formby
learning in progress
And Here's some stories that were posted in the same thread also. These are reports done by journalists...
It's very interesting to hear everyone complain that not enough is being done fast enough. We have become a society of "now", which means we want everything done now, not later. We have no patience for anything. Speed is everything. New Orleans does not have a set evacution plan, and every year there are category 1 and 2 hurricanes in that region that threaten the city. And there have been many instances of false evacuations when a hurricane headed towards the city turns away at the last minute. Some people can't affore to leave, while others just look at it as another false warning. Now me, I don't think I'd want to live in a city that is below sea level and has water on all sides. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. There has been flooding over the years, but never like now. I don't know if the city will ever recover, let alone the entire region. It will take years and billions of dollars to rebuild.
Here is something interesting I found regarding this whole situation, and why we see the slowness in helping people there now (it addresses many things wrong in our country, and although slanted to the right, takes shots at both sides):
"Hurricane Katrina is not to blame for the destruction of New Orleans and the thousands of deaths on the Gulf Coast. The real culprit is the large economic vise that for the past three decades has squeezed and destroyed the infrastructure of the United States. The left hand side of the vise is Democrat social spending, and the right hand side of the vise is Republican tax cuts. In the middle of that tightening vise are the dams, roads, bridges, causeways, levees and sewer systems of our nation. Nothing is exempt from the continuing squeeze -- not even the 30 year old Space Shuttles that were once the pinnacle of our engineering ability and are now an international embarrassment.
When President Lyndon Baines Johnson began his "war on poverty," the largest expenditure of the federal budget was for defense. At that time, America had the ability to place more than a million men in the field and to fight a two front war. We had hundreds of thousands of troops defending Europe at the same time we fought the war in Viet Nam. After thirty years of increased social spending to end poverty, ever greater numbers of our citizens receive "assistance" and we cannot even fight a small war in Iraq without calling up National Guard troops. Today, Defense spending is far less than by Health and Human Services. (Social Security and Medicare are not even calculated as part of the federal budget.)
For the last four years the massive Transportation Bill that would have fixed and widened much of our Interstate system was held up by a threatened veto from the White House even though the funds were available in a trust funded by a tax on gasoline. Even the cut down version was criticized by the anti-tax wing of the Republican party. The Democrats are not any better; they want to use the funds for even more social spending, instead of on infrastructure. It seems the Democrats want to pay for every kid in America to attend Harvard, even if there would be no road to drive there on. Most people tried to escape New Orleans on Interstates 10 and 55. Both of these roads were obsolete and have been too small for normal traffic in that area for at least the last decade. As people drowned in the rising water, the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans seemed more interested in how welfare checks would be delivered than in the total lack of police equipment. The cops did not even have a backup system for their radios.
New Orleans, although lying below sea level , had no master evacuation plan in place. There were no backup communications systems for the police or fire departments and the city owned no emergency inflatable rafts other than for river use. New Orleans is perhaps the second most corrupt city in the United States. Cash is regularly handed out for votes, and the welfare system is one of the most abused in the nation. At first the police were ordered to ignore looters and help those stranded, and then ordered to shoot looters and ignore those stranded. The only static command seems to be confusion.
What destroyed New Orleans? The Democrats didn't want new roads, levees or well equipped emergency workers -- they wanted large welfare checks to buy votes. Republicans didn't want new roads, levees or well equipped emergency workers -- they wanted tax cuts to buy votes.
Over the last decade as Republicans have taken over control from the Democrats in most states and at the federal level, they have indeed cut taxes, but they did not reduce the social spending the Democrats had put in place. The old Democrat motto of 'tax and spend' was replaced by a new Republican motto of 'borrow and spend.' Anti tax gurus in Washington tell states to sell bonds if they need money. Let's make one thing clear: a twenty or thirty year city or state issued bond is nothing more than a tax on our children and grandchildren. Bond money is not magic, it has to be paid back with interest.
Meanwhile there is plenty of oil but no gasoline. Environmental regulations and ridiculous "special blend" gasoline for certain cities have forced refineries to close. Since many of the remaining refineries are on the Gulf Coast and were damaged by Katrina, gas prices will soar. Before Katrina the nation was already importing refined gasoline because we do not have the ability to refine what we use in this nation. Again, our infrastructure is collapsing under the strain of economic downturn.
Make no mistake, we are a nation in economic downturn. We do not have the ability to replace the aging Space Shuttle program any more than we have the ability to fix the hopelessly outdated Interstate highway system. The money is not there to fix hundreds of dangerous dams and dikes in this nation (but we do have the money for medical care for millions of illegal aliens and the funds to educate their children).
Meanwhile the social spending just continues to climb. Next year the federal government will begin paying for prescription drugs for Medicare. This expanded program will cause shortages of drugs and huge price increases. These increases will move the cost of health insurance to an unaffordable level for many more of our citizens. Any time the government tosses money at products, those products become scarce and prices increase. The more government social spending, the higher the prices. That is how the markets work!
What is the solution: first, let families take care of their own kids. The reason most kids get a free lunch at school is because the parents want to use the money for something else. We need to force families to take care of their kids rather than the government. If dad isn't feeding the kids, then toss him in jail. Families must take on the responsibility for their aging loved ones as has been the tradition of humanity for thousands of years. The government should not be the only source of income and care for the elderly. And finally, the governments of this nation must stop borrowing money to give away to people to buy potato chips at the 7-11 stores. People who really need government aid should be forced to buy flour, vegetables and meat, not junk food at a convenience store.
The nation needs to begin to invest in its future again. The future is commerce and there is no commerce without adequate roads, secure ports, navigable rivers, railroads with good track and airports with enough runways. Further, we need a real Army so our citizen soldiers in the National Guard are home to take care of disasters such as the storm which destroyed New Orleans. The National Guard belongs at home, not in Iraq."
And This one...
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
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.
It's very interesting to hear everyone complain that not enough is being done fast enough. We have become a society of "now", which means we want everything done now, not later. We have no patience for anything. Speed is everything. New Orleans does not have a set evacution plan, and every year there are category 1 and 2 hurricanes in that region that threaten the city. And there have been many instances of false evacuations when a hurricane headed towards the city turns away at the last minute. Some people can't affore to leave, while others just look at it as another false warning. Now me, I don't think I'd want to live in a city that is below sea level and has water on all sides. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. There has been flooding over the years, but never like now. I don't know if the city will ever recover, let alone the entire region. It will take years and billions of dollars to rebuild.
Here is something interesting I found regarding this whole situation, and why we see the slowness in helping people there now (it addresses many things wrong in our country, and although slanted to the right, takes shots at both sides):
"Hurricane Katrina is not to blame for the destruction of New Orleans and the thousands of deaths on the Gulf Coast. The real culprit is the large economic vise that for the past three decades has squeezed and destroyed the infrastructure of the United States. The left hand side of the vise is Democrat social spending, and the right hand side of the vise is Republican tax cuts. In the middle of that tightening vise are the dams, roads, bridges, causeways, levees and sewer systems of our nation. Nothing is exempt from the continuing squeeze -- not even the 30 year old Space Shuttles that were once the pinnacle of our engineering ability and are now an international embarrassment.
When President Lyndon Baines Johnson began his "war on poverty," the largest expenditure of the federal budget was for defense. At that time, America had the ability to place more than a million men in the field and to fight a two front war. We had hundreds of thousands of troops defending Europe at the same time we fought the war in Viet Nam. After thirty years of increased social spending to end poverty, ever greater numbers of our citizens receive "assistance" and we cannot even fight a small war in Iraq without calling up National Guard troops. Today, Defense spending is far less than by Health and Human Services. (Social Security and Medicare are not even calculated as part of the federal budget.)
For the last four years the massive Transportation Bill that would have fixed and widened much of our Interstate system was held up by a threatened veto from the White House even though the funds were available in a trust funded by a tax on gasoline. Even the cut down version was criticized by the anti-tax wing of the Republican party. The Democrats are not any better; they want to use the funds for even more social spending, instead of on infrastructure. It seems the Democrats want to pay for every kid in America to attend Harvard, even if there would be no road to drive there on. Most people tried to escape New Orleans on Interstates 10 and 55. Both of these roads were obsolete and have been too small for normal traffic in that area for at least the last decade. As people drowned in the rising water, the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans seemed more interested in how welfare checks would be delivered than in the total lack of police equipment. The cops did not even have a backup system for their radios.
New Orleans, although lying below sea level , had no master evacuation plan in place. There were no backup communications systems for the police or fire departments and the city owned no emergency inflatable rafts other than for river use. New Orleans is perhaps the second most corrupt city in the United States. Cash is regularly handed out for votes, and the welfare system is one of the most abused in the nation. At first the police were ordered to ignore looters and help those stranded, and then ordered to shoot looters and ignore those stranded. The only static command seems to be confusion.
What destroyed New Orleans? The Democrats didn't want new roads, levees or well equipped emergency workers -- they wanted large welfare checks to buy votes. Republicans didn't want new roads, levees or well equipped emergency workers -- they wanted tax cuts to buy votes.
Over the last decade as Republicans have taken over control from the Democrats in most states and at the federal level, they have indeed cut taxes, but they did not reduce the social spending the Democrats had put in place. The old Democrat motto of 'tax and spend' was replaced by a new Republican motto of 'borrow and spend.' Anti tax gurus in Washington tell states to sell bonds if they need money. Let's make one thing clear: a twenty or thirty year city or state issued bond is nothing more than a tax on our children and grandchildren. Bond money is not magic, it has to be paid back with interest.
Meanwhile there is plenty of oil but no gasoline. Environmental regulations and ridiculous "special blend" gasoline for certain cities have forced refineries to close. Since many of the remaining refineries are on the Gulf Coast and were damaged by Katrina, gas prices will soar. Before Katrina the nation was already importing refined gasoline because we do not have the ability to refine what we use in this nation. Again, our infrastructure is collapsing under the strain of economic downturn.
Make no mistake, we are a nation in economic downturn. We do not have the ability to replace the aging Space Shuttle program any more than we have the ability to fix the hopelessly outdated Interstate highway system. The money is not there to fix hundreds of dangerous dams and dikes in this nation (but we do have the money for medical care for millions of illegal aliens and the funds to educate their children).
Meanwhile the social spending just continues to climb. Next year the federal government will begin paying for prescription drugs for Medicare. This expanded program will cause shortages of drugs and huge price increases. These increases will move the cost of health insurance to an unaffordable level for many more of our citizens. Any time the government tosses money at products, those products become scarce and prices increase. The more government social spending, the higher the prices. That is how the markets work!
What is the solution: first, let families take care of their own kids. The reason most kids get a free lunch at school is because the parents want to use the money for something else. We need to force families to take care of their kids rather than the government. If dad isn't feeding the kids, then toss him in jail. Families must take on the responsibility for their aging loved ones as has been the tradition of humanity for thousands of years. The government should not be the only source of income and care for the elderly. And finally, the governments of this nation must stop borrowing money to give away to people to buy potato chips at the 7-11 stores. People who really need government aid should be forced to buy flour, vegetables and meat, not junk food at a convenience store.
The nation needs to begin to invest in its future again. The future is commerce and there is no commerce without adequate roads, secure ports, navigable rivers, railroads with good track and airports with enough runways. Further, we need a real Army so our citizen soldiers in the National Guard are home to take care of disasters such as the storm which destroyed New Orleans. The National Guard belongs at home, not in Iraq."
And This one...
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
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.
