End of your world

Hurricane Katrina Category 5

Although some of you are only just waking up, global warming has been around for billions of years.

Although we see it now as accelerated global warming, it's the speed difference that destroys your world.

The sea cools an interior engine that lies beneath a thin oceanic crust, and as the sea gets warmer there is something going on unseen beneath the waves. Beneath the sea magma, radiating megawatts, is incinerating carbon deposits. What we witness and only mention is the atmospheric engine as the wind picks up and messes with our hair. New Orleans was a bad hair day, nothing more.

Compare the tsunami, in that example of engines at work the interior engine overheated and the casing of the earth cracked, shifting the earths crust and causing a wave that killed hundreds of thousands.

The good news is planetary fail safe mechanisms are at work; ice sheets and glaciers are melting which will raise sea levels & cool the oceanic crust and insulate the magma layer, preventing it from exploding through the crust.

That type of detonation would catapult earth rock into space leaving craters in the moon, and it would be the end of the earth, but the planet would still be here, sans life.

Of course the downside is that we shall have to move to higher ground as the sea rises.

The world is as we humans made it, and we have all but destroyed it, which is not such a bad thing. The earth is not the world, although its confusing, world, earth planet, three words seemingly with the same meaning, so why are there three words?

In all the 1-god religions, yes-even Christianity, while they pray to any old bit of plaster decorating their temples, god informs even the hypocrite, that the meek shall inherit the earth; no book speaks of world.

And you don't need to believe in god to realise there is bullshit in all philosophy, science political or religion, but there is always an element of truth in each.

End of the world will deliver all that you are hoping, without you having to do a thing. The real work begins in establishing a new world order after a bit of anarchy, without making up another god in mans magical image to fill the void between our ears.

In the next phase of human development maybe nature will be enough.

By Simon Willace posted 6 September 05

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The "Looting" in New Orleans: Not Insane in the Least

Some comments on recent events in New Orleans from an anarchist perspective. Despite the comment from the Philadelphia tourist, I can't find this insane.

Let's review now:

* Major hurricane threatens New Orleans with damage much worse than it actually got.
* About 20% of the residents of that city are in households without automobiles.
* Most of them are low-income and live in the shoddiest buildings in the most flood-prone neighborhood, i.e. they are the people most at risk.
* Evacuation is called.
* Evacuation plan is to get in your car and drive out of New Orleans.
* Absolutely nothing is done to provide for the evacuation of those without cars to drive.
* Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of buses (owned by school districts, transit districts, and private companies) were available throughout the metro area and could have been commandeered as evacuation vehicles.
* End result: an evacuation that systematically fails to evacuate precisely those in most need of evacuating.

Put yourself in the position of one of those survivors. Nobody's cared about rescuing you; the only people that really counted were those with more money than you have. People like the owners of the shops in your city.

Shops closed and not about to reopen precisely because the owners fled town. Shops with blown-out windows that can be walked through. Shops whose merchandise is about to be ruined by the disease-ridden and polluted water streaming through levee breaks and flooding your city. Merchandise that, in many cases, you need because you're running low on necessities and relief can't easily get to you because of flooded highways.

How can it be anything but logical to help yourself to some of that merchandise in such a situation? The still photos I've seen seem very revealing; nobody looks particularly menacing or threatening. The "looters" seem to be of all ages and genders; it's not just young gang-bangers we're talking about. In fact, I've noticed numerous scenes showing mothers with their children.

I've dragged out the TV and turned it on tonight. NBC News had two segments on the "looting" and the most violent scene they showed was of a young man throwing a rock at a store window, trying to break it. One scene showed people walking calmly into and out of a Walgreen's, passing right by the camera, while across the street a trumpeter played "When the Saints Go Marching In." Put aside the fact that money hadn't been exchanged for the merchandise being taken out, and it could have been a normal street scene.

One phrase NBC trotted out was "every man for himself." That seems to be directly contradicted by their own footage, which showed many examples of people helping each other (and not just to carry stuff out of stores). Looks more like the key defining behavior in the aftermath of this disaster is cooperation, not individualistic competition. If you want a real example of "every man for himself," look at that evacuation plan the authorities came up with.

With all that so-called "breakdown" of "law and order," there's been only one person shot (not fatally, thankfully) so far. That one shooting is tragic, but let's have some perspective here. In 2004, there were 265 murders in New Orleans. That's just the dead; it doesn't cover the non-fatal assaults with deadly weapons. Add those in and we're probably well above 1 per day on average. If it really was an outbreak of barbarism, the violence would be much worse.

Instead, there's very little of it, Just lots of peaceful folks who have decided that those stores are, in the words of one man, "everybody's store[s]." A breakdown, in other words, of law but not order.

By David B posted 5 September 05

Related:

Bush Expected to Visit Storm-Ravaged Areas
US: WACO, Texas - President Bush is expected to visit storm-ravaged areas of the Gulf Coast later this week, but first he is returning to Washington to oversee the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.