Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

Most of us probably have a special piece of music or a song that we listen to when we are dealing with a loss. The experience is powerful in that it can bring raw emotion to the surface and fluid to the tear ducts in ways that hours of discussion and contemplation often cannot.

For obvious reasons, I’ve decided to share one of those very special tunes from my own life with you. The tune is Wise One which was written by John Coltrane and recorded by the John Coltrane Quartet on April 27, 1964. The band features John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums.

I won’t get too far into what to listen for, because I think the right place to start is with the raw emotion and the introspection expressed so clearly by both Tyner and Coltrane. One interesting feature is the unusual timing of the climax in Coltrane’s solo in that it occurs within the first third of the solo, thus ignoring the golden mean. Strange as it may seem, that ratio did have a great deal of influence on the construction of his solos.

There has been a good deal of speculation that Wise One was written to commemorate Eric Dolphy’s death in 1964. This is not borne out by the fact that Dolphy died one month after the song was recorded. It does indeed feel like a lament for loved ones lost, so that speculation is probably based in good listening, rather than just poor chronology.

If you like what you hear, please consider buying the CD. The album is named Crescent and is, in my mind, one of the finest recordings ever published.

Click here to play or download.

This is part of an ongoing effort to provide a service to select individuals who might, for what ever the reason, not be able to recall what they did last night. This can be disconcerting when being questioned about your doings , to say the least. I believe with the advent of the internet, we finally have a solution to this age old problem, so I’m just trying to do my small part.

For the entire time I had her under my observation last night, Autumn conducted herself with both grace and dignity. She was dressed sharply and presented herself as a confident young woman ready to take on the world. I heard no vulgarities or crass comments pass her lips. Her social interaction with others seemed to be on par with one might expect from a person of Autumn’s character and should present no problems as she moves into the next stage of her life. Her knowledge of subjects as diverse as modern poetry, geopolitical trends in southeast Asia, and domestic policy minutia was a refreshing surprise to all. Overall I’d say that Autumn conducted herself in a way that should make her husband, her family and, indeed, her ancestors proud. Good going sport!!!

…and makes me retract.

I still say he’s a lying sack of …., but it looks as though little Rick may have actualy once said something that was sorta, kinda critical about the conduct of the war. Go have a look at his, um, substansive “concerns.”

These could have carried 5000 people a trip. No, it’s not enough, but it’s not nothing either.

From the New York Times;

With bridges washed out, highways converted into canals, and power and communications lines left inoperable, government officials ordered everyone still remaining out of the city and began planning for the evacuation of the Superdome, where about 10,000 refugees huddled in increasingly grim conditions, running out of water and food, and with rising water threatening the generators.

So dire was the situation that the Pentagon late in the day ordered six Navy ships and eight Navy maritime rescue teams to the Gulf Coast to bolster relief operations. It also planned to fly in Swift boat rescue teams from California.

This isn’t just about flood water, though that on its own will devastate more lives than we can bear. It’s what’s in that flood water that makes this event so awful.

The water that swept through New Orleans’ streets in the wake of Hurricane Katrina carried more than continued misery for the storm’s victims.

It also brought along a potentially toxic soup of pollution - sewage, chemicals and perhaps human bodies.

“The area’s become a hazardous waste site,” said Dexter Accardo of the St. Tammany Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials are surveying the flooded neighborhoods to gauge how hazardous conditions might be.

This never should have happened.

If you presented a small child with a scenario in which a major city was located below sea level, surrounded by water on three sides, in a location prone to major storms, and asked them whether there ought to be a plan to get everybody out should one of those storms arrive; what do you think they would say? Does it even take a second?

Screw the small child analogy - what would you say? Unless you are cruel beyond all hope, you would probably say that a plan to evacuate those who could not evacuate themselves should have been in place years ago and executed effectively two days ago. Political gamesmanship is inappropriate now. Loyalty to one faction or another should give you no comfort. Failure is everywhere.

If we are moral people, this can never happen again. The details which will emerge in the coming days will be so awful that most of us will put up a wall just to maintain our sanity.

We may well have lost an entire city today. The septic and petrochemical pollution may render what’s left of New Orleans unfit for humans for months, years or generations.

From the Washington Post:

Scores of people could be seen trudging west on foot along deserted Interstate 10, lugging small packages of belongings, headed for refuge from the water that now covers 80 percent of this city.

“I have nothing but me, the children and what we have on our backs,” said Molly Moses, a mother of five who was rescued from the roof of her two-story house four miles from the center of New Orleans. About daybreak, as the waters reached the attic, her fiance punched a hole in the roof, where she was found about 10 a.m. Tuesday clutching her 9-month-old daughter.

“We were just too busy trying to save our lives.”

Rising floodwaters led to a second mass evacuation Tuesday from this low-lying metropolis of terrified residents who had avoided the storm’s most direct destruction when it veered slightly to the east.

That particular article delves into looting. Atrios reminds us of how just how unimportant that is right now:

New Orleans is being destroyed. Looting, especially by those who are obtaining food, water, and other necessities, is about number 589 on the list of things which matter right now.

From the New York Times again:

But this seems like the wrong moment to dwell on fault-finding, or even to point out that it took what may become the worst natural disaster in American history to pry President Bush out of his vacation. All the focus now must be on rescuing the survivors. Beyond that lies a long and painful recovery, which must begin with a national vow to help all the storm victims and to save and repair New Orleans.

People who think of that graceful city and the rest of the Mississippi Delta as tourist destinations must have been reminded, watching the rescue operations, that the real residents of this area are in the main poor and black. The only resources most of them will have to fall back on will need to come from the federal government.

Those of us in New York watch the dire pictures from Louisiana with keen memories of the time after Sept. 11, when the rest of the nation made it clear that our city was their city, and that everyone was part of the battle to restore it. New Orleans, too, is one of the places that belongs to every American’s heart - even for people who have never been there.

Right now it looks as if rescuing New Orleans will be a task much more daunting than any city has faced since the San Francisco fire of 1906. It must be a mission for all of us.

Via Matt (again), New Orleans local television being broadcast from Florida.

The best most of us can do, other than to demand much better from all of our leaders in the face of future expected crisis, is to give money to relief agencies. Here’s a link. Here’s another. I trust all of you can figure out some more. Get to work.

Update: Edited this morning to remove traces of BUI and add some more links.

I put a short update at the bottom of the post I have dealing with Katrina, but since the post is long and dull I wanted to put an update up top as well. Sadly, many of us were too quick to assume that New Orleans had avoided the toxic gumbo scenario. From the Washington Post:

The sense of relief that residents felt Monday morning when the city was not immediately inundated by a storm surge overflowing its protective levees was replaced late Monday night and Tuesday morning with dread because of a levee that was damaged by the hurricane.

Water flowing from the damaged levee near Lake Pontchartrain could have equally catastrophic effects, only unfolding more slowly.

I don’t have time today to get into this any further, though I’d like to. Matt has a good round-up if you’re interested. It’s probably not as over the top as it seems to say that we may be losing a city.

Update - 4:49 It’s almost too hard to think about what’s happening. From Kate:

The water continues to rise as thousands more come to the Superdome, where there is no fresh water and a collapsed sanitation system. Hundreds of evacuees at the Superdome are in need of urgent medical care. According to a nurse who is at the Superdome and managed to get through a call to MSNBC, they are working on evacuation methods to get the most sick to Baton Rouge. Some are diabetics and have run out of insulin. Some have come to the dome with injuries they received during the storm. Meanwhile, Tulane hospital is working out an evacuation plan for its over 1,000 patients because water is rising all around the building (over six feet so far). The threat of disease is acute and real throughout the city, as the flood water grows more and more polluted with sewer and chemical runoff, not to mention the bodies of dead animals and, most horrific, deceased New Orleanians. I fear that since there is little commuication within the city, many residents don’t know the threat they are facing and are continuing to walk through the water, oblivious to the pressing need for them to take higher ground and get out of town.

There is little news coming out of the city because everyone is being asked to evacuate, including journalists. WWL is broadcasting on all bands of FM now according to Fox News (which, surprisingly, is the only cable station talking about the true devastation of this). The mayor is sending messages to the press who then try to get the word out to residents. There are many residents who no doubt have no idea what is happening around them, because they do not have electricity and no battery-operated radios. They only know what they can see around them. Looting is taking place, which is probably good. If residents can get food and drink to sustain them for a while, that is better than going without.

This is a disaster of epic proportions.

According to this article, the Superdome, and indeed the entire city, needs to be evacuated right now. One can only imagine how this will happen and how many might die. Gov. Kathleen Blanco says “The situation is untenable,�

I don’t like to ask for donations on this ste, but if there was ever a reason to break with tradition this is it. Here’s a link to the American Red Cross donation form. Here’s a link with several organizations to choose from. Do what you can.

No more from me for a while. I’m not sure I’d even know what to say anyway.

I can hardly believe my eyes, Bob Casey was interviewed yesterday by the AP. Not that he said much of anything, but the act itself comes as a shock. What next? An issues page on his website? Nah. Some candidates actually produce issues pages, you know.

Okay, I’m not being totally fair. He did mention a few positions, like his stance on embryonic stem cell research:

On a related topic, Casey said he opposes federal funding for stem-cell research that destroys human embryos, but that he was encouraged by this month’s announcement by Harvard scientists raising the possibility that embryonic stem cells can someday be used to help create all-purpose stem cells without harming the embryos.

I had the misfortune of watching a little more of the Katrina coverage on television than I otherwise might have cared to. I woke up around 3:00 AM after having gone to bed at about 1:00 AM and didn’t sleep a wink thereafter. I tried to read myself back to sleep, but I couldn’t find anything that didn’t bother and agitate me. Stress from various projects I’m working on has probably caught up with me, so I did what I always do in these sleepless situations; worry about deadlines, drive myself crazy, watch cable news and, if I’m lucky, NFL films on ESPN Classic.

Getting back to Katrina, I don’t really want to critique the coverage as I’m sure anybody with half a brain knows how silly it is to send blow dried debutantes out into a hurricane in their slickers, emblazoned with the corporate logo, to look brave. Whatever.

The thing that really bothers me, and I know bothers a lot of people, was the knowledge that some 100,000 people were not able to evacuate from a city which quite reasonably could have been sunk beneath a toxic brew of petrochemicals, sewage and corpses right now. Fortunately, today’s storm was not as bad for New Orleans as it could have been, though that’s little consolation to the dead, the wounded and the people who have lost every worldly possession.

The people left behind were those who do not own cars and could not afford to leave. They were provided with a football stadium located beneath sea-level which began to crumble mid-hurricane. Had catastrophic flooding occurred with the ensuing petrochemical water pollution, one struggles to imagine how these people could have been saved. Surely we cannot allow for anything like this to ever happen again. While the very worst did not happen today, a very realistic scenario would have involved the deaths of a large portion of an entire class of people in one American city.

For whatever reason, Americans continue to inhabit parts of our nation which are prone to catastrophic natural disaster, and will continue to do so. As we learned today, decent insurance policies with government backing simply isn’t sufficient. Will Bunch points out some areas where the Federal government could and should have done better to prevent catastrophe, but it needs to be pointed out that it is also the responsibility of municipal and state governments to create realistic plans to evacuate those people who cannot, for whatever reason, evacuate themselves. Anything less is inexcusable. Twenty thousand people don’t need to die in order for us, as a nation, to say never again.

Susie shares a classic CNN viewing moment when she recounts Soledad O’Brien questioning Sen. Mary Landrieu about why so many people remained in New Orleans after it was evacuated. Her exact words were “Are they just complacent?� A not so stunning display of what strikes me as upper class indifference towards and ignorance of people of more meager means. More likely, it was just an example crass stupidity uttered mid-blather by and middling broadcast talent. I should mention that she asked the question in the context of the discovery that the roof of the Superdome was being ripped off and collapsing in sections. The superdome was, and is still, housing over 20,000 people who had no way out of town.

Back to the sleepless night; sometime around 4:30 AM, ESPN Classic broadcast Superbowl 13 between the Cowboys and the Steelers in its entirety. One pleasant thing on a night I’d rather forget.

I don’t mean to seem callus by talking about sleeplessness and football at the begining and end of this post. I’m simply not gifted or experienced enough a writer to articulate the absolute horror that needs to be expressed over something that could have been so very much more awful. Natural disasters will continue unabated for as long as any of us will live, but the shameful planning for such disasters needs to come to an end starting today. Storing people in what strikes me as a concrete death trap located below sea level is not a solution; it’s careless disregard for human life and we can do better.

Update: Sadly, it looks as though I may have spoken too soon:

The sense of relief that residents felt Monday morning when the city was not immediately inundated by a storm surge overflowing its protective levees was replaced late Monday night and Tuesday morning with dread because of a levee that was damaged by the hurricane.

Water flowing from the damaged levee near Lake Pontchartrain could have equally catastrophic effects, only unfolding more slowly.

I’ve been too busy with other stuff to even nail down a coherent thought in a few days, so I’ll just post this silly picture.

I got an email last week entitled “Dick is a major cause of divorce,” which struck me as somewhat unreasonable on all fronts. As I think about it, however, my scepticism slowly fades away.

I was a little concerned about one of the statements I made in the previous post, so I decided to do some research to see if I could verify it. Unfortunatly I cannot back up the statement “many other Republican politicians have come forward with legitimate, serious and timely questions about our nation’s war effort in Iraq.”

The staff^* and I have poured through our records, done a few exhaustive searches of both the internet and Lexis, but could find no substantive basis for that claim. This doesn’t mean nothing like that ever happened, just that nobody ever wrote it down, recorded it or said it on a television show with a published transcription. As you may have guessed, the problem stems from my use of the qualifiers “legitimate, serious and timely.” I deeply regret my error and apologize for any agony this may have caused your delicate hearts and minds.

*My reference to having a staff is no longer operative. I’ve searched through my records and I can find no record of their existence. I apologize for the confusion.

Most of you probably already know that everybody’s favorite dog loving drama queen and total creampuff, Rick Santorum, had to admit to being a lying sack of shit today. Whatever, this is just too delicious to ignore:

Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum’s office acknowledged yesterday that it cannot locate public statements of the senator questioning the Iraq war, despite the senator’s claim last week that he has publicly expressed his concerns.

But Santorum said that doesn’t mean he hasn’t made the comments.

In an interview last week, he said he had publicly and privately raised questions about efforts to contain the insurgency and to limit Baathist involvement in the new Iraqi government. He made his remarks in response to a charge by his leading Democratic challenger, Robert P. Casey Jr., that Santorum has failed to “ask the tough questions” about Iraq.

Robert L. Traynham, Santorum’s spokesman, said a search of Nexis, a news database, and the office’s press clippings had not turned up any account of those comments. He noted, however, that the office’s records are incomplete because the office is unable to record everything the senator says.

“I do a lot of interviews on TV, on radio, with print reporters who don’t happen to write everything I say,” Santorum said yesterday. “The fact that it hasn’t turned up in print doesn’t mean I haven’t said it.”

I can’t even believe that those lazy bastards in the press didn’t happen to write down Queen Rick’s concerns about the Administration’s handling of the insurgency. The nerve of some people! This revelation is particularly galling due to the fact that so many other Republican politicians have come forward with legitimate, serious and timely questions about our nation’s war effort in Iraq (how does one write the sound of wind blowing through a ghost town?).

It’s a little late to join a party that’s already a few years old, but I guess it’s nice to see little Rick claim, falsely and proactively, to have had some stake in the concerns of those less delusional than himself. For a lie poorly told, I’d say Rick deserves a milkbone cookie and a crisp pat on the ass.

I’ll add that our dog loving creampuff, Rick Santorum, isn’t just lying like a sack of shit to the press, he’s doing it to his own constituents too. Matt tells the tale of being reassured by Queen Rick’s office that “at no time has the FBI used its authority to request records from libraries or bookstores. ” As it turns out, Rick was lying to Matt. Personally, I blame Matt’s recent foray into moral divergence on this incident. Let’s just all hope the poor kid recovers.

Anyway, the really depressing part of this isn’t even the unhinged madness reguarly displayed by my senator, though that is indeed painful. No, the depressing part is yet to come. The gut punch is going to come just a year from November, when Casey has his ass handed to him in the general and loses to Santorum by 5 (20?) points. On that note, have a nice day!

I don’t tend to worry about these sorts of things, but reading about PGW’s plan to ship hypercompressed liquid natural gas up the Delaware to Port Richmond gives me some pause.

Experts have said that an explosion or terrorist attack on an LNG ship could unleash a pool of fire on the river with heat so intense, it would blister the skin of people a mile away.

As ACM says, I certainly hope that image is plastered in the minds of the regulators who will decide whether or not to allow this plan to go forward. If it does happen, I certainly hope that the people designing the safety procedures have that image burned in their minds, because a lot of people live within a mile of the Delaware.

Just another success story in George Bush’s global war on stability and reason. The Independent:

The speaker of the fledgling Iraqi parliament has announced a 24-hour extension to talks over the country’s new constitution on a day of renewed sectarian infighting that left at least 40 people dead.

Hajim al-Hassani declared the second extension to negotiations shortly after the midnight deadline. “We found that time was late and we saw that the matters will need another day in order to reach results that please everyone, ” he said.

The chaos inside the new legislature continued against the background of another surge in violence.

The latest bloodshed ­ including the deaths of 13 policemen and an American ­ came after dozens of masked gunmen occupied parts of Baghdad. President Jalal Talabani escaped an assassination attempt in which eight of his bodyguards were killed and 15 injured. In further evidence of sectarian unrest, the bodies of 36 men, thought to be Kurds, were found in a dry river bed near the Iranian border at Badrah. They had been “executed” with shots to the head.

And still some question the sanity of those who question this madness. I can’t even begin to fathom the mindset. Objective reality does exist, doesn’t it?

I never knew my friend Matt had such a dirty mind. Heavens! Needless to say, Matt won’t be receiving the sort of praise I reserve for upstanding gentlemen like Dave any time soon.

I made a mistake tonight. Truth be told I made a number, but that’s none of your business, so let’s focus on just one. I have to admit that I’m not as up on my who’s who of hack punditry as I ought to be, so when I saw this diagram of Donald Luskin oil price predictions I became curious about this Luskin fellow and Googled him. When I first glanced at his personal website I thought I had come across a very cruel parody of some delusional, misguided freak. Even now, I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t a parody, but I’m always willing to play the fool.

I won’t link to it, but I’d like you bastards to have a look just for giggles. Click on this link and then click on the very first link listed in the search results (the crap about the conspiracy)..

That’s my perfectly unqualified response to the question Billmon asks in the title of his post Is Anybody Listening? My gut reaction was to say no, but I think that doesn’t give enough credit to people who are genuinely concerned, so I hedged.

In the post, Billmon focuses on Safia Taleb al-Souhail, Iraq’s ambassador to Egypt who was used, willingly, as prop in last February’s State of the Union Address. Given that the draft Iraq constitution appears to establish something not entirely unlike an Islamic theocracy, hostile to woman’s rights, Al-Souhail is feeling a bit queasy about the mess that is Iraq and the mess that is Bush.

This story is much deeper than one woman’s change of heart about all, or even a little, that is Bush. Should the Iraq constitution result in something less spectacular than a full blown civil war, will anybody, but a few notice that our nation has sold another down the river by replacing oppression and brutality with more of the same? Can that compete with the heart warming madness of the staged embrace between a grieving Marine’s mother and a woman who believed her nation might soon be free from brutality because the most powerful man on earth told her so?

No, not really. We are just that far gone.

It’s a little disconcerting, though strangely reassuring, to find details about what you were doing last night posted on the internets. In reality, this sort of thing may turn out to be a useful service for those of us might, for whatever reason, have trouble recalling that sort of thing. For instance, when you find yourself confronted by your significant other with the question “what did you do last night?” you might be able to answer with something more satisfying than “great question,” if somebody was nice enough to write about your doings.

With that in mind, I’d like to tell you that for the hour or so that I had my eyes on him, Dave behaved like a perfect gentleman. I heard him say nothing crass and his anecdotes were nothing if not witty. Indeed, to the best of my recollection, nary a vulgarity passed his lips and he dressed smartly. I’d even go so far as to say that he did his family and his ancestors proud. Keep up the good work kiddo!

On a completely separate note, I’d like to pass along something I learned last weekend that I think you bastards might find useful. If you should find yourself invited to a social event at somebody’s apartment, it’s considered bad form to berate and yell at the other guests. Don’t say nobody ever told you, because I just did.

That might not be such good news after all. You may well have been left behind and didn’t even realize it. If so, this doesn’t bode well for you in the afterlife. By the way, I’m way too busy for this crap. Have a nice day!

Now what on earth prompted The Associated Press to interview somebody from the Conservative Cato Institution for a story on obesity? As you might imagine, the Cato hack promptly loses control of his ability to restrain himself and calls for “private accounts.”

Balko said it’s not clear the government really knows how to persuade people to make better decisions. He said open-ended entitlement programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare, don’t provide much of a financial incentive for people to watch their weight. The government just picks up the cost of treating diseases for those patients, regardless of the amounts, he said.

He prefers that the government give Medicaid and Medicare recipients an incentive to open medical savings accounts, which would allow them to save money when they did not access the health care system.

Now what the hell is something like that doing in a story titled Obesity Rates Up in Most States? Are proper diet, regular exercise and privatization government services really the three keys to maintaining healthy body weight?

If I were to write that a certain politician was a sandwich bag filled with lukewarm Vaseline and crushed Valium, would you know who I was referring to? I’m just curious because I used that phrase earlier this evening and a friend of mine told me I should write more like the way I speak. This is all a learning process and it’s difficulty to find the right or the comfortable boundaries. I’m certainly more muted and respectful on the site than I am in person, but should this be so? As an example , when public figures can behave like this or this, is there really any reason for any of us to hold anything back?

And then there is this from Digsby:

I think most liberals’ first priority at this point is to remove the Republicans from sole power and many in the Democratic netroots have come to the political conclusion that we will only do that if we speak truth to power. The immoderate tone that thrills the netroots is not just for emotional satisfaction; it is a political strategy for beating the opposition.

I think that many in the netroots are no different than the vast majority of Americans everywhere. Policy is seen through a heuristic prism of impressions, image and preconceptions. Very few people are engaged in politics as a purely intellectual debate about the actual efficacy of one policy over another. Most people, even most smart people, make their political decisions based on a whole range of perceptions, only a few of which are based on strict reason.

…Will our “shrillness” help or hurt the party? I think the netroots believes it’s time to try a message that has a little more heat than lukewarm water. The establishment, still smarting from their seminal loss in 1972, is scared to death of anything that resembles real passion. Far more than a serious division in the party over specific policy, that, I think is the real fault line. What kind of politics — not policies — do the Democrats think will win?

This is a struggle for some of us - I know it is for me. My own voice, when I really speak, can be quite shrill and immoderate , but I tend to shy away from that sort of thing on this site. I’ve found, to my surprise, that I sometimes reserve my harshest criticism for other Democrats. I think the reason for that is a combination of living in a town controlled by an inept where it counts Democratic machine and thinking that my fellow Democrats really ought to know better than to ever roll over for the Bush administration.

This is a frustrating reality to live in if you hold a certain set of beliefs. The Democratic party has no control over the direction of this country and its official organs often don’t really seem all that interested in gaining that power. People with whom I tend to agree do not make policy decisions - ever. The people who do make those decision have been proven inept to the core and their values often do not reflect even the very basic trappings of decency. That may be a good enough reason to throw the comfortable, but harmless lukewarm Vaseline and crushed Valium to the pavement and be a little shrill.