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Best Article I have read yet (regarding Katrina)

Timequake

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TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

By Robert Tracinski

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicles, 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.

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.

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.

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

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.

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.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
 
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[mod mode]
FORUM RULES


8. Copyrighted Material - All material posted from copyrighted material MUST contain a link to the original work.
Please do not post entire articles. Proper format is to paraphrase the contents of an article and/or post relevant excerpts and then link to the rest. Best bet is to always reference the original source.
Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
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Here is another from one of the smartest persons in America

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/ck20050909.shtml
Assigning blame
Charles Krauthammer (archive)

September 9, 2005

WASHINGTON -- In less enlightened times, there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews).
1. The mayor of New Orleans. He knows the city. He knows the danger. He knows that during Hurricane Georges in 1998, the use of the Superdome was a disaster and fully two-thirds of the residents never got out of the city. Nothing was done. He declared a mandatory evacuation only 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit. He did not even declare a voluntary evacuation until the day before that, at 5 p.m. At that time, he explained that he needed to study his legal authority to call a mandatory evacuation and was hesitating to do so lest the city be sued by hotels and other businesses.

3. The head of FEMA. Late, slow and in way over his head. On Thursday he says on national television that he didn't even know there were people in the Convention Center, when anybody watching television could see them there destitute and desperate. Maybe in his vast bureaucracy he can assign three 20-year-olds to watch cable news and give him updates every hour on what in hell is going on.

5. Congress. Now as always playing holier-than-thou. Perhaps it might ask itself who created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. The congressional response to all crises is the same -- rearrange the bureaucratic boxes, but be sure to add one extra layer. The last four years of DHS have been spent principally on bureaucratic reorganization (and real estate) instead of, say, a workable plan for as predictable a disaster as a Gulf Coast hurricane.

©2005 Washington Post Writers Group
 
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Since you may have missed it when I posted the first time in this lengthy thread, I'll repeat myself:

[mod mode]
FORUM RULES


8. Copyrighted Material - All material posted from copyrighted material MUST contain a link to the original work.
PLEASE DO NOT POST ENTIRE ARTICLES. PROPER FORMAT IS TO PARAPHRASE THE CONTENTS OF AN ARTICLE AND/OR POST RELEVANT EXCERPTS AND THEN LINK TO THE REST. Best bet is to always reference the original source.
Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
[/mod mode]
 
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Here is another by one of our most gifted writers and speakers Barry Farber

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/9/12/112544.shtml

Barry Farber
Monday, Sept. 12, 2005

New Orleans Rescuers Did a Good Job

...............Some splinters plunge into the skin too deep to work themselves back out over time. I fear the one about rich whites not caring and therefore not bestirring themselves to save poor blacks is one of them. It's hard to think of an insult more untrue and unfair. Someone once described a communist as somebody who could never see a fat man standing beside a thin man without concluding that the fat man got that way at the expense of the thin man. The new racist is somebody who cannot see poor black people waiting desperately for help without concluding the help is delayed because the recipients are poor and black.

The spectacle of so many white rescuers doing so much to rescue so many black victims propels such blather beyond the absurd all the way over to the obscene. A plain old helicopter ride may be nothing to write an adventure story about, but the perpetual day-in and day-out mid-air acrobatics of rooftop rescues are life-endangering. And there seems to be no shortage of Coast Guard pilots willing to take those risks..............
 
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