Katrina -an eye-witness perspective

Folks, there's a very old saying about politics and religion, I'm sure you all know it. I have seen more than one really great forum, spiral into a pit of incoherence and animosity when members post off-topic. We all certainly have the right to say what we please, our's is a free country after all, but it is indeed a slippery slope.

Cheers,
BP

Here is my plan to rebuild New Orleans.

1. Evacuate the city.

2. Send all the garbage from all over the USA to NO for the next 10 years.

3. Let it decompose and compact for 20 more years .

4. Let the people return knowing that the politicians really did feed them a line of garbage.

:twis ted:

Sleepless on LI wrote:

KMA!

A man of few words, actually a man of acronyms.

R/R- looks like we are getting more and more in agreement.

Come to jax and we can mend fences over a brewski.

NYT as a source for anything accurate.NO NO NO

BP wrote:Folks, there's a very old saying about politics and religion, I'm sure you all know it. I have seen more than one really great forum, spiral into a pit of incoherence and animosity when members post off-topic. We all certainly have the right to say what we please, our's is a free country after all, but it is indeed a slippery slope.

Cheers,
BP

Hey BP,

Do a search for one long thread called "angry" It was literaly hundreds of heated posts on the topic of the US economic/political/healthcare system. It was very enlightening and we all survived... as a matter a fact, I learned many things about my fellow forum members of which I am proud to know.

TomJax,

Are you in Jax Florida? I used to live on the beach there in another life.

rock and roll wrote:TomJax,

Are you in Jax Florida? I used to live on the beach there in another life.

Yep - Mandarin

Fun city. I used to be asst. manager of the Haverty's Furniture store there on Beach Road. I have a lot of fond memories of the area.

R&R you are now my new CPAP mentor.

Rock on.

SLPYHED

Kill My Antelope? Kill My Antelope? Why do all these Texans have Antelopes and why do they want you to kill them???????????????? T

bikernc wrote:Remember first and foremost, we as a country failed our fellow citizens! Levy
repair and construction have been cut by two thirds by the government. State, ;ocal and federal officials have known for almost 100 years of this possible catastrophe and yet no one has ever planned . Not the city, not the state and
certainly not the FEDS. Federal Emergency Management Agency oversees all
emergency plans and deemed New Orleans plans acceptable by their standards.
Also, having lived in LA, the people are among some of the poorest in our nation...These people neither had the money, the means or the help to leave the city. THe end of every month the money is gone. Many of us in the "middle class" understand this as well! And as usual, the arrogant, self centered Texicans with whom I am o so familiar are glad handing and congratulating themselves for a job well done.....
No this is not the forum and I am disgusted by the commentary.

Riddle me this Bill... If they didn't have a plan, why is it posted on the net? Better yet, why did the mayor COMPLETELY ignore it? It specifically addresses the issue of the infirm and those that can't move for economic reasons. It was NOT followed. Additionally, the Superdome was a designated shelter, with NO food/water!!! What we are seeing here is not a failure of government, or fema, we are seeing the failure of the welfare state.

> The Intellectual Activist
>
> An Objectivist Review
>
> An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
> the Welfare State by Robert Tracinski
>
> by Robert Tracinski
>
> It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure
> out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them,
> because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is
> going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if
> you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
>
> If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials
> is
> obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send
> transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send
> engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure.
> For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the
> heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work
> and dedication of doctors, nurses and rescue workers; the steps being
> taken to clean up and rebuild.
>
> Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have
> to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if
> they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself
> included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind,
> and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
>
> But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
>
> The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by
> federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
> Katrina This is where just about every newspaper and television
> channel has gotten the story wrong.
>
> The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not
> happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four
> decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
>
> The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
>
> For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be
> confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave
> in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved
> in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many
> people: they have been saying
> that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even
> what we expect from a Third World country.
>
> When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion.
> They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously
> organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in
> America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own
> initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care
> of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small
> town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens
> to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops,
> directing cars through the
> intersection) and large
> ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
>
> So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
>
> To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a
> description from a Washington Times story:
>
> "Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists,
> knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets;
> and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
>
> "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen
> poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and
> gunfire....
>
> "Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened
> Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with
> shoot-to-kill orders.
>
> " 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the
> streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded.
> These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing
> to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
>
> The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this
> article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests,
> riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a
> rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling
> at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
>
> What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for
> an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs
> to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing
> the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes
> people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super
> Dome?
>
> Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
> destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help
> them?
>
> My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
> sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox
> News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She
> studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is
> located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert
> Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in
> America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for
> uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since,
> mercifully, been demolished .)
>
> What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a
> whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the
> informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news
> channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the
> residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane,
> and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the
> city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an
> additional, crucial fact:
> early reports from CNN
> and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the
> prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose.
> There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two
> populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to
> live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
>
> There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when
> the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of
> people from two
> groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected,
> over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced
> helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the
> incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
>
> All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of
> the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of
> the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary.
> But in a city corrupted
> by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow
> of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political
> supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of
> emergency.
>
> No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact,
> some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for
> example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New
> Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is
> an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious
> Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the
> truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that
> was the exact opposite of individualism.
>
> What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of
> the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency
> is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the
> responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond
> to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to
> overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and
> complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use
> the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
>
> But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about
> saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own
> anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their
> businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried
> about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But
> living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
>
> The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains
> and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral
> ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no
> one is reporting.
>
> Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
>
> -------------------------
>
> Try TIA Daily for FREE; simply enter your e-mail address in the box at
> the top-left corner of this page.
>
> Copyright© 2002 The Intellectual Activist
>
>
>


Wonder if we know that Canadian?

WHY DON'T YOU JUST TURN THIS INTO A POLITICAL FORUM INSTEAD OF A CPAP ONE??? Come on, guys. Could you flex your muscles on a PM instead of on this site? Have your political discussions where they should be, either in private messages or on some site that is hosted for that purpose.

I get a link to this thread each time and HAVE to (by nature, sorry) see what was written. It is really disconcerting that you guys can't just let it go. For God's sake, drop it already, please???

We get that everyone is smarter or has a more corect answer than the next guy. Let's move on to what we're here for: HELPING EACH OTHER!!!!!

YEAH!!!!!!..............What SHE said!

DW

YEAH!!!!!!..............What SHE said!

LOL!!!!!!!

I think this dialouge is healthy and good food for thought. We receive a very one sided message from most of the media. It is a good thing to be informed and I welcome it. As with all things, read through it if you are interested, sift out what's good and spit out the bones. And only good natured leg pulling allowed gentlemen! No going for the jugular or we'll have to avert our eyes! No more demonizing Texonians or Canadians...we do share the same continent after all. (ie. no more Kill My Antelope)
Terry

Lol. Why do you have it set to alert you? You just can't stay away, admit it.