Looters rampage - shoot 'em

[theist 1]

I am not familiar with the circumstances of what happened in Darwin but consider the size of Darwin and that of New Orleans. Now consider NO is a bowl that exists below sea level. The leeves broke which flooded the place with thousands left stranded on the roofs all over the city.

 

I do fault the govt. for not building up the leeves years ago and having supplies ready to immediately drop to people.

 

But just think if Bush hadn't have force the mayor of NO to evacuate the people. The mayor wasn't going to call for a mandatory evacuation, It is also the Mayor's job to get everyone including the sick and elderly to cooperate not the federal govt.

[Guest guest]

How do you earn your living? You seem to have so much time to post in this forum.

 

Do you still have time to chant on your japa? Do you still have time to remember Krishna?

 

Give yourself a break.

 

 

[Guest guest]

Theist, I don't know what it's like to live in the USA since I've never been there. But I just cannot understand why white people in the USA pick on "blacks" and say they are no good. Especially when I see so called devotees saying derogatory things about black people. Lord Nityanananda would never be treating anyone like that.

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Theist, Darwin is comparable. And they managed that airlift 25 years ago. Darwin is about the same distance from sydney as LA is from New York.

 

see this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Tracy

 

quote:

After midnight, the cyclone passed directly over Darwin, with its 'eye' centred on the airport and northern suburbs. The wind gauge at Darwin Airport officially recorded winds of 217 kilometres per hour (135 mph) before being blown away itself. Unofficial estimates suggested that the wind speed had reached 300 kilometres per hour (185 mph). The winds and torrential rain continued until dawn. By 6 AM, Tracy had killed 65 people—49 on land and 16 at sea—and Darwin had been substantially destroyed.

 

 

------------

considering that the USA is the most materially prosperous country in the world, what Bush has done for the poor black people of New Orleans is disgusting. That is how all the news media are reporting it here. I expect the news is getting the same slant in other countries too.

 

- murali

[Guest guest]

the white woman who drowned her 2 children in a lake by plunging her car with her 2 children inside? I believe that was the story and I can't remember which state. She lied to say that a black man wearing balaclava or hood snatched them from her. Why did she choose black and not white. Black for bad, right?h reg

 

With regards to your example:

 

"Two men robbed a man on a street corner last night at 10:00 and then fled on foot. Police are looking for two males, in their early twenties wearing dark clothes with hooded sweatshirts over their heads. Last seen heading east."

 

Well, it was in the night and dark and they were wearing hoods, how can one be sure of their skin color? That is the logical solution , and not what you are proposing --PC. In police investigation, color of the skin is vital.

 

But, by you harping on the blacks about this looting news, it showed you have some issues with the black.

 

Chant on your japa and have a look at what you wrote in this thread.

 

 

[Guest guest]

http://www.scsmath.com/worldtour/21/050824-Intrv-Kamal-n-DivyaS/interview-divyasakti.html

 

Interview with Divyashakti Devi Dasi.

(an african american devotee)

Vaidehi Devi Dasi asks Divyashakti Devi Dasi how she came to Srila Govinda Maharaj's lotus feet, and what keeps her going in service even on the days when it's hard to go out:

"We can't do anything - it's all the mercy of Guru Maharaj and Gurudev. To be able to come in contact with these conditioned souls and give them what you first felt when you came to the Temple, all of this joy and real happiness - you want to give that to others. You see how people are suffering in illusion and you just want to be able to please your Gurudev. What he has given you is a natural spontaneous thing. We want to serve, and that comes from the heart."

[theist 1]

Theist, Darwin is comparable. And they managed that airlift 25 years ago. Darwin is about the same distance from sydney as LA is from New York.

 

see this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Tracy

 

quote:

After midnight, the cyclone passed directly over Darwin, with its 'eye' centred on the airport and northern suburbs. The wind gauge at Darwin Airport officially recorded winds of 217 kilometres per hour (135 mph) before being blown away itself. Unofficial estimates suggested that the wind speed had reached 300 kilometres per hour (185 mph). The winds and torrential rain continued until dawn. By 6 AM, Tracy had killed 65 people—49 on land and 16 at sea—and Darwin had been substantially destroyed.

 

 

------------

considering that the USA is the most materially prosperous country in the world, what Bush has done for the poor black people of New Orleans is disgusting. That is how all the news media are reporting it here. I expect the news is getting the same slant in other countries too.

 

- murali

 

----------------------------

 

And was Darwin flooded? There was no way to airlift people from an airport if people couldn't even get off their own roofs. I think this situation is unique in recorded history.

 

Just heard on the radio here that Bush was pushing Govenenor Blanco was allow the federal govt. to take over the evacuation days before it was actually declared.

 

What many don't know is that in America a strong autonomy is given to the states to act independently. This is known generally as States Rights.

 

Looks like Gov. Blanco is due for some heavy criticism in the following days.

[gHari 0]

From New Orleans newspaper:<blockquote>Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.</blockquote>

[theist 1]

A big shot at Walmart saw your post and got the message.

[theist 1]

 

Havoc Preventing N.M. Rescuers From Helping

 

By Jeff Jones

Journal Staff Writer

METAIRIE, La.— A frustrated Albert Longobardi spent Thursday afternoon on the outskirts of New Orleans, watching the rain and waiting for word that he and his team could enter the hurricane-ruined city to offer aid.

"The bad apples are out there ruining it for everybody— maybe costing some people their lives," said the Albuquerque police officer and only policeman traveling as a member of New Mexico's Task Force 1. "Everybody would rather be out there helping. That's why we're here."

Longobardi, a 20-year APD veteran, and his team members were among hundreds of lifesavers at New Orleans' western edge forced to scrap rescue boat missions into New Orleans Thursday after reports of civil chaos and gunfire.

"We're not an armed force," said James Breen, a co-leader of the New Mexico Task Force 1 search-and-rescue unit. "We're not prepared for combat. So we're going to stand down."

That was Breen's message to members Thursday morning after the Federal Emergency Management Agency scrubbed the mission for the New Mexico team and a long list of other units.

Tense reports crackling across the police radio at Zephyr Field in Metairie, a next-door suburb of New Orleans where search-and-rescue teams from around the country are gathered, said two officers were down— a term meaning they were hurt or killed.

Military crews had been flying into the city from Zephyr Field— in normal times home of the New Orleans Zephyrs minor-league baseball team— to pluck survivors from Hurricane Katrina's deadly floodwaters. One crewman said rescue pilots were having a hard time understanding why they were being shot at.

Breen, whose team drove 27 hours straight from Albuquerque to Metairie, said the delay in getting help to desperate people was disappointing.

"It could be an hour. It could be all day before we go out," Breen told team members, toting backpacks and other rescue gear and ready to roll since dawn. "There was some talk about implementing martial law. We're just going to have to wait and see if that happens."

The team was still waiting at the end of the day.

"It's disappointing to say the least because there's people out there who really need help," Breen, an Albuquerque Fire Department battalion commander, said.

Task Force 1 was to have slipped into areas of New Orleans that had not been searched. Members were hoping that today would bring the needed federal clearance to begin.

"These are virgin areas," said fellow task force leader Tom Romero, a New Mexico Department of Public Safety official.

The scene at the baseball stadium— guarded by police to ensure the rescuers' safety— was anything but normal on Thursday.

About 100 yards from where the New Mexico contingent was camped in the parking lot, a makeshift landing pad was set up.

Military choppers loaded up bottled water and instant meals and ferried them off to other rescue groups.

Conversations were carried on at high volume to be heard over the hissing whump-whump-whump of the blades of the Apaches and Chinooks.

When an afternoon rainstorm opened up over the tent camp, many sweaty, exhausted task force members peeled off their shirts, smiled and let the water drench them.

The 70-member Task Force 1 includes doctors, firefighters, paramedics, engineers, search-dog handlers and other experts from across New Mexico and neighboring states. Urban search and rescue is among the all-volunteer-unit's specialties.

Breen and Romero said search-and-rescue teams from Missouri, Colorado, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and California also were at Zephyr Field, while teams from other states were helping out on the Mississippi side of the disaster.

Scrubbing the mission from Zephyr Field meant nearly 400 experts could not enter New Orleans on Thursday.

Task Force 1 isn't the only New Mexico contingent pitching in here. A few miles from the field, members of the volunteer Mesilla Valley search and rescue team spent Wednesday night assisting at a gathering point in Metairie for refugees.

Team member Ned Tutor said the team had brought a pair of boats in hopes of being among the searchers inside New Orleans. But Wednesday night, they instead doled out food and drinks— Gatorades, cans of beanie-weenies and crackers— to other rescue workers.

Tutor estimated there were 10,000 or more refugees at the gathering point on Interstate 10 on Wednesday night. Victims from New Orleans and the Superdome were hauled in by helicopter after helicopter and deposited to wait for buses on a grassy strip by the highway.

"All night. Buses were running them in and out (to shelters) all night," Tutor said.

Fellow Mesilla team member Vic Villalobos said when the team members first rolled up to the massive refugee crowd, "I actually stood there in awe."

 

[Guest guest]

These are tough times, theist, and rhetoric is rampant, and emotions are raw. But we are not taliking black and whiter, we are talking obvious culling going on, by the mengele sanger types, those who insist that the world cannot continuie unless the population is at 500,000,000 (meaning 5,500,000,000 lessers amongst us gotta go). This is real agenda of think tanks around the world, the Z. Brezenski types.

 

Here is the irony, and I hope those who are really intelligent and doing what is necessary to survive any contingency take heed. The target is not the black now, the survivalist whi is digging in, the persons who actually planned for worst-case scenarios are the victims. Those who stocked their food and water, and their defenses, are being kicked out of their homes and forced to join those we now proudly call refugees. Yes, your food and water, your fortified home, your ammo and self-defence, all is lost on the door to door campaign by all government agencies, requisitioned. Folkks who heard my stories about how they may have no worry from their neighbors, but that the forces of government will lay you down thought I was just trying to scare them. But ruby ridge, Waco, and other +self-sustaining" systems are not tolerated by the dominat5ors who push this culling project. In fact, the survivalist is a much greater threat to government agencies than the miniscule looter/junkies who lost their connections to the natural disaster taking random potshots. The trained survivalist is the victim of their own highly developed self-sufficiency. They demand your surrender, not your ability to stick it out with your loved ones. In NO case, the hurricane missed the city, but the destruction came from government incompetance. The levees did not fail, either, the gates failed, the system that should have been maintained by USACE, who are now engineering Iraq. The national guard, in violation of posse c act, are guarding the wrong nation, the coast guard is not guarding the US coast, they guard the Iraq coast (which is only 12 miles long). And the troop transport helicopters that would have come in quite handy to rescue 50 at a time are all in Iraq too, and we see hospital medivacs rescuing 3, then leaving because they are all full up. And of course, the national guardsmen who want to leave Iraq to go help their gulf states are refused because they are needed, where?, Iraq. To make sure women get back under the veil and keep their mouths shut so that the imams can run things acxcording to DEMOCRACY.

 

This is not hate george piece, because bubba and daddy, ray-gun, all made this demoniac bed we are forced to lay in. Carter may be a saint, but he had Brezinski as his NSC officer, who is the architect of the great culling project, and may have been the one who sponsored Pol Pot in the Kampuchea project that was a test to see what happens when a large city is evacuated (Phnomm Phen). We saw, killing fields with bodies stacked too high to see the top. But Pol Pot was an enemy of Ho Chi Minh, so he was our guy. Chickens coming home to roost, because the test went well, and now we can apply. The rewsult is that americans hate americans, and our other agent, Bin Laden, is very happy about of that. He is a culling agent as well, and is paid not only by Saudi princes, but by US taxpayers, Russian Mafia, and those who brought you the wonderful display at tienminnen Square, the chicoms. Cheer on, you demoniac christians, Jesus told us all about you folks, saying that in the future, there will be those who, in jesus name, do only great evil, and are rejected by both Father and Son.

 

hare krsana, ys, mahaksadasa.

 

BTW. The NO mayor informed the folks at the dome that the road was open, and they shopuld walk. But the FEMA troops, told them to go back to the doime, to starve and wade in corpses and their own excrement.

 

PPS. Walmart distriburt5es the food, good for them. But they ran out of guns, they wont be distributing the rugers and S&Ws. Thats why they were looted, and not just by blacks, either.

[Guest guest]

The study done by Zbignew Brezenski is the basis for PNAC, the manuel used by the present administration. In this think tank output, they describe what is following anarchy, cannibalism. Now how are the neo-cons and progressives alike gonna spin that one, which has already occurred in rural mississippi.

 

mahak

[gHari 0]

 

That Walmart exec made it happen two days before it even occurred to me. I guess we would have heard more about it if the goods had actually managed to get to the dome.

 

[Guest guest]

Theist:

And was Darwin flooded? There was no way to airlift people from an airport if people couldn't even get off their own roofs. I think this situation is unique in recorded history.

----------

 

 

Here is a picture of Darwin after cyclone tracy. Notice that there are NO STANDING BUILDINGS ANYWHERE. All the buildings were totally destroyed and the people just crawled out of the rubble, with shocking injuries, the next morning.

 

Darwin was in fact a more difficult rescue operation that New Orleans because airlift was the only way to get people to safety, whereas in New Orleans you only have to bring buses and vehicles close by to the city and then ferry the people to those pickup points and drive them all away to shelter. But nothing like that was done.

 

As Mahak said, also, the Mayor was overruled and the people were kept in the city. Why? Well, Mahak has an answer to that and while his word "culling" is a bit strong, I don't doubt that there was very little compassion or concern for the suffering black folks.

 

Bush is losing the war in Iraq and he can't even come up with a plan to save the people of New Orleans. What kind of national leader is he? He is a clueless idiot. Like we saw in Farenheit 9/11 where he just sat down with the little kiddies reading a book, after he was told that America was under attack by airborne terrorists. The look on his face was clear to understand. He had no clue at all about what to do. He didn't have any advisers to tell him what to do, so he sat there looking clueless. He is an idiot.

[theist 1]

Just had to ferry all the people out? What ferries are you taking about. Even the big Gambling ships were tossed about like toys and ended up stacked upon each other.

 

It is obvious you know little about the events and I admit I also know little. So for us to try and go into too much detail is foolish and futile.

[gHari 0]

While the Mayor has been a real trooper in this calamity, when we see over 200 school buses flooded out we wonder why the emergency procedure wasn't followed that stated that they would use the school buses to evacuate people without transportation. The City probably had an Emergency Measures Officer who is really responsible for this.

 

One also wonders why empty buses showed up to pick up people. Seems there could have been water and food aboard.

 

I really loved it when the mayor told off the government for messing up in the only words that can really describe the frustration of the nation. He'll be mayor as long as wants.

 

Where were all the paratroopers? Iraq? And Batman and Robin? Of course on the positive side, most of those people looked like skipping a meal or two wouldn't kill them, and it did cut down on the floating excrement - at least the local stuff. What's with all the fat in our culture?

If you want to hear your inner feelings externalized about this fiasco just go to http://cnn.com and browse their videos. Search for "Mayor fed up with slow response" and find a twelve minute tirade of the REAL by the mayor Friday morning - totally uncensored. Even Bush was afraid of this straight-shootin' non-politically-correct guy after this. The nation took their hats off to him for telling it like it was.

 

[gHari 0]

From CNN.com:<blockquote>"Our government failed those people in the beginning, and I take it now there is no dispute about it," Clinton told CNN. "One hundred percent of the people recognize that -- that it was a failure." </blockquote> http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/05/clinton.katrina/index.html

[theist 1]

I think the mayor is a fraud. He put on a show for the cameras and to shift blame. But it was his responsiblity and those people should have been evacuated before the storm hit, all of them.

 

Plus the Superdome was left without any security and people were told to go there and he locked them in with no food, no water, no toilets, no medical care. People were raped.

 

To make matters worse 1/3 of the New Orleans police force abandoned their posts and walked off the job. That is app. 400 officers.

 

Seems to be blame enough for all quarters on this one.

[stonehearted 0]

It seems that everyone dropped the ball here when it came to helping and protecting the helpless, especially in New Orleans. Each leader appears to have been waiting for someone else to take charge. The police were completely overwhelmed, with many quitting, many leaving their posts to try to take care of their own families and homes, and at least two committing suicide. I was appalled by the NO mayor's posturing. Yesterday on CNN, I heard Blitzer ask a Democratic congressman, I think African American, how mad he was. That's just the sort of leading question that will get theist and Limbaugh frothing at the mouth (well, keyboard, in theist's case). Frankly, no one is coming out looking good in this mess.

 

My next-door neighbor, a retired US Army Ranger, spoke with a friend of his who lives in Asia and went to Thailand after the December tsunami. He said that folks in SE Asia all just pulled together almost immediately, without the degree of lawlessness we see in the US. Interesting, I think.

[Avinash 0]

>>He said that folks in SE Asia all just pulled together almost immediately, without the degree of lawlessness we see in the US. Interesting, I think. <<

 

Even in Mumbai, the situation was better. After the recent flood, people were helping each other and there was no looting. They pulled themselves up and now, they are back to their work.

[stonehearted 0]

is that the Hollywood writers looking for angles on a Sunday-night TV movie or miniseries about the floods. How do you find an angle that works for TV's demographic? You need upper-middle-class folks with some kind of social power, family tension, and beautiful young women. I don't know whether one of the alternatives, a conspiracy-theory story line about heartless Republicans helping the better-off folks get out and leave the poor, mostly Black, residents at the mercy of the weather, the levees, and thugs. Maybe a heroic Republican US senator dealing bravely with the trauma of losing his highly insured mansion and rallying to rebuild it so our war president can sit on his porch and sip a julep to show how resilient rich Gulf-Coasters are.

[theist 1]

 

Even in Mumbai, the situation was better. After the recent flood, people were helping each other and there was no looting. They pulled themselves up and now, they are back to their work.

 

 

So what do you think accounts for the difference? Just now I saw a television report on how some of these looters are setting fires to buildings. As if the catasrophe is not bad enough they are resorting to arson. Since there is no water pressure they are bring in helicopters with buckets to try and stop the flames.

 

I am sure nothing like this happened in Mumbai. Again, why the difference?

 

That being said they are tons of people acting heroicaly in service to their fellow man and they should not be forgotten.

[gHari 0]

Here's your miniseries, Babhru Prabhu, starring Eddie Murphy.

 

On this <a href=http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?channel=/elements/2005/08/29/national/videoarchive799065_1_videosection_page.shtml>CBS.com LINK</a> you will find an intense video where the Police Chief sets the record straight ("Chief Blasts Media Coverage"). He's not a politician. He just tells it like it was.

 

You get a real feel for what it was really like on the streets of New Orleans when the drugs ran dry and the hopheads drowned in panic.

 

[stonehearted 0]

Yeah--this would work! Stories of the men and women of the New Orleans PD and Fire Department tying to save the city as their own families were threatened. Plenty of drama, and lots of work for black actors. Thanks, gHari.

[AncientMariner 0]

September 5, 2005

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

By Robert Tracinski

 

It took 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 also took me four long days to figure out what was 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 four days last week. 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 a SWAT team 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 speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?

 

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 one 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 those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that 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. [update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]

 

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 incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. And 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.

 

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

 

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.