Dave from Texas has demonstrated that AOL users have different IP's at different times. So it seems I might just have blocked a common AOL IP which Cedarford won't be using next time, but other posters will.

So I will unban the IP address. I will attempt to delete every single Cedarford comment, innocuous or not, pain in the ass though that is.

Posted by: Ace at 10:03 AM | Comments (34)
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When I first read the headline, I thought, oh damn, stupid Huns are going to re-elect Schroeder just because his opponent is a woman.

And look, let's face it, Germany isn't even one of those countries where you really need a guy in charge. It's not like the country, you know, actually does anything on the world stage.

They did a few things 50-60 years ago before the world had to tell them to knock it off.

But now I'm just in love with the idea of gender-biased voting, because it seems that a lot of Greens, socialists, communisst, and other such dopes are going to vote for Merkel just because she's a woman.

You go girl.

Posted by: Ace at 09:55 AM | Comments (4)
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Sounds about right:

''You'd have to go back to slavery, or the burning of black towns, to find a comparable event that has affected black people this way,'' said Darnell Hunt, a sociologist and head of the African American studies department at UCLA.

If the rescue effort had not been so mishandled, and if those who suffered so needlessly had not been so black and so poor, perhaps Hurricane Katrina would have been just another destructive storm.

Empahsis mine (and SWLiP's).

That's sorta why I avoid writing about race. It's a minefield. I kinda-sorta know what this guy was trying to say, but what he did end up writing was, basically, that if only Katrina had obliged all of our equal-opportunity wishes and killed more white people, it would have been no big deal.

White people don't count. Or, rather, it's just that black people count more. A lot more.

Imagine were someone to say "If so many of the victims of 9/11 who died so needlessly had not been so white and so upwardly-mobile, it perhaps might have been just another destructive terrorist attack."

He'll get away with that, of course. You can root for the deaths of people, as long as they're not of a protected race.

Is there no way to note that blacks have been disproportionately affected by this storm without suggesting that if it were mostly whites who'd died, it wouldn't be quite such a tragedy at all?

Posted by: Ace at 09:42 AM | Comments (67)
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This is about ten times better than most MSM shit that I have seen.

Aside from some really excellent photography, this is great because Alvaro (apparently a Nicaraguan immigrant who worked at a hotel) shows what he saw from before the storm, after the storm (but before the flooding), then the flooding/looting, and finally how he got out of New Orleans. Mixed in are his comments (pretty damn good, considering English is a second language for him) and some justifiable snark at the media (Shep Smith, Brian Williams, and some unnamed MSNBC bimbo make appearances). Some nice looting shots too, including one particularly stupid looter (You'll know who I mean).

It's simply amazing work, and this guy is not a journalist yet he seems to do much better than most so-called professionals. Why is that? Forget working at a hotel, Alvaro ought to be hired to do this full time.

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 08:50 AM | Comments (17)
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From The Sun, Saturday, Sept 10 2005, by Jeremy Clarkson. It's not on their website; it's been typed up and sent to me:

Hollywood has taught America that the military can solve anything. It's full of chisel-jawed heroes who never leave a man on the field and never fail to get the job done. So they'd have New Orleans sorted out in a jiffy.

Unfortunately, on the street you've got some poor, starving sould helping themselves to a packet of food from a ruined, deserted supermarket. And as a result, finding themselves being blown to pieces by a helicopter gunship. With the none-too-bright soldiers urged on by their illiterate political masters, the poor and needy never stood a chance. It's easier and much more fun to shoot someone than make them a cup of tea.

Especially if they're black.

Make tea, not war.

Some guy named Greg wants to know:

I'm just curious - I've been following the whole disaster, and I didn't hear about the helicopter gunships killing civilians. did that really happen???? IF NOT, shouldn't someone point this out?

Nah, forget it, he's rolling.

I like how the mindset of a British ponce works. "What these poor souls really need," it seems to them, "is a nice hot cup of darjeeling."

GENERAL HONORE (firing a helicopter's mounted machine gun like a madman at scattering black folks): If they run when you shoot at them, they're looters. If they stand -- they're well-trained looters.

(begins shooting at women and children)

GENERAL HONORE: Whoo-hoo! Get some! Get some!

PRIVATE JOKER: How can you shoot at women and children?

GENERAL HONORE: Easy. You just don't lead them so much. Hahahahaha.

Eh, 90% of anti-Americanism is just a passive-aggressive way for the speaker to convince himself he's superior to someone he actually feels kinda inferior to.

I'm going to start doing my part.

You're Better Than Me

Seriously, you are. You're sooooo smart and cultured. And you... you make tea for black people. I just can't even comprehend such a race-healing gesture.

And those accents! God, I love your accent. It makes me as moist as the sponge in the corner of the bathtub.

You're the best, Jeremy. You, Nigel, Simon, the whole rest of the gang. You're seriously way better than I am.

Now please stop being such an idiotic asshole. Thank you.

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (14)
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My kinda dumb initial post unleashed a lot of intelligent stuff from the readers.

If you're interested in this, make sure you read all the comments. Well, not Cedarford's rant about "a city run by blacks too incompetent" to evacuate.

First of all, Whitehall notes that bringing up the grade of the whole city, or the bulk of it, would take a hell of a lot of dirt:

If 80% of the city was flooded from a Cat 4 (maybe Cat 3+), to say an average depth of 4 feet, do we build it up to be above a Cat 5 storm surge? At the coast, that would be 30 feet above sea level. At New Orleans, that might be 15 feet.

So you need 20 cubic feet for every square foot. NO City covers 180 square miles. That means 3.8 billion cubic yards of fill.

The Panama Canal moved 232 million cubic yards so doing NOLA would take 16 times as much dirt, ballpark.

I'd say do-able, as a first cut, especially if you dredged Lake Ponchetrain and used the city as a spoils dump.

Fretless recounts the same tale:

Ever been though the Seattle Underground? Seattle was build on a tidal flood plain, which caused all sorts of problems. After a fire, the city required all reconstructed buildings to have reinforced ground floors and entrances on the second floor. Then over a span of several years, the city walled in the streets and built the streets up to the second story level, covering over the sidewalks and connecting the second story entrances to the street. The second stories became the first floors in effect, while the original first floor became building basements.

Posted by: Ace at 10:54 PM | Comments (27)
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I let him go for a while, but after multiple warnings after which he has demonstrated repeatedly he cannot contain himself, I thought it was time to part ways.

I just don't have time to patrol his posts for their virulent antisemitism and racism anymore. Free speech and all, yeah, but I don't need that kind of shit reflecting on me. Or, quite frankly, reflected in my advertising rates.

I'll welcome an email noting which blog he chooses to disgrace next and let you know whom he's decided to infest, just in case anyone gets the hankerin' to say hello or beat up on him.

Say You, Say Me... In Memoriam.

Because Some Are Curious: Cedarford got booted for the comment in the rebuilding New Orleans thread (the first one). Something about him not being happy to save a city "run by blacks too incompetent" to evacuate via buses.

Run by blacks? How, exactly, is that relevant, if not in the way he obviously intended it?

If it were just that one comment, I might have cautioned him. But I've had to caution him repeatedly before, and he just would not, or could not, contain himself.

The Jew stuff I excused because he was so thoroughly mocked for it. And this site is Jew-friendly enough that I figure I'm kind of immune to charges of running an anti-Jew hate site.

But I haven't spoken much about race, by conscious choice, because it's very hard to speak about race without getting into trouble. I've attempted to write posts about racial issues but I've abandoned them as requiring too goddamned many caveats and such.

But having said little about it leaves me open to charges of racism, especially with a guy like Cedarford running around posting such gems as black people only wanting "loose shoes and tight pussy" (for crying out loud, even his racism is paleo; I heard that freshman year of college, and it was ancient by then).

I had to delete that a week or two ago, and I gave him his last warning. I guess he was accustomed to warnings, and paid me no heed.

Well, no, that really was the last warning. Sorry, dude. Should have listened.

I like having this blog. It's fun. I get to say stupid things and occasionally get an "attaboy" from folks. No crazy blog money, but once in a while there's enough donations and BlogAds payments to buy some D&D miniatures.

But I'll be goddamned if I'll allow myself to get personally or professionally damaged by running this thing. I'll be goddamned if I get booted from a job or refused an interview because it gets out that I'm running a "hate site."

A hobby isn't worth that, and I'm just not risking it.

So Cedarford, warned again and again about anti-semitism for a full year, and then warned a couple of times about racism, decided he just couldn't be bound by a simple rule.

Well, he's not bound by that rule any longer. I wish him well.

Unbanning Cedarford's IP: Dave from Texas has demonstrated that AOL users have different IP's at different times. So it seems I might just have blocked a common AOL IP which Cedarford won't be using next time, but other posters will.

So I will unban the IP address. I will attempt to delete every single Cedarford comment, innocuous or not, pain in the ass though that is.

Posted by: Ace at 06:44 PM | Comments (89)
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Only morons and jock-sniffing toadies invited.

What the hell else are you going to do tonight? Get laid?

Yeah. Didn't think so.

Posted by: LauraW. at 03:37 PM | Comments (212)
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I'm not an engineer or a city planner. I don't even play one on TV.

But it seems to me that New Orleans will be rebuilt, and at tremendous expense. Bush is so compromised at this point on the issue (rightly or wrongly) that it's doubtful much will be spared to rebuild the city.

If one is going to rebuild, however, perhaps we should rebuild it right.

Again, I have no idea if this is economically or technologically feasible. But...

Okay, what is perceived as ground level in New York City is no such thing. Street level is not ground level. So many channels and basements and subway tubes and power-line conduits have been cut into New York City that the city is essentially a dry-land Venice, sitting on massive piles, elevated above true "ground level," which is 15, 30, or even 40 feet below street level.

Boston's Big Dig was a massive and massively-costly effort to dig beneath an existing city. A lot of that additional cost was incurred due local politicians' absolute determination that residents would be barely troubled at all by the incredible engineering efforts going on all around them. Digging was done at night... and city engineers closely monitored the workers to make sure they weren't violating acceptable noise limits.

In New Orleans, much of the below-sea-level part of the city has been destroyed. I doubt that many of those structures can be saved. Most houses cannot sit in ten to twenty foot high water for a week and a half and remain structurally sound. So most everything in the floodplain will have to be razed to the ground before rebuilding can begin.

If you're going to raze to the ground anyway, why not take the time to then raise the ground?

I have no idea if it would be cheaper to simply build up the city's new "ground level" by putting massive piles down to bedrock and building 12 or 15 feet above the true ground level, or attempting to dump enough earth into the bowl to raise it up. (I know Boston's done an awful lot of that.)

I don't know what the cost would be. Not a clue. Someone smart like Stephen den Beste might come in here and tell me that such a massive engineering project would be too expensive to even consider.

But if it's not prohibitively expensive (and note, the Japanese will occasionally just build an entire artificial island when they think they need more land), why not?

If something like that were to be done, it would be cheapest to do it now, now that we're essentially building from the ground up again anyway.

If the city's going to be fixed -- and I think it will be -- why not spend the extra money to fix it properly rather than continue with the rubber-band-and-duct-tape solution of levees and pumps? We'll just be back to this same problem in 50 years -- or maybe even 10, given the current high-water (sorry) mark of powerful hurricanes we're suffering through -- if we try that.

An Even Better Idea Update: Dem 9/11 commissioner says: Put Jimmy Carter in charge!

I don't know... last time he was in a boat, didn't he get attacked by a rabbit or something?

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (59)
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Read the whole thing, but three take-aways:

1) The city will be in fair shape sooner than you think;

2) The death toll will be lower than some grandstanding politicians have suggested (although still painfully high); and

3) The response from local officials was just as woeful as you've suspected.

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (13)
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