Friday rapid fire

• Assess your risks! - this is the first time I've said this, but there is a very good series over at the Daily Kos about disaster preparedness
• Pay for blog pay rates
• Texas Emergency Management blog - oddly enough I've heard of this guy before. Good stuff, he quotes Clausewitz with

  Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war...
  
  Friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper. The military machine, the army and all belonging to it, is in fact simple; and appears, on this account, easy to manage. But let us reflect that no part of it is in one piece, that it is composed entirely of individuals, each of which keeps up its own friction in all directions...
  
  This enormous friction, which is not concentrated, as in mechanics, at a few points, is therefore everywhere brought into contact with chance, and thus facts take place upon which it was impossible to calculate, their chief origin being chance, As an instance of one such chance, take the weather...

  
  Which is a quote well worthy of reflection.
  
• GreenPeace vs Kennedys - about time.
• An oldie but a goodie by one of my favorite lefties, David Corn, about the infrastructure of the modern anti-war movement.
• Federalism RIP - mandatory evacuations of pets? debated in the US Senate.
• In this rather ordinary column by Steven Moore in Opinion Journal, he does the math and finds that the current numbers currently slated to be spent on Katrina work out to $400,000 to every family displaced by Katrina.
  
• The AJC on school "Resegregation" - Education central planners are a plague upon our society, a quote

  Typically in New York, they'll go to a high school in which there are 4,000 kids, all black and Latino except for maybe 10 whites and 15 Asian kids, and they'll say, "This is a diverse population, with many minorities." Diverse has come to be a euphemism for segregated. And when they say many minorities, it's very deceptive to readers, as if these were Albanians. No, these are apartheid schools. But if you won't name reality, you can't change it.

  Why does anyone take these people seriously, let alone regard them as humanitarians? They want to micromanage society in ways that Mussolini only dreamed about, but they precede it with 5 fuzzy adjectives and they're heroes.
• Kaus has a nice post about the serious and long-term effects of the Davis-Bacon Act
• Chris Nolan has an incoherent post in favor of (as near as I can tell) inertia and the status quo. The criticism she replies to does seem to be very valid though.
  

Hehe. I do a spell check and the spell checker wants to replace Micromanage with "necromancer".