Informant38

Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke is on youtube, or most of it is, I couldn't find the ending.
via w/b.t. link.
Also a snippet of Lee on Bill Maher's erstwhile progressive-left talk thing.
He was chastised for mongering conspiracy-fears by not denouncing the "levees were bombed" idea which is evidently pretty popular, or was at the time, all of 2 years ago.
Coming to that after seeing the documentary made it less bizarre.
Does it really matter if they were bombed or not? A little I guess. But the arrogance behind the caused disaster of Katrina's aftermath, the cold heartlessness of the President's mother's affluent-alcoholic throwaway comment - how so many of the displaced were suddenly better off, sheltered and fed in the Houston Astrodome, than they had been in New Orleans - the obvious disregard in the posture and speech of Bush and Cherthoff compared to the tears and outrage of Nagin and Compass, it adds up to something like a bomb.
Much joy and confirmation in the Judeo-Christian mystic camps as disaster strikes everybody but them, so far. There's this weird background noise that never made it to the overt screen, of New Orleans as an evil place, punished and cleansed by the stern hand of the Almighty, even as many of the survivors testified to their faith confirmed. That many of the lost died praying doesn't enter into it.
And China gets whacked by the same hand. Ha-ha China. Take that you godless jerks.
Some of us have speculatively shifted the scene's particulars to the coming collapse of systems built on the foundations of a stable world, foundations those systems have undermined past repair. How long 'til the next one?
Logically the next step is to avoid getting caught in the chaos. I keep imagining all these second-sighted visionaries piling up and smashing into each other as the limits of their abilities bring them to the same place, like fans lunging toward a foul ball. The near-future.
The central Jewish story is the Passover, which basically involves the good guys walking out of a disaster unscathed, while the bad guys suffer and die. And Christianity it becomes increasingly clear is a kind of watered down Judaism, with the good guy badges and uniforms retailored to fit. This is not about the actual moral teachings of either religion, which line up well with non-religious humane morality. It's about the organization as organism, with its own senses, that distant vision being primary. Prophecy.
The moment occupied by an organism that's semi-immortal isn't as fixed on the timeline as an individual's. And these organizations as organisms would be immortal, so far.
The ability to see the future comes up all over the place - Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Paracelsus, the psychedelic nastiness of Revelations, Polynesians drinking kava and seeing great ships coming over the horizon years before they did, the Scots Gaels have traditions of second-sight that are too common to be based on nothing but wishful thinking, Meyer Lansky was notorious for being able to avoid trouble as if he could see it coming.
It seems probable that humans can tap something that provides a clear enough picture of future events that given other skills can be put to advantage. It would for sure come in handy in the investment sector. But who can see the whole thing? What would it look like if you could? And how do all those partial visions work to create what they see? That's one of the quantum theory spookinesses. That merely looking divides reality, choosing anything creates a new path, another world that wouldn't have been without that looking, and choosing.
As always the selfish have the upper hand there - when you're all that matters the only important thing is how it affects you. Deferring responsibility to divine agency gets selfishness out of the way, but it's not hard to find certainty on both sides of completely contradictory views of the divine. And too much of the common view of the divine is a selfish vision to begin with.
As the global warming debate sputters to shocked silence many turn toward hard pragmatic responses. The carbon footprint of your community would be much smaller if your community itself were much smaller. Eugenics, genocide, Holocaust. FEMA.
The linkage is even more outlandish than the theory of the levees being bombed to flood the 9th Ward of New Orleans. But the logic of it is simple enough - you know lots of the men who run things, men who choose the larger paths we all get carried down, have worked those dark corners for what they could gather for themselves.
George Bush's God killed a bunch of innocent people during and after Katrina, through Bush's agency whether incompetent or callous, but that same God has killed, through that same agency, over a million innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Each day's rise in the world population cheapens the price of human life, lessens the abstract horror. As the truth gets even more inconvenient, where we are, how fast we're headed for what can only be an awful correction, accelerates that degrading of human worth. The competition for survival increases, hardening hearts. Behind the gaudy veils of the television's stage the sound of that heartlessness whispers louder. But Sean Penn was down there in the flood, doing what he could to help. Spike Lee put his heart to the wheel to make that documentary.
Whatever drove them we all need now, and we'll need a lot more of it before this is finished.