Month: September 2005

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No Warning

An excellent, and bitter, review (registration required) in Friday’s Los Angeles Times about in-depth reporting from three separate news organizations — some as recent as last month — about the danger hurricanes posed to New Orleans and the lack of federal and local response to the widely understood hazards.

“These days, media criticism has become a kind of blood sport. One of its practitioners’ most frequently repeated complaints is that mainstream news organizations have become increasingly — if not solely — reactive, retailing the sensation of the moment to an audience hooked on titillating irrelevancies.

“Well, that didn’t happen here.

“Three years ago, New Orleans’ leading local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, National Public Radio’s signature nightly news program, ‘All Things Considered,’ and The New York Times each methodically and compellingly reported that the very existence of south Louisiana’s leading city was at risk and hundreds of thousands of lives imperiled by exactly the sequence of events that occurred this week. All three news organizations also made clear that the danger was growing because of a series of public policy decisions and failure to allocate government funds to alleviate the danger.”

The Times-Picayune has reposted its 2002 series on the hurricane threat.

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Hurricane Hastert

I’m proud to be a native of the state that produced Speaker of the House Dennis “Hurricane” Hastert. At last, a common-sense politician brave enough to speak his mind. As all around him wring their hands over the catastrophe in New Orleans, Hastert alone is clearsighted enough to see beyond the suffering and try to chart a sensible course for tomorrow. “It doesn’t make sense” to spend federal money to help rebuild the city, he said. And: “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.” Sometimes that’s the toughest thing: having the courage to move on.

Hastert noted that federal money is spent on rebuilding other disaster-prone locales sometimes: “But you know we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild, too. Stubbornness.” (I like the fissures part; he must have seen that in “Superman”).

There’s a cost, of course, to such plain-spokenness. People who’ve lost their city react emotionally to your ideas. The principled thing to do amid the wounded yowls is plow straight ahead and enlighten the folks about the careful reasoning behind your blunt honesty. You might say something like this — or at least Hurricane Hastert did:

“ I am not advocating that the city be abandoned or relocated. My comments about rebuilding the city were intended to reflect my sincere concern with how the city is rebuilt to ensure the future protection of its citizens and not to suggest that this great and historic city should not be rebuilt.”

Truly: A profile in courage.

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Katrina: The Real Story

What the media isn’t telling you (and you should be glad):

That Katrina was a weather weapon, wielded by the Yakuza, the Japanese mob. Or maybe Russia. Or China. Or India. Idaho weatherman extraordinaire Scott Stevens promotes this view, based on the belief that the Soviet Union developed energy weapons that can manipulate the weather, set off earthquakes, and mundane things like disable satellites and spacecraft. Stevens appeared on a podcast called the Enigma Report just before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. He told host Kathleen Keating that Katrina’s Florida landfall was a smoking gun:

SS: As I was doing my evening weathercast the Thursday prior, the evening of the 25th of August, I was reading the discussion out of the NHC where the eye of Katrina as she made landfall went over the top of the NHC. If that isn’t putting … let’s just say you’re putting the bead of the eye of the gun on the target. It was amazing. That should have been a big heads up. …

KK: To me that was Yakuza all over. To me that was like their signature.

SS: Yakuz … yeah. It was a very clear signal that you’ve been targeted; you’ve been targeted.

And a little later, he explained that the Yakuza was just one possible culprit: “It could be Yakuza, It could be the former Soviet Union with this. There was China involved. There is India now. There are so many nations that all they have to do is do their little part to keep this thing going.” He also noted that all the planes leaving suspicious contrails over most of the United States had migrated to the region where the storm was active. Of course, neither he nor the host ever explain how storms like this happened before the onset of supersecret Soviet technology.

Now here’s the thing if you spend the time to listen to this guy’s Yakuza/energy weapons claptrap: You’ll find much of what he says thoughtful and perhaps agree with it. For instance, how the destruction of wetlands in Louisiana has contributed to New Orleans’ vulnerability to catastrophic flooding; or how irresponsible it is for our government to commit hundreds of billions to the Iraq war. And he’s reasonably well informed about the economy and the Gulf region’s place in it.

Then he caps everything off by noting that our side failed to do anything to fight the enemy hurricane warriors, whoever they are, and ends by saying, “The great sorting has begun.” Meaning the apocalypse is here, I guess.

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Hurricane Relief: Mission Accomplished

On Monday, as Hurricane Katrina was beginning the process of turning New Orleans and the Gulf Coast into something like hell, the president was talking up all the great things he’s done for Medicare recipients at a senior center in Southern California. He wanted to touch on some current events, though, before he started into telling everyone how much better he’d made their lives:

“… We’re praying for the folks that have been affected by this Hurricane

Katrina. We’re in constant contact with the local officials down there.

The storm is moving through, and we’re now able to assess damage, or

beginning to assess damage. And I want the people to know in the

affected areas that the federal government and the state government and

the local governments will work side-by-side to do all we can to help

get your lives back in order.

“This was a terrible storm. It’s a storm that hit with a lot of ferocity. It’s a

storm now that is moving through, and now it’s the time for governments

to help people get their feet on the ground.

For those of you who prayed for the folks in that area, I want to thank you

for your prayers. For those of you who are concerned about whether or

not we’re prepared to help, don’t be. We are. We’re in place. We’ve got

equipment in place, supplies in place. And once the — once we’re able

to assess the damage, we’ll be able to move in and help those good

folks in the affected areas.”

“For those of you who are concerned about whether or not we’re prepared to help, don’t be.” He didn’t quite say “mission accomplished.” But you have to view the clip — Bush with his cocksure “we done showed Saddam” smirk — to see that he really was saying “mission accomplished.”