Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
09/05/2005 14:21 ||
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#1
That is perhaps one of the most profound and meaningful blogs I have ever read. It actually brought a tear to my eye.
As a "sheepdog" (read security officer) on one of the nation's most famous national laboratories (LBNL), I am often confronted with sheep, but few wolves. Nevertheless, these are my people and I go all out to protect them from the ravages that may come down the line.
To date, after only 2 years on the job, I have been involved in a construction accident, a fire in a user facility, a confrontation with a tresspasser, a suspected fire, and a several other fires and suspicious incidents (odor report, hard drive fire, building evac (2x), etc.).
In every one of those, I have been thanked by the Fire Dept. Capt., but criticized by my own boss or immediate supervisor (as our job is to "observe & report").
I'm a sheepdog I guess. I can't stand by and risk the idea that someone else might be harmed by my own inaction - including the guys who get paid to go into burning buildings.
I don't pat myself on the back (much). I simply tell people "It's my job" and bow out of the way to go on about my business. I don't need accolades.
It's my job.
I wish the rest of my crew or the rest of the people who worked security up here felt even halfway the same way.
#3
Outstanding. I also liked the Michael Moore article from (on or about) New Years Day (2005).
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/05/2005 19:47 Comments ||
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#4
LC FOTSGreg, I haven't yet needed to be saved, but this particular sheep thanks you on behalf of the rest. Keep up the good work -- the people who understand the need appreciate what you do.
New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country. By mid-August of this year, 192 murders had been committed in New Orleans, "nearly 10 times the national average," reported the Associated Press. Gunfire is so common in New Orleans -- and criminals so fierce -- that when university researchers conducted an experiment last year in which they had cops fire 700 blank rounds in a neighborhood on a random afternoon "no one called to report the gunfire," reported AP.
New Orleans was ripe for collapse. Its dangerous geography, combined with a dangerous culture, made it susceptible to an unfolding catastrophe. Currents of chaos and lawlessness were running through the city long before this week, and they were bound to come to the surface under the pressure of natural disaster and explode in a scene of looting and mayhem.
Like riotous Los Angeles since the 1960s, New Orleans has been a wasteland of politically correct dysfunction for decades -- public schools so obviously decimated vouchers were proposed this year (and torpedoed by the left), barbaric gangster rap culture no one will confront lest they offend liberal pieties, multiculturalist frauds who empower no one but themselves, and cops neutered by the NAACP and ACLU.
Criminals have ruled New Orleans for some time, convincing many members of the middle class, long before the hurricane, that the city was unlivable. In 1994, New Orleans was the murder capital of America. It had 421 murders that year. Criminologists predicted 300 murders this year, a projection that now looks quite conservative.
Criminals dominate their neighborhoods to the point that people don't even call in crimes. The district attorney's office, tacitly admitting that the city's law-abiding citizens live in fear, has taken the "unusual" step of establishing a local witness protection program to encourage the reporting of crime, reports AP.
According to the New Orleans Police Foundation, most murderers get off -- only 1 in 4 are convicted -- and 42 percent of cases involving serious crimes since 2002 have been dropped by prosecutors.
Meanwhile, cops, when they can get away with it, have been living out of town. It is far too scary for them and their families. New Orleans Police officers are required to live in the city but many ignore this residency requirement, according to the Times-Picayune. The paper discovered that many top-ranking New Orleans cops lived in the suburbs and that most cops, both black and white, wanted the residency requirement rescinded.
For reasons of political correctness -- critics of law enforcement say lifting the residency requirement will mean more white cops eager to brutalize residents of the inner city and fewer black cops understanding of them -- the residency requirement remains, though cops breaking the rule told the Times-Picayune that it seriously hurts recruitment. It also -- this is particularly evident in Los Angeles where cops involved in the Ramparts scandal turned out to be ex-criminals -- distorts recruitment.
If the New Orleans Police Department has appeared feeble during the chaos -- and in some cases complicit in it -- policies like the residency requirement explain the breakdown. (Perhaps another factor that has rendered the NOPD feckless in the face of a rising murder rate is the criticism of its handling of a minority Mardi Gras.) Americans who have seen cops join in the looting ask: Why are police officers behaving like criminals? Well, because PC police departments like the NOPD hire them. Aggressive, let's-just-meet-the-quota-style affirmative action has become the door through which criminals enter the police academy.
More than the physical foundations of New Orleans will need to be rebuilt over the next few years. Its politically correct culture in which pathologies are allowed to fester in the name of "progress" forms much of the debris that must be cleared away if civilization is to return to New Orleans. A city which boasts as one of its businesses memorial "death t-shirts" -- clothing made popular by the frequency of gangland slayings in New Orleans that say things like, "Born a Pimp, Died a Playa" -- was headed for collapse even without a hurricane, and had become, as the exodus of cops illustrates, unlivable.
Conservative black leaders have been mau-maued into silence whenever they tell the truth about this barbarism and call for dramatic reform. But they are the ones who must lead the city now, and the phonies at organizations like the NAACP who despite all their rhetoric haven't done a thing to help the black underclass should step aside. Hurricane Katrina has made vivid the civilizational collapse they have long tried to conceal.
George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his ruling party have had a rough nine months since the first group of Egyptians came out on the streets shouting "Enough" to 24 years of authoritarian government. But Mubarak would be wrong to think a victory in Wednesday's first contested presidential elections will silence his critics or pave the way for a smooth succession by his politician son Gamal, analysts and opposition activists say. Mubarak's many opponents will continue to contest the hasty constitutional arrangements that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) put in place this year in response to unexpected foreign and domestic pressures, they say. If they detect irregularities in the voting and counting, they will challenge the results through the legal system, casting doubt on Mubarak's legitimacy.
And the two overwhelming questions in Egyptian politics -- who will succeed Mubarak and what role should the Islamist movement play in public life -- are no closer to solution. The turmoil is likely to continue at least until November parliamentary elections, a better test than the presidentials of whether the government is serious when it talks about reform and democracy, said political scientist Hassan Nafaa. It could last for the months and maybe years to come as opposition groups clamour for more profound change, especially if the NDP remains tightly linked to the state or tries to install Gamal Mubarak as the next president, he added.
Mubarak faces nine rivals in the first direct presidential elections on September 7 but only two are widely known. The new rules, which replace referendums on a single presidential candidate chosen by parliament, exclude independent candidates from unrecognised groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition movement. In an interview published on Sunday, Mubarak again ruled out any party for the Brotherhood. "Allowing parties based on religion would be a path surrounded with dangers," he told the independent daily Al Masry Al Youm.
After 50 years under strong and long-lasting rulers from military backgrounds, Egyptians have been wary of politics and sceptical of government promises of change. But in the last nine months a multitude of reformist and civil society groups has sprung up, taking advantage of the opening created by the Kefaya (Enough) Movement, which campaigned against a fifth six-year term for Mubarak or any attempt to create a Mubarak dynasty with Gamal as successor.
George Ishaq, the coordinator of Kefaya, said the movement would pursue its campaign and try to bring opposition groups together in a united front for the parliamentary elections. "We in the Kefaya movement will continue in our struggle, because we haven't yet achieved our aims," he told Reuters. "In our judgment the presidential elections are a referendum in disguise and their legitimacy is in doubt, so we will continue until real elections are held," he added.
Gehad Auda, a political scientist and NDP spokesman, said a convincing landslide for Mubarak in the elections next week would strengthen the hand of reformists in the ruling party. That would indirectly give more space to opposition groups. "A good win will give the NDP more confidence to go more radically into reforming the institutional setup of Egypt, instead of progressing very slowly and cautiously," he said.
But if the result is less than a landslide, the old guard in the ruling party, some of whom have been in politics since the 1960s, would hold it against the reformers, he added. Either way, Mubarak is unlikely to jettison the old guard before November because he might need some of the leading members to do well in the parliamentary elections, he added.
Nafaa said a future bone of contention will be a rule that requires political parties to hold five percent of the seats in parliament, which the NDP currently dominates, before their leaders can run for the presidency. The requirement, which no opposition party can now meet, was waived this year but will come into effect in 2011 or even earlier if Mubarak dies or retires during his next term. "That (provision) will not survive at all. Every serious political figure in this country is calling, not for an amendment of the constitution but for another new constitution, to rewrite the whole constitution," Nafaa said.
Mohamed Habib, deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, told Reuters a Gamal succession was clearly on the cards. "Now he (Mubarak) is preparing Gamal Mubarak to set him firmly on his feet by giving him many powers ... All the indications confirm ... that he is the coming man," he said. But a Gamal succession bid would be highly unpopular in some circles and could reignite the protest movements of 2005.
Mona Makram-Ebeid, a former opposition member of parliament, said the presidential elections had awakened a desire among Egyptians to participate in politics, despite reservations. "But it doesn't matter... The ball has started to roll and there is no way that it will go back," she told Reuters.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/05/2005 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
