WHY DOES ACE HATE BLACK PEOPLE?

A-dub...if you think Ace hates black people, you should really be concerned about his feelings towards Moon gods.

How many times since the founding of New Orleans has it been destroyed by a disaster? I count one. I am not an advocate of rebuilding NO as it once was but with that track record, I don't think potential future storms is the first thing I would use to argue my point.

The better question is: why are WE the ones doing the building?

I happen to love New Orleans. I lived there for 6 years. I went to school there and got married there. My wife and I were daydreaming about moving back less than a week before the hurricane hit, wondering whether leaving was a mistake (Katrina answered that question for us).

But there is absolutely no justification for pouring federal dollars into building a city. Any city.

If private developers feel that building there is sensible and profitable, let them do it. At most, the gov't should be responsible for infrastructure, and the federal gov't role in that should be minimal to non-existent.

This isn't supposed to be an economically planned society. People are supposed to be able to make up their minds about where and how they live without the government (i.e., everyone else) telling them where and how to do it.

Dman, that's sounded like a kiss-of-death statement. Were you knocking on wood when you said that?

Just anticipating the "arguments" in favor of rebuilding N.O., Jack. If Ace is right -- and I think he is -- he needs to prepare his response to liberal challengers.

RETHUGS BRISTLE AT RECONSTRUCTION OF MAJORITY-BLACK CITY!

I thought Bare Knuckle Politics was Foont's vanity forum. Did he lose control of it somehow or what?

And what in the world brought Ace to that site in the first place?

Saw a city, overrun with water. I said, not me. Through Fall I bailed and pumped. In October my city was dry. But in the slumberous warmth the mold got ahead of me. Have I got the will, in this funk? Oh, let them bulldoze the city And sleep with me under the rubble Chancing some Spring awakening!

Maybe Ace just hates Anne Rice. (Except for her homosexual vampire books..he digs those).

I mean those could just as easily be set in a gloomy, foggy San Francisco, couldn't they? And San Fran doesn't get hit by Hurricanes.

So Ace doesn't hate black people. He hates Anne Rice. And Peyton Manning.

carin, lol! Here we go!!!

Weeds are minor compared to mold and funk.

Phinn, I basically agree with you but I wonder whether there are not exceptions to this free enterprise position. Do you think bailing out New York City in the 70's had a positive effect for the Country? Remember Ford attempted to take your position but it just didn't work.

Dude, did you read that right?

It's just preliminary information based on an experimental model.

I don't see any post-categorization in the article.

But hey, wingnuts probably don't need no verifications.

Here's another reason why rebuilding New Orleans might not be a good idea: at the rate that the Mississippi Delta is eroding away, by 2050 New Orleans will probably be on - if not under - the Gulf of Mexico. Also, the Mississippi River is threatening to change course south of Baton Rouge and create a new channel well to the west of New Orleans, leaving the port there - NOLA's primary reason for being - high and dry.

Confederate Yankee has the details. And a couple of really scary graphics illustrating the problem. Add the fact that New Orleans' leaky levees and dikes apparently can't even handle a Category One storm, and, well, it sounds like NOLA residents would be well advised to pull out and head for higher ground. Like, say, the Ouachitas or the Ozarks Mountains.

Ace:

I haven't read the link, yet, but I'm already skeptical. There's no way that a Cat-1 storm could have caused a storm surge in excess of 20 feet where it made landfall, in Mississippi.

That is not to say, of course, that the winds over Lake Pontchartrain and N.O. might have been only Cat-1 force.

Re: Why pay for rebuilding N.O. with federal dollars? The answer is that N.O. is the home of a strategically vital port. The loss of it would affect the entire country, and not just because of oil.

That is not to suggest that federal money should be used to rebuild N.O. as it was, but there is a strong argument to be made that we have a vital strategic interest in preserving a viable port, there. And having a viable port means having places for people to live, eat, shop, and having other services and infrastructure necessary to support its operation.

That is not to say, of course, that the winds over Lake Pontchartrain and N.O. might have been only Cat-1 force

That's what they were saying, but didn't the levees fail the day after?

Carin that was so beautiful, so, well, poetic.

How about a little science with all this after-the fact idiocy. Even if the winds suddenly died down to a Cat 1 strength at landfall, the storm surge doesn't simply go away (or weaken)... it's still the cumulative effect of a Cat 4, 3 or whatever the hurricane had been blowing up to that point. Besides, the winds don't knock over the levees, the storm surge does. By the way, some computer models suggested that Global Warming will kill all American white people by tomorrow.

As far as the Mississippi threatening to change course... yeah, that'll happen when a Cat. 5 hits Baton Rouge directly and breaks those levees. The Mississippi has been wanting to wander around for years, and the marshes south and east of New Orleans were wiped out due to the levees and due to canal construction, but that doesn't meant the Mississippi is going anywhere anytime soon.

This does provide a chance, however, to do what some environmentally sane (as opposed to those damn hippies) people were asking before the storm... rethink the levee system to let the river escape in other places thereby depositing sediment and rebuilding the marshes. But legislators and fishermen and environmentalists weren't being heard prior to the storm... well, because the media doesn't have much use for crackers and Cajuns and the national polls vacation on the precious Chesapeake, not on the Gulf.

Heard a couple of financial planners talking about an article on this (in The Economist? gotta go check); basically agreeing with you Phinn - the feds will come in and build the levees the way they should be, which will eat up more land (3 times wider at the base).

Creating very profitable (i.e. rentable) land, which businesses will want. Houses that were built using higher code standards withstood the gale, those that weren't didn't. Housing will be two story affairs with garage/storage on level 1, living on level 2.

One of the reasons lower NO was such a shithole was that you couldn't get a building permit or a m*rtgage to build anything decent there. Well, they'll be bulldozong that crap down.

They predicted a building boom, incentives, and m*rtgages secured by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Getting back to Dman's comment (#3):

How many times since the founding of New Orleans has it been destroyed by a disaster? I count one.

I can only think of a handful of other US cities being destroyed by a disaster: Galveston ("Isaac's Storm"), San Francisco, and Chicago (gotdam cows!).

Oh yeah, then around these parts we had the Great Blizzard of '78, which reduced New England to a post-apocalyptic Mad Max society closed down the schools for a coupla days.

Et tu, Carin?
ROFL

Very well done.

Just for the science of things- even if a huge amount of cool dry air were to skewer the hurricane, the water it sucked up as a category 5 hurricane would still have to go somewhere.

The water vapor imagery of the storm seems to counter the notion that it had dropped down even to a category 3- if you look back to Andrew in '92, it was broadsided by a block of dry air that significantly reduced its strength. This is fairly common with landfalling hurricanes along the Gulf Coast- air comes off of the Rockies and makes its way through TX being significantly cooler and drier. The weakening, in fact, was pretty well-demonstrated during Rita- went from category 5 to category 3 at landfall.

I think SWLiP had it right- over the city, probably 90-110 mph winds (the NWS instruments were destroyed well in advance of the major storm effects), and from Slidell east to at least Gulfport/Biloxi, the big-league windfield hit.

Nonetheless, don't forget that those winds are the rough equivalent of having a tornado squat over you for the better part of 2-3 hours in a typical hurricane.

As a sidebar- we aren't going to know what exactly happened to the levees until the investigation is complete- bear in mind that the city largely rode out the hurricane just fine. There are barges that have to be cleared out of the area around the Industrial Canal that could plausibly have knocked over flood walls. It would seem to me, in the short term, that securing water traffic more aggressively would be the key.

Finally- you are talking about two sets of levees, by the way. The river levees continue to hold up pretty well- it's the levees that keep Lake Ponchartrain in check that failed. Here's to the notion of the seawall at the mouth of Lake Ponchartrain for the future... hell, if we'd had it forty years ago like they tried, we might not be having this discussion.

Ace, are you ever going to extol your Giants? They look pretty friggin' good to me. Don't think we'll be able to say the same about the Rangers, though...

Geaux Saints.

tmi3rd

You'll note I left the final line alone. It was just to beautiful to mess with.

The Old (MS) River Control Structure is actually NW of Baton Rouge (False River area). Here's a link.

What we think and what we want really doesn't matter. George Friedman of Stratfor has convinced me of this. Full disclosure: I'm a New Orleans resident. However, I'm not native to the city and I don't have a strong sentimental or "patriotic" attachment to it. Friedman makes a quite convincing case that the Port of New Orleans and the Port of the South must be restored to full operation and that there must be a city attached to the ports. The ports aren't optional and their restoration can't reasonably be left to chance or to whichever politicians just happen to be in office locally.

Note well that I'm not making an argument from justice; I tend to leave those arguments to those of you who are so good at making such arguments. I'm just citing and endorsing Friedman's argument from the necessity that we all have, to keep making a living.

The expression "rebuild New Orleans" conveys the impression that New Orleans is mostly in ruins. I'm here; I range over the French Quarter, the Central Business District, the Garden District, Uptown, and the suburbs of Metairie and Kenner. Those areas are damaged and many of the businesses have been looted, but they're not in ruins. They don't have to be "rebuilt"; they merely have to be restored.

I can't write very knowledgeably of the other parts of the city, because I haven't seen them. But my impression is that the security of the city can be much improved through its homes and businesses being concentrated in the areas of the city and its suburbs that are on higher ground, which are already coming back around.

I too live in NOLA, as a Marine who lives in Algiers on the West Bank, and work aboard NSA East Bank, right in the infamous 9th ward. I was just back down there last Friday for the first time since the storm hit. Let me tell you, the 9th is a ghost town. It's like being on a movie set, still, a month later. City buses abandoned across the median on Rampart, debris everywhere, no one around really doing any clean-up, etc. The fact is that NOLA is sinking, and will continue to do so. And it's not that there's just a chance that we may get hit again, it's a statistical certainty; hurricanes are big, they have a difinte tendency to head into the gulf, they have a definite tendency to move northward once they reach a certain point in the gulf due to the prevailing wind pattern and the gulf is relatively small.

I don't quite agree with anyone who says that we need to repeatedly try to keep NOLA and it's environs around just for it's port operations. All of that can be moved to numerous other ports along the U.S gulf coast which have a much smaller chance of being hit, say Corpus.

I also went over the post Confederate Yankee had on the waning marshlands. If those predictions even remotely hold up over the coming years, the situation is just going to get worse and worse.

I live aboard NSA West Bank in Algiers, and I can throw a baseball twice and hit the river levee. I take a foot traffic ferry run by the Navy everyday to work across the Old Man. Nothing drives home how precarious NOLA's situation is like driving up to the front gate and seeing a supertanker or cruiseship float by over the roof of my house and the others around it. It is absolutely eerie, and you very quickly think about what it would be like to be stuck there when The Big One hits. Absolutely no way out. We should let capitalism do it's thing as was stated in an earlier post, because if we go wholesale and just rebuild absolutely everything on the gov't dime just to make us feel good about ourselves, I feel pretty safe in predicting that our children will end up facing a situation just like this one, if not worse.

surf-actant

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Holy cow! That Allison spam is a wierd one.