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Wednesday, August 31, 2005
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Yesterday Insapundit was saying that looters in New Orleans should be shot. But when there was looting in Iraq after our invasion, he sang a different tune:
Some people think the looting is bad, but I think that a certain amount is good. It reinforces in people's minds that Saddam is gone, and that he was unpopular.
And here he quotes an email he recieved:
What's happening in Baghdad isn't looting. It's a popular uprising.
Seems to me these are pretty fine moral lines to be drawing. What if you shoot the wrong guy? How do you know he's looting to make a political statement?
Talking about this New York Times article, Instapundit also said "It's sad to see such lame political opportunism at a time like this." But it's funny, I can't find any political points in the article at all, unless just talking about global warning is political opportunism. His sentence is the kind of sentence that condemns itself.
10:15:57 PM 
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This is an amazing, predictive piece about the dangers New Orleans faced from a hurricane, that appeared in the Natitonal Geographici in October 2004. Read it and weep.
The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are,"
Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse."
The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk. "It's not if it will happen," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "It's when."
On a sideabar to the article is a survey, "should the federal government spend billions of dollars to stem the tide of wetland loss in Louisiana?" I don't know when the votes were cast, but as of now, there are 34,187 "Yes" answers, and 2,930 "No" responses. It seems clear to me that the people want responsible measures to be taken to protect the environment, and are willing to pay for them, but are seduced by the "no taxes," and "we don't have to pay for it crowd." I hope this crowd pays for it over the next decade.
(Via Randy Alfred.)
8:15:46 PM
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Though most of the cognoscenti and even the casual fans have had it for decades, it's noteworthy that as part of a veritable flood of product, Bob Dylan has released Live at the Gaslight, recorded at the Gaslight coffee house in late 1962. The packaging is nice, and the liner notes not bad. This is some terrific Bob, and can be quite a revelation. It includes the earliest known versions of Don't Think Twice, It's All Right and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. It's fun to listen to the former, seeing how it hasn't quite jelled yet and the lyrics are going to change before its release on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. I've always enjoyed these performances, particularly The Cuckoo, Moonshiner, Handsome Molly, and Barbara Allen.
This release excludes some performances that have always circulated as part of the tape: Motherless Children, Ballad of Hollis Brown, Kindhearted Woman Blues, See that My Grave is Kept Clean, Ain't No MOre Cane, No More Auction Block, and notably to me, Black Cross. The latter is a Dylan version of the classic Lord Buckley bit, Black Cross. Bob's version is fun, when he does some deep south dialect. Oh, well, it's probably not politically correct. But even if it's not complete, Live at the Gaslight is fun, and it's an interesting addition to the canon.
8:08:30 PM
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Fox News and others are reporting that the President just got "his own bird's eye view" of Katrina's damage as Air Force One flew over the devestated region. Shortly after, Bush gave prepared remarks to the press pool: We are making progress in New Orleans. The flood is in its last throes. Clearly, the hurricane has a hateful ideology and does not like our freedom or our dryness. We cannot surrender to it. In New Orleans, they are working on a draft evacuation; it is an evacuation process, and we must expect that if we are to bring American-style democracy to the Mississippi Delta. The president added that "to pull out now would only give aid to the elements."
(Via Wonkette.)
4:19:55 PM
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What has happened down here is the wind has changed. The thing that I keep thinking when looking at the disaster that is New Orleans today is that we're witnessing the death of a culture. I'm no expert on New Orleans culture; I never visited there, I've only read a few books. But it seems clear that what makes (made) the city unique is the combination of different types of people who live there. The culture was unique to the history and the place. Whatever they rebuild, if they rebuild anything and recover anything, seems to me might at best be an imitation of that culture. With so much loss, how can the same culture survive? We'll all be the poorer for it; we've all benefited from the life of New Orleans, through the music, the food, the humor and the horror.
4:08:59 PM
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THE COMING STORM: If what this article says is true, the Bush administration has a major political problem on its hands. Money quote: On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them." Yes, some would even blame Bush and the war for a hurricane. But blaming Bush and the war for the poor state of New Orleans' levees is a legitimate argument. And it could be a crushing one.
(Via Daily Dish.)
3:22:41 PM
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The headline is great, the picture so-so.
11:03:33 AM
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Here's a great post from Growabrain with some very funny, maybe offensive (well, probably offensive) Jesus-related items. Gotta love Sarah Silverman, who pretty nearly stole The Aristocrats.
9:57:00 AM
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Number of articles touting the "Bush Boom" on nationalreview.com: 44.
Change in median income 2001-2004: -$673.
Change in the number of Americans in poverty: +4.1 million
Change in the number of Americans without health insurance: +4.6 million
(All statistics are from Census data via the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)
(Via Brendan Nyhan.)
9:03:44 AM
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Xeni Jardin:
Snip from law.com story:
When FBI supervisors in Miami met with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta last month, they wondered what the top enforcement priority for Acosta and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be.
Would it be terrorism? Organized crime? Narcotics trafficking? Immigration? Or maybe public corruption?
The agents were stunned to learn that a top prosecutorial priority of Acosta and the Department of Justice was none of the above. Instead, Acosta told them, it's obscenity. Not pornography involving children, but pornographic material featuring consenting adults. Link (via politech)
(Via Boing Boing.)
9:00:57 AM
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There's more on use of the "looting" word at Boing Boing. Worth reading.
8:52:40 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 9/2/2005; 10:20:18 AM.
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