The friend I expected to visit with me last night called to say he needed to put off our drinking session for a night or two as his boss had stressed him out to the point that he could not be friendly to man nor beast. I respect his decision, because he works for Jimmy Lee, a little Japanese entrepreneur whose only friend is money and who treats, out of pure prejudice, his American employees like slaves. I’ve known Jimmy for awhile. He’s one of those slumlords(he owns a fleabag hotel in what was formerly Chicago’s skid row, a 17 storey building nestled now between a Comfort Inn and a parking lot in the most expensive zip code in this part of the country) who spends much of his time dodging city agencies in court over numerous code violations.

In the man’s defense, he does carry good tenants when they fall on hard times, though he tends to make their lives a living hell in the meantime. This is a case of a guy who arrived in the U.S. as a peon and built his own little empire. He’s got a good heart, he just doesn’t want anyone to know about it. Personally, despite his seeming greed, I like the man. He does a good job of hiding his humanity, but it is there. He simply wants to see others bust their asses and succeed like he did, and if they don’t or can’t, he views it as inferiority.

Oh, well.

So I went down to the hotel bar for a drink. Gabriel and Rebecca, the bartenders, were excellent at their job. I had a pint of Pilsner Urquel on draft and a shot or two of Sauza Hornitos. Then I returned to my suite and read the news.

I am distressed beyond belief about some of the things happening in Nawlins, according to the Associated Press.

New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday, as corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out and storm survivors battled for seats on the buses that would carry them away from the chaos. The tired and hungry seethed, saying they had been forsaken. “This is a desperate SOS,” mayor Ray Nagin said.

“We are out here like pure animals,” the Rev. Issac Clark said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, where he and other evacuees had been waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead.

“I’m not sure I’m going to get out of here alive,” said tourist Larry Mitzel of Saskatoon, Canada, who handed a reporter his business card in case he goes missing. “I’m scared of riots. I’m scared of the locals. We might get caught in the crossfire.”

I’m having some  technical trouble with links that will change in the near future when I change servers from customer unfriendly Square Space to another forum like Blogger, but here is a link to the story, via the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-5249697,00.html

This majorly sucks, but it’s not anything non-understandable where human nature is concerned. These people have been yanked from normal life into an existence not unlike pure horror: Their homes are gone, their entire world has turned into a hell few civilized people can understand and the disruption of communications has cut them off from the money they have in their bank accounts, so they are broke, undomiciled and basically "fucked" for the time being. The despair and the frustration are taking their respective tolls.

I’ve donated money to one relief venue and am going to donate more to another.

We already know that as usual, America is on its own, despite all the help we give other countries in times of disaster, none of those countries nor any of our "allies" will help us.  If you can, please donate whatever you can afford to help the people of New Orleans. If we don’t help our own, they will not be helped, because the rest of the world doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about the United States except when we can do for them.

The illustrious Raven at Rightly So  has posted this  spot-on story about the kind of monster, a child-victimizing sex offender, that we need to do a lot more about eliminating than we have been doing.

The post cites a case of a man who kidnaped an eight year old girl and her nine year old brother and in the girl’s case, kept her and abused her for six months. Her brother is presumed dead.

Raven’s take on this is completely right, we have to deal with assholes like these in a definitive manner, not treat them like normal people with normal rights that enable them to mingle among the rest of the citizenry and choose their targets at their leisure.

“And the liberal sex freaks will come to his defense…and make excuses for all his “behavior” and blame his upbringing and everyone else but HIM…”

There are too damn many liberals who, not seeing any immediate dangers in sight for their own households, will expound upon this pervert’s “rights” while ignoring those of the victim. The scenario’s become all too commonplace. This “he suffered as a child” thing is genuinely too bad, but it’s not the rest of our fault nor something the rest of us have any reason to feel guilty about. It doesn’t excuse the courts for endangering the public by letting them have any kind of benefit of a doubt that lets them walk free. For the protection of the innocent, these types of predators have to be deprived of access to the public, not given a chance to wander the streets in search of new victims, not on bail, not on OR, not on an outpatient basis, parole or probation.