Category: Current Affairs

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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.”

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Today’s Good News from Iraq

By way of Iraq Coalition Casualties, I note this press release from the U.S. Central Command about an incident in Operation Fight ‘Em Over There:

TWO KILLED DURING INCIDENT AT ALI BASE

The release describes an incident in which U.S. troops shot and killed two apparent intruders at a U.S. base in Iraq; a third person was wounded. Nothing unusual there — I hear there’s a war on. But the release goes on to say:

“The professionalism of the men and women, who quickly responded to this incident, prevented any harm to the more than 9,000 Air Force, Army and Coalition members on and around this installation,” said Col. Michael J. Nowak, 407th Air Expeditionary Group commander.

“Security forces personnel flawlessly executed their job in service to the nation and met the challenge of providing force protection of the installation’s perimeter,” he added.

It’s nice that, while war is still hell, the boss takes time out to give the troops a pat on the back for a job well done. I wonder if this is a first in glowing media alerts for well executed killings. I wonder if, in the same spirit of tellin’ the folks back home about the job we’re doin’, Central Command will tell us more about shootings like this one. And this one.

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Today’s Good News from California

The good news from the Golden State is that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s poll numbers are down. Not that that has any huge significance in the cosmos or even in the world of California politics four months from now. It’s just nice to see our thumping lumpish bully-boy demagogue — oh, did I say I don’t care for his act? — have a rough time selling the rubes on his patent potions for what ails him and his buddies.

The amazing thing in the latest poll results from the Public Policy Institute of California is that Schwarzenegger somehow manages to lag behind Bush in the overall approval rating among adults surveyed: 38 percent approval for the president, 34 percent for the governor. It’s a stunning achievement, really, for anyone this side of the BTK killer to trail Bush in a popularity contest.

So, since people don’t love Arnold this month, the initiatives he’s forcing on the voters by way of a special election in November are all hurting. Specifically: an initiative to increase the time it takes public-school teachers to get tenure from two years to five; a measure to create a special reapportionment panel so the Legislature can’t gerrymander things anymore; and new budget rules that would give the governor more power.

But, and this is a big but: Arnold still has two months and change to make people love him again. He’s a Hollywood guy. He’ll have lots of money to spend on wooing us and convincing us that he’s our best friend, and we are our own worst enemies.

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‘Brute Force’ Meets ‘Great Escape,’ Iraq Style

A great read in the Washington Post on Wednesday about one of the major detention centers for suspected insurgents in Iraq. The tale is complete with a “Great Escape”-style tunnel, a breakout foiled partly by satellite surveillance, and a prisoner insurrection of surprising scale and skill:

“On the fourth day of the riots, the Americans called in a Black Hawk helicopter, the video showed. The helicopter descended over the camp, the force of its rotor flattening the tents that hadn’t already been burned down by the detainees. Bulldozers and 200 heavily armed soldiers encircled the compound. The Shiite prisoners finally gave up, complying with a list of demands that included handing over their weapons: the remaining floorboards and cinderblock rubble.

“Little was left of the camp; it smoldered, smoke mixing with the stench of overturned portable toilets the detainees had used to barricade the entrance. Heaps of garbage, rocks and used tear gas canisters littered the yard.

“It was the end to what had been a sobering period for the Americans, coming just days after the tunnel was discovered in Compound 5.”

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Gracious, Gracious George

The confidence of a man who, on a do-over, won 50.7 percent of ballots cast by those who bothered to vote: First he says he’s got lots of political capital to spend. And now that the public is feeling less keen about embracing his special gift to posterity, the Iraq War and Constitutional Convention, he graciously allows he respects the rights of those who disagree with him, like Cindy Sheehan:

” I strongly support her right to protest. There’s a lot of people protesting, and there’s a lot of points of view about the Iraq war. As you know, in Crawford last weekend there were people from both sides of the issue, or from all sides of the issue there to express their opinions.”

That’s the thing about democracy: We prevent the majority — like the rabble who really aren’t interested any more in getting up every day to the news that 10 or 20 or 30 more people have been blown up since we went to bed and that our sponsored group of Iraqi civics students still can’t write a pretend constitution despite the fact we’ve dropped $200 billion or whatever to set them up in business — we prevent the impatient many from trampling the rights of the few; the rights of people like our president. And that’s another beauty of democracy, Bush style: If you win, you don’t need to worry about majorities, minorities, nothin’. You’re inside, and you got political capital to spend.

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More Fun with Chemtrails

Today’s installment: An Idaho weathercaster, Scott Stevens, who has started a site dedicated to recording all the chemtrail activity he sees and that the many chemtrail investigators everywhere send him pictures of.

This is a guy who has studied the weather and makes a living standing up acting like he’s forecasting the highs and lows and storms and fair weather for the next few days. And he’s come up with his own interesting theory about the supposedly odd behavior and increasing incidence of jet condensation trails: At least some of the contrails are just contrails. But the planes that are leaving them behind are doing atmospheric research in conjunction with the development of some type of energy weapons that will be used, among other things, to manipulate the weather.

Of course, there’s more to the story than that. Stevens links to a site that contains a long Q and A with a chemtrail expert that tells all, or mostly all, about what’s going on: The trails are part of a global effort to disperse a variety of materials that will create The Shield — a barrier meant to combat meant to combat the effects of global warming. The reason we don’t know about any of this is it’s secret; and it’s secret because … well, let the experts tell you:

“Due to the severity of the situation it is mandatory to maintain public calm for as long as possible. The Earth is dying. Humanity is on the road to extinction – without the Shield mankind will die off with in 20 to 50 years. Most people alive today could live to see this extinction take place.”

Twenty to 50 years? Why are we bothering with Social Security? Or Iraq? Of course, the government is probably undertaking those projects for show — just to keep our minds off the really important stuff that’s happening “in plane sight,” as Scott Stevens says. He also urges his readers to “demand an accounting from your government, now. I know that they can’t believe they have been able to keep this secret for this long.”

OK — besides the principle of Occam’s Razor, here’s my problem with this as with so many other conspiracy theories: It all goes back to the government. Not that the government’s not capable of some secret double-dealing. But the historic examples of “the government” — any government — pulling off the kind of massive undertaking without alerting the world in general that something big is going on are rare. People blab. Even the Manhattan Project was infiltrated by Soviet spies. And once an atomic bomb was actually detonated in New Mexico, it was just a matter of time before word of what was happening down there got to the outside world (in practice, the secret only needed to be kept for about three weeks before the whole world knew we had the bomb).

But I’m digressing again.

The point is, the same government that — just a couple exhibits here — can’t figure out how to put armor on Humvees, that has blown up two spaceship crews in the last two decades and can’t seem to fly the shuttle anymore without getting in trouble — the same government most people don’t think competent to fill a pothole — is somehow credited with unerring use of its vast omnipotence to carry out its secret ends. Of course, there’s no paradox at all: the the Humvees and the Columbia blowing up are just part of the sleight of hand.

[Actually, I’m late, very late to the chemtrail picnic. USA Today was on the case in March 2001. Now they’re just part of the conspiracy, too.]

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Berkeley Vigil

Vigil

About 8:30 tonight, corner of Solano and The Alameda. (Yes, auslanders, The Alameda.) The MoveOn site said 500 people had signed up to join the vigil at this location. We got there about an hour after it started, and there might have been a total of 250 or 300 on the four corners of the intersection, though I’m a big crowd overestimator from way back. It was a social occasion for lots of people. I ran into an old colleague from The Examiner, and Kate met up with a group of her Oakland teacher buddies.