This is very well said -
Largest Seaport In America Still Closed
Apprx. 25% of this nation's imports and exports go in and out through the Port of New Orleans and the surrounding ports. At this point, it looks like most of the port facilities remain largely intact, with no major structural damage. The Mississippi River did not jump its banks as many had feared. No huge ships sank in the river making it unnavigable. That's the good news.
The question is, when will the ports reopen? The best assessment of the port problem I've seen was written by our old friend Dr. George Friedman of Stratfor.com. Here are some excerpts from his latest analysis (note that this analysis is very sobering, but you need to read it):
QUOTE: "The ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, the Port of South Louisiana is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A larger proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 57 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.
The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.
There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage -- though not trivial -- is manageable.
The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.
What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.
The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.
It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.
A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.
It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States." END QUOTE.
New Orleans port officials said last week that they are not exactly sure when the port will reopen. Their biggest problem, as Dr. Friedman points out above, is that they do not have the people to operate the facilities.
Gary LaGrange, the director of the Port of New Orleans offered this prediction over the weekend: "We think that within a month we can be back at 30 percent. In three months we can probably be back at 70 percent to 80 percent. We think that in four to five months we'll be back to 100 percent." This is serious!
DJHJD
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Hump day sunrise
Time to get cleaned up so that I can be ready for the first loan client of the day. Need to run Ruby over to Car Snot and have her waxed. I've heard that two new loan applications are coming in today; we'll see.
Today, I am just disgusted with people and their inability to keep a commitment to take a leak. And with Sprint. My phone hardly works anymore.
Okay, task #1 done for the day. I guess I'll move on to task #2.
Today, I am just disgusted with people and their inability to keep a commitment to take a leak. And with Sprint. My phone hardly works anymore.
Okay, task #1 done for the day. I guess I'll move on to task #2.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Tuesday evening - late
So, class tonight went well. Later than I thought, but well. Then, I had to meet up with a lad and pick UP condo documents from Clear Lake that he picked up for ME, and then run out to NNicole's to pick up her stuff. Got home around 10:00; and have a HUGE day tomorrow.
Nary a whisper out of the hookah. Nary a word out of N8. Nor from the married guy. I did, however, hear from Curtis, the man from two years ago, who has suddenly re-appeared and thinks it would be a great idea if he sacked out at my place a couple of nights a week. He just wants to get laid, then he'll be back on his way.
Canceled the photo shoot for Friday; back to the drawing board on the models. I think what there is to be done here is to just find the money necessary and hire some through an agency. Something's wrong about my approach, or it would be working.
Of course, as I said to Joe Di last night, I'm the clearing house for being lied to and stood up.
I've decided to change my will/powers of attorney - again. Since L doesn't .. um .. talk to me anymore, it hardly seems appropriate to have him holding the electrical cord to the pacemaker. So, I'm thinking .. Donna? Maybe?
I just bought my THIRD XM radio; this one to be permanently mounted in Ruby. It was just the one I wanted, and I guess I saved about $30.
Okay, I guess it's time to read my new Jaguar catalog and go to bed.
Nary a whisper out of the hookah. Nary a word out of N8. Nor from the married guy. I did, however, hear from Curtis, the man from two years ago, who has suddenly re-appeared and thinks it would be a great idea if he sacked out at my place a couple of nights a week. He just wants to get laid, then he'll be back on his way.
Canceled the photo shoot for Friday; back to the drawing board on the models. I think what there is to be done here is to just find the money necessary and hire some through an agency. Something's wrong about my approach, or it would be working.
Of course, as I said to Joe Di last night, I'm the clearing house for being lied to and stood up.
I've decided to change my will/powers of attorney - again. Since L doesn't .. um .. talk to me anymore, it hardly seems appropriate to have him holding the electrical cord to the pacemaker. So, I'm thinking .. Donna? Maybe?
I just bought my THIRD XM radio; this one to be permanently mounted in Ruby. It was just the one I wanted, and I guess I saved about $30.
Okay, I guess it's time to read my new Jaguar catalog and go to bed.
Tuesday - it should be a new lease on life, but ..
Okay, it's time to call England and talk to someone about a loan. Then, time to work up and submit a loan, then a meeting with Claudia about her home purchase, and THEN, I guess I should start working on this paperwork that's sitting here.
Okay, that loan is faxing out. I've ordered everything, and have to send the borrower a list of stuff to send me BACK. Other than that, it's cooked. And I have twenty minutes before Claudia arrives.
I keep forgetting to eat.
Still have a ton of work to do this afternoon. Not a word from the hookah, nor a word from the married man. I think I'll go to Vancouver instead of to the black tie dinner here.
Just picked up Ruby from the shop. She required nothing unusual, the reason she's riding poorly is that her shock absorbers are cheap. Cheap cheap.
Okay, that loan is faxing out. I've ordered everything, and have to send the borrower a list of stuff to send me BACK. Other than that, it's cooked. And I have twenty minutes before Claudia arrives.
I keep forgetting to eat.
Still have a ton of work to do this afternoon. Not a word from the hookah, nor a word from the married man. I think I'll go to Vancouver instead of to the black tie dinner here.
Just picked up Ruby from the shop. She required nothing unusual, the reason she's riding poorly is that her shock absorbers are cheap. Cheap cheap.
Monday, September 12, 2005
Monday evening ..
Just back from my pre-natal re-imprinting session. I don't really know what to write about that just yet.
The fuzzy one from North Carolina (Michael) had asked that I call him when leaving from Clear Lake. So, I did that, and he didn't answer. Sent him a text message, and he writes back that he is going to call later, when the traffic dies down. Not knowing if that meant he was expecting to come for dinner or not, I write him back and ask that question. So, he writes me back telling me that he doesn't know what's up, he can't promise that he's even coming over, and don't "give up hope."
Uh, fuck you and the busted down donkey you rode into town on?
So, I wrote him back and suggested that, a.) it wasn't a hope thing, it was a hunger thing, and b.) I didn't care either way if he came over, I was inviting him over for HIS benefit, not mine.
No word since then.
The married guy came over this afternoon. He had requested (insisted) that I buy him some inhalants and some better lube, both of which purchases had cost me over $50 some weeks back. He is never too hot to go again, so I never know when to expect him. Thus, this expensive (and, to me, worthless) sexual support merchandise sat here gathering dust until his arrival today.
He popped in, and things started normally. However, they got very weird, very quickly. First, he wanted to be affectionate. Second, he wanted to KISS. Then, he let about 1/2 of the $43 bottle of inhalants drain out on the bed. On the silk duvet cover, the silk pillow sham cover and the sheets.
Smells great in my bedroom.
Maybe men just aren't the thing.
I guess I'm going to go watch a DVD. I wonder which one would be good for tonight.
The fuzzy one from North Carolina (Michael) had asked that I call him when leaving from Clear Lake. So, I did that, and he didn't answer. Sent him a text message, and he writes back that he is going to call later, when the traffic dies down. Not knowing if that meant he was expecting to come for dinner or not, I write him back and ask that question. So, he writes me back telling me that he doesn't know what's up, he can't promise that he's even coming over, and don't "give up hope."
Uh, fuck you and the busted down donkey you rode into town on?
So, I wrote him back and suggested that, a.) it wasn't a hope thing, it was a hunger thing, and b.) I didn't care either way if he came over, I was inviting him over for HIS benefit, not mine.
No word since then.
The married guy came over this afternoon. He had requested (insisted) that I buy him some inhalants and some better lube, both of which purchases had cost me over $50 some weeks back. He is never too hot to go again, so I never know when to expect him. Thus, this expensive (and, to me, worthless) sexual support merchandise sat here gathering dust until his arrival today.
He popped in, and things started normally. However, they got very weird, very quickly. First, he wanted to be affectionate. Second, he wanted to KISS. Then, he let about 1/2 of the $43 bottle of inhalants drain out on the bed. On the silk duvet cover, the silk pillow sham cover and the sheets.
Smells great in my bedroom.
Maybe men just aren't the thing.
I guess I'm going to go watch a DVD. I wonder which one would be good for tonight.
Monday, Monday ver. 640.01
What a day! My "to do" list is whipping me like an errant galley slave, reluctant to pull on my oar. However, it is getting me through things neatly.
Have the white clothing in the dryer, have to go clean Ruby's windows, having some seminar activity at New Vision this afternoon, have a counseling session at 17:00 at New Vision, then home again. I think that Michael from North Carolina is coming over to spend a day or two to get away from his room mate.
Just had an email from Uncle Larry telling me that he's heard from a job resource in Houston. Oh, my. I'd feel like I had won the lottery if he moved back to Baghdad on the Bayou. Unfortunately, this is just a traveling gig and he'd just be flying around the universe on AAmerican's MD-83 fleet.
Time to clean the windows on Ruby, then fold up the laundry, get cleaned up and go meet this character at 2:15
Have the white clothing in the dryer, have to go clean Ruby's windows, having some seminar activity at New Vision this afternoon, have a counseling session at 17:00 at New Vision, then home again. I think that Michael from North Carolina is coming over to spend a day or two to get away from his room mate.
Just had an email from Uncle Larry telling me that he's heard from a job resource in Houston. Oh, my. I'd feel like I had won the lottery if he moved back to Baghdad on the Bayou. Unfortunately, this is just a traveling gig and he'd just be flying around the universe on AAmerican's MD-83 fleet.
Time to clean the windows on Ruby, then fold up the laundry, get cleaned up and go meet this character at 2:15
Sunday, September 11, 2005
a conversation with the minx
My sweet minx and I were chatting online, as we are wont to do, and I began to tell him the full story of Michael's visit last night. I then realized that I had not told that story here, and, rather than re-typing it, I thought I would merely transcribe same and reveal to everyone the Minx's special wit and magic.
DrDivo1: So, I had a man spend the night last night
The Minx: anyone i know?
DrDivo1: he's on gay.com ..
DrDivo1: his picture's on the blog
The Minx: ah
The Minx: i will investigate
DrDivo1: his name is michael
DrDivo1: a North Carolina boy
The Minx: whoo
The Minx: tasty
DrDivo1: he's powerful sexy
DrDivo1: I took him to dinner last night, and had n-o-t-h-i-n-g to talk to him about
DrDivo1: I think he was intimidated -
The Minx: by your vast intelligence
DrDivo1: anyway, he and I had planned the whole time that he would be spending the night (since he lives in Pasa-get-down-dena)
DrDivo1: and he fell asleep on the sofa nearly as soon as the movie started on the TV
The Minx: why do people live outstide the beltway it boggles my mind
DrDivo1: he's a.) living with an older gay man b.) in a totally crappy one bedroom apartment c.) doesn't have a job d.) isn't 'gay' e.) is a total hoot
DrDivo1: he and I talk on the phone for hours. When he got into the car and I took him to dinner, he got really shut down.
The Minx: sometimes it's a lot harder face to face
DrDivo1: anyway, after the movie ended, he bounded up off the sofa, ran into my bedroom, flopped down on the bed and said "this is where I'm sleeping, what about you?"
The Minx: how cute
DrDivo1: anyway, he wanted a massage. About ten minutes later, he was naked. W-O-O-F. Fuzzy from the hips to the ankles.
The Minx: looks like he's got a nice torso
DrDivo1: he does
DrDivo1: anyway, after I massaged him front and back (he never got erect, giving credence to the str8 assertion) he asked for a pair of shorts, and then crawled into bed. No snogging, but he was in constant body contact all night. This morning, he says 'you're great to sleep with."
The Minx: this new breed of man is truly strange
DrDivo1: he asked if he could move in
DrDivo1: well, he asked IF his room mate was still acting weird, could he "hang out with me for a few days"
DrDivo1: which is "new breed" speak for "can I move in?"
The Minx: i'm going to have to move in for a bit... it's aparently the thing to do
DrDivo1: (ROFL)
DrDivo1: anyway
DrDivo1: he was to come back over today, but he has again gone incommunicado
The Minx: definitely part of the new breed programming
DrDivo1: totally
DrDivo1: he's a hookah
DrDivo1: to men
DrDivo1: and bitches about it non-stop, because he says that men touching his body is annoying
The Minx: pulease
DrDivo1: however, he revealed last night (when he barricaded himself into the bed with pillows) that he first was living with/supported by a man when he was 18
DrDivo1: then, he ditched ALL the pillows
The Minx: and all his clothes!
DrDivo1: except for the black boxer briefs which he had donned
The Minx: ah
DrDivo1: then, he began to talk in his sleep and toss and turn all night, all the while making sure he was in constant body contact
The Minx: sounds like the man has issues
DrDivo1: I was just typing "he has issues"
DrDivo1: So, I had a man spend the night last night
The Minx: anyone i know?
DrDivo1: he's on gay.com ..
DrDivo1: his picture's on the blog
The Minx: ah
The Minx: i will investigate
DrDivo1: his name is michael
DrDivo1: a North Carolina boy
The Minx: whoo
The Minx: tasty
DrDivo1: he's powerful sexy
DrDivo1: I took him to dinner last night, and had n-o-t-h-i-n-g to talk to him about
DrDivo1: I think he was intimidated -
The Minx: by your vast intelligence
DrDivo1: anyway, he and I had planned the whole time that he would be spending the night (since he lives in Pasa-get-down-dena)
DrDivo1: and he fell asleep on the sofa nearly as soon as the movie started on the TV
The Minx: why do people live outstide the beltway it boggles my mind
DrDivo1: he's a.) living with an older gay man b.) in a totally crappy one bedroom apartment c.) doesn't have a job d.) isn't 'gay' e.) is a total hoot
DrDivo1: he and I talk on the phone for hours. When he got into the car and I took him to dinner, he got really shut down.
The Minx: sometimes it's a lot harder face to face
DrDivo1: anyway, after the movie ended, he bounded up off the sofa, ran into my bedroom, flopped down on the bed and said "this is where I'm sleeping, what about you?"
The Minx: how cute
DrDivo1: anyway, he wanted a massage. About ten minutes later, he was naked. W-O-O-F. Fuzzy from the hips to the ankles.
The Minx: looks like he's got a nice torso
DrDivo1: he does
DrDivo1: anyway, after I massaged him front and back (he never got erect, giving credence to the str8 assertion) he asked for a pair of shorts, and then crawled into bed. No snogging, but he was in constant body contact all night. This morning, he says 'you're great to sleep with."
The Minx: this new breed of man is truly strange
DrDivo1: he asked if he could move in
DrDivo1: well, he asked IF his room mate was still acting weird, could he "hang out with me for a few days"
DrDivo1: which is "new breed" speak for "can I move in?"
The Minx: i'm going to have to move in for a bit... it's aparently the thing to do
DrDivo1: (ROFL)
DrDivo1: anyway
DrDivo1: he was to come back over today, but he has again gone incommunicado
The Minx: definitely part of the new breed programming
DrDivo1: totally
DrDivo1: he's a hookah
DrDivo1: to men
DrDivo1: and bitches about it non-stop, because he says that men touching his body is annoying
The Minx: pulease
DrDivo1: however, he revealed last night (when he barricaded himself into the bed with pillows) that he first was living with/supported by a man when he was 18
DrDivo1: then, he ditched ALL the pillows
The Minx: and all his clothes!
DrDivo1: except for the black boxer briefs which he had donned
The Minx: ah
DrDivo1: then, he began to talk in his sleep and toss and turn all night, all the while making sure he was in constant body contact
The Minx: sounds like the man has issues
DrDivo1: I was just typing "he has issues"
Sunday evening freedom
Almost 18:00, and I have my evening free. Clearly, Michael is doing something else tonight, although it seemed that he wanted to come over when I dropped him off today.
Planning out the rest of the month tonight; added about fifteen items to my already overwhelming "to do" list. Whoops, more to add.
We have six loans in the pipeline for sure, and five more in some murky sort of status. I am asking that CP make those five more certain (well, four of the five, one's mine alone.) Closing twelve loans this month would be awesome, and it looks very do-able.
Mikey is off in Tennessee, checking out a job prospect. He'll be back on Wednesday, and then he moves on Saturday to his new apartment, which is just slightly west of BumFuck.
New Vision is just cooking. We had 17 today; and three of the new people that came suggested that they're going to be coming back. Next Sunday, we do our vision and treatment of how we want things to go and what we're creating in the future. My Sundays are going to be booked solid through February for sure. Prac class starts up again in a week.
Had an outstanding meeting with Chris and Claudia today; it looks like we're going to move forward with my concept to produce broadway musicals. That's a great thing.
Well, I think it's time to make a big bowl of fruit for dinner, and start watching some DVDs so I can send them all back.
Planning out the rest of the month tonight; added about fifteen items to my already overwhelming "to do" list. Whoops, more to add.
We have six loans in the pipeline for sure, and five more in some murky sort of status. I am asking that CP make those five more certain (well, four of the five, one's mine alone.) Closing twelve loans this month would be awesome, and it looks very do-able.
Mikey is off in Tennessee, checking out a job prospect. He'll be back on Wednesday, and then he moves on Saturday to his new apartment, which is just slightly west of BumFuck.
New Vision is just cooking. We had 17 today; and three of the new people that came suggested that they're going to be coming back. Next Sunday, we do our vision and treatment of how we want things to go and what we're creating in the future. My Sundays are going to be booked solid through February for sure. Prac class starts up again in a week.
Had an outstanding meeting with Chris and Claudia today; it looks like we're going to move forward with my concept to produce broadway musicals. That's a great thing.
Well, I think it's time to make a big bowl of fruit for dinner, and start watching some DVDs so I can send them all back.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Friday, September 09, 2005
Friday night thoughts
Well, here I am - it's been quite the day. After 4:45, when CP brought my check by, I ran hither and yon, paid bills, paid more bills, made phone calls, chatted up Michael (from Atlanta) and got ready to go meet Chris about starting a musical theater production company.
As I was leaving the parking lot from Mama's Restaurant, I was thinking to myself "am I crazy thinking of taking on another project?"
Perhaps.
Anyway, Michael called me and asked to borrow forty bucks and offered to meet me over in the Gulfgate area. He's a hoot. Anyway, after meeting up with him for a few minutes, I drove over to EJ's to meet Mikey and the other Whores of Baghdad, hung out there a while, had Jarred flirting with me. Blah. After leaving, I was nearly out of gas (which, I guess means that I really NEED it) so I filled up at the Big Gay Diamond Shamrock; $53.00. Wow. Then, I think about it, and I just really don't care. I'll just pay it.
We have (counting) possibly six loans in process now. At least four of those should close yet in September. Wow. That should mean a great month for me financially. I may have sold another set of books today, which would rock. I've decided that I'm going to take a diversion and write a definitive book on loan processing (which a former employer nagged at me to write for him for nearly three years, but since he wasn't paying me squat, he can go hang) and sell it. Nationally. Maybe I'll work on that .. um, when?
Tomorrow morning, Ruby goes into the shop for an alignment and etc. at 0700; then, I'm going to work on mailing stuff out and maybe going back to bed. And drinking coffee. I've been so sore that I broke down and called Travis the chiropractor (who's just the best, but annoying) and am seeing him at 11:00 tomorrow.
I had to buy a ticket for the MegaMillions tonight. $171MM. After taxes with the cash option, that would be some $55,000,000. Couldn't help myself.
Working on going to see E over the weekend of the 24th. I just HAVE to take a Sunday off every now and again. Urk. I have to remember to come up with a flip chart and markers for Sunday.
Anyway, that's enough for tonight. I'll post a couple of pictures of Michael (from Atlanta) who is so damned fun to talk to.
As I was leaving the parking lot from Mama's Restaurant, I was thinking to myself "am I crazy thinking of taking on another project?"
Perhaps.
Anyway, Michael called me and asked to borrow forty bucks and offered to meet me over in the Gulfgate area. He's a hoot. Anyway, after meeting up with him for a few minutes, I drove over to EJ's to meet Mikey and the other Whores of Baghdad, hung out there a while, had Jarred flirting with me. Blah. After leaving, I was nearly out of gas (which, I guess means that I really NEED it) so I filled up at the Big Gay Diamond Shamrock; $53.00. Wow. Then, I think about it, and I just really don't care. I'll just pay it.
We have (counting) possibly six loans in process now. At least four of those should close yet in September. Wow. That should mean a great month for me financially. I may have sold another set of books today, which would rock. I've decided that I'm going to take a diversion and write a definitive book on loan processing (which a former employer nagged at me to write for him for nearly three years, but since he wasn't paying me squat, he can go hang) and sell it. Nationally. Maybe I'll work on that .. um, when?
Tomorrow morning, Ruby goes into the shop for an alignment and etc. at 0700; then, I'm going to work on mailing stuff out and maybe going back to bed. And drinking coffee. I've been so sore that I broke down and called Travis the chiropractor (who's just the best, but annoying) and am seeing him at 11:00 tomorrow.
I had to buy a ticket for the MegaMillions tonight. $171MM. After taxes with the cash option, that would be some $55,000,000. Couldn't help myself.
Working on going to see E over the weekend of the 24th. I just HAVE to take a Sunday off every now and again. Urk. I have to remember to come up with a flip chart and markers for Sunday.
Anyway, that's enough for tonight. I'll post a couple of pictures of Michael (from Atlanta) who is so damned fun to talk to.
Somewhere in the City of Louisiana
While innocently watching MSNBC last evening to get the latest on the relief efforts, I was fortunate enough to hear the editorial below from Keith Olbermann. I have NEVER heard such a hard-hitting, honest, emotional, pull-no-punches editorial on TV in my life. It perfectly coincided with my outrage and contempt over the past horrible week, and I bet it respresents the feelings of, hopefully, a substantial percentage of the rest of the citizenry of the U.S. Please, please forward this editorial on to others. And now, read carefully, and picture the editorial as delivered by Olbermann -- in a voice dripping with disgust and anger.
The "city" of Louisiana (Keith Olbermann)
SECAUCUS - Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."
Well there's your problem right there.
If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a crisis, this was it.
The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might've saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could've brought last Monday and Tuesday - like the President, whose statements have looked like they're being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.
But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called "The Department of Homeland Security": "Louisiana is a city..."
Politician after politician - Republican and Democrat alike - has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were - congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.
And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded - even the internet's meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural... and government-made.
But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.
No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.
But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans - even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection - or at least amelioration - against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.
Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?
I don't know which 'we' Mr. Bush meant.
For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been - as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be - whether or not I voted for this President - he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government - our government - "New Orleans."
For him, it is a shame - in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself - it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.
As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's credibility.
Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.
E-mail: KOlbermann@msnbc.com
The "city" of Louisiana (Keith Olbermann)
SECAUCUS - Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."
Well there's your problem right there.
If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a crisis, this was it.
The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might've saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could've brought last Monday and Tuesday - like the President, whose statements have looked like they're being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.
But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called "The Department of Homeland Security": "Louisiana is a city..."
Politician after politician - Republican and Democrat alike - has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were - congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.
And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded - even the internet's meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural... and government-made.
But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.
No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.
But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans - even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection - or at least amelioration - against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.
Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?
I don't know which 'we' Mr. Bush meant.
For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been - as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be - whether or not I voted for this President - he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government - our government - "New Orleans."
For him, it is a shame - in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself - it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.
As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government's credibility.
Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.
E-mail: KOlbermann@msnbc.com
Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences
This was posted on DailyKos. I did a google search on Lorrie Beth Slonsky and Larry Bradshaw; they are paramedics and SEIU activists stranded in NOLA when they were attending a paramedics conference in the city:
Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences
Larry Bradshaw, Lorrie Beth Slonsky
Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.
The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.
We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.
We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the "victims" of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators
running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured
the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.
Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.
On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen
them.
We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses
never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits,
they were commandeered by the military.
By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the
Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement".
We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there." We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told
them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.
All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.
Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts. Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).
This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.
If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.
Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.
From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.
Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its lades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.
Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.
In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.
We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.
There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.
Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.
This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.
Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences
Larry Bradshaw, Lorrie Beth Slonsky
Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.
The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.
We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.
We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the "victims" of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators
running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured
the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.
Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.
On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen
them.
We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses
never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits,
they were commandeered by the military.
By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the
Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement".
We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there." We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told
them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.
All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.
Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts. Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).
This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.
If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.
Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.
From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.
Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its lades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.
Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.
In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.
We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.
There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.
Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.
This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.
"Those Looters Should be Shot, Praise the Lord, and Pass the Guacamole!
A God with Whom I am not Familiar
By TIM WISE
http://www.timwise.org
This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today,
in Nashville, at lunchtime, with the Brooks Brothers shirt:
You don't know me. But I know you.
I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the
restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you
prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for
your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding
catastrophe in New Orleans.
You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then
proceeded to spend the better part of your meal--and mine, since I
was too near your table to avoid hearing every word--morally scolding
the people of that devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not
heeding the warnings to leave before disaster struck. Then you
attacked them--all of them, without distinction it seemed--for the
behavior of a relative handful: those who have looted items like
guns, or big screen TVs.
I heard you ask, amid the din of your colleagues "Amens," why it was
that instead of pitching in to help their fellow Americans, the
people of New Orleans instead--again, all of them in your mind--chose
to steal and shoot at relief helicopters.
I watched you wipe salsa from the corners of your mouth, as you
nodded agreement to the statement of one of your friends, sitting to
your right, her hair neatly coiffed, her makeup flawless, her jewelry
sparkling. When you asked, rhetorically, why it was that people were
so much more decent amid the tragedy of 9-11, as compared to the
aftermath of Katrina, she had offered her response, but only after
apologizing for what she admitted was going to sound harsh.
"Well," Buffy explained. "It's probably because in New Orleans, it
seems to be mostly poor people, and you know, they just don't have
the same regard."
She then added that police should shoot the looters, and should have
done so from the beginning, so as to send a message to the rest that
theft would not be tolerated. You, who had just thanked Jesus for
your chips and guacamole, said you agreed. They should be shot.
Praise the Lord.
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.
Two thoughts.
First, it is a very fortunate thing for you, and likely for me, that
my two young children were with me as I sat there, choking back fish
tacos and my own seething rage, listening to you pontificate about
shit you know nothing about.
Have you ever even been to New Orleans?
And no, by that I don't mean the New Orleans of your company's sales
conference. I don,t mean Emeril's New Orleans, or the New Orleans of
Uptown Mardi Gras parties.
I mean the New Orleans that is buried as if it were Atlantis, in
places like the lower 9th ward: 98 percent black, 40 percent poor,
where bodies are floating down the street, flowing with the water as
it seeks its own level. Have you met the people from that New
Orleans? The New Orleans that is dying as I write this, and as you
order another sweet tea?
I didn't think so.
Your God--the one to whom you prayed today, and likely do before
every meal, because this gesture proves what a good Christian you are-
-is one with whom I am not familiar.
Your God is one who you sincerely believe gives a flying fuck about
your lunch. Your God is one who you seem to believe watches over you
and blesses you, and brings good tidings your way, while
simultaneously letting thousands of people watch their homes be
destroyed, and perhaps ten thousand or more die, many of them in the
streets for lack of water or food.
Did you ever stop to think just what a rancid asshole such a God
would have to be, such that he would take care of the likes of you,
while letting babies die in their mother's arms, and old people in
wheelchairs, at the foot of Canal Street?
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.
But no, it isn't God who's the asshole here, Skip (or Brad, or
Braxton, or whatever your name is).
God doesn't feed you, and it isn't God that kept me from turning
around and beating your lily white privileged ass today either.
God has nothing to do with it.
God doesn't care who wins the Super Bowl.
God doesn't help anyone win an Academy Award.
God didn't get you your last raise, or your SUV.
And if God is even half as tired as I am of having to listen to self-
righteous bastards like you blame the victims of this nightmare for
their fate, then you had best eat slowly from this point forward.
Why didn't they evacuate like they were told?
Are you serious?
There are 100,000 people in that city without cars. Folks who are too
poor to own their own vehicle, and who rely on public transportation
every day. I know this might shock you. They don,t have a Hummer2, or
whatever gas-guzzling piece of crap you either already own or
probably are saving up for.
And no, they didn't just choose not to own a car because the buses
are so gosh-darned efficient and great, as Rush Limbaugh implied
yesterday, and as you likely heard, since you're the kind of person
who hangs on the every word of such bloviating hacks as these.
Why did they loot?
Are you serious?
People are dying, in the streets, on live television. Fathers and
mothers are watching their baby's eyes bulge in their skulls from
dehydration, and you are begrudging them some Goddamned candy bars,
diapers and water?
If anything the poor of New Orleans have exercised restraint.
Maybe you didn't know it, but the people of that city with whom you
likely identify--the wealthy white folks of Uptown--were barely
touched by this storm. Yeah, I guess God was watching over them:
protecting them, and rewarding them for their faith and superior
morality. If the folks downtown who are waiting desperately for their
government to send help--a government whose resources have been
stretched thin by a war that I'm sure you support, because you love
freedom and democracy--were half as crazed as you think, they'd march
down St. Charles Avenue right now and burn every mansion in sight.
That they aren't doing so suggests a decency and compassion for their
fellow man and woman that sadly people like you lack.
Can you even imagine what you would do in their place?
Can you imagine what would happen if it were well-off white folks
stranded like this without buses to get them out, without
nourishment, without hope?
Putting aside the absurdity of the imagery--after all, such folks
always have the means to seek safety, or the money to rebuild, or the
political significance to ensure a much speedier response for their
concerns--can you just imagine?
Can you imagine what would happen if the pampered, overfed corporate
class, which complains about taxes taking a third of their bloated
incomes, had to sit in the hot sun for four, going on five days?
Without a Margarita or hotel swimming pool to comfort them I mean?
Oh, and please, I know. I'm stereotyping you. Imagine that. I've
assumed, based only on your words, what kind of person you are, even
though I suppose I could be wrong. How does that feel Biff? Hurt your
feelings? So sorry. But hey, at least my stereotypes of you aren't
deadly. They won't effect your life one bit, unlike the ones you
carry around with you and display within earshot of people like me,
supposing that no one could possibly disagree.
But I'm not wrong am I Chip? I know you. I see people like you all
the time, in airports, in business suits, on their lunch breaks.
People who will take advantage of any opportunity to ratify and reify
their pre-existing prejudices towards the poor, towards black folks.
You see the same three video loops of the same dozen or so looters on
Fox News and you conclude that poor black people are crazy, immoral,
criminal.
You, or others quite a bit like you, are the ones posting messages on
chat room boards, calling looters sub-human "vermin," "scum,"
or "cockroaches." I heard you use the word "animals" three times
today: you and that woman across from you--what was her name? Skyler?
What was it you said as you scooped the last bite of black beans and
rice into your eager mouth? Like zoo animals? Yes, I think that was
it.
Well, Chuck, it's a free country, and so you certainly have the right
I suppose to continue lecturing the poor, in between checking your
Blackberry and dropping the kids off at soccer practice. If you want
to believe that the poor of New Orleans are immoral and greedy, and
unworthy of support at a time like this--or somehow more in need of
your scolding than whatever donation you might make to a relief fund--
so be it.
But let's leave God out of it, shall we? All of it.
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar, and I'd prefer to keep
it that way.
By TIM WISE
http://www.timwise.org
This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today,
in Nashville, at lunchtime, with the Brooks Brothers shirt:
You don't know me. But I know you.
I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the
restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you
prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for
your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding
catastrophe in New Orleans.
You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then
proceeded to spend the better part of your meal--and mine, since I
was too near your table to avoid hearing every word--morally scolding
the people of that devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not
heeding the warnings to leave before disaster struck. Then you
attacked them--all of them, without distinction it seemed--for the
behavior of a relative handful: those who have looted items like
guns, or big screen TVs.
I heard you ask, amid the din of your colleagues "Amens," why it was
that instead of pitching in to help their fellow Americans, the
people of New Orleans instead--again, all of them in your mind--chose
to steal and shoot at relief helicopters.
I watched you wipe salsa from the corners of your mouth, as you
nodded agreement to the statement of one of your friends, sitting to
your right, her hair neatly coiffed, her makeup flawless, her jewelry
sparkling. When you asked, rhetorically, why it was that people were
so much more decent amid the tragedy of 9-11, as compared to the
aftermath of Katrina, she had offered her response, but only after
apologizing for what she admitted was going to sound harsh.
"Well," Buffy explained. "It's probably because in New Orleans, it
seems to be mostly poor people, and you know, they just don't have
the same regard."
She then added that police should shoot the looters, and should have
done so from the beginning, so as to send a message to the rest that
theft would not be tolerated. You, who had just thanked Jesus for
your chips and guacamole, said you agreed. They should be shot.
Praise the Lord.
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.
Two thoughts.
First, it is a very fortunate thing for you, and likely for me, that
my two young children were with me as I sat there, choking back fish
tacos and my own seething rage, listening to you pontificate about
shit you know nothing about.
Have you ever even been to New Orleans?
And no, by that I don't mean the New Orleans of your company's sales
conference. I don,t mean Emeril's New Orleans, or the New Orleans of
Uptown Mardi Gras parties.
I mean the New Orleans that is buried as if it were Atlantis, in
places like the lower 9th ward: 98 percent black, 40 percent poor,
where bodies are floating down the street, flowing with the water as
it seeks its own level. Have you met the people from that New
Orleans? The New Orleans that is dying as I write this, and as you
order another sweet tea?
I didn't think so.
Your God--the one to whom you prayed today, and likely do before
every meal, because this gesture proves what a good Christian you are-
-is one with whom I am not familiar.
Your God is one who you sincerely believe gives a flying fuck about
your lunch. Your God is one who you seem to believe watches over you
and blesses you, and brings good tidings your way, while
simultaneously letting thousands of people watch their homes be
destroyed, and perhaps ten thousand or more die, many of them in the
streets for lack of water or food.
Did you ever stop to think just what a rancid asshole such a God
would have to be, such that he would take care of the likes of you,
while letting babies die in their mother's arms, and old people in
wheelchairs, at the foot of Canal Street?
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.
But no, it isn't God who's the asshole here, Skip (or Brad, or
Braxton, or whatever your name is).
God doesn't feed you, and it isn't God that kept me from turning
around and beating your lily white privileged ass today either.
God has nothing to do with it.
God doesn't care who wins the Super Bowl.
God doesn't help anyone win an Academy Award.
God didn't get you your last raise, or your SUV.
And if God is even half as tired as I am of having to listen to self-
righteous bastards like you blame the victims of this nightmare for
their fate, then you had best eat slowly from this point forward.
Why didn't they evacuate like they were told?
Are you serious?
There are 100,000 people in that city without cars. Folks who are too
poor to own their own vehicle, and who rely on public transportation
every day. I know this might shock you. They don,t have a Hummer2, or
whatever gas-guzzling piece of crap you either already own or
probably are saving up for.
And no, they didn't just choose not to own a car because the buses
are so gosh-darned efficient and great, as Rush Limbaugh implied
yesterday, and as you likely heard, since you're the kind of person
who hangs on the every word of such bloviating hacks as these.
Why did they loot?
Are you serious?
People are dying, in the streets, on live television. Fathers and
mothers are watching their baby's eyes bulge in their skulls from
dehydration, and you are begrudging them some Goddamned candy bars,
diapers and water?
If anything the poor of New Orleans have exercised restraint.
Maybe you didn't know it, but the people of that city with whom you
likely identify--the wealthy white folks of Uptown--were barely
touched by this storm. Yeah, I guess God was watching over them:
protecting them, and rewarding them for their faith and superior
morality. If the folks downtown who are waiting desperately for their
government to send help--a government whose resources have been
stretched thin by a war that I'm sure you support, because you love
freedom and democracy--were half as crazed as you think, they'd march
down St. Charles Avenue right now and burn every mansion in sight.
That they aren't doing so suggests a decency and compassion for their
fellow man and woman that sadly people like you lack.
Can you even imagine what you would do in their place?
Can you imagine what would happen if it were well-off white folks
stranded like this without buses to get them out, without
nourishment, without hope?
Putting aside the absurdity of the imagery--after all, such folks
always have the means to seek safety, or the money to rebuild, or the
political significance to ensure a much speedier response for their
concerns--can you just imagine?
Can you imagine what would happen if the pampered, overfed corporate
class, which complains about taxes taking a third of their bloated
incomes, had to sit in the hot sun for four, going on five days?
Without a Margarita or hotel swimming pool to comfort them I mean?
Oh, and please, I know. I'm stereotyping you. Imagine that. I've
assumed, based only on your words, what kind of person you are, even
though I suppose I could be wrong. How does that feel Biff? Hurt your
feelings? So sorry. But hey, at least my stereotypes of you aren't
deadly. They won't effect your life one bit, unlike the ones you
carry around with you and display within earshot of people like me,
supposing that no one could possibly disagree.
But I'm not wrong am I Chip? I know you. I see people like you all
the time, in airports, in business suits, on their lunch breaks.
People who will take advantage of any opportunity to ratify and reify
their pre-existing prejudices towards the poor, towards black folks.
You see the same three video loops of the same dozen or so looters on
Fox News and you conclude that poor black people are crazy, immoral,
criminal.
You, or others quite a bit like you, are the ones posting messages on
chat room boards, calling looters sub-human "vermin," "scum,"
or "cockroaches." I heard you use the word "animals" three times
today: you and that woman across from you--what was her name? Skyler?
What was it you said as you scooped the last bite of black beans and
rice into your eager mouth? Like zoo animals? Yes, I think that was
it.
Well, Chuck, it's a free country, and so you certainly have the right
I suppose to continue lecturing the poor, in between checking your
Blackberry and dropping the kids off at soccer practice. If you want
to believe that the poor of New Orleans are immoral and greedy, and
unworthy of support at a time like this--or somehow more in need of
your scolding than whatever donation you might make to a relief fund--
so be it.
But let's leave God out of it, shall we? All of it.
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar, and I'd prefer to keep
it that way.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Thursday support hose
Last night, Lisa told me that I needed to be asking for support from the Universe, instead of specific things, and that I needed to be open to support. So, in our board meeting, all of a sudden the President suggests to the meeting that I should be paid something for everything that I do to support the group; they voted to pay for my Prac II expenses over the next eight months.
Then, this morning, I go to the M Clinic to have my bi-weekly check up, and I took with me the book Donna gave me from Gangaji - and, all eight chapters I read are about .. support.
Okay, so I've been asking for support, and it's been working. Sort of.
Let's have a little quote here:
Then, this morning, I go to the M Clinic to have my bi-weekly check up, and I took with me the book Donna gave me from Gangaji - and, all eight chapters I read are about .. support.
Okay, so I've been asking for support, and it's been working. Sort of.
Let's have a little quote here:
"I cannot tolerate an American president, ostensibly meant
to be one of the most articulate and intellectually
sophisticated leaders on the planet, mumbling his
semicoherent support of the embarrassing nontheory of
'Intelligent Design,' to the detriment of about 300 years of
confirmed science and 10 million years of common sense to
the point where America's armies of dumbed-down
Ritalin-drunk children look at him and sigh and secretly
wish they could have a future devoid of such imbecilic
thought but who realize, deep down, they are merely another
doomed and fraught generation who will face an increasingly
steep uphill battle, who will actually have to fight for
fact and intellectual growth and spiritual progress against
a rising tide of ignorance and religious hegemony and
sanitized revisionist textbooks that insult their
understanding and sucker punch their sexuality and bleed
their minds dry."
-- San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford, Aug. 10.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Tuesday with progress
Tuesday that feels like Monday
Well, I at least got the loan finalized. It will go into docs tomorrow, absent another hurricane, and will close Thursday or Friday. Just sucks. Trying to get an underwriting response on the other, little file that I have, which could now close as early as Monday. Then, there’s another one that we’re working – have to get it processed tomorrow, and sent in.
I went out and used Mikey’s bleach water trick on Ruby’s window glass – WOW! Now, the paint looks like someone blew their nose all over it. I want to go out there and wax it up, but I have to work on Fabulair web content tonight. I also need to watch this DVD that’s been sitting here for more than a MONTH about Islam.
Tomorrow, the day is just whacked. I need to call and reschedule my 9:30 appointment, and figure out just what all needs to be accomplished. Nicole has her first surgery tomorrow, and so I have to make time to stop over there when she’s in recovery. I have dinner with Rosita at around 5:30, and then the New Vision board meeting after that.
Today, I did accomplish (I think) finding the models for the first Fabulair images. I’ll find out for sure later on tonight, but I think that’s finally handled. Hopefully, a week from this afternoon, I’ll be able to get everyone together for the first photographs. I talked to Jayson again today about that, he was getting all weird about me paying him for it, and he’s about as reliable as a bald tire going 90 on the freeway over nails. So, I asked someone ELSE who seemed interested, and he’s got a friend who would also be perfect. Please, let’s get this accomplished, finally!
I think it’s time to investigate food, and then start watching this DVD before it grows cultures.
Well, I at least got the loan finalized. It will go into docs tomorrow, absent another hurricane, and will close Thursday or Friday. Just sucks. Trying to get an underwriting response on the other, little file that I have, which could now close as early as Monday. Then, there’s another one that we’re working – have to get it processed tomorrow, and sent in.
I went out and used Mikey’s bleach water trick on Ruby’s window glass – WOW! Now, the paint looks like someone blew their nose all over it. I want to go out there and wax it up, but I have to work on Fabulair web content tonight. I also need to watch this DVD that’s been sitting here for more than a MONTH about Islam.
Tomorrow, the day is just whacked. I need to call and reschedule my 9:30 appointment, and figure out just what all needs to be accomplished. Nicole has her first surgery tomorrow, and so I have to make time to stop over there when she’s in recovery. I have dinner with Rosita at around 5:30, and then the New Vision board meeting after that.
Today, I did accomplish (I think) finding the models for the first Fabulair images. I’ll find out for sure later on tonight, but I think that’s finally handled. Hopefully, a week from this afternoon, I’ll be able to get everyone together for the first photographs. I talked to Jayson again today about that, he was getting all weird about me paying him for it, and he’s about as reliable as a bald tire going 90 on the freeway over nails. So, I asked someone ELSE who seemed interested, and he’s got a friend who would also be perfect. Please, let’s get this accomplished, finally!
I think it’s time to investigate food, and then start watching this DVD before it grows cultures.
Someone's got her panties in a knot
08.31.2005
Mr. Bush, Go Cheney Yourself! (187 comments )
We have no leadership, no captain at the helm as it were. We are, in effect, being led from disaster to disaster by a headless horseman run amok with stuffed pockets and an empty conscience.SUSPENDING HIGHER GROUND
On September 11, 2001, The Vacationing and un-elected President of this country was tooling around on his holiday and even making time to fit in a little PR in Florida too.
<script></script>
Later it was the "bring it on" hubris of a boy-king, who had spent his entire life doing absolutely nothing of value, now deciding the fate of thousands upon thousands of people.
Still later, it was a Veruca Salt-like tantrum of "I want it now Daddy, I WANT IT NOW!" demanding of either Rummy or Cheney that he get his golden- egg- laying Goose.
Now this dim-witted and loathed bully of a child still sits on his beach blanket while "his" toy soldiers are sent to kill "his" toy victims. "Daddy, I WANT IT NOW!"Daddy VP Delivers:
So what happens when, once again, our leadership is sun-bathing and there is a national emergency? What happens when children are drowning in attics while others are burning in the sun on Cajun hot roofs? What happens to a great city like New Orleans when funding for emergency spending has been cut so that Bush can play war and "toys can kill toys?"
What happens when the entire military and emergency resources of a nation – the ones not yet outsourced to Project Lying Bastards – are tied up in simulations of being prepared for emergencies, and by being tied up are not prepared at all?Just a few of these simulations listed below, taking place over the last few weeks, have tied up all of our resources that are otherwise needed for a catastrophe like Katrina that is unfolding before our eyes:
Alaska, also hereFort Monroe
Town Hall Set, Roll Camera:
So while children are drowning and others are floating around, dead in the water, the wannabe Yale cowboy struts around the set of his faux town hall meetings, has a bit of cake with John McCain, and takes in some fresh air in Colorado.
Congress? Anyone?
Dick? Where is Dick? Anyone?
Condi? Rummy? Any other Iran-Contra Folks?
Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?
Hello?
So where does that leave us, the citizens of this raped, pillaged, terrorized, demoralized, freedom loving nation?Floating face down, eyes affixed on a once great New Orleans!Screw you and the horse you rode in on:
I am more afraid of my leadership than I am of the looming “terrorist” threat. What is terrorism if not the instilling of “fear” on a consistent basis and negligence that results in massive death tolls? I am more afraid of this psychotic designer cowboy (and Yale cheerleader) and his circle of friends than I am of the color coded boogeyman used by a corrupt corporate brood to frighten the very people they are tasked with nurturing.Are we really this stupid or do we just pretend to be in order to get a tax cut? Where are the billionaires of this country who have so lovingly raped the conscience of a nation in order to get those few extra billions?
I can imagine fleets of private planes sent to Katrina’s ground zero and how many lives could be lifted and flown to safety. Imagination is good; it keeps us from going mad. Pat Robertson, that bastion of Christian pay-per-view values, is worth upwards of half a billion dollars. Care to write a check, Pat?
How about ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and other war profiteers, you guys want to help out for operation Save the Drowning Children?Homeland Front Group:
What happens when Chertoff (whose name actually means "of the Devil" in Russian) decides to forgo civil liberties in general and abuses his office, err, industrial department of Homeland Security? What happens when these Homelanders declare Martial Law in order to keep people from looting, but will not supply them with water, food, and other life sustaining supplies?Apparently not a damn thing.
After all, no blond "good Christian" wealthy Republican children are drowning. Fox News anchors sit laughing at this tragedy but cry and piss on themselves because a blond girl on an island went missing (no offense to the family of the missing girl).
Do you realize that one person - one single person who is white, blond haired, and blue eyed - is more important to the networks than the thousands of black children spiraling to their deaths in a swirl of sewage in a once historic city?Looting is what the networks are covering, as though such activity is "typical" of what "black people" do. The majority of residents left behind were the poor, who - due to the inexcusable mismanagement of emergency resources, coupled with high oil prices - were unable to leave on their own. The poor in this country happen to be minorities, so the people left behind were minorities.Take away food, water, and other supplies and what should someone do? Swim over to an ATM and get some soggy money out? Or maybe dive in, holding their breath, and swim through their underwater living room looking for a lost wallet? Not to worry, the Pentagon is on its way, Martial law is declared, journalists are forced out, and those saved are happily dining on cat food.Bush's cutting of his vacation short by a whole two hours - jetting off to DC, from where he can look Presidential -- is almost as timely as is him finally putting down My Pet Goat.
And where is that treasure of a mother, that national “I love my gay daughter when it works for the campaign” bastion of integrity? Lynn Cheney, the doyenne of Christian values, is probably rehearsing her “I am an indignant mother” routine, somewhere in the bowls of her underground mansion. Because she is not out, carrying buckets or collecting donations or for god’s sake doing something to help the people of “her country.”
Congress is still on vacation even though we are witnessing a national tragedy that could produce the worst death toll in recent US history.Condi’s father – a prominent minister and educator - is spinning in his grave as black women and children drown, while Condi stands and shills somewhere – who the hell knows where – on how we are spreading Democracy. As though such a thing as Democracy could be spread through rape, torture, and murder, like some venereal disease.Where is the god damn leadership of this country? Dick, Condi, Rummy, anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
Screw It:
There is no representation of the people and there is no care for the people, just as long as the consumer keeps on consuming and the breeder keeps on breeding. We are a commodity, nothing more. How else to explain such indifference and barrage of smiling, giggling photo ops?How else to explain the military allegiance to a small group of men and not to the country and its people? A Secret Service agent will take a bullet for a traitor or put one into an innocent person for a group of traitors, but will not come out as a whistleblower against a treasonous leadership gluttonous on its power binge. Yes, what a noble job, to be privy to atrocity after atrocity and still bow down and say “sir, may I have another?”
I am horrified at this gross neglect, abuse of power, and absolute disregard for decency. I remember Lynn Cheney, in her smarmy over-glossed way, staging that attack on John Kerry - who unlike her war dodging husband and ruthless corporate dictator, managed to go to Vietnam, come back to fight for the rights of soldiers and against an illegal war, and serve his country for 30+ years. Speaking of Kerry, Lynn said – memorably - “this is not a good man.”
Oh? Mrs. Cheney, Mrs. Bush (all of you, collectively), given that you are mothers, do explain to us what any of your husbands has ever done that did not directly benefit himself and/or his friends financially? One act of note, of real noble value should be easy to locate from such “good men” as these.What have you fine ladies done with your very public time? Well Lynn wrote a little sexy Romance novel, and Laura is in charge of “gangs,” whatever the hell that means.Why are you fine mothers not swimming in the sea of New Orleans rescuing children? Why are you not screaming in horror as the Children’s Hospital becomes slowly submerged under water?How about one Christian act of selflessness that you and yours have done (excluding large charitable donations that pay out in bigger tax cuts)? Such good Christians should have armies of cross-worthy accomplishments.
One example is all that is needed for a full pardon from us, the small “we the people” who can die for this country, bleed for this country, starve in this country, and work to death in this country so that “you, the employees” can have cocktail parties and take the twins to NYC for fashion week.Twins? You girls shopping okay?
This entire lot is nothing more than a bunch of hooligans, all of whom should be held accountable for dereliction of duty, crimes against the citizens of this nation, and crimes against humanity.
My god, cutting funding (alone, without adding the negligence and middle finger to “duty”) for emergency services to pay off the already rich “Bush Pioneers” in tax cuts, results in this: death. What will the Bush minions say now: “We did not know that a Hurricane could or would do that?”
Odd, we knew about hurricanes, especially those of us who went through four of them last year in a three week run. FEMA warned of them for New Orleans starting in 2001. We knew. Scientists knew. So did city of New Orleans via its mayor who repeatedly asked for government funding, over and over, and over. In fact, every rational person on the planet knows that the top priority of a good leader is "the people", not his frat house pals!Tax cuts to the top-already-grossly-rich 2% of the nation over the duties to the other 98% of the people, is unpardonable!We have to sit and watch the myriad of horrors inflicted on us and on others on behalf of us: Dick simulates, Bush tans, Laura reads, twins go shopping, Lynn writes trite tales of love, and a psychotic Rummy tortures, rapes, and murders in our name.That about cover it? Not quite.
Mr. Bush, go Cheney yourself!
And Mr. Cheney, take your war games, your Rummy, Rove, Condi, Hadley, Libby, and especially your over priced and frozen over wife, and shove them up your Ashcroft.RESUMING HIGHER GROUND
Monday, September 05, 2005
Men SUCK. And not in a good way.
Monday but it feels like Sunday and it’s almost over.
Jayson is negotiating with me for the first Fabulair photo shoot; he’s served notice that he expects to get paid for modeling. That’s assuming he can show up. I may just put the whole photo shoot thing off a week and find someone REAL.
Not a word from Michael, I’m giving up on him. Had a message from N8 this evening; he’s “been busy,” and “wants to know if [I] can help him buy a house in San Diego. Uh, if you could lease an apartment it would be a miracle. What the f*ck ever.
I finally, after more than two years, bought some potting soil for the big ceramic pots I have on my patio. I’m going to go buy some crepe myrtles for them (30% off at Teas!) and have something IN them, finally. Amazingly, the patio doors (on the outside) are all mildewed and crappy looking. AGAIN. More work.
Buying another two XM radios; one for permanent mounting in Ruby, and one to carry around – a portable. I’m giving my current one to E, I think. The one I want for Ruby is a permanent mount unit that will fit right where the CD holder is presently. It will look/work a lot better. I also found some Polk book shelf speakers on eBay that were less than the Sonys I had picked out, with better shipping prices. So, I think that it will be Polk speakers in the den and in my bedroom, which will sound nicer. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll be able to get the subwoofer fixed, and the dish network receiver connected up.
Okay, it’s time to see if sleep will follow me. Until the morrow.
Jayson is negotiating with me for the first Fabulair photo shoot; he’s served notice that he expects to get paid for modeling. That’s assuming he can show up. I may just put the whole photo shoot thing off a week and find someone REAL.
Not a word from Michael, I’m giving up on him. Had a message from N8 this evening; he’s “been busy,” and “wants to know if [I] can help him buy a house in San Diego. Uh, if you could lease an apartment it would be a miracle. What the f*ck ever.
I finally, after more than two years, bought some potting soil for the big ceramic pots I have on my patio. I’m going to go buy some crepe myrtles for them (30% off at Teas!) and have something IN them, finally. Amazingly, the patio doors (on the outside) are all mildewed and crappy looking. AGAIN. More work.
Buying another two XM radios; one for permanent mounting in Ruby, and one to carry around – a portable. I’m giving my current one to E, I think. The one I want for Ruby is a permanent mount unit that will fit right where the CD holder is presently. It will look/work a lot better. I also found some Polk book shelf speakers on eBay that were less than the Sonys I had picked out, with better shipping prices. So, I think that it will be Polk speakers in the den and in my bedroom, which will sound nicer. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll be able to get the subwoofer fixed, and the dish network receiver connected up.
Okay, it’s time to see if sleep will follow me. Until the morrow.
I sure am missing N8
I sure am missing N8. Urg. It’s one of the reasons why avoiding new relationship potential can be a good thing.
Time to go outside and work on sprucing up Ruby. Then, to go pick up Mikey and do some shopping.
Time to go outside and work on sprucing up Ruby. Then, to go pick up Mikey and do some shopping.
Monday Monday ver 640.01
Monday, Monday ver. 640.01
It’s Monday that feels like Sunday without church. I’ve done some of the things on my “to do” list, but am stymied by the lack of business offices being open. I’m about to call Mitch and find out if he’s coming by for me to draft some documents he needs, and then I’m going to haul Mikey off to IKEA and Wally-World.
I still have ten months of a client’s bank statements to reconcile; I need to get that done.
San Jacinto College has proposed a Friday evening class session to break the logjam of our miscommunication. That works for me; I like the shortened class sessions, as it doubles my pay envelope on a monthly basis. However, my next pay period from them is October 31. I’ll have eight full classes in that check, though, instead of three or four.
Almost done with today’s “to do” list. I have to go through the Fabulair website and add content; that’s been lying around to do for a long while.
Found a stunning 645Csi on eBay last night; it makes me weak in the knees. Waterhill seems to have sold the townhouse that I loved so much.
Did I blog about Psycho Judy already?
It’s Monday that feels like Sunday without church. I’ve done some of the things on my “to do” list, but am stymied by the lack of business offices being open. I’m about to call Mitch and find out if he’s coming by for me to draft some documents he needs, and then I’m going to haul Mikey off to IKEA and Wally-World.
I still have ten months of a client’s bank statements to reconcile; I need to get that done.
San Jacinto College has proposed a Friday evening class session to break the logjam of our miscommunication. That works for me; I like the shortened class sessions, as it doubles my pay envelope on a monthly basis. However, my next pay period from them is October 31. I’ll have eight full classes in that check, though, instead of three or four.
Almost done with today’s “to do” list. I have to go through the Fabulair website and add content; that’s been lying around to do for a long while.
Found a stunning 645Csi on eBay last night; it makes me weak in the knees. Waterhill seems to have sold the townhouse that I loved so much.
Did I blog about Psycho Judy already?
Interesting afternoon
Interesting afternoon and evening. Of course the first part of my day was absorbed with church and such. Got home around 14:00 after stopping at an outpost of the evil retail empire. Fiddled around after I got home, and Mikey and Denny came by at about 5:30. I had just started to pull the stereo equipment out to re-install it all and clean back in there, and they had fun watching that. I got everything put in so that it FITS and I can close the cabinet doors again.
Once I got everything working again (with Mikey’s invaluable assistance,) I made divo-ghetti. It was quite the effort, I must say. We started watching First Contact (a DVD to test the sound system) and were going to fiddle around with the subwoofer, which doesn’t seem to be working. We moved from that to Sordid Lives, and suddenly Mikey suggested “It’s My Party,” which Denny had never heard of. That was something else again. I hadn’t seen that video in at least two years, and all three of us were sniffling and dabbing with tissues.
Now, the dishes are running in the dishwasher, the apartment smells of garlic, and I am playing the XM.
As per the norm, it’s 23:00 and I’m not sleepy. I could go clean out Ruby’s interior, I guess, but I’m sure I’ll just sit here and fiddle around for a while.
I’m reading people making non-sequiturs in gay.com’s Houston chatroom. It’s so clear why I abandoned it nearly a year ago.
Was supposed to hang out today with Michael – he’s from Atlanta. He blew me off. I don’t even react to this anymore – what’s that about?
Once I got everything working again (with Mikey’s invaluable assistance,) I made divo-ghetti. It was quite the effort, I must say. We started watching First Contact (a DVD to test the sound system) and were going to fiddle around with the subwoofer, which doesn’t seem to be working. We moved from that to Sordid Lives, and suddenly Mikey suggested “It’s My Party,” which Denny had never heard of. That was something else again. I hadn’t seen that video in at least two years, and all three of us were sniffling and dabbing with tissues.
Now, the dishes are running in the dishwasher, the apartment smells of garlic, and I am playing the XM.
As per the norm, it’s 23:00 and I’m not sleepy. I could go clean out Ruby’s interior, I guess, but I’m sure I’ll just sit here and fiddle around for a while.
I’m reading people making non-sequiturs in gay.com’s Houston chatroom. It’s so clear why I abandoned it nearly a year ago.
Was supposed to hang out today with Michael – he’s from Atlanta. He blew me off. I don’t even react to this anymore – what’s that about?
Saturday, September 03, 2005
And, now the redux
Saturday night – just got home from Mikey’s and eating shrimp po’boys. That was fun; we watched two DVDs and hung out.
Came home, talked to a few guys on the computer here, fiddled with Quicken some more; this is going to require a call to technical support, clearly.
After an unexpected text message
Well, now we are well and truly fucked. William Renquist just died. As my friend CP just said, Justice O’Connor’s retirement was the hurricane, and Renquist’s death is the levee breaking.
CP just did my astrological chart – he’s going over it and saying that I have a difficult chart. I don’t yet know just what that means. Pluto is in my house of career.
Came home, talked to a few guys on the computer here, fiddled with Quicken some more; this is going to require a call to technical support, clearly.
After an unexpected text message
Well, now we are well and truly fucked. William Renquist just died. As my friend CP just said, Justice O’Connor’s retirement was the hurricane, and Renquist’s death is the levee breaking.
CP just did my astrological chart – he’s going over it and saying that I have a difficult chart. I don’t yet know just what that means. Pluto is in my house of career.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Astrology of Disaster
PlanetWavesBy ERIC FRANCISParis, Friday, Sept. 2, 2005
Katrina, the Awakener
ONE IMAGE keeps haunting me from this week's journalism, spun by William Rivers Pitt at truthout.org -- that of presidential advisor Karl Rove standing on the roof of the White House in a magician's hat and cape, with a big staff, conjuring Hurricane Katrina. Given the witch-hunt against climate change scientists reported in The Guardian earlier this week, that may not be far from the truth (links below, in blue). On its face, this storm happened at a brilliantly convenient time for world managers who thrive on chaos and distraction, right in the midst of the first meaningful protests against the catastrophic Iraq war gaining momentum -- and with George Bush's approval ratings lower than any president since Nixon at the height of Watergate.
If you recall, moments before Katrina arrived, we were in a reflective, concerned moment as the situation in Iraq descended into worse condition than even staunch pessimists predicted.The US military death toll is near 2,000, and the number of journalists killed in the 30-month conflict has exceeded that of two decades in Vietnam. New, uncontrolled violence takes more Iraqi lives by the day, and sometimes by the hour.
Public attention has now been swayed to a domestic emergency the like of which we have not seen since Sept. 11, 2001. But New Orleans makes what happened four years ago in New York City seem rather dim by comparison, in terms of the number of lives devastated, loss of life, and the destruction of homes. An entire major city has been taken out, not 16 acres of one and the surrounding buildings. The difference now is, there's no one to blame, no emotions of hatred and enmity of some alien outsider to whip up and use to dial in the team spirit -- and the disaster happened to a poor, predominantly black city instead of at the heart of the world's financial and banking operations. Deprived of our prerogative to get revenge, we may actually have to pay attention.
News channels are reporting a state of urban warfare, and troops have consent to shoot and kill American citizens. Police officers are turning in their badges. Scanning the news reports reveals that people are still trapped in the city, on rooftops and in high-rises, and thousands are starving. The condition is deteriorating to the point where vigilante sniper fire at recovery personnel has been reported. Is this even vaguely possible? Who, stranded in their own city, would shoot at rescue workers just for the hell of it? There is no drinking water. Bodies are everywhere. Widespread disease will be inevitable. Tens of thousands of refugees are still left behind at the Superdome and the Convention Center as people die before the eyes of onlookers. The city remains completely flooded because breached levees and overwhelmed pumping stations have made it impossible to remove the water. Due to a breached levee, water from Lake Pontchartrain is still flowing into the city. The stories of cuts to budgets for maintaining these structures only makes one feel sick, in hindsight.It's starting to make the tsunami look good. CNN reported Thursday that a police officer working in downtown New Orleans said police were siphoning gas from abandoned vehicles in an effort to keep their squad cars running, like a detail straight from the mind of Stephen King. Incredibly, no organized relief program appears visible. Indeed, police have received federal orders to privilege stopping looters against delivering aid and searching for survivors. In other words: the priority (as we have so often come to expect) is to protect property, though it would seem there is little property left to even bother with. The effect: poor blacks can die. What we are witnessing is beyond incompetence at this stage, and is approaching the level of genocide.It is important to remember that cities are highly toxic environments, and floods release everything that is usually contained, or held at the bottom or rivers and lakes, into the general environment. Containers and pipes burst. Fires cannot be controlled. In addition, the Mississippi Delta, thanks to generations of contamination by Monsanto, is one of the most dioxin-tainted areas in the world. Though it may not be acknowledged, there is likely to be a serious dioxin problem in New Orleans and nearby areas right now, and for generations to come.
In my mind's eye, I am seeing this unfold along another strand of time. A fully financed, well prepared Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be on the job years before the hurricane made landfall, as this was a predictable event, contrary to recent assertions. (Indeed, FEMA is being absorbed into Homeland Security and damaged by budget cuts.) Hundreds of Coast Guard helicopters from coastal states and many others would be bringing supplies, and getting those most in need to medical help. Old Army bases, so recently closed by budget cuts, would be used as massive relief centers, complete with airstrips, bathrooms and mess halls. Sports facilities, with all their problems, would not have to be used as refugee camps. America's standing Army and National Guard units, themselves not trapped in the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, would be widely available to assist, with all their equipment, rations, supplies and other resources. There would be enough manpower. There would be plenty of money for the operation; America is the richest country in the world. Which may be the problem. But this is not happening in a different time, under different national leadership: it is happening now. And due to the damaged oil-refining infrastructure along the Gulf Coast, the effects of this storm will be rippling, or ripping, into the world economy. The price of gasoline has suddenly risen well beyond $3.00 per gallon many places in the U.S., and has exceeded $6.00 per gallon at some retail outlets in the south. Apparently, many places in the southeast have no gas at all. We are hearing the first calls for fuel conservation since the mid-1970s.
Generally, this is the one thing that can key people into the fact that something is wrong; America's real religion is practiced at the filling station, and nearly all of its transportation energy comes from petroleum.
But it's becoming obvious many more ways that something else is wrong. Imagine if this were a multiple city emergency -- that is, if the damage were to more than one city. Imagine if the casualty toll were higher. Are we now to understand that the federal government is incapable of responding to an emergency? It would seem so. The AstrologyAs I've reported elsewhere [please see cainer.com], a dominant image of Saturn in Leo (which began six weeks ago, on July 16) is that of dams bursting. For some reason, when Saturn changes from water sign Cancer to fire sign Leo, structures that hold back bodies of water (and in one famous instance, hundreds of tons of molasses) tend to give way, often with catastrophic effects. While we are seeing the results of a huge cyclone, we're also seeing those of failed levees -- many of them. You might call this a watershed event. In looking for Saturn imagery, we find plenty working in the chart of the City of New Orleans, but it's difficult to miss the fact that Saturn is now crossing the so-called president's ascendant. As I've also said elsewhere, this would be the big turning point for the non-president's career, with a wave of awareness really coalescing about nine months to the day after the inauguration. In addition, I proposed a couple of months ago that "something is up with the price of gold" -- in this case, black gold, petroleum, the blood of our society. But let's come back to that later. Libra is the astonishing connection that three key charts, the City of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and Mr. Bush, have in common. Also looking at a fourth chart, the progressed horoscope for the city, we find the same effect -- Libra is the dominant energy, with its quest for justice, balance, rebalancing and sensitivity. Between these four charts, there are 17 major planets and points in Libra. And a solar eclipse in Libra is coming in just one month, nestled nicely into the action. This is followed by a lunar eclipse in Aries two weeks later, precisely aligned with many critical factors in Aries, Libra, Cancer and Capricorn. We are in a situation that's going to develop rapidly, in large, significant ways and, as all eclipses do, come with events that do their work on a global scale. Most of the effects of this will be in October -- when the chart for the presidential inauguration comes thundering to life and the media begins to put the many pieces of this rather large, surreal puzzle together.
Cosmic Trigger One: Venus conjunct JupiterBetween this past Monday, when Katrina made landfall, and today, Venus in Libra crossed the Moon's South Node and formed a conjunction to Jupiter. This was one important cosmic trigger of what happened in New Orleans, a kind of collective ignition point that released the considerable energy of Venus, Libra and what you might call the Goddess. This conjunction actually affects everything both in Libra and on the entire cardinal cross (Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn), which is heavily loaded in these charts. Venus is now on course for a conjunction to Pallas Athene early next week, the planet of protection, politics and strategy. We may see a shift in the political climate with this activity, which occurs over the weekend -- a rising expectation that something reasonable or strategic has to happen. Neptune has been involved in this setup: the Venus-Jupiter conjunction is trine the most watery planet, in the sign Aquarius. Chiron in Capricorn is a prominent factor in this configuration. The city's chart has this placement, showing up in many square aspects to the Libra planets all of the charts. Chiron in Capricorn is the "post 9/11 factor," a consistent element between late 2001 and today (though the transition to Aquarius began earlier this year, Chiron is now back in Capricorn). Chiron in Capricorn has shaped up to be an extremely painful lesson in government, its conduct and its power. Chiron has a way of shining the light in the dark places, exposing what is in the shadows -- and in Capricorn on the collective scale, there is plenty. What we have here is a lot of action in the cardinal signs, including two of the most important global factors, lunar nodes (in cardinal signs) and eclipses. The cardinal signs are the initiation points, and they are the points of public contact. The nodes, as do eclipses and cardinal signs, tend to bring in large numbers of people and events that act like "attractors" or points of contact.
And Two: Uranus and Pluto -- and PrometheusOne of the most remarkable events of these charts occurs in the sign Pisces, and it is outstanding both for its symbolism and precision. In the City of New Orleans chart, Pluto is located at 8 degrees Pisces and 53 arc minutes. In the chart for landfall, transiting Uranus is located exactly in this degree and arc minute. An arc minute is 1/60th of a degree. This is an exact, to the minute, transit involving two outer planets that, together, are associated with upheavals, revolutions, breakthroughs and social movements. Indeed, many of the great revolutionary movements of the past few centuries have happened under Uranus-Pluto aspects, and the word "revolution" itself was invented under this astrology. When you think Uranus and Pluto, think uranium and plutonium. To convey the feeling of this on the social level, there was recently a long conjunction of transiting Uranus to transiting Pluto that we think of in its entirety as "the Sixties." The revolutionary quality of this conjunction is related beautifully, using many cycles of history, in the book Prometheus the Awakener by Richard Tarnas, which title is the subject of an accidental discovery made by Lise LePage, who has been handing research on this article. In his book, Tarnas argues that the planet Uranus should really have been named Prometheus, after one of the Greek gods of creation. The energy of Prometheus, who gave the fire of the gods to mankind, is precisely the kind of sudden awakening energy that is associated with Uranus. Under the influence of this idea, many astrologers who have gone over the author's historical research and mythological theory are content to think of Uranus as Promethean energy (most say uranian, meaning the same thing -- high voltage and rebellious). And this, I suggested in an email to Lise, referencing the title of the book. Lise misunderstood, and thinking I was referencing the asteroid Prometheus, promptly put that into the city's natal chart -- and discovered that it's in the same degree as Pluto in the natal chart for New Orleans. So, in its basic, inherent makeup, New Orleans has the asteroid Prometheus conjunct evolutionary mover Pluto in Pisces, to the degree. And the city was destroyed, setting off a chain of events that will seem quite nuclear in hindsight, as Uranus made a to-the-minute conjunction to Pluto (something that happens with this precision for a total of three times for just 12 hours every 84 years). Checking the Sabian symbol for this degree (9 Pisces), Dane Rudhyar gives the keywords "self-quickening," a rather energetic image considering the astrology that degree contains in these charts. In all, we're looking at an enormous release of energy. Saturn in LeoNow we come to Saturn in Leo, a critical era-defining astrological factor for the next three years, and probably well into the future. What happens under Saturn in Leo tends to be extraordinarily stable and have lasting effects, often for many decades or longer. The city's chart has numerous placements in early Leo and Aquarius, including the Part of Fortune (calculated for noon), a rather precise opposition of Mars in Leo and Mercury in Aquarius, and Venus in Aquarius. This is a grand opposition, which (thank the gods) is trined by Jupiter in Sagittarius. That trine from Jupiter is what I'll call the "it could be worse" aspect. Jupiter in Sagittarius, trine the personal planets and trine transiting Saturn, is acting as a protective influence. Note also that the Chiron-Nessus conjunction in early Aquarius that has been in effect for much of this year. Another era-defining event, this conjunction But Saturn in Leo is rather personal event for Mr. Bush, as it is for anyone whose ascendant it crosses. Under this combination of factors, when it's angular (that is, in the ascendant), Saturn can act exactly like Uranus, propelling sudden and unexpected movement, change, progress or something like that. Saturn has not quite made it to the Bush ascendant, which is 7 degrees and 7 arc minutes of Leo, but it does so the morning of Sept. 12, 2005 (Washington, DC time). New Orleans is very much his responsibility -- and the world is watching. One thing that's clear is that Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent devastation will not be a path of escape for those who have hijacked the government and are holding it hostage. To the contrary, we all may be looking at the one event that finally gets our attention, and tips the scales.
-- Additional research & reporting by Lise LePage in the US and Dan Miller in the UK.Please check the cover or subscriber blogs later in the weekend for information about the involvement of new outer planets, including Sedna, Varuna and Deucalion -- all of which bear poignant water and flood imagery.Witch Hunt Against Climate Change Scientistshttp://www.truthout.org/issues_05/083005EA.shtmlBrace for More Katrinas, Scientists Sayhttp://www.truthout.org/issues_05/083105EA.shtmlFEMA Phased Out as Disasters Keep Cominghttp://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090105J.shtml--------------------------Planet Waves by Eric FrancisSept. 2, 2005 - Weekly Horoscope 574Note to Virgos
Katrina, the Awakener
ONE IMAGE keeps haunting me from this week's journalism, spun by William Rivers Pitt at truthout.org -- that of presidential advisor Karl Rove standing on the roof of the White House in a magician's hat and cape, with a big staff, conjuring Hurricane Katrina. Given the witch-hunt against climate change scientists reported in The Guardian earlier this week, that may not be far from the truth (links below, in blue). On its face, this storm happened at a brilliantly convenient time for world managers who thrive on chaos and distraction, right in the midst of the first meaningful protests against the catastrophic Iraq war gaining momentum -- and with George Bush's approval ratings lower than any president since Nixon at the height of Watergate.
If you recall, moments before Katrina arrived, we were in a reflective, concerned moment as the situation in Iraq descended into worse condition than even staunch pessimists predicted.The US military death toll is near 2,000, and the number of journalists killed in the 30-month conflict has exceeded that of two decades in Vietnam. New, uncontrolled violence takes more Iraqi lives by the day, and sometimes by the hour.
Public attention has now been swayed to a domestic emergency the like of which we have not seen since Sept. 11, 2001. But New Orleans makes what happened four years ago in New York City seem rather dim by comparison, in terms of the number of lives devastated, loss of life, and the destruction of homes. An entire major city has been taken out, not 16 acres of one and the surrounding buildings. The difference now is, there's no one to blame, no emotions of hatred and enmity of some alien outsider to whip up and use to dial in the team spirit -- and the disaster happened to a poor, predominantly black city instead of at the heart of the world's financial and banking operations. Deprived of our prerogative to get revenge, we may actually have to pay attention.
News channels are reporting a state of urban warfare, and troops have consent to shoot and kill American citizens. Police officers are turning in their badges. Scanning the news reports reveals that people are still trapped in the city, on rooftops and in high-rises, and thousands are starving. The condition is deteriorating to the point where vigilante sniper fire at recovery personnel has been reported. Is this even vaguely possible? Who, stranded in their own city, would shoot at rescue workers just for the hell of it? There is no drinking water. Bodies are everywhere. Widespread disease will be inevitable. Tens of thousands of refugees are still left behind at the Superdome and the Convention Center as people die before the eyes of onlookers. The city remains completely flooded because breached levees and overwhelmed pumping stations have made it impossible to remove the water. Due to a breached levee, water from Lake Pontchartrain is still flowing into the city. The stories of cuts to budgets for maintaining these structures only makes one feel sick, in hindsight.It's starting to make the tsunami look good. CNN reported Thursday that a police officer working in downtown New Orleans said police were siphoning gas from abandoned vehicles in an effort to keep their squad cars running, like a detail straight from the mind of Stephen King. Incredibly, no organized relief program appears visible. Indeed, police have received federal orders to privilege stopping looters against delivering aid and searching for survivors. In other words: the priority (as we have so often come to expect) is to protect property, though it would seem there is little property left to even bother with. The effect: poor blacks can die. What we are witnessing is beyond incompetence at this stage, and is approaching the level of genocide.It is important to remember that cities are highly toxic environments, and floods release everything that is usually contained, or held at the bottom or rivers and lakes, into the general environment. Containers and pipes burst. Fires cannot be controlled. In addition, the Mississippi Delta, thanks to generations of contamination by Monsanto, is one of the most dioxin-tainted areas in the world. Though it may not be acknowledged, there is likely to be a serious dioxin problem in New Orleans and nearby areas right now, and for generations to come.
In my mind's eye, I am seeing this unfold along another strand of time. A fully financed, well prepared Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be on the job years before the hurricane made landfall, as this was a predictable event, contrary to recent assertions. (Indeed, FEMA is being absorbed into Homeland Security and damaged by budget cuts.) Hundreds of Coast Guard helicopters from coastal states and many others would be bringing supplies, and getting those most in need to medical help. Old Army bases, so recently closed by budget cuts, would be used as massive relief centers, complete with airstrips, bathrooms and mess halls. Sports facilities, with all their problems, would not have to be used as refugee camps. America's standing Army and National Guard units, themselves not trapped in the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, would be widely available to assist, with all their equipment, rations, supplies and other resources. There would be enough manpower. There would be plenty of money for the operation; America is the richest country in the world. Which may be the problem. But this is not happening in a different time, under different national leadership: it is happening now. And due to the damaged oil-refining infrastructure along the Gulf Coast, the effects of this storm will be rippling, or ripping, into the world economy. The price of gasoline has suddenly risen well beyond $3.00 per gallon many places in the U.S., and has exceeded $6.00 per gallon at some retail outlets in the south. Apparently, many places in the southeast have no gas at all. We are hearing the first calls for fuel conservation since the mid-1970s.
Generally, this is the one thing that can key people into the fact that something is wrong; America's real religion is practiced at the filling station, and nearly all of its transportation energy comes from petroleum.
But it's becoming obvious many more ways that something else is wrong. Imagine if this were a multiple city emergency -- that is, if the damage were to more than one city. Imagine if the casualty toll were higher. Are we now to understand that the federal government is incapable of responding to an emergency? It would seem so. The AstrologyAs I've reported elsewhere [please see cainer.com], a dominant image of Saturn in Leo (which began six weeks ago, on July 16) is that of dams bursting. For some reason, when Saturn changes from water sign Cancer to fire sign Leo, structures that hold back bodies of water (and in one famous instance, hundreds of tons of molasses) tend to give way, often with catastrophic effects. While we are seeing the results of a huge cyclone, we're also seeing those of failed levees -- many of them. You might call this a watershed event. In looking for Saturn imagery, we find plenty working in the chart of the City of New Orleans, but it's difficult to miss the fact that Saturn is now crossing the so-called president's ascendant. As I've also said elsewhere, this would be the big turning point for the non-president's career, with a wave of awareness really coalescing about nine months to the day after the inauguration. In addition, I proposed a couple of months ago that "something is up with the price of gold" -- in this case, black gold, petroleum, the blood of our society. But let's come back to that later. Libra is the astonishing connection that three key charts, the City of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and Mr. Bush, have in common. Also looking at a fourth chart, the progressed horoscope for the city, we find the same effect -- Libra is the dominant energy, with its quest for justice, balance, rebalancing and sensitivity. Between these four charts, there are 17 major planets and points in Libra. And a solar eclipse in Libra is coming in just one month, nestled nicely into the action. This is followed by a lunar eclipse in Aries two weeks later, precisely aligned with many critical factors in Aries, Libra, Cancer and Capricorn. We are in a situation that's going to develop rapidly, in large, significant ways and, as all eclipses do, come with events that do their work on a global scale. Most of the effects of this will be in October -- when the chart for the presidential inauguration comes thundering to life and the media begins to put the many pieces of this rather large, surreal puzzle together.
Cosmic Trigger One: Venus conjunct JupiterBetween this past Monday, when Katrina made landfall, and today, Venus in Libra crossed the Moon's South Node and formed a conjunction to Jupiter. This was one important cosmic trigger of what happened in New Orleans, a kind of collective ignition point that released the considerable energy of Venus, Libra and what you might call the Goddess. This conjunction actually affects everything both in Libra and on the entire cardinal cross (Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn), which is heavily loaded in these charts. Venus is now on course for a conjunction to Pallas Athene early next week, the planet of protection, politics and strategy. We may see a shift in the political climate with this activity, which occurs over the weekend -- a rising expectation that something reasonable or strategic has to happen. Neptune has been involved in this setup: the Venus-Jupiter conjunction is trine the most watery planet, in the sign Aquarius. Chiron in Capricorn is a prominent factor in this configuration. The city's chart has this placement, showing up in many square aspects to the Libra planets all of the charts. Chiron in Capricorn is the "post 9/11 factor," a consistent element between late 2001 and today (though the transition to Aquarius began earlier this year, Chiron is now back in Capricorn). Chiron in Capricorn has shaped up to be an extremely painful lesson in government, its conduct and its power. Chiron has a way of shining the light in the dark places, exposing what is in the shadows -- and in Capricorn on the collective scale, there is plenty. What we have here is a lot of action in the cardinal signs, including two of the most important global factors, lunar nodes (in cardinal signs) and eclipses. The cardinal signs are the initiation points, and they are the points of public contact. The nodes, as do eclipses and cardinal signs, tend to bring in large numbers of people and events that act like "attractors" or points of contact.
And Two: Uranus and Pluto -- and PrometheusOne of the most remarkable events of these charts occurs in the sign Pisces, and it is outstanding both for its symbolism and precision. In the City of New Orleans chart, Pluto is located at 8 degrees Pisces and 53 arc minutes. In the chart for landfall, transiting Uranus is located exactly in this degree and arc minute. An arc minute is 1/60th of a degree. This is an exact, to the minute, transit involving two outer planets that, together, are associated with upheavals, revolutions, breakthroughs and social movements. Indeed, many of the great revolutionary movements of the past few centuries have happened under Uranus-Pluto aspects, and the word "revolution" itself was invented under this astrology. When you think Uranus and Pluto, think uranium and plutonium. To convey the feeling of this on the social level, there was recently a long conjunction of transiting Uranus to transiting Pluto that we think of in its entirety as "the Sixties." The revolutionary quality of this conjunction is related beautifully, using many cycles of history, in the book Prometheus the Awakener by Richard Tarnas, which title is the subject of an accidental discovery made by Lise LePage, who has been handing research on this article. In his book, Tarnas argues that the planet Uranus should really have been named Prometheus, after one of the Greek gods of creation. The energy of Prometheus, who gave the fire of the gods to mankind, is precisely the kind of sudden awakening energy that is associated with Uranus. Under the influence of this idea, many astrologers who have gone over the author's historical research and mythological theory are content to think of Uranus as Promethean energy (most say uranian, meaning the same thing -- high voltage and rebellious). And this, I suggested in an email to Lise, referencing the title of the book. Lise misunderstood, and thinking I was referencing the asteroid Prometheus, promptly put that into the city's natal chart -- and discovered that it's in the same degree as Pluto in the natal chart for New Orleans. So, in its basic, inherent makeup, New Orleans has the asteroid Prometheus conjunct evolutionary mover Pluto in Pisces, to the degree. And the city was destroyed, setting off a chain of events that will seem quite nuclear in hindsight, as Uranus made a to-the-minute conjunction to Pluto (something that happens with this precision for a total of three times for just 12 hours every 84 years). Checking the Sabian symbol for this degree (9 Pisces), Dane Rudhyar gives the keywords "self-quickening," a rather energetic image considering the astrology that degree contains in these charts. In all, we're looking at an enormous release of energy. Saturn in LeoNow we come to Saturn in Leo, a critical era-defining astrological factor for the next three years, and probably well into the future. What happens under Saturn in Leo tends to be extraordinarily stable and have lasting effects, often for many decades or longer. The city's chart has numerous placements in early Leo and Aquarius, including the Part of Fortune (calculated for noon), a rather precise opposition of Mars in Leo and Mercury in Aquarius, and Venus in Aquarius. This is a grand opposition, which (thank the gods) is trined by Jupiter in Sagittarius. That trine from Jupiter is what I'll call the "it could be worse" aspect. Jupiter in Sagittarius, trine the personal planets and trine transiting Saturn, is acting as a protective influence. Note also that the Chiron-Nessus conjunction in early Aquarius that has been in effect for much of this year. Another era-defining event, this conjunction But Saturn in Leo is rather personal event for Mr. Bush, as it is for anyone whose ascendant it crosses. Under this combination of factors, when it's angular (that is, in the ascendant), Saturn can act exactly like Uranus, propelling sudden and unexpected movement, change, progress or something like that. Saturn has not quite made it to the Bush ascendant, which is 7 degrees and 7 arc minutes of Leo, but it does so the morning of Sept. 12, 2005 (Washington, DC time). New Orleans is very much his responsibility -- and the world is watching. One thing that's clear is that Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent devastation will not be a path of escape for those who have hijacked the government and are holding it hostage. To the contrary, we all may be looking at the one event that finally gets our attention, and tips the scales.
-- Additional research & reporting by Lise LePage in the US and Dan Miller in the UK.Please check the cover or subscriber blogs later in the weekend for information about the involvement of new outer planets, including Sedna, Varuna and Deucalion -- all of which bear poignant water and flood imagery.Witch Hunt Against Climate Change Scientistshttp://www.truthout.org/issues_05/083005EA.shtmlBrace for More Katrinas, Scientists Sayhttp://www.truthout.org/issues_05/083105EA.shtmlFEMA Phased Out as Disasters Keep Cominghttp://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090105J.shtml--------------------------Planet Waves by Eric FrancisSept. 2, 2005 - Weekly Horoscope 574Note to Virgos
The password is gen
The password is …… “genocide.”
First, it’s clear to me that what is happening in New Orleans now is genocide. It may not be the organized effort as we’ve seen in the Sudan, in Rwanda, or in Bosnia, but it is clearly genocide. Those poor, uneducated people in New Orleans are being left to die with malice. The Federal government, operating consistent with the conservative/Republican dogma of “let them help themselves” or “give the government money to the faith based organizations and let them do it” is now examined for the bankrupt, murdering policy that it really is. The Federal government did not begin to engage the machines that for decades existed to protect and rescue the victims of events not of their own construction until Wednesday, more than two full days after the rising flood waters made for a human catastrophe, and more than five full days after the severity of the situation was evident. The national guard troops who would have been able to immediately mobilize into their cities and parishes are in Iraq, mobilized to fight a war against a people who never offended nor threatened our way of life, or safety or our persons.
The “liberal” organizations that come up for criticism by the right-wing media such as move-on.org have created websites that offer free housing to refugees. So, these unpatriotic, anti-American organizations that the right-wing media is all geared up about are doing far more than ANY right-wing, Christian organization has even thought up.
Could it be that is because most of the refugees are poor, black people?
Let’s notice, shall we, that these displaced persons from New Orleans are uniformly called “refugees.” And, let’s compare the definitions of “refugee” and “evacuee.”
ref·u·gee P Pronunciation Key (r(image placeholder)f(image placeholder)y(image placeholder)-j(image placeholder)(image placeholder))n.
One who flees in search of refuge, as in times of war, political oppression, or religious persecution.
(image placeholder)
[French réfugié, from past participle of réfugier, to take refuge, from Old French, from refuge, refuge.
e·vac·u·ee P Pronunciation Key ((image placeholder)-v(image placeholder)k(image placeholder)y(image placeholder)-(image placeholder)(image placeholder))n.
A person evacuated from a dangerous area.
So, why would the “liberal news media” (which for those who haven’t a clue, is merely a corporate shill for the right-wing movement in this country. The only “liberal” media are the blogs and independent newsletters. Even NPR has been so compromised that their news articles are replete with conservative pundits so that they appear “balanced.” Get a fucking clue) use the word “refugee?” What do they know?
It’s because the people who really run this country, the ones who are never elected, have decided that the “herd” in New Orleans should be culled a bit. Specifically, the uneducated, poor, black people who so irritated the tourists as they walked the French Quarter.
Actually, I think that the intention goes further than that. I think that they also intend to purge the French Quarter of its gay inhabitants, people who uniformly tend to be self-employed or small business owners; people who tend not to have enough insurance, and who couldn’t weather four to six months being without income.
I believe that, after this is all said and done, New Orleans will be a thoroughly sanitized town; suitable for tourists and their credit cards, without the unsightly drag queens and leather daddies, and without the upsetting panhandlers, homeless, drunks and poor people.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969) I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more topromote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it. -Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)
First, it’s clear to me that what is happening in New Orleans now is genocide. It may not be the organized effort as we’ve seen in the Sudan, in Rwanda, or in Bosnia, but it is clearly genocide. Those poor, uneducated people in New Orleans are being left to die with malice. The Federal government, operating consistent with the conservative/Republican dogma of “let them help themselves” or “give the government money to the faith based organizations and let them do it” is now examined for the bankrupt, murdering policy that it really is. The Federal government did not begin to engage the machines that for decades existed to protect and rescue the victims of events not of their own construction until Wednesday, more than two full days after the rising flood waters made for a human catastrophe, and more than five full days after the severity of the situation was evident. The national guard troops who would have been able to immediately mobilize into their cities and parishes are in Iraq, mobilized to fight a war against a people who never offended nor threatened our way of life, or safety or our persons.
The “liberal” organizations that come up for criticism by the right-wing media such as move-on.org have created websites that offer free housing to refugees. So, these unpatriotic, anti-American organizations that the right-wing media is all geared up about are doing far more than ANY right-wing, Christian organization has even thought up.
Could it be that is because most of the refugees are poor, black people?
Let’s notice, shall we, that these displaced persons from New Orleans are uniformly called “refugees.” And, let’s compare the definitions of “refugee” and “evacuee.”
ref·u·gee P Pronunciation Key (r(image placeholder)f(image placeholder)y(image placeholder)-j(image placeholder)(image placeholder))n.
One who flees in search of refuge, as in times of war, political oppression, or religious persecution.
(image placeholder)
[French réfugié, from past participle of réfugier, to take refuge, from Old French, from refuge, refuge.
e·vac·u·ee P Pronunciation Key ((image placeholder)-v(image placeholder)k(image placeholder)y(image placeholder)-(image placeholder)(image placeholder))n.
A person evacuated from a dangerous area.
So, why would the “liberal news media” (which for those who haven’t a clue, is merely a corporate shill for the right-wing movement in this country. The only “liberal” media are the blogs and independent newsletters. Even NPR has been so compromised that their news articles are replete with conservative pundits so that they appear “balanced.” Get a fucking clue) use the word “refugee?” What do they know?
It’s because the people who really run this country, the ones who are never elected, have decided that the “herd” in New Orleans should be culled a bit. Specifically, the uneducated, poor, black people who so irritated the tourists as they walked the French Quarter.
Actually, I think that the intention goes further than that. I think that they also intend to purge the French Quarter of its gay inhabitants, people who uniformly tend to be self-employed or small business owners; people who tend not to have enough insurance, and who couldn’t weather four to six months being without income.
I believe that, after this is all said and done, New Orleans will be a thoroughly sanitized town; suitable for tourists and their credit cards, without the unsightly drag queens and leather daddies, and without the upsetting panhandlers, homeless, drunks and poor people.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969) I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more topromote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it. -Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)
Thursday all day
An interesting day, all around. I’m waiting on Joel to come over; he needs some help setting up a business, and he’s promised he was on his way. Of course, he may get distracted by nearly anything, especially something looking like a crack pipe, so who knows where he is.
I finally got some documents in today for a client that I’ve been waiting for a week; he’s stopped asking about them (hey, if the state can’t get them to me, what can I do about it?) Had a business development meeting today with a guy who has clients that are involved in this latest real estate scam – in which people “buy” a home from someone in distress, they put the deed in the name of a trust, in which the person getting the check takes a very minority interest as a beneficiary, and then the person getting the cash (seller) occupies the house as a tenant, paying rent with the understanding that, when the rent is paid on time for a year, they will be able to refinance (at a huge markup) and get the house back in their name.
Of course, the idea is to evict the person without value as soon as they make a late rent payment.
Ah, here’s Joel.
Later
Watched a movie that the minx insisted was terrific; he was, of course, correct. Upstairs, they’re working on driving me fucking crazy with the rumbling back and forth across the floor. The townhouse that I love so much appears to indeed be available yet, as it’s not got window blinds or other accoutrements that suggest occupancy. And, after listening to the bastard dogs upstairs for yet another night, I’M READY TO BE A HOMEOWNER AND GET THE F*%CK out of here.
My dad has an infection in his lungs. They had their first offer on their house today; 115M lower than the asking price. They rejected it. They’re leaving for the Yucatan tomorrow for two weeks; my sister and her partner are joining them there on Saturday.
Bully for them.
Later
I wonder what happened to that nice couple I met at Mardi Gras over on Canal Street during the Endymion parade. They were from Slidell. They were both cute; I had almost talked the wife into trading me her husband for my mardi gras beads. I hope they’re all right; they have my number. Hmmm.
Okay, it’s time for sleep now.
I finally got some documents in today for a client that I’ve been waiting for a week; he’s stopped asking about them (hey, if the state can’t get them to me, what can I do about it?) Had a business development meeting today with a guy who has clients that are involved in this latest real estate scam – in which people “buy” a home from someone in distress, they put the deed in the name of a trust, in which the person getting the check takes a very minority interest as a beneficiary, and then the person getting the cash (seller) occupies the house as a tenant, paying rent with the understanding that, when the rent is paid on time for a year, they will be able to refinance (at a huge markup) and get the house back in their name.
Of course, the idea is to evict the person without value as soon as they make a late rent payment.
Ah, here’s Joel.
Later
Watched a movie that the minx insisted was terrific; he was, of course, correct. Upstairs, they’re working on driving me fucking crazy with the rumbling back and forth across the floor. The townhouse that I love so much appears to indeed be available yet, as it’s not got window blinds or other accoutrements that suggest occupancy. And, after listening to the bastard dogs upstairs for yet another night, I’M READY TO BE A HOMEOWNER AND GET THE F*%CK out of here.
My dad has an infection in his lungs. They had their first offer on their house today; 115M lower than the asking price. They rejected it. They’re leaving for the Yucatan tomorrow for two weeks; my sister and her partner are joining them there on Saturday.
Bully for them.
Later
I wonder what happened to that nice couple I met at Mardi Gras over on Canal Street during the Endymion parade. They were from Slidell. They were both cute; I had almost talked the wife into trading me her husband for my mardi gras beads. I hope they’re all right; they have my number. Hmmm.
Okay, it’s time for sleep now.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Tuesday Tuesday
Tuesday Tuesday ..
Okay, so I’ve worked my tail off AGAIN today, and seem to have gotten somewhere. I have one loan submitted (by mail! How 1990s is that?) and mailed out eight books I sold on Amazon. I helped a client with some tax documentation, helped Nicole with her grandmother, etc., etc.
Worn out with the non-communications about Fabulair relating to this travel agency that we were talking to. I just got a LONG email synopsis of all of our communications, with all the emails attached. Like, what the fuck good does that do? I KNOW what the email correspondence was; I wrote the stupid things. I’m just ready to move on, because now I’ve wasted another two months. It’s been a full year since I’ve started this concept, and I’m not waiting around any more.
Got the church calendars printed and mailed out. I think I spent $40 in postage today.
I had promised my Aunt Donna that I’d go up and visit her this weekend; then, I procrastinated on buying the ticket to find that it would cost about a gajillion dollars to do that, and I’ve forgotten (no, really .. I think about it, then I forget) to call her and talk to her about it. Now, she’s just called me. Urk.
I hate that. I wish I had the money to just pop the airline ticket and not blow her off.
Now, under the heading of “what the fuck was I thinking?” – I today got another poster tube in the mail. Another with a lovely picture of the 1938 20th Century limited on it. One which will have to be stacked in the closet corner with the other 20 or so poster tubes, approximately half of which have similar images thereon.
If I were to buy the townhouse that I like so much, I’d still not have enough wall space to display all of this crap. That’s assuming that I spent the $3500 or so to have it all framed.
Anyway. There’s a boy who wants to come over for sex. His body chemistry makes me nauseous. There’s another one, but I don’t know about how I feel tonight. Michael (the new hustler man I’ve been talking to) wants to get together and eat mushrooms, but I want to work in the morning. Perhaps I’ll just watch a DVD or three.
I should get something for dinner, but I don’t know. Blah. David called; I’ll see if he wanted to go get something.
Mikey’s talking about moving to Tennessee. BLARG.
No, that’s not quite how I feel about that.
BLARG.
Okay, so I’ve worked my tail off AGAIN today, and seem to have gotten somewhere. I have one loan submitted (by mail! How 1990s is that?) and mailed out eight books I sold on Amazon. I helped a client with some tax documentation, helped Nicole with her grandmother, etc., etc.
Worn out with the non-communications about Fabulair relating to this travel agency that we were talking to. I just got a LONG email synopsis of all of our communications, with all the emails attached. Like, what the fuck good does that do? I KNOW what the email correspondence was; I wrote the stupid things. I’m just ready to move on, because now I’ve wasted another two months. It’s been a full year since I’ve started this concept, and I’m not waiting around any more.
Got the church calendars printed and mailed out. I think I spent $40 in postage today.
I had promised my Aunt Donna that I’d go up and visit her this weekend; then, I procrastinated on buying the ticket to find that it would cost about a gajillion dollars to do that, and I’ve forgotten (no, really .. I think about it, then I forget) to call her and talk to her about it. Now, she’s just called me. Urk.
I hate that. I wish I had the money to just pop the airline ticket and not blow her off.
Now, under the heading of “what the fuck was I thinking?” – I today got another poster tube in the mail. Another with a lovely picture of the 1938 20th Century limited on it. One which will have to be stacked in the closet corner with the other 20 or so poster tubes, approximately half of which have similar images thereon.
If I were to buy the townhouse that I like so much, I’d still not have enough wall space to display all of this crap. That’s assuming that I spent the $3500 or so to have it all framed.
Anyway. There’s a boy who wants to come over for sex. His body chemistry makes me nauseous. There’s another one, but I don’t know about how I feel tonight. Michael (the new hustler man I’ve been talking to) wants to get together and eat mushrooms, but I want to work in the morning. Perhaps I’ll just watch a DVD or three.
I should get something for dinner, but I don’t know. Blah. David called; I’ll see if he wanted to go get something.
Mikey’s talking about moving to Tennessee. BLARG.
No, that’s not quite how I feel about that.
BLARG.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Monday eve sans Adobe
Well, I’ve managed to spend about 13 hours in front of this computer today. I did clear through nearly everything on my task list, but still have several big documents to work on tomorrow. Plus, I have to train a new client on QuickBooks at their shop, which will cut down on my working time tomorrow.
Thinking about hijacking the Minx and heading off to Dallas first thing Saturday morning. It seems that the entire Dallas crew is trying to decide whether to stay in town, or whether to find somewhere to spend their tickets they had purchased for New Orleans. I’m sure that they’ll vote for staying in town. Two pool parties are forming for the weekend more quickly than a hurricane in the Gulf, and the Minx always has such lovely beach wear.
I am beginning to wonder if I’ll ever get Ruby’s stereo re-wired. I should start calling around professional shops and just get over it. My new Maquire’s wax products were shipped today; we’ll see if they show up before the prospective Dallas trip on Saturday. I think I’m still waiting for some stuff from eBay, as well. Hmmmm.
Okay, I’ve been spraying insect spray, as some form of flying little things got into the casita. Sort of like locusts, but without Jason’s cocaine habit. Hopefully, a little spritzing has run them off.
Tired, tired. Off to bed. More in the morning. No N8 today.
Thinking about hijacking the Minx and heading off to Dallas first thing Saturday morning. It seems that the entire Dallas crew is trying to decide whether to stay in town, or whether to find somewhere to spend their tickets they had purchased for New Orleans. I’m sure that they’ll vote for staying in town. Two pool parties are forming for the weekend more quickly than a hurricane in the Gulf, and the Minx always has such lovely beach wear.
I am beginning to wonder if I’ll ever get Ruby’s stereo re-wired. I should start calling around professional shops and just get over it. My new Maquire’s wax products were shipped today; we’ll see if they show up before the prospective Dallas trip on Saturday. I think I’m still waiting for some stuff from eBay, as well. Hmmmm.
Okay, I’ve been spraying insect spray, as some form of flying little things got into the casita. Sort of like locusts, but without Jason’s cocaine habit. Hopefully, a little spritzing has run them off.
Tired, tired. Off to bed. More in the morning. No N8 today.
Monday, Monday ver 639.01
Lunch time, and a bit of time available to blog. Have to get a loan worked up and submitted, then have some paperwork to finish, then .. there’s still a huge to-do list, but have I already been cruising through it? Seems odd that I may have already done.
Perhaps I should empty out my work basket and see what’s in it.
Thought I would have had some sales this morning, but nothing so far. Perhaps Donna is right, and I will need to pick up the phone and start calling everyone tomorrow to follow up.
Have six books sold on Amazon that I need to wrap up and ship. I think this will require a trip to OfficeMax to accomplish. Until then, I need to process paperwork anyway.
The universe says that N8 is not someone to play with. He’s on my mind, though.
Perhaps I should empty out my work basket and see what’s in it.
Thought I would have had some sales this morning, but nothing so far. Perhaps Donna is right, and I will need to pick up the phone and start calling everyone tomorrow to follow up.
Have six books sold on Amazon that I need to wrap up and ship. I think this will require a trip to OfficeMax to accomplish. Until then, I need to process paperwork anyway.
The universe says that N8 is not someone to play with. He’s on my mind, though.
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