It could have been worse

Yes of course it is a highly dubious thing to invite large crowds to gather for a public viewing during a pandemic.  Especially when the police have been breaking up funeral processions for months now.  Extra-especially when the spiking numbers of cases has just prompted the city to once again plead with people to avoid large gatherings ahead of the holiday weekend.

But imagine how much worse the Kern funeral would have been if there were no restrictions. I've got a vision of a Mickey Easterling style tableau except in this case Blaine is mounted atop the Smokey Mary and paraded through the streets, limbs animated so he can wave at us, probably.

Actually, now I'm upset that we didn't get to see this.

Bobby Jindal pantsed us

DEQ still hasn't quite gotten their britches pulled back up.

The fish testing program cost about $500,000 per year and led to an average of three new mercury advisories per year.

That all ended in 2008, when DEQ gutted the program amid a push by Gov. Bobby Jindal to force cuts across various state agencies. For eight years, there was no fish tissue sampling, except in the aftermath of a chemical or oil spill.

State law requires the program to draw its funding from tax dollars, grants or donations. DEQ has been hesitant to ask for more funding from the Legislature or push for a rule change that would allow the use of money from fees or fines.

In 2015, environmental groups put pressure on DEQ to revive the program. “We had to embarrass the hell out of them,” Kohl said. It worked, apparently.

“Our butt was hanging out and we had to cover it up,” Piehler said.

This also says that Louisiana's waterways are particularly dangerous environments for mercury poisoning in the fish that live there. But, you know, as President Trump says....

“Atmospheric mercury is less than it was, and most of the mercury we were getting was from aerial deposition,” he said.

That doesn’t mean testing should cease, Kohl said.

“If you don’t test, you don’t find problems,” he said. “Some people like that. Ignorance is bliss.”

Visibility is a trap

Land of the free, indeed.....

NEW ORLEANS — A large alligator found walking on the street in Lakeview was killed Friday morning because it was reportedly too big to relocate.

The 12-foot alligator was first spotted between French and Germain streets (near Harrison Avenue) in Lakeview around 8 a.m. Police officials said it came out of the water from the pumping station.

For a few minutes Friday morning, this big boy was everybody's friend. Check out the video if you can. It's too hard for me to watch anymore. Buddy was so fat and happy.  Just out for a morning walk to kick off the holiday weekend. Then someone called the cops and well... there are no happy endings in 2020. We should all know that.

We live under a terror regime now. There are rules for living through those, one of which is don't ever let them notice you. It's always the first and often the last mistake.

What are they even doing there

Kicking people out of there homes in the middle of a pandemic/depression must be essential work. Otherwise, we wouldn't force people into dangerous conditions in order to get it done.

Tenant advocates said this week they’re also worried about conditions inside the courtrooms. Anderson-Trahan’s docket quickly became backlogged. One case that was scheduled for 11 a.m. was still being heard at 6 p.m. At one point, there were 24 people inside a small courtroom that doesn’t have working AC. One woman nearly collapsed in the heat.

The judge tried to cut down on the number of people in the courtroom, only to announce minutes later that an overflow room was also crowded.

There were clear signs that the court took some precautions: temperatures were checked at the door and masks were required — but the judge ordered litigants who stood a few feet apart from each other to remove the masks so the court reporter could hear them.

Get used to it

Nobody could have predicted this was where we were headed..... except everyone.

WASHINGTON — After several months of mixed messages on the coronavirus pandemic, the White House is settling on a new one: Learn to live with it.

Anyway, as we've been saying for months, the bosses won the pandemic.  They have the permanent advantage on you now. Learn to live with it.

Herd immunity is also a death cult

It always was, really. But because the only policy responses we're capable of fall within a range from "get used to it" to "maybe it will just go away" then you begin to see why waiting around for herd immunity has always been such a popular option.

Results suggest the New Orleans area is nowhere near herd immunity, which would require a large percentage of the population to be infected with the virus in order to stop it from widely spreading.

Researchers also found a 1.63% fatality rate, which means that reaching herd immunity would result in many more deaths.

"To get to herd immunity, you need 70-80% exposed," said Amy Feehan, an Ochsner research scientist who led the study. "You do the math, and that’s a whole lot of people dying."

Also, there are specific cohorts of people who have to do the bulk of the getting used to all the dying while others reason they will probably be okay waiting it out.  You can guess who those are pretty easily.  In any case, the policy that best protects the status quo of wealth and power will be what we go with. If that means "a whole lot of people dying," well then.. when has that ever stopped us?

Tourist area

A city shouldn't have "tourist areas" It can have neighborhoods that tourists enjoy seeing and visiting. But a "tourist area" is an amusement park where nobody actually lives. This is a plan to sacrifice what remains of our city's most famous neighborhood as a tourist area. 

French Quarter streets where cars aren’t welcome. Sidewalks converted to outdoor patios. And lower speed limits for the cars that do travel through.

Those are just some of the ways New Orleans officials are considering transforming the French Quarter and surrounding areas, according to documents released by the city Tuesday. The draft plans are all aimed at making the city's most important tourist areas more pedestrian friendly, though some critics worry about the effect on residents and necessary vehicle traffic.

If this were a plan to make the entire city more pedestrian friendly, reduce the need for there to be as many cars on the streets, and help people connect to their jobs or their social lives without having to own a vehicle themselves, it would be a good idea. That's not what it is, though. It's a plan to further isolate a "tourist area" from local access depriving it of even the pretense of the character that made it a tourist attraction in the first place.  Because, as always, step 3 is profit.

City officials view the effort as one that will put New Orleans on a par with Paris, the town of Vicchio in Florence, Italy, and other cities that have prioritized pedestrians in tourist-heavy corridors and enjoyed increased tourism as a result, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Ramsey Green said. He argued that the push is all the more critical now, as the city grapples with a sharp drop-off in tourists and the sales-tax dollars they bring, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and to local restrictions on French Quarter businesses.

"Our small businesses, our restaurants, our places that people want to visit, how do we give them more space than perhaps fits in their four walls? And that's kind of what this is," Green said.

Not sure what the actual logic is here so we're hesitant to even argue with it.  But to say the least it's a dubious notion that a travel business depressed by fear of a still raging pandemic is alleviated by a car-less Quarter. Worried about the health consequences of flying across the country, sleeping in a strange bed, and dining out in public?  Well what if we told you nobody can park there now?  Feel better? Besides, aren't the marketing people focusing more on the "drive-in" traveler now, anyway?  What are we going to do with all those cars?

Hard Rock Parking Garage & Golf Cart Rental

— jabco (@JABC0) July 1, 2020

Oh dear. 

Even in better times, the desperate pursuit of tourism at the expense of residents' priorities has become a global scourge. Cities all over the world, including some of those cited by Cantrell officials have been struggling with the consequences of allowing their culturally significant neighborhoods to become playgrounds for the wealthy where nobody actually lives.

Attracting 14 million tourists a year, Florence is Italy’s most-visited city after Venice and Rome. Boasting a huge and rich variety of the world’s heritage and surrounded by Tuscany’s rolling hills, the city’s popularity is easy to understand.

But as with Venice and Rome, the growth in tourism has seen residents driven out of town by the rising cost of living and arrival of Airbnb: according to a Siena university study, one in five properties in the historic centre is advertised as a short-term let.

Some measures, however, seem to be paying off. “One of the main issues is that everyone is so focused on the historic centre, which is only a 5km sq area in a city of 105km sq,” said Del Re. “So we are heavily promoting areas outside of the centre.

Which is why reasonable people are suspicious of the motivation behind the plans in New Orleans. The laudable stated purpose of reducing vehicular traffic in general is a flimsy rationalization offered in bad faith. In truth we're just offering the tourism industry something it's been wanting forever but we're only now desperate enough to give.

Plans to restrict more traffic in the French Quarter have been floated before, only to be killed after critics accused the city of trying to make the half square-mile area more palatable to tourists and said the changes would make things harder for residents.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu backed down from a 2017 plan to permanently bar cars on Bourbon Street.

But the potential this time around to recoup revenues lost to the coronavirus contagion has apparently sold many bars, restaurants and businesses on the idea after Mayor LaToya Cantrell first floated it in May.

It's a classic example of how capitalism commoditizes and consumes everything and how a crisis like the pandemic only accelerates that process.  In case of emergency just pull the lever that makes all the unjust and policies that benefit the wealthiest people go even faster.  It's all we're ever capable of.