Joshuwa

Important to redz and everyone else: I like EVERYONE here and I'm not tryin to insult anyone or cause a debate at all. I apologize if I've upset anyone - that's not my intention at all. So please, don't take any of this the wron way or personally. I am upset at the delay in help, not at any individuals in particular (except Bush).

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>BUSH, the president, hasn't turned down any offers.</div>
Bush, in an interview, said these words:
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>"You know, it's not our style to need outside help. I'm convinced we'll get by just fine on our own"</div>

He then told ABC the following:
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>"I'm not expecting much from foreign nations because we hadn't asked for it. I do expect a lot of sympathy and perhaps some will send cash dollars. But this country's going to rise up and take care of it.'

"You know, we would love help, but we're going to take care of our own business as well, and there's no doubt in my mind we'll succeed. And there's no doubt in my mind, as I sit here talking to you, that New Orleans is going to rise up again as a great city.'''</div>

Doesn't sound like a President that is accepting help to me. Although help is now being received, it didn't start out that way. Offers were initially refused, and then Bush changed his mind, and accepted the help that was being offered.

It's GREAT that we are getting help, but it should've NEVER been refused in the first place.

Link: http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5591456.html

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Now, I hadn't heard anything about folks eating corpses, I'd call BS on that one my friend, but the snipers and MP's, I do belive. Remember also that NO had like the highest murder rate in the world. Lots of those fools are LOVING this.</div>

The scene down there is insane. It wouldn't surprise me at all if people were eating corpses. Things are a MESS down there, people starving everywhere.

And about the 'Black People Loot, White People Find' thing..

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Tell me who said this. I'd like to know so I can complain.</div>
The initial stories and pictures were posted on Yahoo! News, and have now been removed. Not before people saved them, and outraged about it all over. So much so, Yahoo! has issues an official apology and statement on the issue.
The pics: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/...ersy/index.html
Notice how the images are described. A black person in water with goods is a looter, yet a white person in the same situation "found" things.

Yahoo's satement: http://news.yahoo.com/page/photostatement

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>I'm not. I'm proud of the great job they've done.</div>
While I too am glad to see that things are being done, it wasn't until mass amounts of criticism did anything begin.

Just look at what is being said:

New Orleans's emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert:
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>"This is a national disgrace. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans"</div>

It's being refered to as a disaster, a nightmare, a joke, and a massive screwup.

When a Michigan woman asked a police officer for help, he responsed:
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Michigan, said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was: "Go to hell -- it's every man for himself."</div>

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>"How could the government have been so unready for a crisis that was so widely predicted?" asked The Washington Post, adding that experts "issued repeated warnings for years about the city's unique topography and vulnerability".</div>

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>"The sluggish, initial response ... has embittered and inflamed tens of thousands of people awaiting relief, most of them poor and black and many of them old and sick," said the Post editorial.</div>

The above quotes from http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=...rticleid=249856.

That kind of thing, and the lack of, and delay in, the amount of help being done is something I am not proud of. I can't see how anyone could be proud. What's goin on there is not a great success - it's one of the biggest relief failures ever.

I admit, looters/gangs/hoodlums/criminals are not making anyone's job any easier, but they had no affect on the delay in help. Something could've been done much earlier, and with much more help in the beginning.

Regardless if N.O being mostly black has any significance, this is a national disgrace, regardless of race, status, and location of the people affected by this. Infact, we are all affected.

ToXiC_LovE

I am pretty sick of the rants people. I really understand this is affecting you but please... instead of fighting over what is going on, try to do something to help! You're fighting over the fighting down there! Chill! In this country's time of need, we don't need to bicker at each other. We need to come together and get each other through this. I understand you're fired up and FED UP with some things, but you also need to understand that we aren't the ones in control of the matter. We really don't know what is real or what is being fed to us. All we can do is try to help.

Hobgoblin

Looting is an unfortunate and largely inevitable result of natural disasters. Many property owners have to evacuate their homes and businesses ahead of the coming disaster (or flee the area in its aftermath) without leaving behind anyone to protect their property, and law enforcement and other emergency services are generally so overwhelmed dealing with life-and-death issues that they can't spare the manpower to protect private property. People who are caught unprepared (or remain in the disaster area for other reasons) often have to shift into survival mode and take whatever supplies they can get wherever they can find them, and there are always a few who will take advantage of confusion and chaos to make off with other people's property for their own enrichment.

The onslaught of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast in late August 2005 brought the phenomenon of looting into the national spotlight once again, including the two new service photographs shown above, both of which were carried by Yahoo! News and other Internet news outlets and showed persons wading through chest-deep water in the New Orleans area with supplies taken from grocery stores. Many viewers noticed the seeming disparity of the darker-skinned subject's being described in the accompanying caption as "looting a grocery store," while the lighter-skinned subjects were described as "finding bread and soda from a local grocery store." Are these captions evidence of a subtle (or overt) racial prejudice in the news media?

It's difficult to draw any substantiated conclusions from these photographs' captions. Although they were both carried by many news outlets, they were taken by two different photographers and came from two different services, Associated Press (<span style="color:blue">AP</span>) and Getty Images via Agence France-Presse (<span style="color:blue">AFP</span>). These services may have different stylistic standards for how they caption photographs, or the dissimilar wordings may have been due to nothing more than the preferences of different photographers and editors, or the difference might be the coincidental result of a desire to avoid repetitive wording (similar photographs from the same news services variously describe the depicted actions as "looting," "raiding," "taking," "finding," and "making off"). The viewer also isn't privy to the contexts in which the photographs were taken — it's possible that in one case the photographer actually saw his subject exiting an unattended grocery store with an armful of goods, while in the other case the photographer came upon his subjects with supplies in hand and could only make assumptions about how they obtained them.

A Salon <span style="color:blue"><span style="color:blue">article</span></span> on the photographs by Aaron Kinney suggests the captions were a result of a combination of contexual and stylistic differences:
Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations, confirmed today that [photographer Dave] Martin says he witnessed the people in his images looting a grocery store. "He saw the person go into the shop and take the goods," Stokes said, "and that's why he wrote 'looting' in the caption."

Regarding the AFP/Getty "finding" photo by [photographer Chris] Graythen, Getty spokeswoman Bridget Russel said, "This is obviously a big tragedy down there, so we're being careful with how we credit these photos." Russel said that Graythen had discussed the image in question with his editor and that if Graythen didn't witness the two people in the image in the act of looting, then he couldn't say they were looting.
The photographer who took the Getty/AFP picture, Chris Graythen, also <span style="color:blue"><span style="color:blue">posted</span></span> the reasons behind his caption:
I wrote the caption about the two people who 'found' the items. I believed in my opinion, that they did simply find them, and not 'looted' them in the definition of the word. The people were swimming in chest deep water, and there were other people in the water, both white and black. I looked for the best picture. there were a million items floating in the water — we were right near a grocery store that had 5+ feet of water in it. it had no doors. the water was moving, and the stuff was floating away. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow.


Now can we all just STOP over analyzing stupid bullshiz and like Toxic said, start concentrating on the things that matter, like..... oh... helping those people?

This bickering over "whos fault this is" is slowly circulating the globe... and other countries ARE laughing at us for this stupidness.

Sparticus

yup. we can. and this is now dead.

locked.gif

REDZMAN

Just one last note here since I was gone all day.

The photos that have captions listing who is a looter or not, are just that. Photo's with someone's captions. Big deal. Yahoo or whomever else did that is a moron for not noticing what they may have accidentely set up.

As for what President Bush said, you are right. That's exactly what he said. We DO tend to take care of ourself, and we DO tend not to ask for help. He at no point refused any oustide help though. I noted that most of those quotes were early when barely any help was being offered BTW.


I see NO disgrace anywhere. It's funny that so many folks try to turn everything that happens in the world into politics. It's simple. There was a HUGE f***ing storm. Folks decided NOT TO LEAVE. They got STUCK in place and are now having to suffer the repricussions for that. Some couldn't leave, I understand that, and that's sad. But we've got help to Louisiana faster than it got to the Tsunami Areas. Not to mention, the waters LEFT the tsunami areas and you could get anywhere. Not so in Louisiana and elsewhere.

Slow down, look at the situation from EVERY angle, look at the overhead photos of the devestation and horror, and think again.

Simple comparison.

When I was in Korea in 2002, there was a horrible Typhoon that came in and annihliated the southern coast of that country. Korea isn't that big at all, but you know what? It takes over 4 hours to drive 37 miles from Camp Casey to Yongsan in Seoul. 2.5 hours on a GOOD DAY. During the aftermath of this Typhoon (Typhoons are Hurricanes in the Pacific), it took 3 to 4 days to get help to the worst hit areas. And this is in a TIGHTLY packed and populated country.

I belive over 2 thousand died.