city:new orleans

Ah ben zut, Seenthis, tu me préviens pas : tu viens de me faire penser à l’album Yellow Moon, des Neville Brothers, alors du coup je les ai googlés, et devine quoi : je pense que j’en ai tué un…

Charles Neville, le saxophoniste des Neville Brothers, est mort à 79 ans (avril 2018)
▻https://www.francetvinfo.fr/culture/musique/charles-neville-le-saxophoniste-des-neville-brothers-est-mort-a-79-ans_

https://www.francetvinfo.fr/image/75irduef7-7eb7/1500/843/17494127.jpg

Le saxophoniste américain Charles Neville du groupe The Neville Brothers, pilier de l’histoire musicale et du jazz contemporain de La Nouvelle-Orléans, est décédé jeudi à l’âge de 79 ans, a annoncé vendredi sa famille dans un communiqué.

Bon, tout ça pour dire que l’album Yellow Moon, 1989, c’est encore un de ces disques qui m’a marqué.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O87iUDZGDKs

Sinon, il me semble qu’ils apparaissaient en concert au Tipitinas dans un film de l’époque, à la Nouvelle Orléans. Je pense que c’est Mississipi Burning, mais je n’en suis pas certain. Ça dit quelque chose à quelqu’un ? Ça pourrait être dans The Big Easy avec Dennis Quaid (1986), aussi, vraiment c’est vieux tout ça…

Article indigent compte tenu de la carrière incroyable de ce géant... très triste... à suivre...

Le chanteur et pianiste Dr John est mort à l’âge de 77 ans
Radio Canada, le 6 juin 2019
▻https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1175140/dr-john-chanteur-mort-deces-nouvelle-orleans

https://images.radio-canada.ca/q_auto,w_960/v1/ici-info/16x9/dr-john-musicien-chanteur-nouvelle-orleans.jpg

Do you know the Dr ? Dr John ? Mac Rebennack ? Such a night... (1976)
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCRrXZP8b0I

Dr. John Collection on Letterman, 1982-2008
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCFRKWnl-_I

Et collection de duos ci-dessous...

#Musique #Dr_John #Nouvelle_Orleans

Les Blank : Bayou & New Orleans
▻https://www.nova-cinema.org/prog/2019/172-folk-on-film/folk-on-film-america/article/les-blank-2

Les Blank filme les Cajuns, dans une Louisiane dont il connaît les chemins, les routes, les rivières, le bayou, et nous les fait emprunter. On s’approche au plus près des coutumes comme la pêche, les courses de chevaux et la nourriture (les crawfishs, bien sûr !). La musique n’est pas en reste puisque les Frères Balfa, l’une des plus célèbre fratrie de la musique Cajun, fournissent la bande son. « Always for Pleasure » est l’un des titres les plus connus de Les Blank. Il a su poser l’œil d’abord, la caméra ensuite, dans les recoins les plus vivants de La Nouvelle Orléans. Il en montre les spécificités, mais aussi ce qui rassemble les gens. Le Mardi Gras des « indians », les enterrements, « second line », qu’ils soient noirs ou blancs, la St Patrick… Pas que du folk bien sûr, (...)

Wearing the Lead Glasses
▻https://placesjournal.org/article/wearing-the-lead-glasses

There is a room full of soil in downtown #New_Orleans. The soil is parceled into large baggies inside plastic tubs arranged on metal shelves. It’s like a library, except instead of books there are bags of earth. This is the soil archive of Dr. Howard W. Mielke, whose lab belongs to the Environmental Signaling Laboratory at the Tulane University School of Medicine. Mielke established the archive at Xavier University of Louisiana in 1991, and moved it to Tulane in 2006. He has catalogued some 17,000 bags of soil. They come from as far away as Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania; La Oroya, Peru; and Oslo, Norway — and as close as the daycare centers and playgrounds of New Orleans. All are contaminated with lead.

#pollution #sol #plomb

Twelve Empty Supertankers Reveal Truths About Today’s Oil Market - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-21/twelve-empty-supertankers-reveal-truths-about-today-s-oil-market

They are slowly plowing their way across thousands of miles of ocean toward America’s Gulf of Mexico coastline. As they do, twelve empty supertankers are also revealing a few truths about today’s global oil market.

In normal times, the vessels would be filled with heavy, high sulfur Middle East oil for delivery to refineries in places like Houston or New Orleans. Not now though. They are sailing cargo-less, a practice that vessel owners normally try to avoid because ships earn money by making deliveries.

The 12 vessels are making voyages of as much as 21,000 miles direct from Asia, all the way around South Africa, holding nothing but seawater for stability because Middle East producers are restricting supplies. Still, America’s booming volumes of light crude must still be exported, and there aren’t enough supertankers in the Atlantic Ocean for the job. So they’re coming empty.

“What’s driving this is a U.S. oil market that’s looking relatively bearish with domestic production estimates trending higher, and persistent crude oil builds we have seen for the last few weeks,” said Warren Patterson, head of commodities strategy at ING Bank NV in Amsterdam. “At the same time, OPEC cuts are supporting international grades like Brent, creating an export incentive.”

The U.S. both exports and imports large amounts of crude because the variety it pumps — especially newer supplies from shale formations — is very different from the type that’s found in the Middle East. OPEC members are likely cutting heavier grades while American exports are predominantly lighter, Patterson said.

Being poor, by John Scalzi
▻https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

(...)

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

(...)
Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.
(...)
Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.
(...)
Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

Follow-up post: “Being Poor,” Ten Years On
▻https://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/09/03/being-poor-ten-years-on

Ten years ago today, I put the essay “Being Poor” on Whatever. I wrote the piece, as I explained later, in a rage at the after-events of Hurricane Katrina, when so many people asked, some genuinely and some less so, why many of the poor people didn’t “just leave” when the hurricane smashed into the Gulf Coast and New Orleans flooded.

#poverty

27 villes du C40 auraient atteint le pic d’émissions. Pourquoi à ce stade je me méfie de cette annonce ?
▻https://www.c40.org/press_releases/27-cities-have-reached-peak-greenhouse-gas-emissions-whilst-populations-increas

27 of the world’s greatest cities, representing 54 million urban citizens and $6 trillion in GDP have peaked their greenhouse gas emissions. New analysis reveals that the cities have seen emissions fall over a 5 year period, and are now at least 10% lower than their peak. City Halls around the world have achieved this crucial milestone, whilst population numbers have increased and city economies have grown. These 27 cities have continued to decrease emissions by an average of 2% per year since their peak, while populations grew by 1.4% per year, and their economies by 3% per year on average.
The cities are: Barcelona, Basel, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Milan, Montréal, New Orleans, New York City, Oslo, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, Rome, San Francisco, Stockholm, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, Warsaw, Washington D.C.

Comme c’est beau ! Comme par hasard, aucune ville des pays actuellement en voie d’industrialisation, tel que la Chine par ex. n’est dans ce groupe. On peut se demander comme sont calculées ces émissions. Mon hypothèse est que ces données ne prennent pas en compte le cycle de vie des matières et des services produits dans les villes en question, seulement les émissions locales. Ce qui est sale est aujourd’hui en Chine, au MO, etc. Merci la mondialisation...
D’autre part, des questions se posent également sur les contours des villes prises en considération, par ex. est-ce uniquement Paris intra muros ou bien la Métropole, voire l’IdF ? Probablement la première option. A ce stage les informations disponibles ne répondent pas à ces questions de base.
Pour aller plus loin sur la question des méthodes de calcul, et notamment la différence entre la méthode territoriale et celle basée sur la consommation des ménages prenant en compte le cycle de vie, voir par ex. Pichler, Peter-Paul, Timm Zwickel, Abel Chavez, Tino Kretschmer, Jessica Seddon, and Helga Weisz, ‘Reducing Urban Greenhouse Gas Footprints’, Scientific Reports, 7 (2017), 14659 <▻https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15303-x>

#changement_climatique #fake_news_possible

“The Hatpin Peril” Terrorized Men Who Couldn’t Handle the 20th-Century Woman | History | Smithsonian
▻https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/hatpin-peril-terrorized-men-who-couldnt-handle-20th-century-woman-18

“The Hatpin Peril” Terrorized Men Who Couldn’t Handle the 20th-Century Woman
To protect themselves from unwanted advances, city women protected themselves with some sharp accessories

https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/PT5Dh-gfrleAY2P8qOVvKnVYF1U=/1072x720/filters:no_upscale():focal(659x591:660x592)/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/30/00/3000fb4f-9e78-4fe8-b571-8a01d482e51c/hatpinperilcropped.jpeg

On the afternoon of May 28, 1903, Leoti Blaker, a young Kansan touring New York City, boarded a Fifth Avenue stagecoach at 23rd Street and settled in for the ride. The coach was crowded, and when it jostled she noticed that the man next to her settled himself an inch closer to her. She made a silent assessment: elderly, elegantly dressed, “benevolent-looking.” The horse picked up speed and the stage jumped, tossing the passengers at one another again, and now the man was touching her, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. When he lifted his arm and draped it low across her back, Leoti had enough. In a move that would thrill victim of modern-day subway harassment, she reached for her hatpin—nearly a foot long—and plunged it into the meat of the man’s arm. He let out a terrible scream and left the coach at the next stop.

“He was such a nice-looking old gentleman I was sorry to hurt him,” she told the New York World. “I’ve heard about Broadway mashers and ‘L’ mashers, but I didn’t know Fifth Avenue had a particular brand of its own…. If New York women will tolerate mashing, Kansas girls will not.”

Newspapers across the country began reporting similar encounters with “mashers,” period slang for lecherous or predatory men (defined more delicately in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie as “one whose dress or manners are calculated to elicit the admiration of susceptible young women”). A New York City housewife fended off a man who brushed up against her on a crowded Columbus Avenue streetcar and asked if he might “see her home.” A Chicago showgirl, bothered by a masher’s “insulting questions,” beat him in the face with her umbrella until he staggered away. A St. Louis schoolteacher drove her would-be attacker away by slashing his face with her hatpin. Such stories were notable not only for their frequency but also for their laudatory tone; for the first time, women who fought back against harassers were regarded as heroes rather than comic characters, as subjects rather than objects. Society was transitioning, slowly but surely, from expecting and advocating female dependence on men to recognizing their desire and ability to defend themselves.
Hatpin-defence.jpeg
(San Francisco Sunday Call, 1904)

Working women and suffragists seized control of the conversation, speaking out against mashers and extolling women’s right to move freely—and alone—in public. It was true, as social worker Jane Addams lamented, that “never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs.” Dating rituals and sexual mores were shifting. A man no longer called at a woman’s parlor and courted her under the close eye of her parents, but took her to a show or a dance hall, where all manner of evil lurked. The suffragists rejected the notion, advanced by the Chicago Vice Commission, that unchaperoned women should dress as modestly as possible—no painted cheeks or glimpse of ankle—in order to avoid unwanted attention. The issue lay not with women’s fashion or increasing freedoms, one suffragist countered, but with “the vileness of the ‘masher’ mind.”

Instead of arguing with the suffragists, some detractors took a more subtle approach, objecting not to women’s changing roles but to their preferred mode of self-defense: the hatpin. Tales abounded of innocent men—no mashers, they—who fell victim to the “hatpin peril.” A 19-year-old girl in Scranton playfully thrust her hatpin at her boyfriend and fatally pierced his heart. A young New York streetcar passenger felt a sharp pain behind his ear—an accidental prick from a stranger’s hatpin—and within a week fell into a coma and died. Also in New York, a hundred female factory workers, all wielding hatpins, attacked police officers who arrested two of their comrades for making allegedly anarchistic speeches. Even other women weren’t safe. In a suburb of Chicago, a woman and her husband’s mistress drew hatpins and circled each other, duel-style, until policemen broke it up. “We look for the new and imported Colt’s hatpin,” one newspaper sarcastically opined, “or the Smith and Wesson Quick-action Pin.” By 1909, the hatpin was considered an international threat, with the police chiefs in Hamburg and Paris considering measures to regulate their length.

In March 1910, Chicago’s city council ran with that idea, debating an ordinance that would ban hatpins longer than nine inches; any woman caught in violation would be arrested and fined $50. The proceedings were packed with curious spectators, men and women, and acrimonious from the start. “If women care to wear carrots and roosters on their heads, that is a matter for their own concern, but when it comes to wearing swords they must be stopped,” a supporter said. Cries of “Bravo!” from the men; hisses from the women. Nan Davis, there to represent several women’s clubs, asked for permission to address the committee. “If the men of Chicago want to take the hatpins away from us, let them make the streets safe,” she said. “No man has a right to tell me how I shall dress and what I shall wear.”

Despite Davis’ impassioned speech, the ordinance passed by a vote of 68 to 2. Similar laws subsequently passed in several other cities, including Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and New Orleans. Ten thousand miles away, in Sydney, Australia, sixty women went to jail rather than pay fines for wearing “murderous weapons” in their hats. Even conservative London ladies steadfastly refused to buy hatpin point protectors.

“This is but another argument for votes for women and another painful illustration of the fact that men cannot discipline women,” argued the suffragist Harriot Stanton Blatch, a daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “Women need discipline; they need to be forced, if not led, out of their barbarisms, but women never have and never will submit to the discipline of men. Give women political power and the best among them will gradually train the uncivilized, just as the best among men have trained their sex.”

The furor over hatpins subsided at the onset of World War I, and died entirely when bobbed hair and cloche hats came into fashion—at which point emerged a new “social menace”: the flapper. It wouldn’t be long, of course, before politicians grew less concerned with what women wore than with how to win their votes.

pas encor lu

Why ’Dancing In The Street’ Gets The People Going : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/2018/07/28/632661834/american-anthem-dancing-in-the-street-martha-vandellas

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/07/27/gettyimages-76193261_wide-6b43e706f702581712358b90deb4df91a53538b0.jpg?s=1400

Mark Kurlansky, author of the book Ready For a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem for a Changing America, says that at the time, those campaigning for equal rights were split on strategy — between Dr. King’s nonviolence, and the Black Power movements exemplified by Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture), the Black Panthers and Malcolm X’s Black Muslims. It was on the latter side that “Dancing in the Street” began to show a new potential.

What makes the song an anthem is the ring of authenticity: a cry from the heart of summer in a big city, boiling with energy, turmoil and hope.

“1964 was the year when Malcolm X famously said, ’We will get our rights by any means necessary. It really was the year that the black liberation movement was under a shift from the civil rights movement to the Black Power movement,” he says. “The people in the Black Power movement used this song for rallies because it got people worked up and got them going.”

Mark Kurlansky also notes the litany of cities woven into the song: ’They’re dancing in Chicago, down in New Orleans, up in New York City ... Philadelphia, PA, Baltimore and D.C. now," and ending with, "Can’t forget the Motor City.’ “Every city they list where they were dancing,” he says, “was a city with a militant black neighborhood, and a city where, eventually riots, broke out.”

Martha Reeves wants it to be known, “I had nothing to do with that. I just sang the song and in my heart, I was visualizing people actually dancing in the street. I wasn’t singing, you know, doom and gloom when the sun go down, let’s kill everybody and go steal their property, and break into stores and carry refrigerators home on your back.”

But she also says the song reminds her of the trials she faced as a black teen in Detroit, before the modern civil rights movement began.

“We couldn’t stand on street corners and sing,” she recalls, “because there was a police unit called the Big Four. It was usually four big white men, and they had clubs and guns. And if they caught a group of black people standing on the corner singing doo-wop ... they would jump out of the car and attack you, arrest you, or run to your house, because they didn’t want blacks gathering. So ’Dancing in the Street’ is all of that to me.”
On ’Fanfare For The Common Man,’ An Anthem For The American Century
American Anthem
On ’Fanfare For The Common Man,’ An Anthem For The American Century

Mark Kurlansky believes that “Dancing in the Street” has grown into an American anthem over six decades because its irresistible beat and engaging images let people find their own message in the song. He says that co-writer Mickey Stevenson “saw it as a song about integration: about how young black people and young white people could go out on the street and be together.”

#Musique

How we hacked events to get a 90% response rate
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-we-hacked-events-to-get-a-90-response-rate-3fcfd8010bad?source=rss--

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*ODOfXo5s8WKwypHbDMeX9A.png

When it comes to feeling the pulse of your prospects, nothing is better than meeting them face-to-face. Knowing this, I try not to miss a business event where I can meet our potential customers and talk to them in person. But these events come with their own set of challenges; they are usually overcrowded, everybody is vying for attention, and the majority of attendees are there just for networking.In the span of past two months, I attended three events — Digital Travel Summit APAC (Singapore), Collision (New Orleans), and Tech In Asia (Singapore) — and had an incredible experience that has added new paradigms to my understanding of how to communicate well with customers. My goal, as the Head of #marketing for Freshchat, was to make us stand out in the crowd and create a lasting impression (...)

#event-marketing #marketing-field #hack-events #email-marketing

Shell Makes Large Deepwater Discovery in U.S. Gulf of Mexico – gCaptain
▻http://gcaptain.com/shell-makes-large-deepwater-discovery-in-u-s-gulf-of-mexico

http://gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/deepwater-poseidon.jpg

Royal Dutch Shell has announced a large deepwater discovery in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico approximately 170 miles off the coast of Louisiana.

Shell Offshore Inc. said Thursday the exploration discovery was made in the Norphlet geologic play at the 100 percent Shell-controlled Dover well.

The well was drilled in Mississippi Canyon Block 612, located approximately 170 miles (273 kilometers) offshore southeast of New Orleans, in a water depth of 7,500 feet (2,280 meters) to a total vertical drilling depth of 29,000 feet (8,839 meters) measured depth. The discovery was more than 800 net feet of pay (244 meters), Shell said.

The Dover discovery is Shell’s sixth in the Norphlet.

Shell says the discovery is located approximately 13 miles from the Appomattox host platform, making it an attractive potential tieback.

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Water Line Break Floods Staterooms, Hallway Aboard Carnival Dream – gCaptain
▻http://gcaptain.com/water-line-break-floods-staterooms-hallway-aboard-carnival-dream

http://gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/carnival-dream-1.jpg

A water line break aboard the Carnival cruise ship Carnival Dream had some passengers on the 9th deck fearing the worst as their hallway flooded with water up to ankle high.

Carnival Cruise Line released a statement confirming that 50 staterooms on the Carnival Dream were flooded when a water line broke Thursday evening during a seven-night Caribbean cruise. Carnival said guests staying in the impacted staterooms were able to return to their rooms within 6 hours and the ship continued on its voyage uninterrupted, returning to New Orleans on Sunday as scheduled.

Photos and video of the flood spread fast and wide on social media. However, Carnival said in a statement that “the water main break had no effect on the safe operation of the ship”. Carnival’s full statement on the incident is posted below.

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFZi520NKDk

Bonjour à tous.

Juste pour savoir, il y a des utilisateurs d’#enregistreurs numériques ici ? Pour quels usages ?
Avec quel matos ?
Des conseils ?

Merci.

Gonzo by James Booker (1960)
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJFmkieTLfc

C’est la chanson qui a servi d’inspiration pour la dénomination du gonzo journalism de Hunter S. Thompson.

File:Gonzo by James Booker, 1960, gonzo.ogg - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gonzo_by_James_Booker,_1960,_gonzo.ogg

Gonzo journalism - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Gonzo.svg/1200px-Gonzo.svg.png

Another speculation is that the word may have been inspired by the 1960 hit song ’"Gonzo" by New Orleans rhythm and blues pianist James Booker. This possibility is supported by a 2007 oral biography of Thompson, which states that the term is taken from a song by Booker but does not explain why Thompson or Cardoso would have chosen the term to describe Thompson’s journalism. The 2013 documentary Bayou Maharaja: The Tragic Genius of James Booker quotes Thompson’s literary executor as saying that the song was the origin of the term. According to a Greg Johnson biographical note on Booker, the song title “Gonzo” comes from a character in a movie called The Pusher, which in turn may have been inspired by a 1956 Evan Hunter novel of the same title.

Thompson himself first used the term referring to his own work on page 12 of the counterculture classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He wrote, “But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.”

The Muppet Show Compilations - Episode 14 : The Great Gonzo’s Acts
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGuR_PowQqU

#USA #journalisme

U.S. Navy Chaplain Fired Over Sex Act Caught on Camera at New Orleans Pub – gCaptain
▻http://gcaptain.com/u-s-navy-chaplain-fired-sex-act-caught-camera-new-orleans-pub

The U.S. Marines have fired a long-time Navy Chaplain who was caught on video having sex with a woman a New Orleans bar, USA Today reported Wednesday.

On March 20, the Marines fired Navy Capt. Loften Thornton due to “loss of trust and confidence,” a spokesman for Marine Reserve said in a statement to the media. Thornton, a Navy Chaplain since 1992, had been chaplain for Marine Forces Reserve based in New Orleans.

According to media reports, Thornton was captured on video having sex with a woman at a British pub across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. DoD officials are in the process of reviewing the tape, reports said.

The pub is about a five-minute drive from the Marine Reserve base.

The U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps consists of clergy who are commissioned naval officers with the purpose to “promote the spiritual, religious, moral, and personal well-being of the members of the Department of the Navy,” including Marine Corps.

Muhiyidin Moye, Black Lives Matter Activist, Is Shot and Killed in New Orleans - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/us/muhiyidin-moye-dbaha-dead-black-lives-matter.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/08/us/08xp-neworleans/08xp-neworleans-facebookJumbo.jpg

A prominent Black Lives Matter activist was shot and killed while riding a bike in New Orleans early on Tuesday morning.

The activist, Muhiyidin Moye, 32, is known for leaping across yellow police tape to snatch a Confederate battle flag from a demonstrator in Charleston, S.C., last year, an act that was captured on a live news broadcast. But Mr. Moye, who also went by the last name d’Baha, had spent years fighting for racial equality as an activist and protester.

Protester jumps barricade and attempts to get Confederate flag from man #chsnews pic.twitter.com/hTBql8qS9Z
— Ray Rivera (@RayRiveraChs) Feb. 22, 2017

The police found Mr. Moye bleeding near a mountain bike on Bienville Street in New Orleans shortly after 1 a.m. on Tuesday. He had been shot in the leg, and the police report said officers followed a trail of blood that led them back to a bullet fragment a few blocks away from where Mr. Moye was found.

#meurtre #violence #états-unis #racisme

New Orleans Surveillance Program Gives Powerful Tools to a Police Department With a History of Racism and Abuse
▻https://theintercept.com/2018/03/06/new-orleans-surveillance-cameras-nopd-police

As you walk down Felicity Street in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans, red and blue flashing lights radiate from around the corner. But when you turn on to South Liberty Street, you won’t find a patrol car. Your gaze will rise to the peak of a street lamp where the lights are fastened to an NOPD surveillance camera that, just like the lights, runs 24 hours a day. The beams engulf the small, seven-house block, reflecting off the windows of cars and homes, ricocheting off the (...)

#surveillance #discrimination

Autographs for Freedom (1853) – The Public Domain Review
▻http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/autographs-for-freedom-1853

http://publicdomainreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/autographsforfre1853grif_0010-copy.jpg

Autographs for Freedom, published in 1853, is an anthology of literature designed to help “sweep away from this otherwise happy land, the great sin of SLAVERY.” It was put together by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and includes the only published fiction of Frederick Douglass, who would go on to become the first black citizen to hold high rank in the US government. His “The Heroic Slave” is a work of historical fiction centering on Madison Washington, the man made famous in 1841 for leading a rebellion on the Creole, a slave ship en route to New Orleans from Virginia. Having taken control the rebels managed to redirect the Creole to Nassau in the Bahamas. Because it was a British colony, slavery had been outlawed there since 1833. Upon arrival in Nassau 128 of the 135 slaves aboard the Creole gained their freedom. It was the most successful revolt of enslaved people in US history.

The driving force behind the anthology was an Englishwoman named Julia Griffiths, a prominent member of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. She had first met Frederick Douglass in London in the mid 1840s. Douglass had escaped his life of captivity in 1838, at the age of twenty, fleeing Baltimore and reaching New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a labourer and evaded suspicion. In 1841, at an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket, he was invited to describe his experiences under slavery. His spontaneous remarks so stirred the audience that he was catapulted into a key player in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. An orator and wordsmith of great power, he went on to write a classic memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Upon its publication, fearing he would be recaptured because it mentioned the name of his former owner, Douglass left the US to tour the British Isles, give speeches, and build support for emancipation. It was there that he met and befriended Julia Griffiths. When Douglass returned to America he did so with enough funds to purchase his freedom and to set up an anti-slavery newspaper. In 1849, Griffiths sailed to Rochester, New York, to join Douglass. She supported his work and co-founded the influential Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, along with five other women.

#Domaine_public #Esclavage

A visual chronicle of the shotgun shack, a truly American architectural icon
▻https://timeline.com/visual-shotgun-shack-american-d507d33d83c2

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In cities, housing needs are the biggest driver of architectural innovation (see California for its bungalows, the Northeast for its row houses). Local climate and available materials are often as important in determining regional residential solutions as space and population, and the shotgun houses common in the South—especially Louisiana—are a prime example.

Though variations are common, generally a shotgun house is defined as a raised, single-story rectangular home with a narrow frontage—typically less than 12 feet wide—and no hallway. Tall-ceilinged rooms open onto one another from front to back, allowing for maximum ventilation in a hot, humid climate. Modest and efficient, shotgun houses were constructed as inexpensive accommodation for laborers clustered in neighborhoods like New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. By the 20th century the diminutive dwellings had come to dominate NoLa’s working class residential landscape.

Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO).
▻http://www.ip-no.org/about-us

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Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) has grown to be the second largest free-standing (not a law school clinic) innocence project in the country.

IPNO is a nonprofit law office with full time staff attorneys working cases from start to finish, supported by investigators, paralegals and a constellation of volunteer assistance – primarily outside attorneys working pro bono as co-counsel and law students who assist with case review and investigation – at no cost to our clients.

IPNO has a national reputation for winning exonerations; both in cases where DNA can prove innocence, and in more difficult cases where DNA does not exist or has been destroyed. The latter type of cases require hundreds of hours of traditional investigation to gather the evidence needed to exonerate an innocent prisoner.

Since 2001, IPNO has won the freedom or exoneration of 30 wrongfully convicted prisoners who served a total of over 656 years in Louisiana and Mississippi’s prisons between them (These numbers continue to grow – check out our list of exonerees for the most recent information). We also provide intensive support and guidance to each of our clients upon their release.

We simultaneously use our clients’ cases to ask for changes in laws and policies that cause indigent prisoners to be wrongly convicted. IPNO believes in preventing wrongful convictions by increasing openness and accountability in the criminal justice system. This approach makes the system fairer for everyone who encounters it. And, in the states with the nation’s highest rates of incarceration, an exceptionally high proportion of the people are impacted by the criminal justice system.

When a black fighter won ‘the fight of the century,’ race riots erupted across America
▻https://timeline.com/when-a-black-fighter-won-the-fight-of-the-century-race-riots-erupted-acros

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On Independence Day, 1910, race riots ignited across America. Jack Johnson, a black boxer, had defeated the white Jim Jeffries in a heavyweight fight in the middle of the Reno desert. Cities around the nation, including Houston, New York, St. Louis, Omaha, New Orleans, Little Rock, and Los Angeles, erupted with the anger and vindication of a racially divided country.

The day after, newspapers set on the difficult task of tallying the aftermath. “One man was shot in Arkansas, two negroes were killed at Lake Providence, La.; one negro was killed at Mounds, Ill., and a negro fatally wounded in Roundeye, Va.,” reported one local newspaper, explaining that “the tension that existed everywhere vented itself out chiefly in street shuffles.”

A report from Houston read, “Charles Williams, a negro fight enthusiast, had his throat slashed from ear to ear on a streetcar by a white man, having announced too vociferously his appreciation of Jack Johnson’s victory in Reno.”

In Manhattan’s San Juan Hill neighborhood, a mob set fire to a black tenement, while blocking the doorway to prevent the occupants’ escape. In St. Louis, a black crowd marched the streets, pushing No one knows how many died in the wake of Johnson-Jeffries fight, but records show between 11 and 26 were killed. Likely hundreds were assaulted or beaten. To quell the disturbance, cities barred the fight video from being shown in theaters, and Congress tried to pass a bill to ban the screening of all boxing films.

William Pickens, president of the all-black Talladega College, was heartened by the symbolic victory, acknowledging it came at a great cost. “It was a good deal better for Johnson to win and a few negroes to be killed in body for it,” he said, “than for Johnson to have lost and negroes to have been killed in spirit by the preachments of inferiority from the combined white press.”

As Johnson biographer Geoffrey C. Ward pointed out, “No event yielded such widespread racial violence until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., fifty-eight years later.”whites off the sidewalk and harassing them, before being clubbed and dispersed by police.

In Washington, two white men were fatally stabbed by black men, with 236 people arrested in that city alone. And in Omaha, a black man was smothered to death in a barber’s chair, while in Wheeling, West Virginia, a black man driving an expensive car — just as the playboyish Jack Johnson was famous for — was beset by a mob and hanged.

Puerto Rico’s streets crawl with heavily armed, masked mercenaries bearing no insignia or nametags
▻https://boingboing.net/2017/10/15/katrina-rerun.html

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Though Puerto Rican law prohibits ownership and bearing of most long-guns and especially semiautomatic weapons, the streets of the stricken US colony now throng with mercenaries in tactical gear bearing such arms, their faces masked. They wear no insignia or nametags and won’t say who they work for, apart from vague statements in broken Spanish: “We work with the government. It’s a humanitarian mission, we’re helping Puerto Rico.”

Rosa Emilia Rodríguez, head of Puerto Rico’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office, initially dismissed reports of the mercenaries, then, after reporters from the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo pressed her she said she’d “check it out.”

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Erik Prince’s Blackwater mercenaries flooded the city again, turning it into an “armed camp”, after Brigadier Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force announced “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

Erik Prince is now reportedly considering a senate run as a Trumpist candidate in Wyoming. His sister, Betsy Devos, has used millions from her husband’s pyramid-scheme fortunes to fund efforts to destroy public education, and now serves as Trump’s Secretary of Education.

Though the mercenaries in Puerto Rico won’t identify their employers, there’s good evidence that Blackwater (now called Academi) is or will soon be operating there, as well as other notorious mercenary gangs like Ranger America and the Whitestone Group.

Security firm Academi —known by its former name, Blackwater, which won $21 million contract with the U.S. government to provide security services during the Iraq war in 2003— said that they already have offers from the local and federal government and by the Red Cross to come to Puerto Rico.

“We’re ready to go,” said Paul Donahue, Chief Operating Officer of Constellis, Academi’s parent company, in a phone interview with the CPI. He explained that if the government of Puerto Rico accepts the proposal made by Academi to respond to the government’s offer, they would be providing security services for water transportation. The company already operates in the Caribbean islands of Dominica and St. Martin, where they arrived after Hurricanes Irma and Maria made landfall. This company, described as an army of mercenaries by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, has changed its name three times since its founding in 1997 by a former Navy Seal Officer (United States Marine, Air and Land Teams.)

10 Years After Katrina - The New York Times

▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/26/us/ten-years-after-katrina.html

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NEW ORLEANS — It is a wonder that any of it is here at all: The scattered faithful gathering into Beulah Land Baptist Church on a Sunday morning in the Lower Ninth Ward. The men on stoops in Mid-City swapping gossip in the August dusk. The brass band in Tremé, the lawyers in Lakeview, the new homeowners in Pontchartrain Park.

On Aug. 29, 2005, it all seemed lost. Four-fifths of the city lay submerged as residents frantically signaled for help from their rooftops and thousands were stranded at the Superdome, a congregation of the desperate and poor. From the moment the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina dismantled a fatally defective levee system, New Orleans became a global symbol of American dysfunction and government negligence. At every level and in every duty, from engineering to social policy to basic logistics, there were revelations of malfunction and failure before, during, and after #Katrina.

#nouvelle-orléans #mississippi #ouragan

The Great Flood
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-great-flood

How many times will we rebuild Florida’s cities, Houston, coastal New Jersey, New Orleans and other population centers ravaged by storms lethally intensified by global warming? At what point...

Capitalism and the Houston flood catastrophe - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/28/pers-a28.html

Nearly twelve years to the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, Hurricane Harvey is wreaking havoc along the Texas Gulf Coast. Harvey has caused widespread flooding in Houston, the fourth largest city in the country, with 2.3 million people and a metropolitan area population of nearly 6.5 million.

Once again, a major storm has stripped away the pretense and revealed the brutal reality of American society, exposing pervasive poverty, staggering levels of inequality, and rampant official neglect and corruption. Scenes are unfolding of entire families trudging through waist-high water befouled with oil, sewage and chemicals; people young and old scrambling onto roofs in the desperate hope of being rescued from rapidly rising water; entire sections of the city cut off from shelter, food and clean water. The situation will only grow worse as the storm continues to drop record volumes of rain on the city and its environs.

In the richest country in the world, where trillions of dollars were made available to the banks in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, widespread destruction and loss of life have become a common feature of the tornadoes, floods, hurricanes and other severe weather events that occur with increasing frequency. This is above all due to the decay of infrastructure and an acute social crisis that has left millions without the means to prepare for a natural disaster.

The victims, as always, are overwhelmingly working-class. Once again, scenes of human suffering amid official dysfunction are shattering the claims of the United States to be a land of prosperity and progress.

As in every such crisis, the spontaneous response of ordinary people is one of social solidarity. Victims of the storm are rushing to help their neighbors and thousands of people are pouring into the impacted area to assist in saving lives and providing food, shelter and medical care. This stands in the starkest contrast to the authorities, who did nothing to ward off the impact of a major flood or prepare to deal with its consequences.