And so should you.

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?”

Last night, D and I watched CNN’s New Orleans Rising special on rebuilding in the historically-black Pontchartrain Park neighborhood of New Orleans. So many stories. So many lives. Back in the 1950s and 60s, these black families built their lives and educated their children in the shadow of overt segregation. Cut to the 2000s – the Oubre family’s struggle to stay together, a sad tale of upbeat grandparents who were going to ride out the storm but ultimately drowned in their attics, actor Wendell Pierce’s neighborhood rebuilding effort and the Woods family’s resilience and determination to rebuild.

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

Before and After images of Pakistan flooding (via NASA Earth Observatory and The Map Room)

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.

NPR | Hungry For Oil: Feeding America’s Expensive Habit

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.