A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

[burbleflyer 0]

Interesting article.

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

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

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

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

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

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

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

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

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

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

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026

[freeryde13 0]

i think this article went over most peoples head.

_________________________________________

people see me as a challenge to their balance

[slug 1]

  Quote

i think this article went over most peoples head.

Hi Free

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck......
The author is

Robert Tracinski is the editor of The Intellectual Activist magazine and of TIA Daily, which offers daily news and analysis from a pro-individualist perspective. For a free trial visit TIADaily.com

It didn't go over some of our heads, speed read, check author, round file
Took longer to type the response than ID the duck.

Burbleflyer: Shame shame, whats next quoting skinheads if they agree with your agenda?

R.I.P.

[Mockingbird 0]

The author nailed it.

Thanks, burble.

Blue skies & happy jitters ~Mockingbird
"Why is there something rather than nothing?"

[nate_1979 9]

Exactly.

FGF #???
I miss the sky...
There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.

[burbleflyer 0]

  Quote

  Quote

i think this article went over most peoples head.

Hi Free

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck......
The author is

Robert Tracinski is the editor of The Intellectual Activist magazine and of TIA Daily, which offers daily news and analysis from a pro-individualist perspective. For a free trial visit TIADaily.com

It didn't go over some of our heads, speed read, check author, round file
Took longer to type the response than ID the duck.

Burbleflyer: Shame shame, whats next quoting skinheads if they agree with your agenda?

R.I.P.

Just where did you get "race" out of that article?

I never said he was right, partly right, or wrong. I said it was interesting.

As a thinking person, I like to hear many different sides to a story before I form an opinion.

[bodypilot90 0]

some see race in everything. People like Jesse Jackson, we will have with us always .

[slug 1]

  Quote

  Quote

  Quote

i think this article went over most peoples head.

Hi Free

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck......
The author is

Robert Tracinski is the editor of The Intellectual Activist magazine and of TIA Daily, which offers daily news and analysis from a pro-individualist perspective. For a free trial visit TIADaily.com

It didn't go over some of our heads, speed read, check author, round file
Took longer to type the response than ID the duck.

Burbleflyer: Shame shame, whats next quoting skinheads if they agree with your agenda?

R.I.P.

Just where did you get "race" out of that article?

I never said he was right, partly right, or wrong. I said it was interesting.

As a thinking person, I like to hear many different sides to a story before I form an opinion.

Hi burbleflyer

I didn't say anything about race you did. you did.

Isn't that interesting


""As a thinking person, I like to hear many different sides to a story before I form an opinion""

So whata your opinion of article that you posted besides the fact that it's "Interesting".

Don't be shy, think about it since your a "thinking person" and come back with your "own opinion" of the article you posted.

R.I.P.

[chutejump 0]

I agree! I lost my business during the flood of 93. I heard of all of the help that the government was providing, but never saw a thing? no assistance, no financial offerings, nada. But FEMA mistakenly gave 10 Million in food rations and financial assistance to the welfare minority in Kansas City whom were not effected by the flood, and after realizing the mistake stated that this would not have occurred if they had been allocated more money for personal.

I started to rebuild the very day that I could return to my place of business. clean up the mess, salvage what was left, I had no money, no income, and had nearly all of my assets destroyed. One month after the flood the Looters form kansas City came down and stole every remaining thing that I had salvaged from the flood, I did not even have a hammer or tools to secure the building that they had broken into. Than a week after that a government employee in a motor grader mistakenly backed over my truck and totaled it.

Did I set and whine about why the government and God had forsaken me? NO! In this world if you want something, YOU must do something to acquire it. You must take the responsibility to do something for yourself. I had completely rebuilt by 96 and now am in a better position than I was prior to the disaster of the flood. Everyone else saw damage and loss, by looking past the apparent, I saw opportunity. All of this was only produced by the effort and need on my part to take back what I had lost. I am sorry for these people, but I see that they are receiving what they are earning with their efforts. Life is like a job! YOU earn nothing! YOU get nothing!

And to answer your question YES! I own and operate a DZ.

[nate_1979 9]

Good for you.. Good story.

FGF #???
I miss the sky...
There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.

[burbleflyer 0]

  Quote

Hi burbleflyer

I didn't say anything about race you did. you did.

Isn't that interesting

  Quote

Burbleflyer: ?

As a matter of fact, you did.

You mentioned me possibly quoting skinheads in your reply.
Sorry, my bad for thinking you meant skinheads were white sumpremacists or that it had anything to do with race. I guess you think skinheads are nice guys with shaved heads.
I guess I'm an idiot for thinking that you implied my agenda was racist.

Here's the reality: If you mention skinheads in your post, you have played the race card, not me and I am insulted you implied I was a racist.
You owe me an apology.
Here's another article that I think is interesting. Read it, compare the two, and make your own conclusions.
If you would like to point out truths or falicies in either article, then go ahead

  Quote

We are on our own
In the US, white people can't imagine black people who are just like them
Darryl Pinckney
Saturday September 3, 2005
The Guardian
www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1561997,00.html
There were a number of white looters involved in the LA riots, a fact ignored or suppressed a decade ago. And so, as a black viewer, I was relieved yesterday when Channel 4 News finally found a white face among the victims of Hurricane Katrina pushing shopping carts through the water. The woman insisted to the camera that it was the police themselves who had told people to go into stores and get what they needed. She hadn't taken any clothes, she said. She was surviving, not shopping.

The only other white faces I saw during the report were those of national guardsmen, pleading officials and helicopter rescue personnel. I was so busy hoping that the news would get across the commonality created by the emergency that I completely missed the point. There is a reason everyone whom reporters found on the beach front in Biloxi, Mississippi, was white and in some cases low-income: US-style residential segregation.
And there is a reason why the people left behind in New Orleans were black: they make up the majority of the population within the city limits and among them are the city's poorest citizens. However, they don't make up the majority of the greater New Orleans area. Black people are not in the majority in any metropolitan area in the US, though they do outnumber white people overall in the state of Mississippi, where there has never been a black governor.

Black people watching in the rest of the country understood right away what was happening. The poor had been left to be washed away, then to fend for themselves. Maybe pockets of rich people will be discovered, guarding their possessions, but most likely there will be stories of the poor defending what they had. Those with money, white and black, got out.

Maybe a number of people paid little heed to the warnings to evacuate, because there had been such warnings in the past and the storms turned out not to be as furious as had been predicted; but maybe large numbers didn't leave because they had no way to get out, no car, no bus ticket, and because they had nowhere to go if they did get out, no money for a motel. It was not a nice experience watching helpless blacks, the elderly, pregnant women, and children, being winched to safety by helmeted white guys.

Fortunately, a black guy, a volunteer, was filmed using an axe to chop through rooftops to help people escape. They were soaked, and the dread they'd just escaped in those attics of ever rising water was suggested by the expressions on their faces. The rest of the US could see their fear, but they couldn't see the country's fear of them.

In the US, white people are able to conceive of black people who are better than they are or worse than they are, superior or inferior, but they seem to have a hard time imagining black people who are just like them. Officials in the affected areas are already beginning to have their say about the inadequacy of the measures the federal and state governments had in place to cope with the catastrophe, but maybe one of the reasons the rest of the country sat around and didn't seem able to take hold right away was their fear of the black people left behind.

When I heard that relief workers had been told not to go on the New Orleans streets I had to ask if they were white. One story quoted a black woman who complained that the truckloads of national guardsmen wouldn't make eye contact with the people in the streets. Maybe they are under orders determined by emergency priorities, but in the south the national guard is overwhelmingly white. These are the new policemen, with shoot-to-kill orders. The images of black people emerging from broken glass fronts with armloads of clothes or cigarettes bring to mind the LA riots, as if to say: this is what black people do at the first breakdown of public order. They, or the criminals and opportunists among them, can turn even a natural disaster into civil disorder. So far only Jesse Jackson has complained about the racist display the US is putting on for an international audience.

Louisiana has a large poor white population, but where have they gone? Where are the white people? New Orleans sits in a basin and hasn't the same pattern of suburbs as other US cities, but it does have them. Ninety percent of the houses in the town of Slidell, just over the bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, have been ruined. The west-lying towns, on higher ground, all have a river side, their backs to the levee. Where are those residents? They got out.

Novelist Richard Ford, who lived in New Orleans for many years, observed that Mayor Nagin had been brave to tell everyone to leave. People in the Superdome are alive, he said, because they were there, not somewhere else, but then the conditions quickly deteriorated. Of the 25,000 people shipped to the Houston Astrodome the vast majority are black. The crowd at the convention centre includes white people, but the feeling among black people seems to be that the media have once again found an occasion to portray black people as lawless and that were an equal number of whites stranded in a destroyed city, federal government help would have been dispatched more quickly.

The army bases that have been closed recently in the south as economy measures should be opened up. It is a scandal that at the time of writing there have been no air drops of any kind. The recovery will be difficult, because of who has insurance and who doesn't, to start with. And then there is all that mud. Maybe Bush can't respond convincingly to the calamity because to do so would require thinking along New Deal lines, in terms of the kind of governmental agencies that he is ideologically opposed to.

After years of not investing in the country's infrastructure, this could be the first consequence of misspending. The US telephone systems, bridges, railroads and highways are in poor shape. The authorities were told 25 years ago that the New Orleans levees could not withstand a storm of Katrina's magnitude, but a city that votes Democratic wasn't going to get the necessary allocations to refortify the works. Bush turned down foreign aid because America is the giver, not the receiver, but they are also not talking much in the US news media about what we can't afford and what resources aren't available because of the war in Iraq.

We are becoming like the countries we criticise and pity, places where the state and the society have less and less to do with each other. We are on our own, but then black people have always known that.

· Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton

[slug 1]

Hi BF

Dude you sure know how to cut, copy and paste in your posts.

In spite of your percieved Owee I don't owe you squat. The thread speaks for itself.

If your owee still hurts have a talk with nate and maybe he can kiss it for you and make you feel better

R.I.P.

  Quote

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Hi burbleflyer

I didn't say anything about race you did. you did.

Isn't that interesting

  Quote

Burbleflyer: ?

As a matter of fact, you did.

You mentioned me possibly quoting skinheads in your reply.
Sorry, my bad for thinking you meant skinheads were white sumpremacists or that it had anything to do with race. I guess you think skinheads are nice guys with shaved heads.
I guess I'm an idiot for thinking that you implied my agenda was racist.

Here's the reality: If you mention skinheads in your post, you have played the race card, not me and I am insulted you implied I was a racist.
You owe me an apology.
Here's another article that I think is interesting. Read it, compare the two, and make your own conclusions.
If you would like to point out truths or falicies in either article, then go ahead

  Quote

We are on our own
In the US, white people can't imagine black people who are just like them
Darryl Pinckney
Saturday September 3, 2005
The Guardian
www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1561997,00.html
There were a number of white looters involved in the LA riots, a fact ignored or suppressed a decade ago. And so, as a black viewer, I was relieved yesterday when Channel 4 News finally found a white face among the victims of Hurricane Katrina pushing shopping carts through the water. The woman insisted to the camera that it was the police themselves who had told people to go into stores and get what they needed. She hadn't taken any clothes, she said. She was surviving, not shopping.

The only other white faces I saw during the report were those of national guardsmen, pleading officials and helicopter rescue personnel. I was so busy hoping that the news would get across the commonality created by the emergency that I completely missed the point. There is a reason everyone whom reporters found on the beach front in Biloxi, Mississippi, was white and in some cases low-income: US-style residential segregation.
And there is a reason why the people left behind in New Orleans were black: they make up the majority of the population within the city limits and among them are the city's poorest citizens. However, they don't make up the majority of the greater New Orleans area. Black people are not in the majority in any metropolitan area in the US, though they do outnumber white people overall in the state of Mississippi, where there has never been a black governor.

Black people watching in the rest of the country understood right away what was happening. The poor had been left to be washed away, then to fend for themselves. Maybe pockets of rich people will be discovered, guarding their possessions, but most likely there will be stories of the poor defending what they had. Those with money, white and black, got out.

Maybe a number of people paid little heed to the warnings to evacuate, because there had been such warnings in the past and the storms turned out not to be as furious as had been predicted; but maybe large numbers didn't leave because they had no way to get out, no car, no bus ticket, and because they had nowhere to go if they did get out, no money for a motel. It was not a nice experience watching helpless blacks, the elderly, pregnant women, and children, being winched to safety by helmeted white guys.

Fortunately, a black guy, a volunteer, was filmed using an axe to chop through rooftops to help people escape. They were soaked, and the dread they'd just escaped in those attics of ever rising water was suggested by the expressions on their faces. The rest of the US could see their fear, but they couldn't see the country's fear of them.

In the US, white people are able to conceive of black people who are better than they are or worse than they are, superior or inferior, but they seem to have a hard time imagining black people who are just like them. Officials in the affected areas are already beginning to have their say about the inadequacy of the measures the federal and state governments had in place to cope with the catastrophe, but maybe one of the reasons the rest of the country sat around and didn't seem able to take hold right away was their fear of the black people left behind.

When I heard that relief workers had been told not to go on the New Orleans streets I had to ask if they were white. One story quoted a black woman who complained that the truckloads of national guardsmen wouldn't make eye contact with the people in the streets. Maybe they are under orders determined by emergency priorities, but in the south the national guard is overwhelmingly white. These are the new policemen, with shoot-to-kill orders. The images of black people emerging from broken glass fronts with armloads of clothes or cigarettes bring to mind the LA riots, as if to say: this is what black people do at the first breakdown of public order. They, or the criminals and opportunists among them, can turn even a natural disaster into civil disorder. So far only Jesse Jackson has complained about the racist display the US is putting on for an international audience.

Louisiana has a large poor white population, but where have they gone? Where are the white people? New Orleans sits in a basin and hasn't the same pattern of suburbs as other US cities, but it does have them. Ninety percent of the houses in the town of Slidell, just over the bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, have been ruined. The west-lying towns, on higher ground, all have a river side, their backs to the levee. Where are those residents? They got out.

Novelist Richard Ford, who lived in New Orleans for many years, observed that Mayor Nagin had been brave to tell everyone to leave. People in the Superdome are alive, he said, because they were there, not somewhere else, but then the conditions quickly deteriorated. Of the 25,000 people shipped to the Houston Astrodome the vast majority are black. The crowd at the convention centre includes white people, but the feeling among black people seems to be that the media have once again found an occasion to portray black people as lawless and that were an equal number of whites stranded in a destroyed city, federal government help would have been dispatched more quickly.

The army bases that have been closed recently in the south as economy measures should be opened up. It is a scandal that at the time of writing there have been no air drops of any kind. The recovery will be difficult, because of who has insurance and who doesn't, to start with. And then there is all that mud. Maybe Bush can't respond convincingly to the calamity because to do so would require thinking along New Deal lines, in terms of the kind of governmental agencies that he is ideologically opposed to.

After years of not investing in the country's infrastructure, this could be the first consequence of misspending. The US telephone systems, bridges, railroads and highways are in poor shape. The authorities were told 25 years ago that the New Orleans levees could not withstand a storm of Katrina's magnitude, but a city that votes Democratic wasn't going to get the necessary allocations to refortify the works. Bush turned down foreign aid because America is the giver, not the receiver, but they are also not talking much in the US news media about what we can't afford and what resources aren't available because of the war in Iraq.

We are becoming like the countries we criticise and pity, places where the state and the society have less and less to do with each other. We are on our own, but then black people have always known that.

· Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton

[nate_1979 9]

  Quote

If your owee still hurts have a talk with nate and maybe he can kiss it for you and make you feel better

Not to be stupid, but I'm trying to figure out where I fit into this, can you make the connection for me?

FGF #???
I miss the sky...
There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.

[slug 1]

  Quote

  Quote

If your owee still hurts have a talk with nate and maybe he can kiss it for you and make you feel better

Not to be stupid, but I'm trying to figure out where I fit into this, can you make the connection for me?

Hi Nate

Exactly or Exactly or Exactly

See your origional post in this thread in response to the cry baby with the owee.

If you agreed with his origional post show him some love and help him with his pain.

R.I.P.

[burbleflyer 0]

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  Quote

If your owee still hurts have a talk with nate and maybe he can kiss it for you and make you feel better

Not to be stupid, but I'm trying to figure out where I fit into this, can you make the connection for me?

Nate, you would to be stupid, slug, on the other hand cant seem to make coherent post.

[Frenchy68 0]

  Quote

some see race in everything. People like Jesse Jackson, we will have with us always .

Probably a good thing. Otherwise, Speakers' Corner would disappear, and you would have to stick with the Bonfire, and put up with my 5000'ish posts.

"For once you have tasted Absinthe you will walk the earth with your eyes turned towards the gutter, for there you have been and there you will long to return."

[slug 1]

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  Quote

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If your owee still hurts have a talk with nate and maybe he can kiss it for you and make you feel better

Not to be stupid, but I'm trying to figure out where I fit into this, can you make the connection for me?

Nate, you would to be stupid, slug, on the other hand cant seem to make coherent post.

Dude all the crap your posting is a cut copy and paste, Because you considered the author's views to be "interesting

We asked for you opinion on the interesting article you posted and you haven't responded

We're waiting for your coherent response.

BTW Nate was responding to my post, and i responded back your input didn't add anything accept a cheap shot. Whats next the incorrect spelling attack

R.I.P.

[nate_1979 9]

FGF #???
I miss the sky...
There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.

[bodypilot90 0]

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Probably a good thing. Otherwise, Speakers' Corner would disappear, and you would have to stick with the Bonfire, and put up with my 5000'ish posts.

true that

[slug 1]

  Quote

R.I.P.

[Treejumps 0]

I think that this article hit the nail on the head. If you are a ward of the state you get what they give, good or bad. If you don't want to live under that system there is unlimted opportunity to make your own way.

[namgrunt 0]

yes you hit it on the head

if you ever viseted NO before the storm you know just how correct you are.


..

59 YEARS,OVERWEIGHT,BALDIND,X-GRUNT
LAST MIL. JUMP VIET-NAM(QUAN-TRI)
www.dzmemories.com

[beowulf 1]

I also think Mr. Tracinski has hit the nail on head. This whole problem has nothing to do with race and everything to do with lazy people not willing to get off their asses and do some thing with their lives.

[tso-d_chris 0]

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

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

By the same logic, if we were a socialist state, everyone would have had a car to evacuate in and there would have been far less loss of life.

The facts can be twisted too promote any political agenda you like, but the fact of the matter is that the gulf coast was hit hard by Katrina, and the federal government's blatant failure to respond in a timely and adequate manner has significantly increased the loss of life.

[mnealtx 0]

  Quote

By the same logic, if we were a socialist state, everyone would have had a car to evacuate in and there would have been far less loss of life.

The facts can be twisted too promote any political agenda you like, but the fact of the matter is that the gulf coast was hit hard by Katrina, and the city, state and federal government's blatant failure to respond in a timely and adequate manner has significantly increased the loss of life.

Fixed that for ya

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706