The fifth annual Rising Tide conference was a great success as was the A Howling In The Wires book launch.

There are posts coming on the experiences of moderating the rockstar Treme panel and being in New Orleans for the quasi-solemn, mostly-circus fifth anniversary of The Storm. I could swear Davis Rogan handed me a can of sardines in Louisiana hot sauce and the Surgeon General of the United States flew coach from New Orleans to Atlanta.

Such tales and more coming. Until then, entertain yourselves with this collection of memories from the past weekend. Thank goodness for digital photography.

Twitter – The Rising Tide twitter account is @risingtide with tweets from our attendees using the hashtag #rt5. Most of my liveblogging will be livetweeting via @maitri and @backoftown this year. See you on the ‘tubes.

Blogs – Rising Tide Conference Blog

Loki buzzing about onstage

“I am not offended, I am just exhausted … I do not ask every guy named Mike where his people come from.” Classic.

Thinking about making an Indian version with “Do you speak Hindu?”

Blogging about the “Ground Zero Mosque” isn’t an exercise in politics du jour. If these arguments against the mosque and resulting decisions, however distracting from real American problems of the economy and jobs, are not combated early, often and vehemently, a lot more than an argument stands to be lost here. The freedoms of Americans like me are next up on the chopping block. And why not? We will have precedent.

Sepia Mutiny | America has a Nativism problem, not a “Muslim Problem”

“Islamaphobia” is not what afflicts our nation. It is merely a symptom of the underlying malady which, like chronic malaria, can flair [sic] up and leave the collective “us,” the American people, weak until treated. It will never be totally eradicated. Treating the problem by adopting an “enlightened” us vs.”ignorant” them mentality will make things worse, as will appeasement.

… In no way am I trying to say that Muslims should not be both concerned and saddened by what is happening right now. On the contrary, I am saying that none of us non-Muslims should for a second believe that we will be spared or that we need not concern ourselves because we are not the immediate targets of this ugly behavior by some politicians and media organizations. This isn’t just the Muslim and Latino community’s problem. This is the Global American’s problem too.

First Draft | The 9/12 Project and National Unity

… that’s who we were, a lot of us, on 9/12/01 — assholes, painting our chests red, white and blue and high-fiving our drunken buddies while we beat up Sikh cabdrivers and yelled. That’s who a lot of us were, and boy, were we ever grateful, weren’t we, for Osama bin Laden giving us an excuse for a self-important hoedown.

… I know a lot of people have memories of examples of kindness and decency from those days; all I have is notes of phone calls from people talking about yet another container of pig’s blood smashed on a mosque doorstep (CLASSY) and some dipshit accosting me at a rally yammering about how the “dune coons” were taking all our jobs away. It was high-level horrific, because Lower Manhattan was still actually burning, the entire country pretty much hadn’t slept, and here come these people … marcher Colin Zaremba, 19, told The Associated Press, “I’m proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have.”

Listen up, brown Americans out there who operate under the delusion that you’re white: Enough with the support of racial profiling of all browns and bigotry against Muslims and illegal Latinos, in particular. These are not justified behaviors just because, in your shameless desire for western approval, you deem all Muslims and illegal immigrants as driven by nothing but megalomania and greed, respectively. What’s with the self-loathing? You think that by distancing yourselves from the latest object of Rah Rah We’re America’s ire, they will consider you their friends and on their side, on the side of self-proclaimed Good. How blind are you? Have you observed how folks like Mr. I’m Proud To Be American And I Hate Arabs here look at your brown skin? The content of your character is worth approximately nothing to people like him. So, when they eventually call you a name, discriminate against you in housing or employment, leave a flaming cross on your lawn or worse because they can’t and don’t want to differentiate between an actual Muslim terrorist, just another Muslim and you, don’t run crying to me.

Instead, come back to real America now and be a real American who fights for the rights of all who want freedom regardless of race or religion. And stop offending my brain acting this way.

Update: Manhattan Cab Driver Stabbed By Passenger Who Asked “Are You Muslim?”

Black families rebuilding their lives and fighting for their families in the shadow of a segregation that only went to ground and not away. Never away.

That’s what five black New Orleans homeowners discovered this week when a federal judge in Washington ruled that Louisiana’s Road Home Program did indeed give them less money than they’d have received had their houses been destroyed in a white neighborhood — but that he couldn’t do anything about it.

… homes in black neighborhoods aren’t valued as highly as homes in white neighborhoods — and not because the bricks, drywall, flooring and roofing materials used in their construction necessarily cost less. They are often considered of lower value simply because of what they are: homes in a black neighborhood.

Some hurts have subsided, but not really. And other hurts and little triumphs grow over them. That’s the reality of recovery. It’s not simple. In other words, “Is everything normal again in New Orleans?” is a pretty dumb question.

Editor B photographs and writes about two different states of New Orleans today.

So which photograph represents the state of New Orleans today? I think they both do. This remains a city of contrasts. It can be a challenge to keep both these images in mind. We seem to have a natural tendency to reduce and simplify. We want to view things as black or white, positive or negative, with little nuance and few shades of gray. It’s difficult to integrate stark contradictions into a coherent whole.

But that’s exactly what we have to do if we want an accurate picture of where we live.

We’ll be in New Orleans again in just a couple of days. I can’t wait, especially now that the Rising Tide conference schedule has been set in stone. See you there!

8:30am Doors open: Conference check-in with light breakfast
9:30 Opening Remarks
9:45 Crime and Justice Panel moderated by Tulane criminologist Peter Scharf . We are also pleased to announce that New Orleans Police Chief Ronal Serpas has agreed to sit on the panel.
11:00 Keynote address by Mother Jones human rights reporter Mac McClelland
11:45 Break
12:00 “Paradise Lost” environmental panel moderated by Steve Picou
1:00 Lunch
2:00 Politics Panel hosted by Peter Athas
3:00 Break
3:15 “Why Can’t We Get Some Dam Safety in New Orleans?” presentation by Tim Ruppert
3:45 Presentation of the 2010 Ashley Morris Memorial Award
4:00 “Down In the Treme” moderated by Maitri Erwin

Please donate what you can. I prefer the World Food Programme because they do get the job done. Please please help. It’s to get a lot worse.

A nice quick look at America’s current hydrocarbon extraction technologies.

But this:

New technology has changed oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico too. As seen in the wake of BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf, companies have sophisticated technology like remote-controlled submarines. That means they can explore for oil in places humans can’t even go. Sometimes the projects resemble a space mission.

I seriously thought the next line was going to be “Can you say hi to Gaston The Gator, kids?” Oh dear. Where do I start? Remote-controlled submarines have been around for decades. Inside the crust of the earth, where humans could never go, is normally where hydrocarbons come from. Remote sensing, seismic … oh, never mind. Yes, operating in deeper water depths is cool. Now move along.

While I developed and utilized some hella amazing and new Sophisticated Technology as an oil worker, the way NPR and the rest of the media utters the phrase, you’d think it is a special, infallible weapon bestowed on us mere mortals by a fearsome sky god. Oh, drill rig of omens, give me petroleum beyond petroleum.

Technology is not magic, it’s a set of tools and processes developed by humans to address our problems. Thus, anthropomorphizing it, imbuing it with super-human powers and, worst of all, not questioning its effectiveness is not exactly productive on the part of the news media. Why? Because even the most Sophisticated Technology on the planet is only as good as its human operator. Again, the potency of any technology ultimately comes down to the humans in control of it, all the way from proper design and maintenance to not cutting corners and taking the proper, prescribed safety precautions during a malfunction. If the humans in charge are lazy, incommunicative, penny-pinching shitheels with limited imaginations, chances are the technology will not do what it was made to do and maybe even … wait for it … fail. So quit ooohing and aahing at a company’s New-Fangled Technology and investigate and report the human culture behind its use.

Speaking of chance, there’s something amiss about the usage of “low-probability, high-cost event” to describe this oil spill. One problem with such an event is that it doesn’t occur in isolation and the effects of many events of varying magnitudes are cumulative in a finite-resource environment. Another issue I have with it is, all things remaining equal, one doesn’t figure out the probability of recurrence until another such event occurs. Will it? Won’t it? Who knows? If this can’t be answered with a certain degree of confidence, calling it a low-probability event is probably a waste of time. I offer to our esteemed media that the language shift to that of true prevention and effective, scale-sensitive disaster management, away from probabilities of recurrence and other buzz-concepts dropped by corporate PR departments.

And then this: “Focus on the low-probability side of that equation … The fact that you can count on one hand the kind of blowouts that have occurred in the face of these tens of thousands of wells is a pretty remarkable testimony to the safety and the risk management that the companies provide.” Gee, think of all the blowouts that could have happened! We’re doing you a favor. Even if it’s our job, ferchrissakes! You tell them that on our behalf, NPR!

It appears a possible BP pipeline leak is being investigated up here in the Midwest. Not low-probability and not high-cost when compared with the Gulf. But not Sophisticated either, I fear. We have a long way to go.

Law-abiding Muslims and browns in turbans are vilified in the process, justice is shattered once again, Harry Reid still hasn’t found a spine and the dissonance hurts ears and brains alike, but Fear & Loathing is an ancient Washington game. And fools rush in … Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me … you get the picture.

A new episode of Rescue Me airs tonight. For those of you don’t watch the show, here’s a quick rundown: Denis Leary plays a New York City firefighter whose alcohol-drenched and dysfunctional family life is thrown into a serious tailspin in the years following 9/11. There’s life and then there’s trauma. You get over both, if you’re lucky. Two weeks ago, the show introduced a firefighter from another house; Pat Mahoney is dying of cancer he came down with after working in the rubble of the World Trade Center in the months following the attack. The character Mahoney is symbolic of many firefighters, police officers and relief workers who have developed blood cell cancer from inhaling benzene and other toxic chemicals during the search and cleanup.

Ground Zero is hallowed ground. I know, I was there. In 2007, long after the last piece of rubble was taken away, D and I stood at the corner of Washington and Liberty Streets in Manhattan’s financial district and stared into the crater, past the hole. I thought my heart could shatter no further after Kuwait, 9/11/2001 and The Storm, and yet whatever remained was shredded.

Can you look at a picture or hear or watch footage from that day without fighting the urge to lose it, tear your clothes and run screaming into the wilderness? Not I.

But it shouldn’t turn us into animals, into barbarians. Barbarians who tout our nation’s freedom of religion on one hand and, on the other, deny it to a group of Americans who want to build a religious and community center in a former Burlington Coat Factory building three blocks away. Savages who blessed the launch and nourishment of two disastrous wars using 9/11 as a launchpad. And the worst, most hideous act of all: referring to Ground Zero as hallowed ground and then turning around to deny vital monetary aid to 9/11 first responders under the pretext that it “creates a massive new entitlement program, exposes taxpayers to increased litigation, and is ‘paid for’ with tax increases and potential job losses.”

If anyone should have their citizenships revoked, it should be these asshole politicians we put in power, who would rather play with the lives of real American heroes and their families, only prolonging the greatest mass murder in American history for their own gain and not helping heal it. Furthermore, instead of loudly bringing up these inconsistencies and injustices, We The People more often tuck our tails and watch the moral-relativist ball tossed back and forth between two parties who purport to work for America. Barbarians and animals.

Would you like to keep Ground Zero truly Hallowed instead of using just the word over and over again until it loses its meaning? Want to put that America F**k Yeah sentiment to good use beyond linking to a favored opinion on your Facebook wall? Here’s what you do:

- Donate money at any time to the Fire Fighter Cancer Foundation, Inc., P.O. Box 2830, Wilmington, DE  19805

- Team up with your local fire station for the Save Our 9/11 Survivors program, to “help raise funds to provide 500 air purification units that will help ailing responders breathe clean air, avoid secondary infections, and suffer less. Please organize fund raising activities to help your brother & sister responders and send donations by 9-11-2011 (10th anniversary).”

- Stop watching the greedy hate fomented in cable news and reading that which raises anger and self-righteousness as well as your inactivity. Your patriotic bravado followed by no positive action does nothing for the people who are living and dying the real fallout of 9/11.

- Write your congresspeople and political action committees and ask them what the hell they are doing anyway. Soaking in their pre-packaged tea or beer or whatever it is today is what they want you to do. Get away from it. Break truly free.

- And stop fearing. Fear is the mind killer. Think. Be decent. Be American. It’s about time.

Fundraising in 2005

nola.com:

Herman Leonard, a photographer who created some of the most famous images of such jazz greats as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and others, died Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Mr. Leonard, 87, lived in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina struck and destroyed much of his collection.

He was born and raised in Allentown, Pa [and] attended Ohio University in Athens, which offered a degree in photography.

From left, Nichelle Nicols, Brad Altman, George Takei and Walter Koenig pose for photos following the wedding of Altman and Takei at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, Sunday, Sept. 14, 2008. Nicols, Takei and Koenig are members of the original cast of “Star Trek.” (AP Photo/The Rafu Shimpo, Mario G. Reyes)

George Takei To Prop 8 Supporters: “Mind Your Own Marriage!”