KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis New Orleans is the Lost City of America. New Orleans has disappeared as surely as the lost city of Atlantis or the lost city of Pompeii, which former mayor Marc Morial and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA.) have compared us to in their statements. That New Orleans, the New Orleans I mean to tell you about, that will never, ever, exist again--that city of love, lust, death and sex--will never exist again. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now! To order on Amazon.com, go here! A small, independent and outspoken magazine like this one can't reach you every week without the support and patronage of its readership. As our way of thanking those who have committed to keep your World's Magazine here on your desktop through their generous donations, we feature their names and cities here in our Roll of Honor. SUSTAINING PATRONS RON DIENER, Wendell, NC, USA DARHL STULTZ, Largo, FL, USA MATT STOWELL, New Orleans, LA, USA TIMOTHY MEADOWS, Anaheim, CA, USA CHERYL HILL NATION, West Fairlee, VT, USA DRAGAN & DRAGANA VICANOVIC, Belgrade, SERBIA LESZEK MICHAELWICZ, New Orleans, LA, USA MARIE SINSABAUGH, Granville, OH, USA TERRY TERRIAN, Sebastopol, CA, USA BECKY ALTEMUS, Houston, TX, USA Supporting Patrons BARBARA ATWELL, Berkeley, CA, USA IAN CRYSTAL, Ph. D, New Orleans, LA, USA LARS KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, USA MEREDITH TUPPER, Tampa, FL, USA NGOZI RAZAK-SOYEBI, Jos, NIGERIA NICK ALLEN, New Orleans, LA, USA RIC WILLIAMS, Austin, TX, USA ROBERT PURVIS, Montclair, NJ, USA STEVE VIVIAN, New York, NY, USA STUART ALTMAN, ESQ., New York, NY, USA We encourage you to add your name to this Roll of Honor. GENERATOR 21 cannot continue and thrive without your support. Thanks in advance. To support G21, please send checks or money orders to: G21: The World's Magazine Attn: Rod Amis 1116 Crestline Road Wendell, NC 27591-9245 USA To donate by credit or debit card, please go to the Western Union website by following the highlighted link. Should you donate via Western Union, please notify us via e-mail. Please make all remittances payable to Rod Amis. Again, thanks. CURRENT MOON lunar phases

Rod Amis - Unbound

SMOKE

"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.

29 October, 2005: By the time you read this on Halloween, much of what I have to say about the deplorable (not my word but that of Mayor of Atlanta, GA, USA) situation for former residents of New Orleans will be news you don't want to hear. Simply because I wrote a book about the city that I called my home does not mean that I need to belabor the topic week after week. We both agree on that.

Meanwhile, because of the issues of race and class, I've noticed that the Mouthpiece Media (MM) have gone back to subjects that suburban America is more comfortable listening to on their nightcasts: Plamegate, Judy Miller and the New York Times, Harriet ("Fall on your sword") Miers. Something vanilla and non-threatening to your moral conscience.

I can't say that I wholly blame them; the MM was out of character talking about real-life issues. They need something the Babbling Classes (a.k.a the wealthy Punditocracy) can more readily relate to while getting paid to waste oxygen.

I don't know one person, trying to hold onto a job or trying to get their kids through school , who gives a rat's ass whether the Times fires Judith Miller - awful example of professional journalism that she is - or erects a monument to her at Rockefeller Center in New York City. BUT if you listen to the Babbling Classes of the MM, this is a story we the people should care about.

Maybe I'm missing something here.

Maybe th is is more earth-shaking news that the natural disasters in Pakistan, in Central America and the U.S.A.-made disaster in Iraq - all of which have taken more thousands of lives than This Editor could possibly imagine.

Maybe, instead of committing these pages to focus on the AIDS pandemic that is decimating human life I should I have asked all the writers here to focus on Judith Miller, I. Lewis Libby and the Bush Administration's on-going tissue of lies.

What is important to the average person? I have to wonder, watching the shameful performance of the MM. I really do. [END RANT.]

COMMENT on Smoke Opening Rant 21 October

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E, the Magazine of the Environment in its latest issue (September/October, 2005 - " Cities of the Future -Today's 'Mega-cities' are Overcrowded and Environmentally Stressed" by Divya Abhat, Shauna Dineen, Tamsyn Jones, Jim Motavalli, Rebecca Sanborn, and Kate Slomkowski) focuses on the future of the planet based on the explosive growth of mega-cities. Not just the ones we usually think of like New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Mexico City but also Mumbai (formerly known Bombay,) Dhaka (Bengladesh,) Jakarka (Indonesia,) Seoul, (South Korea,) and others around the world. With goood reason.

The world has increased four-fold in population in my single lifetime and I am less than sixty years old. Think about it.

As the United Nations stated and we reported in these pages, we are rapidly moving toward a more urban world. The poor are migrating to the mega-cities of the future, in hope of finding employment, a better future for their children and the "Gold Mountain." Instead, they are finding a moment of pollution, ecological degradation and disease. They are being made more prey to tuberculosis, hepatitis, and the HIV/AIDS pandemics both in the so-called "Developed" world and especially the so-called "Third World."

Little or nothing is being done to change this trend or ameliorate the human suffering that it portends.

I'll share with you only a brief quote from the piece E Magazine offers this month, regarding the city of Mumbai:

According to a 2004 estimate, the population of metropolitan Mumbai was approximately 17 million. Every year, the city receives more than 250,000 rural-to-urban emigrants. Mumbai could be the world's most populous city by 2020, with 28.5 million, says the Population Institute.

"With this sizeable number of people, resources are getting increasingly scarce. Buildings are getting taller, with no care for where water and space, children's playgrounds and parking areas will come from," says Preeti Gopalkrishnan, Communications Executive of Population First, a sustainable human development program based in Mumbai.

Half of the metropolis' population lacks running water or electricity, and the smoke from hundreds of thousands of open cooking fires joins with the sooty smoke from two-stroke auto rickshaws, belching taxis, diesel buses and coal-fired power plants in a symphony of air pollutants. Breathing Mumbai's inversion-trapped air, experts say, is the equivalent of smoking 20 cigarettes a day.

According to a 2000 estimate by the Mega-Cities Project, 70 to 75 percent of women living in slums complain of general weakness and anemia, while 50 to 60 percent suffer from chronic malnutrition, recurrent gastroenteritis and helminthic [caused by parasitic worms] infections. Malnutrition and paralysis are common causes of mortality.

The water supply situation in Mumbai is critical, reports the UN, with the level of supply so much below demand that water use is restricted and reaches emergency proportions when the monsoon fails. More than two million Mumbai residents have no sanitary facilities, and much sewage is discharged untreated or partially treated into waterways. Attempts have been made to relocate industries outside the island city, but industrial pollution remains a serious problem.

This is a view of one of the mega-cities of our near-future.

In our view, it leads to the question What can be done?

Here's one answer.

COMMENT on E Magazine Mega-City Commentary

Cities in Space

The technology that launches satellites into geo-synchronous space has been around for decades. We all know that. The technology to build geo-syncronous cities has also been around for decades. This Editor studied it at university in the 1970s. As Long-time Loyal Readers know, one of my favorite and most challenging courses at the time had the same name as this subject header.

The beauty of building a city in space, capable of supporting 100,000 or more people, was that most of the mining could and can be done from our other great satellite - the moon.

I'll pause here because I realize that what I'm proposing is not what you normally expect to read in these pages. I usually keep my topics "earth-bound," so to speak. But I assure you I'm talking about the future of the earth.

Reasonably, it would take a decade to construct such a city and transport 100,000 people - with the first waves being construction crews - to inhabit it. But it is possible. The question is whether we choose to invest in weapons or such cities. It's that clear-cut.

After the first city was in orbit, building the second and third cities and so on, would take far less time. The first city would act would as a platform for future construction and the need to expend on leaving Earth's gravity would no longer exist.

Wait. I know you are starting to believe I'm talking Jules Verne fantasy here but I am not.

What I am talking about is the survival of a species that I see moving quickly toward its own destruction.

Your love affair with the automobile and consuming fossil fuels is jeopardizing the lives of all of us, whether we participate or not.

So it's the responsibility of some of us to look for alternatives. You don't like wind or solar power on this planet. Maybe, just maybe, you'll give the rest of us - who value life - an opportunity to use if off-planet.

Rather than build "Son of Star Wars" missile systems in the near-Earth regions of outer space, why not let us build livable cities? Why not?

ONE QUESTION: If you asked people to take a choice between living in Mumbai or Seoul in twenty years or living in the first space city, free of pollution, industrial waste, carbon monoxide and with jobs for the asking, as the pioneers of off-planet life, which one do you believe they'd choose?

I'm suggesting that people from the so-called "First World" would be pushing people out of the way for the chance. Mark my words.

And in this rush to be one of the first families living off-planet, what determining factors would be used? That was the question that stymied people in the 1970s and that I suspect would put the kebosh on such a project today.

The sociological issues becomes paramount because the nations that would be most willing to invest in such a project, as the United States would be least inclined toward today with its focus on weaponry and "security," those countries would want to have photo-op first citizens of the new city - and that would be entirely wrong, in our view.

Okay, Gentle Reader, stop and breathe. Take a deep breath.

What I am suggesting is no more outrageous than when U.S. President John Kennedy proposed in the 1960s that we send humans to the moon. He asked, as I am not, that we employ technology yet to be developed.

I am not.

You know, as I do, that we have had humans living in geo-synchronous orbit around our planet for years now. It's called the International Space Station. I am only suggesting that we ramp up the process. I am only suggesting that we do something we are already doing, times a few thousands.

What I'm suggesting, of course, requires taking money away from pr oducing weapons of death and devoting those resources toward instruments of life.

Okay?

Breathe, again.

Do the math. We are talking about a planet with thousands of millons (a billion people is a thousand million, after all. Right?) and I am merely imagining that we could move a few hundred thousand to a better, if unusual, life during the next few decades.

By the year 2050, there will be billions of people living in the urban slums described in the United Nations forecasts, many of them without potable water, electricity, sewers. Which of these prospects sounds the most mad?

I am not proposing a single city. The first will be the most difficult but then we must continue. Before we despoil Mother Earth, we must give her a chance for repair and, as I write this, we are the largest problem.

I am not simply proposing a minor migration off-planet but that we begin migrating into the stars. The largest colony would be on our largest satellite, the moon.

I know that this notion will be either considered "crackpot" or totally anathema to some of you reading this column. I also know that it is a solution whose time has come. In fact, in this view, it is quarter past time to consider this option.

As I hinted before, beginning this new column was a chance to allow myself to become "Unbound." That's a Promethean theme. I am attempting to offer you fire ä

I realize that some of my fellow dissidents would say that the expenditures I'm proposing would be better employed solving the problems of people on this planet.

My response: the fastest way to do that is to get people off this planet.

COMMENT on Cities in Space

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MIRRORS

IF your still with me, NO, I haven't gone off my nut. I'm simply offering a much more visionary solution than that to which you are accustomed. I actually believe that there is a two pronged attack to saving our species:

1. Begin to focus on the real issues of poverty, inequality and classism; end the consumerist trend and focus on life issues, which means
   
2. Focus simultaneously on allowing the Earth to heal the damage we've ignorantly done by getting some of our burgeoning population out of the way without resorting to killing people.

That seems simple enough to me.

In this section of the column, I'll go back to being "earth-bound" and the kind of Rod you like better.

No more outrageous proposals, no more "Unbound." Just your regular Joe Sixpack. Happy?

COMMENT on Mirrors Intro 31 October

ABOUT THE MAGAZINE

You'll note that in this edition of the magazine I've attempted to offer you a much more diverse mix of articles than we have in the recent past. There's even a bit of humor. The House of Cards page returns, for example, after being gone for years.

We've also, after conducing a poll of our Mailing List determined that the World PressWire newsfeeds that we've done for the last year doesn't add value to the site for our readers at all. So that was jettisoned.

Other changes are in the works as we move toward anniversary number ten for your World's Magazine. Rod is in Streamline Mode again.

I have to give major kudos to BRAD BALFOUR for his interview of Atom Egoyan in NEW YORK STATE this week. I found it a great read. Brad is a gem that you all should appreciate.

COMMENT on MIrrors Mag 31 October

FROM ROD'S PHOTO ALBUM

A friend who I'll allow to remain nameless sent me this photo with the caption, "Banned by Disney." I had to laugh. Here are mother and daughter appearing as one might expect them to do on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

I'll admit that the shot is a bit risque. But it's also a hoot. I can already hear the Usual Suspects saying how crass I tend to be. I've been called worse.

What really cracks me up about this shot is how Dad is staring into the camera. What is this man thinking?

Believe me, you ran into too many of these people if you've ever lived in New Orleans.

Trick or Treat?

COMMENT on Rod's Photo Album 31 October

Life of Rod

30 October 2005: Happily, I've begun receiving submissions for the G21 AFRICA book imprint your World's Magazine plans to publish within the next month from some of the great writers you've had the pleasure of reading here.

UNHAPPILY, not a week goes by that I don't get a complaint about the difficulty some people - friends, relatives, ex-lovers - have in purchasing my own book on New Orleans from my publisher Lulu.com. The fact is even I have yet to get a copy of my own book. Go figure.

I keep getting these polite, cordial, flattering e-mails from the person at Lulu.com who is my main contact. But what I don't get is a copy of my own freakin' book!

This past week, I swore to myself not send another complaining e-mail to Lulu. I said that I would give them the chance to make these right.

As soon as this edition of the magazine is published, I go back into Major Complaint Mode.

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I'M WORKING MY BUTT OFF these days. Between the G21 AFRICA book forthcoming, sweating over "Katrina" (the New Orleans book, ) keeping this magazine alive and the proposed "My Glass House" book, it seems I'm either writing or editing all the time. Both ends of the candle are burnt.

And this week, I expect to go into a form of ego meltdown when I get the official confirmation that I didn't get the Kiplinger. That is what Life of Rod is like right now.

It's just NOT pretty. [Yes, yes. I'll fix the typos during the course of the week.]

Thanks for coming back this week. Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.

COMMENT on Life 31 October

THINGS I WANT THIS WEEK

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at the (U.S.) Public Broadcasting System (PBS's) WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at And over.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS Internet magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia.

Our Resident Philosopher has exchanged his legend mobility for a means of keeping your World's Magazine. Now he must become earnest about gaining a financial underpinning for this enterprise. (Read: Buy back his freedom and then go home.}.

In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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