Ranting and Roaring

• “The Trews: _Den of Thieves_”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AM2EGG/702-1440726-7780863?%5Fencoding=UTF8
• “Matthew Good: _In a Coma_”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000B5S8BC/702-1440726-7780863?%5Fencoding=UTF8
• “Battlestar Galactica: Season One”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AJJNFE/702-1440726-7780863?%5Fencoding=UTF8

I’m to Episode 5 already in BSG since I started watched at 4:30 AM this morning! It’s as every bit as good as the pilot (which is included in the disk set, unfortunately for me). Matt Good’s acoustic work is great; I’m very puzzled by the absence of Suburbia in the collection, to tell you the truth. I haven’t spun up the Trews yet, except to rip the disk.

A blue faced Titanium Tissot T-Touch watch (with Titanium strap, unlike the model below)

If you’re looking for a quality watch in Canada, please send me a note and I’ll redirect you to a dealer in NYC. (Hint: if you’re quoted a “great price” in Canada, they’re giving you list).

On order from Amazon.ca. Even though Good’s turned into a bit of raving lunatic in recent years, I still believe he’s one of the finest rock musicians this country has produced. Although this is nominally a “best of” album, it includes acoustic versions of many songs and a DVD—all for $23!

My favorite Good song—Near Fantastica—is not on this disk, but there’s many other classics. For the Good music neophyte, such as Tony, I’d rate the following as best and/or most representative songs from this disk:

• Strange days
• Rico
• Flashdance II
• Everything is automatic
• Load me up

Other great Good songs, not on this disk.

• The workers sing a song of mass production
• Expats of the blue mountain (esp. “better man”)
• Giant
• Fearless
• The war is over (esp. “omissions of the omens”)

Some BDS sufferer who shall remain anonymous writes:

The outrage about the US feds re Katrina is not about who was responsible for what beforehand [i.e. because Bush can't obviously be held responsible for that -- dpj] but the fact they ignored thousands of (mostly black) people who were literally stranded in shit for days. How long should it take the president to call up the army and order them as CIC to get those people the hell out of it IMMEDIATELY when it became apparent they were being left there to rot? Yes, you CAN blame Bush for that. He’s SUPPOSED to take charge at times like that, not come out with platitudes and then look for people to blame. And HE’s going to head a commission of inquiry to find out what went wrong? What’s he there for if not to take charge in extreme emergencies, regardless of technicalities? Unbelievable. Ummm, I think that falls under the category of conflict of interest . . . .

I’m fairly familiar with the storyline that’s being promoted, which conveniently leaves out the presense of a hurricane, the withdrawl of military assets etc. outside of the hurricanes path, and the fact that the area affected was about the size of the UK and so forth. I was going to argue with your cronology, but there’s a deeper flaw in your reasoning: the federal government is not allowed to militarily invade NOLA — this is something that has to be explicitly requested by the governor who of course had on hand 8000 national guard troops and the resources (buses, ambulances, municipal governments, etc) of all the surrounding communities to call upon and which are in place to actual do the evacuation.

The first major news reports I heard of levee breaches was on Tuesday morning, though in fact they had been happening during the day on Monday. By Tuesday night thousands were already being evaculated by the Coast Guard, the US Navy, the LA Dept of Wildlife and Fisheries, the LA National Guard, the Texas National Guard, and so forth. Of course, they weren’t sending press releases to CNN so it never really happened. Furthermore, they tried (as far as I can gather) to concentrate their efforts on people in the 10s of thousands of square miles of affected area who were in mortal danger as opposed to those in a state of inconvenience near television cameras.

link

There are a few shameful things of course. As the the UK’s Sun notes, helicopter gunships where used almost exclusively to mow down poor black folk; as Dave T notes, people who couldn’t show ownership papers for a motor vehicle of some sort where denied the right to exit behind their white masters; canibalism as noted by Randall Robinson; and so forth.

I’ve put this together from some e-mails I had recently written, so there’ll be a couple of dangling references you can ignore

• Remember that guy crying about someone’s mother dying in the nursing home, telling her day after day that someone’s coming but no-one came? True story — except the guy who told the story changed the dates so that the federal government would be seen as responsible. rather than the city. She died in the flood after not being evacuated as per NOLA’s evacuation plan.

  link

• Computer simulations show that levees should not have failed. Big-O type malfesance?

  link

• Why did so few people die in the hurricance? It turns out a lot of rescuing went on by lots of strange government departments by various folks taking their own inititiative.

  link

  From another e-mail, but related:

  Now, if the formula is IF X had done Y, what would have been the change in outcomes for different actions by various levels of government?

  For example, if you fill in the list with X=”Bush” and Y=”kept Clinton appointees in FEMA and off CNN and kept it out of the DHS” then Y would probably be “no difference in death tolls”. If X=”spent 70m this year of levee works rather that 15m” Y would probably be “no difference in death tolls”. If X=”FEMA had competent and dynamic management with an unlimited budget and acted perfectly” Y would probably be “two dozen more lives would have been saved”.

• Did Bush learn anything from Katrina about apointing cronies? No: link

  This one is pretty well the last straw for a lot of people.

A few of the things that are saving Bush personally on Katrina are the utter incompetence of the local authorities and their attempts to shift the blame to the federal government and the attempts of Jesse Jackson/Kayne West/Farakhan (Bush dynamited the levees) et al. to use this as the trigger point for the race war. FEMA was utterly useless (they wanted signed request for resourses allocated, for example) but so many other departments picked up the slack, it probably made little difference in the overall death toll.

CNN reports:

Thirty percent favored a full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and slightly more—33 percent—said they would support a partial withdrawal.

Only 26 percent said they wanted to keep the number of troops at the current level of 138,000, and 8 percent said they wanted to see more troops deployed there.

I.e. 67%—more than 2/3rds, a supermajority—favour the US staying in Iraq.

Radley Balko:

The government let people die not only through its inaction, but it killed more people by preventing private entities from taking up matters on their own.

The next time someone tries to make the argument that only government can help in times like these, remind them that it is private actors who were on the scene while the federal government played bureaucratic games. That is, until the federal government stepped in and stopped them.

Doc Searls:

When the blaming stops and the fixing truly begins, we’ll need more than our government organizations to step forward. As citizens, and as groups of citizens, will need to do what government simply can’t do.

Yes, we need bureaucracies. But bureaucracies can’t imagine anything. Including predictable acts of God.

People, on the other hand, can.

Samizdata has a different take, but one I can’t really find myself disagreeing with right now:

I also expect membership in the NRA and other similar groups to surge as people re-learn the lessons of the Los Angeles riots: the state might help you pick up the pieces after the fact and a policeman might come around to draw a nice chalk line around the bodies of your murdered loved ones, but when the veneer of civilisation cracks, you had better have a gun and be psychologically prepared to use it because the reality is that when the predators turn up, you are on your own.

I’ve been booking marking interesting articles about Katrina on del.icio.us. The Captain’s Quarters post about the NOLA emergency plan is quite interesting—the city had thought of most of the contingencies and didn’t bother to follow the plan anyway. I blame Bush.

I suspect when all is done and accounted for, the officials doing most of the blame assignment now (including the Mayor, the FEMA folks, and so forth) will actually end up being the most blameworthy. Oh, and that tool who runs Homeland Security should be hog tied and sent out of town on a rail.

I’m off to London (the big one in the UK) for 4 days and then onwards to Greece, specifically Arahova, Mykonos and Athens. Normally I don’t pre-blog my trips but my parents are staying in my house for the duration, so I’m not worried about looters!

Colby Cosh:

On 9/11, and in the days afterward, the New York police indelibly stamped their nickname—the “Finest”—on the pages of history. It appears that the New Orleans Police Department, in its most difficult hour, has also confirmed the truth of its traditional nickname: “North America’s Sleaziest Bastards.

Having personally known a New Orleans cop, I can confirm this is absolutely true. He lasted a year before he said “to hell with this”.

I also got an answer to the question “why did so many people stay” yesterday. Yes, a lot of them had no option. But more than a few stayed so they could loot. My thinking has come 360 degrees on the whole looting thing – I started at “shoot the bastards”; I moved to “let the poor f*ckers take the worthless stuff” and now I’m back to “shoot the f*cking bastards”. Why? It’s not the looting per se that’s the problem, it’s the lawlessness. Once you degenerate to gangs attacking hospitals, you’ve got to progress beyond the stern looks the governor has been promising.

Al’s got lots of good stuff going on over at his place, where I’m not an infrequent commentor.

Update: don’t underestimate the incredible power of stupidity in not getting people out of the city either.

Slate on the history of New Orleans levees:

Geographers refer to this as the difference between a city’s “situation”—the advantages its location offers relative to other cities—and its “site”—the actual real estate it occupies. New Orleans has a near-perfect situation and an almost unimaginably bad site.

Here’s an NPR story on the canals in New Orleans. It’s too late now—water has mostly stopped pouring into the city. When the story gets written I can’t help but think that lack of an emergency plan to block those canals is going to figure large.

The largest canal is under 150m wide, the smaller ones at least half that.

It’s nice to see the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in France:

The telegraph.co.uk reports that French President Jacques Chirac wants got to war with Yahoo, Google, MSN and other US-based search engines, defending his country against the threat of ‘Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism.’ “We’re engaged in a global competition for technological supremacy. In France, in Europe, it’s our power that’s at stake,” Chirac said in a speech in Reims this week, according to David Litterick’s news story. Chirac said that he would provide forgivable loans to create a Franco-German search engine, which is currently in development in the labs at Thompson and Deutche Telekom.

Ah yes, there’s nothing like the little garage startups (or corporate wellfare bums either).

The left have discovered their new My Pet Goat; perhaps they’ll have better luck peddling it this time.