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Evacuation to his brother’s house in Texas and loss of his own house in Slidell, Louisiana probably contributed to the death of Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown a blues/jazz/Cajun musician at age 81.

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Commenting on what happened in his city, Dr. John said:

“It makes me think of what my friend Reverend Goat just told me: ‘Let me say this before it goes any further; New Orleans didn’t die of natural causes, she was murdered.'”

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…and the fifth rider was mounted not upon a horse, but a massive pachyderm with wild eyes and no reins; and this rider was called Incompetence and was the most dangerous for his brethren followed close on his path.

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Part of earning your Combat Crew badge was attending survival schools.

The basic school was at Fairchild AFB outside of Spokane, Washington. You learned the basics of escape and evasion: map reading, compass use, unarmed combat, camping, etc. The testing was practical, in the Cascade Mountains with limited food and 50 miles to cover.

Before entering the POW camp you were required to crawl through an obstacle course with things blowing up all around you. In the POW camp you were subjected to duress.

Then there was sea survival at MacDill AFB on Tampa Bay – you got very wet, and the equipment was designed not to work flawlessly, so you could learn to improvise.

For jungle survival you went to the Philippines to get chased all over the place by a local tribe [Negritos] hired to make your life miserable.

Arctic survival at Eielson AFB, near Fairbanks, Alaska provided camping to -40°.

After going through it you supplemented what the Air Force provided with purchases from camping stores.

They ought send FEMA’s management to survival schools.

We could drop a mock-up roof in a swimming pool and let them experience life in an attic while the water rises.

Maybe put them in jon boats anchored out in Lake Pontchartrain for a few days without food and water.

We could use a hog factory barn to simulate conditions in the SuperDome, followed by a couple of days in the yard of an Alabama maximum security prison, during August, without food or water.

After completing all those things I would load them onto buses and take them to one of the current recovery shelters with only the clothes on their backs and nothing in their pockets to experience what evacuees have to go through.

After you go through survival school you have a feeling for how difficult things can be and why people want a rapid response.

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This CBC article nails it: First Katrina recovery contracts go to Bush friends.

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Approximately 3,000 people died and the individual most responsible is still at large – why?

In the intervening four years we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, trampled on peoples rights, created huge new structures, and can’t respond as well as the third world to a natural disaster.

In November of 2004 people assumed they had elected a “strong leader” – where is he?

We don’t need more people to act like they care by talking to victims; we need people with the leadership that would have prevented many of those people from becoming victims.

After the September 11^th attack we were told that nothing could have been done because the information wasn’t specific enough. This time the information couldn’t have been more specific or more accurate, and they still failed to provide protection for the American people.

With our nation’s flags at half-staff in mourning for the lives lost in this disaster, the Pentagon is holding a march and a concert in the nation’s capitol. As Joseph Welch said to Senator Joseph McCarthy: “Have You No Sense of Decency?”

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