The Binary Circumstance

Apparently still smarting from the criticism leveled against him as Director of FEMA during the hurricane Katrina disaster, Michael D. Brown has started his own disaster recovery firm, Michael D. Brown, LLC.

“If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses — because that goes straight to the bottom line — then I hope I can help the country in some way,” Brown told the Rocky Mountain News for its Thursday editions.
[…]
“Hurricane Katrina showed how bad disasters can be, and there’s an incredible need for individuals and businesses to understand how important preparedness is,” he said.

Brown said companies already have expressed interested in his consulting business, Michael D. Brown LLC. He plans to run it from the Boulder area, where he lived before joining the Bush administration in 2001.

“I’m doing a lot of good work with some great clients,” Brown said. “My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me.”

Given the way that the Bush administration operates, I think we can also expect that “Brownie” will soon be selling his services back to the U.S. government.

After seeing so many floating corpses in New Orleans on the TV news coverage of Katrina, the question that everyone has on their minds is “Why are dead bodies in the water always facedown?”

Slate provided an in-depth explanation and Busker kindly provided the link.

Ever since seeing the pictures of bodies floating in the water on TV and hearing rescue workers talk about finding dead children, I’ve been haunted by the image of dead children floating facedown in the water and holding hands. It’s like some eerie painting that I keep seeing in my mind.

I imagine that they were friends or brother and sister. They had been playing or sleeping. Every day was something new. They were full of questions about the world around them as all children are.

Each of those floating corpses represents the end of a lifetime of experiences no matter how long or short the life was. And the person who could tell us the most about those experiences is gone for good.

For many, all of their possessions were wiped out also. For some there are no artifacts from which to recreate the story of their life. It’s as if they never existed.

Death doesn’t give a damn what happened to you during your life, nor does it give a damn how old you are or anything else.

The Slate article makes the observation that dead bodies do not always float facedown though they usually do. The news media does have a bias in the pictures they show us, however.

Editorial control over photographs also contributes to a facedown bias. Most photo editors won’t publish pictures of a body that could be identified by a friend or family member. Since facedown corpses are likely to be anonymous, they’re more suitable for newspapers and television.

Facedown pictures also distance us from the fact that the floating, decaying corpse was a person with an identity and a life, perhaps a life similar to our own. The corpse seems much less of a person without its face showing. If we could see the face it would be frozen, no longer expressing happiness, sorrow or anger, just frozen in death.

If we could identify them, the details of their lives would unfold. Who knew them? How were they connected to other people? Where they connected to others at all? Did they have a job? Children? Lovers? Enemies?

We would be living in a very different world if the news media showed us any bodies floating face up. Ironically, if they did that they would be showing us life, as it is.

They would be showing us the truth.

By censoring how they show death, the media is distorting the reality of life.

Bodies are shown floating facedown in the water for the same reason that Jesus is portrayed rising from the dead. Mendacity.

Water from hurricane Rita’s rains have already caused a break in the New Orleans levees, re-flooding sections of the city that were only recently pumped dry after Katrina.

As millions tried to evacuate the Galveston, TX region, a bus carrying elderly people burst into flames. The fire spread rapidly because many of the passengers had oxygen tanks. More than 20 people were killed.

According to NBC news this morning, the highway was backed up for dozens of miles because of the bus fire and many people ran out of gas while being stalled in the bumper-t0-bumper traffic and had to abandon their cars. What a tragedy it will be if Rita arrives before all those cars can get off the road.

In addition, analysts have suggested that Rita could drive the price of gasoline up to $4.00/gal.

I’ve written about before about investing in gold as a hedge against inflation. In May when I wrote that article, the spot price of gold was about $426/oz which was a ten year high.

It seems like investors are seeing a lot of inflation ahead because since then they have bid up the price of gold to around $472/oz., it’s highest level since 1988.

From CNNMoney:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Gold surged to a fresh 17-year high Monday morning, pushed by speculative buying and options-related interest amid concerns over inflation and U.S. economic growth, dealers said.

The December gold contract ended the day up $7.10 at $470.40 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange’s COMEX division, after hitting a session and contract peak of $472.50 earlier in the day.

The session high was the highest for gold futures trading on the NYMEX since January 1988 when the market reached $488.92.

With the gain, gold is closing in on $500, a level not seen since mid-December 1987. Some analysts are calling for gold to move back to such levels in 2006.

I don’t know where the price of gold is going but I do know that the debt from the war in Iraq and hurricane Katrina will have to be paid off somehow.

The Bush administration and the Republican Congress do not raise taxes or veto any spending bills which means the only way to pay off the debt is for the government to counterfeit more money.

I think I can hear them starting up those printing presses now.

That means inflation.

Inflation is a hidden tax on wages, savings and the value of the U.S. currency which all decline in relation to hard assets like real estate and gold.

Inflation hits the poor and those on fixed incomes the hardest. As each day passes and more dollars come off the presses, their money is worth less and less.

It’s really easy to understand how this happens if you just imagine that your neighbor down the street has a printing press in his basement. Everytime he wants something that he can’t afford, he goes down in the basement and prints up some more money.

You and all the other people who are working for a living cannot compete with a printing press. You just work harder and harder and every time you think you’ve got enough money saved up to buy something you want, your neighbor shows up with his wallet full of counterfeit bills and bids up the price. He can always pay more than you because he can always print up whatever he needs.

Of course, it’s illegal for any average citizen to counterfeit currency. That’s because the government wants to preserve its monopoly on the printing of money. That’s the way they make everybody else work while they live off of taxes, which they take from workers at the point of a gun, plus all that new money they can print up whenever they want to buy something they can’t afford.

So go back to your neighbor who has the printing press in his basement and imagine that he not only has the right to print money while you don’t, he also has the right to take your wages and your property whenever he wants it.

The fact is no amount of labor can ever compete with that.

Everybody’s got a neighbor like the one I’m talking about. His name is Uncle Sam.