konane's Blog

Posted 9/9/2005

"Politics: Louisiana's senior senator, whose brother is lieutenant governor and whose father was New Orleans' mayor, is blaming President Bush for "the staggering incompetence of the federal government." Come again?

It's understandable that on the Sept. 4 edition of ABC's "This Week," Mary Landrieu said of President Bush, "I might likely have to punch him — literally" if he or members of his administration made any more disparaging remarks about local authorities and their pre- and post-Katrina efforts. Some are and were family.

Brother Mitch Landrieu is lieutenant governor of Louisiana. Father "Moon" Landrieu was not only mayor of New Orleans, but also later became secretary of housing and urban development under President Carter.

If anyone had clout in Washington, it would be this family and this swing-state senator. She could easily have traded her vote on a key issue or nomination for needed funding, a common practice in Washington. If funding for levee repairs was less than adequate, she was in a position to get more.

Likewise, ex-Sen. John Breaux was arguably the most influential senator in Washington during the Clinton years, and could easily have gotten more funding, if nothing else, in an effort to break the growing GOP hold on the South.

But if all money ever asked for was appropriated, as Breaux himself has said, everyone knew that the levee system was designed for a Category 3 hurricane, and not for a "once every hundred years" storm that could put New Orleans under 20 feet of water. And the track record of how money that was appropriated was actually spent is not good.

Despite Landrieu's complaints of budget cuts and paltry funding, the fact is that over the five years of the Bush administration, Louisiana has received more money — $1.9 billion — for Army Corps of Engineers civil works projects than any other state, and more than under any other administration over a similar period. California is a distant second with less than $1.4 billion despite a population more than seven times as large.

In December 1995, the Orleans Levee Board actually boasted to the New Orleans Times-Picayune about all the federal money it had to protect the city from hurricanes. As a result, the board said, the "most ambitious flood-fighting plan in generations was drafted," one that would plug the "few manageable gaps" in the levee system.

The problem was at the local level. The ambitious plan fell apart when the state suspended the Levee Board's ability to refinance old bonds and issue new ones. As the Times-Picayune reported, Legislative Auditor Dan Kyle "repeatedly faulted the Levee Board for the way it awards contracts, spends money and ignores no-bid contract laws." Blocked by the state from raising local money, the federal matching funds went unspent.

By 1998, Louisiana's state government had a $2 billion construction budget, but less than one-tenth of one percent, or $1.98 million, was dedicated to New Orleans levee improvements. By contrast, $22 million was spent that year to renovate a home for the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Where did all the money go? Again, the Times-Picayune says much of the money went not to flood control, but to lawmakers' pet projects, from a $750 million for a new canal lock to a $2.5 million Mardi Gras fountain project that ran $600,000 over budget.

Nine months before Katrina, three top Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness officials were indicted by a federal grand jury in Shreveport and charged, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Louisiana, "with offenses related to the obstruction of an audit of the use of federal funds for flood mitigation opportunities throughout Louisiana."

No reason to wonder why. New Orleans is not called the Big Easy for nothing."

http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&artnum=1&issue=20050909

"A Perfect Storm of Lawlessness
New Orleans’ vicious looters aren’t the real face of the city’s poor—their victims are.

Nicole Gelinas

  New Orleans hasn’t even been disarmed yet, but the story of those who looted, trashed, and terrorized the city this week is already being re-written. Al Sharpton went on MSNBC Thursday night to say that “looters are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them.” The final PC version of the story is likely to go like this: The desperate people left behind in New Orleans, nearly all black, had justification in brutally attacking their city because the help they frantically sought didn’t come.

In truth, the looters, rapists, and murderers who have terrorized New Orleans since Monday began their post-Katrina reign of terror a full day before the situation grew truly desperate—and it was their increasingly lawless behavior that kept willing but unarmed professional and volunteer rescue workers away from the city and from the poor people who needed saving.

Let’s go back to last Sunday morning—such a long time ago, it now seems. Most New Orleanians with means—the most resourceful poor, the middle class, and the affluent—left the city of nearly half-a-million residents that day, 24 hours before Katrina hit. They took planes, they drove, they hitchhiked, and some walked. Save for the home and business owners who valued their property more than their lives, most of the 100,000 or so who stayed behind were those not only poor in financial resources but in human capital as well.

Some who stayed behind are the New Orleanians who depend on the government on a good day—impoverished women, children, and elderly folks who went to the Superdome and to the Convention Center Sunday, expecting their government to take care of them. And those were the smart ones—those who moved rationally and proactively, despite a lack of transportation out of the city and a lack of government co-ordination, to secure their own physical safety. Thousands of others who stayed in their low-lying homes in the 9th Ward (which predictably flooded, as it flooded 40 years ago during Hurricane Betsy) drowned or now find themselves trapped—starved and dying of dehydration.

And the others who stayed behind, unfortunately, are those who terrorize New Orleans on a low-grade level on a good day—and have now taken over the stricken city. What’s happened is the predictable civil deterioration of a city whose fragile civil infrastructure can’t control or contain its core criminal class in peacetime.

Katrina didn’t turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This week’s looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans’ murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005 with 330 or so murders—compared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the same in size.) Today may not be the best day to get into New Orleans’ intractable crime problem, but it’s necessary, since it explains how this week’s communications and policing vacuum so quickly created a perfect storm for the vicious lawlessness that has broken out.

During the mid-1990s, New Orleans made some progress in cutting down its murder rate from its one-time peak as the Murder Capital of America. With the help of the feds, the city weeded out the worst of its police force (including two murderers) and implemented some new policing techniques borrowed from successful cities like New York, including COMSTAT. But New Orleans—and the state judicial system—has never cemented a sustainable institutional infrastructure to build on early progress, and the murder rate had risen perceptibly again.

New Orleans, first off, doesn’t have the middle-class or affluent tax base to afford the professional police or prosecution force it needs—crime has created a vicious cycle, pushing out taxpayers who fund the police. Nor have the city and state cemented the command-and-control direction of financial and human resources that police, detectives, and prosecutors need to do their jobs.

In New York, the mayor, police, and prosecutors know that taking one killer off the streets means preventing more killings, because a murderer frequently murders again. In New Orleans, killers and other violent criminals remain free, because in many cases, they aren’t arrested or tried; conviction rates remain abysmal. The lawlessness these criminals create in pockets of the city breeds more killers and more lawlessness. Witnesses and crime victims in the inner city fear to come forward: they know that even if a criminal winds up arrested, his associates will be free to intimidate them.

On a normal day, those who make up New Orleans’ dangerous criminal class—yes, likely the same African-Americans we see looting now—terrorize their own communities. Once in a while, a spectacular crime makes headlines—the shooting death of a tourist just outside the French Quarter, or the rape and murder of a Tulane student. But day in and day out, New Orleans’ black criminal class victimizes other blacks. Churches put up billboards in the worst neighborhoods that plead: “Thou shalt not kill.” The inner-city buses shuttle what look like hundreds of war veterans around the city—young black men, many of them innocent victims, paralyzed in wheelchairs.

This week, this entrenched criminal class has freely roamed the streets—and terrorized everyone. On Monday, New Orleans still had food and water stocked in stores across the city, but young looters began sacking stores, trashing the needed food and stealing TVs, DVDs, and other equipment. If the uncoordinated, understaffed New Orleans police had even a prayer of keeping order, it was Monday. By Tuesday, the looters had armed themselves with ample weapons supplies available in stores all across the city; by Wednesday, the armed gangs, out of food and water like everyone else, were not only viciously dangerous but desperate, hungry, and thirsty.

But while the looters have reportedly killed police offers and have shot at rescue workers, they’re mainly victimizing, as usual, other poor blacks. The vicious looters aren’t the face of New Orleans’ poor blacks. Their victims are: the thousands of New Orleanians who made their way to shelter before the storm, and who rescued others and brought them to shelter during and after the storm—but who now cannot get the help they desperately need.

This week’s looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute) was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the storm, but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.

Was this week’s looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans’ officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims—according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.

Armed marauders have now taken over every dry area of a deluged city. They’ve hampered rescue efforts: without wanton looting, there was at least a chance that individual police officers could have distributed food in stores to those who needed it most. And they’ve likely hampered rebuilding efforts down the road: they’ve smashed much of intact Uptown and the French Quarter, which will surely be a pyschological barrier for those who knew that the storm didn’t destroy their homes and their livelihoods—fellow citizens did.

Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco lost whatever fragile authority they ever had over New Orleans early Monday, as the waters still rose. The federal government was unacceptably slow at assessing a rapidly deteriorating situation. Now, no civil authorities can re-assert order in New Orleans. The city must be forcefully demilitarized, even as innocent victims literally starve. What has happened over the past week is an embarrassment to New Orleans—and to America."

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_09_01_05ng.html

Live links in this article to other articles.

"Breaks in the Levee Logic

By Duane D. Freese

But it, too, got caught up in the drumbeat about the levees, arguing:  "[P]eople living along the Gulf Coast have grown up hearing about what could happen if the 'big one' hit the region. Yet the levees weren't raised or strengthened sufficiently to prevent flooding. Initial plans for evacuating the city and ensuring civil order were haphazard at best."

Indeed, if editorial writers had a comment to make it was to say something about the levees.

And why not? The levees broke, didn't they? That's what helped mess up the rescue effort, didn't it? And there were cuts in federal help, weren't there?

The answers to all these questions are yes. But, the fact is, they miss an important point, which The New York Times editorialists might have discovered had they read their own news storyby Andrew Revkin and Christopher Drew. The reporters quoted Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, about how surprising it was that the break in the levee was "a section that was just upgraded."

Worse for the editorial writers were statements by the chief engineer of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Lt. Gen Carl Strock: "I don't see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case. Had this project been fully complete, it is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm that the flooding of the business district and the French Quarter would have still taken place."

The reason: the funding would only have completed an upgrade of the levees to a protect against a level 3 hurricane. Katrina was a level 4 plus.

And the reasons for this goes back decades.

Since the 1930s, when levee building began in earnest, Louisiana has lost a million acres of its coastal wetlands, and faces the loss of another 640,000 additional acres -- an area the size of Rhode Island -- by 2050.

A new study based on satellite measurement released in May found that the wetlands area was sinking at a half-inch to two-inches a year as of 1995, or up to more than a 1.5 feet a decade.

"If subsidence continues and/or sea level rises and human action fails to take place, the entire coast will be inundated," Roy Dokka of the Louisiana Spatial Reference Center at Louisiana State University and an author of the study noted in July.

And he went on in a Times-Picayune piece that columnist Bunch apparently failed to examine:

"The current plans to save the coast are focused on fixing wetlands, which is incredibly important, but the problem is that subsidence is affecting the entire coast. We need to combine those plans with regional hurricane levees and sand shoals. We have to find some way to protect the people and valuable infrastructure we have on the coast."

This echoes a point that was raised by the White House Office of Management and Budget in a review of the Corps of Engineers levee and flood work back in 2003. It noted that while the Corps managed projects that reduced flood damage to specific areas, annual flood damages to the nation were increasing. As such, it wanted the Corps -- though well-managed -- to broaden its approach by coordinating with federal flood mitigation efforts -- to be "more pro-active in preventing flood risks rather than reacting to them."

The regional Corps head so often quoted by the media himself said in 2003 that a project to protect the city from a category 4 or 5 storm would take 30 years to complete, with the feasibility study alone costing $8 million and taking six years to complete. At the time he opined, "Hopefully we won't have a major storm before then."

As for the $14 billion plan called Coastal 2050 for wetlands restoration that Louisiana politicians have been pushing for the last two years for the federal government to provide a stream of funds -- up to 65% of the cost -- some experts say it was only a stop-gap.

"We are not going to stop marsh loss. Subsidence is too dominant," James Coleman, a professor of coastal studies at Louisiana State University, told the Times Picayune a few years ago. Coastal restoration "is a temporary fix in terms of geological time. You will see results of massive coastal restorations in our lifetime, but in the long run they are also going to go."

Indeed, those interested in getting a taste of the complexity of New Orleans situation, a good place to start is to read "The Creeping Storm" by Greg Brouer in the June 2003 Civil Engineering Magazine:

"During the past 40 years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a barrier around the low-lying city of New Orleans to protect it from hurricanes. But is the system high enough? And can any defense ultimately protect a city that is perpetually sinking -- in some areas at a rate of half an inch (editor's note: Or up to 2 inches) per year?"

We know the answer to the first question now -- obviously not. The answer to the second question will require more investigation. It would be nice if some editorial writers would perform a little more. Snap judgments in this situation are worse than no judgment at all."

http://www.techcentralstation.com/090205F.html

On the bright side illegals and drug dealers will be paying taxes on taxible purchases they make.  Gets rid of a whole underground non-tax paying entity. 

Food and medicine will be exempt. 

Monthly rebates based upon their taxible purchases and will end up with more money than they now have.   

It's a win/win situation for everyone, also will encourage businesses and manufacturers to locate in the US because they are not hobbled with our bureaucratic red tape tax code as they are now.

You might want to see if your personal information can be searched.

Since the link to their website email didn't work for me sent them a regular email requesting removal at   info@zabasearch.com<info@zabasearch.com>  so hope after about 10-12 more emails my information will be expunged.

Beginning this month (May '05) a new database will  be available to the general public, free of charge,  that displays your personal information (names,  addresses, phone numbers, birth dates). The database  is found at www.zabasearch.com. 

THEIR CANNED REPLY:

"From Chimps to Einstein

by Alex Escobar

Chimps are pretty intelligent creatures. They, like humans, learn through trial and error. If a chimp jumps on a limb that is too thin to support its weight, it will learn to use thicker limbs. Chimps also use tools and seem to have a rudimentary form of self-awareness that humans acquire only after they reach the age of two.1  Now imagine for a moment that you were a chimp. You might suppose that you understood your environment pretty well. In fact, you might think of yourself as a real mover and a shaker since you knew exactly who to groom to make things happen within your chimp group. The evidence indicates you would be right to be proud of yourself since chimps understand their environment so well that they have survived for millions of years in their native forests.

Yet we humans know, because of our larger brains, that there is much that chimps do not understand. To begin with, it is unlikely chimps know anything about our planet orbiting around the sun, or for that matter, that they are on a planet (our ancestors only figured this out recently). Our larger, more advanced brains allow humans to fathom the universe at a deeper level.

But do we have the capacity to understand everything? The question we need to ask is, given the complexity of the universe, are we as humans all that much different in our degree of comprehension when compared to chimps? Are we so much more advanced past our primate relatives that we should expect the whole universe should be understandable? You may very well see the hubris in this assumption.

Contrary to the belief in our omnipotent intelligence let me suggest that we may not be able to easily understand the universe in some fundamental ways. By this, I don't just mean there are parts of the universe we don't presently understand but will eventually come to fully understand. What I am saying is there are fundamental properties of the cosmos that our type of intelligence may find very hard to grasp or comprehend.

A clear example of this is thinking in higher dimensions. Our minds have evolved to think in terms of three dimensions. As such it is easy for us to think in three or less dimensions, but it is almost impossible for us to think in four dimensions. Our inability to understand higher dimensions, however, does not mean they do not exist in the same way that the chimpanzee's inability to contemplate the solar system does not mean the sun and planets do not exist.

The year 2005 marks the centennial of the publication of Einstein's first five major papers in physics. These papers signaled the beginning of a whole new paradigm or way of thinking about the universe. In 1916, Einstein introduced us to the concept of the space-time continuum in which he envisioned reality as a four-dimensional space-time that included time as the fourth dimension. By treating time as a fourth dimension, he was able to derive a series of equations that led to the general theory of relativity. The general theory of relativity allowed Einstein to make several predictions that have been borne out by experimentation. One of the predictions that arises from this theory is that mass warps space-time. Indeed, this is given as the explanation for gravity since planetary motions are now understood as the straightest pathway through the space-time curved by the sun.

All of this is extremely fascinating, in large part because this understanding is so different from our normal, everyday experience. In fact, I believe it is so different from our common mindset that the truly revolutionary aspects of Einstein's ideas have been sitting in front of us for close to a hundred years, and few have fully embraced them.

You see, Einstein treated time in his equations as he did the three space dimensions. In other words, in Einstein's equations, the dimension of time is very similar to the three space dimensions with which we are familiar.

What do we know of space dimensions? Well, we know that space dimensions exist right now in their entirety. It's not like one part of space was there yesterday, and today another part exists and then tomorrow another part will come into existence. Space dimensions exist as a whole all the time. On the other hand, time (the fourth dimension) is treated exactly like the description given above. Only part of this dimension exists, and that part is always now.

In 1916 Einstein threw the door wide open for us, but in the past century, few if any have stepped through. The big secret is that time is the fourth dimension - not some imaginary dimension, but a dimension that is just as real as the other space dimensions.2 Time does not exist in bits and pieces but rather in its entirety. What this means is that past, present, and future are not separate but parts of a whole that is continuous like any space dimension. We humans are not built to understand four dimensions, and this is why it has taken so long to come to this realization. We can only 'see' three of the four dimensions of the space-time continuum, which is why we understand space-time the way we do. Perhaps if we had a more advanced form of intelligence, it would be easy to comprehend this. Like the chimps, we are also limited in our capacity to understand nature.

Many of the eastern meditative schools hold that this is true. Here we have a group of 'scientists' that have been studying the universe using their minds as the instrument of choice. These studies indicate there is a timeless state in the universe that is accessible through meditation. Accessing this state is often described as expanding awareness, and this follows directly from time being the fourth dimension. In the same way moving from two to three dimensions would seem expansive, moving from our known three to the more inclusive four would also seem liberating.

If it is true that we exist in four-dimensional space-time, it must also be true that we are four-dimensional space-time beings. This means the past you is attached to the present you and all of the future you. You are much more than you perceive yourself to be. Although this may all seem odd, consider that our human intuition is exactly this. If your present is attached to your future, then you should be able to access information from your future-self.

There are other implications of this reasoning. To start, let us focus in on one atom. What would an atom look like if we could see an atom throughout space-time? If we consider the atom to be like a very small marble, the marble would turn into a very long thread. In physics, these types of lines are called world lines. The line would weave its way through stars, interstellar dust, planets, rocks, the ocean, a fish and then perhaps into you. Of course the line would then continue out of you and back into the earth and so on. The line would extend from close to the beginning of the universe to the end, one part of space to a vastly different part.

Now imagine all of the atoms in the universe. That's too much! All of a sudden, space-time becomes a massive jumble of spaghetti. Lines would intertwine and wrap themselves around each other. This spaghetti would be so dense that what we consider to be empty space would appear to be full of strings.

Atoms flow through you constantly. They enter your body through the food you eat, the air you breathe and water you drink. They leave your body through your breath and the wastes you eliminate from your body. Your body in space-time would be like a knot of atom world-lines that would extend out to everything else these atoms had ever been part of or will be part of. You would be connected to everything else in the universe either directly or indirectly. So you see, when we think in four dimensions, everything is connected to everything else in one marvelously complex pattern of energy that goes far beyond our ability to conceptualize.

Once again, the eastern meditative schools provide an interpretation and inform us that we are all part of an inseparable whole. The belief is that our common human perception that we are all independent and separate from each other is an illusion. In Hinduism, this is called maya - the grand illusion caused by our categorizing minds that reflects our ignorance of the true nature of the universe. Many spiritual texts from the East indicate we are One.

As we enter the new millennium, there is so much to be hopeful for. Although there appears to be much angst and strife in our world, we are set to embark on a whole new way of being. We are situated at a nexus that will bring ideas that have been traditionally associated with western science together with eastern traditional beliefs into one overarching understanding of the cosmos.3 For this, we can in part thank our friend Albert Einstein. His insight has set the stage for a transition in thought that is as large as any that has ever taken place.

References:

1. Patterson, F.G. and Cohn, R.H. Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives, eds. Parker, S.T., Mitchell, R.W. and Boccia, M.L., Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, pp 254-2722.

2. Davies, P. 'That Mysterious Flow' Scientific American, September 2002, vol. 287, p 40-47

3. Escobar, A. Mythology for the New World: A Synthesis of Science and Religion, Lincoln: IUniverse, 2005

Alex Escobar, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer at Emory University and has recently published his book Mythology for the New World."

http://www.aquarius-atlanta.com/june05/chimp.shtml