Account from the Superdome

Two friends of mine went to New Orleans last weekend, and refused to listen when told to evacuate. They decided to stick it out in their French Quarter hotel. During the actual storm, their window blew out, but the hotel stayed solid. Monday, the two decided to leave and seek shelter. They walked to I-10, where hundreds were already standing and waiting. Between them and the Superdome was rising water, but the situation on the road looked bad, so they trekked out through the water to the Dome.

While walking and swimming through various levels of water, they encountered a dead baby floating away. The water smelled like gasoline and grime. When they made it to the Superdome, armed guards simply asked them to drop any weapons into a box (filled with guns, they noted) and let them pass. At this point the Superdome was still relatively clean, and they changed clothing in the bathroom and tossed out their soiled wet clothes.

Quickly, they realized things were going to get bad. Looters broke into the restaurants and vending outlets, bringing out liquor bottles and cases of beer. They were offered beer at $1 per can. Soon, fighting broke out, and people were left bleeding or dead in the corridors. No one came to help the sick or dead.

Hoping to find safety, they set out to find a place to hide. A trash can held the corpse of a 4 and a half year old girl. The mourners nearby said she had been raped and killed. A storage unit looked promising, and the duo hid out for several hours listening to the chaos beyond. Deciding that they would get mauled if found hiding, they left the unit and went down to the field, where they saw Army and National Guard troops. The Army told them they couldn’t hang around for safety, so they went to where the National Guard was forming a ring. The Guardsmen told them they could hang around the perimeter if they wanted, so they sat about 10 feet away from where two Guards were posting entrance to their circle. At some point after, a man came out of the flooded areas of the Dome with a pipe. He hit one of the Guards, a woman, on the head. He then shot the other guard in the leg (origin of gun unknown). The female Guard ran screaming away. The perpetrator ran back to the water. He was found with just his nose above the surface, and locked up.

While all this was taking place, the Superdome became increasingly dirty and the people panicked.

They watched two women beat a man to death after he tried to grab one of their daughter’s, presumably to rape. Before his cell phone battery died, he text-messaged me how scared he was, and that he didn’t think he would make it out.

As the bathrooms became disgusting and were quite unsafe, my friends stopped eating and only drank the available grape juice, so as to not need to use the restrooms. They urinated in bottles. One friend began vomiting by Wednesday on this diet. When they were finally told to go outside to line up for bus convoys, they thought relief was in sight. Hardly. The masses stampeded, crushing at least three people that they saw. They held back, staying away from the fray. A Guardsman told them that 53 people had died over the previous night (Tues/Weds), and my friends think most were murders. A morgue tent was set up in the middle of the Dome.

By Thursday, they decided to enter the lines leaving the complex. By then it smelled so horrid neither friend could find a word to describe the odor. They were at first glad to be on the bridge outside, but soon found themselves hot, squished, and scared. A woman behind the pair had two German Shepards that were getting violent, and had nipped at my friends. One friend finally turned around and asked her to keep her dogs away from them. She screamed, “It’s just because you hate black people!” “Uh-oh”, they thought, “we’re dead now!” Luckily, the crowd didn’t turn on them, and they were safe. After 14 hours they made it to the front of the line. The pair got separated, and one got on a bus 4 hours before the other. The last one to get a bus told me of how the bus driver gave every seat a trash bag, asking the people to use them. After arriving in Dallas Saturday morning, however, the bus was strewn with litter.

He told me of how wonderful the people of Texas were. Every time the bus stopped, volunteers gave them food and water, and a soldier even hugged him. The volunteers at the convention center were very welcoming, and my friend has now vowed that Texas is the greatest state in the nation. He was very angry at the mayor and governor of Louisiana, for their lack of preparedness for a storm that they knew was coming. Neither friend ever wants to step foot in New Orleans again.

SUBJECT: Spam Report: Mon, Mar 14 2005 – Zero Spam!

Congratulations… Our server did not detect any spam in your account today!

It seems to me that I get two spam messages on that account every day. There is no way to opt out of them, either.

This software must have been written by the sort of person for whom the metal ladders need to carry warnings like “Don’t put against high voltage killer zapper electrical wires.”

Israeli-made bullets bought by the U.S. Army to plug a shortfall should be used for training only, not to fight Muslim guerrillas in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. lawmakers told Army generals on Thursday.

Since the Army has other stockpiled ammunition, “by no means, under any circumstances should a round (from Israel) be utilized,” said Rep. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, the top Democrat on a House of Representatives Armed Services subcommittee with jurisdiction over land forces.

[ ... ]

Although the Army should not have to worry about “political correctness,” Abercrombie was making a valid point about the propaganda pitfalls of using Israeli rounds in the U.S.-declared war on terror, said Rep. Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the subcommittee on tactical air and land forces.

“There’s a sensitivity that I think all of us recognize,” Weldon told the Army witnesses, including Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, who led the U.S. Third Infantry Division that captured Baghdad in April 2003.

I once had lunch with a mercenary who had found Muslims in Africa. His group always greased their bullets with pigfat. Sounds fine to me. If they’re worth killing, they’re worth offending.

Hat Tip to Silent Running. and Mike H.

Sure, it’s hot, there are no breaks and no opportunity to get lunch. But as immigrant workers, they’re used to toiling long hours for low pay.

“We’ve had much harder jobs,” Hernandez, 38, said while leaning on a tall chair along East Van Buren Street.

The two are among dozens of women hired by the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters to carry out the union’s demonstrations. It’s sort of an “outsourcing” of the protest.

…

The old-fashioned method, where workers would protest their own conditions, is apparently passe. The construction workers who were supposedly being treated unfairly were still on the job during the demonstration, receiving their supposedly substandard wage and measly benefits.

Chavez and Hernandez, both of whom came from Chihuahua, Mexico, six years ago, say most of the construction workers are immigrants as well. So, they feel like they are trying to stop people in the same situation from being taken advantage of.

Unfortunately, the permalink doesn’t work for this article. It is the May 31, 2004 top entry in the El Gringo blog, and the original source is The Arizona Repulsive

From the pages of the Spanish newspaper El Pais erupted a disturbing anecdote. Jose Milicua, a noted art-historian, uncovered evidence that “anarchist” forces used modern art to torture prisoners during the Spanish Civil War. Oh, the Horror! Art was misused in the Spanish Civil War! Sane people are more concerned with the real tragedies and atrocities, While it is true many metaphorically consider modern art to be torture, the idea that being forced to view modern art could be a signicant instrument of torture is laughably over-serious.

Surfacing at a time when cultural patrimony and the loss of priceless art in Iraq were of concern to the whole world, the story managed to seem an irresoluble addendum. Irresoluble? What is the conflict? That artists were used for nefarious purposes is a shock? Apparently the author never noticed the 70 years of Soviet Art!

There was something astonishing about such a transgression. Yes, torture is evil! However, I doubt that the art made much difference either way, compared to the more serious ravages experienced by the prisoners! I too was tortured with art while in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) school – after a week without food, the claustrophobia boxes we were stuffed into had pictures of food just outside the air holes. How horrible! Those artistic descriptions of fruit almost broke my will to resist!While cultural artifacts were mourned as victims of war, we were again reminded of art’s precarious role. or perhaps art’s relative unimportance in such major events.

….

With a mix of technocratic modernism and a brutal psychiatry, Laurencic has entered art history with a nefarious contribution to modernist aesthetics. Inspiration for the cells was drawn from the heights of modernist abstraction: Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Klee, and Dali. The cells were a pastiche of geometric abstraction and surrealist freneticism, along with a theory of supposed psychological properties of line and color. While it is true that high contrast regular patterns can be disturbing to migraineurs, this technique sounds rather trivial! Laurencic coined this style “psychotechnic” and its role was to entirely debilitate the prisoners through meticulous physical and psychological punishment.That’s always the goal of torture – nothing new here except some silly ideas of how to do it.
The walls of the 6ft by 3ft cells were painted with tortuous geometric or pseudo-surrealist patterns that were thought to cause distress to the viewer. The entire cell itself was constructed in order to force the prisoners to stare at the walls incessantly. Beds were placed at 20-degree angles, making sleeping and sitting practically impossible. On the floor, bricks were scattered at irregular intervals to prevent the prisoners from being able to walk forwards or backwards. Tar was sometimes used to cover surfaces, so that contact was unbearable in the daytime heat. All the occupants could do was stand and stare at the oddly shaped walls, covered in supposed psychologically “damaging” shapes and figures, perspective tricks, and off-scale patterns drawn straight from the avant-garde. To enforce the dizzying effect, lighting was manipulated in order to distort the already abrasive decoration. Being forced to stand all the time seems far more torturous than having modern art in one’s field of view. Perhaps if they had placed a modern art critic in the cell to lecture the prisoner, the torture might have been more effective!
Beyond the barbaric nature of the cells, the story seemed appalling to many for a deeper reason. It certainly did not go unnoticed, and almost no retelling could escape reflection on its irony: the side which was supposed to be “right” now seemed equally deplorable in the eyes of history. To torture is one thing, but to do so with the great art of the modern age? What can be said when the progressive forces of society are used for the most repressive of means and by those whom history touts as heroic? Grandiosity is a common symptom of those in the art world. So is contradiction. How is “great art” torture? Who was heroic in that war? All sides were pawns of much greater and more evil figures, Hitler and Stalin, and the anarchists, like now, we simply fools, not heroes. The “progressive forces” brought us the Gulag, the bloody Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot. Why is anyone surprised that they use nasty tactics during a century in which they killed 100,000,000? I
n this light, the losses the Iraqi museums have suffered can seem more ambiguous than unfortunate. No, in this light the much exaggerated Iraqi museum losses look just the same as they did without this blather. They are a loss to humanity.Though the irony was easy to grasp, it was not simple to concede as it is hard to let go of the underlying hope it denies. This was the same hope through which Nadine Gordimer remarked that “art is on the side of the oppressed” since “if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?” As mentioned above, how about Soviet Art and Nazi architecture? These were Art of the oppressors, hardly a new phenomenon in history!
As far as modern art is concerned, the arrant ironies of cultural progress have yet to echo the sentiment. Laurencic’s “practice” shows how modern art could easily find itself seduced by barbarism, despite the liberationist jargon of its manifestos.
As Milicua’s discovery makes clear, the expanding torrent of modernist culture flirted with a mutual dependence on both cultural progress and social repression. Torture is an almost too predictable extension of a culture of shock, disorientation, distress, and a rampant militarist fetish. Still, it seems far-fetched to imagine the adherents of modernism, with its progressive core, rejecting even the most basic tenets of their own faith. The key is the word “progressive.” It is usually associated with those who would minimize freedom, and who become Useful Fools for the torturers. If you want to find a rampant militarist fetish, check out all of mankind’s history.
Could the context creating a truly modern art also be a baneful hint of aesthetics immersed from all sides by horror? Are torture, war, suffering and art inexonerably linked? No, they are not. The question is silly. However, torture, war suffer and art seem to be as inevitable as death and taxes.
Perhaps within the depths of radical cultural freedom there is a specter of anomie, where the art of the oppressed could turn itself into a repressive mechanism of subjection, irrationality, and cultural disintegration. Art is a pretty mild mechanism of oppression. Certainly it is used as an adjunct to more effective methods, but it is of relatively small importance.
Certainly it can be true for what we’ve lost, since these may the punitive damages of democratic change. What are we willing to concede? Perhaps it was this uneasy disjunction that inspired Laurencic. Maybe it is this horror that underscores all attempts to easily resolve the ambiguities of art in general, which our own naïve need to do. Accordingly, El Pais ended its story with the simple thought, affirming that “the creators of such revolutionary and liberating languages could never have imagined they would be intrinsically linked to repression”.That’s a remarkable amount of deep seriousness based purely on the premise that artists and those who write about art are critical to the progress of social and political ideas. It is really evidence that artists are too often individuals existing in closed self-referentials circles and are rarely of any significance to important world events (an exception being the rather poor artist, Adolph Hitler, but art was not the method he used for his barbarities, an another being the Playwright Kim Jong Il).

The ear-blasting takeoffs of military fighter jets at suburban Scottsdale Airport have residents buzzing and city officials flying off.
That’s the sound of people who fight and die for their benefit!
Nearby airport neighbor Nick Luongo said his wife was taking a shower when some of the fighter jets passed overhead.
“They scared the living daylights out of her,” Luongo said.
Maybe he shouldn’t have bought a house in the flight path! Scottsdale airport was originally a military training field far out in the desert. It is now surrounded by homes, bought by fools now whining about the noise made by the defenders of our nation!John Little, Scottsdale’s director of transportation, said the military jets, which are “very noisy” when they take off, are infrequent visitors.
I love that sound. It is the sound of America in action.
Scottsdale Councilman Wayne Ecton said they are not infrequent enough. Last week at a City Council subcommittee meeting on aviation he suggested Scottsdale let military pilots know they are not welcome.
Wayne, you idiot, those people are risking their lives to protect your freedom. Why don’t you take off, quietly, and not come back?
Scottsdale air traffic controller Mary Anne Addis reminded the subcommittee that military jets have the right to land at Scottsdale Airport. She turned to Ecton and asked him if he was bothered to see U.S. military jets in the sky after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Give that lady a raise! That was exactly the right response!

But no… he’s deeper than we thought! Apparently wanting to out-do Gray Davis’ electrical blackouts, Bustamante is calling for gas shortages in California. Something in the water in Sacramento seems to lead to meddling with energy.

Of course, that’s not how he describes it… he just wants the gasoline industry regulated as a utility.

This means that when a gas company needs to change its price for gasoline, it has to go through regulatory procedures. These proceedings take months, involve thousands of pages of expensive paperwork, enrich many lawyers while boring them to death, and require lots of meetings where every fruit and nut (in plentiful supply in California) is given his/her/its chance to speak.

As any motorist knows, gasoline prices change very frequently. This is in response to rapid fluctuations in supply and demand, which are normal in this market. So what happens if you have to set your price in a process that takes months….

Say Arizona has a gas shortage caused by a broken pipe-line. The price in Arizona rises with the shortage. Gasoline sellers have a choice… sell their gasoline in California at, say, $1.60 per gallon, or sell it in Phoenix for $2.00 per gallon. Guess where the gasoline goes!

More importantly for Californians, guess where the gasoline ceases going! Yep, that’s right, gas shortage.

So vote for Bustamante, Californians, and add gasoline shortages to your power outages.

………………….

But whatever happens, Californians, DON’T MOVE TO ARIZONA when you get tired of this.

Arizona is a terrible place to live:

• We have lots of guns and allow open carry or licensed concealed carry.
• We have plenty of conservatives.
• We have the country’s largest nuclear power plant.
• We allow evil-looking assault rifles&#153, and many of us have them – and we keep them pointed west.
• We don’t have Hollywood stars to tell us how to think.
• We don’t label everything that has a .00000000000001 chance of causing cancer.
• We used to have lots of trees to hug, but the environmentalists let them all burn.
• We don’t have a coastal commission.
• We have annual hunting seasons, including one on tree-huggers and another on animal-rights extremists.
• Barry Goldwater was from here.
• Dan Quayle and Gordon Liddy live here.

Trust me… you won’t like it!

Did I mention that I moved here from the People’s Republic of Santa Monica? Well, anyway, do what I say, not what I did!!!

He or she has all the brains of a fireplug, and deserves the appropriate treatment from every passing dog!

It was going so well. They were following my advice, albeit taking too long.

First they provided pictures.

Then they showed the bodies.

But I guess I wasn’t precise enough in my instructions. I forgot to tell them not to alter the bodies. Sometimes, you’d think common sense would be enough.

But no… somebody thought they should pretty up the bodies. Why? Well, maybe because that’s what they always do before a showing? Because they wanted to repair the damage to the faces to make them more recognizable? Because they didn’t want to offend the Arabs by showing more of the mutilation that war brings?

Whatever, it was stupid! STUPID! This is just the sort of thing the Arabs are used to: altered “evidence!” So much for convincing them that the Pig Latin twins are ed-day!

It’s hard to get good help these days – people who can follow instructions and apply common sense!