Listics

They had modeled it.  Hurricane Pam was a preparedness exercise run last summer by FEMA in cooperation with the LSU hurricane center.  The exercise concluded with an optimistic sense that circumstances would be grim but the challenges were quantifiable and manageable.  The plans were anitiseptic.  They left out the stench of death, corpses bobbing on the water, dysentery, the poorest and the sickest abandoned by single passenger automobiles clogging the traffic arteries out of town They left out the racist population control measures — black’s identified as looters, whites as refugees.  They left out the fear and the cowardice of the christian right, the inability to empathize, to communicate.  They left out the stingy Republican corruption and the troop and materiel deployed overseas that were part of the first response network. 

And of course all the best laid plans were simply blown away on Katrina’s winds.

(This from Michael Moore lifted in its entirety from Tamar’s "In and Out of Confidence")

Friday, September 2nd, 2024

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It’s Day 5 of Hurricane
Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be
airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military
choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears
parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could
really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do
like helping with national disasters. How come they weren’t there to
begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye
of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then
but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there
were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this
storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody
tell you? I know you didn’t want to interrupt your vacation and I know
how you don’t like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to
and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of
flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business
peeps. Don’t let people criticize you for this — after all, the
hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in
the dike?

And don’t listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how
you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget for New
Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them
that even if you hadn’t cut the money to fix those levees, there
weren’t going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you
had a much more important construction job for them — BUILDING
DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I
was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the
clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of
the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn’t stop and grab a bullhorn and
stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done
that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try
to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out.
Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this
would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter
and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all
their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a
hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that
stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It’s not your fault that 30
percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had
no transportation to get out of town. C’mon, they’re black! I mean,
it’s not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving
white people on their roofs for five days? Don’t make me laugh! Race
has nothing — NOTHING — to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army
helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and
the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your
ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now
driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way.
Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

"Some of America’s leading scientists
have accused Republican politicians of intimidating climate-change experts by
placing them under unprecedented scrutiny," Paul Brown reports today in the Guardian.

I for one do not believe it.  Right wing christian demagogues at war with scientists?  Why?  Who benefits?

Oh.  Wait.  Joe Barton, chairman of the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce, is leading the charge.  "Mr. Barton, a Texan closely associated with the fossil-fuel lobby, has spent
his 11 years as chairman opposing every piece of legislation designed to combat
climate change," Brown says.

So maybe there is a smattering of substance here, but — heck, a little intimidation is just politics, right?

Andy Carvin has set up an open blog and mobcast for people to share information and thougts on Hurricane Katrina.  Photos, posts, tagged info, and podcasts are being collected at Katrina Aftermath, http://katrina05.blogspot.com/

Here are Andy’s instructions…

I knew those right wing christian nutcases would go too far.  Now they have the blessed virgin herself seriously pissed at them.

Cross your feet, Pat.  We only have one nail left.

"Justice Sunday and the environment, Pat Robertson wants to assassinate Chavez, Ecuadorians want oil revenues to benefit society, the King of Swazi liberates girls, the Dutch lock up their chickens and more … Browse our continually updating front page at http://www.truthout.org."

Tell me you don’t need to know why the Dutch are locking up their chickens.

This post has something to do with peak oil and petrodollars and an "Iranian bourse."

Iranian bourse?  An exotic stew of goat meat and fava beans?  No, I think that would be Sicilian bourse.  The favas give it away.  Iranian bourse is made with chick peas, I think.  Garbanzo beans.

Google this passage:  "A successful Iranian bourse will solidify the petroeuro as an
alternative oil transaction currency, and thereby end the petrodollar’s
hegemonic status as the monopoly oil currency. Therefore, a graduated
approach is needed to avoid precipitous U.S. economic dislocations."

231 hits.  That can’t be right.  How could that turgid prose appear 231 separate places on the net?  Let’s put the quotes around it so we’re searching for the literal string. 

104 hits.  How can this be?  William Clark published this article about a week ago.   Of course, over the last few years Clark has been beating this drum, with early drafts and re-worked material from his book and variations of the essay linked above.  He’s been getting the word out on Iran as the economic enemy of the petrodollar alliance.

An oil exchange "marker" denominated in Euros will certainly challenge the petrodollar market.  The idea that Tehran may have the effrontery to set up an exchange for these trades is certain to rile up the neoCons.  But why an Iranian Bourse?  Why not set it up in Moscow?  Oslo?  Why not just use the EuroNext?  Trading oil for hard currency is an obvious choice, and the Bush devaluation (based on war without end and the debt implicit in the policy choice) will certainly shift commerce away from the USA, but it seems subtly disinformational at worst and naive at best to posit the creation of a new exchange in Tehran.

And underneath it all, Clark’s key point regarding the shift of trade — a shift away from NYMEX dollar denominated petroleum futures trading to a stable currency, a currency unaffected by the mental illness of the psychopathic degenerates in the executive branch — is probably valid.

What concerns me, is that whether one rants about Iranian nuclear intentions like Bush does, or raves about Iranian petrodollar warfare like Clark, one is providing an argument for the "PNAC vendors" to march deeper into Asia on their war for global control of dwindling petroleum reserves.

So who does William Clark work for really?  I’m just guessing….

Those sneaky christians scored again…  now Bush supports both the teaching of creationism ( the principle that god threw this shit together 6000 years ago and laid in a few dinosaurs to confuse us) AND "intelligent design" (the principle that god threw this shit together a real long time ago and the dinosaurs were real, hence Texaco gasoline).

Know what’s spooky?  Some adult Americans actually believe that this is the choice we face in articulating an understanding of the multiverse.

BTW… the article continues with an overview of the new Deometry curriculum:

The Odessa school system is also considering replacing its current high school math curriculum with a new approach that emphasizes God’s role in the study of quantity, structure, change and space. One likely course offering: Deometry, in which students of the field once known as geometry (from geo meaning earth and metro meaning measure) accept as their starting point that God created the earth, before embarking on their study of lines, points and circles. Educators are reportedly also debating the best way to incorporate the role of the Creator into other high school classes, including home economics, gym and drivers ed. 

Thanks to Norm for the link.  I guess.