Most Americans live in counties that are at least partially protected by earthen and concrete levees, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency statistics obtained by the New Orleans advocacy group Levees.org.

While those levees don't necessarily protect all the people living in the 881 counties that have them, a study for Levees.org by geographer Ezra Boyd concludes that the levees more than pay for themselves when their cost is compared to the investment they protect.

In Louisiana, 37 of 64 parishes contain levees, and those parishes contain 74 percent of the state's population, and 75 percent of its annual total income. On a per-capita basis, residents of those parishes earned about $1,000 more a year in 2000 than their counterparts in parishes without levees.

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http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/20...


The non partisan group Levees.org has just released new data that squarely addresses the question of whether metro New Orleans should be rebuilt.



The new data is important because after the Army Corps of Engineers' levees failed during Katrina, the survivors were marginalized and labeled irresponsible for depending on levees.


 Many suggested that improving the levee system was a poor investment of federal funds and would encourage living in dangerous areas.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sandy-rosent...

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?

Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

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http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/are_a...

It's been one helluva decade, even though we've reached the end without knowing what to call it. Some have tried "the aughts," others the "double-Os." I'm content to simply call it over. To mark its location in the great march of history, I've taken to calling it the millennial decade, after the great numerological transition it heralded. Yet for describing its character, nothing comes closer than the Decade of Trauma -- American trauma, that is.

Here in the home of the brave, we've endured a decade that shattered nearly every notion of what it meant to be an American, whether you live on the left or the right. And so we shout. Or hide. Or startle too easily.

In America today, it seems we all have a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder, as evidenced by our increasingly vitriolic political environment, where reality is denied and histrionics run riot. Anger, we're told, is the natural reaction to trauma; in people with PTSD, the anger is out of control. By that measure, the millennial decade has brought us 10 years of PTSD politics -- with no end in sight.

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http://www.alternet.org/politics/144791/am...

"Do you have any Evita T-shirts?" I recently asked a docent at Buenos Aires' Evita museum. I wanted a T-shirt with a picture of Evita Peron on the front. Is that too much to ask for? Apparently so.

Here in Argentina, Evita is either worshiped as a saint or vilified as the devil incarnate. In either case, no one here wants to wear her image on a T-shirt. Rats.

Even finding the Evita museum was a whole bunch of work and involved at least two subway transfers and a whole bunch of "Donde esta...." It's located out in the Palermo district, sort of like the Beverly Hills of Buenos Aires -- and there's a reason for that too, which I will explain later.

I suppose in some ways you could think of Evita Peron as Argentina's Sarah Palin. After all, our Evita did have a passion for designer clothes. Plus both Sarah and Evita cherished the limelight. But the similarities between Evita and Sarah stop there.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/3/821...

Now that State Senator Ed Murray has withdrawn from the mayor's race, an interesting shift has taken place. There is no "black" candidate running for mayor. Oh, certainly, there are three African-Americans still vying to run City Hall, James Perry, Troy Henry, and Nadine Ramsey, but none of them are part of the pre-storm political establishment. Da Paper dismisses them as lightweights, supporting that dismissal with the fact that Perry and Henry have never run for office and Ramsey has never run a serious campaign.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/3/821...

Nowhere does the Biblical Jesus piss me off more than when he tells Martha, "Tough shit, your sister has chosen the better lot, deal with it." Spoiled Mary enabling prick.

Really, had I been his speechwriter, I would have had him equitably tell Martha to leave the drudgery behind and come sit and listen too. Or asked everyone to pitch in and not given the speech until all the work was done. Or waved my hand and made the house clean and the food prepared. But I'm way left of Jesus's authors. Probably left of Jesus himself. Make me a deity, and see who gets smitten, see who is told to passively accept their suckage lot in life. Service to one another only works when everyone plays the game. I have no stomach for a deity who tells one to suck it up and lets the other have all the good shit. Jesus sounds Republican in this one.

Fuck that noise. I like the scripture of Ernesto the Queen-goddess much better. He spoke from a barstool throne with a wine glass scepter in the Holy Land of Haight in the days of yore called the late 70's.

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http://wildwildleft.com/diary/48/#398

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Both poles are warming much faster than the average global warming so that while we sit here complaining about the cold where we live now what we ought to be doing is enjoying it while it lasts. Once water no longer exists in its solid crysililine state there is going to be a lot of other stuff that no longer exists, probably including us.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/2/821...

I saw "Avatar" today. And I was moved, along with some audience members sitting near me, by the underlying anti-imperialist message of this movie.

Before I get started, if you haven't seen the movie, go see it. You'll understand what you're about to read a lot more if you have. But if not, I'll do my best to summarize without giving too many spoilers.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/2/257...

In this New Year, I resolve to learn the balance between that which I can positively effect and that which I cannot. I make this resolution not in a desire to shirk my responsibility to my fellow person, but out of the understanding that life is too short to hold myself to a series of arbitrary, exacting rules that remove the joy of daily living. This goes beyond the familiar language of the Serenity Prayer and has application to every activist cause of which I espouse. Though we may be tough on the offenders, we are even tougher on ourselves, and that inevitably leads to burn out and soul-killing cynicism. There is no sin in recharging our batteries periodically or at least recognizing that the greater problems which face us will remain no matter how many hours we devote to their eradication or how intensely we seek to amplify the volume to raise public awareness.

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http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/1/1...

Dissecting the last 10 years is like picking at an open wound. Once you start, you feel it almost necessary to do something to dress that wound, or perhaps it's simply time to provide for palliative care.

Looking back on all the lost opportunities to make the world better, each layer as it unfolds seems to reveal a new horror for us to confront.

Take the general state of our planet's environmental health: We're drowning in trash, as whirlpools of plastic garbage the size of small nations create massive dead zones in the ocean.

We continue on a path to poisoning ourselves with burning carbon, which results in acid rain, mercury in the food chain and causes tens of thousands of preventable deaths every year in the US.

Species are disappearing at alarming rates.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/31/8...

In 1996, Bill Clinton and Al Gore ran on the slogan of "Building the Bridge to the 21st Century". Fourteen years later we wonder if we will ever get off that bridge and get into the 21st century. Not chronologically, for the rhetoric of new centuries is not about the rolling over of a clock. But the promise of transformation. For Clinton and Gore, building that bridge meant the internet, more money for education, and personal responsibility for grabbing opportunities and acting as citizens. Kinda pathetic for a millennial bridge, isn't it? More and more the public mood is, well where is it? Where are my opportunities? Where is it that my taking responsibility as a citizen actually does anything?

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http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/1/1...

Something went wrong just before my friend Will was born, in a small city in the midwest, in the mid 1960s. The most likely cause: a mild prenatal stroke. It did not cause enough damage to be immediately apparent; it took time before his parents realized that there was something amiss with their youngest child.

As a parent of a child with significant learning disabilities, it's hard for me to be too judgemental about parental response to discovering "there's something wrong with my child". It's hard to explain what kind of fear and grief that revelation brings. Still - I cannot begin to understand what Will's parents did next: they sent their five year old over a thousand miles away to a boarding school for emotionally and behaviorally troubled children.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/1/821...

Circumpolar beings of light are fading. A recently released report tells of declining populations of polar bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea. It's official.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/1/821...

Watching the aftermath of Katrina, the throngs huddled at the Superdome, the lack of water, of food, the racial makeup of those who had been left behind, was very traumatic for me -- I had never seen anything like it in America. After a few days of watching I wrote this to put down in words for all time what I was actually seeing on television.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/31/8...