There will be blog

Yeah yeah yeah, here comes the occasional bit about how I've been tweeting too much and blogging too little and all memory is being lost in the sands of windswept digital chaos and I need to do more deliberate writing for archival purposes, etc. etc.  But, seriously, I'm getting back to posting here soon.  Really.

Meanwhile, the Hunkerdowncast has its first official spin-off piece of media, so there's that. Basically we're gonna watch some New Orleans themed/shot/set movies and talk about them.  Here's the first one. 

 

Update: 

Oh speaking of blogging again, I did write this bit for the above mentioned show. Might as well just post it.

 Last month the mayor of New Orleans and several city councilmembers decided we are all ready for our close-ups and voted to rescind a very recently passed ban on use of certain surveillance technologies such as facial recognition software by the New Orleans police department.

There is no evidence that these tools do anything to reduce violent crime. They have been shown, however, to reinforce the existing biases of the criminal punishment system against poor and marginalized people, and to cast a wide dragnet over a city where everyone is effectively treated as a suspect.  Of particular concern was the potential for police to violate the privacy of consenting sexual partners and to use it to enforce a newly activated state prohibition against abortion.  

City Council had already passed a resolution explicitly instructing city law enforcement not to enforce the so-called state “trigger laws” that went into effect when the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe vs Wade. The resolution calls for no city funds to be used to catalog or report abortion cases.  

However, when the new surveillance ordinance failed to include language prohibiting NOPD from using surveillance tools against abortion seekers or against consenting sexual partners, council had to scramble to amend the law again a week later.

Meanwhile Mayor Cantrell embarked on a public campaign against the NOPD federal consent decree monitoring program put in place in 2013 after a Department of Justice report found that NOPD officers routinely engaged in “patterns of misconduct that violate the Constitution and federal law.”  One prominent case at the time being the 5 NOPD officers charged with murdering and burning the body of Henry Glover in the days following Hurricane Katrina (put a pin in that one).

At a press conference, Cantrell asserted that the consent decree had put officers “in handcuffs” and that she was "concerned about our officers' ability to protect themselves”  However, in interviews, many NOPD officers who exited the force report that they have not been driven away by mandates for unbiased constitutional police practices but rather by an capricious, political and punitive NOPD management style responsible for flagging morale. Federal Judge Susie Morgan, the person responsible for administering the decree, slapped back at Cantrell during a subsequent hearing saying that comments by the mayor, “Suggesting that officers want the consent decree to end so they can return to policing the way they did before 2013 is wrong, and dangerous.”

Called back before the City Council to address this and other matters, Police Chief Shaun Ferguson then let slip that  NOPD policy does in fact recomend collecting information on abortion seekers after all.  It was at this same hearing that District C councilmember  Freddie King asked the chief if there was something he could get the police to do about homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk  because it makes "everyone's quality of life a little undesirable." This coming on the heels of CM Oliver Thomas having run a pair of panhandlers off of Crowder Boulevard to the thrill of his Instagram followers.

All of this is to say that  the mayor of New Orleans (who was in DC this week continuing to lobby against the consent decree) along with a faction of the City Council now appear more determined than ever to turn their cameras and other instruments of state surveillance against the city’s most vulnerable populations for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

But what if I told you that there was another way for the rich and powerful to clean up the streets of our unhappy little corner of the planet while also boosting the city’s high dollar tourist trade at the same time?  Therein lies the premise of this week’s film.
 

Do more posts

Not to go too far into the realm of self-actualized blogging but I am aware that I haven't posted as much here during the back half of 2021 as I would have liked to. There are reasons for that. Being "busy" is relative to a bunch of stuff and I don't need to explain it in too much detail. But lately I've been specifically busy in ways that take me away from typing out paragraphs on the yellow web page. Either that or I've been lazy. In any case it's been easier these past months to just tweet out whatever is the thing that comes up than it has been to write it all down before the next distraction occurs. 

Sometimes that's fine, but also it is a problem.  While it's loads of fun to argue with people on Twitter, the actual constructive reason for posting things on the internet is to share information and to take notes. Twitter is good for sharing immediately. It's less good for taking notes for future reference.  Too often I find myself half-remembering something I read and tweeted out a week or a month or even a year ago but not being able to dig it back up easily.  I can only find the real deep cuts if I've blogged them, tagged them, and hopefully synthesized a few ideas about them here.  Let too much of that slip away into the ether and you start to feel like you're losing your grip a little bit.  It's not healthy. 

So I'm gonna try to get back to doing posts in 2022.  I don't want to lose as much of it as I lost this year. In the meantime, I do, in fact, still have some 2021 notes I will try to salvage. Another consequence of not getting the little posts out day by day is those notes get stored away in unfinished draft posts that get bigger and bigger and more difficult to finish as time goes by.  Presently this blog has 788 "drafts" where I've shoved at least a few links and sentences that I must have thought at the time would be good to pull out at some point.  I'll probably never go back through all of that. But  there are at least four that have the skeletons of long-ish posts about big topics from this year I probably ought to finish if I can.  One is about the pandemic, one is about infrastructure, one is about tourism, and one is about this year's elections.  I'll try to get those done just for my own peace of mind, if not by the end of this week, then at least within the next month.  That might tie a bow on the year so we can move on. 

Also more blurting out of random things. Let's get back to that if we can.

Holy hell it is already June

It's been quiet on the Yellow Blog for a few weeks and, I guess, for much of the year. I've been kind of slacking, I realize that. That's not to say I've been off in space or anything. The main point of this blog is basically note taking for stuff that goes on in the news or just things I read and hear in general. Trust me there are plenty of notes. The "drafts" folder here is quite prolific. I just haven't taken the time to sit down and organize them in a while.   That's not a great thing because if I don't process at least a little bit, it starts to feel like I might forget it all. Which.. again.. the main point of this blog is so I don't forget about things that happen. 

And there's a ton of stuff going on right now that I don't want to lose track of.  The legislature is wrapping up today.  I managed to get some of that down a few weeks ago, but things have not improved since.  Most notably, despite being in possession of an historic budget surplus flush with federal money to throw at whatever they like, lawmakers decided to fund a roads and infrastructure program by forcing more cuts to higher ed and health care. 

Today, we learned that they have decided to scrap two years of work toward a plan for automating expungements of criminal records because the State Police said it might cost too much. 

Davis said State Police still weren’t able to afford the proposal. He told legislators last month that  if James’ bill passed his agency might be forced to reduce the size of its next police academy class — a priority for several lawmakers — or cancel the purchase of new police vehicles. 

But lawmakers could have absorbed the entire cost in next year’s budget. The Legislature’s budget plan includes $17 million in unallocated funding that can still be spent. The Supreme Court is also sitting on millions of dollars of reserves that could be used for this purpose if it wanted to do so.

Anyway, there's more, of course. But that's not the only thing.  A bunch of stuff has been going on. Another building is collapsing downtown while we are still figuring out what to do about the last one.   A big municipal election is coming and some of your all time favs are back in the mix. It's hurricane season again and the turbines are.. not ready.  It's June now but the first of July is coming and that is going to be the worst first of the month yet for people facing eviction. 

Also other things! I have to make time to get this stuff in context before it all becomes a big blur and our consciousnesses disintegrate into the wind.  I'm trying.  

Meanwhile, holy hell it is already June. The myrtles are already in bloom and it hardly even feels like we're in 2021 yet.

The beastly drafts folder

Too much things happen. I collect a lot of links but don't always write the thing. Eventually it leads to this.

Of particular concern are the stores of notes on short term rentals and on S&WB which keep getting bigger and more difficult to put together the longer they sit unpublished.  It seems stupid... is stupid, I guess But this is a burden on me. I use this blog as a way to keep track of the news. It's how I force myself to think about the stuff I've read. Otherwise, I'm just going to forget everything that happens and it will be like none of us was ever here and... you know maybe that wouldn't be so bad...

Sorry about the some kinda spam something or other

Stuff is broke




Something has been hijacking the site intermittently this week. I think I've got it fixed. Sorry.

I was told there would be exploding pie

Oyster reminds us that this website turns 10 years old this month.  

I don't really keep up with Jeffrey's stuff anymore. I sort of lost interest since he moved away from play-by-plays of hijinks at our local biblioteques. Those were hilarious. I will say, though, that I recently spoke with a woman on the street and she swore that Library Chronicles was the premier "must read" blog in New Orleans. I laughed— but she seemed serious, despite being a little tipsy. Then she violently thrust an empty Cisco wine bottle into what appeared to be a fat garbage can. So who knows?

Who the hell knows what this blog is actually about? It's called "Library Chronicles" but it's hardly ever about libraries.  I just happened to be in one on the day I created it. It's just as often referred to as Yellow Blog. I probably should have called it that.  I started writing it at a time when blogs weren't expected to have dedicated subjects. I was reading some left-leaning national bloggers at the time (particularly Atrios and Tom Tomorrow and Josh Marshall) and so I'd say the general style and direction followed that model.. although the content did not always do that.

If it has subject areas worth mentioning beyond just the regular day to day news and socialism, they would be Saints football,  Mardi Gras parades, and the occasional recipe. 

For a while it was mostly about me (and Daisy) horsing around at work while learning how to do what would eventually come to be called "social media" long before it was actually called that.  Then, thanks in large part to people like "Ricky Prado" and "Oyster" and Michael it became a way for me to have some company in "yelling back at the TV" a little regarding the perpetually sorry state of local and national public affairs.

And then there was Katrina and everything after. Suddenly a whole lot more New Orleanians had ample cause to yell back at the TV too. The NOLA blogosphere reached a critical mass of diverse voices such that it became a network (again, still before "social networking" was a thing) for New Orleanians to build a narrative of the city's recovery outside of the traditional media and political hierarchy.

Did that matter?  I think it did. Different people will offer you different perspectives and examples as to where it mattered most.  Fundamentally what it did was inject the rabble directly into the process of describing what was happening to them. People like to accuse New Orleanians of civic apathy. I think this is a gross mischaracterization.  New Orleanians love to talk about New Orleans. They are fiercely opinionated about it. They are naturally irreverent and subversive and not at all afraid to act on those tendencies.

This is for the better and sometimes for the worse, of course. I'm no internet triumphalist and I've never been one to argue that post-Katrina New Orleans should be considered any sort of grand success story... or really a "success" at all.  (The football team is better, I guess.)  But I do think the interactive media dynamic causes things to happen differently than they otherwise would. Also, I think there's still time to do some good things.

Personally, I can say doing this has plugged me in to some of the things and people who make the city work in ways that nothing else could have. I've learned a great deal.  Mostly what I've learned is how many more smart and talented people are out there than my grumpy post-adolescent self would have imagined ten years ago.

Many of these people happen to also be assholes, of course, but that's fine with me too. In fact, Things You Can Learn From An Asshole might be the most descriptive title for this blog.  For now, though, we'll just have to make do with what we've done. And try not to be too ashamed.

News is not news Learn something old every day

Some guy came into the library the other day handing out these fliers.

At first I didn't think much of it. We get a lot of freaks in there. But then the same thing turns up on every freaking channel and I'm beginning to think it's either really bad spam or it might be... you know... a thing. Anyway, they say there's free beer so, hey.

Now whose medium is dying?

Despite all the bullshit techno-speak and false narratives about trends and generational differences, the only point about the rise of the blogosphere worth paying attention to was the way in which it created a public discourse driven by independent non-commercial voices instead of for-profit ad-farming institutions. Obviously, that couldn't last forever. Sooner or later the "creative class" finds a way to make it all about selling Red Bull again.

Maybe we could have prevented this by not saying fuck so much. I guess the world will never know.

Discussion question

I was recently privy to (or perhaps tangentially involved in) a discussion which momentarily featured the following statement.

99% of blogging is inane

Now I happen to agree with this statement wholeheartedly but it seems that some participants in this discussion feel that there are individuals who may possibly find it insulting. So I want to be clear about the question up for debate here. It isn't whether the featured statement is true (because it quite obviously is). And it isn't whether or not some people might find it offensive (because I'm beginning to think that this is quite possible). The question is, wouldn't these offended persons then, almost by definition, be spectacular self-awareness-deficient turds? And why does anybody care what they think?

The whole episode inspired me to trot out this "Statement of Audience" I originally copied and signed off on when I read the definitive essay on blogging waay back in 2003. True today as it was then... perhaps moreso.

Nobody really blogs anymore anyway

From Jan Moller's legislative session rundown:

• Political blogging is the wave of the future, political bloggers say.

The link is to a Monroe News-Star profile on Louisiana political blogs which reads like another one of those "Gee whiz the kids and their internets" stories we thought we'd seen the bulk of five or six years ago. My favorite line:

While the blogs may differ slightly in the way they frame issues, almost all of the state's prominent blogs lean to the right of the political spectrum.

I did not know that.

Also, while Moller's remark seems a bit skeptical... although Moller seems to read The Old River Road way more often than I ever have.... I sort of agree with the sentiment. As more internet users spend their link-sharing time on Facebook, as net neutrality reform threatens to make some sites less accessible, and as the amount of news content made available for people to share for free continues to shrink, I'd say that political blogging (at least of the "democratization of information" sort described in this article) is more the wave of the past.

And now for my next trick...

Yeah I know it's kind of a bad time what with all the fun going on around town. (See everything mentioned in the below-linked WCBF post plus... oh I don't know... throw a dart at your feed reader and pick something... that one, for example.)

But I think it's safe to say that, despite the excitement, posting here will be a bit light this week... and then non-existent the week after. I've got some pretty heavy personal business to attend to this weekend before taking a week long vacation abroad so... yeah don't expect too much.

It ain't all that bad, though. It's not like I'm going away forever or anything. (In the words of my friend and mentor Chris Rose, I'm "not suited to live anywhere else")

Besides, interrupting the blog gives me an opportunity to join the multitude of Randian "wealth producers" and other assorted conservative nutcases in Going Galt for a week. The neat thing is, at the same time, I will also be engaged in the celebrated hipster lefty tradition of retreating to France. It's kind of a fair-and-balanced post-partisan douche-out and something I'm quite proud to accomplish.

Maybe by the end of the week, I'll get to that Mardi Gras hippie dumpster diving story I've been sitting on.... but don't be surprised if I don't.

Yup

I mean... YUP LOL, with a hearty heh, indeed to boot.

Feedback

About a month ago Nightprowlkitty posted a Kos diary rounding up some of the local blogosphere reaction to Unnecessary Evac 2008. My favorite quote:

Jeffrey over at Library Chronicles, which I believe was to be a sports blog about the Saints (but not absolutely sure), has something to say about the Mayor's re-entry plan in his post entitled "Piss on Ya"

And I suppose this is a "sports blog about the Saints" at least some of the time... albeit a notoriously tardy one. (It's Wednesday and the game re-cap is late again) But really the Yellow Blog defies classification. Sort of the Gonzo the Great of the local internets.

Yellow Blog will re opened soon too

Sorry to disappoint, but the housekeeping duties both at home and at work have been putting a crimp in things over the past few days. First, there was no power, then there was cleaning to do, then there was a fridge to re-stock, then there was a football game to attend (more on that soon), now there are lots and lots of books to shelve. You know the drill. We'll be back later with more football lowlights and evacuation complaints.

Stupid lack of comments at Rude Pundit

It's tragic since I have no other possible way to communicate with Dangerblond.

For the record, I put almost no thought into it

It's just sort of where I was at the time.

And since that day, I have continued to put little or no thought into everything else that appears here.

Beaten by the target

Okay so I'll admit it is pretty much what makes Thers's blog awesome... but (ahem) I've been doing it longer and you never see me complain.

Filler... with links

It's still early but today looks like one of those light posting episodes. Busy day... busy week.. yada yada yada. If I get a chance later I may write something about basketball. Meanwhile see the following links:

Mark Folse on Stacy Head

Moldy City has a WTF I kind of figured might be coming.

More excellent NFL Draft analysis from "Peter Finney"

Woody Jenkins: What a wanker

Ditto: Ben Stein

And that's all I got right now. If you need to read more news, try cracking open a floodwall.

I'm always the last one to find out about these things

But this may be the best use anyone has ever devised for blogging.

And I might never have known had it not been for the Tweeter Tube

Blogger's Manifesto

The Onion: You Know What's Stupid? Everything I Don't Understand