burying, digging, and power
One day, several years ago, I buried something very powerful. It was beautiful and pure, but also scary and daunting. And it contained a tremendous amount of energy. It overwhelmed me, and I didn't know how to deal with the power contained therein. I couldn't wield that much power myself, and with little promise of outside help wielding it, I was afraid, and had a very difficult time staying grounded when I held it.
So I buried it.
I've since visited that X-spot on the map many, many times, but last week, I dug it up again. It hadn't really changed much. It's still every bit as powerful as it was. But it's no longer as scary. You see, I've become more powerful since I buried it. I now have no trouble holding it, admiring it, looking at it in the eye from every angle, and staying grounded while I do so. It still dazzles me with its beauty. It still awes me with its uncountable potential for good. And it is still utterly enthralling to the deepest levels of my soul.
Now I have to let it go.
It is nothing more than a beautiful image, a what-if, an alluring, prenascent expectation. And the wisest thing that's been pointed out to me in weeks is "expectations are for amateurs."
Now, there is something deeper still than this artifact from my past, something more pure, more real, something that feels good to be with, something that is comfortable and not the least bit awkward. Something infinitely more powerful, because it exists in deeper levels of reality. It is shared kinetic energy, not imaginative potential energy.
And it is right before me, making it easy to forget about past artifacts, no matter how brightly they glow.
poink, right to the heart chakra
I played some music last weekend, but beforehand an African deity manifested before my eyes. He was accompanied by a rock-solid bearded hippy white guy on a drum, keeping groovy time. The deity had a huge head, and he glided across the floor by shaking his feet and floating on the rattling.
He came up to where I was standing, looked up at me, leaned forward with his staff, and went "poink!" right in the heart chakra. The jolt seemed to send a brilliant white pulse through me, that purified and released. Zing!
Then I got to play 2 Freakwitch songs in a room full of people with their lights already on. And there were several master drummers in the room, some of whom played with us.
Then I got another pleasant jolt last Tuesday.
There is a lot of divine energy flowing through my heart chakra lately. Feels good.
"winning" the war
So I have to wonder,
what the fuck does this mean? "A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Thursday indicated fewer than half of Americans believe the United States will win the Iraq war."
I've seen this so many times with cnn.com polls. The questions are worded in such a way as to be meaningless. What exactly does it mean to "win the Iraq war?" What are the conditions of victory?
Wasn't the goal to oust Saddam? If so, doesn't that mean we already won? Or was it about making sure Iraq has no WMDs? They don't, so we already won, right?
This question reflects the big problem with this war: there is no clear, justifiable objective. Our troops have no mission there that makes any sense.
Apart from protecting the Halliburton employees in the oil fields, of course...
Google sued for mass copyright infringement
As always, one of the best starting points to understand the new lawsuit against Google is
Lawrence Lessig:
Google wants to do nothing more to 20,000,000 books than it does to the Internet: it wants to index them, and it offers anyone in the index the right to opt out. If it is illegal to do that with 20,000,000 books, then why is it legal to do it with the Internet? The "authors" ' claims, if true, mean Google itself is illegal. Common sense, or better, commons sense, revolts at the idea. And so too should you.
This suit reinforces Lessig's arguments that the old Intellectual Property paradigm is utterly outmoded in this digital age. Makes sense to me.
I feel lighter today...
.... and I don't just mean because I've lost some weight over the past few months. Though that certainly helps....
Last night I had the most amazing energy blast through me, both energy that had been stagnant and blocked (on some level) for years, and also some fresh new energy. It was one of the most intense energetic experiences (outside of playing music, which is always right up there on the intensity-o-meter) that I've had in months. Good-intensity, by the way. It felt fantastic, on both the releasing-old-stuff-that-I-don't-need-anymore level as well as the nice-clean-fresh-new-energy-to-fill-the-void level.
At one point, I was observed floating up near the ceiling....heh.
But perhaps the best part of it was the connection (re-connection?) with someone very dear to me. Things feel less awkward, and a few orders of magnitude more authentic, in this moving from the slippery slopes and madness of what-ifs to the stark and pleasing immediacy of actual healing work. Whee!
Firefox, IE, and Browser security
There were reports floating around recently (that came from Symantec, the anti-virus company that profits from the insecure state of proprietary software) saying that Firefox has more security problems than Internet Explorer.
This may be fact.
But it misses the point entirely. To read that statement as a condemnation of Firefox (or more broadly, of any Free software) presupposes that some software will not have bugs or security problems. And that just ain't so. All software has bugs and security problems. Period, end of report. The question is, how are those bugs and security holes responded to?
As this story points out, the fact that more holes are being found -- and efficiently patched -- with Firefox and other Free software applications is a strength, not a weakness.
It's just not a strength that is easily profitted-upon. Therefore, corporations who depend on profit will throw more obfuscation out there around this issue.
Bottom line: nothing is more secure than Free software. Period.
do you believe in magic...
Good question. For me, I'm not sure "belief" is quite the right word. "The most reasonable and elegant explanation for the phenomena at play in existence" is probably closer.
Just sayin'.
inconclusive, needs more study
Because we don't know whether or not
global warming is true. Yeah, right.
Remember the mantra, the predicted effect of global warming: an overall average increase in temperature, and localized anomalies, storms that we haven't seen in centuries.
Like, say, a category 5 hurricane smashing into a city below sea level....
Tryad: Public Domain
I just downloaded the new
t r y ^ d :: p u b l i c d o m a i n album, released under a
Creative Commons license. Musically, it's somewhat interesting in a audio-layering kind of way. Apparently the music is a long distance collaboration among the geographically-scattered members.
But perhaps more interesting is their belief in the Creative Commons way of releasing music. I must confess it's something I've been very interested in doing with Freakwitch. Glad to see there are others doing it. I hope it works well for them.
dancing, guitars, and women
I discovered two things tonight. First, dancing without a guitar in my hands feels strange.
Second, I am almost never compelled to dance to prerecorded music. And the energy throughput is much, much smaller than it is with live music and real musicians.
I think I need to learn to substitute "woman" for "guitar" to feel better about dancing when I'm not playing music... :-)
Just what humanity needs....
....insane lunatics willing to use
nuclear weapons to enforce their will upon others. The fact that the insane lunatics are in the Pentagon is beside the point. The Washington Post reports that the Pentagon is using familiar anti-terrorist language, ie, in case we are in imminent danger of attack by WMDs we can nuke them before they attack.
Because as we all know, there is no possibility that the US Government could be wrong about some group possessing WMDs.....
a positive thought
I've been thinking more about when society and the infrastructures of capitalism collapse, and the mayhem that will ensue.
I don't think it will be a complete collapse. People will still get together and do interesting things without a profit motive. The Free software movement is proof of that. And people are intelligent and creative. They will use technology in whatever ways occur to them as being a good idea.
Really, I think it's going to come down to surviving the initial wave of chaos, and then finding a good community committed to mutual survival and flourishing.
Once survival -- again, Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- is cultivated, then joy can take root.
And that's what it's all about.
divide and conquer in NO
There are countless harrowing stories trickling out of New Orleans and other areas on the Gulf coast that were devastated. But there are several recurring themes. The authorities are using force to separate people, to divide them so that they don't unite and work together.
This article is particularly harrowing, describing how a huge crowd of people were directed into a certain area and then fired upon by cops with guns once they approached:
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 constitute a highly visible embarrassment to city officials. The police told us that we couldn't 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 to the south side of the Mississippi, where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the city.
The crowd cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation, so 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 past 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, as did people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and other people in wheelchairs. We marched the two to three miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it didn't dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed 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 the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us that there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
Harrowing indeed.
Does anyone really believe that government officials armed with guns are really there to help unprivileged people? If you actually believe this, read on to see what happened when they had already been scattered and forced to take refuge on their own:
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 something we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. But 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 two or three days, the desperation, frustration and 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 that 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 accurate. Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, "Get off the fucking freeway." A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades 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 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" attitude 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 eight 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.
So you can see a theme here. People band together to try to help themselves, and they are thwarted and harrassed by Cops With Guns. It also gives credence to the Maslow's hierarchy of needs arguments: when people's basic needs are not met, they become desperate and are willing to violate an ethical code they would otherwise hold sacred, in order to survive. But when these needs are being met, people work together and become friendly and cooperative.
We can take from this that government officials fear people organizing. Divide and conquer so that the people cannot claim too much power. Given that these people cannot be divided and conquered and reprogrammed by the television sets sitting in the center stage of their living rooms any longer, they must be confronted directly, aggressively, and violently.
Through all this, I'm really beginning to appreciate the arguments of anarchist theorists; truly, the state's primary function is to preserve its own power at the expense of the people it governs.
photojournalism in New Orleans
This site has been making its way across the blogosphere. Very interesting series of photographs and commentary from New Orleans.
EDIT: the original link was not correct, something in my cut and paste was acting strangely. And sadly, when I returned to fix the link, the page had been taken down.
mackworth island
I went for a walk today with my family on
Mackworth island. My wife snapped this photo of my daughter up on my shoulders.
It was a beautiful day for a walk on a simple trail, with gorgeous views, fairy houses, amazing air, and my digital camera.
an interesting frame of reference
...can be found on this
Katrina timeline.
Blogkeeping
I just made a few minor changes to this site. There is now a BlogThis! icon at the top left, for both myself to use as well as anyone who uses Blogger who happens upon this site.
Secondly, I put a link just below that to my audioscrobbler page.
Lastly, I switched the comments infrastructure from HaloScan over to the native Blogger comments. Cool.
Lessons From Hell
Another John Chuckman article is definitely worth reading. I love Chuckman, in that
appreciate-a-vitriolic-rant kind of way.
Homeland Security, FEMA, and contradictions
OK, first of all, as some background, the Department of Homeland Security (in their infinite wisdom)
recommends that people not use Internet Explorer for security reasons. Yet, in the aftermath of Katrina, the FEMA web site
requires that one use IE to apply for post-Katrina assistance.
Typical. And this is emblematic of the problems our great government is having. The left hand not knowing about the right, etc etc etc.
Linux on a Toshiba Satellite M35X-S149
I updated my
Linux on a Toshiba Satellite M35X-S149 page with a fresh documentation of my Linux install. The section that starts with "Ubuntu Linux (Hoary Hedgehog)" is the new stuff.
Ubuntu Hoary is in...
...and it rocks. Sheesh, I've missed KDE. Check it out for yourself. Unbelievable the amount of software that comes for free.
And, let it be known, amaroK is the music player for Linux that I've been waiting for for years and years and years. Playlist generation, automagic album cover downloading, automatic lyric fetching, easy CD burning right from the player, etc etc etc. And it's even compatible with audioscrobbler, so anyone who cares will be able to discern what kind of music I listen to with up-to-the-minute detail. Wow.
It seems like every time I install a new Linux distro I say this: Linux just keeps getting better and better and better. Minor wifi hassles notwithstanding.
Ubuntu upgrade
Well, I've started to upgrade my laptop to the latest Ubuntu. It installed reasonably cleanly, except wireless doesn't magically work like it did with the old version. I find it difficult to believe that Ubuntu would take a step backward in this way, where something would Just Work(tm) in a previous version, but not in a newer version.
Anyway, I've posted a thread on the Ubuntu support forums; hopefully I'll get some help there, and hopefully it won't involve recompiling kernels.
In addition, my AIM account is acting weird; like my friends list was deleted somehow. So if you chat with me on AIM, say hi so that I can add you back to my list.
laptop back
w00t! I'm writing this from my laptop, which arrived today and seems to be functioning normally. This, of course, means that I can upgrade my Ubuntu installation on my spare partition. It'll be nice to return to KDE, or really to use KDE on the laptop for the first time!
This also means that my email is functioning normally again, email me at my usual address. Gmail is nice, but this is better.
micro$oft squirming
Microsoft is squirming over the recent Massachussetts decision to use open standard data formats. Note the argument is
not specifically choosing OpenOffice over MSOffice. It's about how the data is stored. They are choosing to use the OpenDocument format, simply because it is more free.
Microsoft is free to use this license; it is an open standard and can be implemented without restriction. That's the whole point. Yet,
Microsoft Office does not support OpenDocument and company executives said this week they have no plans to support that format in future versions of Office.
Despite Microsoft's refusal to support OpenDocument, Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, says
"Microsoft could put capabilities within their XML Office suite right now to open, save and manipulate OpenDocument formats. It is certainly something they could do. "
"What we've backed away from at this point is the use of a proprietary standard and we want standards that are published and free of legal encumbrances, and we don’t want two standards," Kriss said.
Seems sensible to me. Yet Microsoft clouds the issue by claiming the XML is the main benefit of OpenDocument (XML is the language of OpenDocument, but it's nothing more than a generic way to store data that is human-readable, like HTML):
Microsoft's Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to "public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies."
So two smoke screens there. The other one is about forcing a single format. This isn't quite so, they are framing it wrong. It's about openness, not restriction; Microsoft's argument implies that someone will be restricted. Just not the case.
And speaking of Linux, the Kubuntu desktop is looking quite nice.
why are they surprised?
Why is everyone so surprised that the government didn't move fast enough to help people? Since when has government been out to help people in need? It's too preoccupied with its prime pursuits, which involve money and oil and war and vast military budgets and cutting edge technology and thought control and propaganda.
Look at the response to the tsunami last year. It was bureaucratic, slow, and profitted upon. It had nothing to do with helping people. With these people, you have to frame it in terms of dollars or it won't make sense. And helping people is very expensive, we have to tighten our belt, we're at war.
Can you imagine what the thousands of Louisiana National Guard troops in Iraq must be feeling? Their function is to guard the nation, and when they are desperately needed, in their own state, for their own families, to guard their actual homeland they are off protecting oil for profit?
Who is surprised?
Notes from inside New Orleans
This account was written from someone with a similar political outlook as my own:
In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.
Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control, criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on "welfare queens" and "super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.
City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week's events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor,overwhelmingly black, city. While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected leaders.
The author, Jordan Flaherty, is a union organizer and journalist.
it just doesn't stop
There are two stories that caught my eye tonight.
First, and we should all feel better about this, Halliburton has already been hired by the Navy to clean up hurricane wreckage. Glad to see the US asserting its strength.
Secondly, U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu goes off on Bush:
"But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government."
Bush looks remarkably like Ronald McDonald to me these days....
How The Free Market Killed New Orleans
Michael Parenti's
newest article is up at Znet. It makes several very interesting points about how the Neocon reliance on "private charity" and the mythical "invisible hand" of capitalist theorists is a farce. Go read it.
Ubuntu Linux
Rumor has it that my laptop will be re-delivered on tuesday. We'll see. When it does arrive, I want to install the new version of Ubuntu, specifically so I can install Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the KDE desktop (normal Ubuntu defaults to GNOME).
Here are some Ubuntu links I wanted to document here, for my future reference (or indeed for anyone interested in Ubuntu:
Tux magazine
I've waited for something like this for years. When I first getting into Linux, the
Linux magazines out were aimed more toward system administrators and programmers. I've said that Linux deserves a full-featured magazine aimed at end-users, and new users at that.
Enter Tux Magazine. Very cool, published by the same people who publish Linux Journal, but aimed for the new user. The magazine is published in PDF format, and distributed for free (with registration). Useful stuff here. Reading the latest issue now.
It begins...
For those who don't know, I work part-time taking road service calls at AAA. I just now got a call from a panicked person saying he heard that there was no more gas left in Florida, and he wanted me to confirm that rumor.
more thoughts brewing
I have more half-baked thoughts swimming around my head in the wake of the response to Katrina. I can't help but think, what happens when breakdown of society is nationwide, or even global? How will we survive when there is no one to bring us aid?
When it comes to survival under duress, when infrastructure has been destroyed, capitalism is an abstraction that gets in the way. When society breaks down, no one will care about $100 bills, credit cards, expense accounts, fancy cars with no gas to operate them, or cavernous mansions with no food or running water. What will matter is not marketing degrees, but rather real ability to survive, to find and procure food and water, to build shelter, and to defend yourself and your loved ones.
This pacifist is in a quandary about whether or not violence is justified to defend oneself, one's loved ones, one's community, in the chaos of a disaster. Normally I will eschew violence. But I cannot say what I would do if someone threatened my family, my child, in the course of a disaster (or in any other context for that matter). Given this, can I truly call myself a pacifist? Even Buddhist monks learn to defend themselves. The larger question: Is violence and taking advantage of the weak part of human nature? Or is it an artifict of oppression and/or capitalist slavery? My first thought is that there are more powerful tools, in the long run, than firearms. It seems to me that my best bet for survival is to shine my light bright and not fight, unless absolutely necessary. And even if I do find a need to fight, it should be from a place of compassion, as the person picking a fight with me would clearly be doing so because of suffering.
Is the US response to Katrina informing The Terrorists(tm) about our weaknesses in the event of a catastrophic attack? Let's take the BuShites at face value, and assume that there are thousands of Evil Terrorists(tm) conspiring to bring down America. Well, I'm sure they are watching and chuckling at our pathetic and scatterbrained attempts to help our own people in their time of need. If their goal truly is to kill as many Americans as possible, I'm sure the US government's response to Katrina is most edifying to them.
What happened to Donald Rumsfeld's vision of an agile military able to deploy quickly anywhere on the globe? Well, not if actual Americans are in need... our troops are too busy asserting control over global oil production. In addition, what about the federal funding diverted from reinforcing the New Orleans levees due to high costs of Iraq war?
where to begin...
Like so many people, my mind is reeling from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I have several thoughts bubbling. In no particular order:
The US Government does not now have, and arguably never has had, helping people in need as its primary focus. As if there were any doubt (not in my head), the response to this disaster should make that point clear. Helping people is just simply not it's job. After all this talk about "protecting the homeland" and all the government machinations of the past 4 years, the attempt to bring help is slow, muddled, delayed, confused when people actually need it.
Simplified categorization of people has got to go. In this case, I'm referring specifically to Bush's zero tolerance for looters policy. Of course, the BuShites have historically had trouble categorizing people, as "looters," "terrorists," "enemy combatants," "detainees," etc etc. But in the wake of such a horrid tragedy, to include people taking food to feed their families in such a draconian plan, is just silly and uncompassionate. But it's even more evidence that the government is in place to protect corporate interests more than anything.
Racism is at work in the aftermath of Katrina. Look at the pictures coming out of New Orleans. Most of the photos I've seen are black "refugees"; there are very few white refugees in most of the photos I've seen. Of course, it's not so much a racial divide as it is an economic one; though that particular issue is clouded because black people tend to be poorer than white people. But for a distressingly vivid illustration of how racism is working, I direct you to how the AP describes white people "finding" things and black people "looting" things.
This gas price spike is just the beginning. Oil prices are just going to keep rising until there is no more oil. Deal with it. Accept it. You can't deny it's true. We are past the point of peak oil; it's all downhill from here. The only question is how badly society crashes and burns until we work out new means of transporting goods and people that don't involve dead dinosaurs.
Links and multimedia potpourri. There is a good collection of photographs on the NOLA site. Wikipedia (what an amazing resource that is...I can't imagine what it will look like in a decade) already has a Katrina page. This is the most interesting blog from New Orleans that I've seen; run by a guy who has an ISP at the top of a New Orleans high rise. Though he doesn't appear to be directly involved, there are some exquisite rants from Bob Harris.
The Issue Pales in comparison, but...
...it's highly significant that
Massachussetts is thinking of switching all its computers to Free software, including Linux desktops and OpenOffice (or more specifically, to programs that use the
OASIS OpenDocument format). Very cool, a small candle in a sea of darkness.
The Mayor of New Orleans is pissed
You can
hear for yourself (mp3 player required).
And, just to clarify for the mainstream news media hounds, chaos and disorder and mayhem IS NOT THE SAME as anarchy. Please get it straight.
Riding the Crest of Untold Suffering
Clearly the topic of the day is Hurricane Katrina. But first, some context. Over the weekend, I had heard that the storm was heading inland and that New Orleans (among other towns) were, more or less, bracing for impact. So with that in mind, on Monday I headed north to a good friend's camp, to hang out, let the kids run around, and help with some minor construction work.
So I remained largely ignorant of the impact and devastation of this storm. It wasn't until a telephone call with my obviously shaken wife on Wednesday that it began to dawn on me how bad things are getting. entire towns have been wiped of the map; millions of people are now homeless; the sporting goods (ie, gun) section of Wal Marts are being looted; martial law has been declared; 80% of New Orleans is underwater. The list goes on and on. Total devastation, and the chaos that goes hand-in-hand with a population of house-pet automatons, utterly ill-equipped to deal with such devastation.
I have long been convinced that society as we in fat America know it cannot sustain itself. I don't mean to be "gloom and doom" here, but the fact is, our lifestyle of extravagance, cars, cheap and plentiful produce in February, has a cost. And we are beginning to see some of the evidence of this cost. Ironically, many Americans believe that this cost is measured by the immediate impact of Katrina upon gas prices. This of course is short-sighted at best. America's (and the world's) addiction to petroleum may well be the direct cause of Katrina, not to mention last year's tsunami, the terror attacks of 9/11, and who knows what other cataclysms of tomorrow.
The question in my mind is not if, but when our social structure collapses, and how I and those close to me will deal with said collapse. I have no doubt that it will get ugly, especially when Americans so deeply rooted in gun culture will release their fear, anger, and desperation through violence.
The martial law bit worries me, for what I hope are obvious reasons to any of my readers. Things Political continue to spiral downward, where those in power seek to consolidate that power in response to tragedy, riding the crest of untold suffering.
