Kurkuk

The medic for this site is going on R&R so I got sent up here to fill in. My clinic is slower and the camp is smaller so a new medic is handling mine while I'm here. The trip up was pretty uneventful except for the Russian flight crew having to change a tire on the charter plane. Seems they had one blow out when it landed in Tikrit. We stood on the runway watching- I swear I wouldn't have been surprised if one of them had grabbed one of the others by the nose and started leading him around while yelling "Whoop, whoop, whoop" and smacking his head like the Three Stooges.

They got it changed though and we flew to BIAP and then traveled to Victory. I was really surprised by how smoothly it went; my previous experiences there had been awful as it had been crowded as hell. The last time was of course in July when the airport had been shut down by the security company going on strike. The Baghdad airport looked cleaner this time and was slightly more efficient. It could really use some updating though- the color schemes and the phone booths that look like helmets out of the movie Space Balls are pretty goofy.

Of course nothing says welcome to a new location like incoming fire and last night was no exception. I collected an hour’s worth of “Bunker bucks” (pay for sitting in a bunker after work hours) as they call it after a rocket exploded; seems there were at least two but the second didn’t explode. The EOD guys found it this morning and blew it in place. I really wish the bad guys would quit this crap.

So, in other Iraq news, I met a really nice Major here who is almost infectious with his enthusiasm working with the locals. He has an Iraqi counterpart who is apparently well liked locally and together they go about the surrounding towns and villages doing good deeds such as small scale civil engineering projects, medical checkups, handing out food and other gifts, etc. He believes it is having a positive effect as they get more tips on the bad guys and more locals seem to be interested in talking to them about how to open businesses including getting loans. With the national unemployment running over 30% putting people back to work is a prime goal here. They are also working to get the religious leaders to sit down and talk to each other.

I should be back at my site in a couple of weeks. A few weeks more and I am out of here! I’m still waiting to hear back from the admissions counselor at the school I’m trying to get into but hopefully that will go well.

Having your cake...

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It’s an old expression but one that has shown to be timeless.

The moonbats are screaming for the president's head (again); the reason this time is a slow response to the hurricane victims plight. Of course they are also screaming about the president bringing in the military, abuse of power, how this presidency has taken away more of our rights under the Homeland Security Act, etc.

Now I’m not going to sit here and say I think that the government needs to be given more power- I certainly don’t, but which is it folks? Do you want the government to be able to provide you with more services or don’t you? As the people continue to demand more from the government they are going to have to give up more to the government.

Personally I prefer my freedoms and as such believe that I and I alone am responsible for myself. That doesn’t mean I don’t need other people, just that I accept the responsibility to take care of myself without expecting others to do it for me.

Think about it folks, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

The man-made disaster in New Orleans

I thought this was worth reading (I wish I was smart enough to have written it myself but alas I'm not):

TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
By Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades.
Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed; they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion.
They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in
America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on. "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened
Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

"'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets, she said. They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will."

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News
Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America.
"The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city
corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

Sick... and New Orleans

Well after fourteen months overseas it finally caught me- the Iraqi crud or whatever you want to call it, the typical upper respiratory infection that everyone seems to get not long after they get here or return from R&R.

I felt lucky to have not had it before, chalking it up to a strong immune system from dealing with so many sick folks for so long. We’ve been having a run of it on camp again lately and maybe I’m stressed or my diet contributed but I managed to catch it. Phlegm, sinus congestion, cough, etc. I started a Z-pack yesterday along with some decongestants- I hate taking any drugs though.

I feel like a slacker since I slept in this morning instead of working out but my head hurts and I’m hacking.


On other topics, I keep reading the news along with people’s reactions to the storm aftermath. Let me say this up front- I feel bad for the truly good folks who have lost everything and had their lives devistated- I can only imagine how hard this must be. It’s distressing to see how poorly people are handling this though; it’s embarrassing on a lot of levels. After reading a lot of non-mainstream news sources, I’m not that disappointed in the way the gov handled things although it looks like Bush could have been more visible. The whiny mayor and governor on the other hand should both be fired for their actions- or lack thereof as it appears to be.

As for the flooding, that whole area along the Mississippi has had the same problems for years- a few years ago FEMA finally started telling folks they couldn’t rebuild in some of the areas because of the continual flooding. My opinion is that New Orleans has always been a lost cause- it’s below sea level, built on marshes and has been sinking for years. Building levees is a band aid patch to a problem that we can’t fix- poor planning by early peoples compounded by continued poor planning and poor understanding of riverine systems though the middle of last century.

For those of you have never worked any sort of “critical event” I can tell you that all of the planning in the world is great until the event actually happens. I’ve been part of planning, drills and actual small scale events and things just do not go as planned. I’ve worked shelters and most of the people who show up at them are not the sort you would want to have over to cook out and have a beer with. Every shelter we ever opened had folks taking advantage of the situation, stealing, and complaining that not enough was being done to help them.

There has never been an event of this magnitude in the US. There is no way that you can expect the gov to have immediately gotten the situation under control. Had people actually heeded the warning and evacuated there would be far fewer problems- I realize that many were physically unable but that still leaves a lot who could have. The federal government also has to give the local/state government a chance to handle situations first (the rivalries that you see on TV between local and federal officials really do exist). The locals are the ones who should have emergency response plans drafted; they are the ones who are tasked with knowing not only the areas and potential problems but also what resources are available and where those resources are. We had plans that listed everything from how many drugs stores were in the county to what heavy equipment was available at private companies, how many gas station there were and how much fuel they generally maintained on hand. Now bear in mind that you have to figure some of this will not be available at any given time so you have to sort through it and figure out what is actually able to be put into service.

The logistics of this are as mind boggling as the amount of variables. If the people still there had any decency about them instead of acting like wild animals they could be working to improve the situation instead of making it so much worse. There is a huge lack of communications that is contributing- towers are down, there is no power to recharge batteries, different frequencies, etc.

I think the main problem though is that people have no since of responsibility for their own selves. How long has the federal government been telling people that they need to always have a certain amount of supplies on hand? There is no excuse to not have a weeks worth of food sitting in your house. This should be common sense but as we have noted, common sense is anything but common anymore. Remember Civil Defense? It wasn’t just for a Soviet nuclear attack, it was for any type of problem.

Maybe I’m just weird because I actually paid attention to my relatives growing up, but I took to heart their stories about being responsible for yourself and your family as well as the Boy Scout motto of “Be Prepared”. My mother’s side of the family is all from the coast where they expected hurricanes and tropical storms and prepared for them. My mother just carried that over and has always taught us to keep extra supplies on hand. We don’t have hurricanes where I’m from but we do have ice storms that knock out the power. I’ve never had to worry too much about it though as I’ve always kept extra food and camping supplies on hand. I’ve always been able to help my neighbors out during these times.

Does that make me paranoid? No, just realistic to the fact that any interruption of the supply infrastructure is felt quickly and I want to be able to take care of myself and those I care about. The sad part here is that we see this every time there is even a brief interruption and still folks don’t learn- look at all the folks who rush out to buy what they perceive to be needed supplies anytime we have a storm. Even sadder- look at what they buy and how quickly the local stores run out of those items.

Again, the only bright side I can see to this is that maybe folks will start to see that they need to take some responsibility for their own lives and it will inspire more demands for more energy efficiency with folks seeing the advantages behind the Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle campaign- I doubt it, but it would be nice. Maybe more folks will take to riding bicycles and other efficient forms of transportation like motorcycles and scooters (which would have the added benefit of hopefully making them safer drivers with more of them on the road). I know that I will probably be looking at buying a motorcycle for commuting when I get back.

I've been trying to be upbeat and all that but this just reinforces what I've kinda thought for a while. I don't know what the answers are, just that things need to change and change soon or we're going to start picking up speed on that downhill slide.

If all this makes me seem a cold and callous bastard then so be it, but I believe that, just as you can’t love others without first loving yourself, we can’t really help others without helping ourselves and our country needs a lot of help right now.

I'm just a rambling fool and this is just my two cents worth.................

I don’t need no stinkin’ Nomex suit on because I have thick skin and am not easily offended.

Katrina

There's a lot I'd like to say about this event, I've actually written some of it down, but I know it won't go over well with some people. It's my blog site and I can post what I want but I just don't feel like listening to some of the comments I know I'd get. I may post them later....