Time to get a gun? - After reading shocking stories of looting around New Orleans, I've been wondering what I would do in the event of utter chaos. I mean, what could stop these people from looting nursing homes and children's hospitals? Only mortal threat, I fear.
Update – What the hell is wrong with these people? Shots fired at military helicopter assisting evacuation of Superdome.
13 comments:
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The disruption of public services or health care must not be tolerated, and any attempts to do so should be met with as much force as can be mustered.
Blowing some guy's head off for walking out of a store with a TV: not good.
Blasting some cretin trying to up-end a nursing home: yes, please.
An armed society is a polite society :-)
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It's not hard to learn how to shoot safely - frankly, it's easier than learning how to drive, and safer, too.
Last year, the Bush administration cut New Orleans' levee construction and maintenance budget from $36.5 million to $10.4 million. But that sort of penny-wise decision will happen, when you've got an optional "off-budget expense" eating up $5.8 billion per month. Not to mention the administration's proven skill in long-range planning.
A joint study by environmental groups last year concluded that the Bush administration's reversal of wetlands protection policies left New Orleans vulnerable to this precise devastation by even a Category 2 or 3 hurricane. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality called that conclusion "highly questionable," adding, "Everybody loves what we're doing."
Better give that man a Presidential Medal of Freedom...
But no one could ever have foreseen that terrorists would one day use commercial airplanes as weapo... er, strike that. No one could ever have foreseen this terrible, totally unpredictable tragedy. Our prayers are with those families today.
Ding! Check your watches... how long did it take before some troll made a natural disaster into a Bush-bashing issue?
If only that budget hadn't been cut. Then Katrina would have swerved off her course and New Orleans would have been spared... damn that Bush! He saved $26.1 million but single-handedly wiped out the gulf coast.
[/whatever]
"I find myself wishing that all those who just couldn't wait to get up on their political hobbyhorse and ride to glory over the corpses of Katrina's victims would take a minute to sit down in a quiet, soothing place with a refreshing beverage, take off their shoes and socks, wiggle their toes a little, and then carefully cram those socks into their mouths before anything else escapes."
http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005434.html
From the Chicago Tribune: "In a telephone interview with reporters, corps officials said that although portions of the flood-protection levees remain incomplete, the levees near Lake Pontchartrain that gave way--inundating much of the city--were completed and in good condition before the hurricane."
Good instincts though. Classy. Most people might have waited a couple of days, maybe until the corpses were cleared away, before resuming the "Chimpy Bushitler" line, but not you.
Next time, don't forget to mention Kyoto and "The Day after Tomorrow." Great movie.
Given the performance of your boy this week, it's not the most opportune time to hammer anyone for bad timing. As more and more wacko "Chimpy Bushitler" voices like Lou Dobbs and the Wall Street Journal chime in on the administration's ineptitude, your childish response will be harder for you to maintain.
Alas, it was all a "natural" disaster. It was Katrina who ignored the science. It was Katrina who leased the wetlands to business interests from 2001-2005, even while being told that doing so compromised the city's safety. It was Katrina who read the government report citing this precise circumstance as one of the 3 likeliest catastrophes in America, and it was Katrina who responded by cutting the relevant budgets. It was President Katrina who went on television and said "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." And though there are thousands of scientists and bureaucrats whose entire working lives have been spent predicting this scenario, or being professionally charged to deal quickly with its aftermath, it's "unclassy" to say so. Let's wait a year, and then soberly and tastefully intone "mistakes were made," like 9/11.
It's only the lunatic left who would dast think otherwise, or be so hateful as to speak about it "before the corpses were cleared away." We owe it to those corpses to be quiet, except to parrot "progress" and "hard work" and "New Orleans will rise again." The reason we pay taxes is so that our leaders can be forever reactive. After all, this is the last hurricane that will ever strike the area.
To expect accountability from a government that only had a week's notice is MoveOn.org raving. There's simply nothing that should have been done. As the poster above observes, "Whatever." All we can do is wait until a plane is taken out of service in Iraq, and then use it to drop our prayers and good wishes on the fine folks of Louisiana.
"...the levees near Lake Pontchartrain that gave way--inundating much of the city--were completed and in good condition before the hurricane."
Clap, clap, clap! Wonderful!
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N02521178.htm
Reuters: Models predicted New Orleans disaster, experts say
Virtually everything that has happened in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck was predicted by experts and in computer models, so emergency management specialists wonder why authorities were so unprepared.
"The scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was well anticipated, predicted and drilled around," said Clare Rubin, an emergency management consultant who also teaches at the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University.
Computer models developed at Louisiana State University and other institutions made detailed projections of what would happen if water flowed over the levees protecting the city or if they failed.
In July 2004, more than 40 federal, state, local and volunteer organizations practiced this very scenario in a five-day simulation code-named "Hurricane Pam," where they had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed over half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents.
At the end of the exercise Ron Castleman, regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared: "We made great progress this week in our preparedness efforts.
"Disaster response teams developed action plans in critical areas such as search and rescue, medical care, sheltering, temporary housing, school restoration and debris management. These plans are essential for quick response to a hurricane but will also help in other emergencies," he said.
In light of that, said disaster expert Bill Waugh of Georgia State University, "It's inexplicable how unprepared for the flooding they were." He said a slow decline over several years in funding for emergency management was partly to blame.
In comments on Thursday, President George W. Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
But Louisiana State University engineer Joseph Suhayda and others have warned for years that defenses could fail. In 2002, the New Orleans Times Picayune published a five-part series on "The Big One" examining what might happen if they did.
SCENARIO LAID OUT
It predicted that 200,000 people or more would be unwilling or unable to heed evacuation orders and thousands would die, that people would be housed in the Superdome, that aid workers would find it difficult to gain access to the city as roads became impassable, as well as many other of the consequences that actually unfolded after Katrina hit this week.
Craig Marks who runs Blue Horizons Consulting, an emergency management training company in North Carolina, said the authorities had mishandled the evacuation, neglecting to help those without transportation to leave the city.
"They could have packed people on trains or buses and gotten them out before the hurricane struck. They had enough time and access to federal funds. And now, we find we do not have a proper emergency communications infrastructure so aid workers get out into the field and they can't talk to one another," he said.
Most of those trapped by the floods in the city of some 500,000 people are the poor who had little chance to leave.
Ernest Sternberg, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo, said law enforcement agencies were often more eager to invest in high tech "toys" than basic communications.
"It's well known that communications go down in disasters but people on the frontlines still don't invest in them. A lot of the investments that have been made in homeland security have been misspent," he said.
Several experts also believe the decision to make FEMA a part of the Department of Homeland Security, created after the September 11, 2001 attacks, was a major mistake. Rubin said FEMA functioned well in the 1990s as a small, independent agency.
"Under DHS, it was downgraded, buried in a couple of layers of bureaucracy, and terrorism prevention got all the attention and most of the funds," she said.
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