Live from Austin!

Democratic Presidential hopeful John Edwards has spoken eloquently about the plight of the poor in America, saying that “poverty is the great moral issue of our century.” In his 2004 speech to the DNC, he said:

John Kerry and I believe that we shouldn’t have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck.

As the official “John Edwards ‘08 Blog” put it recently:

Income inequality means more than 40 million people lacking health insurance or millions more having insufficient health insurance that does not cover preventive care. The gap between the income or wealth of those with the highest ammount (sic) of money in a society and those with the lowest can be a source of disease in itself.

[...] For instance, one study showed that a young man living in Bangladesh where poverty was severe but fairly uniform had a higher life expectancy than a young man living in Harlem, in the USA, a land where income disparity is the worst of any of the so called first world nations.

In the mean time, John Edwards has just purchased a 28,000 square foot mansion on an estate outside Chapel Hill NC, having sold his previous mansion for $5.2 million. The new Edwards estate is expected to be valued at over $6 million.

The main house itself is a mere 10,000 square feet or so. The rest of the floor space is in the recreation room—or rather, the 15,600 square foot recreation building. I can already picture Christmas with the Edwards family; perhaps the kids will play charades on one of the two stages, while John practices his speeches from the other. If they have guests for Christmas and run short of space, the master bedroom is 600 square feet, so they’ll always be able to put 10 extra king size double beds in there.

Of course, last month when John Edwards announced his intention to run for President, he didn’t do it from his home. No, he went to New Orleans, and helped a few poor people renovate a house that is probably smaller than the roofed walkway connecting the two sections of his own humble abode.

For some unaccountable reason there has been a little carping from the peanut gallery. People seem to think that the Edwards lifestyle is a little out of keeping from someone who says he’s so upset by income inequality. Me, I have no doubt that John Edwards cares deeply about the plight of the poor, and I’m sure he’ll be employing a dozen or so to sanitize his toilets, vacuum his rugs, clean his pool, and polish his basketball court. And his squash court. And his four storey observation tower.

Once again, reality is all too eerily reminiscent of a story from The Onion.

Ironic quote:

You are sending me direct contact information that is sensitive. I protect your privacy in the following ways: (1) I will never sell, rent, or give away your address to any outside party, ever; (2) I will never send you any unrequested e-mail, besides e-mail in the regular course of business; and (3) Your information is stored behind network address translation and a software firewall.

That’s Jason Fortuny’s privacy policy, as stated on his web site before his prank.

At least one marriage has been ruined by the prank. I’m not going to name or link to the victim, for obvious reasons. Again, if you really want to know, read Fortuny’s web pages; he seems delighted, as it turns out it was someone who had thrown him out of an online community for previous anti-social behavior.

Lots of people seem to be focusing on a few of the victims who were married and cheating on their wives, like that justifies humiliating all the others.

Meanwhile, Fortuny has started scrubbing his contact details from his web site, removing references to past clients and employers, and deleting his résumé from the web. Perhaps he’s worked out that a reputation for hoaxing people and posting private e-mail to the web isn’t the best career move for a system administrator.

It also seems to me that Fortuny’s posting of sexually explicit photographs on the web places him squarely under 18 USC 2257 record-keeping requirements. Clearly he hasn’t complied with the law and obtained 100+ model release forms, and that could result in up to 5 years of jail time if the authorities choose to make an example of him.

I’ll end with another nice quote from his LiveJournal:

“I’m just going to quickly and quietly say that the refugees in New Orleans are human trash who don’t deserve to live.”

—Jason Fortuny

It’s nice to know the TrollJournal abuse team are so relaxed about the whole thing. Publishing public information may be grounds for dismissal, but linking to illegally published private information from your journal is just fine, apparently. If only I’d known, eh?

Before anyone else calls to ask if we’re going to drown…I don’t think so. The hurricane is currently projected to head up the east edge of Texas. It has weakened down to category 4 again, and Austin is just outside the edge of its projected path.

So, we’ll get some strong winds and thunder and lightning and a load of rain, but that should be about it. We’re on a hill, well above the flood plain around the river.

Meanwhile in Houston, things are grim. It looks like an attempted mass exodus; people have seen dead bodies floating in the water, and don’t want their family to end up like that. An eyewitness reports:

Local news stations report that TXDOT (Texas Department of Transportation) is opening inbound lanes to outbound traffic on I-45 North now, and Highway 290 West and I-10 West later. Traffic is now moving at a crawl when it moves at all and some people have run out of gas after having been on the road for 12 to 24 hours. There is now almost no gas left anywhere in the city.

So if you were asking why all those stupid people in New Orleans didn’t evacuate, you can definitely now STFU.

There’s been some mild panic in Austin too. Clearly watching the Federal Government leave New Orleans to drown has freaked people out. The local grocery stores have had a run on bread and bottled water.

An article on Slate paints a compelling picture of what a dreadful place New Orleans actually was, by many metrics, and asks whether we should even try to rebuild it.

Meanwhile, another article explains why it’s essential to have a port city located where New Orleans was.

Oh, and as if things weren’t bad enough, watch out for escaped plague-infected monkeys.

Let’s enjoy a few compassionate thoughts from the right-wing libertarians. First, Becky Akers, columnist for Lew Rockwell of the Center for Libertarian Studies:

The day after the hurricane, Louisiana’s Governor Kathleen Blanco ordered New Orleans evacuated—again. Yep, folks facing a flood several fathoms deep without electricity, potable water, or food are too stupid to leave on their own. Good thing the Nanny Kate tells them what to do. [...]

Nanny’s sending buses, boats and helicopters after all the silly little citizens who didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. Whatever happened to bunking in with friends and families? I’ve experienced several hurricanes; on hearing that an especially dangerous one was heading my way, my first thought would be: “Time to visit Dad.”

Oh yes, those silly poor people. Why didn’t they just hop in the SUV and spend the weekend with daddy in the Hamptons?

General Ralph Lupin of the National Guard whined, “We’re doing everything we can to keep these people comfortable. We’re doing our best. It’s not getting any better, but we’re trying not to let it get any worse.” Alas, running hotels and restaurants isn’t easy, though entrepreneurs make it look that way every day. Their skills provide clean beds and rooms, private baths, delicious meals ? all the miracles that Leviathan desperately longs to reproduce. And can’t. Nor ever will.

Yes, those silly poor people. They should have just checked in to one of New Orleans’ many fine hotels, all of which are still open through the miracle of private enterprise.

Over to Justin Darr at Alan Keyes’ RenewAmerica site:

The reality is that the poor residents of the New Orleans could have evacuated the flood zone on a public bus before the hurricane for about the cost of a bottle of water. The total disabled population of New Orleans who might not have been able to evacuate is estimated at around 55,000 residents. So, the question must be asked why up to half a million people did not evacuate the city. The sad answer is that many of these residents remained because they where waiting for the government to aid them.

Check out NASA’s before and after photos and note the scale of the destruction. The flooded areas are a good 40-50km across. I guess that seems plausibly like a $2 bus ride if you’re a wealthy white libertarian who’s never ridden the bus in his damn life.

In a culture where all the comforts of life have been provided to people as entitlements, their sudden absence has unleashed a violent backlash against the society these people feel has let them down. In other words, if some people do not get what they feel they are entitled to get, then something unfair must have happened, so now they have the right to go out and take it.

Yes, damn those looters for not obeying the god-given laws of the free market. Don’t they know that price gouging is good and that nobody deserves food or shelter unless they can pay for it at the prevailing rate?

Meanwhile at the Mises Institute, no theory is too crackpot for institute president Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr:

After evacuations, the looting began and created a despicable sight of criminal gangs stealing everything in sight as the police looked on (when they weren’t joining in). Now, this scene offers its own lessons. Why doesn’t looting and rampant criminality occur every day? The police are always there and so are the hoodlums and the criminals. What was missing that made the looting rampage possible was the bourgeoisie, that had either left by choice or had been kicked out. It is they who keep the peace. And had any stayed around to protect their property, we don’t even have to speculate what the police would have done: Arrest them!

Yes, when the wealthy white people lived in the city, everything was good. After they left, there was rioting and disorder. Therefore post hoc ergo propter hoc it’s the wealthy white people who actually preserve law and order in society, not the police. OK, there was that weather thing, but no, that couldn’t be anything to do with it, could it?

Over at The “Intellectual” Activist, Robert Tracinski spews out the familiar “blame the victims and rescuers” spin:

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling.

Oh, what a surprise, they get their information from FOX News.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape?

[...]

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.

Yes, anyone who has to fall back on welfare is a vicious wolf just waiting for the chance to descend into raping and pillaging.

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.

So, what explains the moral ugliness of all these right-wing libertarians?

According to The Guardian, Texas has taken in more than 230,000 refugees from New Orleans. That’s more than every other state added together; Austin alone is planning to take in more refugees than Colorado. (It’s a shame the Coliseum is half demolished.)

The Red Cross say they already have more volunteers in Austin than they can use, though the Capitol Area Food Bank is still looking for assistance.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Bush played the guitar while New Orleans drowned. And now this:

The good news is—and it’s hard for some to see it now—that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house—he’s lost his entire house— there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.

—George W. Bush, 2005-09-02

I wonder what proportion of the newly homeless poor black population of New Orleans had comprehensive home insurance? The astonishing thing isn’t that Bush would say something so tactless and insensitive; it’s that his PR minders would allow it through into an official White House news release.

There’s more good news for Bush and his buddies though. Guess who the government’s hired for the storm cleanup? Could it be Halliburton? Of course it could.

Oh, and how about using Katrina as an excuse to test some experimental sonic weapons on unruly crowds? Sorted!

In a surprising turn of events, however, even FOX News don’t seem to think they can spin this one as positive for Bush.

You’ve all seen that “looter” is an irregular verb for white people in the media: “I am commandeering essential supplies, you are finding essential goods, they are looting”. You’ve also all seen the compassionate Conservatives criticizing people for not evacuating. Here’s something new: calling people looters for stealing an abandoned bus in order to evacuate.

Ask yourself this: If I were in New Orleans wading through sewage-filled water and dodging bullets, if I’d waited days to be evacuated by the authorities but seen no action on their part, would I steal a bus to survive?

Speaking personally, hell yeah. I’d steal anything up to and including an army tank in order to get myself and my friends and family to safety. Not that I’ve ever driven a tank, of course; but I’m sure I’d learn pretty quickly with that kind of motivation. And this guy packed the bus with complete strangers and drove them non-stop to Houston.

The news media call it an “extreme act of looting”. I call it taking initiative and showing compassion for your fellow man.

Actually, maybe I should take some tank-driving lessons in Dallas. You never know when something like that will come in handy.

2005-09-04: Pat Robertson may have had the good sense to take his meds last week, but inevitably some Christians are seeing the New Orleans disaster as proof of the existence of God. Because, you know, if it wasn’t for God, things would have been worse:

Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, also sees God’s mercy in the aftermath of Katrina — but in a different way. Shanks says the hurricane has wiped out much of the rampant sin common to the city.

The pastor explains that for years he has warned people that unless Christians in New Orleans took a strong stand against such things as local abortion clinics, the yearly Mardi Gras celebrations, and the annual event known as “Southern Decadence” — an annual six-day “gay pride” event scheduled to be hosted by the city this week — God’s judgment would be felt.

New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion — it’s free of all of those things now,” Shanks says. “God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there — and now we’re going to start over again.”

—Agape Press (sic) Christian News

Update 2005-09-18: Dateline Hollywood have a satirical item featuring Pat Robertson announcing that Hurrican Katrina was because Ellen Degeneres was chosen to host The Emmy Awards, and that she may have been to blame for 9/11 as well.

(Bar all homosexuals and bisexuals from taking part in the Emmy awards? That would thin the herd a bit…)

So it’s a total disaster in New Orleans. Three levees are breached, one of them has a hole over 150 meters across. 80% of the city is under water up to 6 meters deep. The entire city is without electrical power or water supply. It’s estimated that it will be 9–12 weeks before they can even get rid of the water, much less get the city habitable. Interstate 10 is broken chunks of floating concrete; there’s no route into the city for trucks and other major vehicles. Mississippi reports at least 110 dead; Louisiana hasn’t even begun counting—but there are bodies floating in the water-and-sewage filled streets. It’s estimated that up to 100,000 people were unable or unwilling to leave the city. The death toll could be in the tens of thousands by the time it’s all over. The official message is simple: everyone must leave New Orleans.

The Red Cross has around 40,000 people in emergency shelters. Another 25,000 are going to be sleeping in the Houston Astrodome. They won’t be going home any time soon, as once the water is drained from the streets every building will have to be checked for structural soundness and shored up; every sewer line will need to be inspected. Then, of course, there will be the electrical infrastructure to replace, and the leaking gas lines to fix. In the mean time, some of the people left alive in the city are looting. Police are finding it hard to stop them, what with meters-high piles of debris that they have to cut through with chainsaws even to be able to patrol on foot.

So the residents of New Orleans who evacuated might get to go home to a ruined shell of a home with no electricity, by Christmas if they’re lucky. But right now, the water’s still rising… the Army engineers who were trying to repair the levees have been forced to abandon the city. The National Guard is facing the problem that most of its members were shipped out to Iraq to make up for low troop numbers, so the city is basically lawless at this point.

The New Orleans aquarium is gone; sealions are wandering the empty space where it used to be. The President’s Casino is missing too. The public library is paper maché. Boats weren’t safe either, with an 8 meter wall of water hitting the coast.

It’s not just New Orleans either. The BBC have a photograph of an oil rig that was smashed into the Cochrane Bridge in Mobile, Alabama. Most of Mobile is apparently without electricity too. Biloxi, Mississippi is without electricity, water and sewerage.

Damage estimates so far are around $25 billion, it’ll probably be the worst hit for the insurance industry ever. Since the worsening storms over the last few years had already brought many insurance companies close to bankruptcy, I imagine a few will collapse this year.

2004’s hurricane season was close to the worst ever. This year’s hurricane season is only half over and has already surpassed it. It appears that the severity of hurricanes may be directly linked to global warming, while the frequency of them is rising with the natural periodic rise in ocean surface temperature. Combine the two and you have a deadly combination. Katrina was more than 300 km across, and meteorologists say things could have been much worse. If you think the Kyoto protocol would harm the US economy, that’s nothing compared to what a decade of steadily-worsening hurricanes will do to it.

Now let’s set the wayback machine to February 2005:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has identified millions of dollars in flood and hurricane protection projects in the New Orleans district.

Chances are, though, most projects will not be funded in the president’s 2006 fiscal year budget to be released today.

In general, funding for construction has been on a downward trend for the past several years, said Marcia Demma, chief of the New Orleans Corps’ programs management branch.

In 2001, the New Orleans district spent $147 million on construction projects. When fiscal year 2005 wraps up Sept. 30, the Corps expects to have spent $82 million, a 44.2 percent reduction from 2001 expenditures.

Of course, all the levee construction in the world wouldn’t have saved New Orleans from this disaster—but it might have reduced the death toll and damage a bit. But hey, at least we all got our wartime tax cuts, right?

Will this tragedy be enough to silence the people who say that everything is OK, that global warming is a myth, that it’s a good idea to send the National Guard to Iraq, that we should keep cutting spending on infrastructure and emergency planning so we can finance a war and still have tax cuts?

I’m betting it won’t. They’ll keep shrieking their denails, and ultimately they’ll get away with it because their beliefs are so much more palatable than the unpleasant reality. I predict that the Climate Change Science Program and NASA’s studies of climate change will still get their budget cut next year. Why even study whether global warming might be causing these disasters, when you can just choose to believe it isn’t?

And remember, this is not a partisan issue. Democrats supported the major budget cuts for the US Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans, and the cancellation of a study into what would happen if a hurricane hit the city. Democrats voted for the war in Iraq. When the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto protocol on the grounds that it would result in economic harm to US industry and would exclude some nations (Senate Resolution 98 in 1997), those voting included John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.

New Orleans in particular is a problem people have known about for a long time. It was just waiting to happen, like the big earthquake in San Francisco, or Mount Rainier showering Seattle with ash and red hot debris. The big question in my mind is whether people will learn, or whether they’ll carry on as before and build a New New Orleans right where the last one was. Either way, I never got to see New Orleans, and now I never will.