So, I've just found out why Juggicide and co. said one of their newbies named themselves after a storm. From what Ba tells me, they've almost effectively evacuated the Big Easy, and turned the super dome into a temporary shelter. Now, I live in a cave these days and while we own a TV, I don't have it plugged in, so maybe the rest of the community even over on this side of the pond might know about this already, but it's news to me. I went to New Orleans once in December, and it was an amazing town even in the dead of winter. I think, considering my delicate sensibilities, it'd be too much for me in the spring. It's truely a unique place, and while it is an American city, it's also French, Arcadian, and just a whole universe unto itself. Once you cross Canal Street into the French Quarter, all bets are off. I hope we don't have any community members or families there of who are down that way, but I'm sure we're all hoping that the storm causes as little damage to life and property as possible. Lousiana parish sheriffs, however, are neither living nor actual property, so I suggest we stake them and their deputies out as an anti-hurricane palisade.
I'm a regular visitor to New Orleans. Some of my team are based there (all thankfully evacuated). Hopefully everyone will be safe, and the place won't get trashed as it is one of my favourite places to visit. Perhaps a prayer to St Expedite is indicated?
I was reading about today in the paper and heard a news report on the radio about it too. I believe around half a million people are being evacuated from the city. I heard the mayor in one of his speachs describe the storm as 'a once in a lifetime storm' so lets hope no-one is killed or seriously injured in it. New Orleans is one of the US cities I'd really like to visit so hopefully the distruction won't be too severe. Edit: I don't mean for that last sentance to sound like I only hope the destruction won't be too severe because I want to visit it and haven't yet.
http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2005/08/29/210206.html An update on Katrina.
From what I understand, the hurricane went a little to the east of New Orleans. Many people were figuring that this was going to be the storm that sunk the city. The city is almost completely surrounded by water. Being as the city is below sea level, in some places by as much as 8-10 feet, dikes have been erected all around the city. Scientists and meteoroligists were afraid that the surge would break the levies and actually sink the city. Only one levy broke, that I'm aware of. Most of the major part of the storm went through Mississippi and Alabama. There is major flooding as far as around 60 miles from the coast. The people that did evacuate the areas are being encouraged not to return for at least two to four days. Many will not have anything to return to. There were places where houses were almost completely under water. The hurricane is now moving up the state to where I live. It's died to a class 2 hurricane, but the winds and rain will still be heavy when it reaches us. It shouldn't be too bad, but my dad and I will probably get quite a bit of work off it, providing we get our machinery working soon. We had a fix-it-day and some of the parts we ordered haven't come in yet. I'm waiting on him to call me, so I can go help him put everything back together in the rain. Oh what joy. I'll update again sometime later.
more than 50 killed in hurricane Katrina. Down town has been completely flooded and it looks pretty bad.
There was one apartment complex where the people did not leave. Killed 30 when it was destroyed. One of our local talk-radio stations is carrying full coverage of the storm all day long. They did this last year when another storm hit. NOA (national oceanic and atmospheric) weather radio stations were knocked out yesterday. That meant that there would be no storm warning coming over the radio. That's when we were really gratefull for the local station staying on for so long. They have helped a lot of people find loved ones, assess risky areas, and many other things. We'll be busy tomorrow cutting trees. Some of them are across houses, some have just had limbs fall out. Mississippi is going to be really hurt by all this. Probably Alabama, too.
Glad to here you made out OK redneck... We've been watching the news almost nonstop and it doesn't look pretty. Helicoptors lifting people off rooves (roofs?) one at a time, The superdome in shreds with 35,000 people in it, all sorts of terrible wreckage. It's horrible.
http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2005/09/01/212317.html more news on Katrina. It's getting progressively bleaker out there. Will someone please explain to me why would anyone want to shoot at evacuation helicopters? They're not even carrying anything valuable, except a bunch of sick and exhausted people. As for looting... Marauding jewelry and electronics stores is one thing, but I totally understand stealing food, water and diapers at a time like this. I mean, it's either that or see your kids go hungry. (By stealing I mean from a store, not from your neighbor) Redneck, how are you doing out there?
Things are so devastating over there that people's animal instincts are beginning to take over. The instinct to do what it takes to survive, the instinct to kill. Someone evidently shot their sister over a bag of ice. It's getting pretty bad. I agree on the looting bit. Seriously, food and the like are necessities. What are you going to do with a TV in an area with no electricity? =__=; And jewlery has no value at that point. And likewise, are you doing okay Redneck? D:
this is taken from www.angryflower.com "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Well, horrible. Over the weekend I'd caught the news about Hurricane Katrina'a approach to new Orleans and the devastation it could cause. It was to hit Monday morning, and I checked the news to read that the storm had weakened before hitting the city. Forgot about it. Didn't notice on Tuesday or Wednesday except for reading about an evacuation plan that had no provision for people without a car. Fabulous. And suddenly Thursday it's thousands dead, helicopters getting shot at, rapes in the Superdome and rats eating dead bodies in shit-covered streets. Holy fuck. Slow motion 9-11. The hurricane was coming no matter what we did; nothing could be done about that. Well, except for prepare for it. And somehow, astonshingly, that didn't get done. Molly Ivins says it's tacky to start playing the blame game before the bodies are even counted, but the range and depth of fuckupery at play in this disaster are too much. There's the pre-hurricane phase of general and specific neglect, the fact that this has been on Bush's desk since 2001 as a real threat that needed attention and the mindboggling direct cuts in levee construction and maintenance earlier this year, which is bad enough. But then there's the runup to the disaster, the days of warning that resulted in no mobilization, no readiness to get people out of the city, no provision of food and water until Wednesday. Wednesday. Just enough time for thousands of people to die and tens of thousands more to be driven desperate by days without food and water. As a Canadian, I've seen disasters hitting America before, devastation, people pulling together, the National Guard slinging sandbags and handing out watter bottles. This time, the National Guard's not at home. They're busy right now. This is the second major disaster on Bush's watch, making him 0 for 2 on anticipating real dangers to America and effectively addressing them. We recall the summer of 2001 when Mr. President was warning America that it needed a $150 billion dollar missile defence shield to protect itself. Whoops. Missed that one. And then last Friday an enemy marches towards America with murder on its mind but since it's not a terrorist, nothing gets done. Missed the ball again. "Nobody anticipated the breach of the levees." I wonder if, perhaps, the levees in the American mind have been breached. There is a wall around 9-11 and the things that have been done in its name. That wall has been astonishingly resilient, protecting bandits who've raped the public interest at will. Is the loss of an entire city enough to crack it? Have the levees been breached?
"I am a jealous God" is a phrase from the Old Testament. Same Old Testament that Jesus tried to persuade the people to turn [i:3c2aa6b6e4]away from[/i:3c2aa6b6e4]. Same Old Testament that was VERY, VERY clear on a long, detailed and unbelievably rigid code of behavior, which the Christians have for the most part abandoned. (Keeping kosher is no longer necessary, "eye for an eye" is considered un-Christian, adultery is no longer punished by stoning etc) The "Thou shall not lie with a man as if with a woman" is a quote from the Old Testament. I still don't get why these particular "Christian leaders" think it's okay to follow [i:3c2aa6b6e4]some[/i:3c2aa6b6e4] Old Testament's rules, and not the other (The God of the Old Testament would have been quite irate) Granted, the last quotes in that article are from the New Testament, BUT they were not attributed to Jesus himself, only to his various followers, and they've been known to say things like "Of all beasts, the woman is the worst one" and "let us take an axe, and cut off the fruitless tree of marriage", in which case I'm surprised they're still considered authority on marital relations. As far as I know, Jesus has never said anything against homosexuality. For all we know, he didn't object to it. But even if he did, this is still the same guy who saved an adulterous woman from stoning. I can't picture him sending down a hurricane that killed hundreds (?) of people, just to send a "polite warning" to the homosexuals. It pisses me off that these demagogues use natural disasters as a means to "put the fear of God" into people. ... But I see why people believe them If you believe in God, and something this horrendous happens, you wonder why would an otherwise loving God allow such thing to happen. Either God is, well, not as nice as we'd like him to believe, or it's something that we did to incur his wrath. Or better yet, something that someone ELSE did to incur his wrath. Homosexuals? Sure! Feminists? Why not! People who believe in separation of Church and State? Oh yeah, they brought this whole thing down upon us. Let's burn them. ... sigh...
Actually, the situations were slightly different. In the first, the reporter had actually seen the man go into the store and get the items. In the second, the items were floating out of the store, and people were picking them up. They were done by two different photographers in different areas. The color of the people in question was coincidental.
More from angryflower.com: Last week, in a fury about the horrors unfolded in New Orleans, I posted an update in which I complained bitterly about George Bush's response to the disaster. I wondered if the breach of the levees in New Orleans might be accompanied by a similar breach in the wall of Americans' denial about the ruinous criminality and incompetence of the man occupying their President's office. Now, just as the levees in New Orleans are being rebuilt and the pumping stations set to work, so to are the sandbags of ideological support being thrown into place and the bad or shameful realities are pumped away. This week the President's defenders launched two parallel and contradictory lines of argument, sometimes simultaneously: "It's wrong to play the blame game when people need help" alongside "It was the local and state authorities' fault." Ah, the blame game. I'm all for it. The blame game serves two enormously useful functions. First is the practical: if somebody already screwed up big time, it's stupid and negligent to leave them in the position where they can do it again. The dude who drunkenly grabbed the wheel and ran the van into the river probably isn't the guy you want handling the gettin'-the-van-out-of-the-river duties. You blame so you can fix rather than just making it worse. But more importantly, blame is a necessary emotional response. When we've been shocked or horrified or hurt, the natural reaction is to want to retaliate, push it back out, even if that just means yelling your anger at whoever's responsible as though he was there. People crave someone to blame. With 9-11 it was easy, since the horror was an act of human will; the blame game went through the whole season and post-season in about 3 hours. It was the terrorists' fault. Unfortunately the terrorists who actually did it were all dead so "the terrorists" needing stretching a bit to include the terrorists' co-conspirators and their allies and supporters and those who share similar ideologies and those who speak the same language and live in vaguely the same part of the world. "The terrorists" have been a very plastic, resilient Blame Bag. Or, if you like, a highly attractive Blame lighting rod. But with Hurricane Katrina, however, there is no direct human agency. You can't blame the storm, and for some reason the people who believe in God don't blame him even though if he exists it's clearly his fault. But people still need to blame. I know I do, and for me, there's ol' reliable: George Bush. I revile his Presidency, and given what a horrific monster of a president he's been it's very easy to send my blame his way and to wish others to do so that, after a lifetime of evasion of responsibility of every form, George Bush can become the lightning rod and endure the storm of blame that is rightfully his. That doesn't mean he's solely responsible for this catastrophe, or that he's the only one to blame. Oh, no. For an occasion this horrible there's blame for everybody. As more information comes to light, it's becoming increasingly evident that Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco did a very, very poor job of handling their responsibilities. I have yet to hear Nagin's explanation for the hundreds of unused buses swamped out in the flood, and at the very least Blanco didn't handle her interactions with the Feds very well. I have no doubt their failures will be exhasutively illuminated in the coming weeks. Emergency plans were neglected, obvious problems were overlooked, it was a mess. But if a month ago you'd asked people "Do you think the Federal Government has a responsibility to render immediate aid and assistance to the victims of a National Emergency like a terrorist attack or natural disaster?" I think most folks would answer "Of course." And if you then asked, "Yeah, but what if the local and state authorities really screwed up? I mean really blew it. Wouldn't that absolve the Federal government of responsibilty?", most people would (should) look at you like you were nuts. A wise comic book once said "With great power comes great responsibility." Responsibility goes up. It doesn't stop when the guy below you drops the ball. Indeed, it is activated. As you go higher up the chain of authority you get more power and more responsibilty. That's what being the boss is. That's what being the President is. And what's been so galling and angering and horrifically appealing in all this is how George Bush has been so perfectly George Bush during this crisis. He played out his part as the clueless asshole sham president to a T. Monday evening he relaxed at his mansion. Tuesday he popped over to San Diego to spin bullshit about Iraq and clumsily play some chords. Wednesday he grumpily returned to Washington and chuckled during his speech. Thursday he said that nobody had anticipated that the levees would be breached, by "nobody" meaning him, by "not anticipating" meaning somebody had told him a few times about this disaster scenario in New Orleans but he hadn't really been paying attention. Friday he finally dared to visit the scene and complained that the people that had just gone through the worst week of their lives hadn't done enough. The man who cut short his vacation and usurped state authority to extend Terry Schiavo's living corpse for political advantage couldn't bring himself to do either when thousands of American lives were on the line. Classic Bush. I want to hear someone ask this President "Are you satisfied with your own performance during this crisis?" I honestly wonder what his answer would be.
"Aman" is the right word indeed. In greek it is used as showing fright, pity, surprise. I think all three are in abundance in this situation.
This story appears in todays Daily Mirror 19 September 2005 EXCLUSIVE: UP IN FLAMES Tons of British aid donated to help Hurricane Katrina victims to be BURNED by Americans From Ryan Parry, US Correspondent in New York HUNDREDS of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned. US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees. Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption. One reason given for this destruction is BSE (mad cows disease)
Okay, what's the difference? The that he actually took it from an abandoned store and the other guys took it from the water(floating??!) near abandoned store?
I'd say you'd have to know more details about the situation to be able to discuss it properly. Looting is when opportunists steal goods that should not be readily available, but are made so by extraordinary circumstances, such as war, riots or natural disaster. (Dictionary.com calls it 'plundering'.) If the man's reason for going into the shop and taking stuff was simply to take advantage of the situation for material gain, I'd say he was looting. If his reason was to get food and drink because he was stuck in a flooded city and had to survive, then I'd say he wasn't looting. However, there is still a difference between picking stuff up out of the water and actually going to the shop to find it, whatever your reasons. The former is just lucky, where as the latter has inherent an intent to take from that shop. So if you had a different definition, you might still say he was looting. Having just checked Ba's post on this again, to see what he said about it, I have to say that I hadn't even noticed the people's skin colour. I thought we were talking about sensationalist journalism, not racism.
http://operationeden.blogspot.com/ I just glanced over this livejournal. The way these people have been failed is heartbreaking.
