Halloween milestones

Mark Moseley calls attention to the fact that today is the 6th anniversary of the creation of Sandy Rosenthal's Levees.org watchdog group. And I suppose he's right to do so. For all of of the self-aggrandizing bullshit emanating from Levees.org over the years, I can't say that they've necessarily been on wrong side of things big picture wise.

It's nothing novel to observe that we live in a world where embarrassing self-importance is a pre-requisite to "success" in anything even when it comes to fighting the losing although largely righteous battle Levess.org has. But by being the enormous egotistical crybabies they've been they have, in fact, managed to at least delay the inevitable calcification of the myth that New Orleans was flooded by a "natural disaster" rather through the negligence and dishonesty of Corps of Engineers' flood protection "system in name only."

Of course in the long run, the same mistakes are going to be repeated by the same people regardless. But thanks to Sandy, fewer of us can claim to have been totally ignorant of just how that happened. So, yeah, congratulations.

Meanwhile, October 31, 2005 was also the first day that New Orleans offered library services to the public after Katrina. I remember it as though it were something I blogged about only yesterday. One advantage of having done that is that I, unlike apparently anyone else in the city, can actually remember this having happened at all. I guess Sandy Rosenthal wasn't the only self-important loudmouth stupidly trying to combat the inevitable collective amnesia these past 6 years after all.