Please Help Our Southern Neighbors Recover From Their Apocalypse

Biblical. Sized. Help. Is. Needed.

Please. Give. Generously!

I just made a good-sized contribution to the Salvation Army -- and expect to make more contributions as the scope of this clarifies.

Glenn has a blogburst round-up of charitable donation options. I have some personal/political reservations about the Red Cross, but frankly this is such an awesome situation that it would be a mistake not to see that their substantial distribution network isn't fully utilized. If that doesn't give you some perspective on how bad I think this is then nothing will.

In fact, that's probably my key insight: We probably need to keep spreading donations among the major relief organizations so that no one of them burns out -- because they're going to be afterburners-on for MONTHS if not YEARS.

In fact, this situation is so sobering that I have trouble imagining rebuilding New Orleans like it was. And certainly not without an ENORMOUSLY expensive 3-ringed dyke system like the Netherlands finally invested in after their catastrophe in the 1950s...

And this just rips your heart out while making you want to scream. Frankly, it's probably not appropriate to tear Nagin a new one even though every fiber of my body wants to. Odds are that he and his administration as well as the police and fire leaders are probably now virtually sleepwalking -- and in the knowledge that they have personally lost everything as well.

All the usual puerile bile is now targetting W for how this is all his fault because of Iraq (funny how Clinton wasn't on national TV mobilizing the country to put a 3-ring dyke around the Big Easy -- or did I just happen to miss it?)

But in retrospect, we'll probably have to have some sort of FEMA team in future that can literally replace or spell a local administration trying to cope with this scale of disaster.

Oh, and by the way, this looks to be a dry run for what a small nuke will do to one of our major cities -- only not quite as severe. After all, there's still SOME chance that the residents may be able to move back within the next few years.

Did I forget to mention that we'll be really lucky if it's only one nuke and one city?

APOCALYPTIC UPDATE: "Or does it haunt the landscape like a ghost?" (HT Michael)

HEARTENING UPDATE: From Michelle.