Obviously it's Carnival and everyone is busy doing that

Menckles gave me a new camera for my birthday last year and I've been giving it a workout this parade season.  I'm going to try and share some of my favorites along with some parading notes here in the coming days. But right now we're kind of in the thick of things so we'll leave it alone until we're all snowed in or whatever on Monday.

Meanwhile here is that one float in Krewe D'Etat everybody got a kick out of.

#Standing

Some people are obsessed with standing.

A federal judge on Friday (Feb. 13) dismissed a controversial wetlands damage lawsuit filed by the east bank levee authority against more than 80 oil, gas and pipeline companies, ruling that the authority failed to make a valid claim against the energy firms.

The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East contended that dredging of navigation canals and other actions by the companies caused wetland damage that reduced or would reduce the effectiveness of the recently-rebuilt levee system protecting most of metro New Orleans.

The suit attempted to get the energy companies to either repair the damage or pay damages to the authority, with the money used to improve the levee system.

But U.S. District Court Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown found that the levee authority's standing as a third party to federal and state permits granted to the energy companies was not strong enough to justify a financial claim against the companies.

As we all know by now, healthy wetlands are an indispensable element of the natural and man-made systems that protect the inhabited parts of South Louisiana from storm surge during hurricanes.   One assumes the Flood Protection Authority would have some interest in making claims against damage to that system. 

So why do they not have "standing" to sue in this case?  Watch this.

Brown also disagreed with the levee authority's attempt to find the energy companies liable under provisions of Louisiana law governing the flow of water over property, which is called "natural servitude of drain". The levee authority contended that the energy companies were responsible for storm surge posing an increased threat to the levees because of the erosion the companies caused.

But the state law is written to protect downstream landowners from problems caused by upstream users, and the levees are on higher ground. Brown said several cases cited by the authority did not adequately support their position turning that provision of the law around.

Because levees are on higher ground the levee board has no jurisdiction where it concerns the marshland that actually makes those levees effective.   Weren't we supposed to have evolved beyond this sort of self-defeating thinking post-K? 

And if the levee board doesn't have standing to sue over damage to the levee system who does?  The State of Louisiana itself might.  But that's not likely to happen. Not under the current administration.

The ruling also was praised by the administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal, who opposed the suit.

"We appreciate the judge's ruling and are pleased that this frivolous lawsuit has come to an end," said Shannon Bates, deputy communications director for the governor. "We've maintained that this was not a claim SLPFA had the authority to bring, and we are glad the court agreed."

And not likely under the next one either.  

Everybody hates Bobby

Muses "Peer Pressure" float from last night.  Bobby Jindal's T-shirt declares LSU a "No Go Zone"


Jindal won't let go of his Islamaphobic "No go zone" fiction.  The mayor of London says it's complete nonsense.

During a discussion in the United States Friday morning, London Mayor Boris Johnson said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s recent claims regarding the existence of so-called “no-go zones” in his city are “complete nonsense.”

“I would be more than happy personally to escort Gov. Jindal around any area that he thinks is a no-go zone, and I will show him what a happy, thriving community it is with people jumbled up in all sorts of ways,” Johnson said during a Politico Playbook breakfast in Washington, D.C

Bobby doesn't care, of course. He's telling a different sort of "truth."   It doesn't have to be technically true, it just has to be a thing that his intended audience knows.

"Wait, there's a camera"

Chart party

This is exactly what happens.

New Orleanians' king cake consumption over time pic.twitter.com/Lhsjy7Orpf
— Bradley Warshauer (@bradleypw) February 12, 2015

This might not be an entirely accurate figure but I think this year I've had a couple of Antoine's cakes and a couple of Rouses cakes.  I got to try one of those Duong Phuong deals everyone is raving about this year.  I thought it pretty much just tasted like King Cake.

Oh wait. This morning a co-worker brought one in from Wal-Mart. It was not the best breakfast food I've ever been involved with.

Bonus chart:



  Ain't no place to pee... 

Open ended entitlement

Lee Zurik looks at the ongoing Hollywood South debacle.

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - When Miley Cyrus made the move from music to movies, one of her first releases was shot in Louisiana, back in 2011. "So Undercover" had a budget of nearly $14 million.

“It received a straight-to-DVD release in 2013,” says media critic Matt Brennan. ”It barely made a splash and I hadn't heard of it until I looked at it for this interview.”
But Louisiana taxpayers helped plug the movie's budget gap by writing a $3 million check - taxpayer money, handed over directly to this flop, as part of the state's film incentive program.

“It's an unaffordable program,” says Jan Moller, who leads the nonprofit Louisiana Budget Project in Baton Rouge.

I wonder how many people actually understand that the state just writes out checks to these movies studios and receives only about 23 cents on the dollar return on investment.

Moller says the Motion Picture Investor Tax Credit program is sucking money from higher education and healthcare. “This is an open-ended entitlement program that is costing the state more than $200 million a year,” Moller says, “at a time when we have a $1.4 billion shortfall.”

  If people did understand this better, then maybe this dumb Druids float would look a bit different.

Jindaled

The Presidential election calendar is not friendly to the particular scam Bobby Jindal has been trying to run.  He's had Louisiana more or less on a crash course with budget hell for years now. The idea was to be well into his pursuit of national office before things started to fall apart at home.

And it was going okay too. Were it not for the fact that the national press begins vetting potential Presidential candidates so early in the process, it's unlikely that you'd see the local papers start to call him out this explicitly before he was long gone.

Year after year, Louisiana didn't have enough money to cover its expenses, yet Gov. Bobby Jindal refused to roll back income tax cuts or ever-increasing corporate tax breaks. Instead, he raided reserve funds and sold off state property.

Jindal suggested job growth from his economic development wins would replenish those assets once the recession ended. It hasn't — and money from the lucrative oil industry has taken a nose dive with crude prices. Now, the Republican is running out of short-term patches and is struggling to plug a $1.6 billion budget hole just as he tries to build support for a possible 2016 presidential run.

Funding for higher education and health care services will almost certainly be subject to cuts deeper than what they already have endured in recent years, and Jindal's successor will have to repay a string of debts and IOUs.

"They've used all the smoke that was in the can and all the mirrors that they could buy and now they're out of tricks. Their solution is to gut higher education like a fish," said Republican state Treasurer John Kennedy.

Note that the above is an AP report anyway.  

The Wisner list that counts

Dambala posted the Wisner grant proposals.  This doesn't tell you exactly how much was awarded in each case, but these ballpark figures are better than just the list of grantees the city released yesterday.   Anyway, I'm sure Dambala would explain further but he seems distracted by something.

Jon Stewart's best moment

Probably no surprise that Jon Stewart is leaving now that Colbert has moved on.  Over the period that both of their shows were running back to back they sort of became the Siskel and Ebert of the cable news shows.   I was less enthusiastic about watching one without the other. 

Not very long ago, "the discourse" on news and politics was so limited that it seems stifling to even conceive of now.  But the last 10 or 15 years have really seen media criticism flourish as new platforms allowed for a much broader and more robust conversation than had been previously possible. I wonder sometimes if people take that for granted now.  Stewart and Colbert were able to tap into and really focus that dissenting energy and give it a voice on corporate television.  That it happened at all is remarkable in its own right. That it happened for almost two decades is revolutionary.

But, as some smart people have observed, maybe this was a revolution that has run its course.

Anyway,  I'm sure there will be plenty "best of" Stewart clips posted around for the next few months.  Don't think many will top this, though. And it wasn't even something that happened on his own show. 

The Tom Benson legal and medical full employment program

So here's a joke. How many doctors and lawyers does it take to make sure Tom Benson's light bulb is screwed in all the way?

Um.. well it's a lot.

Three different physicians will evaluate Tom Benson’s mental health to see if he is still fit to make business decisions about the Saints, Pelicans and other assets in his business empire, a judge ordered Tuesday.

Benson, feuding with the relatives he has decided to cut out of his succession plans, was resisting the idea of an independent evaluation. He said he was willing to meet privately with Civil District Court Judge Kern Reese, but he argued that a psychiatric exam was too intrusive.

Of course Team Rita wanted to have Benson's brain dissected and checked by a team of specialists for post-concussion syndrome or something like that.  Benson's people preferred the test be limited to a brief recitation of the 5 times table. So they reached a compromise of sorts.

Reese did reject the particular evaluation called for by psychiatrist Ted Bloch III, who was proposed by Benson’s estranged relatives. The judge said that exam would be too invasive — it involved performing extensive questioning, blood work and neuropsychological testing over the course of several days.

Instead, Reese said that Benson would undergo a standard exam used in these types of cases. Bloch and two other physicians — one chosen by Benson’s lawyers and another chosen jointly by that doctor and Bloch — will have until March 13 to complete their reports. The three-physician team must be assembled by Feb. 25, Reese said.

What they're going to do is put Benson to a series of problems and see how he scores.

He might, for example, be asked to measure the volume of liquid contained in a small draft beer at the Smoothie King Center and then subtract that amount from the volume in a large size.  (The answer will surprise you!)

Another question available to the evaluators involves Benson's understanding of Vatican protocol.

There's also a reflex test where the doctor plays the Superdome third down siren and, if Benson flinches at all, he's already doing better than the Saints' defense.

For Benson's sake, I hope there isn't a written portion on the test. He'll have a hard time getting his Apple IIc or whatever he used to type this letter in the exam room.

Anyway, we're headed into the heavy duty half of parade season and I'm riding Sunday so I decided this year I would make some specialty throws.



See they're reversible, just like Benson's estate.  But either way you choose to wear them, they're sure to be a weight around everyone's neck. 

Jindaled

WVUE looks into Jindal's "Louisiana Miracle" a bit.  Or at least they look at the part where we subsidize companies out of the state treasury so that they can lay people off.

We found more. On May 4, 2012, the state announced International Paper would invest $44 million in their Bogalusa mill to retain 411 jobs. The state offered International Paper a $2.2 million tax credit and industrial tax exemptions. Remember, the state announced that deal on May 4.

Two weeks later, on May 18, International Paper told the state it would lay off 64 workers at another plant in Louisiana.

“That's a terrible juxtaposition of events,” LeRoy says. “It suggests that they were holding back, perhaps, on the layoffs until after they got the award.”

International Paper sent this brief statement in response to our inquiries:

We received the state incentive only after committing to invest $30 million dollars in capital improvements at our Bogalusa mill. We appreciate the cooperation from the state and are proud to employ 2000 workers across Louisiana.

In 2008, the Commerce and Industry Board approved a tax break of $1,985,260 for Libbey Glass in Shreveport. State records show the company promised to create 46 new jobs. But they actually reduced their workforce by 147. Nonetheless, the board approved their tax break renewal and let Libbey continue to receive its incentive.

“I think, in this time and day when unemployment has been so high for so long, we shouldn't be paying companies to lay people off,” LeRoy says. “We call this ‘payoffs for layoffs.'”

Meanwhile... 

Widespread layoffs, hundreds of classes eliminated, academic programs jettisoned and a flagship university that can’t compete with its peers around the nation — those are among the grim scenarios LSU leaders outlined in internal documents as the threat of budget cuts looms.

Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration is considering deep budget slashing to higher education for the fiscal year that begins July 1 to help close a $1.6 billion shortfall.

LSU campuses from Shreveport to New Orleans were asked to explain how a reduction between 35 percent and 40 percent in state financing — about $141.5 million to the university system — would affect their operations. The documents, compiled for LSU system President F. King Alexander, were obtained through a public records request.

The potential implications of such hefty cuts were summed up in stark terms: 1,433 faculty and staff jobs eliminated; 1,572 courses cut; 28 academic programs shut down across campuses; and six institutions declaring some form of financial emergency.

At the system’s flagship university in Baton Rouge, the documents say 27 percent of faculty positions would have to be cut, along with 1,400 classes, jeopardizing the accreditation of the engineering and business colleges. Some campus buildings would be closed.

We need to layoff  everyone in the university system so that we can pay for all these tax incentives that go toward laying people off elsewhere.  In it's own way, it has a certain elegance.

Throw me something, Wisnah

It's Carnival time and the mayor is throwing out trinkets.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu on Monday unveiled the list of local groups receiving Edward Wisner grants this year, apparently signaling the status quo remains in place for the contested piece of coastal real estate that has produced the revenue for Wisner grants going back decades.

More than 60 organizations, ranging from the Louisiana Children’s Museum to St. Augustine High School, will share about $1.2 million this year.

Back in September the Wisner heirs fighting to maintain control of the land trust that produces these grants lost rather decisively to the city in court but are still holding out hope that the State Supreme Court will take up their appeal.

The Advocate doesn't list all of this year's recipients but the city's website does if you are interested.

If there are further details as to the amounts distributed, they aren't posted in an obvious place. As you can see from the list, though, this money (however much of it might be waste or patronage or wasted patronage or whatever) actually does a lot of good.  Which is one reason the thought that the city might sell this golden goose is concerning.

Some of the heirs have said they worry Landrieu will simply sell off the land, part of which holds Port Fourchon, a hub for vessels serving offshore rigs.

The proceeds of such a sale would presumably be split among all of the beneficiaries that get a cut of the land’s proceeds today, including the city, Tulane University, the Salvation Army, LSU and a collection of some 50 different individuals. But the land would be gone as a regular source of income.

The mayor so far has not made any moves in that direction, although he said Monday that his administration is in the middle of evaluating how much the land is really worth.

He compared it to the Public Belt Railway, another city property that Landrieu has said he would be willing to at least consider selling. “I’m going to make sure that asset is valued correctly,” he said.

Like the Public Belt, it's not an easy asset to value.  For instance, it might depend on how many Georges family members are interested in buying. 

There's also the problem of just how long term an investment in land in that area really stands to run. Now might, in fact, be the time to get out of that sinking plot.

Sunset Boulevard

You have to feel a little bit bad for him, right?  It would be inhuman not to... right?

The governor ignored the specific question — about Jindal’s cuts to per-student spending for higher ed being the deepest in the nation — and instead delivered a sermon that included a boast about “eight credit upgrades” for the state and the “strongest credit rating we’ve seen in decades.”

Unmentioned: That just last week, Moody’s issued a “credit negative” report on Louisiana and said its problems have been intensified by its reliance on $1 billion in temporary patchwork funding being used to prop up the budget this year. The Republican state treasurer, John Kennedy, protested “budget gimmicks” and years of being “fiscally irresponsible.”

Minutes later, when Simendinger asked Jindal to explain why the big state deficit “qualifies you to run for president,” the governor replied with a string of non-sequiturs.

“In New Orleans, 90 percent of our kids are in charter schools.”

“It used to take 10 days to get a prescription if you were uninsured in Baton Rouge, and now it takes 10 minutes.”

“In ethics rankings we were bottom five for legislative disclosure, and now we’re in the top five.”

There's a parlor game going where we try and figure out which cabinet positions under the next Republican President Jindal has disqualified himself for before his little campaign.. or whatever this is has gotten off the ground. 

Jindal's speech in London was his failed application for next Sec. of State. Today is his application for Sec. of Ed.
— Karl's in Charge (@karlschott) February 9, 2015

I was sure he was after that Secretary of Something Called Volcano Monitoring gig for a long while there.  But at this rate, it looks like he's running for Iraqi Information Minister.  (Yeah yeah "Baghdad Bobby".. I know. You can have that joke for free, though.) 

Occasional Monkey-borne Apocalypse Update

The Tulane Primate Research center in Covington is going to be the end of all of us one of these days.

At a hastily-called news conference Saturday (Feb.7), a host of parish, state and federal officials announced that a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist investigating the bacteria that led to the death of a monkey at the center last year had fallen ill and that tests revealed she had the bacteria in her blood. Investigators say it's too early to determine definitively if the scientist became sick as a result of her work at the center or whether she may have been exposed to Burkholderia pseudomallei as a result of her travels.

The bacteria are rarely transmitted from person to person or animal to person. Melioidosis is primarily a tropical climate disease and is widespread in southeast Asia and northern Australia. The bacteria that cause the disease are found in contaminated soil and water and spread to humans and animals through direct contact with the contaminated material, usually through an open cut.

Officials have said there's no reason to believe that the bacteria have spread beyond the primate center and there are no reports of sick individuals at the research facility, which employs about 300 people.

A hastily called press conference alerts the area that they do not need to worry about this thing they would not otherwise have been aware of.  That is very reassuring. Right after having been very frightening.

Anyway, longtime diseased monkey enthusiasts will note that this is not the first such incident by a long shot.  They do have fun at the Tulane monkey house.

Happy Lombardi Gras

Five years ago, Saturday, the Saints won the Superbowl.  Ever since that day, we've all been living happily ever after.

I was out at parades all day yesterday, otherwise I would have put these up. Anyway here is Super Bowl 44.  Watch it before these Youtubes get taken down.

Episode I: The Floats Awaken

It's the first weekend of big parade time season.  May the Force be with you. Failing that, at least have some money to spend on toys and such.



When we got out to the parade route tonight, Menckles and I managed to convince ourselves that this was the first year in several that it didn't rain on Oshun.  It turns out this isn't true, though.  It's just that we missed much of the Friday parades last year because we went to a show instead. Anyway, this is the first time we've seen Oshun in decent weather in a while, so that's something.



Another thing about that nice weather. This was the largest crowd I can remember seeing on a first night in quite some time.  That might have something to do with the fact that there are two parades on the first Friday now, but still, it looks like it's going to be a big year.  Here is King Shango welcoming the crowd.



Also, Oshun looked terrific... for Oshun, anyway.  There have been years when this was barely a parade at all. Some Oshuns have been little more than a few maid/duke floats pulled by pickups.  This was not the case here. 



The floats looked great. They weren't huge or elaborate but they didn't have to be.  Just straightforward fun. 




On the other hand, they could have used a copy editor.  Oshun's theme this year was supposed to be "Carnivals Around The World." Simple enough concept.  Except they spelled it "Carivals Around The World" on the title float.. which wouldn't have been too much of a big deal if only there weren't several other misspellings in the procession.





But let's not be too critical. It's Friday night. It's parade time again.  Everyone had fun. It really was the best Oshun I've seen in.. maybe ever.



I haven't seen many Cleopatras.  They're a recent transplant from the West Bank so I don't have much to compare them with.  Here is this year's Queen Cleopatra.



One nice thing we can say for them is they bring a lot of bands. I didn't stop to photograph all of them but it was an impressive line up including.. but in no way limited to.. Carver, McMain, Karr, and many others.   They were led by St. Aug.



Cleopatra also had room for a few dance teams, marching clubs, and other random units like these stilt walkers.




So it was a good parade... especially for a first Friday.  Of course, this being a first Friday, it come as little surprise that Cleopatra's floats and theming would be pretty plain. Cleopatra's theme was "Nightmare on the Avenue."  They made a banner for it and everything.




I didn't get out to see Krewe of Boo this year, but I'm pretty sure these are those floats hastily repurposed. Something tells me we'll see these a few more times this year before it's all over with.





The "Killer Clown" here was particularly memorable. We'll be on the look out for that one again.



Beyond that, there isn't much else to report.  I already said the crowd was pretty nice.  There was one dog on our block.  It didn't seem like he wanted to be there very much. Technically you're not supposed to have your dogs out at the parades but I've noticed that rule isn't enforced too strictly on the first weekend.  But that's a good thing because a lot of dogs really love it out there.  This poor baby, though, looked a little nervous.



Anyway, it's nice to be easing back into parade season.  If you stayed in, though, you might have gotten to see Anthony Davis do this.. so really there was no way to lose tonight.

Everybody still hates Bobby

This one is a little more predictable than earlier given the author but here is Tyler Bridges in Politico.

But here’s what Jindal doesn’t say: Louisiana’s budget is hemorrhaging red ink, and it’s getting worse. He inherited a $900 million surplus when he became governor seven years ago, and his administration’s own budget documents now show the state is facing deficits of more than $1 billion for as far as the eye can see. There are no easy solutions today because Jindal has increasingly balanced the budget by resorting to one-time fixes, depleting the state’s reserve funds and taking money meant for other purposes.

Aaaaand Jindal's entire tenure as Governor involved an oil boom plus a "trend bucking" stimulus of federal funded hurricane rebuilding activity.  How the hell do you fuck that up this badly?

Carnival links: Flags and revolutions

Tattered Rex flag Uptown New Orleans 2006

• NOLA.com social scene reporter Sue Strachan has provided us a handy dandy "Guide to Mardi Gras flags" this week. It comes with a photo gallery of selected flags. It's not a complete list, of course. She's asking for submissions.


There are all sorts of Carnival organizations.  Some of them stage parades, some of them, are benevolent associations, some have open memberships, some are exclusive clubs.  Lots and lots of them have their own flags.

Strachan writes that these various flags can be seen together as the city's "10th flag."  


New Orleans and flags have had a long-standing relationship. Nine official flags have flown over the city: Spanish flag of Castile and Léon; white flag of Bourbon France; Bourbon Spain; French Tricolor; U.S. flag beginning with the 15 stars and stripes of 1803; the flag of Independent Louisiana; the Stars and Bars of the Confederate States of America;  the state of Louisiana flag; and the City of New Orleans flag.

During this time of year, we can add another to this list -- the Mardi Gras flag. (A concept I first saw described in an article by Edward Branley on the GoNola site.) Who created the first official flag of the Carnival season? None other than Rex, which also originated the traditional Carnival colors of purple (justice), green (faith) and gold (power). According to a representative, "In Mardi Gras' earliest days, large banners were used to promote Mardi Gras every year. By the late 1870s, Rex had created its own flag." And so a new custom began.

Of this city's 10th flag, there are many incarnations, with many people flying ones they find in local stores or online. Many of the krewes have their own designs, with their own rules on when to fly the them.


But, really, that's not quite it. Or, at least, lumping all the Carnival organizations's flags together into one thing is a little too "One City One Voice" for me.  Carnival is too many things to too many people for it to fall under one multi-flag.  Indeed, there are many flags among them that I'd rather not be associated with at all, thank you very much.

What's great about the epic civic pageant that is Carnival in New Orleans, though, is that every socio-political element owns its status, wears it on its sleeve and parades it around in the streets while everyone drinks and dances.  One very prominent such element happens to be the scions of 19th Century neo-Confederates.

As the oldest and proudest Carnival groups, they're the most likely to display their flags on their homes.  I've been noting them for a while now.  This is from a post from 2006 where I shared some flag pics.



Every year during Carnival the former kings (or their descendants) fly these flags at their homes. The bottom right of each flag denotes the year in which this particular king reigned. This flag belongs to Rex from 1983. (It hasn't been very well maintained)

That's the flag at the top of this post, BTW.  Anyway.. sorry to go on quoting myself but rather than rewrite the same point...


The Old Line Krewes are tied to a history of racial hatred and upper class arrogance that goes far beyond the 1991 anti-discrimination controversy. (A good book to start with here is James Gill's Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans ) But Carnival doesn't only belong to the rich. 

A goodly part of it does belong to the juxtaposition of rich and poor, though.  More on that in a bit.  In any case, I'm grateful to the neo-Confederates for indicating the locations of their homes with these flags. They help Steve Scalise know where not to accidentally give a speech.  Here are some of those flags.

Proteus flag prominently displayed above humble cottage



Here is the Downman mansion on St. Charles Avenue at Third Street.  These flags indicate two former Rex and a Comus in the family. (I think the Comus flag technically indicates a Queen of Comus since the identity of Comus himself is never made public.. just like the Grand Wizzard unless he decides to run for Governor.)

Rex stops here on Mardi Gras morning for a toast.  It's on the uptown bound side of St. Charles so the whole parade has to cross the street in order to accomplish this.  It always comes as a neat little surprise to the folks camped on the neutral ground there when they have to turn around.

This is a Momus flag.



Besides Comus, they are the only Old Line krewe to abandon parading rather than comply with the anti-discrimination ordinance.  Oh but they still roll anyway.  Their floats and members parade as part of the Knights of Chaos.  Privilege has its privileges.



• Here's a look at some of this year's parade food.  There's a map there as well as blurbs about each outlet by Todd Price.  More and more of the new wave of food trucks are entering the selection lottery now and so more of them appear alongside the regular carnie fare.


Of course there are always a few random vendors who show up regardless of license. This sign is from one such truck.






• Everyone is putting out their Carnival preview stuff.  Good news, mostly.


This is from Arthur Hardy writing in The Advocate. 


The Krewe of Isis, a mainstay in Jefferson Parish for more than 40 years, has no plans to change its name in response to current events in the Middle East.

Here is a welcome message from Boh Brothers.



Happy Fucking Carnival: pic.twitter.com/Ka9yf4t0We
— 504 Not Found (@Adrastosno) February 6, 2015







• Finally, here is a PDF of this month's Antigravity Magazine.  On page 18 begins a must-read article by Jules Bentley about social changes expressed through carnival. 


If you're familiar with Bentley, you'll recognize his usual weaknesses.  Always a perceptive, witty writer,  Jules sometimes throws in unnecessary straw men in order to set up his little one-liners. He just has to throw in the word "millenials" at one point. But one can be a plumb-ignorant egotist with no sense of history or politics at any age.  There's also a passage where he describes the Chewbacchus parade as a much more stereotypical herd of nerds than it is in real life. When you read Bentley, you have to shrug that stuff off a little in order to stay focused on his point, and he does have one.  But that's more work than a lot of readers are willing to do so his better points often get lost.

The heart of this article is a parallel he draws between the arrival of Comus in the 19th Century and the arrival of the latest wave of DIY organizations, most significantly the Sci-Fi themed Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus.  Bently observes in each case a kind of assertion of status laid out by a new class of wealthy arrival to the city.

This week's Gambit inaccurately stated that "Carnival has been celebrated in New Orleans since 1856.." Sounds like they've been listening to the Mayor of Mobile too much. 1856 was only the beginning of Comus.  There was Carnival in New Orleans before that.  Like today's Carnival, it revealed glaring social inequalities.


Mardi Gras as it existed through the first half of the 1800s was unruly, a day of social levelling in which the poor controlled the streets. James Gill, in his tremendous and tremendously enjoyable book, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans , reminds us that for our city’s only partially obsolete hereditary ruling classes, “[the holiday’s] real significance lay in the annual reaffirmation of social eminence over merit.” Their Mardi Gras was grand— private balls and parties, removed from the hoi polloi. 

While the aristocrats were safely ensconced inside, the world outside became a more raucous (and threatening) scene.


In her terrific, deep-diving 2008 FSU PhD thesis, “Setting the Stage: Dance and Gender in Old-Line New Orleans Carnival Balls, 1870-1920,” Jennifer Atkins also aggregates a great deal of the better writing on Carnival’s class- conflict aspects, including Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion that the collective voices of the oppressed raised during Carnival render the streets, even if temporarily, “a democratized space.” “In the process of asserting status and power,” Atkins writes, “protests from disenfranchised groups, though performed in the surrealistic carnival world, can be very real threats to society."   

Comus was, for its day, what today's tech industry might call an act of disruption. It was an end run around regulation for the betterment of a hegemonic class of elites.


If Carnival in the streets was to continue, its power must be put back in the hands of the already powerful. There was talk among the Creole aristocracy of cancelling Mardi Gras, but a group of Americans, showing the entrepreneurial spirit typical of their kind, came up with a better idea. These Americans—not Creoles, not New Orleanians or even Louisianians— created the first organized Mardi Gras parade with floats. Drawing from the work of English poet Milton, the first Comus parade had two floats. One featured Comus, an ancient god of festivity whom Milton cast as a deceiving necromancer, and the other featured the Devil. They rolled in open and unpunished defiance of the bans on masking and music-making. 

Comus took on some of the forms of popular Carnival... the outdoor music and masking.. formalized them, and in the process, sanitized them to a degree.

But they didn't obliterate it entirely.  The notion of Carnival as order overturned still persists to this day.  It may, in fact, be even more powerful than ever.

Last year, in a Lens op-ed CW Cannon argued that we may now be living in the "golden age" of Carnival specifically because of the more democratic and inclusive nature of what might otherwise be perceived as chaos.


Krewe du Vieux is quite conscious of itself not just as an insurrection, but also as a resurrection, an effort to recover from the anti-carnivalesque aspects of the 19^th century Uptown Carnival model. Their mission statement expresses this ambition explicitly: “We believe in exposing the world to the true nature of Mardi Gras — and in exposing ourselves to the world.” Since Katrina, Krewe du Vieux has been joined by several other downtown parading clubs — ‘ti Rex, Chewbacchus, Red Beans — each of which follows  the Krewe du Vieux model far more faithfully than the Uptown one, especially by keeping dues affordable.

But the ultimate expression of the carnivalesque instinct in our time is what happens downtown on Fat Tuesday itself. Here the line between spectator and performer is almost totally erased as thousands — whether costumed, masked or merely bystanders — converge in the streets in a utopian vision of mass civic participation. And on this day — if only for a day — we also witness New Orleans’ idealized sense of itself come down to earth to shape the city’s social reality.

But Bentley adds a twist to this that Cannon doesn't.  Bentley recognizes, in Chewbacchus, a deliberate.. almost commercialized.. turn away from the notion of social upheaval. 


Cybernetic Carnival seeks to appropriate e.g. the irreverence of Krewe du Vieux, reducing that Krewe’s incisive political and social satire to a directionless but consumer-attractive pose of “subversiveness.” Instead of engaging current events or the foibles of the powerful, Chewbacchus participants engage in a post-modern remixing of consumer culture: a Hollywood-film alien mixed with a burlesque dancer mixed with a robot from a Japanese cartoon.

 Just as Comus sanitized the "threatening" class conflict of 19th Century Carnival, so too does the emergence of Chewbacchus seek to blunt the satirical bent of modern Carnival.  So goes, Bentley's thesis anyway.  It's not as black and white as all of that in reality.

For one thing, this town is too small for us to identify rigid divisions between newcomers and natives or between hyper-insular social groups of any sort.  There's no actual "neutral ground" in the classic sense.  Hell, KDV even crossed Canal Street this year.  The truth is, everybody knows everybody.  And, unless you really are Comus, you probably move within several of the artificially conceived circles that Jules uses to illustrate his points. But that doesn't mean there isn't at least a bit of truth in them.

This week NOLA.com, home of the perpetual "Entrepreneur Week" ran a poll suggesting that Krewe Du Vieux's style of subversive satire might be... you know.. sooo Old New Orleans.. or something.  Chewbacchus may not actually be out to sanitize Carnival, but it looks as though someone at least hopes they are.

Anyway there are parades tonight. You may have heard about this. Probably not too much satire or gentrification involved in any those so relax and enjoy.

Everybody hates Bobby

Here is a blog post about what a miserable failure Bobby Jindal has been as governor.  It appears on The American Conservative's website.

Eddie Compass thinks Brian Willams's Katrina stories were bullshit

Eddie Compass and Ray Nagin weren't the only people making up bullshit stories about the chaos in New Orleans after Katrina. Turns out Brian Williams was doing it as well.  It's good to know that in times of crisis you can rely on the Mayor, the Chief of Police and the national media to remain level-headed.

There were definitely helicopters shot down in Iraq.  Not Brian Williams's helicopter, though.  There were also definitely bodies floating in the water in New Orleans.  Brian Williams probably didn't see any.

In a 2006 interview with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Williams said he witnessed a body floating in the French Quarter area of the city. "When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country," Williams told Eisner, who suggested in the interview that Williams emerged from former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw's shadow with his Katrina coverage.

Citing former city health director Brobson Lutz, the Advocate reported that the French Quarter was largely dry. "We were never wet. It was never wet," Lutz told the Advocate.

Now that we have Dr. Lutz and Sean Payton's combined record of where "it used to be wet," we can finally start mapping that.  Keep in mind, though, that this map would differ from any record of where the floodwaters actually were. It turns out that, even though Dr. Lutz was in the quarter himself at the time, he's not most reliable source on this. There really was some water near Williams's hotel.  Not a tremendous amount, but definitely some. 

Still, it's unlikely there were bodies floating in that few feet of water. At least not within Williams's view.  Had there been, Lutz would have paid them to wait in line at Galatoire's anyway.

Uber but for Galatoires

Robert Reich: 

Defenders of on-demand work emphasize its flexibility. Workers can put in whatever time they want, work around their schedules, fill in the downtime in their calendars.

“People are monetizing their own downtime,” Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school, told the New York Times.

But this argument confuses “downtime” with the time people normally reserve for the rest of their lives.
There are still only twenty-four hours in a day. When “downtime” is turned into work time, and that work time is unpredictable and low-paid, what happens to personal relationships? Family? One’s own health?

Other proponents of on-demand work point to studies, such as one recently commissioned by Uber, showing Uber’s on-demand workers to be “happy.”

But how many of them would be happier with a good-paying job offering regular hours?

If you want to see a picture of what the so-called sharing economy is really all about, look no further than the Galatoire's lunch line.

This is definitely not the first time the topic of homeless (or college) placeholders has come up in relation to Galatoire's Friday lunch, especially during the insanely-packed Mardi Gras season. Local critics including Ian McNulty have reported on the subject over the years. A Tiger Droppings forum once mentioned somebody who actually organized the homeless people to wait in line, and even tourists on Chowhound have brought up the subject before heading to New Orleans. For what it's worth, waiting in line is a commandment of New Orleans culture, and hiring a "day laborer" is not the standard for most patrons of Galatoire's... right, guys? Erm, like, right, guys? Biaggio DiGiavanni, the exec. director of Osanam Inn homeless shelter ("five minutes away from Galatoire's"), tells the Daily Beast otherwise:

It's competitive and the homeless people are aware of this line and they think if they can make a couple quick bucks they will hang around Galatoire's. Now more people are trying to get those spots.

But naturally this wouldn't be a truly New Orleans experience without this same homeless shelter director turning right around and approving the situation:

"Here's a homeless person and a chance to pick up a whole bunch of money just for standing around... It gives them something to do."

Right.

That's Eater commenting on a Daily Beast article just to be clear.  Maybe since the Galatoire's cattle call is how it's always been done, there's a tendency to ridicule outside media for affecting shock at it.  The Eater reporter seems to play to that sentiment a little anyway.

But whatever you think of the Galatoire's "tradition" it's hardly comforting to think that it's becoming a dominant model in the American labor market thanks to companies like Uber, Taskrabbit, et al.

I noticed this app the other day. Appears to be locally based. Still something tells be Galatoires patrons might want one specific to them.  What would we call it?  Stand-In?  Fuuder? Brunch-Me?

Where do you ultimately want to be?

The former mayor who tried to get Tom Benson to move the Saints to San Antonio will now arbitrate the Benson family feud.

Hardberger is a former chief justice of the Texas 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Rickhoff mentioned Hardberger's time in office as mayor helping Gulf Coast residents after Hurricane Katrina. Hardberger served two terms as mayor from 2005 through 2009. After the storm, Hardberger said his city and the Saints team conducted talks over moving the team to San Antonio.

Some of Hardberger's famous remarks from 2005 while his talks with Benson were ongoing.

“The Saints are not working against this,” Hardberger said. “Benson has said on numerous occasions he wants to be in San Antonio. The players want to be here the coaches want to be here. Now, (Benson) is a businessman. But I believe him when he says he ultimately wants the team to be here and stay here.

I wonder if Hardberger still believes Benson, ultimately wants the team to be in San Antonio.  Because that might be relevant to his involvement now.

Double dip theft

Bar and restaurant managers already get away with a kind of theft via their exemption from federal minimum wage laws.

So when it turns out that they're also stealing tips on top of that, well...

Two bartenders who filed a lawsuit claiming that Pat O'Brien's managers stole from the tip jar and withheld overtime pay scored a victory Wednesday (Feb. 4) when a federal judge gave their case collective action status. The ruling allows other former and current bartenders to join the lawsuit against the French Quarter bar.

Tourism Matters, though, so I guess we shouldn't poke it too hard. 

Un-vanished

BP's aggressive use of dispersants on the Macando spill did everything it was supposed to do. It dispersed the oil from the surface of the Gulf and caused it to sink to the ocean floor.  This allowed BP (and a large volume of complicit media outlets) to set off on a misleading, "Where's all the oil?" campaign.

The confusion all of this managed to create over the amount of oil spilled into the Gulf eventually paid off last month when Judge Barbier issued a lazy, let's all just meet in the middle ruling on the matter effectively saving BP as much as $8 billion in the process.

Anyway, they're finding the oil now.

Then there’s this possibility: Though the oil has apparently separated from the water itself, it’s now burrowed so deep that it will take substantially longer to decompose. “There’s less oxygen down there,” Chanton told Live Science. “It might be there for a long period of time, a little reservoir of contamination.” He added in a statement: “Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It’s a conduit for contamination into the food web.”

Worth it, though, right?

Coca-Cola proves the real money really is in PR

Here's a Pew report from last year about the tilt in the media business away from journalism and toward PR.

The salary gap between public relations specialists and news reporters has widened over the past decade – to almost $20,000 a year, according to 2013 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the public relations field has expanded to a degree that these specialists now outnumber reporters by nearly 5 to 1 (BLS data include part-time and full-time employees, but not self-employed.)

In 2013, according to BLS data, public relations specialists earned a median annual income of $54,940 compared with $35,600 for reporters. In other words, journalists on average earn just 65% of what those in public relations earn. That is a greater income gap than in 2004 when journalists were paid 71 cents of every dollar earned by those in public relations ($43,830 versus $31,320).

Most of that widening has come from salary growth in the public relations industry during a time when salary increases in the journalism field did not even keep up with inflation.

Only chumps go into news.  The real money is in telling pretty lies.  Of course some of these numbers may be a statistical anomaly.  For example, the low-wage writers who produce NOLA.com content still aren't technically counted as PR professionals for some reason. 

It doesn't help, also, that more and more journalism jobs are going to robots who work for free.

You wouldn't necessarily know it at first blush. Sure, maybe reading it in the context of this story it's apparent, but otherwise it feels like a pretty standard, if a tad dry, AP news item. The obvious tell doesn't come until the end of an article: "This story was generated by Automated Insights." According to AI's public relations manager James Kotecki, the Wordsmith platform generates millions of articles per week; other partners include Allstate, Comcast, and Yahoo, whose fantasy football reports are automated. Kotecki estimates the company's system can produce 2,000 articles per second if need be.

But there are some things even those robots can't do.  For instance, they still can't quite replicate the phony smarm necessary to run a corporate social media ad campaign. 

For the campaign, which was called “Make it Happy” and introduced in an ad spot during the Super Bowl, Coke invited people to reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”.

The idea was that an automatic algorithm would then convert the tweets, using an encoding system called ASCII, into pictures of happy things – such as an adorable mouse, a palm tree wearing sunglasses or a chicken drumstick wearing a cowboy hat.

In a press release, Coca-Cola said its aim was to “tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads across the internet”.

But Gawker, noticing that one response had the “14 words” white nationalist slogan re-published in the shape of a dog, had other ideas.

The media company’s editorial labs director, Adam Pash, created a Twitter bot, @MeinCoke, and set it up to tweet lines from Mein Kampf and then link to them with the #MakeItHappy tag – triggering Coca-Cola’s own Twitter bot to turn them into cutesy pictures.

Whoops! Don't you just hate when your smarmbot accidentally goes #MakeitHitler all over your shitty commercial. But then if you're gonna "tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media"  maybe a cynical, disingenuous ad campaign set up to run on autopilot isn't the best way to go about that. 

For that kind of work you still need to shell out the big bucks. Which is why the real money for humans is in PR.... although probably not ideal for the humans with souls or consciences or whatever. They're less good at saying this with a straight face. 

By Wednesday, the campaign had been suspended entirely. In a statement to AdWeek, a spokesperson for Coca-Cola said: “The #MakeItHappy message is simple: the internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It’s unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn’t.”

The statement concluded: “Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign.”

All they wanted to do was teach the world to sing... or something like that.  When will you humans learn it's not polite to point out that phony smarmbots are, in fact, phony smarmbots? How "negative!"

#Gentrifytoday

I like it when they just come out and tell you what they're all about.

In a series of Facebook posts obtained by ThinkProgress, the senior adviser for policy and communications to Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) posted racial comments and endorsed gentrification of his neighborhood.

Benjamin Cole, a former Baptist pastor and energy industry spokesman, posted a series of videos and comments on October 13, 2013 mocking two African Americans outside his DC apartment. In the first, he compared them to animals escaping from the National Zoo engaged in “mating rituals.” That message included a video of a woman, shouting and seemingly engaged in an argument with someone not visible as she walked. In each of his posts, he used the hashtag “#gentrifytoday.”

This is why the system is broken

Guy who created and maintains critical email encryption software is forced to conclude, "I'm too idealistic." 

Like many people who build security software, Koch believes that offering the underlying software code for free is the best way to demonstrate that there are no hidden backdoors in it giving access to spy agencies or others. However, this means that many important computer security tools are built and maintained by volunteers.

Now, more than a year after Snowden's revelations, Koch is still struggling to raise enough money to pay himself and to fulfill his dream of hiring a full-time programmer. He says he's made about $25,000 per year since 2001 — a fraction of what he could earn in private industry. In December, he launched a fundraising campaign that has garnered about $43,000 to date — far short of his goal of $137,000 — which would allow him to pay himself a decent salary and hire a full-time developer.

Guess he didn't entrepreneur hard enough.

New stop on the Traveling Governors Exhibition

Shreveport. February 24. They'll be talking to school board members so don't expect a whole lot of highbrow intellectual talk.

Working the legacy refs

Hey, big thanks to the Obama Administration for finally taking the correct stance on Net Neutrality .  Of course, by the time the multiple court challenges are about halfway done, the next administration will be able to reverse all of this.  But, yeah, this looks nice for now. And that's really all that matters, right?

The news-ish business

Non-profit news organizations, like The Lens, are really no different from commercial outlets. They don't depend on advertising (for the most part) but they do rely on their ability to pull in grants and to cultivate relationships with large donors.

They also accept smaller donations, of course.  I try to drop whatever I can in their tip jar whenever I can afford to.  But that really isn't the kind of support they need in order to sustain operations. In other words, "readers like you" are insignificant. What really matters is keeping the big benefactors happy.

What they're finding, though, is that keeping those people happy also means keeping them from looking bad in the news.  And that's not easy to do since most of the new worth writing about in this town largely involves people with lots of money doing bad things.  So maybe you see the problem.

Beatty says ceding to funders by not covering particular stories “would be a dereliction of duty on our part.

“We all know when we’re doing a story that’s going to hurt us,” Beatty says, adding that covering those stories nonetheless is tantamount to maintaining journalistic integrity.

Like a number of nonprofit news outlets around the country, The Lens is in the process of discovering whether that commitment to what Beatty calls “the kind of reporting that upsets people by design” will ultimately garner support or be its ruin, media watchers say.

Simply put, if what you're writing isn't pissing off powerful people, then what you're writing really isn't news.  But if your "news" operation depends on maintaining friendships with those same people, then, if you want to stay in business, eventually you learn to produce a news-ish product instead.  Otherwise, you're pretty much doomed. As a reader, it's possible to stay informed via the news-ish papers, but it's nicer when the bullshit filter has already been applied a few times before you get to it. 

Anyway, if you can help The Lens out, please do so. Their next "Breakfast with the Newsmakers" event features Councilwoman Latoya Cantrell. Seems like a good excuse to get out and support them.    

Bike Wars update

Episode 1: Despite the objections of its own traffic engineer, the city of New Orleans installed a bike lane on Baronne Street.  This was allowed in order to make the nice things for rich people they're building on top of some CBD parking lots seem like a hipper neighborhood for the rich people who will use the nice things.

Episode 2: Despite the presence of a bike lane on Basin Street, valets at the Saenger theater have been parking cars there anyway.  I hope the city puts a stop to that.  But since, in this case, keeping the bike lane clear might actually impede the rich people from enjoying a nice thing, I wouldn't hold my breath.

In any case, here's the quote of the day.

There's more to becoming a bicycle-friendly city than striping in bike lanes, Duckworth said. "City Hall has an obligation to protect these essential taxpayer investments by fining scofflaws who obstruct bike lanes. Otherwise we will see more unnecessary cyclist deaths," Duckworth said.

I don't know enforcement is really what's at issue.. at least not in the sense that THE CITY NEEDS TO FINE MORE PEOPLE, as that quote suggests.  But rather, the problem is the city is for whatever keeps the important people happy. 

In any case it's very true that the city has decided being "bike-friendly" is something you measure in miles of bike lane.. regardless of whether or not the lanes are making things better or worse. 

Oil royalty wayback

Bob Marshall explains what Obama's proposal to renege on Louisiana's promised share of offshore drilling royalties means for the future of coastal restoration projects.

Louisiana had always received the same share of offshore royalties as inland states, even though tens of thousands of miles of pipelines run from those rigs through its coast. Research shows canals and pipelines related to those activities are responsible for at least 36 percent of the 1,880 square miles of coastal wetlands the state has lost in the past 70 years.

The 2007 bill, passed in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, changed that system by dedicating 37.5 percent of all royalties from specific areas of the Gulf to the four coastal states with energy development – Louisiana, Mississippi Alabama and Texas.

Louisiana has taken in less $10 million total across the seven years since the bill passed, but that amount is expected to increase dramatically in 2017 because vast new areas of the Gulf will be included. The state is estimating annual income of as much as $178 million a year, depending on the rate of pumping and the price of leases and oil. Its estimated income could jump to as much as $600 million annually after 2055 when a cap on the states’ share is lifted.

In other words, we really haven't even begun to realize the benefits of this change and now they're proposing to take it away from us. 

Not sure if this is any consolation to anyone but it's worth remembering this was already a pretty shitty deal in the first place. And that many folks said so at the time.

See also here.

More recently, Congressman Garret Graves, during his time as Jindal's CPRA head, vehemently opposed raising additional revenue via the controversial SLFPA-E lawsuit. Graves said he preferred "pushing legislation that would bring Louisiana a substantial share of offshore drilling royalties currently going into the federal treasury." 

So, nice to see that's going well.

Cap hell is self-correcting

The Saints are twenty something million dollars over the cap right now. But they will automatically become not over the cap in a few days without even having to do anything.  But they'll still be close to the cap. Which is supposed to be a problem except that it totally wasn't a problem last year.

Anyway here it is. You figure it out.

Death panelists

For as much time as the spent warning America about the notrorious Obamacare "Death Panels" which didn't exist, Republicans sure do think a lot about the ways they'd like to kill you off.  Or, I guess they'd put it, allowing you the freedom to die.

I think we probably need to consider the alarming idea that this is going to be the right’s overall approach to dealing with health care. They have no real ideas for how to deliver affordable health care to every citizen and they have no methods for controlling the spiraling costs of the former system. In order to maintain their “free-market” health care philosophy they are going to have to make it clear that you must get rich if you expect to live through catastrophic illness or accidents. If you are sick, it’s up to you to figure out how to pay for your care and shelter. That’s the only solution available to them.

As a libertarian theorist posited in the Washington Post last week,”people could die and that’s ok”:

[It] is an acceptable price to pay for certain goals — including more cash for other programs, such as those that help the poor; less government coercion and more individual liberty; more health-care choice for consumers, allowing them to find plans that better fit their needs; more money for taxpayers to spend themselves; and less federal health-care spending.

Unsurprisingly, many Republicans are backing your child's basic freedom to die of measles... or whatever you get from employees with unwashed hands.

A nice exception.. at least to the vaccination thing.. appears to be Bobby Jindal.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) on Tuesday said Louisiana requires all school children to be vaccinated, and for good reason.

"I have no reservations about whether or not it is a good idea and desirable for all children to be vaccinated. There is a lot of fear-mongering out there on this," he said in a statement. "I think it is irresponsible for leaders to undermine the public's confidence in vaccinations that have been tested and proven to protect public health. Science supports them and they keep our children safe from potentially deadly but preventable diseases."

On the other hand, Jindal's statement emphasizes personal choice.

.@ChrisChristie got in LOTS of trouble over his vaccination comments, @BobbyJindal takes a different approach. pic.twitter.com/IijTVPKdGX
— Julia O'Donoghue (@JSODonoghue) February 3, 2015

He would personally not send his kids to a no-vax school. OK but is it possible for other Louisiana parents to do that?  For instance, Jindal says "just about every private school" requires vaccinations.  If this means that some do not, are they still eligible to participate in Jindal's voucher program? 

I wonder who owns that moon

Congrats. We're sending our disgusting commercial capitalism off into space now.

(Reuters) - The United States government has taken a new, though preliminary, step to encourage commercial development of the moon.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, U.S. companies can stake claims to lunar territory through an existing licensing process for space launches.

The Federal Aviation Administration, in a previously undisclosed late-December letter to Bigelow Aerospace, said the agency intends to “leverage the FAA’s existing launch licensing authority to encourage private sector investments in space systems by ensuring that commercial activities can be conducted on a non-interference basis.”

In other words, experts said, Bigelow could set up one of its proposed inflatable habitats on the moon, and expect to have exclusive rights to that territory - as well as related areas that might be tapped for mining, exploration and other activities.

Here's a Kids In The Hall sketch that sorta kinda predicted this day.

Having a very long think

Russel Honore is not running for Governor.  But as long as people keep asking, he'll keep thinking about it.

Asked if he has plans to run for political office, Honoré said he is thinking about it. He also said that while many of the potential candidates for governor have had disparaging things to say about environmental regulators, he hasn’t heard any of them talking about environmental concerns.

“I heard one of the candidates say he’s going to put his boot on the neck of EPA,” Honoré said.

Pretty sure nothing will come of that.  But I still wonder why John Georges showed up to introduce him at Rising Tide two years ago.  

Left to the waves

Almost a decade's worth of hard work post-Katrina trying to get Louisiana its fair share of offshore oil revenues is about to be pissed away.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is proposing that off-shore revenue sharing -- slated to begin in 2017 -- be scrapped with a plan that would provide "broad natural resource, watershed and conservation benefits for the entire nation." The proposal is part of the president's $4 trillion budget, unveiled Monday (Feburary 2).

The revenue sharing, part of 2006 energy legislation co-sponsored by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., was expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually for Louisiana for coastal restoration.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, who defeated Landrieu in the 2014 Louisiana Senate race, immediately promised a fight on the two Senate committees with jurisdiction over the revenue sharing legislation -- Appropriations and Energy. Last year, Landrieu chaired the Energy Committee.

"I will do everything in my power to use my seats on these committees to not only block the President's raid on oil and gas revenues, but fight to increase Louisiana's share of offshore revenue," Cassidy said. "Funding for coastal restoration must remain a promise to Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states."

Ha ha, freshman Senator Bill Cassidy will do everything in his power to help.  Great. 

Mary Landrieu made oil revenue sharing a top priority after Hurricane Katrina. Mary, like most Louisianians Republican and Democrat alike,  reasoned that, since Louisiana has borne the nearly immeasurable costs of an eroding coastline and increasingly catastrophic flooding in order to provide "the entire nation" the benefit of extracting the state's fossil fuels, we ought to be reimbursed for our trouble.  At least a little bit.  It's a big mess, all of this, and it will cost us at least $50 billion just to keep it in check.

For a while, we even got the rest of the country to agree with us on that small point.  Until 2015 when, I guess, Katrina is "over" so, hey, good luck!   I'd say maybe we should sue somebody but Governor Jindal and Congressman Graves have already told us that's a bad idea.

Penalizing low wage workers

The most right wing city government in our lifetime has already obliterated the traditional civil service wall between politics and service delivery.  Now they are moving on employee pensions.  Like any right wing outfit, they'll tell you they're operating out of a sense of fiscal responsibility, but really they are about punishing people for not being wealthy enough. 

The actuary said Social Security integration could be appropriate, but it wouldn't save the city much money and it would penalize low-wage workers.

The city, like any private employer, pays for half of a worker's Social Security costs, so it's not unreasonable for the city to deduct those contributions from an employee's pension package, the actuary said, but doing so would represent a "radical change" in the plan's structure. It might not be legal to apply it to current employees, he said.

The actuary also noted that Social Security's benefits are proportionately more generous at the low end of the wage scale, so the workers who benefit most from the current system are those at the bottom rung of the employment ladder. If pension benefits were reduced as a function of Social Security payments, as Head's scenario would do, low-paid workers would take the biggest hit.

The move also would provide relatively little budget relief, according to his analysis. The most aggressive of Head's scenarios would apply Social Security integration to all employees with less than 15 years service. That would improve the fund balance by .3 percent and save the city $1.5 million in 2014, and more over time as the share of employees covered by the new plan increased.

Not sure if Stacy Head actually cares about saving the city money as much as she cares about penalizing low wage workers so you can see why she likes this option.

Traffic report

Entergy truck carjacked.

NEW ORLEANS, LA (WVUE) -A worker in an Entergy truck was carjacked at gunpoint Tuesday, and moments later a woman was held up by men in same truck.

At about 1 p.m., the worker was approached by two black males in the 4400 block of Duplessis Street. The men produced a handgun, robbed the victim of his cash and stole the Entergy truck.

Moments later, a woman was robbed of her purse in the 1900 block of Wickfield. The suspects fled the scene in the truck, which was found unoccupied at Pratt and Mirabeau.

If you're gonna ride around New Orleans robbing people, an Entergy truck is probably the best vehicle to use for that.

Mayor's car stolen.

NEW ORLEANS - Mayor Mitch Landrieu's ongoing battle against the city's persistent crime problem hit home over the weekend when one of his family's cars was stolen and later recovered, according to Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office.

A Jefferson Parish deputy recovered the 2009 Jeep Grand Cherokee Saturday evening at about 7:30 p.m., about seven hours after it was reported stolen. The deputy was driving through the city when he received an alert on an anti-theft vehicle tracking device, according to a JPSO press release.

Mitch's new TV ad will demand that Sidney Torres present his plan for dealing with the crime problem.

Tom Benson's car runs over somebody. 

A car carrying New Orleans Saints and Pelicans owner Tom Benson was involved in a traffic incident that injured a security guard outside the Smoothie King Center after a Pelicans game, New Orleans police spokesman Tyler Gamble said Saturday. The security guard "suffered a foot injury and was transported to a hospital," Gamble said.

The mishap occurred Friday about 9:30 p.m. in a VIP parking lot near the arena. Benson's driver, Blake Romig, and the security guard gave conflicting statements of what happened, Gamble said. No citations were issued.

It's worth mentioning that all Rita did was verbally abuse and fire the employees.  Don't think she ran any of them over. 

Couldn't help but notice a lot of towing going on during KDV on Saturday.



If this happened to you, you might check that 504NotFound app for assistance.  But sit tight, dawlin.