I cook regularly with habaneros and bonnet peppers (which are even hotter). I'm very careful about washing my hands and any implements after touching them, but by and large don't find it a problem at all. On the other hand I'm a smoker and a guitarist, so my lungs, throat and fingers probably have sufficient scar tissue to deal with most of the "heat".
It really is very easy. All you have to do is start from the premises that George W Bush is a "good guy", that anyone who opposes the "good guys" is a "bad guy", and a "good Guy" must do as much as they can to oppose "bad guys". Once you do that it all makes perfect sense so long as you are arrogant enough to override all othet moral considerations with a morality based on yourself as the ethical centre of the universe.
Onserve any two year old. Assume the same level of moral maturity. Apply to any situation and Bush's responses generally make perfect sense. Perfect two year old sense mind you.
Tomli: I would guess the reason for choosing the Superdome and the Conference Centre was that most residents of New Orleans would be able to find them easily. The refuges didn't just need to be safe, they also had to be well known. HAving thousands of people wandering around lost as a huricane approaches probably isn't a great idea.
I notice that Dubya is calling on Americans to respond to Hurricane Katrina with the spirit of 9/11. So I assume we will imminently see war declared on the weather and Castro given 48 hours to either prove he's not stockpiling winds or to get out of Cuba.
Back in my twenties I walked both into and out of the centre of London several times. To Caterham in Surrey and from Watford. Both walks of around twenty miles. Both done carrying nothing. For some years I regularly used to walk ten miles in AND out of town from the suburb I lived in.
I'm pretty sure I know what walking far enough from New Orleans to have avoided the hurricane would have entailed in good weather and carrying nothing. I'd not even make an attempt at it these days. I don't think anyone under the age of 12 would have had a chance of managing it. I don't believe there are many who could manage it carrying much more than a change of clothes.
Which doesn't mean that nobody could have managed it, but does mean that it was a better bet for most people wiuthout transport to seek shelter within the city.
This is all starting to read like bad SF
I'm not so sure, I find it all very reminiscent of Dhalgren. So perhaps it's excellent SF.
I don't think the governmental response is best analysed in terms of conscious conspiracy. The problem is the inherent contradictionn in their approach to governing. They are elitists by nature, and mostly control freaks, yet they believe in small government and individual freedom of choice. The former being gut reaction and the latter being an intellectual position.
So whilst there is no crisis they do what they can to starve the system of resources so that people will step in and replace government activities with private enterprise and charity. Then the moment there is a crisis they attempt to deal with it by controlling as much as possible.
That gives a situation where woefully inadequate resources are in place and in the charge of people instructed to control as much as possible.
The system might work if they were prepared to loosen the reigns in the way they profess to favour. It would also work if they gave it the necessary resources. As it stands it has to be a mess.
However they are elitists and see themselves as the elite. They are also largely "people of faith". What they have an awful lot of faith in is the idea that no matter what the evidence they are always right simply because they are the elite. So the mess can't be their fault. It must be down to other people behaving badly. So they attempt to impose control more forcefully.
Of course when it's al; over they will look at the evidence and decide that it proves that government is always inefficient and they'll do more to slim it down so that they can make an even bigger mess of the next crisis.
They are doing the best they can. It's not their fault that they are self important, prejudiced, arrogant, greedy, irresponsible fools. Is it?
Fortunately over here our equivalents have managed to produce their own internal crises and are busy self destructing. Sadly what has replaced them isn't as much better as we'd hoped.
Is there any part of the media—print, TV, whatever—that is capable of self- examination and can see this?
No, at least not often. For a case in point take a look at coverage of the furore in the UK over Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, "comparing a journalist to a nazi war criminal". Early on a couple of newspapers printed a fairly full transcript of the exchange. In fact what Livingstone did was point out that the excuse "I was only doing my job" was used by concentration camp guards and war criminals at Nuremburg. However yo wouldn't know that from any of the later coverage. Every single journalist in the UK seems to think that they only issue is Livingstone's comments. They do this because the alternative would be to accept that journalists should be held to the normal standards of manners that the rest of us are.
One of the problems is that having TV news 24/7 means a never ending search for excitement and controversy. So we get to see the exciting and emotive footage, we get to hear the controversial comments, but we rarely get a journalist following the details of a story all the way through. It takes too long and there's almost always some new exciting footage to show instead.
Newspapers should be dealing with this. I don't know how it's working in the USA, but over here they mostly seem to be ducking the challenge or dealing with only one partisan side of the story.
I keep getting the impression that this is some sort of parallel universe thing. I see TV pictures of the devastation and interviews with ordinary people and I see one universe, then it's journalists in studios and politicians and they are discussing some other universe entirely. I'd love to know how TV pictures from that other universe are breaking through into ours and I'd like to know which of the two I'm living in.
It's a repeating pattern. "Nobody could have forseen...". Meaning that a whole bunch of people predicted something that the right didn't want to believe but could safely be discounted since they were obviously only making the prediction in order to cause trouble.
If I was told last week that London would be flooded within a few days then I could not have left the city. I didn't have the train fare or the bus fare and I wasn't physically capable of walking or cycling any distance. For the next few days I would be able to get out of town, but there won't be enough money again by next weekend.
"Louisiana, Louisiana, they're trying to wash us away, they're trying to wash us away" - Randy Newman "Louisiana 1927.
The song I can't get out of my head at the moment.
Firstly, people seem to misunderstand what Michael Brown's job is. As head of FEMA he has not been appaointed to deal with the emergencies following a natural disaster. He was appointed to cut the budget of FEMA at every opportunity whilst doing his best to get good PR for the administration. So far as I can see he'd done his job very effectively. To the extent that he's got rid of such unnecessary things as radio equipment to allow FEMA staff to communicate in situations where land lines and cell phones are not available. This is, from the administration's POV a feature and not a bug. As is the fact that the people who are likely to die as a result will largely not be Republican voters.
"Some people got lost in the flood, some people they was alright." Louisiana 1927 again.
There's another thing that strikes me is typical of the current US administration (and something it has in common with the government here in the UK). The whole system seems to be built around staying "on message". This leads to a President surrounded by people who are determined to say only what he wants to hear. The pattern devolves down the scale and you end up with everyone hoping for the best and ignoring anything unpleasant. Since it's also run by people who put a premium on being "people of faith", you also have all this being done by people who are psychologically attuned to believing their assumptions even in the face of contradictory evidence. This makes it VERY hard for them to anticipate and prepare for problems, and it makes them slow to recognise when something is going wrong.
"President Coolidge he come down here on a railroad train, with a little fat man with a notepad in his hand. President Coolidge he say "Little fat man isn't it a shame, what the river have done to this poor cracker's land." Louisiana 1927.
Today the BBC is reporting that de Menezes had overstayed his student visa and was therefore in the country illegally. Which may explain why he ran from the police.
Of ourse now we need an explanation of why so many people are so paranoid and xenophobic that we have the utterly ridiculous immigration rules currently in place.
As ever, when one follows the chain of events through, the responsibility lies with the fact that we are all screwed up in one way or another and not doing enough to deal with that. Something that should always be borne in mind when discussing such things.
What concerns me is that it isn't the first time the Met have made this sort of screw up in the Stockwell area. There have been a couple of other incidents where unarmed men were shot largely due to armed officers being put in the position of having to act rapidly without all the information they should have had. I'd hope to see somebody reasonably high up locally being fingered by the PCC, because it's turning into a consistent pattern of mistakes.
It was in Stockwell. It's not the first time armed police have killed somebody in the area by any stretch of the imagination. As a local I don't like it but don't find it shocking, though it would probably have upset me had I been there.
It doesn't seem at first sight that there was any impropriety on the part of the police. We'll find out when the PCA enquiry is publihed.
The police seem to have treated the scenes as if there was a serious possibility of further explosions, which implies they believe that it's a case of the detonators failing to set off the bombs. The BBC is reporting that a bomb disposal squad are examining a rucksack left on the bus in Bethnal Green. Two men were arrested at UCH but one was released later. I would guess that means they have the Warren Street culprit.
It's not going to be easy to get much definitive information for a while. At least one suspect is in custody so there's nigh on the certainty of a trial. As a consequence I don't expect the police to reveal very mcuh at all so as not to take any risks with the prosecution.
All in all I suspect Al Qaeda are regretting the decision to outsource the jihad to India.
I shall be using the tube next Thursday and would really appreciate it if any terrorists reading this could avoid bombing the Bakerloo line in the interim.
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