According to a wikipedia article: "... Hurricane Katrina is ... the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history (estimates run higher than $100 billion). Over a million people were displaced ... a second disturbance merged with the remains of Tropical Depression Ten on August 20 [ 2005 ], and there is no way to tell whether the remnants of T.D. Ten should be credited with this storm. ... on August 28, Katrina was upgraded to Category 4. Later that morning, Katrina went through a period of rapid intensification, with its maximum sustained winds strengthening to 175 mph (280 km/h) (well above the Category 5 threshold of 156 mph (250 km/h)), gusts of 215 mph (344 km/h) and central pressure of 23.635 inches (906 mbar) (hPa) by 1:00 p.m. CDT. It later reached a minimum pressure of 902 mbar (hPa), making it the fourth most intense Atlantic Basin hurricane on record. ...
... Katrina made landfall on August 29 as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 140 mph at 6:10 a.m. CDT near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana. A few hours later, it made landfall for a third time near the Louisiana/Mississippi border with 125 mph (200 km/h) Category 3 winds. ... Its lowest minimum pressure at landfall was 27.108 inches (918 mbar) (hPa), making it the third strongest hurricane on record to make landfall on the United States. A 15 to 30 foot (5 to 9 m) storm surge came ashore on virtually the entire coastline from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to Florida. The 30 foot (10 m) storm surge recorded at Biloxi, Mississippi is the highest ever observed in America. ...
... as many as 60,000 people had gathered at the Superdome for evacuation ... [ Superdome image from GlobalSecurity.org Public Eye Orbimage ...
...]... Air conditioning, electricity, and running water all failed, making for very unsanitary and uncomfortable conditions. There have been widespread reports of murders, rapes, beatings, robberies, and general mayhem in the Superdome ... mainstream U.S. media have omitted the more serious reports ... Officials say that the flood damage, debris, human waste and bodily fluids in the Superdome is a "potential biohazard," and that it is too early to tell what the final fate of the structure will be, although demolition has been cited as a possible outcome. ...
... Over 70 countries have pledged money or other assistance, including Cuba and Venezuela ... Mexico ... contributed two military ships, helicopters, military equipment, hundreds of tons of food, bottled water, medical personnel and hundreds of troops (it is the first time Mexican soldiers have operated on U.S. soil since the Mexican-American War) ...".
According to a 31 Aug 05 BBC web article: "... Water from Lake Pontchartrain ...
...[was].. pouring into New Orleans after the failed attempts to plug breaches in the barriers which are supposed to protect the city. ...".
According to a 5 Sep 05 MSNBC AP web article: "... The network that was supposed to protect the below-sea-level city from flooding was built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane, the Army Corps of Engineers said. It was overwhelmed when Katrina's winds and storm surge came ashore a week ago as a Category 4 storm. That has left some lawmakers wondering why officials only considered the consequences of a moderate storm. ...".
According to a 1 Sep 05 The Interdictor blog entry: "... "Bigfoot" is a bar manager and DJ on Bourbon Street, and is a local personality and icon in the city. ... Here is his story as told to me moments ago. ...
... more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them. ... Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. ... there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids. ... Before the supplies were pitched off the bridge today, people had to break into buildings in the area to try to find food and water for their families. There was not enough. This spurred many families to break into cars to try to escape the city. There was no police response to the auto thefts until the mob reached the rich area -- Saulet Condos -- once they tried to get cars from there... well then the whole swat teams began showing up with rifles pointed. Snipers got on the roof and told people to get back. ...".
According to a 13 September 2005 Washington Times web article by Wesley Pruden: "... Democrats in Louisiana are terrified of the lasting effects of the hurricane and subsequent flooding ... of something really serious, the loss of their remaining stronghold in the black precincts of New Orleans. ... "It would not take a large shift of population out of New Orleans to tilt the political balance in favor of the Republican Party," Jim Nickel, the former Democratic state chairman in Louisiana, tells the Financial Times. "Although there are large African American populations in other Southern states, they have not been as concentrated and organized in a large metropolitan area. New Orleans has been a veritable ATM machine of votes for the Democratic Party." ... Floods have changed demographics before. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 sent thousands of blacks from the delta counties in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana to Detroit and Chicago. This erased the political power of the planters, who typically kept their field hands' poll-tax receipts in the plantation safe, to be brought out on election day with precise instructions on how to vote, and for whom. ...".
According to a 7 April 1997 Salon web article by James Carville: "... I grew up on the Mississippi, in a one-stop-sign town by the name of Carville, La. ... John M. Barry's "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America" is the best book I've read in years. ... Levees allowed the river to spill out well beyond its banks, while still holding it to a predictable channel. Levees had another benefit as well: Confining the flooding river would speed up its current; the faster current, in turn, would gouge out the river's bed and lower the water level in the future. ... would the faster current carve out enough to prevent big-time floods? That was the billion-dollar question. ... [Some engineers] knew levees alone could not work. ...[However, the powers-that-be adopted]... a cockamamie levees-only policy. ... The levees-only policy was not an immediate bust. For several generations it worked well enough to allow some of the South's most fabled families to reclaim the rich soils of the Mississippi Delta and build huge cotton empires. ... But a flooding river does not err. It finds each crack and exploits it. That's what happened in spades in '27. The first cracks showed up in the levees. ... Then the river exploited the logical gaps in the levees-only strategy. Because the scouring effect was not that big after all, the river threatened to pour over the top even of intact levees. For most people, the only hope of avoiding the floodwaters was a sudden crevasse on the opposite side of the river. And not everyone was content to leave the matter up to chance. Locals patrolled every stretch of levee with guns -- and shot on sight anyone who approached close enough to plant a few sticks of dynamite. ... As the flood waters started approaching New Orleans, the close-knit cabal of New Orleans bankers who ran Louisiana from their exclusive krewes and clubs decided they were going to save their own skins by dynamiting a levee about 10 miles from the city. They were powerful enough that they didn't even need to do it under the cover of night -- they got the governor to sign an order making the operation legal. On the afternoon of April 29, 1927, workers started blowing a massive hole in that levee. As New Orleans aristocrats watched from their yachts, the river buried St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes under 30 feet of water. ... the Great Flood ... swept ... Huey Long to the Louisiana statehouse. It leveled a self-serving aristocracy. ...
... While today it is damn near impossible to name a single famous engineer, in the 19th century engineers were masters of the universe -- with egos every bit as outsized as today's Wall Street bigwigs. ...".
With respect to China, according to an Epoch Times web article in 2005e "... The following is a transcript of a speech believed to have been given by Mr. Chi Haotian, Minster of Defense and vice-chairman of China's Central Military Commission. Independently verifying the authorship of the speech is not possible. It is worth reading because it is believed to set out
Text of the speech:
... Hitler's Germany had once bragged that the German race was the most superior race on Earth, but the fact is, our nation is far superior to the Germans. ... Our Chinese people are wiser than the Germans because, fundamentally, our race is superior to theirs. ...... After the June 4 [ 1989 Tiananmen Square ] riot was suppressed, we have been thinking about how to prevent China from peaceful evolution and how to maintain the Communist Party's leadership. We thought it over and over but did not come up with any good ideas. If we do not have good ideas, China will inevitably change peacefully, and we will all become criminals in history. ... we finally come to this conclusion: Only by turning our developed national strength into the force of a fist striking outward - only by leading people to go out - can we win forever the Chinese people's support ... Therefore, the June 4 riot made us realize that we must combine economic development with preparation for war and leading the people to go out! Therefore ... Publicly we still emphasize economic development as our center, but in reality, economic development has war as its center! We have made a tremendous effort to construct "The Great Wall Project" to build up, along our coastal and land frontiers as well as around large and medium-sized cities, a solid underground "Great Wall" that can withstand a nuclear war. We are also storing all necessary war materials. Therefore, we will not hesitate to fight a Third World War ... If we take the long view, we will see that history led us on this path. ...
- First, China's long history has resulted in the world's largest population, including Chinese in China as well as overseas ...
- Second ... the profit-seeking western capitalists will invest capital and technology in China to assist our development ...
- Third, our numerous overseas Chinese help us create the most favorable environment for the introduction of foreign capital ...
- Fourth, China's great economic expansion will inevitably lead to the shrinkage of per-capita living space for the Chinese people ...
- Fifth, China's great economic expansion will inevitably come with a significant development in our military forces, creating conditions for our expansion overseas. ...
... Would the United States allow us to go out to gain new living space? ... Only countries like the United States, Canada and Australia have the vast land to serve our need for mass colonization. ... Therefore, solving the "issue of America" is the key to solving all other issues. ... America was originally discovered by the ancestors of the yellow race ... We the descendents of the Chinese nation are entitled to the possession of the land! ... It is historical destiny that China and United States will come into unavoidable confrontation on a narrow path and fight each other! ... In the long run, the relationship of China and the United States is one of a life-and-death struggle. ... The United States is the most successful country in the world today. Only after we have learned all of its useful experiences can we replace it in the future. ...
one mountain does not allow two tigers to live together ... after solving the "issue of America," the western countries in Europe would bow to us, not to mention to Taiwan, Japan and other small countries
... Comrade Xiaoping emphasized "refrain from revealing the ambitions and put others off the track." ... Thus we will understand why we constantly talk loudly about the "Taiwan issue" but not the "American issue." We all know the principle of "doing one thing under the cover of another." ... If, however, the attack ... triggers a nuclear retaliation from the United States, China would perhaps suffer a catastrophe in which more than half of its population would perish. ... The population, even if more than half dies, can be reproduced. But if the Party falls, everything is gone, and forever gone! ...
... we recently decided to further promulgate atheism. If we let theology from the West into China and empty us from the inside, if we let all Chinese people listen to God and follow God, who will obediently listen to us and follow us? ...
... It is indeed brutal to kill one or two hundred million Americans. But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century ... the majority of those Chinese living in the United States have become our burden, because they have been corrupted by the bourgeois liberal values for a long time and it would be difficult for them to accept our Party's leadership. If they survived the war, we would have to launch campaigns in the future to deal with them, to reform them. ...
... The central committee believes, as long as we resolve the United States problem at one blow, our domestic problems will all be readily solved. Therefore, our military battle preparation appears to aim at Taiwan, but in fact is aimed at the United States, and the preparation is far beyond the scope of attacking aircraft carriers or satellites. ...".
According to a 15 July 2005 MSNBC AP web article: "... Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu, a dean at China's National Defense University, told visiting Hong Kong-based reporters ... "If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition into the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons ... If the Americans are determined to interfere ... we will be determined to respond, and we Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all cities east of Xi'an ... Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of, or two hundreds of, (or) even more cities will be destroyed by the Chinese ...". ... China has a "no first strike" nuclear policy, but ... Zhu said he believed that applied to non-nuclear powers and could be changed. ... The general said his comments were "my assessment, not the policy of the government ..." ...".
A gauge boson can physically be represented as a link
between the two fermions that emit and absorb the boson,
and all the types of gauge bosons can be described as
links between (or virtual pairs of) a first-generation
fermion particle its antiparticle. Denote them,
and their relation to the octonions, by:
Octonion
neutrino - n 1 antineutrino - an
red down quark - rd I cyan down antiquark - cd
green down quark - gd J magenta down antiquark - md
blue down quark - bd K yellow down antiquark - yd
red up quark - rd i cyan up antiquark - cd
green up quark - gd j magenta up antiquark - md
blue up quark - bd k yellow up antiquark - yd
electron - e E positron - p
Here is a chart showing how fermion-antifermion pairs
correspond to:
16 G - U(2,2) gauge bosons for MacDowell-Mansouri gravity etc
8 gl - SU(3) gluons
3 W - SU(2) weak bosons
1 ph - U(1) photon
an cd yd md cu yu mu p
n - G G G G G G W
rd - gl gl gl G W G
bd - gl G ph G G
gd - W G gl G
ru - gl gl G
bu - gl G
gu - G
e -
Note that if you use triality to convert the fermion/antifermion
8-dim half-spinor spaces into the 8-dim vector space,
with basis {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 }
having octonion structure {1,i,j,k,I,J,K,E }
where {0,1,2,3 }is a basis for physical M spacetime
and {4,5,6,7 }is a basis for internal symmetry space CP2,
you should get something like this:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
0 - G G G G G gl gl
1 - G G G G gl gl
2 - G G G gl gl
3 - G G gl gl
4 - G W W
5 - W ph
6 - G
7 -
As van Holten indicates in hep-th/0201124, there is a 1-1 correspondence between Y-M gauge bosons and ghosts. In the case of the 28-dimensional Spin(8) gauge group of the D4-D5-E6-E7-E8 VoDou Physics model,, the corresponding 28 ghosts can be regarded as antisymmetric pairs of 8 pre-ghosts, with one of the pre-ghosts in the pair being a particle and the other being an antiparticle. The 8 pre-ghosts are like the 8 gauge potentials that form 28 gauge field bosons by antisymmetric wedge product. From that viewpoint, you could say that the role of ghosts is played by first-generation fermion particle-antiparticle pairs, and that when you do path-integral sum-over-histories quantization you don't need to add ghosts in by hand, because virtual spinor fermion particle-antiparticle pairs will do what is needed.
In my opinion, the triality relation for Spin(8), which identifies half-spinors with vectors is a natural relationship that makes it unnecessary to throw in ad-hoc ghosts when you quantize, thus making Cl(8) with triality uniquely useful for physics, and that is an indication that the 8-dim Clifford algebra structure is not only basic from the point of view of 8-periodicity, but is also basic for modelling a quantum theory of gauge group physics with ghosts.
From a more geometric point of view, if the BRST transformation acts like the nilpotent cohomology operator on the cohomology of Spin(8), then, consider that Spin(8) cohommology looks like
S3 u S7 u S11 u S7
and
S7 is a fibre bundle made up of S3 and S4 = QP1 (quaternionic projective space)
S11 is a fibre bundle made up of S3 and QP2 (quaternionic projective plane).
The 28 ghosts for the 28 Spin(8) gauge bosons can be seen as:
Note that S3 u S3 u QP2 = S3 u S11 is the structure of G2, the automorphism group of the octonions, and that the two S3 u QP1 = S7 7-spheres are each unit spheres in octonion space.
Since S3 looks like the quaternion unit sphere, and is generated by an associative triple of octonions, and QP1 and QP2 are obviously quaternionic, it seems obvious to ask what happens to the octonionic Spin(8) or Clifford(8) theory when a particular quaternionic subspace is frozen out, and that is exactly how in the D4-D5-E6-E7-E8 VoDou Physics model a M4xCP2 Kaluza-Klein space emerges at low temperatures (of our present world) from the full high-temperature octonion 8-dim spacetime.