"Arrogance plus Incompetence are Toxic"

[Pirate Smile]

Jonathan Alter just said this to describe BushCo.

It fits well.

[chomskysright]

1. MALEVOLENT NEGLECT: Krugman is picking it up too

Back up from the horror of what you see. Waay back from facts like the head of FEMA was an estate planning lawyer and represenative for the Arabian Horse Association: www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/ 002458.html...; beyond the martial law imposed; beyond the knowledge about what class storm this was; back beyond the Times-Picayne documenting 9 times over the past year about the problems with the levee; back beyond N.O. being one of 3 disasters to be anticipated as a very real possibility.

Think bigger than bashing the incompetency of FEMA. There's sly purposfulness here and I believe that someone on Citizens for Legitimate Government may have stumbled on it:

"It was suggested to me by someone that it seems like the lack of assistance in New Orleans was meant to provoke people to extreme violence and chaos. It certainly looks that way to me... but what if new orleans is being used as a test case to see, in a real world setting, how easily a motivated, angry populace (and the military personnel forced to do the dirty work) could be subdued and controlled to create a working model of how to impose endless Martial Law throughout the country while keeping those who might resist under the lid... and those in the armed forces in line. It's a thought... because I find it absolutely incredible how inept the response has been... to the point of criminality on the part of the federal government." --c., CLG reader.

http://www.legitgov.org/

Redact to Stanley Milgram's experiments (no longer possible given ethical violations).

Its Stanley Milgram's experiments in vivo: how much torture will someone accept as given to another? http://www.stanleymilgram.com/milgram.php

Controversy surrounded Stanley Milgram for much of his professional life as a result of a series of experiments on obedience to authority which he conducted at Yale University in 1961-1962. He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment.



Its Kitty Genovese: 'I didn't hear nothin'.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Genovese

Catherine Genovese ( 1935 - March 13, 1964), commonly known as Kitty Genovese, was a New York City woman who was stabbed to death near her home in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, New York. The circumstances of her murder and the apparent action (or inaction) of her neighbors were sensationalized by a newspaper article published two weeks later and prompted investigation into the psychological phenomenon that became known as the bystander effect or Genovese syndrome....Later investigation revealed that at least 38 individuals nearby had heard or observed portions of the attack,



Its PsyOps whose intention is to 'convince' and 'persuade.'

http://www.psywarrior.com/

"Capture their minds
and their hearts and souls
will follow"

[Dogmudgeon]

2. A Kitty Genovese irony

Her uncle was Philip Wylie, a fiction writer (When Worlds Collide, The Disappearance) and pundit (Generation of Vipers) who regularly railed against the public's growing alienation and loss of community responsibility -- the same forces that ultimately sealed his niece's fate.

--p!