You'll Need to Remember This, Too, Okay?
This has been making the rounds, so I thought I would mention it, too.
Late Sunday morning, 28 August 2005, the Associated Press reported on a press conference given by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco in which Nagin called for a mandatory evacuation of the city.
The day before, Interstate 10 had been converted into a one-way northbound escape route for the entire city, but it was already a parking lot when the mayor and governor went before the cameras. My emphases:
Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.
"There doesn't seem to be any relief in sight," Blanco said.
Judging from that, I don't think President Bush shirked his duties in the precuationary stages. But he surely deserves to be criticized for his later inaction. I'm convinced of that already.
"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," Nagin said.
The storm surge most likely could topple the city's levee system, which protect it from surrounding waters of Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and marshes, the mayor said. The bowl-shaped city must pump water out during normal times, and the hurricane threatened pump power.
Previous hurricanes evacuations in New Orleans were always voluntary, because so many people don't have the means of getting out. Some are too poor and there is always a French Quarter full of tourists who get caught.
"This is a once in a lifetime event," the mayor said. "The city of New Orleans has never seen a hurricane of this magnitude hit it directly," the mayor said.
He told those who had to move to the Superdome to come with enough food for several days and with blankets. He said it will be a very uncomfortable place and encouraged everybody who could to get out.
Sounds like Nagin was right on about a number of things, but still didn't seem to make much of an effort to move people from the southeastern areas of the city northward on the buses available. Even if all they could do was dump people off in higher elevations, they should have at least made some effort.
And now I hear that there may be thousands of dead in the outlying areas of New Orleans. Is that even possible? Jesus.
Plain Semantics
My blogrolling compatriot Michael King made an observation a few days ago about how a pair of wire photographs of people wading through New Orleans had borne distinctly different caption language describing the very same actions ---as performed by whites and blacks.
The light-skinned chick found the food she had with her, but the black guy had looted his.
But, as Mike apparently suspected, context is everything.
Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations, confirmed today that [photographer Dave] Martin says he witnessed the people in his images looting a grocery store. "He saw the person go into the shop and take the goods," Stokes said, "and that's why he wrote 'looting' in the caption."
And the caption on the photo from the other wire service (Agence France-Presse) was written by Chris Graythen, who says:
I wrote the caption about the two people who 'found' the items. I believed in my opinion, that they did simply find them, and not 'looted' them in the definition of the word. The people were swimming in chest deep water, and there were other people in the water, both white and black. I looked for the best picture. there were a million items floating in the water - we were right near a grocery store that had 5+ feet of water in it. it had no doors. the water was moving, and the stuff was floating away. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow.
We've all been fools if we've been believing that racial tensions in America had somehow gone away. New Orleans has done much to reignite some embers I thought had gone cold.
No Justice, No Peace
Via the Power Line comes this damning essay from Nicole Gelinas at City Journal. She ends thusly:
Was this week’s looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans’ officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims—according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.
Armed marauders have now taken over every dry area of a deluged city. They’ve hampered rescue efforts: without wanton looting, there was at least a chance that individual police officers could have distributed food in stores to those who needed it most. And they’ve likely hampered rebuilding efforts down the road: they’ve smashed much of intact Uptown and the French Quarter, which will surely a pyschological barrier for those who knew that the storm didn’t destroy their homes and their livelihoods—fellow citizens did.
Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco lost whatever fragile authority they ever had over New Orleans early Monday, as the waters still rose. The federal government was unacceptably slow at assessing a rapidly deteriorating situation. Now, no civil authorities can re-assert order in New Orleans. The city must be forcefully demilitarized, even as innocent victims literally starve. What has happened over the past week is an embarrassment to New Orleans—and to America.
When I made my typically oppressive and caucasoidal "law and order" arguments among my Leftist pals yesterday, to a person, they misunderstood my point: I don't care that someone steals a TV ---so long as such stupidity is punished by Darwinian death.
As I have said many times before, those who do not accept the moral imperative of capital punishment are themselves complicit in the murders, rapes, and robberies that plague our society. There has to be something wrong with you to oppose justice for the irredeemable. Who are you trying to impress with your equanimity and infinite tolerance?
Exterminating this class of sociopaths who prey on us is a great benefit to the vast majority of law-abiding and decent Americans. Why isn't it done? Because of the political pressure applied by liberal wankers who do not accept certain moral imperatives.
There's no question who needs a good killing, except in the minds of the liberal media elites who cluck and moan about American barbarity while a great American city suffers unimaginably ---even at this very hour.
Unimaginably Lovely; Therefore, Real Mood: hug me
I saw a few minutes of Halle Berry on the Oprah show when I was flipping through the channels after work today and I simply must say that she has never looked more beautiful. Halle Berry is absolutely stunning with the white dress and the long, dark hair and the most perfect skin ever even imagined.
Can We Just Borrow the Army for a While? Mood: don't ask Now Playing: "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn
Not to be too judgemental or anything, but if the fucking Government isn't going to find some way to supply these poor wretches with at least some fresh water, can't they at least authorize the troops to shoot these TV-stealing firefighter-fighting subhuman motherfuckers?!?!
If you can't even protect the goddamned hospitals, what the fuck do you have? It isn't civilization, you dolts! It's Early Man.
Shoot them! With a gun! That's what the bullets are for, you twits!
Floaters Mood: don't ask Now Playing: "Maneater" by Hall and Oates
There's a lot of stuff going on right now that we don't know about and aren't going to be allowed to know about.
Is that tinfoil enough for you?
Don't look at it, friend. Just turn your head, bite down on the slug, and let the man cut it out.
The Cheap Veneer of Civilization Mood: don't ask
You know what I take away from this particular Battle of New Orleans? The very pessimistic view that huge swaths of this country could not really survive a man-made disaster on this scale.
That is, when the Submitters finally explode a radiological bomb in the middle of Manhattan or detonate a nuke in the middle of Long Beach, it will not surprise me to see the very most animalistic behavior among the survivors.
This is what we have, finally, when we do not respect ourselves and do not respect the law.
I wouldn't begrudge any man taking a loaf of bread or a bottle of water from some looted and waterlogged store there in New Orleans. I wouldn't care a bit if people are stealing clean pairs of underwear or shoes for their babies.
But stealing a goddamned TV? You should be shot on sight. Not because you're stealing, per se, but because you're too fucking stupid to live.
Supernature
It is a symptom of Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) that its victims believe that this President ---and other conservatives in his corner--- are the actual cause of natural disasters. Stupid and insane, but a real belief. If only we had signed the Kyoto Protocols, Hurricane Katrina would have never happened, see.
And the anti-Christian Left thinks it's other people who abuse Science for their own ideological purposes? What a crock.
Contraceived Now Playing: "Heard It in a Love Song" by the Marshall Tucker Band
First of all, I cannot conceive of losing everything I own or of knowing that my family is drowned and drifting on the waves of carnage lapping about a once-great city. It is insanity.
Second, I cannot conceive of losing everything I own or of knowing that my family is drowned and drifting on the waves of carnage lapping about a once-great city.
Those would also be the next and the last things that I could ever conceive.
A city beneath the waves. Is that not one of the most ancient of all our fears as urbanized creatures?
Down to the Filter
Have I mentioned how interested I am in the opinions of people who said we should never have gone to war for Iraq, anyway, with respect to what kind of constitution and government the Iraqis now should have?
Would it be too much to ask these gristleheads why the Iraqi people are even in such a position to decide ---or to argue the point or threaten non-cooperation in--- the establishment of the new Iraq?
Word has it that democracy is messy and unpredictable.
We in the West will have the government there that we always wanted when the Iraqi people begin making a daily demonstration of their confidence in and allegiance to self-government; when they show the rest of the Arab and Muslim world that modern standards of decency and right are the greatest guarantors of stability and social prosperity; when enough of the jihadist vermin infiltrating the country are exterminated.
(It's because of people like them that we can't have nice things. Or even cigarettes.)
Pegged
Charles Johnson's LGF Irony Meter has pegged out on the news that Che Guevara's family wants a piece of the action:
HAVANA, Cuba (Reuters) -- With his picture on rock band posters, baseball caps and women's lingerie, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara is firmly entrenched in the capitalist consumer society that he died fighting to overturn.
The image of the Argentine-born guerrilla gazing sternly into the distance, long-hair tucked into a beret with a single star, has been an enduring 20th century pop icon.
It's true. In some quarters, Che's more popular than the Beatles.
The famous picture was shot by Alberto Diaz, a fashion photographer better known as Korda, at a funeral for victims of the explosion of a French freighter transporting weapons to Cuba one year after Fidel Castro's revolution triumphed with the help of Guevara.
Korda's group photograph was not printed by his newspaper the next day. Seven years later, when Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli showed up looking for a cover picture for an edition of Che's "Bolivian Diary," Korda gave him two prints for free.
Guevara was captured six months later in the Bolivian jungle, where his bid to start an armed peasant revolution ended in fiasco. On news on his death, Feltrinelli cropped the photo and published large posters that quickly sold 1 million copies.
The guerrilla fighter was transformed into martyr, pop celebrity and radical chic poster boy.
Korda said he never received a penny from Feltrinelli.
Yes, but that's just part of keeping it authentic.
Dang!
Did Haley Barbour just say that anyone found here at night will be found here in the morning? Heh, heh. Well, not those exact words, but he's firm against looting. Good for him. If people aren't already clear on the Golden Rule, then the cops can help them to understand it.
In Perilous Union Now Playing: "Like to Get to Know You" by Spanky and Our Gang
Thanks to Charles Johnson, have a look at this steaming pile over at the National Vanguard:
One of the most important steps that Whites are taking these days (and, we all must admit, that millions of non-Whites have already taken) is a recognition that Jewish power is toxic to any society that allows it to exist. (And allowing it free rein is tantamount to suicide.) Jewish power is behind the drive for racial mixing, open borders, raceless globalism, and international capitalism, just as it was behind racially-destructive international Communism. But what is really waking people up is the Jewish power behind the current war in the Middle East, and the outrageous hypocrisy of Israel as Jews maintain an aggressive racial state (armed to the teeth, by the way, with Weapons of Mass Destruction) while doing everything in their power to open the borders of and multiracialize and multiculturalize other peoples' countries.
I'm sure that all of you are by now familiar with Cindy Sheehan, the mother of Casey, her son who was killed in Iraq last year, and her vigil outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. Her story has moved the hearts of millions just as it has angered the neocon spinmeisters who pushed for this war. Though she has hesitated and backpedaled more than once, she has brought out into public view the one flaming truth that the Jewish-controlled left and Jewish-controlled right are desperate to conceal: that her son, and all the other Americans being brought back home in body bags, died for Israel, not America.
Will Mother Sheehan stand up and denounce her Nazi well-wishers? Doubt it. She believes as they do, but will manage to avoid too public an association, lest the American People get wise to this crap.
Sobering Now Playing: "Star-Spangled Banner" as performed by Jimi Hendrix on the morning of 18 August 1969
Read this brief essay by Ken Ringle in tomorrow's Washington Post about Hurricane Camille. It's harrowing:
Yesterday morning the National Hurricane Center cleared its throat and upgraded Katrina to a Category 5 hurricane -- the designation for storms capable of truly catastrophic damage and deadliness. That, however, wasn't the center's most significant statement. The real news was the center's chilling declaration that, at 902 millibars of internal barometric pressure -- the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico -- Katrina was "comparable in intensity to Hurricane Camille of 1969 . . . only larger."
Those of us who lived though Hurricane Camille will never forget it. Camille struck with the force of several hydrogen bombs, altering forever the topography of the Mississippi coast. Its nearly 200-mph winds and 25-foot storm surge exploded concrete buildings and erased entire communities -- then gouged open graveyards and hung corpses in the live oaks like so much Spanish moss. There was a problem for a time telling the storm victims from those already embalmed.
To give you some context, the Woodstock music festival was wrapping up the night Camille roared ashore near Pass Christian, Mississippi. And she was still raging through the Mississippi River Valley Monday morning, 18 August 1969, when Jimi Hendrix played to the few thousands near Bethel, New York who had not yet started home.
About 48 hours later ---out in the West Texas town of El Paso--- this writer was born.
I guess this is another one of those once-in-a-generation things.
And About As Popular as Truman Now Playing: "Send in the Clowns" as performed by Judy Collins
Via Jeff Goldstein, have a look at this very interesting post at Mr. Snitch! Doing his best Paul Harvey, Mr. Snitch begins:
Accused of changing the rationale for 'his' war, and hounded for mismanaging it. Derided as an uninspiring public speaker. Belittled as an idiot. Blamed for dividing the nation. Charged with incompetence in his administration. Accused of trampling on the Constitution. Engaged in censorship and manipulation of the press. Mockingly compared with lower primates. Pressured for a key Cabinet Advisor's resignation. Of course, we're referring to Lincoln.
My favorite of these, of course, is the changing rationale for war. As we all know, Mr. Lincoln would have enjoyed universal support throughout the more enlightened and far less racist North had he simply commenced to fighting for the immediate emancipation of all black slaves everywhere.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to hang around, hoping to be the first commenter on a thread at Eschaton to say "Frist!"
Has any analysis been done on how vastly inflated Duncan Black's visitor counts are by these farcical mushroom people? You know: the ones who wish to avoid political debate by pretending they're in an AOL chatroom, circa 1998.
Conditioned Now Playing: "Mother Mary" by UFO
Sounds like the cable news networks are recycling the menacing leitmotif music they use to condition their viewers to respond to certain stories.
hug me
don't ask
spacey
To give you some context, the Woodstock music festival was wrapping up the night Camille roared ashore near Pass Christian, Mississippi. And she was still raging through the Mississippi River Valley Monday morning, 18 August 1969, when Jimi Hendrix played to the few thousands near Bethel, New York who had not yet started home.