The masterful blog essayist Bill Whittle has a new piece up that “talks about what we are taught, and by whom, and how this can make a city live or die in disasters man [made] and natural.”

Make it lunch-time reading.

***

Update:

Via Instapundit, Steve Sailer weighs in with a related column on race and Katrina. Sailer has written many brilliant articles, and I admire his willingness to challenge politically correct shibboleths. But I strongly disagree with his assertion that African-Americans tend to* posess “poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and “need stricter moral guidance from society.” Sailer links to this article**, but I see nothing there to support his assertion.

You want to talk about judgment and moral guidance? Go read about Jabbar Gibson and Ronald Miller and the Rev. Bennie Newton for exemplars of how we all should act in times of crises. Moral cowardice and weakness is not predetermined by race. Case in point: The infamous moral cowards in Kitty Genovese’s mostly white neighborhood.

John Podhoretz weighs in here.

*9/6 at 10am EDT: Steve Sailer responds here. He notes, correctly, that he wrote that “African-Americans tend to possess…” I shouldn’t have omitted “tend to” and have now added those words above.

**9/6 at 10:05am EDT: Where it says “this article” I initially linked to Sailer’s New Orleans piece when I intended to link to his July 15, 2000, column on IQ. The link has now been fixed. I will respond to the substance of Sailer’s argument later today.

9/7 at 7:00 am EDT: Sorry for failing to update yesterday. I still intend to re-visit this topic when I have some time, but not now.