect me to subsidize your foolish endeavor to go back.”

  I say let the water have what it wants. It would probably be cheaper to relocate these folks then to drain and rebuild 80% of New Orleans.

• No Daniel, the new course would change about 100 miles N of NO and flow W of its current course coming out about 60mi W of NO.  I am trying to remember the film that the Army made about the flood that almost changed the river’s course back when I took my Engineering Geology class.  I think that I will look over on the ACE web site to see if I can give you a better source FYI.

  As to living bellow water level, do you think the low-lying parts of the Netherlands should be abandoned?  There are some big storms in the North Sea after all…

• Thomas Sowell did an excellent piece awhile back and he said that taxpayers pay and repay for people to rebuild in unsafe areas.  If people had to pay insurance rates commensuarte with the risks, they couldn’t afford to make unwise decisions.

  Years ago people had to live near rivers and the oceans to transport goods to market.  With autos, trucks, trains, we do not need to rebuild cities in totally unsafe areas.

  If everyone who agrees would write to the president and their congressmen, maybe we can forstall more waste of taxpayer money.

• I keep trying to talk Jeanne into number six.  She keeps lecturing me on self control.

• My husband and I have been having this discussion as well.  I say that to rebuild is utterly foolish.  He says that may be so, but if those in charge do not offer the people of N. O. a hope that they will be able to return to the town they call home there will be riots to deal with.  He believes that this is the only hope they have left and it would be inhumane to take it away from them at this particular time.

• The New Orleans question is a tough one ;m saying that maybe the government should be telling them that the rest of us won’t be subsidizing their desire to live in a high risk zone. If they want to live there, maybe the rest of us won’t be giving them billions of dollars to bail them out time and again.

• “I told her it’s our duty as a Catholic couple.”

  Now there’s a line I never thought of using, Dom, you sly dog! Seriously, though, we expected to see at least two or three little Bettinelli’s to be running around loose within a few years anyway.

  My mom and dad had four of us. We all fit into a little ranch starter home with three bedrooms and one bath. It pays off in the present, as Dad has MS, and doesn’t have to go to a nursing home because Mom and my siblings insist on taking care of him themselves.

  As the Gaels say: “Bairns are a blessin.’”

• I’ll be delivering our 8th on Sept 7th. The first few are tough, when they are all challenging toddlers but once you get past that it’s all gravy in terms of entertainment value alone! Personally I’m hoping for an even dozen- right now the kids are 15, 14, 12, 10, 7, 3, 20 months (one is adopted and sadly we lost 2). I’m thinking in terms of dynasty!

• Good point, Mary. If there is one way that a couple can absolutely change the world: it is to have children and plenty of them. It deals a major blow against the culture of death and it is a sure irritant to modernists, liberals, athiests, socialists and their CEO – the Evil One. Besides…kids are so much fun!

• Mary:

  You should think about a traveling softball team while you’re at it. Good luck with number 8.

• The great thing about fertile Catholic families is that those who subscribe to the culture of death don’t have kids. Over time, they de-populate themselves.

  Mary, is there such a thing as aa pro-life/Catholic adoptive parent organization? In a few years, we may consider adopting especially as we are getting a late start on a family (me turning 37 in a couple months).

• “The great thing about fertile Catholic families is that those who subscribe to the culture of death don different questions really. Along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, perhaps it would be best phrased: “Should they not build within a half-mile of the ocean?” Sure, we love the ocean and we pay top dollar to be able to see it from our living rooms and our beach cottages and our hotel rooms. But is it wise, as a society, to allow it when such devastation is always one hurricane away?

  New Orleans is a different case. It’s a city that should not be where it is. (See this National Geographic article I referenced in the previous entry.) And it’s presence where it is, with its attendant levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River from turning it back into the swamp it once was, only makes its situation worse. By preventing the normal ebb-and-flow of flood and drain that replenishes the Delta sediment eroding into the Gulf of Mexico, the barrier wetlands that could protect New Orleans are fading away.

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  There are parts of the Netherlands that have lived below sea level for hundreds of years, and though there have been major floods there, the people always come back and rebuild because it is their home.  What needs to chance is not for NO to be abandoned but for the Mississippi to be allowed to chance course and flow to the sea to the west if NO where it would have gone back in the ‘60s if the Army C of E hadn’t kept it in its present course.  With rail and pipelines and etc. there is no reason that NO can’t stay where it is in greater safety if the river was somewhere else.

• Just checked, you are correct. State Farm adminsters a Federal Program.  What lunacy!

  With all respect to those hurt by the storm, it makes no sense for the Federal Government to inflate land prices in New Orleans or elsewhere with their political manipulations.

  JBP

• “By law, all flood insurance is sold by the federal government. Private companies are not allowed to sell it because in order to avoid insolvency the price of the policies would be so high that only the rich could afford it. Thus taxpayers subsidize low-cost flood insurance so people can live in flood plains.”

  Dom, not true, read the WSJ today, please.

  And yes a profit seeking company could just build this in, but there is some called state regulation of insurance prices and rates. THEY won’t let you charge what is needed. Same thing happened on Long island after the big storms there some time back, now rates are allowed to be what they should be, and there is no problem with availability. Similar thing in FL, actually in the last few years.

• I’m not sure what in the WSJ you’re referring to, but nothing I saw on opinionjournal.com contradicted what I said. And their extolling of ever higher levees and dams ignores that building those levees and dams extracts a toll elsewhere on the Mississippi and the Delta. All that water, and its terrible power, must go somwhere.

  By some estimates, the construction of dams and levees are so restricting the natural flow of silt and water that the the Delta is disappearing at the rate of one acre every 33 minutes, 25 square miles per year (not including what hurricanes like Katrina do.)

  Bigger and better levees and dams are only a short-term solution because they create bigger problems down the road. Will we someday see islands of below-sea-level cities and towns sitting in the midst of the Gulf of Mexico and surrounded by levees and dams?

  As for the insurance, yes, in states where it’s de-regulated they charge what it costs and that would be too much for most of the people you’re seeing plucked off rooftops in New Orleans. The insurance is available, but not everyone can afford it. And when this happens again, it’s taxpayer-funded disaster relief that will pay to rebuild.

• Flood insurance is available from the private market in most states, for high valued residences and for commerical polices. Often sold as a “wrap” around any governmental coverage. Wouldn’t be surprised if the socialists of Mass don’t allow this.

  Yesterdays WSJ had a large article on the dead tree version about the companies doing this. Section B1.

• If you think N.O. will be rebuilt in our lifetimes, just look at NYC. Five years this month, two towers and three smaller buildings were destroyed. This, in the most expensive business district in the world, in a city many call the capital of the world.

  Five years later all we have is a hole in the ground.

  The scale of destruction in N.O. is at least 10,000 times greater in area alone and you can magnify the problems with biological and chemical pollution, not to mention the expected result of buildings that have been saturated with water for tens of days.

  I think I saw a lady die last week and that lady was 350 years old.

  Sad.