Bulldozer Oil Tanks
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, covered the trials and traumas of New Orleans during the storm and after and won a Peabody Award and three Emmys.
I say Lee Gives America its voice because he gives the still-ailing New Orleans the opportunity for its people to speak on the myriad issues that face them, which also face America. First on the BP oil disaster, on the destruction of the fishing industry, whose catch comprises 40 percent of America?s fish supply; on the oil-coated waters, whose offshore drilling comprises 20 percent of America?s natural gas and oil; and of course, on the dead sea life, the blighted marshlands, the soiled fowl, the scarred beaches; and on the lie that a well that is capped for one day can make 75 percent of the pollution gone the next; and on the voice that describes the explosion of the wellhead like a bag of fire incinerating its victims, the voices of a one-armed survivor and a two-fisted reporter.
Lee?s cast of truly real people embrace the issues of poverty, poor health, a failing medical and psychological care system, a public school system being rapidly privatized, with an administration that doesn?t see its black students and their issues clearly. What with the trauma these kids bear, the ubiquitous violence they experience, the fact that New Orleans has become the US city with the most murders is almost no surprise. Lee?s documentary in fact is the antidote to Reality TV, America. Take it upon yourself to see this, to make a regimen for your own understanding of life and its possibilities, of the need to pay attention beyond the pure pursuit of your own pleasure.
Nor does the New Orleans Police Department fare much better in the face of this chaos, with visual stories of them killing a retarded man, carrying another dead man in his old car to burn his body and car behind a police station, then remove the skull bones to crack them into pieces and scatter the evidence. The Big Easy is in trouble from every angle, a microcosm of America. And one of the largest trials against law-enforcement in an American city has occurred to help set New Orleans PD on its feet again to protect people, not kill them.
Nobel prize-winning libertarian economist F.A. Hayek famously wrote that the great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law. There is no better example of this fundamental struggle than Rosa Parks, known today as The Mother of the Freedom Movement.
She refused to be treated as a second-class citizen. But her hometown of Montgomery, Ala., segregated blacks on public transits. Minorities were forced to sit in the back, forced to give up their seats to whites, and sometimes were left standing on the side of the road after paying their fare. Rosa stood up to the Big Government Bullies and said enough is enough. Her demand for equality before the law forever transformed America.
Indeed, she made the world a better place. So how despicable is it that today officials in her old hometown are forcing people to give up their homes? The government is tearing down houses against the property owners will and then sticking them with the bill.
Imagine you come home from work one day to a notice on your front door that you have 45 days to demolish your house, or the city will do it for you. Oh, and youre paying for it.
'The Mother of the Freedom Movement,' Her Neighborhood Needs YOUR Help - Big Government (blog)
Roger Ebert is nothing if he isn’t a knee-jerk leftist, absolutely without a single original political or cultural thought in his head and his latest meandering post on the Sun-Times hosted Roger Ebert’s Journal is a perfect example. His piece is titled “ Ten things I know about the mosque ” but it doesn’t seem like there really are ten things. One is tempted to believe that the only reason he posted it was to find an excuse to attack Sarah Palin.
Plus, in essence, he calls Palin a liar by assuming that some right-wing “anonymous genius” is writing all her Tweets and Facebook posts. Ebert has to reach into the dim corners of his conspiracy-laden mind for that one because there is no hint anywhere in the rest of the world that Palin isn’t writing her own stuff. It’s just Ebert’s hatred of Palin informing his belief that she’s too stupid to put two words together.
America is the one “missing” an opportunity with the Ground Zero Mosque. We should bend over backwards for Imam Rauf so we can “showcase” our “Constitutional freedoms,” Ebert insists. We should allow the mosque because it is these Muslim’s right to build it at Ground Zero.
Ebert does have a good point on the mistake of planning a mosque near Ground Zero, though. But once again he mars what could be a good point with left-wing talking points.
Why has Lebanon ended up as the graveyard of so many invaders? Israelis used to say in the 1960s that one of their military bands would be enough to conquer the country. Sometimes, prior to Israel and Egypt agreeing a peace in 1979, they would add archly that I dont know which will be the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, but I do know the name of the second. The idea was that Lebanon, only the size of Wales and its population divided by communal, sectarian and party hatreds, would inevitably be a pushover for the greatest military power in the Middle East. Lebanons Maronite Christian minority was an obvious ally for Israel against the forces of Arab nationalism. The well-earned reputation of the Lebanese for commercial ingenuity and capacity to survive in all circumstances suggested that they would be the last people to die in the last ditch fighting an overwhelmingly powerful enemy.
Such a picture of future relations between Israel and Lebanon, and the inevitable dominance of the former, sounded likely enough forty years ago. In reality it turned out that the best day for anybody invading or even interfering in Lebanon is usually the first, after which their prospects begin to sour. So it was with Israel. Within a few years of the Israeli invasion of 1982 Israeli soldiers returning home would throw themselves to the ground to kiss Israeli soil as soon as they crossed the border, thankful only to have made it back alive. When the last Israeli troops withdrew in 2000 from the slice of territory they still held in south Lebanon they stole away in the middle of the night, abandoning their local Christian allies to triumphant Hizbullah guerrillas.
For long one of the most perceptive correspondents in the Middle East, Hirst says that his decision to write this book followed the 33-day war in July and August 2006 when Israel rained explosives on Lebanon in a vain bid to cripple Hizbullah. An ill-organized ground invasion was equally fruitless, achieving nothing other than deflating Israels reputation for military invincibility. What was meant to be a demonstration of strength notably by the Israeli air force turned into an almost comic illustration of ineffectuality. Hirst asks how this could have happened. Could it even be said, he wonders, that Lebanon, the eternal victim has now become the perpetrator too, posing no less a threat to greater states than they habitually posed to it? He is too intelligent to quite go along with the post-war claim by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, that his Jihadist fighters had won a divine victory transforming Lebanon from being one of the small states of the Middle East into one of its great powers. But he has no doubt that Israel, having gone to war to re-establish its own deterrent power, succeeded only in undermining it.
The explanation for Israels failure in Lebanon, not just in 2006 but over the previous three decades, is important because American interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia have followed a similar trajectory. It is scarcely news that small states are more dangerous than they look. Hirst takes his title from a remark by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in a letter to a friend in 1870 saying Beware of small states. Bakunin meant that small states were not only vulnerable to a strong and predatory neighbor, but that these neighbors would pay a price for involving themselves in the complex affairs of their victims. Half a century earlier the Duke of Wellington made a similar point, warning Britain against getting entangled in what at first glance appeared to be small-scale conflicts, saying Great powers do not have small wars. This is as obvious in the 21st century as it was in the 19th and is as true of Iraq today as it was of Lebanon 150 years ago. The rivalries of imperial powers exacerbate the conflict between their local proxies, but this is a two-way street. As the Ottoman empire disintegrated in Lebanon in the 19th century the British backed the Druze and the French supported the Maronites. If one man hits another, a local chieftain complained, the incident becomes an Anglo-French affair, and there might even be trouble between the countries if a cup of coffee gets spilled on the ground. The same happens today except now the rivals are Israel and Syria, neither of which can afford to let the other win uncontested control of the country.
EWING * Assaults: On Monticello Avenue at 2:48 a.m. Aug. 11, three stepsisters were fighting. One suffered a minor injury to her leg. * Fraud: Fraudulent deposits were made to a victim’s TD Bank account using fraudulent checks, then money was withdrawn from ATMs using the victim’s card. Over $2,000 was taken. Victim suspects a female he was staying with in Ewing.
EWING * Assaults: On Monticello Avenue at 2:48 a.m. Aug. 11, three stepsisters were fighting. One suffered a minor injury to her leg. * Fraud: Fraudulent deposits were made to a victim’s TD Bank account using fraudulent checks, then money was withdrawn from ATMs using the victim’s card. Over $2,000 was taken. Victim suspects a female he was staying with in Ewing. * Larceny, Theft: On Aug. 10, a victim who lives on Prospect Street reported that a witness told him that at about 11 p.m. Monday, he saw two black males drive to the rear property of the victim in a blue and white GMC pickup truck.
They got out and cut an opening in a fence that surrounds the property, then began to dismantle a commercial refrigerator and a commercial freezer that was inside the yard. They appeared to be taking the parts for scrap.
After the witness approached the suspects, they drove off. The owner of the property, after being told of the crime, called police. Report filed.
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