SAI

Whatever we have seen, on TV, Newspapers, etc, the majority of victims seem to be African-American. The looters, in whatever videos or pics I have seen are African-American. Of course to many this might seem like African Americans are a bad bunch. BUT wait.....the population of New Orleans is 67.3% African-American. So maybe there is a reason that we are seeing so many of them....cause they are way past the majority. Any disaster like this occurs, society is going to break down, and the bad seeds are going to come out, regardless of race. It just happens to be in NO that the majority are African-Americans. You aren't going to see an Ethnic Canadian running around. Just wanted to point that out, because I for one feel stupid and ignorant with a few comments I made, even if they weren't racial, it was somewhat biased.

cyphur

iTrader: (10)

Thats a great point, and I completely agree with you. I made much the same point in a thread in the lounge. When your demographics sway that heavily towards one side, of course the image coming out of the area is going to be skewed when you look at it from somewhere else. Also keep in mind the media isn't doing anything to help their image either. They're just giving you glorified snapshots to boost their ratings, not the whole picture.

slowredz

iTrader: (23)

I guess the 33% of white people were smart enough to leave I dont care what color you are the people doing that should be shot and maybe it will be a better place if it gets rebuilt

longrange4u

iTrader: (2)

Nice post SAI.

Crime and desperation know no color. I don’t agree with racial stereo typing. And the logic behind trying to stereo type a race in a city that has the racial majority... is ludicrous!

Any person that steals from another for personal profit... is a thief. Thief’s of society are the bottom of society. No race no color no background... thief’s are cowards and too weak to earn what they instead choose to take from those that have earned. Looters.... are thief’s. Period....

KCS

iTrader: (20)

I wouldn't go so far as to say that everyone looting is a low life thief. I just saw on the news last night a "looter" who would go into town and take food and essentials from a grocery store and distibute it around to elderly or handicapped people that could get it themselves. Thats pretty honorable if ya ask me. But the assfaces who steal Nikes and jerseys and those who shoot at the Nat'l guard helicopters...I agree they suck.

MilDot

So you would do the same thing?
It is a different culture, with different morals.
It is not racist to recognize the fact that people are different.

02-4.8

If NO was surrounded by trailer parks instead of ghetto's and still had the same socialist dependent infrastructure it's always had, you see white people instead of blacks all over tv.

TAQuickness

iTrader: (28)

Keep in mind also, the majority of people in this world are not capable of thinking for them selves. Case in point, my sister-in-law, an otherwise very book smart individual, started spewing mindless facts about how this is a racist issue, W is at fault, and yada yada yada... She even compared this to the 9-11 tragedy to back up her rasism points.

So I let her finish, then calmly pointed out, that one of the many differences between this and 9-11 is NY elected a strong leader as a mayor. NOLA didn't. If Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco had half a spine between them, this would be a completely different scenario.

This is not a matter of race. This is purely a matter of weak leadership, ignorance, and stupidity. If any one indivudual could be be held responsible, it would be Ray Nagin. He is the one that said this would be a "Catastrophe of Biblical Proportions" and he didn't do **** to fully evacuate everyone in his city.

All that said, I still don't think Ray Nagin should be hung by his nuts. Each individual person on this earth is primarily responsible for their own safety. Blaming anyone else for your own stupidity or ignorance is just plain stupid.

Bens 2000WS6

You know out of all this I feel sorry for the people that lost everything. However I have mixed emotions about it all because I heard on the news that the NO Local Government knew that the Levy system could only with stand a Cat 3 Hurricane. Knowing this a plan was draw out to "fix" the system to make it stronger and better to handle a cat 5 hurricane. The hurricane it self did not destroy NO. As all the new reporters are reporting the Town was still in tact and missed the brunt of the storm, but when the Levy system broke thats when everything went to ****. No in hinde sight $20 billion to make a stonger levy system is a lot cheaper than upwards of $100 billion to rebuild the city completely.

02-4.8

No, it's the one they were trying to build that was only designed for a cat3, what they had coun't even handle that.
So even if it was built they'd still be SOL.

Bens 2000WS6

No the one that they have now would/could only with stand a Cat 3. It almost with stood a Cat 4! The $20 Billion proposal was for a newer/heavier levy system that would with stand a Cat 5 if something like that were to ever happen. Experts have been looking at this area for along time saying this would happen. But the local government looked at the price tag and said Now the rest of America will pay for it in taxes.

TAQuickness

iTrader: (28)

You're right. The existing levee's were only designed to withstand a CAT3. It's a known fact.

But I do have to ask the question - What do you think broke the levee system? To the best of my knowledge, it was the CAT4 hurricane that hit the city.

02-4.8

"It is not so clear whether the money Bush cut from levee projects would have made any difference, however, and we're not in a position to judge that. The Army Corps of Engineers – which is under the President's command and has its own reputation to defend – insists that Katrina was just too strong, and that even if the levee project had been completed it was only designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane."

"The levee upgrade project around Lake Pontchartrain was only 60 to 90 percent complete across most areas of New Orleans as of the end of May, according to the Corps' May 23 fact sheet. Still, even if it had been completed, the project's goal was protecting New Orleans from storm surges up to "a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane,” according to the fact sheet."

What they were trying to fund/build was only designed for a cat3
http://www.factcheck.org/article344.html
I posted this in the other thread that got deleted

02-4.8

Also, here's the fact sheet mentioned in the factcheck.org article
http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/pao/re...asp?prj=lkpon1

"PURPOSE. The project is designed to protect residents between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River levee from surges in Lake Pontchartrain driven by storms up to the Standard Project Hurricane. The SPH is equivalent to a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane."

It also wasn't scheduled to be completed until 2015 anyways.

Got to love all those key facts the media likes to leave out

Bens 2000WS6

From what I have read and heard on the news. The reporters where saying the day after that there was a lot of damage from the wind to buildings and so forth, but it was not a complete disaster as many building still stood unharmed, and the levy system was still in tact and holding. However once the river started to rise the force of all the water at once ended up breaking the levy system in t spots. So from what I hear the hurricane did its own amount of damage, but its wasnt "extremely" bad. When the levy system broke and the water filled the city, thats when everything went to ****.

Bens 2000WS6

This is exactly right. This is the Smaller of the 2 quotes for the levy system. There was also a $20 billion quote to create a levy system that would with stand a Cat 5 hurricane.

Like I said hinde sight $20 billion is cheap

Bens 2000WS6

Ok I heard $20 Billion somewhere, but I just read $20 Million thats even cheaper!

Edit: Ok the $20 Million was suppose to be for this year alone

$20 billion would be the entire improvement for the whole levy system to be upgrade to with stand a Cat 5. ok now I got my facts straight

J-Rod

There are plenty of blacks who live in Alabama and Mississippi who are not on the news shooting at the police who are trying to help them, etc...

As has been pointed out. Almost 70% of the population of N.O. is black. So you'll be more predetermined to see more blacks when looking at N.O. 30% of the population of N.O. lives at the poverty level. Lots of government housing, etc... So, lots of poor folks who have nothing.

I think unfortunately there is a lot of blamestorming going on. I think lessons can be learned about the proper and improper way to run a disaster. I hope everyone learns from this a measure of self reliance that is necessary rather than waiting for officials to take care of you.

J-Rod

This article makes some good points about the issue of self induced victims of the welfare state... Again, this is NOT to state that everyone who was stuck in N.O. is a criminal. There were just a few who make thigns bad for the whole. But, there are a bunch of folks who have been wards of the welfare state who have always been taken care of by the government, so when this disaster came upon them, they waited for the government to come get them...

http://www.rense.com/general67/notabout.htm

Not About Rain, Wind,
Flooding But Rape,
Murder And Looting
By Robert Tracinski
TIA Daily
9-6-5

"What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?"


It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed; they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

"'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets," she said. "They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will."

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

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.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

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. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

Hagarr

iTrader: (6)

J-Rod- Great article. I have sent it to many people.

Brian