A stab at the border issue

I am getting pretty worn out on the whole border issue and I wish we could just put it to rest and focus. Come on people! Focus on the big picture. You see, they are doing it again. The political hacks have pulled out this great big colorful pinyata for us to kick crap out of. We are all so busy looking at this thing that we forget we are involved in a pretty massive war with people getting maimed and killed on a daily basis. We are nearly out of oil.
The border issue is really a bi-partisan issue. Both sides want to claim credit for doing something about it but neither side actually wants to do something about it. Dems are afraid any law restricting the flow across the border will be preceived as anti-hispanic and possibly racist. The republicans see it as bad for business as anything restricting the flow would decrease the labor pool thus creating a greater demand and higher pay for labor.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think any of the politicians want to solve the problem. If they do, I have two really simple solutions that I believe would work. If you can think of a reason--a real, practical reason it would not work then please, let me know.
The solution is simple. You charge a hefty fine for any employer to hire an undocumented worker, say $10,000 per offense. This alone would most likely not do much as most people who commit crimes don't expect to get caught and this praticular crime would be very difficult to prosecute without witnesses and whatnot. But here's the kicker--this is what make it work--You give any illegal a fasttrack to citizinship for turning in an employer.
This throws the balance off. An employer might be willing to hire an illegal when he knows he can get away with paying him $10.00 an hour cash when he'd have to pay a citizen $15.00 for that citizen to get the same take-home pay. Not sure about where you live, but around here you cannot live off of $10.00 an hour--even if you aren't paying taxes.
Another way to fix the problem woud be to allow Mexico to be come the 51st state or maybe the 51-55th state. All of there young people can come up here to work and all our retired people can go down there to, well, retire. If we are going to have open borders, why not have that go both ways?

My belief is that none of this will happen. There will be no "fix." There might be some sort of political hackery. Something that lets both sides claim a partial victory and might involve some sort of amnesty. Something that simply clears the slate for yet another wave. The real problem, I think, is we need to agree on if it is actually a problem or not. If it is a real problem, fix it and move on. If it isn't then how 'bout we talk about something that matters. Something like what are we going to do when we run out of gas or why our children are dying in Iraq and Afghanastan for the last few drops of it.

Idea Bank

Have you ever had an idea that you thought was just too good? I mean, there is this idea, it seems just so damn simple yet so obvious that you can't really, honestly believe that nobody else has had the idea? I'm not talking about the sort of idea you get when you get too baked. Those ideas always seem brilliant, but in the cold light of the day-after are forgotten--or should be.

I'm talking about the sort of idea that might just make an impact on the world. Might not be sliced bread or a better mousetrap or cold fusion but then again. . .

Some times I get these ideas. Sometimes, after chewing on them for a while, I find the hole in the logic--the reason they just won't work. Some I've had for a while. I've hidden them, nourished and polished them in the hopes that one day I might actually be able to make them happen and then for a brief moment I will have all the fame, fortune and glory I so greatly deserve.

That inevitably leads me to the realization that I do not want fame, fortune and glory. Maybe a bit of the fortune but as for the other two, I'm too set in my ways and fond of answereing my door in nothing but a towel. Methinks my life would change and I'm quite fond of the way it has been playing out thank you very much.

Still, Some of these ideas linger and the older I get the less interested I am in saving them for myself--as something I might get around to eventually. (I actually saw a round tuit years ago. Just the one and I've never seen one since. I think after I've finished this post, I might just see if I can find one on Ebay. My current belief is that you can find anything on Ebay--but you probably already figured that out for yourself.)

I've decided I am going to start putting some of these ideas on my blog. Feel free to use these ideas to fix the world but if you do, please do the right thing and acknowledge the thinker. If you make a wheelbarrel full of money on any of them, a check will be fine. If you are interested in helping make any of these things happen, please, by all means, let me know and maybe if we put our heads together and bang in unison, we just might get somewhere.

I call these ideas my "get rich slow and painfully" ideas. I call 'em that because most of them won't make a dime and the ones that will (or might) will make it at a rather slow rate. Most of them aren't about making money--they are about fixing things and making a diference.

Idea # 27
Idea 27 began to develop from a discussion I had years ago about internet porn and some of the difficulties it presented to legitimate. I was researching a paper for "Psychology of Women" on gender reassignment surgery. The class had been more or less organized male bashing--there were only three of us in the class and one dropped after the first week. After listening to how much it sucked to be a woman because of men, I began to wonder why it seemed I had heard much about men wanting to be surgically altered to become women but never had I heard of a women wanting to--or actually becoming--a man through surgery.

The problem with the internet is that any search that included even a vague reference to sex or sexual organs or the like, would result in literally a million hits. Try looking up breast cancer back then and you'd get plenty of porn but you would most likely become frustrated well before you found what you were looking for.

The sex reassignment surgery thing seemed to reinforce the dominant view in the class. Once again he men had the advantage. It seems the reason there are more men surgically becoming women than vice-versa is that it is relatively easy to turn a man into a woman while it is nearly impossible to go the other way.

My idea? Fairly simple. We have .gov for government. We have .edu for schools. We have .tv for reasons that escape me. Why not a .xxx? With a xxx extension, it would be some much easier to protect our children while making it easy for those who want it to find the porn.

I suppose some of the porn site people might have a problem with it but it could hardly be considered censorship. Even if some providers choose to block the xxx addresses, somebody else will step in and provide that service.

It might create a stampeede to secure the new .xxx addresses but, to be fair, anyone with a praticular .com should be allowed first option on the .xxx site of the same name.

Neither of us are likely to make any money on this idea but maybe it will protect free speech and the children at the same time.

My next get rich slow and painful will have to do with trains.

Tales of a Buick 8 part 2

Guess it has been quite some time since I've posted. I'm sorta losing interest in this blog thing as it seem I can use this time more productively working on my web site or SST's or Mike's. I guess I'll keep it going for a bit but up until now it seems very few are following this anyway. Maybe nobody is following the web site either but. . .

Akay enough whine already. Lot has happend since Last time I posted. perhaps the most significant thing was getting my 1971 Riviera back from the body shop. It spent something like a year and a half getting re-painted. Early spring 2004 I took the car into the body shop where I used to work. I stripped the car down to bare metal and then over the past year and a half, the guys at the shop did the rest. Unfortunately I got it back just in time to put it away for the winter. Right now it is still in my shop so I have had to put the trike project on hold for now.

I put a bunch of pictures of the Riv up on my web site. I've also made quite a bit of headway on The web site I'm doing for Mike ( www.michaelculley.com ) and I've also been working on a web site for my friend Kurtis' independent film project.

Seems there is more to report but I'm not really in a writing mood tonight.

Some nice light reading for you

www.halliburtonwatch.org

Posting Problems?

I removed the word verification as it may have been making it difficult for people to post responses. I apologize for this inconvenience. If you recently tried to post a responce but had difficulty, please let me know as I am trying to isolate the problem.

Fixing the world Part One

Have you ever had something you knew you needed to write but you were afraid to write it because you knew if you didn't get it just right--if you didn't nail it? Well, lets just say; "bad things, man! Bad things!"To make things just a teeny bit worse, you know with absolute certainty that you will bolloks it all up. The last bit of bother with it is it is simply too big. It is huge--so huge it won't fit inside your head--not all at once. God no! Simply impossible. You musn't take it straight on, you need to nibble. A little about the edges. A bit at a time, but if you ever try to look at the whole thing--and you will just as surely as you will look down when I tell you; "whatever you do, don't look down."--it will be too much.

Katrina isn't a little nibble--it's a huge gaddamned slice. Can't look at it--not straight at it. Got to look a bit over to the left--just off to the side. Look at how slow the president acted. Look at how
stupid it was to not use the busses. How criminal it was to leave the nursing home patients. We need these thing. We need the Army Engineers to blame. We need the city planners and state government. We need to focus our anger. Thousands dead. Not in Iraq. Not in Africa. Not in Malasia, India or Paris. This happened in America and these things don't happen in America. This is not what we pay our hard--earned tax dollars for! Can we get a refund?

We blame. Why? Why is it that before the water is pumped out or before the fire is out. Before the cars get towed. Before anything else--hell, sometimes even before we ask if everybody is okay, we start looking for who we can pin it on. Who's to bless and who's to blame?

Why? Lots and lots and lots of "whys" starting with a city that was built mostly under sea level--one that is sinking( the city not the sea--sea's rising). We constantly and continually ask why and who but for the wrong reason. We look for why and who so we can divide up the bill. We blame so we don't get stuck with the tab. We shout accusations back and forth and just keep our finger's crossed that when the shitstorm ends we are one of the one's left standing.

After we place the blame--after we sacrifice the goat--we go back to business as usual. We fail to address the underlying problem. We need these goats. We need diversions we cannot look this in the face because in it we see death. Not the death of some poor resident of the Big Easy. The death we see is our own. We might say, in that patented dark humor, "well, that's what you get when you live by the beach." Or something more crass. But on some level, we see our own inevitability.

We dont want that. We don't want to know, we don't want to realize that in the grand scheme of things--barring an afterlife--we really don't mean squat. We don't want to realize that with all our amazing technology we can get snuffed out by nothing more than the wind and the rain. We don't want even to think about this. We don't want to think about the possibilities this encapsules. We don't want this thought leading to the idea that maybe we are hurting the planet as that might lead to other thoughts--other guilts. Guilt for things we have done and for things we have refused to do--things we still refuse to do. We don't want this to spiral into a strange sense that maybe we've already been through this before.

We will rebuild New Orleans it seems but I have a bunch of questions I think we should discuss before we start rebuilding.

Family Traditions

The other day I had a friend over for dinner. As I began preparing dinner--a roast, I grabbed the butcher's knife and began cutting the ends off the roast. My friend asked me why I was cutting the ends off. I had to pause. At first the question just struck me as absurd. Some things were, well, they just were. The truth was I cut the ends of the roast off because that is how my mother did it. It never occured to me to ask why. It just was. I put down the knife and picked up the phone.

When I asked my mother why she cut the ends of the roast off before she cooked it, she was silent for a few moments. Finally she answered; "well I always cut the ends off because that is how your Grandmother always did it.

Even more perplexed at this point, I asked my mom to put my Grandma on the phone--my Grandma lives with my parents now.

I asked Grandma why she cut the ends off the roast before she cooked it. She answered; "I cut the ends off so the roast would fit in my pan.

Oops!

I must apologize to any of you who tried go to my writing page. You can follow the link on this page to my web site and then look for the link that says my writing. For now, it is in the first column right below the link to my blog. If that doesn't work you can cut and paste www.vulcansworkshop.com/writing and I think that should take you there.

Gumbo and Gasoline-- the gumbo part

I got the ways and means
To New Orleans I'm going
Down by the river
Where it's warm and green
I'm gonna have drink, and walk around
I got a lot to think about oh yeah

Concrete Blonde,
Bloodletting.

I'm drawn to this like a moth to flame. I've been trying to avoid it for over a week now but I guess it is time I tackle this as it seems itwon't leave me alone.

My mind keeps being drawn back to her. Back to the French Quarter and that one insane night I spent there with her. Has it really been nine years? I can't help but wonder if she was still there. Me? I was just passing through. To her, it was home. I can only hope she made it
out. Chances are though if she didn't get out shortly after I left her, I doubt she lasted this long. Nevertheless, Tammy, if you are out there, my thoughts are with you.

The tragedy is undeniable. The loss of life and property is just unimaginable. I remember the day My friend Josh's house burned down and seeing and understanding what it was to lose all of one's personal possessions. I remember when we had an unprecedented 17 inches of rain
in 24 hours and so many lost so much. We were "lucky" as we only had six inches or so in the basement. My friend Kevin's parents lost everything up to the second floor (including all of his sister's belongings which were in the basement). They had to leave in a boat. Funny thing about
flood damage is you can't get flood insurance unless you live in a flood plain. Until your property floods, it can't be considered a flood plain. A lot of hard working people lost everything. But I don't think anyone lost their lives.

I just can't imagine the enormity of the situation. I remember shortly after 9/11, I went to meet my buddy Mike at a tattoo convention in Chicago. I remember looking up at the Sears tower and thinking about the twin towers of the World Trade Center. My god, it is huge. It is impossible to process the two--the image of the twin towers going down with the reality of the Sears Tower. The two just don't go together easy--not in my head anyway. That is the sort of thing one shouldn't try to fit. I tried a few years ago--right about the time we started blowing
shit up in Iraq. I tried fitting that into my head, the Twin Towers, kicking the shit out of Iraq and other things, personal things. I almost made it fit but then just as I was about to succede, there was a sudden darkness with ghosts of black choppers and steamships and icebergs and
conch shells shattering like so much glass.

The things that kept me going and held the darkness were the things that surprised me. You see, I'm a Romantic Cynic. I suppose this might seem contradictory but let me explain. You know the example of optimist/pessimist of the glass half full/empty? Well, As a cynic, I
believe it doesn't matter because some idiot will most likely come by and break the glass before you get a chance to drink it. What makes things really confusing is that I am also a romantic. I believe that things could be-- should be better. I believe that a lot of things were better and have since gone to hell. If only we didn't have to take the bad with the good.

After 9/11 the romantic in me and the cynic had quite a conversation. The Romantic was overwhelmed with the outpouring of the human spirit-- of love. I remember seeing all of the people walking away for the carnage in New York. There was no black, white, yellow, red. All
were a pasty gray. And then red, white and blue.

The stories of heroism-- of the 343 firefighters, the police, the passengers and crew of Flight 93. They were all heroes. Each and every one. We all pulled together. For a brief moment we were one-- we wereall Americans-- even the French!

There were things the cynic was pointing at. There was, of course, the hijackers. The impossibly offensive idea that any God worth serving would think it a good thing to kill people. There was the fear that we might just turn the entire middle-east into a vast ocean of glass uninhabitable for God knows how long. Eventually we would go there and blow shit up and kill people but for a moment, the entire world held its breath. From Moscow to Beijing, from Scandinavia to South Africa, the world held its breath Some grieved for us-- with us, others looked nervously at there feet. There was a very few who burned our flag andcelebrated in the street but not many.

The world watched and wondered. They wanted to see what the world's most powerful country would do after being bloodied. I think most of them were generally surprised when we held hands and hugged each other and told each other that things would be all right-- that we could lean on each other. That tragedy brought us together as a Nation. Just like Pearl Harbor galvanized our parent's parent's generation to wake thissleeping giant.

We are a wonderful, beautiful, nearly magical people. Where else in the world do people so diverse live and get along at all? Hell, in Ireland we have Catholics and Protestants killing each other. In The middle-east we have Jews and Palestinians, in Iraq we have Shiites and Sunnis killing each other and Americans. The whole history of the human race is us versus them. Our country is unique in that we are not all black or white or red-haired, red-skinned, blonde-haired-blue-eyed, we are all different-- from every part of the world. My Grandmother was Irish, my grandfather German. We are all immigrants, (well, except the Native Americans who really got the shit-end of the stick!) I wish we could go back to the way they lived and respected the land but I fearthere are way too many of us for that now.

We didn't loot after 9/11. We didn't horde or make a run on the banks or anything else "unseemly" We had a point to focus our anger and it was a righteous anger. Maybe not the wrath of God but rather thereckoning of man.

We had a purpose and we all gave whatever we could. Some gave blood. Some gave money, food. Others gave of themselves. Thousands move into New York to help in any why they could. We held hands and we sang and we lit candles. We prayed to whatever Gods we are close to. We sang and celebrated the lives of the heroes. There was fear, panics when white powders showed up in envelopes. We were a bit jumpy-- hell, we still arefor that matter.

Some of us worried that this would be the necessary excuse to erode our freedom-- the precise thing our enemies hate so much. We worried if they were winning by us giving in-- giving ground. We came up with ways to protect ourselves. We developed new tools like the Department of Homeland Security. Some still worry that maybe we gave up a bit too much freedom in the wake of the attacks. Most I guess just accept it as thenatural consequence of being packed so tightly.

I was impressed. I was proud of my country and my countrymen. I was glad we had strong leaders-- even if I didn't vote for them. I saw true leadership in the wake of the terrorist attacks. I saw Mayor Giuliani stand up and do what leaders are supposed to do in times of chrisis. they are supposed to lead and comfort. Giuliani reminded me of the speeches of Churchill during the battle of Britain. I was proud to be a part of this. I was proud to be an American.

While 9/11 shows us our strengths, New Orleans shows our weakness. I have been completely and utterly disgusted over and over again in the past few years with the press. Between sensationalist inept over-coverage, completely missing the real story, failing to follow up on the real story, running from one circus to another quite often. When I was in college, I embraced the ideals of the Fourth Estate and I thought for a time that I would make my mark-- my contribution-- by becoming a reporter. That was before O.J.

Me and my friend Josh were supposed to be heading to another friend's house but I kept getting the "in a minute" thing. When I finally came in the house to see what was taking so long, I found Josh sitting in front of the TV with some other friends. They were looking at video footage of a white Bronco sitting in the driveway of what looked like a very nice house. I asked Josh what
was going on, he said it was O.J.

I didn't know which was worse, that the press would broadcast live footage of a white bronco doing absolutely nothing for four hours or that my friends would actually watch it. I became so disgusted that Iliterally did not watch TV again for nearly four years.

The press has become vultures swooping in to show the death and destruction. Tonight, CNN ran a story about how they sued to be able to show us dead bodies. CNN was bitching that, even though a judge decided they could take pictures of the corpses being picked up-- even though
they could legally do it, the National guard moved vehicles to block the camera's view.

They sued to be able to show us corpses. Not sure about you but I don't want to see any corpses-- especially ones that have been sitting in shit-water for two weeks. Bad enough people have to pick 'em up. Not sure about you but I'm a bit uncomfortable with the thought of everybody seeing my fat bloated corpse on national television. And I sure as shitdon't want to see somebody I love like that!

Don't get me wrong, I have seen a few members of the press that seem to be doing their job and doing it well. Shepard Smith comes to mind. Geraldo is close but, being from near Chicago, I have a hard time taking him seriously. I'm sure there are others out there but the game is such
that the press are so worried about scooping and sensationalizing, that they don't seem all that worried about the truth.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Early on the press was reporting that people were shooting first-responders to steal their boats. After hearing this reported either on Fox or CNN, there isnothing about it to be found anywhere.

The press deserves a big kick in the crotch. But another group of jackasses needs a kick also. The politicians. It comes as no surprise to me-- remember I'm a cynic-- that the politicians are scrambling to try to divert blame. All of the politicians involved in this thing need to be quietly taken out and shot. Since we can't to that, hopefully we will remember what happened and will vote accordingly. At least Bush had the balls to make the Nixon-patented passive-voice half-assed apology. Guess it is too much to expect any politician to say, Yep, I fucked up. Itisn't all my fuck-up but some of it is mine.

The real tragedy is we didn't have a Giuliani to stand up and say shit was going to get fixed. This really is the only thing we need a leader for. We don't need a leader to scream at the mayor or the Guv'ner-- we can do that ourselves. What we need is somebody who can take charge and at least make you think they have things under control.

When you look around and realize the people who are supposed to be in charge don't have a clue what they are doing, the urge to go off and fend for onesself becomes more of a survival instinct than a simple idea. Given the lack of leadership, we should be amazed that any of the police stuck around-- that was heroic nearly to the point of stupidity. Those that took off? Well, can't we simply say they were human andforget about them for now?

Today, on the news the LA State's Attorney announced he was charging the owners of the St. Rita nursing home with negligent homicide for leaving 34 patients to fend for themselves. The authorities claim they offered to send busses (perhaps to bring 'em to the Superdome?) to
evacuate the patients the day before the storm and the owners refused. If convicted they could be sentenced to a maximum of 170 years for their transgressions.

Sure, I guess they deserve to be punished. I mean, assuming losing everything and living with the knowledge they were responsible for the deaths of 34 people in their care isn't a punishment. They said they notified the relatives and told them they were not evacuating but theywere welcome to come and get their loved ones.

Seems to me we are holding these people to a much higher standard than anybody else of any level of authority. Could not the same basic argument be made to bring charges against the Mayor, the Governor,perhaps even the president himself?

Bring your lawyer
And I'll bring mine
Get together, and we could have
a bad time

George Harrison,
Sue me Sue you blues

I live in the Midwest. We get a bit of snow up here. For those of you unfamiliar. Snow is this pretty white stuff that covers everything. Sometimes it melts and turns into water. Sometimes it melts and re-freezes and becomes ice. It is wonderful to look at but it makes driving and even walking hazardous. There were stories that went around when I was a kid. They might have been urban legends but they might have at least been based in truth. The story was always that a FOAF (friend of a friend) had just finished shoveling the sidewalk when a neighbor lady walked down the sidewalk The lady fell and broke her hip. After the lady recovered from
the broken hip, she got a lawyer and sued the homeowner. The court decided that if the man had not shoveled the snow would have been an act of God and therefore not the homeowner's fault but since he shoveled, it became his responsibility since it was no longer natural.

Maybe the story was bullshit. Maybe someone made it up. Most of us have heard of the lady who sued McDonalds because her coffee was too hot. We have all heard of the frivolous lawsuit. We have all been warned that if we come across someone who is injured we should not touch them or move them unless they are in imminent danger. I have heard of a person getting sued for braking someone's ribs while giving them CPR-- did save their life.

Whether real or imagined, the fear of litigation is huge. Any time there is a disaster of any magnitude, the first thing to do seems to be to call your lawyer.

I heard somewhere over the past few weeks that the Mayor of New Orleans was worried because the Hotels threatened to sue him if he called a mandatory evacuation and it turned out to be a false alarm. I have not been able to find anything to support this claim. I have not been able to find any evidence that any hotel anywhere has ever sued local authorities for declaring a emergency. Whether this is true or had any bearing on the situation will most likely remain a mystery. The mayor did, however, say that the reason he didn't use the busses to evacuate was because he didn't have any drivers. Desperate times call for desperate measures but you can't help but wonder if he got a bunch of people to volunteer to drive the busses and somebody wrecked one of 'em full of people, gotta wonder if the big story is the amazing rescueor the irresponsible mayor.

A few years ago, there was a fire in a skyscraper in Chicago in an old county building. Literally, before the smoke had cleared, accusations were flying and everybody was trying to implicate someone else and also trying to dodge their own guilt. Hell, even with the 9/11 thing, we got some of that. That is why the government gave an average of on million dollars to the victims families. This was in exchange foran agreement they would not sue anybody.

Don't get me wrong, we do need to look back at things to see what we did right and what we did wrong but it seems more often than not, we only look far enough to pin the blame on someone or something. We give the litigants a target. And then we step back and congratulate ourselves
for dodging a bullet.

We need to be able to blame somebody or something. We need it in much the same way we need stupid people. We are like children walking though a minefield. We need to be able to say, "see, see that is precisely where they went wrong. As long as we don't step on that spot right there we will be fine." We congratulate ourselves for being smarter than the poor bastard that just got blown to hell and we continue on until the next one bites the dust. It is the only way we cancope.

So we find somebody to blame. We find a scapegoat-- a sacrificial lamb and we hang it on them. We have to because if we don't, we will look around and see that we are in the middle of a minefield with no safe way out. We carry on because surely this tragedy cannot happen again as we have fixed the problem and fixed the blame.

The real problem-- the real blame goes to the damn French. It was their brilliant idea to build the city in the first place. Tom Jefferson shares in the blame since he bought it from the French. Hell, Jacksonfought the Limeys off so we can blame him too.

Seriously though, The City of New Orleans should not exist on such a scale-- not where it is. The simple truth of the matter might be nobody did anything about it because nothing could be done. There is something like a million people living in or near New Orleans. There are ssentially three main pathways in and out. We all now know that over 100,000 of it's citizens didn't have transportation. Think about this. Suppose you want to get a million people out of New Orleans, 100k of them without transportation. Where in the hell are you going to put them? It isn't like you can call up Texas and make reservations for a half-million rooms.
Here's the thing, If you tell people to get the hell out and they don't go, then it is their fault for not leaving. Well, except for those that don't have cars but still, you can blame them too because it isn't like anybody has tried to keep the fact New Orleans is below the waterline a secret. But if you decide you are going to load up everybody on busses and just head off to Woodstock, you are in the wrong generation. You fill those busses with people and then get some drivers,
they are now your problem. Not that they weren't your problem before but it is kinda like shoveling the sidewalk. You participated and now you are stuck.

Suppose you do? Suppose you manage to get a bunch of busses and get them ready to move out, how many people are actually going to take that trip. I've asked myself the same question since this happened. If I were told to evacuate my home, would I? Would I leave my home and head to parts unknown with a million other people to go and find sheltersomewhere else?

Hard to answer. I live in the Midwest for a lot of starting with I was born here. Sometimes I hate winter. I hate snow. Try pushing a wheelchair across a frozen parking lot and you will begin to understand why. Sometimes I think I would like to live somewhere where it is warm year round. I've thought about it and I've ruled out the West Coast because of the earthquake hazard and I've ruled out the North Carolina-to-Texas area because of the hurricanes. Arizona and New Mexico seem too hot. So I'm stuck here with the occasional blizzard and tornado. You don't evacuate for blizzards and tornadoes. For blizzards you watch the pretty white stuff and if it gets really crazy you shovel your roof (we haven't had to do that since '70). For Tornadoes, you hide inthe basement for a bit.

I think the real thing we are all pissed off about is having to look through the thin veneer we call civilization. We fancy ourselves beyond all that. We have the Internet. We have satellite communications we have huge ships and helicopters and all these wonderful toys. We like to see
ourselves as enlightened and educated. We like to think we are above the tribal barbarism we see in the third world.

We think we are in control. We are masters of our world. We are an enlightened beacon unto the world-- we lead the way. But when the water flows over the levy and we get a glimpse of what might happen, we get pissed. Instead of getting pissed at ourselves-- for really it is our own arrogance that has caused this-- we find scapegoats. We blame Mayors and Governors and Presidents and nursing home owners and we congratulate ourselves for finding the culprits and then? Then we blissfully ignorethe basic, intrinsic cause of the problem in the first place.

So we continue. We rebuild a city that should not have existed in the first place. We rebuild the levies to beat the last storm. We ignore the subsidence-- the sinking of the city. We ignore the continual destruction of the wetlands which used to protect the city-- which leave the city more and more vulnerable over the years. As the wetlands disappear, as the delta disappears and as global warming continues to raise the ocean level on the sinking city. The population continues to grow It will be relatively safe for a while. It is not likely that this generation will forget or begin to think it couldn't happen again. For a while mandatory evacuations will actually see people heading for shelter but after a few false alarms. After a few mad-dashes out of the city
only to find there are no rooms available, people will get tired of that crap and will begin to gamble. Maybe fifty or sixty years from now another big one will hit. Maybe by then the population of the New Orleans area will be home for 2 million people?

Not sure what will happen but I know one thing for sure, When it happens again, the ones who lose the most will be the ones who don't have anything. They will be the ones that can't afford to evacuate. They will be the ones who don't have insurance because they can't afford it.
What little they have will be washed away. They will be the ones that pay with their lives. And once again we will be trying to figure out whose fault it is. Next time the answer will be simple. It will be our fault.

One last thing before I go. There were a lot of smart people warning us what would happen in New Orleans but nobody listened. We should listen now. We should listen to what they have to say about the Mississippi delta but we need NEED NEED NEED to listen to what they are telling us about oil and the environment and do something about it before it is too late. If we let that go, there will be nothing left to blame.

Run, run, run, run
You better make your face up in
Your favorite disguise
With your button down lips and your
Roller blind eyes
With your empty smile
And your hungry heart
Feel the bile rising from your guilty past
With your nerves in tatters
When the conch shell shatters
And the hammers batter
Down the door
You better run

Pink Floyd,
Run Like Hell

Poems laddies!

I have begun putting my writing up on my web site. I decided to start with my poetry because I haven't given up on my prose yet. www.vulcansworkshop/writing should take you straight there. lemme know what you think.