when you loose your fucking house in one day like i did, then you can fucking talk… the only ungrateful bastard around here is you!

poor people didn’t get out because of poverty, no assests, no resources and the federal government’s inability to come in to provide relief, shelter and placement. families are separated, and we did not know where we were going when the federal gov’t did come.

to answer your question why didn’t we get out, well that goes back to my earlier answer…victim of circumstances. get a clue! look at the geographic landscape of new orleans, look at the levee breaks and then draw your conclusion…

look at both sides of the story before you draw your own conclusions…

from the look of what you have stated, i see we are dealing a person who knows no better, not socially conscious of any thing and probably a white young adult who is babied by his parents!

(2) Generater 101 – It’s better to leave your generater outside where it might get stolen than takin it inside and havin your family get jacked. This ain’t rocket science!

(3) Stop fighting at the gas stations PUTOS! And to those ill fuckers who try to cut in on the side…THE LINE’S THERE FOR A REASON CHUMP!

(4) No more 24/7 News Coverage-Updateathon, I am so sick of that shit. Who’s watching that shit anyways? I dont know anyone that ever learned anything from Tony Regreto, Jookie Nespral, Kristy Cougar, Dwight Fort Lauderdale. Don’t these ppl got shutters to take down? Wouldn’t it be nice if they came correct and HELPED the ppl in this difficult time and show us their “Hard days work” on the evening News? Is anyone running the stations over there?

(5) This hurricane had been tracked for almost 2 weeks, why are ppl bitching about the distribution centers? YOU are NOT entitled to nathan, you gotta lock it down yourselves. This ain’t New Orleans. Shut the fuck up already! I can dig if we’re bummy and livin in the PJs w/out cheese and old ppl but not phat pocket Guidos ballin in a Honda talkin bout the wait or my Homies in their Impalas, tellin you how it is. At least the Benzi -box works and you could pawn the 22′s and get mad cash.

(6) Treat a busted traffic light as a four way stop. Stay off the motherfuckin roads and go read the DMV manuals. Why do these buckshots keep speedin thru an intersection even when everyone else around is stoppin, has stopped or is slowing down?

(7) curfews are for your safety! Leavin home to check on your dawgs on the end of the block since the prepaid celly aint workin don’t count. Also, going to Farm Store for a cold one is not a good reason to be out of your pad. Have fun in jail, Oh and don’t forget the soap, suckas!!

(8) To the ppl stealin gas out of ppl’s cars, I got somethin for you. Oh how can I forget the ones stealing generators, Carbon Monoxide not withstanding. Stand over the workin generater and breathe in slowly and deeply.

If you’ve ever done this or know anyone who has, then you/they are truly an Asswipe.
BTW there’s a gas station in the Everglades that’s Open! It’s Called Python Gas And Venom, no lines they’re always waitin. GO THERE!

First of all please check this timeline with backed up FACTS.It will show who sat on their butt and who worked.
Second ,Don’t think that the whole world was not watching when this unfolded.Nobody gives a shit about Blanco or Nagin.For outside world buck starts and stops at dubya.He only came to DC on wednesday.Hurricane warning started on Friday,hit on Sunday and the leevees brike on monday.There was ample warnings about leevee breaking .Although our president was in UK when the tsunami struck she hopped on the first flight home.(She doesn’t have any airforce ones !have to travel commecial airlines I guess)
You say “NOW IS NOT THE TIME.” when the fuck are you going to look into problems of the federal government failure ?January 21st. 2009?
About shooting and looting , you have the biggest army in the world ,send them in.And keep the guns away from “dangerous” masses .
Apart from all the politics,racial issues or whatever you think that happened,do you think it is acceptable for a federal governent not to even air drop food and water to the thousnads who were trapped in new orleans?

For your reading pleasure here is news about looting from america’s finest news source the onion

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing African­Americans “looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses.” “I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I’d managed to find,” said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. “Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers.” Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.

Ultimately, the corps is directed, along with 15 other agencies, by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It is FEMA who is really calling the shots and setting priorities here,” General Strock said. (New York Times)

The federal problem is that FEMA and the Levees directly were underfunded and ignored, despite it being the #1 or 2 most likely disaster. Added to the problem is that the Director Brown’s primary qualification was being Bush’s Campaign Managers college roommate. His last job was with some Arabian Horse Foundation and he’s neither qualified nor competent. FEMA has direct responsibility for the Levees, and they and the Federal Government are at fault there.

The other responsibility of the Federal Government is to step in with the National Guard when state law-and-order gets out of control. They were used in the South during school desegregation and more sadly in Kent State against Vietnam protestors. Flood specific, they step in all the time. I remember some Mississippi floods when I was a kid and seeing National Guard sandbagging on TV. A quick Google shows that they helped out during floods in Texas, Utah, etc. The fact that the promised 40,000 National Guardsmen hadn’t arrived 5 days after New Orleans flooded was criminally negligent.

One more thing the Federal Government does is step in if City and State resources completely buckle – as they did here. If law-and-order breaks down – riots for example – the Federal Govt steps in. If a city disappears underwater, the Federal Government shouldn’t be lagging behind the media. They should be right there keeping the country together. They messed up. Bush’s main problem is that he only took action when there was an obvious political cost, not when the country needed leadership.

Do NOT simply “show up” & figure this is the kinda help they need or want. The Red Cross will tell you what you need to know.

PS: If you DO decide to “show up”, be sure to provide your own…

water
food
living quarters
clothing
transportation
fuel

For at least 2 – 3 weeks. Something tells me you didn’t live in South Florida during Andrew. Or, if you did, you were either too young for anything to sink in or you didn’t pay attention.

They’d probably like to have a few chainsaws & generators, too.

Repeat: Call the Red Cross.

It’s been a very exhausting week for all of us here at KatrinaHelp (www.katrinahelp.info), the first 6 days were probably the worst! 8 of us form the SEAEAT team, founded and formed KatrinaHelp just hours after the hurricane hit News Orleans. Within 12 hours, we had about 60 people from around the world (mainly seaeat folks & ground zero) helping out… We set up information coordination for missing persons, help needed, offered, etc. The wiki was up…

24 hours into the disaster, we got more help from peter griffin, dina mehta and the other folks from mumbai to get the blog running which thanks to them has developed nicely! Within 30 hours, we had about 200 contributors, and due to the load from yahoo our servers in Amstrerdam went down. So it was an up down scenario every hour or so, all thru this we’ll still be getting sos calls, tourists stranded on rooftops, etc. By then the Superdome wasn’t even connected to the outside world. 48 hours into the crisis, it was still bad, where was the US coastguard? ER? Search & Rescue? Where???? It was just us, a couple of volunteer networks and ham radio operators that were maintaining that coordination of info flow.

90 hours into the disaster, Dina and Phil of Skype journal got a line going for us, which meant real time information flows from the ground to the rest of the world, we had a 2 hubs, one in Australia, another in New Zealand, we got a communications network going. It was easy to ferry messages and take/make calls directly into New Orleans via points in LSU and Tulane. By Friday night 2 more communication hubs joined the KatrinaHelp wiki network from Canada and Peurto Rico! We got our phone line going wireless -on skype 24 hours/day with shifts – teams in India, USA, Bahrain & Amsterdam managing it. We got into affected areas where resecue services couldn’t get into via text messaging.

Thanks to Taran, Sanjay Senanayke and Rohit Gupta from the days of the tsunami we got a mock up of their ARC (Alert Retrieval Cache) system going with Mahangu (lastnode) giving us tips on sms reporting from the ground. Soon we had built a network of informational coordination, a complete communications network, including damage reports and teamed up with CivicSpace Labs and other grass roots organizations in providing immediate relief for the vicitims and those displaced. Despite all this, there are still horrible things happening each hour…. the stuff we get over our lines and on email is shatterng just like this letter we received from a lady in San Antonio (http://katrinahelp.blogspot.com/2005/09/update-from-san-antonio-pathetic.html) who stated that when residents were opening their homes to evacuees coming in from the superdome , officials in the city were putting them up at hangars, unused shopping malls and motels turned overnight into shelters…. which weren’t fake claims after we started monitoring a San Antonio Evacuee Ops Scanner stream made possible thanks to Ham operators from around Louisiana.

Today morning, we get reports of cops in New orleans having committed suicide (there are otehr disturbing stories as well with respect to residents in affected areas and kids), other individuals in the forces turning their badges in and red tape and beauraucracy defending the slow response to get aid to where it is most needed because the ‘never expected this crisis of such a magnitude!’

This is all just 3 minutes of the horror and misery thats still going on. Is there any one out there? What you see in the media is the same thing we saw in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, etc. The same claims that aid is going through…. (when its going thru only after 5 days of hell and at a very trickly pace), everything is the same when you compare this crisis to that of the tsunami, the only small difference is the size factor – everything else is the same! And the people who suffer in the end are the victims, displaced and volunteer networks…..

If you or anyone needs latest damage info, wants to offer help, needs help , wants to get in touch with loved ones in affected areas (we can call international, don’t worry), report missing persons, need to get to college but you’re adisplaced student, need to alert the world/media to a pressing/disturbing katrina issue may it be lack of aid or red tape barring relief operations in your area – we will broadcast to radio/TV stations, etc. please contact uson the following number:

+15042081564

That number is local if you’re calling from

It is operated just like the rest of the Katrinahelp Wiki Network 24hrs/day & we do have international speakers.
If you need us to call you back, either leave us a voice mail message (sometimes our lines are busy) with your details or give us a missed call and we’ll call you back. The KatrinaHelp team is operating on 3 continents and we’re in this for the long run!

Thanks,
Angelo Embuldeniya.
(The KatrinaHelp Team)
http://www.katrinahelp.info
http://192.122.183.218

I stumbled on your blog a couple of months ago and have been enjoying this window on SL life from Chicago. Although I was born in SL, I basically grew up in New York City. I don’t visit SL very often and do not pretend to understand all the contradictions of SL life and culture.

But I would like to comment on some contradictions of American culture.

What’s happening on the US Gulf coast is totally unforgivable. It just goes to show that SL does not have a monopoly on incompetent governance. Many recent American policy decisions have been made on the basis of wishful thinking: peaceful transition to democracy in Iraq, unending supplies of foreign oil, no consequences to climate change and environmental degradation. It’s completely out of touch with reality. Some of the biggest political debates are whether evolution should be taught in schools. Is it surprising that basic engineering and scientific warnings go ignored?

The disparity of America is on display for the world to see. The wealthy and middle class were able to evacuate New Orleans when warned. The poor, the elderly, and the sick were completely ignored. For a country skeptical about Darwin, there is a whole lot of social Darwinism going on.

The best quote that I heard is from the FEMA director of Baton Rouge, Louisiana: “We’re dealing with people we did not know were there”.

As Leon Wynter responded, these are people that aren’t even acknowledged to exist.

If 9-11 made the US wake up (briefly) to the implications of its foreign policies, Katrina has made the US wake up (probably also briefly) to the implications of very deep social and class divisions in this country.

A really good conversation on race and Katrina was on the radio today: http://wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/09022005

And to add to the irony, the AP reports that Sri Lanka is now offering aid to the US: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Katrina-World-Offers.html