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September 28, 2005
Scopes II
3 monkeys sittin' under a coconut tree Discussing things as they are set to be Said one to the others Now listen you two There's a strange rumor that can't be true They say man was descended from our noble race But the very idea is a big disgrace No monkey ever deserted his wife Or her baby to ruin their lives YEAH, the monkey's drift is mine.
-- Damien "Jr. Gong" Marley, "Educated Fools"
Well, we don't throw our crap as much anymore, except metaphorically...
Posted by griffjon at 09:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Brown off script?
Also, Michael Brown, our favorite horse-man, seems to have gone off script. After attacking Blanco and Nagin, he goes on to spread the blame a little wider:
But he also spread responsibility widely for what President Bush has called an inadequate response -- to a White House that he said was fully apprised before Katrina's Aug. 29 landfall, to a Department of Homeland Security whose leaders cut money and staff for three years as they pursued the "emaciation of FEMA," and to a military he said was slow to react.Brown admitted that FEMA's ability to move life-sustaining supplies was flawed and "easily overwhelmed" by Katrina's scale. He said that emergency communications broke down because the country made little "real progress" in learning from the 2001 terrorist attacks, and he warned that if U.S. authorities remain focused on preparing for terrorism instead of natural disasters, "then we're going to fail."
Brown said he is "happy to be a scapegoat . . . if it means that the FEMA that I knew when I came here is going to be able to be reborn and we're going to be able to get it back to where it was" when he joined the agency in 2001.
...
In Baton Rouge, La., Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher said, "Mike Brown wasn't engaged then, and he surely isn't now. He should have been watching CNN instead of the Disney Channel."
Nagin spokeswoman Sally Forman said, "The governor and the mayor were totally on the same page."
The much-anticipated testimony of Bush's ousted disaster management director came against a backdrop of partisan fighting over the administration's handling of the Katrina crisis. It handed new ammunition to leaders in both parties who have expressed growing misgivings over the course of homeland security.
--WaPo
Word is that he's shopping his resume around town with not much luck.
Posted by griffjon at 11:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Delay indicted!
Wow, this makes me happy.
DeLay indicted on conspiracy charges House majority leader's position in jeopardy. Advertisement
* Past coverage and related documents
By Laylan Copelin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
A Travis County grand jury today indicted U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on one count of criminal conspiracy, jeopardizing the Sugar Land Republican's leadership role as the second most powerful Texan in Washington, D.C.
The charge, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years incarceration, stems from his role with his political committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, a now-defunct organization that already had been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money during the 2002 legislative elections.
From the Statesman
Posted by griffjon at 11:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 25, 2005
Make Levees, not War
That was my favorite protest sign yesterday. I went down to the Mall near the end of the actual protest and hung around for the first few bands and speakers for the afternoon, and then wandered home, as I didn't find anyone I knew there and the protest was done with. It was a good turnout, even by the late hour that I'd gotten there.
I forgot my camera, so I took some photos with my phone, but still have no easy/free way of getting those off it (25 cents to email it)
(standard rant about text messaging -- it's effectively free for the phone companies, so why do they charge 10 cents to send and an additional 10 cents to receive, so they make 20 cents revenue per in-network text? Oh yeah, because it's a profit cow and people will pay)
Posted by griffjon at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Now that's just.... bizarre.
The Military helps evacuate the elderly:
Soldiers methodically loaded the elderly and sick onto baggage carts -- sliding stretchers onto the shelves normally used for suitcases -- and pulled them to the open ramps of huge cargo planes as they evacuated residents of hospitals and nursing homes in the path of Hurricane Rita.Working throughout Thursday night, military and civilian agencies pulled off an ambitious airlift in 19 hours to avoid repeating the failures of New Orleans, where hundreds of infirm residents were trapped and died before help could reach them.
Good job, creative thinking, and all that, but I'm just waiting to hear someone say;
"I'm sorry sir, but your grandmother seems to have ended up in Hoboken, New Jersey..."
Posted by griffjon at 11:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
MT Upgrade
So, I decided to just upgrade to the latest MT, which includes some built-in spam protection. We'll see how that works with the trackback spam, and maybe I can take off the annoying registered comment thing if it works well enough!
Posted by griffjon at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2005
Fun quote from my reading today
From my reading for Tech, Culture and Development
"Globalization has eviscerates the power of states, reducing them to mere instruments of policies that support the interests of global capital and the U.S. government."
-- Silvio Waisboard, "State, Development, and Communication" in _International and Development Communication_, Ed. Bella Mody
Posted by griffjon at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)
Trackback spam
I've been getting aq whole lot of trackback spam, so I'm disabling that for the time being to see if I can get off whatever list of open-trackbacks I've gotten on.
In the mean time, here are the IPs of spammers I've blocked:
Deny from 66.70. Deny from 66.134.121.182 Deny from 66.159.239.140 Deny from 66.219.161.190 Deny from 67.15.130. Deny from 68.83.28.204 Deny from 71.105.32.203 Deny from 80.53.1.130 Deny from 80.58.3.172 Deny from 82.201.185.22 Deny from 139.179.14.111 Deny from 140.78.61.8 Deny from 194.58.41.126 Deny from 200.50.43.161 Deny from 203.190.254.9 Deny from 204.157. Deny from 212.227.109. Deny from 218.177.52.149 Deny from 218.248.1.13
Posted by griffjon at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)
September 20, 2005
GWU Wireless and Linux!
So, tho GWU doesn't claim it's possible, Linux can access the wireless network and VPN system they have in place.
Getting the Cisco VPN software can be a bit of a challenge. Google for it (linux cisco VPN) or ask the helpdesk -- they do have a copy for Linux. I was able to find it at another university unprotected (most univs required logging in for downloads, but not all).
For Debian systems, this is the beginning of the solution, from Ubuntu Forums' poster "hemps":
1. Mine was a fersh install
2. Place your latest Cisco Client in your home directory.
3. Do a sudo apt-get install build-essential
4. Do a sudo apt-get install gcc
5. Do a uname -r to find the correct kernel-headers for your build.
6. Use synaptic to search and install the correct kernel-HEADERS, not source.
7. Untar your Cisco Client, go to the vpnclient folder and do a sudo sh vpn_install
8. Answer all questions, the defaults worked for me.
9. make sure you start the vpn sub-system with
sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start
10. Copy your .pcf profile to the sudo cp/etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles.
11. Do a vpnclient connect(without the .pcf extention)
12. Hope this helps.
The VPN subsystem doesn't start by default, so you'll have to do step 9 every reboot until you add it to your startup. The keys for me were steps 5 and 6 (I used apt-get instead of synaptic).
HOWEVER, if your wireless card is listed as wth01 or somesuch (anything but another eth0/eth1 thing) you'll have to patch your system some more, search for interceptor.c -- it's not too difficult to fix this.
Posted by griffjon at 09:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
PDF Bluescreens in XP and more tech frustrations
I've come to the rather sad conclusion that I can't read academic papers on my computer -- can't easily annotate, underline, and write long arguments in the margins. The tech isn't there. And especially with some of the policy reading, it's so incredibly dry and info-dense but insight-sparse that I find myself scrolling through it instead of reading it, and I come to the end and have no clue what I've just read.
Two of my 3 classes give out pages of URLs for each class, links to online journal archives, etc, so I spend an hour or so searching, downloading and printing. I appreciate being able to access these documents online, for sure (well, except one prof's links are all to scanned pages, not OCR'ed into text, so no searching, copy/pasting, etc., blah), but resent the extra hassle and time pushed on to me by this. I'd rather they go thru whatever University printing system they have and produce a photocopied book at the beginning, honestly, or use their duplication abilities and student workers to make copies for the class, it's not like it's a huge class, less than 20 people. If you're assigning 10-15 hours of reading, please don't add 2 more that is printing said reading.
Anyway, this means buying printer paper and carrying my laptop into the office room when no one's using it and hooking myself up to the printer there and printing many many files every week. Many of which are huge and annoying PDFs. Whih there's now a bug in Windows that causes a fucking bluescreen of death when printing (some) PDFs. Yay. Oh, it's a known bug, and Microsoft has a "hotfix" for it -- but they won't give it to you unless you call their support line. And guess what? You have to pay $$$$ to call their support line.
So, I've gotten all but one article printed out for next week. Since I've found that this is indeed a PDF error, ,and not some horrible hardware problem that would really send me too the looney bin right now, and the PDF I still need to print is thankfully not the photos-of-text variety, I can technically prolly copy it into Word and print from there. So all is well, but I think I'll wait on printing that article for now. I can potentially print it in Linux, but as much as I hate printing in general, I'm not sure I want to play with getting that working in Linux, either.
Today is not a great technology day. My Georgetown netID won't work, so I can't connect to the "blackboard" system for my tech/culture/dev class, I still haven't been able to get support on connecting my Linux laptop to the GWU wireless network VPN, my computer is being annoying, and my bed is broken, which, after so much effort to drag the damned thing out here, is not nice of it.
Grr. And it's noon and I've not read a page yet. Guess I should go do that.
Posted by griffjon at 11:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 17, 2005
Gitmo-eas corpus?
128 prisoners are refusing food in gitmo. 13 are hospitalized and are being force-fed by tubes.
US citizens on US soil can now be detained as 'enemy combatants'.
I guess I should take this opportunity to go by the National Archives and see the Constitution and Bill of Rights before they're hidden from public view as dissident documents written by anti-authoritarian deists and atheists rebelling against a government.
Read Wikipedia on habeas corpus.
I just watched the Daily Show with Kurt Vonnegut. I loved his mini-rant on democracy (paraphrasing): 100 years after you become a democracy, you have to let your slaves vote. 150 years after, you have to let your women vote. And at the begining, there's a lot of ethnic cleansing and genocide...
I feel that liberal, Constitution-supporting, types need to either reclaim "patriotism" or adopt a new phrase. I love the USA as a concept, but the current realities honestly disgust me on pretty much a daily basis, and currently identifying with "patriotism" means putting a magnetic $3.95 sticker on your gas-guzzling, oil-dependency-increasing SUV and voting for the Republican party, with a nice scoop of xenophobia with cultural imperialism on top.
I want my country back.
Posted by griffjon at 06:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ahh, free trade and markets!
As if you needed any more reasons to boycott Wal-Mart and Sam's Club (try CostCo instead, they pay a living wage.)
US retail giant Wal-Mart has been hit with a lawsuit that claims it ignores sweatshop conditions at many of its suppliers' factories around the world.The class-action suit has been filed in Los Angeles on behalf of 15 workers in Bangladesh, Swaziland, Indonesia, China and Nicaragua.
Each claims they were paid less than the minimum wage and not given overtime payments. Some say they were beaten.
...
The lawsuit alleges that Wal-Mart has failed to monitor working conditions at its overseas suppliers.
It further claims that the low prices Wal-Mart demands force some suppliers to resort to sweatshop conditions.
--BBC
Posted by griffjon at 06:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sick
BBC mentions that the people who planted a human finger they bought in a bowl of Wendy's chili so as to sue Wendy's plead guilty.
Now, certainly buying chili from a fast food place I would argue comes inherent with an "EULA" about accepting the possiblity that non-beef meats might be included. But buying and chewing on someone's finger to fraudulently sue a chain and cause them to internally investigate any missing fingers of their own employees and suppliers is just twisted.
Posted by griffjon at 06:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
"Dem"ocracy
A twist of the term coined by Owen "Blacka" Ellis, a Jamaican poet, playwright, and comic. In Jamaican patois, "dem" is "them" (also it pluralizes other nouns), so "Dem"ocracy is rule by "Them".
I mention this because the BBC posts some interesting results on a survey determining if a people felt that their government represented their will. EU countries scored in the mid-80s... US scored in the mid fifties.
Posted by griffjon at 06:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Tariffs and Subsidies
BBC reports:
President George W Bush has renewed his pledge that the US will abolish all trade tariffs if others do the same.His comments came as US trade representative Rob Portman and European Union Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson meet for fresh trade talks.
The two are trying to come to agreement on abolishing agricultural subsidies.
Interesting pledge from Bush. They're trying to abolish subsidies, and he pleges only to end tariffs. That's America's concept of free trade for you, sure 'nuff, and the likelihood that any congresscritter who votes to end ag subsidies who has a rural continengent (and that's a lot of 'em) will get re-elected is just about nil.
As long as subsidies are a reality, I feel that there should be tariffs on exporting subsidized goods to pay for the cost (or at least part of it), which would have the added benefit of not exporting things under cost, which has a long history of gutting local markets in the developing world and destroying the local capacity to produce, which, if the real cost of production ever is revealed, will cause serious food shortages in those nations.
Posted by griffjon at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 16, 2005
The Blame Game
First, they're not playing the blame game, then, Bush "takes the blame", now, they're trying to find someone else to pin the blame on. While they may not be playing the "blame game," it does look a lot like hot potato(e?).
The federal government is trying to find evidence of any past efforts by environmental groups to block work on New Orleans' levees, according to a published report.The Clarion-Ledger said Friday it obtained an internal Justice Department e-mail sent out this week to U.S. attorneys that asks: "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."
Cynthia Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, told the newspaper she could not comment on internal e-mails.
Y'know, if the Dems had their act together, this is when we'd pull a Rove and send them on a high-stakes goosechase to discredit their media mouths, but, their media mouths don't admit mistakes, so what's the point?
Y'know, I heard that the NAACP resisted levee repairs...
Posted by griffjon at 02:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 15, 2005
Mas Gasolina
There's something inherently right and amusing about walking by an SUV cranking out the "Dame mas gasoliiiina" song while its human is frantically pumping $3.39.99/gallon gas into it.
Posted by griffjon at 03:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 10, 2005
I should just stop reading the news
Because it gets me to web pages like this Red Cross FAQ page:
Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?* Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.
* The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.
* The Red Cross has been meeting the needs of thousands of New Orleans residents in some 90 shelters throughout the state of Louisiana and elsewhere since before landfall. All told, the Red Cross is today operating 149 shelters for almost 93,000 residents.
* The Red Cross shares the nation’s anguish over the worsening situation inside the city. We will continue to work under the direction of the military, state and local authorities and to focus all our efforts on our lifesaving mission of feeding and sheltering.
Posted by griffjon at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 07, 2005
Firemen to... the Bush PR camp!
Via DailyKOS and TPM, an article from the Salt Lake Tribune on firefighters, 1,000 of them, brought to the disaster areas to... hand out FEMA flyers and walk with Bush for PR shots:
ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?" As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers. Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA. On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency. Federal officials are unapologetic.
"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters.
But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.
The key to this regime is that they live in their own reality created with props, seeded questions, and hollywood-style special effects and scenes, and they pump these images and stories out, fully developed, to news stations, which can use them easily. The key to defeating this is to force the media to deal with reality again, for which Katrina might be our only real wedge, the reality being so grim and at such loggerheads with the regime's imagining of it.
BoingBoing points out this wonderful photoshop of two photos taken on the same day:
Posted by griffjon at 08:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 06, 2005
First Class
Due to my Mon/Tues schedule, and labor day, today was my first actual class, and it's Econ for policy types. It seems like it will focus heavily on econ and policy interaction with mentions and summaries of the various Big Names in theories. There are 3 other ISTP people in it, and then lots of people from other policy-esque programs who I didn't really get a chance to meet much.
I think we covered in 2 hours the majority of what I remember from my undergrad survey of micro/macro econ. ( think the majority of what I don't recall is the math...
I'm hoping it's light on the calculus, because my calc is ... uh... 11 years old now? I crash-coursed this morning on it and recovered a surprising chunk (well, it's not like I have the chain rule memorized, but I know when to apply it), and it looks like the course will be heavier on essays than math questions. For anyone else in the oops-I-don't-know-calculus-boat, I recommend Tutorials for the Calculus Phobe. They're very basic, and at times painful, but they force you to go through all the elementary material, which I was having trouble with on the other calc sites. It takes you through limits and derivatives, and covers the derivative "shortcuts"/rules. Wikipedia's calc pages are particularly useless to learn calc from. Very info-rich, very not-useful if you don't already drink the koolaid.
I spent my metro ride home trying to figure out the demand curves for spam and puppies. I figured my spam demand curve is a point at $0 cost, 1 can of spam. Hey, free spam. I can make art out of it, or use it as catapult ammo. (requirement: build catapult). Puppies are a bit harder, as I am trying to capture the free-as-in-puppies version of free (contrast with free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech), free-as-in-puppies is like advertisements; sure, they're free, but they're worthless, and potentially of negative value to you. So, the puppies curve would seem to be inverted; the cheaper they are, the less value they confer (e.g. a crappy banner ad on some random website as opposed to the click-thru watch-the-flash ad for Salon.com content, the Salon content is (supposedly) of higher value, and the ad "costs" more to watch...
Hm. I need to work on this further...
Anyhow, it went well. I'm looking forward to next Mondays courses in Culture/Technology/Development and the ISTP intro/cornerstone course.
Posted by griffjon at 09:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Didja *get* the memo?
From today's WaPo:
The proposed airlift of 400 Hurricane Katrina evacuees to the D.C. Armory yesterday was temporarily delayed by federal officials who sought more time to develop a comprehensive national plan for placing victims across the country, authorities said."We temporarily paused some airlifts while we identified cities and states who were ready and willing to receive these evacuees," said Russ Knocke, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
"It is very important that we have an organization in place so that there are city and state officials as well as nonprofit groups ready and willing to receive and care for these individuals," he said.
Knocke said evacuees could be airlifted to the Washington area as early as today.
The postponement frustrated some city officials who had stocked the cavernous D.C. Armory with supplies and hundreds of cots in anticipation of the arrival of evacuees. It also reflected confusion nationwide as federal officials contend with dwindling shelter space in the deep South and a mass movement of displaced people that has sometimes been chaotic.
Right, because obviously, the local officials who already had cots and supplies laid out weren't prepared, and the evacuees need there to be a committee much more than sanitary living conditions and food. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about planning and coordination, but it's September 6th, for crissakes. I would've hoped that either the past 4 years of disaster preparedness work in the wake of Sept 11th would've created some form of basic contingency plan, or, at the very least, sometime during the week since Katrina, for FEMA to peek out into the sunlight and get something in place, instead of now.
To be fair, as I write this 200 of the 400 for the DC area have arrived, so it's "only" one day delayed. I guess everyone's finally getting back from vacation?
Posted by griffjon at 02:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Time Lines
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001:
I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help the victims...
at 9AM, the first plane struck, and tho Bushie finished reading "My Pet Goat", he delivered an initial response by 9:30, and a fuller one by 10a. For this attack, we had zero warning.
That evening, he gave a fuller response:
Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency response plans. Our military is powerful, and it's prepared. Our emergency teams are working in New York city and Washington D.C. to help with local rescue efforts. Our first priority is to get help to those who have been injured, and to take every precaution to protect our citizens at home and around the world from further attacks. The functions of our government continue without interruption. Federal agencies in Washington which had to be evacuated today are reopening for essential personnel tonight and will be open for business tomorrow. Our financial institutions remain strong, and the American economy will be open for business as well.
September 12th, he began banging the war drum, on the 13th, he called for a national day of prayer and rememberance.
Compare that to Katrina. We had a LOT of warning, but very little preparation was done, and those without independent transport were left behind.
Mom-is-always-right-EDIT: N.B., we did have some credible warnings that Osama was planning an attack using planes, and we didn't do anything with that warning either... (end edit)
During the worst of the storm and the 2 days following, the president was strumming a guitar on vacation. The Vice President was on vacation, Condi was taking in a performance of Spamalot on Broadway.
And now, a week later, we get this from the AP:
Bush also announced he is sending Vice President Dick Cheney to the Gulf Coast region on Thursday to help determine whether the government is doing all that it can."Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people," the president said after a meeting at the White House with his Cabinet on storm recovery efforts.
"What I intend to do is lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong," Bush said. "We still live in an unsettled world. We want to make sure we can respond properly if there is a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) attack or another major storm."
But Bush said now is not the time to point fingers and he did not respond to calls for a commission to investigate the response.
"One of the things people want us to do here is play the blame game," he said. "We got to solve problems. There will be ample time to figure out what went right and what went wrong."
Bush was devoting most of his day to the recovery effort. After the Cabinet meeting, he was gathering with the congressional leaders, representatives of charitable organizations and with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to talk about assistance for displaced students and closed schools.
Actually, now IS the time to point fingers, because the time for action was last week, and you certainly took your own sweet time in taking the action, so now you get to face the blame for that. Republicans will tell you that it's Blanco's fault for not ceding control to the Feds, and that they can't go in without permission.
Hey, guess what? she still hasn't ceded control! But wait, the Feds are in there now! How's that POSSIBLE? (Blame Game...
The other defense is that Blanco didn't declare a state of emergency; as reported by NewsWeek and Washington Post by an anonymous Senior Bush official. Except said Bush official was lying, the state of emergency was called on the 26th of August.
(9/11 speeches quoted and available as mp3s from American Rhetoric.com.)
Posted by griffjon at 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 05, 2005
WTF?
BBC reports on New Orleans Dome conditions:
"They killed a man here last night," Steve Banka, 28, told the Reuters news agency before he left on Sunday.A body lies face down in water next to the Superdome
Death was everywhere, both inside and outside the Superdome
"A young lady was being raped and stabbed."And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them.
"He jumped up on the truck's windscreen and they shot him dead," Mr Banka said.
...
Inside the Superdome, a National Guard soldier charged with keeping order confirmed the brutal reality of life after Katrina.
"We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom. Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death."
...
Hillary Snowton, 40, sat with a white sheet wrapped around his face to shield himself from the smell of a dead body that lay, untouched, just metres away.
He had watched the body lie there for the past four days, decomposing in the sultry Louisiana climate.
Posted by griffjon at 09:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Roberts court?
I guess it's better than the Scalia court, but I'm increasingly nervous about Roberts in the there-must-be-a-reason department. Read more at The BBC
Posted by griffjon at 09:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 04, 2005
Eep.
Posted by griffjon at 08:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 03, 2005
Dismantling Emergency Response
A timeline of the rismantling of emergency response by the Bush Regime.
Posted by griffjon at 09:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Shaking my head
The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina. ADVERTISEMENTHalliburton subsidiary KBR will also perform damage assessments at other naval installations in New Orleans as soon as it is safe to do so.
KBR was assigned the work under a "construction capabilities" contract awarded in 2004 after a competitive bidding process. The company is not involved in the Army Corps of Engineers' effort to repair New Orleans' levees.
Can we get Enron to provide energy, and KPMG to do their taxes? Ooooh, and Andresen to do financial consulting?? And WorldCom can provide the comm infrastucture...
Posted by griffjon at 09:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 02, 2005
Opposite Day
It's Opposite Day in DC; CNN compiles a nice list of fed statements from their DC offices and cross-checks them against reality reported from NOLA.
The federal response:* [FEMA chief] Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.
* Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we're doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.
* Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.
* [NOLA Mayor] Nagin: They don't have a clue what's going on down there.
* Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.
Posted by griffjon at 03:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Give Robertson money!
Visit the FEMA donation site
Witness:
Donate CashAmerican Red Cross
1-800-HELP NOW (435-7669) English,
1-800-257-7575 Spanish;America’s Second Harvest
1-800-344-8070Operation Blessing
1-800-436-6348Humane Society of the United States
1-888-259-5431UJA Federation of New York
212 836-1880
Notice #3? (down from #2)
Operation Blessing? Who's THAT run by? Pat Robertson? Oh, wait, it is. SCREW YOU ALL YOU GODDAMNED TASTELESS MOTHERFUCKERS.
Wait. And humane society? Honestly, FEMA, just list Red Cross and stop there next time.
PS: Sorry that you've been taken over by the Reds.
Posted by griffjon at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
AUUUGH
The lack of a pulse from the Republican Regime on this is disgusting. Bush valiantly cut his vacation short by two days, but was sttumming the guitar during the first hours of disaster. Cheney's still on vacation. Rice was enjoying Spamalot, and the party uppers are going after the estate tax instead of even giving a nod to the victims.
Also, Left Behind by KOS is another good read.
Posted by griffjon at 10:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Compassionate Conservatism?
From CNN via usucumsane:
"It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that's seven feet under sea level," House Speaker Dennis Hastert said of federal assistance for hurricane-devastated New Orleans."It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," the Illinois Republican said in an interview Wednesday with the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois.
Democratic Sen. Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana issued a statement to "disagree strongly" with Hastert, and he sought to clarify his comments during the day.
Hastert, in a transcript supplied by the suburban Chicago newspaper, said there was no question that the people of New Orleans would rebuild their city, but noted that federal insurance and other federal aid was involved.
"We ought to take a second look at it. But you know we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild too. Stubbornness."
There are "some real tough questions to ask," Hastert said in the interview. "How do you go about rebuilding this city? What precautions do you take?"
Hastert later issued a statement saying he was not "advocating that the city be abandoned or relocated."
"My comments about rebuilding the city were intended to reflect my sincere concern with how the city is rebuilt to ensure the future protection of its citizens and not to suggest that this great and historic city should not be rebuilt," the statement said.
Uh... Mr. Speaker? You have your foot so far down your throat that it's met your head in your lower intestines. Not only is that dangerous, it violates a few laws of physics. Your statements reveal the depth of your stupidity. We built this capitol on top of a swamp. Let's bulldoze it (actually...) and move it to somewhere safe.
Posted by griffjon at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
DRM
The EFF has an excellent, easy-to-read, if hard-to-accept explanation of why DRM (digital rights management) is a dangerous and slippery slope, especially as being practiced by iTunes, Napster, Microsoft and the like:
The Facts: You Bought It, But They Still Own ItImagine if Tower Records sold you a CD, but then, a few months later, knocked on your door and replaced the CD with one that you can't play in your car. Would you still feel like you "owned" the CD? Not so much, eh?
But Apple reserves the right to change at any time what you can do with the music you purchase at the iTunes Music Store. For instance, in April 2004, Apple decided to modify the DRM so people could burn the same playlist only 7 times, down from 10. How much further will the service restrict your ability to make legal personal copies of your own music? Only Apple knows.
Read the EFF's DRM guide
Posted by griffjon at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 01, 2005
From the mouth
this blog is being posted from some geeks holding steady at their ISP in N.O. .
Posted by griffjon at 08:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More Katrina
First, funds which previously were being used to maintain and improve the anti-flooding measures in N.O. were of course diverted to Iraq:
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Plus, FEMA, the gov't agency tasked with dealing with exactly this kind of emergency, has been all but eliminated by the Bush regime:
the advent of the Bush administration in January 2001 signaled the beginning of the end for FEMA. The newly appointed leadership of the agency showed little interest in its work or in the missions pursued by the departed Witt. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Soon FEMA was being absorbed into the "homeland security borg."This year it was announced that FEMA is to "officially" lose the disaster preparedness function that it has had since its creation. The move is a death blow to an agency that was already on life support. In fact, FEMA employees have been directed not to become involved in disaster preparedness functions, since a new directorate (yet to be established) will have that mission.
But surely, the Homeland Security folks, who've been working oh so very hard, spending our civil liberties, privacy, and tax dollars have been helping? Nah. They're too busy preventing Canadian medical relief and fresh-water filtering systems from getting to N.O.:
Planes are ready to load with food and medical supplies and a system called "DART" which can provide fresh water and medical supplies is standing by. Department of Homeland Security as well as other U.S. agencies were contacted by the Canadian government requesting permission to provide help. Despite this contact, Canada has not been allowed to fly supplies and personnel to the areas hit by Katrina
I'm just glad our president was busy doing this:
During this:
(images via BoingBoing and credited to AP Photo/ABC News, Martha Raddatz and Ben Sklar / AP respectively)
Posted by griffjon at 07:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Integrity in Gov't ... oh, wait, she left.
From the NYT via KOS:
Susan Wood, director of FDA's Office of Women's Health, announced her resignation in an e-mail to colleagues at the agency. The e-mail was released by contraception advocates.The FDA last Friday postponed indefinitely its decision on whether to allow the morning-after pill, called Plan B, to be sold without a prescription. The agency said it was safe for adults to use without a doctor's guidance but was unable to decide how to keep it out of the hands of young teenagers without a prescription -- a decision contrary to the advice of its own scientific advisers.
"I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled," wrote Wood, who also was assistant commissioner for women's health. "The recent decision announced by the Commissioner about emergency contraception, which continues to limit women's access to a product that would reduce unintended pregnancies and reduce abortions, is contrary to my core commitment to improving and advancing women's health."
Posted by griffjon at 07:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
To paraphrase...
...my ever-eloquent friend JP, (who for wholly inadequate reasons refuses to get a blog of any sort, leaving us to paraphrase, quote, and plagarize), except without using quite as much profanity:
I am ever so glad we've sacrificed so many civil liberties and personal privacies, not to mention tax dollars, for disaster preparedness and relief in the post-9/11 world that the crisis in New Orleans is going so swimmingly (pardon the pun) well, with adequate evacuation procedures beforehand, functional shelters, and ample staffing and equipment to help in the search-and-rescue and rebuilding tasks.
Also, the UK Mirror reports:
Mr Bush was at Coronado Naval Base in Texas with entertainer Mark Wills as Hurricane Katrina's 145mph winds killed hundreds on the the Gulf Coast when he committed the PR blunder.Mr Bush finally cut short his holiday in Texas by two days to fly to Washington when the scale of the disaster became clear. He was spurred into action after Veteran CNN anchorman Jack Cafferty asked: "Where's President Bush? Is he still on vacation?"
"Based on the latest polls my guess is getting back to work might not be a terrible idea."
Those ratings show that support for Mr Bush has slipped to a career low of 45 per cent on concerns over the Iraq war and spiralling US fuel prices.
I hear that his first choice in musical instruments to play while New Orleans got flooded, the violin, was not available on base.
Oh, and we also have BushCo to thank for disassembling FEMA into Homeland Security and stripping it of its disaster-relief capabilities. Because one terrorist attack that is the first ...ever... in our country's existance, is a much higher disaster-preparedness priority than, oh... hurricanes, 10-20 of which happen EVERY SUMMER, and at least one big and damaging one every 5-10 years or so.
Posted by griffjon at 03:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack