Le Show; 2009-02-22

From deep inside your radio, and from New Orleans, Louisiana, a special edition of Lesho Ladies and Gentlemen, because it's Marty Girl Weekend, what? A lot of the regular features, plus I think a fascinating conversation with a man who's radically trying to re-imagine the future of New Orleans, and no, it's not Mayor Ray Nagan, but first, let's go digital. Hi deaf, no deaf, no deaf, take my hand. It's a digital wonderland. First some letters, e-mails actually. All right, Patty will be our in. Patty writes, let me preface this with the fact that I lived literally in the middle of nowhere, in South East of Ohio, no forlain roads, no cell service, dial up internet. I bought a converter box, hooked it up, and was able to receive digital TV on my 18 year old set in antenna. But it was like watching

in a snow storm. Analog was clear as a bell. Yesterday, we installed a brand new HD TV. It was hooked directly to the antenna, we turned it on, and the digital picture is as perfect as the analog. This seems to prove that the TV makes a difference, as that is the only item that changed. It is said that people in a rural area may have to go to the expense of a new TV to stay connected to the outside world. Perhaps instead of converter box coupons, the government should issue digital television coupons. Thanks, Patty. The Yang comes from Hans, who writes, thanks a lot, since the original date for the cessation of analog television broadcast has been extended. My reception of digital broadcast has deteriorated. Signals that were strong before the original deadline are now weaker, and the quality is poor with dropouts and poor signal strength. What is going on? I have two acquaintances who are news cameramen for local stations. They asked the engineers, since stations must still broadcast analog. They must broadcast on two frequencies, both analog and digital.

They have reduced the wattage on their digital broadcast to save money, resulting in poor digital strength. Thanks a lot, Harry. You lulled it. The VCR is one of the unsung casualties of the move to digital television. Consumers who have used the devices to record over the error cable channels will soon be losing key features, as both systems go from analog to digital. They will be left to choose from a few Jerry built or pricey solutions. Hi, I'm Jim at Pricey Solutions. There are work around. VCR owners could watch one program recording another if they hooked up a second converter box to the same TV with the second box sending its signal directly to the TV instead of the VCR. It requires extra equipment and some wires, which ladies love. Swapping out on old VCR with a new one that has a digital tuner doesn't solve the problem of not being able to watch one program and record another. Digitally enabled VCRs typically won't tune in digital cable because you can't find one that will decode the scrambled signals.

Of course, the federal government has told people that all you need is the converter boxes, what they're not telling people is you won't be able to record as you previously did. We don't have the perfect solution yet for VCR customers affected by the digital transitions. Meghan Pollock of the Consumer Electronics Association, but she expressed faith if consumers make an issue of these lost features, the manufacturers will respond. The marketplace will adapt. She said, faith-based solution. That's the way the marketplace adapted when the insatiable demand for digital television originated in the first place. They went to the government. The digital transition has left some confused. A job in Missouri man was frustrated with the switch. So frustrated that he peppered his television set with gunfire. The 70-year-old man was livid over losing cable and could not get his digital converter box to work. News of the digital Wonderland ladies and gentlemen, and speaking of broadcasting, this just in, residents living in six United States cities are, for the most part, dissatisfied with local radio. Says a survey from the Rochester Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Federal listeners indicated through survey answers that four out of every ten in these markets rate the effectiveness of local radio is providing them with very little satisfaction or zero satisfaction in terms of local programming. Stand by for very little satisfaction, ladies and gentlemen, hello, welcome to the show. music All over bedThey can do sooner when

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Sayonare, hey, sayonare! This is Lesho and another interview with another New Orleansian who is standing up and making a difference in the city. I became aware of his project and his passion. I guess it was in

October when Tulane University had a public showing one Monday morning of the results of a weekend long series of discussions and plans among American and Dutch planners, architects and designers to reimagine the city's relationship with water. It turns out to be part of a project called Dutch Dialogs and David Wagner is in New Orleans to discuss it today. David, thank you for coming in. Thank you for having me. Thanks for those who listened about New Orleans. How did Dutch Dialogs come about? And what is it? What is it? It's maybe a figment of my imagination at times I think, Harry? Although there's there's continuing interest. It's really a collaboration with the Dutch government. The American Planning Association has supported this at their top levels, the executive director and the first assistant. But the Dutch government has been

the key to this and a lot of it has been my own advocacy that we think differently about where we live here. We think differently about water, including it instead of excluding it. So in brief, it's a collaboration through the Dutch Embassy in Washington with the city of Rotterdam and to a lesser degree the city of Amsterdam, also the province of South Holland, Technical University at Delft, another in the Hogue School in Rotterdam, and private firms, Landscape Architects and the larger civil engineering concerns. It is pretty amazing that there is this level of interest in New Orleans. But I guess it's a beautiful old lady even if she's a little broken down. And you come at this from... I'm an architect. We have done what I used to think was planning, but I now better understand as urban design. We've done some of that in

North Louisiana and done some of that in China. We were involved in the planning processes in New Orleans, bringing New Orleans back, and then the unified New Orleans plan. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, well, at the end of the unified New Orleans plan is where this chapter begins, which is November 06 having realized there was so little attention paid to infrastructure, with even less paid explicitly to water, our safety, and certainly not the value of water. Not enough paid, in my view, at least to economic development, which sounds like a coarse thing, but if you're in a city with a lot of poor people, I don't think that it's great to say, well, we're fine the way we are. I don't think it is fine the way we are. So, you know, in November 06 is when I started going to the Dutch Embassy in Washington, and then in 07 January, I started going to the Netherlands to involve this, what I call knowledge network, which is what the Dutch just call, you know, the Dutch. They're all there working together

to think about these things. You know, their prints is a study water management. So this fairly unglamorous term to them is fundamental. They've been at it for a while. Eight centuries at least, you know, they basically created their land. There's that cliche, that funny cliche about God creating the heavens and the earth, but the Dutch made Holland, and they made a lot of mistakes. They're quick to tell you that. They're very self-critical people, but being self-critical means you can be self-correcting, and over the years they've learned from their own mistakes, and that knowledge is an exportable thing to them. But it's also something that, because they're good Calvinists, they think they should share. And you went to them under what auspices? Errogance, false belief. But, you know, I was raised in politics. My father was a congressman, and I didn't choose that course. I thought design could make a difference

a little bit. I know that it wouldn't overcome politics. So I guess it was sort of a, maybe, bread to think I could do more than just be a regular citizen. But I also think, Carrie, that the real story of New Orleans is about regular citizens. And, you know, our government has not been the most effective. And so we've, as members of the pollists, stood up and done what we can do. The problem is we're overmatched. It's not possible for me individual with no real authority to stand not against, but with or even with the core of engineers. And, you know, we have this need now to represent ourselves. And that's what we're trying to use the experts to do. So from 2006 to that morning at Tulane in October, where these really remarkable plans were presented, which to summarize what I saw that morning were a call

to reimagine the relationship of New Orleans to water, to stop fighting a war against water, and to start living with water to enhance both safety and the beauty of the city. And done at three different levels of detail, one a region-wide level, one a sort of a neighborhood level, and one a very granular block level of design. How did you come from that meeting in Holland to that morning in Tulane? The trip to the Netherlands in 2006, we spent a lot of time looking at the coastal defenses that were there. We went out to see the gates and the barriers and the large-scale public works. Those are those beautiful gates that you see on the internet next to the photos of the crappy stuff in New Orleans, right? Right, it's the envy that Americans have for technology. That was then, but this effort has been more an internal as you alluded to. It's been more

from the inside out. We have our problems in Louisiana with coastal restoration problems, wetlands, rising sea level, all this. Those are really problems that can't be ignored, have to be dealt with. Some people are trying very hard to deal with that. My perception was no one was really dealing with the internal urban issues that could improve safety, and as you said, the beauty of the city, the value of the city. So I started going, as I said, back in January of 2007, when again, in the end of March 1st of April with the Head of the American Planning Association, we've been seeking funding all along, because this is generally paid for by my friends who probably want to avoid me, because I asked them for $5 or $10,000 at a time sometimes. My firm, and as I said, the Dutch government, but we thought we had funding a couple of times in Havent. Maybe that's allowed the reality that we've engaged to be selective enough to be attractive, because sometimes if you just go in to solve the narrow problem and here's

your client, maybe you can't think broadly, and especially when engineering disciplines are involved, you have to think more broadly. The first Dutch dialogue was really a presentation mostly of the way the Dutch deal with water in their own place. What are techniques that the Dutch use and the Netherlands that they, the people we invited, might think would be applicable here? It was not looking specifically at this train. So we had a Dutch dialogue. One, the one you saw, what's Dutch dialogues to, which was a Friday through Monday presentation. We presented Monday morning, as you saw, the results of the working at these three scales. We now have some people who are interested in going forward with this, including those of you who would listen about it, and we have an administration that probably has to engage infrastructure just to get us out of the economic morass we've fallen into. And maybe this is timely.

Yeah, except that we're not shovel ready in their cliche of the moment. Are we? We are not. We are not. And I've known that for quite a while, Harry, which is why the intensity of the thing grows, which is why it wakes me up at night. Netherlands can't ask everybody to rebuild it the way it was. I don't think a city with the repetitive loss ratio we had is okay the way it was. I don't think that we can ignore the subsidence that we have. So I think, you know, you have to think differently. I think any political system, you know, any engineering system is like an astral system. It has to self-correct to endure. And I think that part of the self-correction here, I mean, I think that my focus is on the water. What do we do with the groundwater? What do we do with the surface water? And how do we make that the, you know, the sort of lyrical basis of our city, but also the functional basis of our engineering system? More with David Moments from now here on Let's Show. But first,

the general accountability office, the government accountability office actually, reports the tens of thousands of assault rifles and other firearms in Afghanistan are at risk of being stolen because US officials have lost track of them. Gee, that doesn't sound familiar. Does it? No reliable records show what ultimately happened to 135,000 weapons donated by NATO countries. Many of the weapons supply between 2004 and 2008 were left in the care of Afghan run military depots with a history of desertion theft and subpar security systems that sometimes consist of a wooden door and a padlock. Meanwhile, in the war on terror, an international group of judges and lawyers has warned that systemic torture and other abuses in the global war on terror have undermined cherished values of civil rights in the United States, Britain, and other countries. We have been shocked by the damage done over the past seven years by excessive or abusive counterterrorism measures.

Says Arthur Cheskelson, a member of the International Commission of Jurists. Many governments ignoring the lessons of history have allowed themselves to be rushed into hasty responses to terrorism that have undermined cherished values and violated human rights. Cheskelson is a former chief justice of South Africa. He should know. The worst of the worst latest in gentlemen, the Chinese weggers, they are people who advocate for a separatist regime for their racial minority, their ethnic minority in China. Therefore, they've been languishing in Guantanamo for seven years, maybe because we were trying to please the Chinese government. A court last October, federal court ruled they must be released into the United States. This week, a US appeals court reversed that ruling saying the court doesn't have the power to regulate immigration. So the 17 weggers never convicted or even accused of anything

remotely against the United States remain in Guantanamo. The worst of the worst. And the US will have to keep about 60,000 troops in Afghanistan for at least the next three to four years. US commander in Afghanistan says that he warns this will be a tough year. So, drink up. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. And the soldiers that she is a kind of scutt, they got to keep walks, I make you sick, you

but I'm going to do it, don't mind. They're right, they won't not part over to the vocabulary. Six different just to look at it. I'm getting out of doing it. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind.

Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind.

Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind.

Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind.

Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind.

Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. Come on, take a mind. What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations?

What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? What's been the response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?

The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?

The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?

The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?

The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?

The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?

The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?

The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?

The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?

The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations? The response of city officials to these conversations?