| Saturday,
September 17, 2005 Here are some more
pictures of HSV2 Swift my son Phillip sent. For those who tuned in late,
Phil is Lt. Commander Phillip Pournelle, Executive Officer of this ship, and
USNV Swift did yeoman work in the New Orleans and Gulf Coast rescue efforts.
Your tax dollars at work. Good work.
Dad,
We've been detached to proceed on duties assigned.
With the road and rail infrastructure restored to New Orleans, it is no
longer beneficial for us to run up and down the Mississippi River. We are
headed for Little Creek for some ship work and then on to Europe and Africa
for exercises.
We're heading out of Pensacola this evening and will
return to Little Creek on Tuesday morning.
The crew has done a wonderful job and have been very
flexible.
Today was to be a half day off but they have all
returned quickly and are quickly offloading the refrigeration milvans we
used to ship chill and frozen foods. We would not have been able to execute
the myriad tasks we were assigned without the ingenuity, flexibility and
hard work of this crew.
I'm certain they will show the same excellence in the
tasks before us in Africa and Europe.
I for one, also look forward to seeing my family when
we return to our Home Port.
Love,
Phil
Godspeed.
==
The more I read about New Orleans, the more I become convinced that far
from the breakdown of civilization to Hobbesian primitivism, there may have
been less crime in New Orleans during the crisis than there would have been
in the same weekend had the hurricane not happened. There were incidents,
yes; but we are dealing with a city with a very high crime rate to begin
with. Gang rapes in which the victim continues to hang out with the gang
afterwards are not unknown in gang cultures. Any gang culture. There were
murders, but there are always murders. There was some looting, but was there
more or less burglary than in normal times? The very fact that I can ask
those questions without having an immediate answer is significant.
Schadenfreude is the condition of taking pleasure from the misfortunes of
others. There are some in this land who take delight in relating stories of
the breakdown of civilization, and, I am sad to say, there are those who are
particularly happy to report such things when the participants are black. (I
need not add that there are organizations devoted to finding black victims
of white criminals and publicizing the stories; and that the black crime
rate in normal times is considerably higher than the white and Asian crime
rates even though a significant part of the young male population of blacks
is in jail, thus reducing the numbers of the most likely violent criminals.)
We had plenty of stories of the horrors in New Orleans after the
hurricane. Many of those are unsubstantiated and now appear to be made up
out of whole cloth, while others may be inflations, or the same story told
several times as if it had happened several times; others are sheer
misinterpretations of real events; and the question is, of the residual, is
this higher or lower than the usual crime rate in a typical period in August
in that area? I haven't time this week to dig up the answer, but
there's a pretty good Master's or even PhD (Social Science) thesis in
this...
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