Minor Wisdom

Tsunami aid workers shocked by N.O. post-Katrina

The following story by Bill Capo of WWLTV.com, published last week, speaks for itself:

Two leaders of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights who have spent the last 18 months helping victims of last year’s Tsunami took a walk through the Lower Ninth Ward Friday.

Their reaction was one of shock, because they said they expected to see more signs of recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

“We think of America as being this fabulous, powerful superpower, and it’s exactly like Third World situations,” said Tom Kerr.

“In my personal opinion, I think you should have done much, much faster. It should be much better than what I have seen today,” said Samsook Boonyabancha.

...

"The fact that the relief and the support for people who live here is so minimal even though there is so much money in this country, it's really shocking," said Kerr.

Their conclusion: hurricane victims face far more red tape from government and private industry than do the survivors of the tsunami.

In another news story published five days ago in the Gulf Times of Qatar,¹ Kerr is quoted as saying that the Lower 9th Ward looks “a lot like Aceh [Indonesia] six months after the tsunami.”

(Hat tip trail: Wet Bank Guide, via Your Right Hand Thief.)
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¹ The story was apparently not picked up by any American media outlets besides WWL.

Darfur tragedy spreading to neighboring Chad

Yesterday, Amnesty International released this report:

A new human rights tragedy is unfolding today in the eastern part of Chad. It is a direct product of the long-running crisis in Sudan’s neighbouring Darfur region, where the Janjawid, funded by the Sudanese government, have been attacking and systematically displacing those ethnic groups associated with Sudanese armed groups opposed to the Sudanese government. In Darfur, the Janjawid, often assisted by the Sudanese air force, caused the forcible displacement of some 2 million people and many thousands of deaths. These ruthless, mobile fighters have now extended their activities into eastern Chad. There, they have targeted a diverse range of ethnic groups who identify themselves and are identified by others as "African" rather than "Arab." The Janjawid have stolen the cattle that are their main source of wealth, driven them from their homes and villages, and killed or dispersed their inhabitants.

...

Since September 2005, Janjawid attacks into eastern Chad have caused the forcible displacement of between 50,000 and 75,000 people. Many of these people remain in Chad as internally displaced, but at least 15,000, cut off from safer means of escape, have fled into Darfur, despite the continuing conflict and disruption there. Those displaced have virtually no access to humanitarian assistance and, in Chad at least, people who have been internally displaced have congregated in informal camps where often they remain exposed to the threat of further attack.

To see AI's video of eyewitness accounts, click here.

Are you now reading an "enemy of thought"?

There's an intriguing article by Alan Jacobs on Christianity Today titled Goodbye Blog: The friend of information but the enemy of thought. Jacobs argues that "the particular architecture of the blogosphere is the chief impediment to its becoming a place where new ideas can be deployed, tested, and developed." The problem: the immediacy of blog communication — instant posting, instant commenting — does not allow time for the development of thought. Too many of us read, react, and write comments conveying our reaction. Jacobs draws a comparison between today's blogosphere and another advance in communication technology:

As I think about these architectural deficiencies, and the deficiencies of my own character, I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as "that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation." For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, "could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure." Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.

On a smaller scale, the same problems afflict the intellectual and moral environments of the blogs. There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies like rss), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely conversations.

(Hat tip to Mirror of Justice.)

A blogging trick I just taught myself

This one is for bloggers. Let's say you post an entry that refers back to a previous entry, as I did here. And let's say you want the older entry to link forward to the newer entry. You could manually edit the older entry to add a postscript link to the newer entry. But today, one of those cartoon lightbulbs lit directly over my cranium: Why not send a trackback to the older entry, and let the software generate the forward-looking link? As explained here, we normally send trackbacks to other blogs. But is there any reason why you can't send a trackback to your own blog? On TypePad at least, there isn't.

Transvestite crime wave

Some Dennis Rodman wannabes are plaguing Magazine Street. Gangs of transvestites are descending on boutiques, stealing thousands of dollars worth of fashion accessories. No, this item is not from the Onion; it's from New Orleans CityBusiness.

Somehow, I get the sense that criminals like these don't exist in places like Minneapolis.

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

Last summer before Katrina, Ernie Svenson showed me a copy of his favorite periodical, Modern Drunkard Magazine. I was reminded of the magazine when Ernie posted something about it the other day, including a link to the MDM web site. The site includes a page titled Wino Wisdom, which is close enough to "Minor Wisdom" that I thought I should study it. I found an item there, quoted below, that reminded me of something I wrote last month — I must say the drunk's quotation is pithier than my writing:

The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The drunk says, "Are you gonna drink that?"

Robert G. eschewing the philosophical for the practical.

Attention Saints' season-ticket owners

I know that with Reggie Bush and a new coaching staff, Saints fans have high hopes for the upcoming season. But just in case the Saints' season is, uh, typical, you folks with seats in the terrace will want to bookmark this web page. (Hat tip to Electronic Ephemera.)

Air Torture

Jim Kunstler recently wrote about torturous air travel. But some air travelers have worse experiences. Even worse, U.S. taxpayers pay the air fare.

Minimum-wage earners poorer now than any time since 1955

According to a joint report from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the buying power of the federal minimum wage is now at its lowest point since 1955. In other words, today's working poor are effectively poorer today than any time since 1955.

The current minimum wage, $5.15/hour, was established in September 1997. Since then, its purchasing power has dropped 20%.

For a PDF copy of the report, click here; to view it in HTML, click here.

Inspiration

I find this story inspiring. It's the story of the geeks¹ in this photo, taken in December of 1978 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The caption that typically accompanies the photo is, "Would you have invested?" If you had, you wouldn't have to work for a living today.

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¹ Used in this sense: "A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept." See Answers.com.