THE PICTURE'S FAKE BUT CLOSE TO REALITY OTHERWISE

(from boingboing.net)

On the other hand, this is real - drinking water in a beer can, courtesy of Anheuser-Busch.

In more serious news, the NY Times is reporting that police officials in New Orleans are starting to confiscate firearms from residents still in the city.

"No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said."

Now, we're not constitutional law scholars here (well, actually, I think Junichi might be) and we're all for stricter gun control but isn't this, um, illegal under the 2nd Amendment?

It also seems highly suspect that private armed guards won't have to relinquish anything.

"that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons."

In other words, if you're not rich enough to hire guards to protect your private property, you are not allowed to own a firearm to protect your own private property. Huh?

By the way, the images of the evictions are incredible.

By the way, the conspiracy theorists are claiming that the Army Corps of Engineers blew up the 17th St. levee as a way to divert flooding away from the French Quarter (and tonier neighborhoods) while sinking the poorer parts of town under water. Normally, we'd just brush this off - and the rumors are far, far, far from being substantiated - but it's worth noting that there's a precedent for this.

In 1927, panicked by rising waters on the Mississippi, rich New Orleans bankers and others convinced the state governor to blew up a levee downstream, destroying two parishes in the process, in an effort to save N.O. from being flooding:

"a major portion of the 600 thousand people made homeless was black tenant farmers which made up the labor force of the agriculture-based Delta. Those refugees were not allowed to leave and were forced to work and live on the levees that year to provide damage control."

All sounds eerily prescient, doesn't it?

Moreover, there's an online Wall St. Journal article which reveals that the affluent, whiter neighborhoods of New Orleans survived that some of the residents would be more than happy to see N.O. rebuilt with fewer black and poor folk:

"The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

There's sort of a dilemma here: no one wants to see NOLA rebuilt down to the last slum. This city has suffered so terribly these last weeks precisely because there's such a large population of underserved people in poverty. On the other hand, who wants to see NOLA get rebuilt strictly along gentrification lines, i.e. all Starbucks and Barnes and Noble? Clearly, the challenge will be to rebuild the city and lure back poorer survivors with actual jobs and affordable housing. Anything less and this tragedy becomes magnified many times over.

--O.W.