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April 30, 2006
Fighting the blog
I'm trying to wrestle this thing back to the ground but it seems to have recently formed a mind of it's own.
--Jason
UPDATE: Seems as though the blog has been brought back around and now seems to view the world the way I want it to. Hopefully it won't get uppity again anytime soon.
-JC
Posted by JasonColeman at 11:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 25, 2006
The most moronic idea eva. . . .
Is the so-called "windfall profit" tax or the even better "excessive profit" tax. Anyone who thinks that this will in ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM lower gasoline taxes is simply DELUSIONAL. Any additional tax on oil companies (who by the way DO NOT set the price of oil or the price at the pump) will simply be passed on to consumers by HIGHER PRICED GASOLINE.
I'm waiting for the day when an "excessive profit" tax is talked about for Google or Microsoft.
REDUCING TAXES WILL LOWER GAS PRICES, INCREASING TAXES WILL RAISE GASOLINE TAXES, if that's too complicated for you to understand, then you have no business even talking about gasoline prices, much less being a United States Senator.
/rant off
--Jason
Posted by JasonColeman at 2:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Problems with the post . . . .
A mystery white powder has spilled from a package at a Hueytown post office (Hueytown is a suburb of Birmingham, AL). The powder was corrosive, damaging floor tiles, and caused a somewhat violent reaction among employees, including vomiting and some workers collapsed once outside.
Reports are initial and sketchy, but the powder sounds like Calcium Hypochlorite.
As Drudge would say. . . developing.
UPDATE: Now they're saying it's fish bait. Someone must be going after some very strange fish. Or perhaps its just a case where postal workers in this heightened climate of fear of terrorism over-reacted. Whatever the case and cause, we can be grateful that it appears to be "rather" benign, if inconvenient and unpleasant.
UPDATE2: Turns out it was methyl chloride, at least I was on the right track.
--Jason
Posted by JasonColeman at 11:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 22, 2006
Let's do the election corruption boogie. . . . .
Today, New Orleans voters (and others as I'll show in a moment) will be casting ballots for the Mayor of New Orleans. It's no secret that Ray "Chocolate City" Nagin is hoping that this election will come down to race based politics rather than doing what's best for the city, but that's not what this post is about.
As voters go to the polls, I want to share something with you, my tiny readership, in the hopes that you'll share it far and wide.
So here we go. . . .
A few weeks ago, the Louisians Secretary of State's office sent out a 4 page document entitled "Municipal Elections Information" within the document was a form to request an absentee ballot by mail.
I've scanned the document and offer it here Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4
First I'd like to take issue with Page 1, please notice this:
Now we had a number of evacuees come through Birmingham and we provided aid and shelter to family members and friends in the aftermath of the storm, but I find this shotgun approach to locating voters rather . . . . inappropriate. The mailing came to us because various Katrina evacuees used our mailing address in the immediate aftermath for FEMA registrations, contact info and the like. So our address got on the list and this ballot request made it's way to my hands. Now that's not all that bad, I just thought it was worthy of note.
Here's where things get, in my opinion, VERY BAD. Take a look at page three, here's an excerpt:
Do yo see it?
Take a look again. . . .
Do you see it now????
Ok here you go:
Anything that would positively establish identity is OPTIONAL INFORMATION. Yep, that's right, optional. I could easily fill out this form, get my ballot, send it in; and I haven't lived in New Orleans in over a decade. Furthermore, I can make as many copies of this form as I'd like:
Instructions (NOTE: You may copy this form for outher Louisiana Displaced Registered Voters.)
Given the track record of Louisiana Government in the past say, um . . . well . . . FOREVER, I don't have much confidence that the Sec State will be able to provide for a legitimate election given that anything that could be used to positively identify a voter as a legitimate voter is *Optional.
I'm going to refrain from any more commentary about this, I think that by merely presenting this I'm giving enough condemnation to it. I hope if you have any opinions, you'll share them with me, and further, please feel free to lift these scanned images and repost them whereever you'd like. I'll even go the extra step of saying it's ok to hotlink these for those who may use blogger or other shared hosting resources. However, if you have the bandwidth, I'd appreciate it if you save copies for yourself and don't hotlink. OK???
So here's a final question. How many of those 16,000 absentee ballots already received for the New Orleans municipal election do you think were sent out with no positive identification of the voter based on this form????? I'm guessing it's significantly more than a few.
--Jason
PS You might also find something of interest in my -Katrina Category. Like maybe this.
Posted by JasonColeman at 1:40 PM | Comments (3)
April 19, 2006
Oh damn, it's just gonna fall off?????????
Ok, so back in March, Larry O'Hanlon for the Discovery News service reported that there was "tectonic subsidence" in Louisiana which essentially amounted to:
"New Orleans is at the top end of what looks like a gigantic, slow-moving landslide"
O'Hanlon quotes LSU Geologist Roy Dokka as saying:
"Not only is southern Louisiana sinking, it's sliding"
O'Hanlon also describes the phenomenon as such:
"Like a smaller landslide on the side of a hill, the huge Southern Louisiana landslide has a "headwall" where the slide is breaking away and a "toe" out in the Gulf where the debris from the slide is piling up, Dokka explained. The only difference from a traditional landslide is that this one is far, far larger and it's buried under lots of wet sediments, so it requires very accurate survey measurements to detect it. "
Dokka's work in investigating the "Michoud Fault" which runs essentially through New Orleans' Ninth Ward is slipping, as a result of sediment piling up in the Gulf and pushing the tectonic plate down. While many have been keen to blame the "sinking" of SE Louisiana on the oil and gas industry, Dokka points out that:
"Subsidence associated with petroleum extraction was not a factor due to the lack of local production."
So that brings me full circle back to a topic I've explored here in the past. We simply are too quick and use too much energy decrying the evils of human impact on the planet without knowing enough about what we're talking about.
For years people have beat the U.S. up over CO2 emissions (one of those greenhouse gasses), stating that U.S. industry and American citizens (current target: the SUV) are killing the planet through global warming. For years this was a mantra repeated far and wide. Attempts to get the U.S. to voluntarily give up our industrious ways and return to eating grubs and berries, wearing loincloths (made from ecologically sound flax farming practices, not evil leather), and to continually in perpetuity pray to Gaia for her to forgive us our sins, have been made by the radical pseudo-scientists lamenting over global warming.
Then along comes a pretty exhaustive study from Columbia that the U.S. is not in fact adding to the global rate of CO2 production in the atmosphere, but we're actually sucking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than we're putting in, making us a NET ABSORBER OF CARBON DIOXIDE from the atmosphere. That's right, all those evil machines that pump out CO2 also had the coincident effect of allowing us to farm more efficiently, manage our forest better and keep millions of lovingly kept lawns and houseplants that sucked more CO2 out of the atmosphere than we were putting in. Big loss for the global warming crowd. They could no longer legitimately beat up on us for increasing CO2 levels (although they still try) and now they had to go look for another evil wrong-doer to blame the CO2 problem on (In truth, they still blame us, and simply ignore the evidence to the contrary, after all, the U.S. is an easy target, we're comfy and content, and the angry "change the world my way" crowd continues on.)
We've also been told that it's mankind that is responsible for Global Warming because of everything from the shoes we wear (more cows for more leather means more Methane) to the cars we drive (the CO2 issue again) to our air conditioners and hairsprays (nevermind we stopped using ozone depleting propellants and freon long ago and replaced them with safe alternatives unlike . . . cough . . . cough. . . Europe). Then we have NASA come back and let us know that the Sun is particularly angry right now (apparently at the U.S.) and burning hotter than any period since we've been aware that the Sun is a big ball of flaming nuclear hellfire at the center of our Solar System rather than Apollo's Chariot streaking across the sky. That would seem to be another loss for the "humans are evil" crowd, but again, it's not. They conveniently ignore the evidence and scream "It's the cars, it's all the cars, I tell you!!!!" This as they jump into their 70's era Volkswagen bus spewing black smoke behind.
[Ok Ok, that's not entirely fair, most of those "humans are evil" hippies are now driving hybrids filled with ecologically unfriendly heavy metal batteries which will be useless after 10 years and be hulks of rusting metal in junkyards with acid leaking from them. I'm not against hybrids, but their just a band-aid, we'll see the cool stuff soon enough if the hippies would just get out of the way of those people that are actually developing the technology. . . cough. . . Exxon. . . .cough. . . GM (ever wondered about why if GM's SUV sales are hurting so much why their stock and sales and profits keep going up. . . cough . . . cough . . . a nice shiny new SATURN anyone?)]
So anyway back to the Michoud Fault (pronounced Me-shoo with a silent d if you're a coon ass), and New Orelans and points south, sinking and sliding into the Gulf.
Here's my point, shut up with the blaming of every little environmental study and hiccup on humans and our activity on the planet. I've got a news flash for the hippies, Earth Firsters, Greenpeacers and my favorite environmental assholes the Earth Liberation Front (thanks alot for fucking up my second season in Vail), humans are a part of the natural environment too, we're animals just like the two toed slow moving Birdfood Salamander and we are filling our role in the evolutionary life cycle of the planet just like every other creature on the planet. The only real difference is that we've got opposable thumbs that allow us to all the things that a beaver can (build dams), the birds can (build nests -- but ours have roofs, score one for us --) and a cheetah can (move really fast, sure we use cars, but that's just another score for us). We're doing what we are simply because "we can". I've yet to see an environmentalist complain about a Beaver turning wetlands into a full fledged body of water, but having a human build it is an affront to Gaia or some such nonsense. We're here with opposable thumbs for a reason, because evolution or God or whatever construct you choose to follow gave them to us. Gave them to us so we could pick up one rock, spin it around a few times, and whack it on another rock to make a tool. Follow that out buy using that tool to break off some more rocks with ore in then, back to the opposable thumb allowing us to master the creation of fire and wham-o we've got metal George. Um, maybe we should put it back.
NO! We shouldn't put it back, we should get more and make more and use those big brains between our ears to accomplish more tasks, more complex tasks. Hey, lets try farming, and lets make some houses so we don't have to force bears out of their caves (or more correctly let's try to avoid having the bears force us out of caves by leaving the caves) and lets build the wheel so we can get around better and lets make a plow to increase our agricultural output to feed more humans, after all humans are animals too and they should be cared for and looked after and allowed to prosper because humans are a part of the natural order too.
Look, I know that it's a tragedy every time a species goes extinct, and it's just as tragic when a fishing village is swallowed by the sea, but lets get real for a moment, things have been going extinct since long before man started to stand up and look across the African steppes at the world beyond. There are also thousands of villages on seacoasts and waterways that have been washed away by rising tides, flooding, storms and tectonic subsidence. Let's get real for a minute and realize that we're just an ant colony (albeit a big one) to Mother Earth, we've got two power hands, like the ant's two powerful mandibles, with which to shape and develop our world to suit us.
When Mother Nature, Mother Earth, the planet, what have you, gets screwed up, she'll let us know, and she'll do it in a big way. Katrina wasn't that big of a storm, there have been bigger in the past, many more much bigger, what was big was that Katrina "just happened" to finally hit a city that for hundreds of years was unprepared for an event which they simply wished or willed to not come along. Well it finally did and to try and connect Katrina with global warming is downright silly. Unless you want to throw the one that hit Galveston, and Betsy and all the other into the "it's the U.S.'s fault bucket as well.
But let's connect up those opposable thumbs and get back to the Michoud fault. New Orleans is a doomed city. It's simply silly to think any other way. New Orleans was doomed from the start, when Iberville and Bienville had a spat and one brother took off to report back to his French overlords about progress in the New World, the other brother laid out New Orleans in a spot where the Dutch could come in and shell it, all for 30 pieces of silver. Yes kiddies, if you haven't heard it before, you heard it here first, the geographic placement of New Orleans is the result of traitorous actions and espionage committed against France so that the mouth of the Mississippi could be opened up to another nation and the port there (New Orleans) could be taken and destroyed, only to relocate the port to a more suitable location.
Events turned on their ear and New Orleans wasn't shelled or taken over and by the time the treachery and espionage was revealed, it was too late and too expensive to move the city to it's original surveyed location. New Orleans is doomed not only because of the treachery of an international plot, but it's doomed because one day the Mighty Mississippi is going to simply tell the Corps of Engineers to bugger off and it's going to reroute itself down the Atchafalaya Basin. No matter what the Corps does, it's merely buying time, the Mississippi is a bit tired of it's present location and wants a change of scenery, we've known this for decades upon decades, but we're fighting it, and putting up a good fight, an honorable battle, but a battle that is destined to be lost eventually. No matter how many control structures, levees, relief reservoirs and the like we build, eventually the Mississippi will change course, and leave New Orleans high and dry. Which to some will be a nice change, although economically it will be a disaster that dwarfs Katrina, Rita, Betsy and every other Gulf Coast hurricane combined.
Don't get me wrong now, I'm not about to suggest that we give up on New Orleans, I'm not saying that we shouldn't rebuild it at all. I'm saying we need to step back for a minute and realize that things are not necessarily what they seem. The present course, like the course of the Mississippi, is not necessarily a good one.
There is a strong urge to rebuild New Orleans exactly like it was (the new addendum to that plan is to raise everything in the city 1 to 3 feet off the ground. . . useless, but we'll get to that in a minute), and I understand that urge. New Orleans is my hometown and my trips down there since Katrina have been simply heartbreaking, but over time and with some reflection, I've come to realize that New Orleans was simply waiting for this to happen and in all honesty, Katrina wasn't quite bad enough for New Orleans. The storm actually missed the city, travelling up the Pearl River instead of the Mississippi. Katrina was a near miss for New Orleans. I know it doesn't seem that way from the destruction and chaos played out on our TV screens, but it actually did miss the city and that part of the storm that did hit the city were the weakest quadrants of the storm. An analysis of the data suggests that the actual category rating of the storm was somewhere between a 1 and a 2. That Cat 1 or 2 storm was enough however to bring about a cascade of disparate events sufficient to effectively destroy a city.
But I still say Katrina didn't destroy New Orleans enough. I'm sure many of my family members who read this, especially those still in the city will be positively horrified by me writing that, but in my mind it's true. I'm not wishing for any more loss of life (I wish Blanco and Nagin would have done their jobs and mitigated the loss of life when they had the chance), so don't try to paint this that way.
I'm talking about DESTRUCTION. I'm talking about shattering buildings instead of flooding them, I'm talking about scouring entire areas of the city clean, wiping the slate and REALLY allowing some rebuilding, the RIGHT kind of rebuilding to be done. Today across New Orleans people are ripping out sheetrock, carpets, and paneling, they are scraping out the inside of their homes with shovels and tossing the soggy remnants of former lives into the street where it cooks for days in the sun then carted away to landfills. Many of these people are "rebuilding" their lives, but it's my firm belief that most, not all but most are setting themselves up for even greater misfortune.
Katrina didn't do enough. The storm left hundreds of thousands of building shells, filled with the soaked remnants of their lives. Cruelly however, the storm left a false hope in place for many of those returning that they'd be able to rebuild, a false hope that levees would be rebuilt to protect against a future storm and a false hope that Katrina was "the Big One" and that New Orleans was safe from another storm for some time to come.
Talking to people in New Oreleans, many times I heard, "Well, it's over now, and we're safe for another hundred years." Similarly I heard, "Well, at least now we know what to expect, so we can build bigger levees to protect us." These are dangerous, albeit understandable, positions to take.
Like CO2 emissions and Global Warming and even "drilling is causing Louisana to sink" we simply don't have a good enough understanding of what happened during the storm on the BIG level. Sure we watched alot on TV, and we saw alot of destruction in real time, but we'll never know what forces were actually brought to bear at the height of the Cat 1 or 2 storm that hit the city. We'll never know if the local nutria had undermined the portion of the levees that failed, there's no possible way for us to know about that, because we hadn't looked at those sections, with an eye for observing what's about to cause this levee to break. Likewise we'll never know if the barge broke the London Ave. Canal levee or the barge was sucked into the Lower Ninth along with the water rushing in from the failed levee.
We do know however that it's far easier to blame human failure than it is to blame Mother Nature. After all, it's Mother Nature, we can't extract a pound of flesh from her, we can never toss her in jail or make sure she never has a job running the weather or even convince her never to strike the city (or another city) again. So we blame people. We look for individuals and say "It's your fault the levees failed" "It's your fault for driving that SUV that global warming increased and made storms increase and that caused Katrina, and it hit New Orleans to prove that Bush hates Black people." "It's you, the phantom government agent who mined the levee with dynamite to flood out the black homes." "It's you, the American people who caused all this by your insistence that you work hard and develop this nation and live comfortably in big houses while you use up oil that causes the SE Louisiana wetlands to sink."
It doesn't matter that all this is all bullshit, because it's easy. It delivers the pound of flesh.
So now that the pound of flesh has been taken. Come on people, it's been taken, lets move on. Let's use our opposable thumbs and big brains. We have to rebuild. But again, we find that the devastation is simply not as great as we needed it to be to make rebuilding easier, so we have to use our big brains to make some hard choices and difficult decisions.
Most of New Oreleans should be bulldozed. Most of the homes that people are currently ripping out sheetrock and carpet from should be bulldozed. Every flooded structure in New Orleans, no matter how severe, should be bulldozed. I'll never sell this argument to many people, but I believe it's what needs to be done.
Building a levee to protect the city against a CAT 4 or 5 storm is possible, but then again it's not. Many people who read this will have never experienced a hurricane. Many never will. Tornados however are a much simpler concept to understand and more of us have a common experience with or have seen a tornado in it's full scope on the television. We can easily grasp what a tornado is because we can see it in it's entirety in pictures with points of reference when we watch video of one.
A hurricane, in very simple terms is a tornado, a hundreds of miles across tornado.
Building a structure to withstand a direct hit from a tornado can be done. You wouldn't want to live in it however. It'd be an ugly structure, largely underground (ding ding. . . warning. . . put on your thinking caps), small and cramped and not what one would consider a home.
Have you figured it out yet? Structures that could withstand a tornado (the forces most similar to a CAT 4 or 5 storm) simply won't work in New Orleans, so it's back to the drawing board. Well, not really, we're back to levees. The levee system to survive a CAT 4 or 5 storm would have to be MASSIVE. Not just big, I mean MASSIVE, Great Wall kinds of massive, pyramids massive, panama canal massive. Massive with a tectonic fault running right through the middle. Do you see the problem yet??
So what's the solution. Honestly, there seems to me to be a solution, but you're not going to like it.
Bulldoze New Orleans. That's the solution. Buldoze every structure that experienced flooding, every structure that's been abandoned since the storm, hell, if someone leaves their home for the weekend and you can get away with it, bulldoze that one too. Wipe the slate clean, THEN you can rebuild the way rebuilding needs to be done.
The Ninth Ward should never be a residential area again. I'm sorry, but it's true. We have a major tectonic fault running right through the middle of it. It's indefensible, and to try is only to prolong the inevitable. I know that there will be an immediate kneejerk reaction to this. What about the homes, the lives, what will these people return to. The answer to that is simple, they won't. That's not a racist statement, although I'm sure I'll get email saying it is, but it's not, and I'd say bulldoze Lakeview if there was a fault running through that area of the city (wait a minute, I'm saying to bulldoze Lakeview too. . . maybe that will get the cries of racism off my back).
The Ninth Ward has a purpose in what I believe the New New Orleans should become. The ninth ward should be a shipping offload/onload and storage yard for the most advanced port facility the world has ever known. It's location is ideal for such a use, the land can be acquired at a reasonable fair market value and allow displaced families a real opportunity to rebuild someplace that A) Doesn't have a tectonic fault running through it and B) Isn't likely to be flooded again.
Rebuild the Ninth Ward levees to the levels they were pre-Katrina, level the shattered homes, pave it solid and turn it into a port facility that's the envy of the world, a port facility that can handle imports and exports for the new milennia, and most importantly, it's an area that would not have to be protected by new, larger levees that will be constantly on the move through tectonic subsidance.
Next, take a hard look at the size and shape of the New New Orleans. No matter what, it will be decades before New New Orleans has the population base that New Orleans did. The footprint of New New Orleans that is protected by levees can be adjusted, New Orleans East could be largely abandoned to create a series of chevron shaped open-ended levees to absorb the brunt of a storm coming from the Gulf and energy and resources can be devoted to rebuilding the core of the city and population centers on the north and west sides of the city.
Next, bring in the pumps. Begin pumping sediment from the Mississippi into the interior of the city. Millions of cubic yards will be needed, but it's there, in the river, and it can be relatively easily extracted, pumped and distributed throughout the city. The project would be a massive undertaking and certainly not easy, but filling the city would be far easier in the long run than raising every structure 1 to 3 feet above grade (the current plan) which will effectively do absolutely nothing in the event of a similar catastrophe (remember, this was a CAT 1 or 2 storm, 3 at most, but there are bigger storms out there, and ONE DAY, one will hit the city. Rebuilding to protect from the storm that just hit isn't enough, IF we're going to rebuild, and stay, we must plan and build for the storm that didn't hit, but almost did.
The filling of the bowl that is New Orleans may take years, but done sensibly, a section of the city at a time, with developers standing by at the ready to come in and build on the New New Orleans mound would do so mostly at their own expense, willingly. I also imagine that they'd be more efficient and effective than a government operation to do the same.
The material is there for us to do it. We have the technology. We just lack the will to do what's right because it's painful. It would be painful to tell families that their homes must be bulldozed and the entire level of the city must be raised 8 to 12 feet. It would be painful to watch billions of dollars go into a project that people wouldn't see create immediate gains.
The New New Orleans mound could be a planned city and again the envy of the world. A pace setting port for the rest of the world to look at and envy, a planned city laid out to maximize resources and space. Between the New Oreleans East Chevrons wetlands could form and nature would reclaim the land, further mitigating destructive forces from storms. Population centers on the West Bank and across the lake would supply safe housing for those wishing to work in the city and commute like workers from New Jersey and the East Bay do in Manhattan and San Francisco. A new example for city architecture and design could be built utilizing all the lessons we've learned over the millenia.
New New Orleans residents would finally see a day where rainwater falling into the city would naturally leave, the millions of dollars invested in pumps which can fail would be replaced by the natural force of gravity, which will never fail us no matter how severe the storm. New New Orleans residents would be able to look down upon the Mississippi river rather than up at it. New New Orleans residents would be facing the same set of problems and utilize the same solutions that other Gulf Coast cities on high ground do. The risk from storms would still be there, but the added danger of living in a bowl on top of a swamp with a tectonic fault running through it would be removed.
The character of New New Orleans must change too. New Orleans can no longer afford to be a hovel filled with poverty, it simply can't afford it. New New Orleans should be smaller, leaner, and meaner. It should be expensive to live in the city proper, and living there, just because it's where you live should be a thing of the past.
New New Orleans should be the Manhattan or San Francisco of the South. It should have a small footprint and space should be maximized due to the inherent dangers of living between a river that doesn't want to be there and a Lake that functions as a Hurricane Magnet (luckily we've dodged the bullet repeatedly of a Hurricane blasting all of it's energy into the city and then parking itself in Lake Ponchatrain to gain strength and batter the city to bits). New New Orelans could have the appeal for tourists that it's always had, with added attractions and facilities designed to handle the throngs effectively and maximize the returns to the businesses present and thereby the tax revenue to maintain the structures necessary to protect the city without fighting the constantly losing battle that it has been fighting for centuries.
What's happening in New Orleans now, as I watch it happen, only seems to be another step toward prolonging the inevitable. Lifting houses 1 to 3 feet is not going to help if New Orleans is hit again in the near future, and it certainly won't help if a bigger, stronger storm rolls through. Rebuilding the fragile wooden shells that have been wracked by Katrina will not serve the citizens well when the next storm hits. New, stronger building codes are necessary, and if the city is not going to "fill the bowl", then it MUST raise the houses, and not 1 to 3 feet, but 8 to 12 feet or more if damage by flooding is to be eliminated.
Stilts Ok, fine, build on stilts. They work, but there are other options, mandate that every residence be built on top of a first story (8 to 12 feet high) of cinder block or poured concrete, use the space for parking or storage, just don't be sad if the next storm comes along and junior is using it as his room, the goal is to save as much of the "authorized" living space as possible from the destructive forces of flooding.
DO SOMETHING EFFECTIVE NEW ORLEANS. Everyone in the city knows that 1 to 3 feet solves nothing. Most homes experienced far more water than 3 feet. Most homes were faced with 5 feet or more, some even more than that. 1 to 3 feet may put insurance risk tables into an acceptable range for flood insurance, but another Katrina event or worse and those 1 to 3 feet will be useless.
I'll wrap it up now, it's quite the rant already, and I went all over the chart with it. Alot of this is something I've wanted to say for a long time but I just couldn't bring myself to post something that my friends and family would read that said "Bulldoze New Orleans", but I really can't get behind the current plan by the city of having people build up 1 to 3 feet when every picture I took while I was there showed higher flood levels. I can't support 1 to 3 feet when I see that every home I ever lived in in New Orleans had 5 to 10 feet of flooding. I can't support the notion of rebuilding the Cat 3 levees that failed under a Cat 2 storm. I just can't.
A levee is like a chain, it's only as strong as the weakest link. The old New Orleans levee system incorporated hundreds of miles of levees, the breaches measured in 10's of feet, not miles, of levee. To assume the old system can be rebuilt and maintained to defend against the storm to come is simple unreasonable. Something bigger MUST BE DONE, a grander undertaking must occur if we're to rebuild New Orleans to any shade of her former self. If we decide not to have as big a city, that's GREAT, I'm all for it. Not because it's easier to evacuate, but because it makes the possibility of a LARGE USEFUL undertaking to commence. Not because I want to see a smaller New Orleans, but because logic dictates we NEED to see a smaller, stronger, leaner, meaner, more efficient, more robust NEW NEW ORLEANS.
Thanks for reading this rant if you got through it all, I appreciate your indulgence and welcome any comments, positive or negative, call me a loon, call me a prophet, I don't care, but if any portion of this struck a chord or sparked an idea, I'd love to hear it.
Thanks to Confederate Yankee (on the blogroll) for pointing me to the Discovery News Article, you can find Dokkas article here in abstract form and here in it's entirety, and once again, thanks for lending your ear (actually, your eyes) to me for a few minutes.
--Jason
I also have a hurricane Katrina category with pictures and other posts if you're interested.
-JC
Posted by JasonColeman at 8:18 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 11, 2006
Grab a cup o' joe. . . .
Then sit back and read Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions take on the Immigration Reform Act and the so-called compromise amendment.
It's worth anyone's time who wants to understand what's going on without the cloudy and often misunderstood interpretations of the MSM.
--Jason
Posted by JasonColeman at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 2, 2006
A brief musical interlude. . .
Click the triangle to play, may take a minute or so to load. If it doesn't work for you, try THIS LINK.
Hope you enjoy. If you don't?.?.? Well, it wouldn't really be me if I said I cared.
--Jason
PS - Support the band by checking out their site: The Right Brothers
Posted by JasonColeman at 11:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 1, 2006
HP Printing
--Jason
Posted by JasonColeman at 12:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
