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News :: Media |
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TV Doesn't Lie? |
Current rating: 0 |
by wayward
(No verified email address) |
09 Sep 2005
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Actual TV screenshot |
Click on image for a larger version  |
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This is a strangely telling screenshot from TV news. |
Related stories on this site:
The Imperial Presidency: Katrina Underscores Bush's Isolated Style
America’s Battered Wife Syndrome
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This work is in the public domain |
Comments
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Interesting |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Sep 2005
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Isn't SkyNews, the scrolling wire which appears to be the source of this very appropriate if somewhat accidental titling, owned by Rupert Murdock, the same power behind FoxNews? I'll bet somebody will lose their job over this one.
It just goes to show that the truth sometimes leaks out of the Republican echo chamber. |
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Re: TV Doesn't Lie? |
by another view
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Sep 2005
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New Orleans Didn't Just Go Nuts
It's Been Nuts...
[by Mac Johnson] 9/7/05
Where to even begin in being one more idiot talking about Hurricane Katrina? I hate the subject. It should be a news item and a humanitarian cause --a huge recovery and reconstruction effort joined in by all. It should not be a political issue fit for "commentary."
But the Hurricane tore at more than just the weaknesses in New Orleans' inadequate levees. The shortcomings of the levee system were known to all who ever lived on the Gulf Coast, and in the end, all the levees really did was encourage expanded development in a huge geologic bowl sitting between a large lake, North America's mightiest river, and the immense green waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The whole booby-trap was simply yet another triumph of government subsidized and directed development. And its failure was long anticipated.
What was not anticipated was the way the Hurricane tore at our human divisions.
First out of the gate were the Holy Men of the Cult of Global Warming, who couldn't wait for the first dead to wash up before they declared the Hurricane irrefutable proof of Global Warming and a direct responsibility of George W. Bush.
Next up were the racial ambulance chasers, always looking for another grievous injury to add to their political caseload. Looking at the Sea of Black faces abandoned without transportation, food, water or protection, they somehow managed to look past the City's Black Mayor, Black Police Chief, Black City Council members and all the other Black office holders that run the 67% Black city, and found that the whole thing was: white folks' fault. Yet another example of racism at its worst.
This opened up a torrent of Bush-bashing, since he was the closest Republican that had any responsibility for the City. The Democratic Governor of Louisiana -- though white -- was merely a victim of the whole thing it seems, just like the Mayor of New Orleans. Nobody has any power in this world other than George Bush. Nobody has any responsibility. George Bush is now the navel of the world for his enemies. If a butterfly flaps its wings in Central Park, it's George Bush's fault. And the butterfly is racist. And it was blown there by Global Warming.
And at some point during the disaster, the most disturbing of all the infighting began. The thugs of New Orleans turned on their neighbors like a Mongol horde. Looting erupted, as did arson and robberies, shootings and beatings. Rape became an organized crime as gangs preyed on the defenseless stranded girls of New Orleans. Pharmacies were looted and hospitals were surrounded and invaded in a manic hunt for drugs. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin couldn't stop such junkie armies from destroying much of what was left of the City's medical infrastructure, but he could excuse them, explaining that it was all just people "looking for something to take the edge off their jones, if you will." Actually, no, I won't. (The mayor added a few minutes later in the same interview: "You know, I'm not one of those drug addicts. I am thinking very clearly." And nobody said different, Mayor.)
Barbarians with an edgy jones shot a cop in the head, shot a national guardsman, halted life-saving evacuations by firing on helicopters and humvees. Police had to mow down a gang of six shooting at contractors who came to repair the levee breaches. A group of white civilians that came into the city in private boats to save as many refugees as they could -- giving lie to the racism howls of the media -- gave up and turned back because people began shooting at them, trying to take their boats.
Soldiers who should be concentrating on rescue operations are carrying full battle gear through the streets of an American City, opening doors with rifles at the ready. Overnight, it seems, The Big Easy had become Thunderdome, and Mad Max was nowhere to be found. In the middle of the worst American natural disaster in over a century, gang warfare, anti-authority psychosis and individual malevolence finished off the hope of tens of thousands that had survived the flood. It did more to demoralize the nation than the storm had done.
What happened?
The storm may have triggered the violence, but it did not cause it. What we saw in New Orleans was what happens in America's most murderous city when the criminals realize that all the cops have left.
It wasn't desperation, or insanity, or protest. It was New Orleans, without police.
Many people believe that Washington, D.C., is the "murder capital of America." And indeed it often is, but that is only because such rankings are limited to "major cities" -those with a population of 500,000 or more, and New Orleans has (or had) a population of 485,000. Were it not for this actuarial accident, Washington, D.C.. wouldn't even have a shot at the murder title. The per capita murder rate in New Orleans is 16% higher than in "Murder Capital" Washington, D.C.; and nearly 10 times the national average. To have a murder rate equal to that of New York City, New Orleans would need to reduce its murders by 86%. No, that's not a typo.
At a time when crime is plummeting in most of America, it has been steadily increasing in New Orleans. And one cause is simple: The New Orleans CityGovernment has run its law enforcement apparatus into the ground. On a per capita basis, New Orleans has less than half as many cops as Washington, D.C.: just 3.1 police officers per 1,000 citizens. Turnover has become a huge issue, as young cops leave at the first opportunity. A report conducted <http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-02-10/news_feat.html> for the city two years ago said that New Orleans was "bleeding police officers."
The strain shows. Fewer than one in four murder cases in New Orleans results in a conviction. 42% of violent offenders have their charges dropped by prosecutors because the cases are "not suitable for court." Many in New Orleans will not now testify against the thugs that they know -- more likely than not -- are going to be released Scot-free. People don't even bother calling the police in New Orleans anymore. In 2004, academic Researchers conducted an experiment in which they had police fire 700 blank rounds into the air, in a single afternoon, in one neighborhood. No one -- not one person -- called to report the gunfire. It was background noise.
The report on police levels mentioned above stated that New Orleans needs 2,000 cops just to maintain order in normal times. When Katrina struck, the city had only 1,700. No more than 1,500 are on duty now, after dislocation, desertions, resignations, and two suicides.
There is no wonder the place went chaotic. There should be no mystery. It is barely under control on a good day.
Why are the cops leaving? They are utterly demoralized. They face low pay to fight a losing war against crime in a city that will not commit resources to the battle. "We have to use our own shotguns," one patrolman was quoted in the New York Times. "This isn't theirs; this is my personal gun."
They are demoralized because they have to bear the reputation of working in what is widely acknowledged as the most corrupt police department in the country.More than fifty NOPD officers were sent to prison in the 1990's, two of them to death row.
They are demoralized because they have to live in New Orleans, due to a strict residency requirement for police. And unless you are wealthy enough to live in the perpetual party of the Vieux Carre, New Orleans is not a nice place to live -- especially for those with children. 84% of officers with children reported sending them to private or parochial schools, at their own expense. That's quite an endorsement of Mayor Nagin's schools.
So they leave, and are not replaced. It is not just "white flight" either, for those that want to see the world through racial lenses. Most of those leaving are black officers.
All this is not to say that New Orleans has had no plan to reduce its high crime statistics. For a while, one police district tried lying about the statistics. It meant letting some violent thugs go (and with an edge on their joneses, I'm told), but it was cheaper than fighting real crime; and it kept the tourists coming.
Asked if such lying meant that perhaps the NOPD should have its stats audited by an outside agency, Police Chief Eddie Compass stated, "I don't need an outside agency coming in. I think we have proven that we are capable of taking care of our own house."
This is the same Chief that now screams on camera for outside agencies to just take over. As soon as order is restored, you can bet the New Orleans CityGovernment will rediscover its need for independence -- and privacy.
The overnight crisis we saw in New Orleans this week has been a long time coming. It was just the bursting of a purulent boil that has been festering for years.
Undoubtedly, that is Bush's fault as well. Perhaps his Global Warming has been putting an edge on criminal's joneses, unbeknownst to the City Government. |
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America's Darwin Awards and a Philosophy Assignment |
by Martin Schönfeld
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Sep 2005
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The horrors of America's downward spiral are lessons for a global Enlightenment, and if we are unwilling to heed past experiences, we will invite even more catastrophic news. Seen in a Kantian light-its triple beam of humanism, autonomy, and sustainability-the events of the past five years have been a perfectly rational recipe for disaster.
It is worth recalling the steps of America's willful decline. In 2000, the first executive order of the new rulers was a fundamentalist population policy, cutting funds for developmental aid organizations working for reproductive rights and birth control. The next surprise was the U.S. fight against the International Criminal Court, created to prosecute crimes against humanity. The third slip of that year was the American boycott of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions. Why would Americans declare war on the world's climate? Are they not on the same planet? For the first time in history, U.S. diplomats suffered unanimous catcalls and sneers on the world stage.
Bigger news followed in 2001: the horror of 9-11; the executive flights of the Bin Ladens from Tampa International Airport to the Middle East; the federal attempts to classify data on the terrorist attacks. In 2002, the Patriot Act stifled domestic opposition; Colin Powell attempted to deceive the United Nations; and the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay expanded in violation of the Geneva Convention. In 2003, America made pre-emptive assault its new policy doctrine and secured the assets of Iraq. In 2004, statistical discrepancies of another election were ignored, while U.S. torturers made global headlines. Critique was now heard from unlikely quarters-the International Red Cross, the Pope in Rome, and amnesty international in London.
Meanwhile, climate change was becoming evident. Glaciers started melting on four continents; polar sea ice began to shrink; and freak weather events -storms, droughts, floods, and heat waves-were wreaking havoc in Europe and Asia. The U.S. rulers reacted by twisting science, censoring EPA reports, and dismantling environmental laws on the federal level. Projects for mass transit systems, wetland restoration, levee strengthening, and renewable energy sources were cut or shelved. Instead, tax breaks promoted gas-guzzling vehicles; new laws raised emission caps on toxins; companies were invited to drill on formerly protected land; federal forests were opened to industrial use. Ensuring that nobody complained, previously autonomous media were embedded as wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate conglomerates; Greenpeace was prosecuted as a terrorist outfit; and flag orders were issued for Florida schools.
In 2005, the wind sown by the neocons was reaped in the hurricane at the Gulf coast. Federal monies set aside for levee strengthening and bayou restoration had been diverted for the military campaigns in the oil-rich territories abroad. Instead of respecting standard information-such as National Geographic's 2004-prediction of the hurricane-the U.S. rulers chose to pursue their own goals and exhorted the suffering populations to read the Bible and pray for survivors. Thus the chicken came home to roost, killing the car-less poor, while the mobile rich could flee.
The developed nations in the world are doing their best to react to climate change, by transforming their societies into sustainable orders, and by reducing their addiction to fossil fuels. But since 2000, America has been doing the opposite, betting the family farm on the oil game-at the expense of scientific information, human rights, and environmental rationality. The victims of the neocon gamble are the dead in New Orleans. Other victims in America were good old ideas: humanism, in policy; autonomy, in the media; and sustainable development, in energy goals. East Asia and Europe may aspire to the rational humanity explored by Confucius and Kant, but America lives today on the darker, angrier, and willful planet of Thomas Hobbes and Ayn Rand.
If America's cultural decline continues, Philosophy, as an academic core discipline, will fade out in the United States. Philosophy is the intellectual canary in the social coal mine-its free inquiry into humanity and natural patterns is possible only where intellectual liberty persists. In summer 2005, Florida's rulers tried to end academic freedom for the first time (state bill H-837), and as administrators are warning their faculties, such state-level attempts at bringing universities in line are expected to continue. The intended prosecution of professors who rile religious and corporate interests will affect Philosophy more than other fields, since its job is the free-spirited analysis of our place in the world, and thus to question bias and taboos with logic and evidence.
Should America's new rulers succeed in controlling the academy, U.S. philosophers would join the fate of their counterparts in other failed nation-states, such as East Germany. There, communism had turned Philosophy departments into surveillance offices ensuring political correctness on campus. Needless to say, East German philosophy did not produce any good results, and the professors who had made vigilante career in patrolling the boundaries of the mind faded into ignominy and disrepute after Germany's pacifist revolution and reunification in 1989.
Philosophy faces a crisis. But any crisis is an opportunity for turning things around and for advancing truth, reason, and humanity. And doing so is easier now than at any other time, for we can reflect now on a greater wealth of empirical data than anytime before in the past. While the political and ecological news are ranging from the dismal to the disastrous, advances in the hard sciences are inspiring and exhilarating. It is no exaggeration to say that science, as such, is acquiring a uniform global shape, and that nature, as such, is finally coming into definitive view. Academic censors in the U.S. would merely lend workers in Europe and Asia a competitive edge; and if suppressed at home, stem cell research, evolutionary biology, environmental science, and climate studies would merely keep soaring elsewhere. The progress of reason is unstoppable.
The marvelous fact of twenty-first century science is its interdisciplinary convergence. Physics has made strides in unifying quantum theory, general relativity, and thermodynamics, thereby strengthening its ties to chemistry, and in turning cosmology from a hope into a science. Chemistry has shown the unification of entropic and evolutionary traits of material organization, thereby harmonizing itself with biology, and in revolutionizing our understanding of material grids. Climate studies marry chaos- and complexity theory to meteorology and paleontology, and chart the musical beats of the biosphere. It appears we are at the cusp of a unified model of reality.
The results will be revolutionary, to say the least. For the first time in human civilization, we can now pursue questions of origin and design in a rigorous, rational, and empirical form. While older intellectual workers scoffed at questions about the creation of matter, mind, or nature, younger researchers enjoy the luxury of being able to investigate these questions systematically. The Great Integration of Information, it appears, is globally just around the corner.
As such developments are ever more visible in worldwide publications they also give us a new philosophical assignment. The rift between analytic rigor and postmodern deconstruction can be healed in a critical return to our older wisdom. Scientists, from S. Hawking in Physics to E. O. Wilson in Biology, ask philosophers to join them in the quest for nature's pattern and point. And both Hawking and Wilson remind us that Philosophy's heyday was the Age of Enlightenment, while the developments after Kant, in their view, had been somewhat of a comedown.
The new Philosophy assignment is thus a rather old one, dating from three centuries ago. Thinkers need to return to this early modern task, to work on the systematic frames of meaning. The path of discovery runs between the extremes of dumb dogmatism and shallow skepticism. The critical key for doing this work is to remember that Western Enlightenment resulted from the first era of globalization-had it not been for the secular influence of China's culture on the European lands ravaged by the Christian terror of the Thirty Years War, the pioneers of the Enlightenment, such as Leibniz, Wolff, Voltaire, and Kant, would have been all but impossible.
There are multiple ways of returning to this assignment, and give-and-take pluralism is indeed the point. But two items merit anyone's consideration, especially in schools at the Gulf. First, Philosophy can rise to the occasion if it is humble enough to look outside, to the data of other disciplines, and to integrate this empirical rainbow into rational frames. Second, we can frame the data by focusing on the deeper meaning of climate change that escapes America's politicians. To avoid more Katrinas and Darwin Awards in this willfully ignorant society, philosophers must once again teach, just like shamans and metaphysicians had done earlier, to think like clouds-to map out viable stances in nature's dance. It's time to do work. There will be bad weather, and the clock's ticking. History will tell if neocons - too greedy, selfish, and mean - can wise up.
Martin Schönfeld teaches at the University of South Florida in philosophy and environmental science. You can find more information at the USF site www.cas.usf.edu/philosophy/index.html. |
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