If you were a loving God, you would be vengeful toward whatever threatened or mocked your creation.

If you were a software engineer, as God, you'd design in error handling, but you'd make it very tolerant, so that errors failed gracefully until they reached states of being incompatible with the runtime, and their processes needed to be terminated.

Imagine a loving God, looking down on New Orleans, which awash in oil money and the dollars of credulous tourists, nourished North America's second largest population of con men, prostitutes, mooches, scam artists, snake oil salespeople, lobbyists, etc. You'd realize these people were incompatible with a vision of a better humankind.

And then your vengeance would be swift.

Since millions of well-meaning people used "helping the Katrina refugees" to distract them from their own meaningless and bored lives, some of the many criminals and perverts in New Orleans have survived -- and one city has taken more of them than others.

This has caused some people to wonder: Will God sodomize Houston, like He did New Orleans?

Of course, if God has a sense of aesthetics -- and we must assume He does -- he has other reasons to smite Houston. A giant expanse of concrete, Houston is entirely flat and populated with "American drag," as William S. Burroughs calls it: a repeating wallpaper pattern of suburb, apartments, big box stores, adult video stores, convenience stores and finally, raging ghettos, connected by a tangle of ugly freeways. God the Artist might smite Houston for the sake of beauty.

Hurricane Ike awaits offshore for his chance at fulfilling God's plan and wasting Houston.

You can track Hurricane Ike as he tries to fulfill God's will and destroy Houston Texas at the NOAA NHC page.

4:00 PM:

Galveston, which rests on a barrier island off the same shore as Houston, is going to get sodomized. The storm surge, combined with a high tide, will inundate it just as the high winds batter it and scatter debris through the walls of its remaining buildings. Since people come to Galveston either to keep track of loved ones at the nearby prison, or to make an easy livin' selling garbage to tourists, this is no pity. In fact, it is beauty in motion.

The hurricane is currently headed directly for Houston. Right now, its higher winds are cycling at 73 mph, but here are the chances it'll be faster when it smashes into land:

Category 1 (74-95): 12%
Category 2 (96-110): 56%
Category 3 (111-1310): 29%

We are boarding windows, and I have a "little friend" in case of rioting, but we've never had that here. Galveston might have it; like NOLA, it has a high percentage of criminals, although they're more poor whites and Hispanics than African-Americans at this point. Freeways are locked up in parts with people fleeing the south of the city.

I don't hear the media cry of pity as we heard with Katrina. Maybe finally everyone is sick of people who are so useless they trash relief centers, commit robberies and rapes, and can't stop dealing and taking drugs while they're waiting for others to save them from themselves.

8:15 PM:

It's strange how much like a garrison this feels. Our house, like others on our block, is boarded at the windows and other weak locations. People were removing old sheds and pieces of fence to nail down. Home Depot and Lowes ran out of lumber four hours ago and generators ten hours ago. The population is getting ready for war with nature, and we're defenders.

The disturbing silence of a pause before the main event swept over the land. Storm is making landfall in a couple of hours, with 110 mph as its highest sustained wind speed. I discovered yesterday that all news about hurricanes uses NOAA data, but they add bloviation and sensationalism to make you feel like you're getting more. Skip the blowhards and go directly to the source, where you get the figures and not the emotion.

I have shared with several people the idea that God may be wreaking havoc on us because we sheltered demonic fugitives from Katrina. Not many have disagreed, since it is now common knowledge that the Katrina People(tm) raised our murder rate by over a quarter. Considering they were 100,000 in a city of eight million, they work hard and fast. If we could only get them to apply that energy toward blogging, I am sure the progressive vision of America would be fulfilled.

People here are a little more stubborn than others when it comes to storms, mainly because we've all survived a handful or so of big ones. If you look at the news they're seeing in NYC, it looks like Houston is doomed. To us, it's another variation of the big storm we had as kids or a decade ago. We dig in to fight.

8:38 PM:

Power dies after a sudden gust, and stays dead for 11 days. God smirks as Houston enjoys a Satanic delight of some cooler weather, then plunges into despairing heat. Tempers rise as utility company trucks drive past neighborhoods on their way to the inner city or devastated Galveston, neither of which represent any help for the people who keep the city running. People drive around aimlessly through non-working traffic lights, cops arrest everyone after dark, giant piles of dead trees rot or burn, generators throb into the night, and misery generally triumphs over common sense and decency.

A few isolated pockets of people hunker down, read by candlelight, eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drink bottled water, and survive just fine. They are interviewed by zero news crews, zero journalists, zero politicians and zero police officers. Their goal is simple: to survive by avoiding any more contact with society than is necessary. I consider them future kings.

Houston's punishment is swift and decisive. God's hand has pummelled this city into submission for its cowardly acceptance of those He deemed Satanic and stupid, but his real victory is the aftermath, in which demons are pressed into the service of Good by doing Evil to the Evil, sort of like a double negative. Local churches, payday loans, pawn shops, porn stores, and drug dealers are still in business living off the blood of their hosts.