The Blog From Another Dimension

Japan, 1985, Fall

In a recent post I told about my summer trip to Japan twenty years ago. Here is the next part of the story.

I came back home from the 6-week trip to Japan in late August of 1985, with an acceptance letter in hand from U.C. Berkeley to get my B.A. degree, and from there, who knows where I would have gone. I was to start at Berkeley in January, and so started to look for housing, hopefully international housing so I could have some Japanese housemates and we could have language exchange. That was the general idea. At least until I got the phone call.

The phone call came from Toyama, Japan, where I had stayed for a week or so, "teaching" some classes at the YMCA in exchange for a homestay and the countryside experience. The phone call was from the YMCA. One of their teachers was leaving, They wanted to know if I could come and work for them. In less than ten days.

I was wholly unprepared. I was setting up to move to the East Bay, not the the Far East. I was being asked to wrap up my whole life and move to a completely new and foreign one, in just over one week's time. To take on a job as a teacher, for which I had no training or experience. One might wonder why they asked me to do the job in the first place, and the answer, as I was to find out later, was that it was extremely difficult for them to find anyone willing to live and work that far out away from the central areas of Japan, for the paltry paycheck they were offering.

But I was ready to make my decision. I figured that life experience overseas was the trump card--to live and work in Japan, in the culture and with the language I had been studying for more than two years so far, that seemed like a good decision. Before going on and getting my Bachelor's degree in Japanese, why not pack some real experience under my belt first? So I made up my mind to go.

I sent a letter off to U.C. Berkeley explaining why I was not going to attend. I informed the YMCA that I would take the job. And they express-mailed to me the documents I would need. And at the same time, I packed up my life--stored what I could of my possessions in my parents' garage, got the gear I felt I would need for my trip, and got ready to go.

But it is never just as simple as that.

The YMCA mailed the visa documents to me and explained what I would have to do. They told me I would have to go to Korea first, and while there, drop off my work visa application at the Japanese embassy in Seoul. Then I would go to Japan and wait for the visa to come through, go back to Korea, pick up the visa, and then go back to Japan and get to work. So I bought a ticket via Korean air, one which would constitute a 24-hour-plus flight: San Francisco to Los Angeles, with a two-hour layover; Los Angeles to Anchorage, with a two-to-three-hour layover; Anchorage to Seoul, with a six-to-seven-hour layover (during which I foolishly imagined I would be able to get to the Japanese embassy to make the application and then get back to the airport--I was not aware this was impossible); and then Seoul to Tokyo, from where I would board a train to Toyama. All seemed set.

Little did I know that the Toyama YMCA had absolutely no idea in the world what they were doing, or what they were setting me out to do.

I was scheduled to fly out in the morning on Monday, the 7th of October, 1985, to arrive in Tokyo on the 8th. On Friday, the 4th, I decided on a lark to drive up to San Francisco and check out the Japan Center to see if the Kinokuniya Bookstore there had anything I might want to get first. While there, completely on a whim, since I saw the signs showing the way to the consulate, I decided to drop by and confirm that my visa plans were solid. Boy, was that a good move.

You see, it turns out the plans were completely wrong. The YMCA had led me astray, and had I not checked in with the consulate, I would have been out of a job, out more than a thousand dollars in airline tickets, maybe even my life savings in a futile long stay in Seoul, and I would not have been able to get back in to U.C. Berkeley. In short, I would have been screwed, royally. Because when I checked with the consulate, they told me that there was no way the YMCA's plan would work. I would need to stay in Korea while the visa was processed, which could take months. And that would most definitely not have worked.

I found this out on Friday, at about eleven a.m., with my non-refundable one-way ticket to Japan set to take me out Monday morning. Upon first discovering this, it seemed that I was indeed screwed in the regal sense.

But then the consulate people, obviously taking pity upon me, told me that while there were no guarantees, maybe they could do something. I don't know if it was the reputation of the YMCA or my panicked 21-year-old puppy-dog eyes, but they said to get the basic materials I needed to apply for a visa and bring them back to the consulate as soon as possible.

Now, remember, I was in San Francisco, near downtown. My house was in the south peninsula, near Palo Alto, a good 45 minutes' drive in good traffic, each way. I needed the papers from the YMCA, my passport, passport photos, and my college diploma. Diploma? I asked them, and they said, yes, you need a bachelor's degree for a work visa. Um, I don't have one, I replied. What do you have? they asked. I studied at community college for more than two years, I replied. Then bring your A.A. degree, they said. Um, I don't have one, I replied. A few courses short on that. Well, they answered, get your transcripts of what you do have and show them to us.

So off I went, knowing that the consulate closed late but not late enough that afternoon. I must have gone I-don't-know-how-many miles per hour, it felt like warp ten, down highway 280, all the way to Los Altos Hills, to get to my college and wait in line to get my transcript printed and sealed. Then up to Stanford Shopping Center to get some passport photos taken. Then home to get the papers the YMCA had sent me to use in Korea, with my passport of course. Then back up 280 to Japan Center to the consulate. I may have broken several laws of physics to get there in the time I did, for somehow, I got back up there by maybe 1:30 pm, and handed them what I had. They took the sheaf and told me to come back by 4:00.

Boy, do I owe those guys one, wherever they are now. I came back at 4:00, and sure enough, they handed me back my passport with a one-year work visa. I didn't need to go to Japan via Korea, but the ticket was non-refundable, so I went that way anyway. And I was grateful. Had the S.F. consulate people not taken pity on me, all would have been lost. Even if I had decided to sweat out two or three months in Seoul and had the Toyama YMCA been willing to wait, the embassy there probably would have turned me down because I didn't have the proper degree. By chance, I had stumbled coincidentally into the only way I could have ever gotten to work in Japan, not having the prerequisites to do so officially. To this day, I do not know what the people at the Toyama YMCA were thinking. They were not thinking enough, that much is for certain.

So I landed in Tokyo and got my visa stamped on Tuesday, October 8th, 1985. But not before my 24-hour-plus flight, on which something else quite memorable happened. Which will be the topic of part three of this story, coming soon.

DeLay Indicted

This is big. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted by a grand jury on charges of violating election fundraising laws. This is the first time that a Congressional leader has been indicted. And it's significant considering how hard it is to indict any politician, since they themselves write the laws under which they can charged--and they usually make it really hard to get caught. Which is why you have outright bribery and corruption easily spotted all over the place and rarely is anyone ever charged over it. I mean, who here really believes that Cheney's relationship with Halliburton has played no role in its government contracts?

Naturally, Republicans are trying to call the whole thing a partisan witch hunt, claiming prosecutor Ronnie Earle, a Democrat, is simply playing politics. However, not only does Earle have a serious reputation, but 11 of the 15 politicians he has prosecuted in his career have been Democrats, including a sitting Senator, two Representatives, a state house speaker, an attorney general, and others--not exactly low faces on the totem pole. Not to mention the fact that it was the grand jury, and not Earle, that indicted DeLay.

All this comes on the tail of other corruption stories breaking on the Republican side of Washington, most notably the Abramoff scandal, in which the "super-lobbyist" is connected to several crimes and several top Republican figures. Josh Marshall is all over that one.

Meanwhile, Bush's poll numbers remain around the 40% level, where they probably would have been for most of his term if not for 9/11, the Iraq War, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on campaigning, and other causes external to Bush's own person or performance; Bush's numbers have far more reflected events surrounding him than they do the president himself; with no new terrorist attacks or wars or massive PR spending, we get down to the base numbers he's always been headed straight for. But now, after Katrina, after Social Security, after scandal and corruption galore, there's just not much to buoy him artificially anymore.

Ads? What Ads?

Over at Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum pointed out a number of problems with advertisements on web sites:

• Ads that malfunction in a way that causes your browser to overload and use 95% of your system resources, effectively bringing your PC to a halt.
• Ads that malfunction and cover up parts of the screen they aren't supposed to.
• Ads that flicker wildly for five or ten seconds before finally settling down.
• Ads that somehow disable the Back button on your browser.
• Related: ads that prevent you from leaving a site altogether, forcing you to shut down your browser in order to get further work done.
• Ads that decline to close even though they supposedly have a close button.
• Ads that prevent a site from loading just because the ad server is malfunctioning.

This above and beyond the usual things about ads that annoy people, such as pop-up and pop-under ads, moving ads using animated GIFs or worse, Flash animations, so that the periphery of so many sites look like crazed circuses.

However, when I read the article, I had to concentrate and imagine more than just a bit to accept this list. Actually, I have experienced maybe half of these things, but only while using my Windows machine, on the uncommon occasions where I surfed the web on XP. On my Mac, especially with the software package I've got, I don't experience any of them. Not even the extra points I added about pop-unders and animated ads. It just isn't an issue for me, at least not any more.

In case you're wondering, I use Safari, which is not complete without Pith Helmet ($10 shareware) to complement it. What Safari doesn't do, Pith Helmet does, blocking almost all ads and allowing you to tailor settings for each site. For example, I have plug-ins disabled so that Flash animations aren't a problem. When I need or want to see Flash, I just go to the Pith Helmet menu and select site preferences, where you get a few dozen different settings related to cookies, scripts, plug-ins, animations, and security issues, tailored for that site. It's actually a lot less complex than it sounds--left to itself, it does a brilliant job at stopping the advertising annoyances and making it much more comfortable and safe to surf the web. The $10 payment is on the honor system--you can turn off the infrequent fee reminders in the preferences--but I gladly paid the measly ten bucks for the great functionality.

That said, I have had some problems with Safari in terms of compatibility with sites--for example, Safari can't see the formatting buttons on Blogger.com's blog post editing page. But no problem--I have Firefox standing by, which resolves pretty much anything that Safari can't handle--and Firefox itself has a lot of good ad-blocking features and extensions itself. In fact, if you're using a PC or don't like Safari on your Mac, go for Firefox and check out its extensions page for ad-fighting.

Just whatever you do, don't ever use Internet Explorer, unless someone is holding a gun to your head. Out of principles if for no other reasons.

Music Labels Cry Crocodile Tears

Now that the initial contract between Apple and the music labels for iTunes Music Store sales is expiring, and the experiment has been so successful, the music labels want to do what have have been doing for a long time: screw over their customers like they screw over their artists. The labels want to allow for pricing tiers, charging variably per song and album. Already they are making more from iTMS sales than they make from brick-and-mortar sales, given there is no need for CD production, casing, packaging or physical distribution, and Apple likely takes a lower cut of the price than music stores do.

Yes, Steve Jobs is making a lot of money off of the iPods, no mistake about it. And yes, keeping the price of music to a dollar a song and ten for an album is helping him sell more iPods so people can use the iTunes Music store with it. So he has a bias to keep song prices low, while he charges a premium for the iPod itself.

This is the argument made by Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., who says that some music is more valuable than other music, and that mandating one price for all is "not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers."

While he's right about Jobs, it has zero bearing on the pricing structure argument at large. So what if Jobs is making big bucks selling iPods? The music labels make far more selling music, even at current prices. And he is completely full of it when it comes to artists and consumers. What he wants to do is keep 99 cents as the rock bottom and charge more for hot songs. How is this "appropriate" for consumers, at least from the consumers' point of view? As for artists, the labels give them next to nothing unless they are really big-time and able to negotiate--but on the whole, they rip them off royally, and there is no chance that the labels will give any but the most powerful artists a pay boost from higher iTMS pricing.

This is nothing but a naked grab for profits by the music labels, with no benefit for the artists and certainly no benefit for the consumer--quite the opposite.

Good Night, Tennessee Tuxedo

Would you believe that comedy actor Don Adams' funeral will be attended by a hundred heads of state and masses of journalists? No? Uh, would you believe dozens of heads of industry and scores of Inspector Gadget fans? No? How about two dozen boy scouts and a reporter from the National Enquirer?

Don Adams, a marine in WWII and of course best known as a comedy actor, passed away at age 82 on Sunday. He survived his daughter, Cecily Adams ("Moogie" on Deep Space Nine) by one year. Rest in peace.

Japan, 1985, Summer

On July 11, 1985, I set out on my second trip to Japan. I had gone once before in the summer of 1983, taking a wonderful 3-week trip along the Tokaido coast with a group led by my Japanese Language professor, followed by a month of homestays in Shizuoka. The second trip was by myself, and included a short internship in a Japanese company in Shinjuku, another homestay in Shizuoka, a new homestay in the Japan Sea coast town of Toyama, and further travel, particularly to Osaka, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kagoshima.

When I arrived in Tokyo, I did the internship at a company called Sophia Systems, and first experienced something that was rather endemic on that trip: people seemed to think I knew what was going on when I didn't. I should have asked more, but being young and less than industrious in some ways, I failed to ask. And so I muddled through a week or so working in this office without really having any clue of what I was doing there--what I was supposed to do, to produce. They set me up in an apartment building/dormitory in Kitano out near Hachioji, and every day I commuted in to Shinjuku with the other workers, to an office in the NS Building. At that time, West Shinjuku was only half-developed, some of the now-signature buildings not there, only empty lots in their place.

I would come in to the office and they would give me English translations to proofread. I did that for the time I was there, but not having been given instructions by my professor, who had set this up, and not told more than the basics by the people at the office in Tokyo, I just did the work and muddled along. Years later, my Japanese professor asked why I had not filed the kind of report she expected, and the only reply I could give was, you never told me what I was supposed to write about. I did what I could, commenting on what I could observe of the cultural differences, but it was not much. The main detail that sticks out after all these years was my ongoing race with the office ladies and the refreshments cart. I was uneasy being served by others, but they were uneasy having any of the office workers get things for themselves. I would usually wait until they were otherwise occupied, and then dash off for a drink before they could intercept me and insist on getting it for me--which they usually did.

After Tokyo, I went to the town of Iwata in Shizuoka Prefecture. The town is now famous for the soccer team Iwata Jubilo based there, but when I was there (both in 1983 and in 1985), it was just a countryside suburb of Hamamatsu City. The only event of note when I was there was that when I announced my plans to travel in Kyushu later on, my host mother insisted on arranging me to take a bus from Nagasaki to a transit point I forget the name of, on the way to Kagoshima.

From Iwata, I made my way to Toyama, where my professor knew the head of the local YMCA. In exchange for a homestay at the homes of a few students, I guest-lectured at the Y's English school, which is to say I just stood up and talked, providing language practice for the students there. It was there that I learned about careers in language teaching, and that experience changed my life. At that point, I had just finished more than two years at a community college, majoring in Japanese Language, and had been accepted to U.C. Berkeley for the following January. But the idea of being able to spend a year in Japan, living and working, greatly appealed to me; I was much interested in applying and adding to what I had learned already. However, I did not make any serious plans to do so--it just appealed to me, and I mentioned that to the staff when I was there. More on that later.

While there, I again experienced the no-one's-telling-me-anything malaise. During my stay, there was a YMCA event, a nature camp outing for mentally handicapped children. It was quite enjoyable and the children were sweet, but I was not given the slightest clue of what I was supposed to do. One evening, there was a long meeting I was asked to attend. However, the meeting was completely in Japanese--I was the only non-Japanese there--and there was no mechanism to translate for me. After about a whole hour of being unable to understand what was going on, I got tired of the uselessness of it all and wandered back to my room. I was later chastised for leaving the meeting, but I had a good excuse: there was no point whatsoever for my being there. Between that event and the internship uncertainty, I developed a feeling that it is assumed in Japan that you always know what's happening, and no one tells you anything unless you ask, even when you might not even know to ask. I did experience that some times in Japan in the early years, but never figured out if it was just me, which it probably was.

After Toyama, I traveled down to Osaka. I forget what I planned to do there because I was not able to get it done; I had picked up some nasty bug from one of the kids at the camp, and was confined to bed for my few days in the city (I stayed at a youth hostel while there, mostly sticking to my bunk). Fortunately, the malady abated in time for my scheduled departure. From there, I went to Hiroshima. I had been there before in 1983, but had departed from my tour to meet a pen pal from that time. My pen pal had shown me the Hiroshima Atomic Park and the Peace Dome (the preserved remains of the domed building near ground zero), but that was it. I had not even been aware at the time that there was a museum on the site, and so I had missed it. This time around, I wanted to get the whole tour. I did, and I am glad I made the stop.

The museum is not a pleasant place, but then it is not supposed to be. Quite grim, but significant and sometimes fascinating, the museum displayed the story of the bombing through models, photographs, and exhibits of melted and twisted items, as well as other objects like the bank steps where the shadow of someone who sat there when the bomb went off is preserved. It's a stop that should be required for anyone, but especially for Americans, whatever your opinion is about whether the bombing was justified. This is not something you can just find out about in a removed sense. Coming out of the museum, I was greeted with a scene of almost jarring discordance: break dancers were performing near the exit. This was the mid-eighties.

After Hiroshima, I made my way to Nagasaki, not just for the second atomic bomb park and museum, or for the historical tour regarding the city's long past contact with the West. It happened to be O-Bon time in the city, and I got to experience the festival, from the parades and floats in the evening streets exploding with firecrackers, to the issuing of the candle floats in the water to memorialize the spirits passed. I believe I still have a primitive wooden mallet used to hit gongs in the parade that someone presented to me.

Leaving Nagasaki, I took the bus tour that my Shizuoka host mother had arranged. In our spotty communications, I had tried to impress on her that I needed to get from Nagasaki to Kagoshima by a certain time, that the hostel where I was staying only accepted visitors up to a certain hour. She insisted that I take the bus, saying it was the fastest way to where I was going--so naturally I assumed it was a transit bus. It wasn't. It was a tour bus that made frequent long stops along the way, at tourist spots I neither understood nor was interested in in the slightest. So I spent much of the time looking at my watch and bemoaning the fact that the tour was taking me not only too much time, but was circuitously taking me away from any train stations where I could depart the bus and get back on schedule. I am sure that my host mother meant well, but she did understand well enough to know that I was on a tight schedule, and despite her ability to speak English just well enough, she never told me that it was a sightseeing bus or what exactly the sightseeing was about. I don't know, maybe even she didn't know.

FInally, the tour ended and I got on a train for Kagoshima and I believe I made it there on time. Kagoshima was fine, but dusty--the nearby volcano was pluming and there was ash everywhere. You would have to shake it out of your hair every time you came indoors. After Kagoshima, I went home via Tokyo and a four-day stay in Hawaii. It was the end of August.

It was a few weeks later that the Toyama visit came back to change everything I'd planned, setting me on a completely different path in life, but that story is for another post soon.

Science and Religion

Let's say it simply: science does not deny the existence of God. Science simply explains what we observe in the universe in a mechanical sense. It is fully possible to accept both science and religion wholly. Science only "contradicts" certain religious doctrines in the interpretations, and these details are when the doctrine attempts to use scripture to establish science. Historically, religion has always evolved to accept what science has found; where churches attempted to establish religious-based scientific dogma (the concept that the Earth was the center of the universe being the best example), they eventually changed the dogma to accept what science showed was true. It often took a great deal of time and they wound up cowing and punishing a lot scientists along the way, but it always happened. And so it will with evolution. It's just a question of how long it will take the fundamentalists to "forgive" the scientists for reporting what they see.

20 Years in Japan

I just realized that I have an anniversary coming up: my 20th anniversary of my coming to live in Japan. I thought I had let it slip past in August, but after checking my old passport, I found that it is instead coming soon: October 8th. I haven't lived here for 20 years straight--I went back twice for a total of about five years to get my higher degrees. So I've lived here for 15 years, but it will have been 20 years since my first working visa became active, in a few weeks, give or take. Probably when that day comes, I'll blog on the experience of getting here. Until then, I want to touch on some changes since the good old days--how things have changed.

I was on the phone with my father last night, and we spent more than an hour and twenty minutes chatting. We realized that such a long call was going to cost maybe six or seven dollars on his present calling plan, and a lot less on a plan he is considering joining. I myself pay maybe 8 cents per minute calling the U.S. This is all in contrast to what we used to pay 20 years ago. Or more accurately, what I had to avoid paying in Japan. Back then, KDD was it--the only long-distance carrier, period, and calling the U.S. cost a few bucks every minute. Calling from the U.S. wasn't cheap, either, but it sure was by comparison. So we had a system: I would call via the operator, making a collect call, saying that Quincho was calling for Malachi. Those names belonged to our dog and cat, respectively. So when my dad got a call from an international operator saying that the dog was calling the cat collect from Japan, he knew I wanted to talk. So he would tell the operator that the cat was out, but would call the dog back in 15 minutes. The code was necessary because the operator would not let us hear each other, and would relay only limited messages. But it was enough so that I knew my family was home and I would be getting the call back soon.

That was back in the days when people actually used public phones. When the phones in Japan were red, yellow, green, pink, and I think pale blue, and you needed a scorecard to figure out what the colors meant. Back when you had to pay a 70,000 yen non-refundable deposit to get a phone line, instead of signing up for a cell phone. There was no email, no voice-over-IP, no instant messaging.

So one of the things I want to do this week is to be an old fart and tell you about how I had to walk for miles in the snow to get an English-language magazine, and how there was only one bilingually-broadcast English-language movie on TV each week, and it was usually Death Wish III with Charles Bronson and we were grateful for it. And believe it or not, the last sentence was actual truth. So sit right back down, you young whippersnappers, and get ready for some nostalgia.

Anthropomorphization

Not too long ago we had the case of Terri Schiavo (which some right-to-life die-hards are still carping on) and the question of whether or not she was aware. The family videotaped her, and then the right-to-life people heavily edited that video so that random actions appeared meaningful. Terri seemed to look at her mother or a balloon and smile and laugh. She seemed sentient, she seemed there.

Of course, it was all an illusion. But we humans have the predisposition to see human qualities in just about anything. Even those who saw Terri without the benefit of video editing claimed to see life in her, and I am sure that would have been true even if many of these people were not politically or emotionally biased in favor of seeing that life. In the end, the autopsy proved that Terri had indeed been long dead, with most of her brain atrophied into nothing. No higher reasoning. Not even the ability to see--which belied the idea that Terri was tracking faces or balloons or anything at all with her eyes. They were just random movements with no sentience behind them. But so many people believed otherwise, not because of logic or reason or truth, but because we ourselves imbue human life into what we see, be it weather, machines, or people who are in a vegetative state.

Most of all, however, we seem to do this with animals, and so I come to my prime example for the day. This touching set of photos came via Taiwan, concerning a type of bird I have come to be familiar with in this area: the Barn Swallow. I was initially interested because of the photography--it can be hard to catch birds in such poses, and this set was extraordinary. But it was even more exceptional because of the apparent subject matter: the mourning of one fallen swallow by others, who seemed genuinely distraught by the death, and even appear to be trying to revive their friend, grabbing the still body with their claws and calling out loudly. A textbook case of human grief and denial upon a confrontation with death. If you go to see the photo series, you will see to what I am referring.

Or so it would seem.

When I first saw the photo set and read the captions, I was inclined to see what they saw. But I am a skeptic by nature, and so immediately I questioned it--though I did not stray too far from the assumption. I doubted that the birds were truly feeling the emotions that the narrator was implying, though I did think that perhaps the dead swallow may have been young enough that it's mother was still concerned with its upbringing, bringing about a concerned response. The more I saw of the photo series, however, the more I began to doubt that--the birds were doing an unusual amount of grabbing on to the corpse. In the end, I did not know what to think--until I read the comments, which eventually involved some people who know quite a bit about birds, who explained what was really happening. The swallows were not mourning their dead companion. They were trying to mate with it. I know that can sound sad or even disgusting (though the combination of the photos and the human commentary in light of the reality can be comical), but you've got to remember: these are birds, and not the most intelligent of birds, either. I can see a dog mourning, perhaps, but birds are far less advanced. Not to say that I don't love them, they're beautiful creatures. But let's accept them for what they are, and not mistake them for what we are.

Damned If You Don't, Damned If You Do

After Katrina, right-wing blogs started attacking New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin because he didn't arrange a complete bus evacuation with only 29 hours' warning. There still isn't a public answer to why that didn't happen--there might have been many reasons not to, like not enough time, not enough drivers, no way to bus people with special needs--but that didn't stop conservatives from harshly criticizing Nagin. In part, undoubtedly, it was because Nagin made that famous radio call in which he criticized Bush for having press conferences when he should have been sending buses and other assistance. Then the photo of the flooded school buses came out, and the wingnuts jumped all over that gleefully, as if to say, "we've got art!"

When Rita came storming in, you can bet any number of mayors in the storm's potential path wanted to do anything to avoid being burned in effigy like Nagin was. After all, they had several days' warning that the storm was coming in full speed, unlike with Katrina, not to mention they had the hard example of Katrina to set a fire under them to do something, anything, and fast. But that leads to other problems.

Now, the people who flamed Nagin for not busing people out almost certainly had no idea what they were talking about, the kind of logistics involved, what is necessary to do the job, and what dangers and drawbacks there might be. They didn't much care, their goal was not to be precise or logical, it was to attack politically. But as a result, public pressure now is decidedly on city officials to bus people out who can't get out by themselves--probably in many if not most cases doing so without having thought the idea out thoroughly. And in the process, we may have discovered another possible reason why it was ruled out in New Orleans, in addition to all the other reasons: it can kill people.

In Texas, near Dallas, a bus carrying 45 elderly people from a nursing home in Houston burst into flames. It appears that the brakes caught fire, and then the oxygen tanks of some of the passengers exploded. It is estimated that 24 people on the bus died in the incident.

Was it really necessary to resort to such means to make these people safe? In the gridlocked traffic, these people had already been on the bus overnight. Had all the safety implications been thought out, or had politicians simply been afraid of accusations of not using buses and ignored such issues? Was the busing, without proper equipment, really necessary? After all, many of the people who had decent shelter and yet perished in New Orleans did so because the rescue efforts which should have come within 48 hours took five days. It may have been wiser to have them take local shelter, and then evacuate when the hopefully-now-alert rescue operations could bring them out with less risk.

Maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe this was a freak accident and taking dozens of people with oxygen gear onto a normal bus is considered safe. But I'd be interested in knowing a definitive answer, just as I'd be interested in knowing if Nagin and the city planners had good reasons for their actions, or if they were indeed derelict and inept. But I do know one thing: if I were a family member of one of those people who died on that bus, I would stop at little to find the answer to that question. Politics should not dictate evacuation measures.

Update: a New York Times article gives a lot more detail. The bus was privately owned and operated, hired by the nursing home to move the patients, but the patients were moved at the urging of local fire officials, who told them to transfer the patients due to flooding concerns; it is still not clear whether the city or the nursing home decided to move the patients out of the city instead of finding local shelter. And while there are regulations about moving oxygen containers on aircraft and trains, there may not be any regulations at this time about doing so on buses--though I would expect that might change after this event.

TempComments

In the next day or so, I will remove the notice I've had up for the past few weeks, in which I note possible problems in the comment system, and offer an out-in-the-open email address for those who have had problems posting comments. Having that email address, tempcomments@blogd.com, right up there like that, has revealed many things to me.

First, no one has had problems making comments, it seems. Three people used the address to send me friendly, complimentary asides, which was nice. But the purpose for which the address was created appears to have been less a need than I thought, so good news there.

Second, I apparently have been the big winner or one of the big winners in no fewer than twenty-one European and one New Zealand lotteries over the past eight days, netting me prizes worth 14,803,903.78 Euros, 11,650,950.00 Dollars, and 850,950.00 Pounds Sterling, along with the chance to win millions more. All I have to do is pay out tens of thousands of dollars for authorization fees, clearance payments, and little odds and ends like that. Amazing the money you can make in eight days just by creating an email account and publishing it on a blog page.

Third, I have discovered a Japanese matchmaking site that has used the temp comments address to inform me twenty-four times that, and I quote, "$B!z%A%c%C%H$G$O$I$s$J%j%/%(%9%H$K$bEz$($^$9!#(BNO.I don't veceive your mail." Nice of them to say so, because I was not aware that they did not veceiving my mail, and that my H$G$O$I$s$J%j was H$K$bEz. Gesundheit. (note: that's supposed to be garbled, it's not an error.)

And finally, I have received urgent and heartfelt greetings from SALIM IBRAHIM, a merchant in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, who has been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer. He has only a few months to live, so he wants to give his significant $25 million fortune to charities in Bulgaria and Pakistan (where else?), but requires me to funnel it through my bank account first, in exchange for which I can keep 20%. He is earnestly joined by Eric Kamara, Dr. Mike Umeh, Kennet Cavender, Kaditi Musa, Mark Edward, Ahmed Yousf, Richard Wilford, Alfred Green, Doris Brown, Pedro H. Gozanlex, Roland Martin, and Mario Wolf, who similarly have one kind of personal crisis or another and need to use my bank account to transfer funds. Most are so urgent that THEY USE NOTHING BUT CAPITAL LETTERS TO ASK FOR MY ASSISTANCE IN TRANSFERRING MONIES. Apparently, my email address was given to them by the Bank of Senegal. So for the next few weeks and months, I will be the conduit os MILLIONS IN US$ MONIES from nations such as Sierra Leone, South Africa, Holland, the U.A.E., Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Senegal, and the United Kingdom.

Thank goodness that none came from Nigeria, because those guys are total frauds.

Proving Faith? The Irony and Self-Indulgence of Faith-Based Science

Intelligent Design (ID) has been forwarded as a "scientific" theory to show that evolution is incorrect and that the universe and life in it was created by an intelligence which coincidentally would greatly resemble, oh, say, "God," not that we're saying that "God" created the universe. Maybe it was someone else.

The thing is, as I've said before, ID isn't really science. It pretends to be, but it doesn't fulfill some of the basic requirements, such as any kind of structured hypothesis with evidence or data of any sort which can be tested and verified. ID simply claims evolution is flawed, ignores scientists explaining how those claims are incorrect, and then forwards an alternate explanation without actually working out how A got to B got to C. Essentially, it says "evolution is wrong and so we're right."

There most certainly is not any process in ID that I've heard of which takes any kind of evidence or data, and, through scientific analysis, show that randomness could not have been the cause of all things. ID says that there is too much structure, too much organization, but if that's the case then you should be able to make that case through statistical analysis, through some reproducible mathematical construct based on some kind of evidence which shows the thesis to be true, or even likely. This is not, however, presented, and to my knowledge, nothing solid is. Only general statements of "that can't be" and "this must be" based upon common-sense applications of half-understood scientific knowledge. Essentially, ID is based on a feeling, not evidence.

It is the half-understanding of science which I'd like to focus on. Science is not about what you think or believe, it's about what you can show and what you can prove. Somehow, a lot of people including those who would propose ID, have gotten the impression that all you need for a scientific theory is an idea, and then claim that it's better than everything else. This, I think, is the result of faith-based thinking: just believing is good enough, the argument is one of philosophy and opinion, and not hard fact.

That's the difference between religion and science: one is about faith and belief, the other is about observation and evidence. Religion is about faith, and as such, should require no proof. That's supposed to be what faith is, at least in part. So why do religious people so readily make claims to proof, why do they eagerly search for, accept, and forward to others "proof" of God? Is that not a sign of weakness of faith?

It is the eagerness, this need to prove what is believed which leads people who claim to be following science to accept and forward shoddy scientific "proofs" that evolution is wrong and that an intelligent designer, a creator, is inevitable. People who claim faith is their most valued quality consistently are pushing forth 'proofs.' This doesn't add up.

One experience I had is an excellent example of this. Not too long ago, I told this story, but it is especially relevant in this discussion so I will tell it again. Some years back, when I was working at a movie theater in San Francisco, a young woman (a preacher's daughter and fundamentalist) confided in me that she had proof that radioactive dating, which she referred to as carbon dating (many people do), is wrong, and therefore the world is only 6,000 years or so old. Her proof came in the form of a conclusion she made after hearing a single lecture in a high school science class. As she told it, her science teacher lectured on the process of radioactive dating, explaining that first a scientist estimated the age of an object, and then tested it to determine the age.

She immediately saw the flaw in this: if a scientist makes a guess as to the age of an object and then plugs that number into the equations to determine the age, that means the result of the test is biased by the scientist's guess. Therefore radioactive dating is flawed, and therefore her beliefs were in fact correct. Despite having what she believed to be definitive evidence to disprove radioactive dating, she did not present her evidence for review, in this case by the science teacher; instead, she ignored the teacher and went along her way, confident in her rightness.

Her analysis mirrors what we see with ID today. Her conclusion was based upon a cursory understanding of the subject matter, and was supported not by active evidence proving her point, but rather the denial of a different set of ideas which she disagreed with. It was presented as if it were a logical and scientific basis, 'proof,' if you will, for believing what she believed, and disbelieving whatever may have challenged that. She passed it on to me as evidence that I should believe, that I should have faith in God, and not so much in science, which was obviously not on very firm ground.

Her analysis was all wrong, of course, and could easily be poked apart, by either a quick check or a thorough review. First, she had assumed certain things without trying very hard to understand them or make sure she had it right, primarily whether a scientist's preliminary estimate is in fact plugged into the equation that determines the age of the object. She heard there was an initial estimate of age, did not hear what it was for, and so assumed it must have been part of the test that determined real age.

In fact, the initial estimate is used by scientists to determine which type of radioactive testing should be attempted, as different tests are applied when testing for certain age ranges. Carbon dating, the most commonly known, can only determine an object's age if it less than perhaps ten thousand years; if the object is older than that, carbon dating cannot give an accurate reading. For older objects, different tests are performed, which reveal the age of an object within different time frames.

Therefore, the initial estimate of an object's age is needed simply to determine which test has the best chance of correctly identifying the object's age; it is not plugged into the final equation. And if the wrong test is chosen and the object is not of an age within the test's range, the test will not give a false positive--it will simply show that the object is younger or older than the test can determine, prompting the scientist to apply a different test. Like a mechanic who sees a nut to unscrew from a bolt, estimates its size, and chooses what seems to be the correctly-sized wrench to use to remove it. If the mechanic guesses wrong about the nut's size, it does not change the actual size of the nut; the initial estimate was not 'plugged into' the action of trying the wrench on the nut. The wrench simply does not work, and the mechanic knows to reach for the next-largest or -smallest wrench.

Second, my young friend did not scrutinize her conclusion; she did not test it or attempt to shoot holes in it--something that any scientist worth his or her salt will do to their own theory in anticipation of others critiquing it. She did not consider the improbability that a set of scientific tests which tens of thousands of highly intelligent and trained scientists base their careers upon could be so easily and completely disproved by a high school student after listening to a single lecture. She did not go up to her science teacher and explain the discovery, even though this could have led to a scientific revolution, or at least a more accurate Science class which would not mislead other students. She did not allow her theory to be put to any test or challenge; she did not fully explore the possibilities.

These are quite similar to elements one observes within the ID paradigm. Take the arguments on this page, which promises to "refute evolution in one minute flat." The first argument: the universe could not have been created from nothing. How do they know? The formation of the universe began before the current laws of physics existed, and we cannot know the laws which governed pre-formation, or even if "nothing" existed before the formation of the current universe. The second argument is that life cannot arise from nothing. However, experiments have shown that a mix of gases existing on primordial Earth, when interacting with energy as in lightning, can cause amino acids, the building blocks of life, to form; it is not too much to ask that in the immense soup of chemicals that proteins, and later, self-replicating genetic material could have formed. While this has not been demonstrated, it has been far from proved wrong, and current laws of physics do not at all forbid this. The third argument is that mutations are destructive and it is impossible for one creature to turn into a "completely different kind" of creature. The first idea ignores the fact that some mutations are indeed beneficial and there are specific examples (one being the evolution of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms), and the second idea ignores the progression through intermediate forms adding up to larger changes, not to mention that basic structures can change size and appear very different without changing much in their underlying structure.

Do a search on the Internet, and you'll find many such sets of "proofs" which really amount to one thing: people without much real scientific understanding claiming proof, more often than not, by claiming to poke holes in evolutionary science. They always end up being very wrong about the claims of error, and never produce proof of their own contentions.

My young friend was earnest in presenting her proof, and probably this is true with most people who subscribe to ID. They see something which disputes a theory they don't fully understand but which seems to contradict their own beliefs, and because they want to be able to say their beliefs are true, they accept, support, and forward the new "theory" without the kind of questioning that is necessary to the process they claim to follow. Like another old friend from San Francisco who was a smoker and believed in research that "proved" smoking does not cause cancer--without questioning the research or the fact that it was funded by the tobacco industry, she wanted to believe, so she accepted what was set before her, like so many of us so often do.

This is why you have to question authority, question information you receive, and test it as far as you can to determine its validity. This is skepticism, this is reason. Is it a show of weak faith? Perhaps, but were have been given both faith and reason, and I don't think it was intended for us to ignore either one.

When challenged with scientific evidence which contradicts fundamentalist concepts of the way the universe is, some will just say that God created those contradictions to test our faith. I would counter that perhaps God created fundamentalism to test our reason.

Good Read #2: To Your Scattered Bodies Go

Hmm. Can't seem to locate my copy of Startide Rising, so for today I'll blog on a different Good Read. This one is by a science fiction writer not too many have heard of: Philip José Farmer. The book: To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

The basic plot is a startling one: after dying, every human that ever lived awakens on the banks of a great river. Everyone who dies after the age of five is there. You're there. But we don't appear on the river chronologically, resurrected immediately after we perish on Earth. Instead, every human from every age, from the Neanderthals to the 21st century (supposedly the Earth is destroyed in 2008, so better get ready!) is resurrected upon the River at the same time. Everyone awakens unclothed, hairless, with perfectly-formed bodies at the peak of youth--with absolutely no clue as to what happened or why we are there. There are no buildings (at least at first), no signs of civilization except for two things: everyone has a large metal "grail" or closed container attached to their wrists by a transparent strap, and regularly spaced along the length of the river are 50-foot-wide, 5-foot-tall "grailstones," mushroom-shaped constructs with holes along their tops. At any given location, there is a majority of people from one time and geographic location on Earth; a minority from another time and place; and a remainder of peoples from any number of times and places.

Naturally, as everyone awakens at once, having just died, most people completely freak out. Waking up young, nude and shorn on a riverbank is not what most people expected in an afterlife.

The story follows the perspective of Sir Francis Richard Burton (the British explorer, not the film star), from his death to his premature awakening in a preparation area, to his awakening on the river and his adventures thereafter. He quickly teams up with a Neanderthal named Kazz, a young American writer named Peter Frigate (who happens to be a Burton biographer, not to mention the avatar of author Farmer), a woman named Alice Hargreaves, who was the model for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and an alien calling himself Monat Grrautut from Tau Centauri, claiming to be the one who destroyed the Earth.

Soon, many facts about the River world become apparent: the River stretches from one pole of the world to another; there is a riverbank on each side a mile or two deep before unclimbable mountains bar one from traveling north or south. That's all the world is, unending river valleys, spiraling and winding throughout the entire world; to go north or south, one must circumnavigate the globe along the valley to reach the next valley over. There are few if any natural resources.

There are also no farms, and aside from fish in the River, no natural source of food. The grails, however, when placed in depressions in the grailstones, are granted three meals a day; at set times, energy flares like lightning shoot up from the stones, and any grails set into them are suddenly filled with a meal and other treats (the first filling providing clothes and other amenities). Only the owner of a grail is able to open it. It soon becomes clear that the world is an artifact, constructed for the purpose of resurrecting all of humankind and keeping them alive--for a reason completely unknown. The makers, whoever they may be, do not show themselves or give any clue as to who they are or what they want.

But no one can escape one fact: they have been given a second chance at life. And a third, a fourth, and more: if a person is killed on the Riverworld, they are again resurrected the following morning--somewhere else along the River, at random.

Farmer takes this grand concept and uses it well; we meet a host of people, from ordinary to famed to pretenders to fame (if someone declares they are Jesus and no one knows them, who can dispute it?). Societies quickly form, miniature nations, often in line with the majority society resurrected at that point of the river. Naturally, many of them are brutal, and "grail slavery," where one is held in bondage while masters hoard the lion's share of your grail offerings, crops up almost everywhere. There is great suffering and chaos, wars and attempts at power and empire--and the ever-present question of, who created this place and why are they allowing this to happen?

Sir Richard Burton is determined to find out, and vows to travel to the head of the river at the pole of the world, a daunting task even if the world were not filled with territoriality, greed, and violence. And dogging him all the way is no one other than Hermann Göring, of all people. Along the way, we meet all kinds of people, in this book and the sequels, including King John of England, Cyrano de Bergerac, Odysseus, Tom Mix, Jack London, Ulysses S. Grant, and Baron Von Richtoven, among many others.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go is the first in a series of five novels by Farmer, and is followed by The Fabulous Riverboat, where Samuel Clemens is aided by a Mysterious Stranger to find the resources necessary to build a powerful steamship to ply the great river; The Dark Design, catching up with Burton and his accomplices; The Magic Labyrinth, a climax where the pole is reached and the answers to the Riverworld are discovered; and Gods of Riverworld, the post-climax novel (Farmer was probably as enticed by another assured paycheck as he was encouraged by the fans for this one) where Burton and company find themselves having everything they want, and discover that it's not all they thought it would be.

The book series is a fascinating adventure into a variety of cultures, customs, philosophies and personalities. Unless you have a specific personal distaste for some element of the general storyline, the books are easy to get hooked on, prompting you to get your hands on the full set and see what happens and what it's all about. It might reassure you to know that Farmer does in fact give you all the answers in the end; it's not just some tease where the writer abandons you after you've committed yourself. You learn who built the world and why, and a lot more. It stands as one of my more unusual favorite book series.

Masters of the Domains

From the famed urban-legend-debunking site Snopes.com, come a few unfortunate domain names. All of them took on unintended meanings when they were represented as domain names without spaces between the words. See if you can spot the unfortunate double-entendres from the original organization names:

• PowerGen Italia, an Italian battery company
• Who Represents? a talent agency lookup site
• Experts Exchange, a site for people to discuss programming
• Mole Station Native Nursery, a nursery site from Australia

Any suggestions for other unfortunate domain names?

Bush Dawdled. For Five Days.

A news story from yesterday cleared up something that many suspected but hadn't been reported yet, as far as I am aware. On this blog, I argued (mostly in the comments section, with conservative visitors), that it doesn't take the National Guard four to five days to get into New Orleans. One visitor, citing his own experience with military logistics, claimed that four to five days was not excessive considering all the planning and organization that had to be done, and all the obstacles that storm damage would cause, and therefore we could not fault Bush for the storm damage. I responded that when a state of emergency had been declared three additional days earlier, before the storm hit, the NG had that much time to get everything together; I also pointed out that just a day or so after the storm ended, caravans of buses took people from the Superdome in New Orleans to the Astrodome in Houston in under ten hours, so clearly the obstacles didn't present that much of a delay.

Turns out I was right, despite my lack of logistical knowledge:

Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, President Bush went on national television to announce a massive federal rescue and relief effort.

But orders to move didn't reach key active military units for another three days.

Once they received them, it took just eight hours for 3,600 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., to be on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi with vital search-and-rescue helicopters. Another 2,500 soon followed from the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas.

"If the 1st Cav and 82nd Airborne had gotten there on time, I think we would have saved some lives," said Gen. Julius Becton Jr., who was the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Reagan from 1985 to 1989. "We recognized we had to get people out, and they had helicopters to do that."

Five days. Two days to announce the effort (as he ended his vacation), and another three days to get the order out. And it only took eight hours for the first forces to get there; from reports of the majority of troops arriving by the fifth day, the main land forces were clearly not far behind.

Maybe Bush was just too fuzzy from his vacation fog. Or maybe he resented his five-week vacation being cut short by three days and decided to just kick back in D.C. till his vacation time was up. Or maybe Bush didn't want to waste money on moving the rescue effort until he was ready to go in with it for a photo op. Of course, neither of those is true, but the reality is even worse. No wonder he took the "bold" move of accepting responsibility--he knew that eventually, reports of when the NG got activated would reach the public.

So it wasn't the storm damage. It wasn't that a state of emergency hadn't been declared, as the White House dishonestly claimed. It wasn't because the NG wasn't ready to move, we've seen many reports about how troops from around the country were ready to go, and just awaiting orders to do so. It was Bush not responding fast enough, not pressing the relief efforts as he should have, not giving the orders that he should have. That's not responsible for everything that happened, but it is for a great deal of it. The disorder in New Orleans was greatly due to the fact that the local officials foolishly believed that federal assistance and NG troops would be there within 48 hours, which was supposed to happen. The NG could have gotten there even faster, as it turns out. Now we know why they didn't. You can't argue that it was the governor's fault, because not only had Blanco asked Bush to send everything he had, but Bush had the authority, all upon himself, to get the Guard moving and into Louisiana.

You might argue that it was someone or something else in government that caused the delay, but that won't wash. Bush was in charge, and regardless of whether he accepts it, the responsibility was his. If there were problems, they were in his house, and they were his to fix. But frankly, I find it impossible to believe that Bush moved quickly and something else failed to click. Why did it take him two days just to announce the rescue effort, when it should have been in place by then? Either he was not aware that he had the authority to make things move, or he himself waited for two days, doing nothing. Can't palm that off on someone else. And for the three days following, was Bush completely unaware that the guard troops weren't moving? Didn't he get a clue when two days after he made the announcement, nothing was happening? After all, if there's one thing we know about Bush, it's that he knows the National Guard. He was in it, remember? No, you can't say that Bush tried his best and someone else screwed up. At the very least, he should have been briefed on all progress, and therefore known what was and was not happening. This was nothing less than his responsibility, and he sat on his hiney for five days while people suffered, starved, drowned and died.

Of course, I am certain that the Republican-controlled probe to investigate the delay (a independent, bipartisan committee was rejected by the GOP) will get down to the bottom of this.

Bush said the other day: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces, the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice." Can you believe that? Again, he's blaming the fact that local government officials were in charge for what happened. Amazing. He's also trying to grab powers for the federal government here, away from the states where it has resided; what happened to states' rights? How about the Posse Comitatus Act? Look, it's not hard to figure out, folks. A challenge of this scale requires the President of the United States to get off his ass and do his job without dawdling for five full days. Or perhaps I am mistaken on that.

Operation Rescue Bush

One thing you have to give the Bush administration: they're so slick sometimes they make "Slick Willie" look like a talentless ametuer. Yes, they were off their game in the first few days after things blew up in the post-Katrina debacle. They got a lot better very fast, but by that time, things were already too far gone. No amount of Rovian maneuvering could dodge responsibility for what happened.

So Bush is taking a new tack: first, he's trying out the political trump card of "accepting responsibility." Sometimes in the past, when politicians have taken this move, it gives them a way out. When the FBI move on the Koresh compound in Waco, Texas turned disastrous, Janet Reno immediately accepted responsibility, and offered to resign if the president asked it of her. She received a great deal of respect for doing that, because she did in fact put her reputation and her career on the line. Clinton himself received far less respect when he too claimed full responsibility a short while later; it had too much of the "hey, that worked, so me, too" feel to it. Reno's claim felt genuine; Clinton's rang less true.

Bush's claim is about as fake as a breath mint on top of a heap of steaming wet horse manure. Now, if on September 2nd, say, when people were experiencing hell in Louisiana and elsewhere and the fact of the government screw-up was just dawning, had Bush taken responsibility then, that would have been gutsy. But he didn't. He waited another two weeks, and before claiming "responsibility," he tried blaming the Democratic mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic governor of Louisiana. And when that didn't work, he tried the old "now's not the time," "let's not play politics," and "let's not play the blame game" tactic. When that didn't work, he removed Michael Brown from the rescue effort, and when that didn't work, he fired Brown. And still it didn't work.

That's when he "accepted responsibility," stunning the nation--after all, Bush always refused to take responsibility for anything, refused to admit that he'd ever made a mistake. And probably a lot of Americans took his claim of responsibility seriously, and credit him for it. Which they should not, of course. An immediate claim when the feces were still flying into the rotating blades would have been worthy of respect, but only after blaming everyone else and trying everything else?

When you've tried every last out and come to realize that you're going to be seen as responsible no matter what, "accepting responsibility" means nothing. It is not a "get out of jail free" card. It does not mean that he gets to avoid criticism now. If anything, it is the last affirmation that all the criticism heaped on him is justifiable and true--which, when you think about it, is part of what "being responsible" is really all about.

The second move Bush is making is to act like a Democrat. He cares about the poor. He cares about minorities. He cares about inequalities. Really? What a set of solid brass cajones does he have to have to make that claim? After five years of tax cuts for the rich, inaction on poverty, massive corporate welfare and handouts, cuts in social services and no raise in the minimum wage--after five years of the rift between the poor and the rich growing more and more and more massive, Bush suddenly decides he's a Democrat? The phoniness of all of this is shown up just by a single recent act he took: to suspend the Bacon-Davis Act for the rebuilding after Katrina, and as a result, slash the wages of the people in the region who might otherwise use the good wages to buy homes and cars and rebuild their lives as well. Bush is pushing people under, people who are trying to keep their heads above water. If he cared about inequality, he'd raise their wages, not cut them.

And the uber-slick Rovian Bush is back. He wants to take care of the poor. He's leading the nation in prayer. He's got the guts to take responsibility. He's going to spend $200 billion on the reconstruction, and make sure that we beat poverty while we're at it. And no tax hikes to pay for it, either--we wouldn't want to hurt Americans with such a thing. Instead, we'll simply "cut unnecessary spending" (read: Democratic programs, mostly for the poor), and pile the rest on to the already-crippling deficit. Heck, that thing's so big and bloated already, who'll notice more?

Certainly we don't want all that money ending up in the hands of the poor--they don't know how to spend it right, like rich people do. The "recovery account" handouts news has the right wing appalled at Bush's pledge to give a $5,000 check to each adult evacuee to help go find a job. Already right-wingers are outraged, and rumors of the New Orleans poor going out and blowing it all on designer handbags are already making it into the right-wing blogosphere.

$5,000 isn't chicken feed, but if your home is gone, your possessions gone, your property swamped and worth nothing, your job gone and you're in a strange new place in the midst of a jobless "recovery," $5,000 will not last very long. And if you do the math, you'll see that even if a million people get that handout, it still will only be a few percent of the total Bush plans to spend.

I have a sneaking feeling that Bush hasn't changed one iota, that this is nothing but another Rovian ploy, slicker than ever. Think about it. Who's going to get the lion's share of that $200 billion? Where will the money really end up? Just ask yourself: where did it end up in Iraq?

After all, the Bush people are hardly new at this.

Tobacco-houdai Movie

Well, this is a brilliant idea. Japan Tobacco is holding a promotional screening of the movie Sin City, and I suppose appropriately in relation to the film's title at least, they are inviting 150 heavy smokers to watch the film while smoking their hearts out. In fact, smoking will be required during the screening. This is apparently in reaction to the recent restrictions against smoking, in a country which is still the most smoker-friendly of the industrialized nations. However, as we have seen with Christians in the U.S., no group feels more persecuted for minor restrictions than the constituency which is the largest, most powerful, and least imposed upon.

But this screening should get awards for sheer lack of common sense for a few key reasons. First of all, smoking is prohibited in movie theaters for reasons other than the lovely aroma the practice produces; theater smoking was among the first to be banned for the very cogent reason that the upward trails of smoke obscure the image on the screen. Now imagine everyone smoking. Wall-to-wall smoke trails, and an ever-increasing smoke cloud gathering directly in the path of the light from the projector. Yeah, that'll look good.

But the second reason is a real kicker: this film will likely be screened in one of those pocket theaters, packed with seats in a small space. Now, smoking rooms get pretty dense with smoke even when you've just got people seated relatively sparsely. But a room which is mostly seating, filled with no one but chain smokers for more than two hours? In a room not designed with ventilation to handle heavy smoking?

Forget whether or not the film will be visible to the viewers. They'll be lucky if anyone in the theater is conscious by the time it ends.

Looking for Good Reads?

A friend at work recently asked for a recommendation for a good book, and I thought it might make for a few good entries to mention novels I think would be generally enjoyed. If you're looking for something good to read and haven't gotten to these ones yet, given them a try. A caveat: I basically read science fiction. However, I will suggest only books which I believe do not require you to be a science fiction fan.

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, by Orson Scott Card, tops my list. It's right up there with Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, also by Card. While I disagree rather sharply with his politics, and do not like all of his writings, Card at his best is something you do not want to miss.

Pastwatch is set in the future at a time when the world is recovering from environmental disaster, and technology is advanced so that anything in the past can be observed. Beginning crudely, without sound and with blurry vision, and developing to audio-visual devices with highly accurate and perceptive capabilities, the Pastwatch machines allow observers to watch the lives of people centuries and millennia gone. The purpose is akin to the old saying that those who have no past have no future; the Pastwatch project is supposed to map the development of mankind in the past, discovering where we have been for the benefit of those to come.

But if you think that this book is going to be all about time machines, time warps, causality loops, and paradoxes, you're mistaken; Card's science fiction is less about technology and science, and more about people--their motivations, their histories, their ways of seeing and understanding who and what they encounter. Science is well in the background, humanity is in the forefront. Card also defines history most sensibly as the story of people, and uses the characters in his novel to show how the individual and the way each of us looks at the world in turn shapes the world. One of the characters in the novel, for example, named Tagiri, watches a woman from an ancient time at the time of the woman's death, and sees a sadness, the cause of which she feels compelled to discover. So she works backwards through the woman's life, seeing effect first, and searches for the cause. This not only teaches her a new technique for learning the story of a life, but leads to a grander search: the source of the woman's sadness was that her son was sold into slavery, which becomes a new focus of her own line of study--and, in time, a focus of the novel itself.

While the strongly character-driven story is this novel's most potent feature, it is not the only one. Another is the review of history and the intriguing possibilities of what might or might not have happened if Christopher Columbus had acted differently. Card's thorough research shows, and not just in the lengthy bibliography in the back of the book, but in the detail in his telling of history, and his fascinating speculation as to what might have been, where the world might have become radically different had one person moved in this way or that.

And what must-read book would be complete without stunning twists? Card has two of them in this story, fascinating events which turn the story in new directions and send chills down your spine as you consider the ramifications. Well, for me, at least they did. You'll have to decide that for yourself when you read it.

Next time: Startide Rising.

Spam Notes

A few things I've observed. First of all, about referral spammers (read this post for a definition of that). Recently one firm which figured out how to get past the filters has been hammering the site steadily. But what's interesting is that they consistently hit two specific entries--both of them about spam. I've noticed this before in the past: when spammers hit you, they more often than not target entries in the blog which talk about spam (as they will with this post, no doubt). One can only imagine that this is their sick, twisted way of giving you the virtual finger--complain and we'll target you. Swell people, these blokes.

My visitor count is going very high so far this month, perhaps 20% higher than usual lately. I thought it was the high-volume spammers, but a closer inspection of my logs shows they're using a single IP address--not responsible for the increased number of unique IP hits. Strange. Sometimes I have no idea why more people start coming--though I suspect it has to do with breaking thresholds in Google listings somehow (don't ask me how that works, though I suspect chicken entrails are involved).

And finally, you may have noticed my special note in the side bar and above the comments area mentioning the trouble I'm having with the TypeKey comment system (if you are reading this well after publication, the note is probably long gone). In order to assist in figuring out the problem, I published a temporary email address for people to contact me if they had trouble with the comment system. Well, I got one or two such emails... and now a lot of spam. For those who don't know, posting your email address on a web page, any web page, is a glaring invitation to get spammed. Spammers have automated programs that continuously read web pages and harvest any and all email addresses from them (which is why I never require commenters to leave an email address).

What's more interesting is that the scam spammers, and not the ad spammers, seem to be the ones who use this most. As with my experiment a while back, the published email address garners not so much ads to buy things, as it does more emails from Nigerians with millions to route through my bank account, and European lottery officials informing me that I've won millions, and so just pay the processing fees and the check will be in the mail. Specifically, after only just a few days of life, the email account has received three Nigerian emails, one European Lottery email, one spammer trying to trick me into putting a "reciprocal" link on my site, and one more trying to get me to advertise for them on my site. So once again: don't publish your email address on any web site unless you really, really like Nigerians.

Invention of the Year: TeleCrapper 2000

This guy deserves a Nobel Prize or something. He created a free, slap-together do-it-yourself product that serves a dual purpose: reducing the efficiency of telemarketers while, at the same time, making fools out of them for your sheer delight.

Have you ever received a robotic telemarketer call? The kind carefully designed to fool you into thinking you're having a conversation with someone in your neighborhood, and you don't realize for a while that it's a recording and they're selling something? This guy (whom I found via Engadget) took that idea, juiced it up, and aimed it right back at the telemarketers.

Here's how it works: You start with a pre-recorded conversation with a variety of statements, questions, and generalized utterances. The TeleCrapper 2000 then waits behind your Called ID service with a list of numbers identified as telemarketers. When the phone rings, the Telecrapper 2000 scans the Caller ID against the list. If it's one of them, then the TeleCrapper 2000 picks up after the first ring. It plays the recorded script's first line, then waits for an answer. The TeleCrapper 2000 can detect the silence at the end of a telemarketer's statement, and so it can realistically answer shortly after they finish saying something. The TeleCrapper 2000 then plays the next recorded line, waits for an answer, and so on, and so on. When you hear the conversations it has, it is amazingly realistic, and you can imagine it fooling just about anybody. (Unfortunately, it's more than just the average person can wire together; hopefully, someday someone will sell a ready-made version of it.)

The idea of this, as I mentioned before, is twofold: first, it completely wastes the telemarketers' time by engaging them in a protracted, fake conversation with zero benefit to them. Some of these people go on with the TeleCrapper 2000 for quite some time, even after the TeleCrapper 2000 reaches the point where it runs out of material and just loops the same four or five replies over and over and over again.

The second purpose is that it gives you a great deal of entertainment and sheer joy. You can record, listen to, and share the conversations the telemarketers have with your computer, and laugh yourself silly. The creator of this product, who will surely be rewarded handsomely by God, has put up a dozen or so of these recorded conversations on his web site; scroll down to the very bottom of the page and listen to them. Probably the best of this guy's list is #5, which was turned into a Flash animation on this site. But #9 was a hoot, because the robotic conversation was based on accusing the caller of being "Chris," and the caller was in fact named "Christy" (another called was "Crystal"). #11 was outright hysterical; the robot conversation simulated a confused old man, and trapped the caller into a seemingly endless three minutes of pure, hilarious nonsense.

But that has nothing on the conversation numbered 12, in three parts, where first the caller is fooled for 3 or four minutes, then believes that he's talking to a deranged old man and tries to make fun of him with the office listening, not realizing he's trying to cruelly tease a machine on an endless loop, sounding like a complete fool. Then he calls back and tries again, this time seriously attempting to get the woman of the house before it spins off into absurdity again.

The maker states his desire that many people will do this, and share their own recordings over the Internet. I hope they do.

I tell you, I haven't laughed this hard in years.

Do the Math

Conservatives out there are saying that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is criminally irresponsible for not having gotten the Superdome people on buses and evacuated all of them before Katrina hit; at the same time, they defend Bush, saying that he got the National Guard and other relief to New Orleans as fast as could be expected.

If you run into somebody arguing thusly, present this simple argument:

Nagin had 29 hours warning before stormfall that a mandatory evacuation would be necessary. Bush took 4-5 days to get the National Guard in the city.

How can you fault the mayor of a city for failing to evacuate 30,000+ destitute civilians in school buses in 29 hours, and at the same time say that the President of the United States was not slow when it took him four to five days to get the same number of highly organized and well-equipped soldiers in military vehicles into the same city?

Somehow, the math simply doesn't work out. You can't have it both ways.

In Business, It's All About Three Things: Cronyism, Cronyism, and Cronyism

Something I became aware of via Josh Marshall is the path of cronyism snaking its way within the Bush administration, or at least one particular snake.

Bush hired cronies to run FEMA. FEMA is now contracting out to Kenyon, a disaster management firm from Houston. Kenyon is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SCI (Service Corporation International), a "death care" industry provider.

This is where the territory starts to become familiar. SCI has strong Bush links. So we have Bush hiring cronies who hire even more cronies. And this happening even after Bush has been criticized openly for cronyism. I guess its their nature, like the scorpion riding on the fox's back.

But the kind of crony we've found underneath other levels of cronies is of interest. Remember back in the 1990's, when Clinton was in office, and according to Republicans, his big crime was lying under oath? How that was an impeachable offense?

Well, guess what then-Texas-governor Bush did for SCI? I'll give you a hint: he did it under oath.

That's right. He lied. Under oath. Supposedly an impeachable offense, and then the GOP turns around and puts in place as their presidential candidate a guy who lied under oath as governor just recently.

And it was not lying under oath about sex, either. Here's how it went down: SCI was run by Robert L. Waltrip, a long-time Bush family friend. Waltrip had donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to Bush Sr.'s presidential library, had paid the elder Bush tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees, and had given at least $45,000 to Bush Jr.'s political campaign to be Texas governor.

In 1996, Eliza May was appointed as director of the Texas Funeral Service Commission, and she didn't fool around. She immediately started going after funeral homes that were committing illegal practices. The TFSC had been criticized for a decade for being lax on enforcement; in fact, May's predecessor had been jailed on charges of aggravated perjury and witness tampering. May changed all that, cracking down on the funeral home industry. The problem was, she wasn't supposed to do that: the funeral home industry was in tight with the Bushes. In early 1998:

... May's staff uncovered evidence that some SCI funeral homes were using unlicensed or inexperienced embalmers. In March 1998 she issued subpoenas for documents to 23 SCI mortuaries, prompting the company to complain bitterly to state officials.

The details are incredibly gory, and I won't recount them here; see the linked sources at bottom for that information. Soon after May did nothing but her job serving the public, Waltrip and an SCI lobbyist visited Governor Bush's Chief of Staff Joe Allbaugh.

Remember Allbaugh? President Bush's first crony pick as head of FEMA, before Allbaugh roomie Michael "Brownie" Brown got assigned? Yep, that's the one. May was soon called into a meeting between Allbaugh, Waltrip, and others on that side of the Bush crony fence, demanding that May close the investigation. After May fined SCI for violations, Bush's people started looking for dirt on her. The following February, May was fired because the commission "lost confidence in her." SCI eventually never paid the fines, and more Bush cronies later set aside the charges.

May filed a whistleblower lawsuit. In that lawsuit, Bush would have been subpoenaed to testify, during which time he would undoubtedly be asked about his connections with SCI. Desperately wishing to avoid this, Bush's lawyers had Bush sign an affidavit under oath, which read in part that Bush:

... had no conversations with Texas Funeral Services [sic] Commission officials, agents or representatives concerning the investigation of SCI by the Texas Funeral Services Commission or any dispute arising from it. I have had no conversations with SCI officials, agents or representatives concerning the investigation or any dispute arising from it.

Note the language: "no conversations," with either SCI or TFSC officials. However, neither was true. Bush had, in fact, had conversations with both. Bush had spoken to Waltrip in Allbaugh's office, and Bush had also met with Dick McNeil of the TFSC during a Bush campaign visit. While Bush's people claimed that neither conversation was "substantial," it was revealed that Bush had, at the very least, discussed the case in passing with McNeil. That in itself, no matter how Republicans play it down, was enough to demonstrate that Bush had, in fact, lied under oath--an impeachable offense, remember.

Not to mention the fact that the lying under oath aside, this case reeked of cronyism, bribery, and corruption. One would have to be hopelessly naive to think that Bush was not involved in the SCI matter, and even if the affidavit were true, it would be at best a weasel wording, because Bush's Chief of Staff Allbaugh was deeply involved, and to imagine he was doing so without Bush's knowledge or involvement strains credulity well beyond the limits. This might not be admissible as evidence against Bush in a court of law, but that does not lessen Bush's corruption; he's simply spent a long time engineering clever ways to break laws and get away with it.

The May case settled out of court in 2001, and long before that, after Bush was elected the news media lost all interest in the case. But now, even as Bush's cronyism is proving to have cost hundreds if not thousands of lives, Bush and his cronies are still hiring yet more cronies and paying them off with taxpayer dollars.

Though Bush himself ran several businesses into the ground and never earned an honest dollar, it seems that the soundest investment of all was in giving Bush your money and joining the crony bandwagon. For SCI, it's been paying off for years now, as it is paying off for other Bush cronies and financial backers.

Meanwhile, grieving families in Texas, gruesomely horrified by botched SCI embalmings, received no justice; Texas' funeral commission presumably has slipped back into its quiet corruption; and in reward for taking care of Bush's dirty work, Allbaugh got rewarded with a juicy government resume-padder and as a result hundreds and possibly thousands of people died in the path of Katrina.

Sources: The Washington Post and The Austin Chronicle.

9/11

I just glanced at the time, and it read 9:11, by chance. Got me thinking about what to comment on in light of the 4th anniversary of 9/11. Should we still be memorializing 9/11? My answer is "no," because it has lost its true meaning.

Bush is still using it endlessly as an excuse for every screw-up and bad policy move he keeps making. He's still milking it for every PR dollar its worth, including a Washington D.C. "Pentagon march" instituted by Donald Rumsfeld purportedly to honor 9/11 victims, but which has highly visible allusions to both 9/11 and Iraq--a clear political attempt to link the two.

And this is one of the reasons I'm not big on commemorating 9/11. Not because I don't sympathize with the families, not because I'm not patriotic--but because Bush & Co. have turned it into one everlasting campaign commercial for whatever policy they want to boost this week, and that usually means Iraq. If you truly want to memorialize and respect the victims of 9/11, then do so with a moment of silence today with your family at the dinner table; then take out your checkbook and donate to the victims of Katrina in the name of the 9/11 victims. That's a way to respect the dead--not to join in some political parade.

Another reason, close in importance to the first, is the same reason why in four years no one will be commemorating the survivors of Katrina--because the event will have passed, mourning will have been done, and life goes on. The victims of 9/11 have been grieved for more than just about any other disaster in memory, and it's good enough. Time to move on.

Katrina has shown that the government has not taken homeland security seriously at all, and it's time America woke up and realized that terrorism isn't the great threat that we've been led to believe--at least it's no more of a threat than it has ever been, and will forever be. Time to reclaim reason, stop allowing politicians to use 9/11 to get us to approve anything they want, and get back to where we were in the late 90's before this nightmare began.

Mourning has passed. All that remains is politics.

Neighborhood Noise

[Note: sounds should open in a new window when clicked. For full effect, play them all in sequence.]

Well, now that the election is over, hopefully now all the noisy political campaign loudspeaker trucks will stop crisscrossing the neighborhood all day long until 8:00 in the evening. But that's little relief, because just as the loudspeaker trucks and vans vanish into the night, the Star-Trek-Phaser-on-Overload insects are startup up. I swear, they sound just like phasers about to blow up, a constant, incredibly loud, piercing high-pitched whistle. And then at sunrise, the other bugs, including the annoying "MEEEE, ME-ME-ME-ME-MEEEEEEE!!" cicadas and the Bone-Chilling-Wail-Eminating bugs, get started for the day. That along with the morning crows and partridges, and the afternoon bulbuls. But that only lasts through the summer. When they stop, it'll be just in time for the Kerosene-sellers to weave through every single parking lot in the neighborhood at 5 kph, with their loudspeaker-enhanced mind-numbing electronic note song: "DO-doo ... do-Do-DOO-Doo-do ... do-Do-DOO-DOO-do-do-DO-do-do-DOO-DOO!!" Now. Repeat that. ONE... HUNDRED... TIMES.

I suppose I can at least thank God that they don't all come at once, all the time. But what I would like to ask is, what happened to that famous Japanese neighborhood "wa" that we heard about? Okay, so we can't control the bugs or the birds, but what's with all the loudspeaker trucks? I want some wa, dammit!

More Katrina Notes

Newsweek has Bush at 38%.

On the whole Bush-hates-blacks thing:

The right-wing defense of this is that liberals are claiming that Bush consciously held back, that he looked at black faces on TV and said, hey, they're mostly black there, so I'll just let them suffer for several days." Which of course, is not even close to the real accusations.

Consider it this way: you're in an office on the 24th floor of a building when you hear news that down the street, there has just been a major accident with considerable damage, and rescue crews will not be able to make it there for some time. You think that you could go down there and help out, but more likely you figure that the job is being handled and you can stay put.

Now consider the same story, with one difference: you hear that among the victims were your own family members. Without doubt, you will instantly jump out of your seat, race down to the accident site, and move heaven and earth to get the job done yourself.

That you would not have had this instant, strong reaction in the first scenario does not mean that you actively decided to let the people suffer, it just means that you didn't have the connection to the disaster that made you get off your ass and make sure that things were getting done. It's someone else's problem, and things will get done. It's more of an unconscious distinction, not a thinking one.

This is the dichotomy we saw in action when it came to New Orleans. A good president and good public administrators will consider all Americans to be their family and will react accordingly. They will have that gut reaction which spurs them to put fire under everyone's asses. That is the reaction Bush would have had if it were Kennebunkport or Houston that got hit. You think that if a white, affluent community were being hammered by a natural disaster that Bush would stay on vacation, strum a guitar, or have cake with John McCain? Don't be ludicrous.

It's not that Bush said to himself, let the black people suffer. It's rather that they weren't his people, and so he had no gut response, and didn't light any fires under anyone to get the lead out. Now, maybe if he hadn't been busy dismantling FEMA and stacking its administrators with cronies so he can pay them off for favors done, then things might have actually been handled well without Bush getting on their backs about it. But because he did screw up FEMA, and he did not jump out of his chair when Katrina hit, that's his fault, his responsibility.

Okay, enough with the comparison between Giuliani vs. Nagin, because it's not even close to fair. Everybody talks about Giuliani and his hero moment, walking down the street calmly and giving orders, reassuring the people, and how we haven't seen that from Nagin. You want to know why? Giuliani was not neck-deep in water with corpses floating by and the news media miles away. Giuliani had to deal with a relatively small area of Manhattan under fire, but most everywhere else was OK, structurally at least. He could talk to people. Emergency vehicles could go places. Not to belittle 9/11, but in the limited scope of Manhattan, it was a far more manageable crisis than Katrina. Had Giuliani been surrounded by floodwaters, his communications knocked out by a storm, the TV cameras unable to record his "Giuliani-moment" hero shot, and the federal government letting him rot for five days, I have a feeling he wouldn't have fared quite as well. He'd be screaming for help and mad as hell, too.

New Rule: you can't attack Nagin with buses. The right wing has found their favorite graphic image, that being the school buses sitting in a flooded bus yard in New Orleans. They adore it. It's everywhere on the right-wing blogosphere, and now the media is beginning to pick up on it. The idea is that the buses could have been used but were not, and that Nagin is to blame for it. That's the web-wide right-wing talking point. They tack on the idea that Nagin waited too long for the mandatory evacuation, and they're in glee for someone to shift the blame to, and off of their dear leader Bush--as if Nagin making any errors means that Bush didn't, or that Bush's errors are now okay.

Of course, it's total bull. The timeline shows that: Sunday morning 1 am, Katrina upgraded to Category 4 (anything less would not have triggered a mandatory evacuation), 9:30 am, Nagin calls for the mandatory evacuation, 6 am Monday morning, Katrina makes landfall. Now, you could fault Nagin for waiting eight and a half hours before making the evacuation order--what his reasons for waiting were, I do not know and will not guess--but the whole bus evacuation thing is idiotic, and the idea that he could have called the mandatory evacuation in time to do it right is also fiction. The plan requires two days to carry out. Katrina was not upgraded to Category 4 until 29 hours before it hit, so even if Nagin had jumped right to it the moment the upgrade came, he still would have been 20 hours too late.

Could Nagin have seen the possibility of Katrina hitting New Orleans specifically and being a Category 4 or higher 20 hours before it became official? Yes. However, city and state officials do not evacuate entire cities based on guesses.

About the buses: what if Nagin had mobilized them right away? First off, there were nowhere near enough buses to get even a sizable percentage of the people out within 29 hours. Second, the logistics would have been horrendous: you try to find 500 school bus drivers in a city where everyone is hightailing out of there. Could inexperienced drivers have been used? Sure, if you wanted a guaranteed percentage of accidents and screw-ups leading to several deaths and many more injuries. And last, but not least, given the time frame, even with the best of planning, most of those buses would have been stuck on roads out of New Orleans when the full force of Katrina hit, probably killing hundreds of people right there.

Walter Maestri, Director of Emergency Management in New Orleans, said in an interview with Bill Maher that the buses were, in fact, being used in the limited ways they could be used for, and were returned when all that could be done was done.

The fact is, the buses were used, as well as they could be, before Katrina hit, to get people to safety as well as could be done. That the people bused to the Superdome languished and starved and died was not the fault of Nagin or anyone else locally. It was the fault of the federal government, which could get rescue efforts to Indonesia within 48 hours but took more than twice that long to get things started up for New Orleans. Nagin sent people to the Superdome expecting the federal government to do its job. Bush fumbled the handoff.

So enough with the bus crap. Nagin probably did make his share of mistakes, and maybe some of those screw-ups cost lives, but it is just as likely that Nagin's decisions and actions saved more lives. He cannot be blamed, at the very least, for the fact that he carried out plans with the expectation that the Bush administration would react and have help on the ground within 48 hours. If Bush had done things right, the majority of the horrors of the aftermath could have been avoided.

Deal with it.

I haven't seen much of the TV coverage of Katrina outside of CNN, but what I have seen in addition to the Internet and print media reinforces what I have stated before: that while the media is content to blame New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin directly, while they are content to blame Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco directly, while they are content to have at Michael Brown directly, there is a decided aversion in the mainstream press to name President Bush directly as someone responsible for the disastrous relief efforts. You'll hear "government" being blamed, FEMA being blamed, and especially the local Democrats (but never, strangely, the Republicans in Mississippi though they had similar problems) being blamed, but rarely if ever, in a mainstream news story, will you hear or see or read that Bush was the one who screwed up.

Yes, the talking heads will go over it, the blogs will mention it, the op-eds will talk about it. But in the mainstream stories, while others catch heat, Bush is not among them. Do a Google News search for "Bush is responsible," and you get mostly blogs or op-eds, but other than that just tame mainstream reports that "some allege that Bush is responsible," or "a slew of partisans have already declared that George W. Bush is responsible," more often than not refuting claims that Bush is responsible for anything.

In short, Bush is getting a major-league bye from the mainstream press on this disaster, despite the rather blatant screw-up which he is directly responsible for. A press that shows no problem with blaming individuals, just not Bush directly. There is the feeling that the press has gotten its stones back, that it is now more willing to rail and fight when they see something outrageous. But if that exists, it still stops at the White House porch.

This media is cowed.

Post-Katrina Updates

Michael "Brownie" Brown, that lovable Bush crony who knows nothing about disaster relief, has finally been fired by Bush. Talk about closing the barn doors after the Arabian horses have bolted.

And Brown wasn't the only Bush crony at FEMA, according to the Washington Post.

Bush has used his authority to set aside the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act which requires federal contractors to pay their employees the "prevailing wage" for said work in the area where the work is being done. Halliburton is among the first to benefit from this latest-among-many Bush administration sops to big business, as it was granted federal contracts almost immediately after Katrina struck.

So what does suspension of Davis-Bacon mean? It means that businesses involved in rebuilding, who were already going to cash in big-time from all the work after Katrina struck, will be able to cash in even more. It also means that people who live in the area, who need to make money to rebuild their homes and their lives are going to get their paychecks slashed, paid the barest minimum the market will bear. Disaster relief for businesses which don't need it, and wage theft from the people who need it most.

Supporters of the plan say that it will reduce the costs of rebuilding. They do not offer any proof of this whatsoever, though--the fact remains that only the wages for workers is being reduced, not the amount being charged by the businesses for rebuilding. No caps on what can be charged. No limits to profit margins. Now, if Bush had added that kind of restriction, he might at least be able to argue he's doing it to cut costs. But not now. This hurts workers, doesn't help cut costs, and hands bonuses to businesses who were already looking forward to flush times.

Along with the GOP's aversion to raising the minimum wage to anywhere near a living wage and its many corporate welfare giveaways to companies already making record profits, this only reaffirms that the Bush administration loves corporations and hates the average American worker. Is it any wonder that we have a jobless "recovery," that average incomes are dropping, and Americans are falling into poverty by the millions?

Dr. Ben Marble, an ER physician and new father whose home was destroyed in the hurricane, shouted "Go f*** yourself, Mr. Cheney! Go f*** yourself!" while Cheney was live on camera on CNN. The epithet was a reminder of when Cheney, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, used the same epithet when speaking to Democratic Senator Pat Leahy.

Think what you will of them man, he spoke his mind. And it's been very rare that anyone harshly critical of the Bush administration has been played willingly by the news media. Cheney said before and after the outburst that he hasn't heard any criticism, and that this was the first. Well, no wonder: even though Dr. Marble was allowed to leave the scene unmolested, once the news cameras had left, soldiers with M-16s came to Dr. Marble, handcuffed him, and questioned him for 20 minutes.

OpEd News (clearly not an unbiased journal) has the most detailed story here. In short, Marble was in part upset because Cheney's visit caused him to take a long detour to get to his destroyed house. He was headed home when he came across a barricade 200 feet from his destination. Despite the closeness of his home, he was not allowed through. Then a motorcade honked at him to move, and when he did, the motorcade was allowed through the barricade. Dr. Marble had to take a 20-minute detour to get home, costing him even more in high gas prices that already had him roiled. When he got home and was sifting through the wreckage, he discovered that Cheney's visit was responsible for his detour, and it was likely Cheney himself was the guy in the motorcade. So he set off to see him and the rest you know.

See the video here, lifted from Toolz Blog.

It seems like having National Guard troops in Iraq did in fact hurt the response time after Katrina hit, by as much as one day, according to Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, Despite Donald Rumsfeld's indications to the contrary.

According to Josh Marshall, Army recruiters are starting to show their dorsal fins, looking to reach their quotas by finding people devastated by Katrina, looking for jobs. Fresh meat...

Firefox 1.5 Beta

The new Firefox beta is out, and I'm going to give it a try starting now. Among the new features: improved pop-up advertisement blocking (which is a good thing, because pop-ups have been starting to break through the protection offered up to now); click-and-draggable tabs (you can now re-sort and re-arrange tabs as you like them--about time); better file handling (there used to be a long beach-ball pause when you tried to save or download something--no longer); RSS bookmarking (catching up with Safari); faster navigation system, better product updating, lots of bug fixes and a lot of other nice stuff.

What's not there: the ability to turn off individual plug-ins. Which is why I will still be using Safari with Pith Helmet for most of my browsing. The inability to disable the endlessly annoying flash animations--especially the damned dancing ads--is a feature most browsers lack, and I have to wonder why? Am I the only one who can't stand a dozen postage-stamp images swirling and jumping and shifting all over the place? Flash is the new animated GIF, and it's even more annoying. If any Mozilla developers are reading this, for the love of God, put an "off" switch on the plugins! And make a switch to turn off animated GIFs while you're at it.

So far, the new Firefox has performed well. The tabs are re-arrangeable, the performance is a lot snappier, and on initial start-up, it quickly and painlessly imported all my bookmarks from Safari. Sweet. One flaw noted already: it said it would also import my passwords--but I'm still being asked for them. I tried doing it again, from Mozilla (which should be more compatible), but to no avail.

They Know Headlines in Ireland

Via DKos, photo of a TV with Sky News in Ireland. It pretty much says it all.

More on Bush/GOP and Katrina

It really is hard to find accurate language to describe how despicable Bush and the GOP are acting in the Katrina aftermath. Awful, horrendous, heinous, vile, abhorrent, abominable, detestable, sickening, atrocious--you try to apply these words and yet they feel insufficient to describe the true degree of disgust you feel at what they're doing.

More reports from disgusted firefighters asked to do PR work for FEMA instead of saving lives. These two guys were so nauseated by the setup that they left and went home. They're still packed and ready to go do real work, though--but they'll have a long wait. Apparently Bush doesn't want anyone he can't gag to go into the area.

FEMA throwing a media blackout on New Orleans--now that Bush has been photographed with fake rescue efforts and firefighters not allowed to do any real work, it's time to turn off those cameras. After all, we don't want the American people to see what hell on Earth the Bush administration allowed to fester, or the bodies of the people they let die.

More and more comes out about how FEMA was gutted and staffed with political cronies of Bush. Current FEMA head Brown ("Brownie") got recommended for the job by his college roommate, a Bush campaign flack. War and Piece reports how people in charge at FEMA are former Bush "war room" staffers and campaign spokesmen now running political interference and damage control for the administration. Which, after all, has been the Bush administration's first and last worry: not to save people threatened by Katrina and the aftermath, but to save their own sorry political asses. And they're even eating their own: having run out of Democrats to smear and blame, they're going after Brown themselves--so long as Bush can get out of it blameless or at least looking not so bad.

Meanwhile, Republicans are scared spitless about the possibility of a balanced, independent investigation into the Katrina affair: they demand that Republicans run the show.

And the Rove PR machine is now in full gear. Impostors like this guy are getting full media play on many different shows and networks, spreading lies and blaming Democrats, including good ol' Republican standards like Newt Gingrich. The White House is leading that full-out campaign to smear blame all over Louisiana Democrats, while Scott McClellan chides reporters for even suggesting Bush might be responsible, saying: "there are some that are interested in playing the blame game. The President is interested in solving problems and getting help to the people who need it." More pure BS one cannot find. Aside from photo ops for Bush and preventing help from getting to those who need it most, blaming others is about all they've been doing. Standard Rovian tactics.

On the more just side of things, Bush's numbers seem to be slipping. After the ABC News poll found that 46% approved of Bush's handling of the Katrina crisis, two more polls have come out. CBS reports the number is now down to 38% (they had him at 54% a week ago), and Zogby has him down to 36%.

But it's a bitter, small, and pointless justice, with most of the damage done; with the media bowing before Rove and the Republicans controlling the investigation, the people responsible for what happened will never face the light of responsibility. Bush & Co. will again paint over their lies and incompetence, blame Democrats and underlings, award themselves medals and call themselves heroes. And in the end, that 46% and probably then some will wind up believing them.

Some are saying that Americans deserve what they're getting, reaping what they sowed, for putting Bush into office and keeping him there. But something tells me that the people who suffered and died weren't the ones who voted for Bush in the first place, and that those who did still just don't get it.

FEMA Still Screwing Up, Bush Still Yanking Rescue Units for Photo Ops

This is criminally insane. Criminally.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has had his own firefighters working round the clock, putting out the raging fires burning in the city, many new ones breaking out every day. They've been at it for a week now, and are exhausted. Nagin has been crying out for experienced firefighters to be brought in to give them assistance and relief.

One thousand highly-trained, experienced firefighters volunteered to help out, ready to join the fire-fighting and rescue operations--helping the people in the path of Katrina, saving their lives and fighting the fires. At the direction of FEMA, they converged on Atlanta.

So what did the Bush administration's FEMA put them to work doing? Did they send them to New Orleans to help put out the fires? Did they set them out on rescue work in the devastated areas to save lives? Hell, no. They're doing much more important work: PR and community-relations work. Answering phones. Handing out fliers.

Are these people completely batshit insane?

"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."

But at least the good people at FEMA have their politics and damage control in full gear:

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.

Gee, I wonder why the hell not? The firefighter called it for what it is: "It's a misallocation of resources. Completely."

But not to worry. At least some got out into the field. Fifty experienced firefighters were sent straight out to Louisiana on a high-priority mission: to appear in another fucking photo-op with President Bush, similar to the September 2nd photo-op below when Bush also allowed people to die so he could play dress-up with rescue teams. Pardon my French, but this is so goddamned sickening, it's criminal.

People are still in harm's way, a profusion of fires are still burning, and good, generous Americans are standing up to sacrifice their time, comfort, money and safety to take on the hard tasks. And the Bush administration puts them to work answering phones and acting as window dressing for Bush, so he can be photographed by a fawning press corps, looking as if he's concerned, rolling his sleeves up as if he's helping instead of getting people killed.

So I await the first Bush apologist who tries to say this is somehow Bush not being a fuck-up. Go ahead. Please. I can't wait.

John Roberts: Because He Has That Chief Justice Look

So, let me get this straight. We've got a lawyer here, mostly corporate. Did work as a political hack for two Republican administrations. Has served as a judge for just two years, having made fewer than 40 decisions.

And somehow this guy is qualified to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America? He is the most brilliant legal mind of our times? His qualifications were lackluster even as a regular justice. I had to stop watching a CNN interview with an analyst after five minutes due to pure disgust, with the CNN reporter and the analyst both crooning over Roberts as a superb choice because of the fact that he clerked for Rehnquist (no mention of his actual performance), because he worked for the solicitor general (no mention of any specific thing he did in that job), because he argued cases before the court (no mention of what cases he brought or how he performed), because it "seems as if he has the proper demeanor to foster that sense of collegiality" on the court--even because he looked, in their opinion, like a chief justice, for crying out loud! They brought up inane reason after inane reason, talking about his having young kids even, and never once talked about his pure inexperience as a judge, his partisan standing (they claimed the reverse), or the fact that the White House won't let his real record be known. Not a single example of any legal case he argued and why it earned merit. Just that Bush made an excellent choice. Not one shred of evidence about his actual talent as a legal mind. Doesn't matter! He looks like a justice, that's all we need to know! It was sickening.

Any suggestion that Democrats have no standing to question his appointment is a joke, especially with the White House refusing to release huge numbers of documents that would give the Congress a better idea of what kind of legal mind he is--which is supposed to be their duty, advising and consenting, not blindly rubber-stamping. But the conventional wisdom of today suggests that Democrats have no choice but to accept Roberts because no one can find anything substantial to object to. Hey, how about not being qualified for the job? What specifically has he ever done to distinguish himself enough to stand out among all the other legal minds of the day?

No doubt Bush and the GOP will now use the fact that little time is left to rail at the Democrats for "shutting down" the Supreme Court and derailing the justice system if they don't mindlessly approve whomever Bush throws at them. The real reason for the rush, of course, is clear: if no one gets appointed to fill the chief justice spot, then senior Justice John Paul Stevens, a liberal for heaven's sake, would for even the shortest time take over the chief justice position and have some influence over how things work.

46% of Americans Born Yesterday

Bush has demonstrated a talent over the course of time for pulling roses out of his rear end after so miserably screwing up time and time again, and the Katrina debacle is no exception. Due to Rovian photo ops and the cooperation of an adoring press, Bush's abominable mismanagement of the Katrina aftermath has no less than a 46% approval rate according to a new ABC News poll (via Kevin Drum).

Despite the fact that the number is below 50%, it begs the question, even if you take into account the 30% who would approve of Bush even if he abused a child on live TV, how could as many as 46% of Americans get even the impression that Bush actually did a good job? He failed to prepare. He continued his vacation, even days after the hurricane hit. He went on a political junket and played guitar, Rice went shoe shopping and took in a broadway show, Cheney stayed on his ranch to do fly-fishing--all while thousands died. His administration badly fumbled the relief efforts, bickering over who controlled what and what paperwork was where. His photo ops were phony as hell and probably wound up killing people. FEMA, Bush's responsibility, so utterly failed to do its job that hundreds almost certainly perished as a result. He played politics like crazy, blaming all the failures on Louisiana Democrats, lying about how the disaster couldn't have been foreseen--all bald-faced lies, too, easy to see through, now hastily and quietly withdrawn by the White House. And then the White House trying to grab control over the relief efforts just as things got moving, so as to take credit and avoid blame.

And 46% of Americans approve of this?

Or as Kevin Drum put it, what exactly has Bush done that deserves approval?

Approve of the massive outpouring of support from the people of the United States and the world. Approve of the people of Texas and elsewhere who opened their homes to the evacuees. Approve of the police who stayed on duty in New Orleans at a time of despair, despite so many others abandoning their posts. Approve of the National Guards soldiers and Coast Guard officers busting their asses to work things out.

But Bush? What did he do aside from screw up?

Yes, I know that 70% of Americans bought the whopper about Hussein and 9/11. Yes, the news of Rehnquist passing away helped Bush take people's eyes off the ball. And yes, the media filtered the content so that little if any direct criticism of Bush leaked through--mostly people who were "satisfied" with how things were handled got through, or people upset at nameless 'leaders.' News of Bush's fake photo ops played only outside the U.S., as did survivors railing at Bush. Bush's obvious lies were quickly and quietly left behind by journalists. But despite all that, I did not see a campaign by the White House even a tenth as slick as they usually put out. He really screwed the pooch royally, and even the PR campaign afterwards wasn't very good. And it was all rather apparent despite all the mitigating circumstances. So where did the 46% come from? Have half of all Americans become so easily taken in that they'll believe even the thinnest of shams? Or have they just become so knee-jerk ready to approve of Bush no matter what the Bush need not even try?

Forgive the rant. But sometimes the profound gullibility and absolute dearth of independent critical thinking among too many of the American people is so stupendously appalling that one cannot help but scream in despair.

Help

Sean has done a great job of listing places where you can donate money for and get information about the relief operations after Katrina. Please visit and donate. I've dropped $200 of my own via my family back in the U.S. Now you can feel all guilty and do it too.

More News on Bush's Fake--and Deadly--Photo Ops

Two more items have surfaced on Bush's fake photo op to the damaged areas. The first item has to do with the already-observed fact that one of the backdrops for Bush's visit was a coast guard hangar with at least two helicopters sitting idle while people suffered and died from lack of rescue not far away. Why were the coast guard helicopters and several coast guard officers just sitting there doing nothing when thousands were still in peril? So they could make Bush look presidential.

Here's the new item: according to a NOLA.com (a Times-Picayune subsidiary) story, air traffic in the area was halted for security reasons while Bush was there:

Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said.

The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana five days after Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Melancon’s chief of staff, Casey O’Shea.

“We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon.

The second item: the U.S. media continues to whore for Bush: note that even in criticisms, none mention Bush by name; none point in his direction, though they do point at others, specifically Democratic Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin; and none of the aired interviews with survivors contain references to Bush, though a brief glance at international stories show that survivors regularly blast Bush severely--so why barely a hint of this gets through in the U.S. press?

The second item is in a story reported on by Dutch ZDF, a public television network, an organization with a reputation for good reporting. The story goes beyond the photo op that the American media slavishly abides by. It reports that Bush's visit was carefully staged for the cameras: flunkies came through an area, disposing of dead bodies and clearing the worst or most unsightly of debris; disaster aid was brought in specially so Bush could be seen in front of assistance brought; and then immediately following Bush's visit, the aid was removed, and the town left to fend for itself just as before. In short, a Potemkin village, a sham, a facade for the cameras. The story is here; this is a crude Google translation; this is a more sophisticated translation by a viewer:

"Clean-up operation only for Bush?

Where the US President visited the disaster area, aid units cleaned up the area. But only there. Reporting from Biloxi, ZDF correspondent Claudia Rueggeberg cited desperate inhabitants [of Biloxi telling her] Bush should have transported aid materials inside his limousines instead of a bunch of body guards and media correspondents.

Along his [Bush] travel route aid units removed debris and recovered corpses. Then Bush left and along with him, all aid troops left too. The situation in Biloxi remains unchanged, nothing has arrived, everything is still needed."

In short, Bush grounded rescue operations and then prettied up small portions of the area so he could pose in front of faked relief efforts, while real food sat baking in the sun, and rescue operations ground to a halt. If these reports are indeed true, Bush would then be without question guilty of killing Americans in distress for the base purpose of a political photo opportunity.

But hey, there are two ultra-conservative Supreme Court justices to nominate--how can the U.S. media be expected to keep up?

No Racism Here

By the way, in case you were wondering what Kanye West was talking about, these two photos were up on the news wires. They've been in the spotlight for a few days now, but here they are in case you missed them. It should be noted that while Yahoo News Photos has removed--at the request of AFP, which provided the caption--the images of the two white people walking away with groceries, the image of the black 'looter' (image and caption provided by AP) is still up with the exact same caption.

In anticipation of the wingnuts who will complain that the black guy was indeed looting and how dare a liberal pansy like me demand black people should never be called 'looters,' keep in mind that the point here is that the black man was labeled as a looter while the white people were labeled as "finding" food. The disparity and implied racism of the captions is what is at issue here, not the idea of whether or not the black guy was looting or not. All three were doing the exact same thing; call it illegal, call it necessary to survive. The fact that whites "find" and blacks "loot" when they are doing the exact same thing is the thing to rail at here. At its not just this, either; this is simply one small example of an institutionalized and subtle layer of racism that permeates our society. Another example is how the use of powder cocaine--used predominantly by whites--carries a far lesser penalty than the use of crack cocaine--used predominantly by blacks.

And then there's the whole inability of conservatives to understand that the people who stayed in New Orleans for the most part were people who couldn't get out, particularly the poor people. One commenter on this blog has already thrown that out there--talking about the blacks in New Orleans and commenting that people "decided" to stay behind--as it has been repeated endlessly in conservative circles on the web. This, mind you, in reference to the people who evacuated to the Superdome, not the ones who stayed at their houses out of sheer stubbornness despite having the ability to leave. And still, some of those who stayed at their homes were among the ones who had no means to leave and nowhere to go. Bill Maher said it very well:

This is what I call 'unintentional racism.' Because that's the whole thing with the Bush people, they just can't imagine, 'Why don't you just pack up your range rover, grab a case of Poland Spring Water out of the garage, and go to your summer home? What is the problem?'

An overstatement for comical effect, but the message is intensely viable. The days of outward racism are behind us, where men in white sheets are few and far between--but what has replaced it is a subtle bias, an institutionalized racism that doesn't always register consciously, but is still very much there.

I dare the wingnuts to look at these two photos and claim that race had nothing to do with it.

The Rescue That Was Staged

Remember the whole giant operation that we saw rushing in to New Orleans when Bush came to have his photo op? Guess what. It was, to a large extent, faked. Remember seeing the equipment fixing the levees behind Bush? No longer there. Remember the fleets of buses to get people out of the hell-on-Earth that is the Superdome? Missing in action. The people living in filth and squalor without even the barest necessities in the Superdome? Believe it or not, I am not making this up--they have been locked in and not allowed to leave, by the U.S. government. I shit you not.

You have to see this segment from--of all shows--Hannity and Colmes on Fox (again via Crooks & Liars), where Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith report live from the spot, describing a scene of despair in inhuman conditions, belying the Bush administration fiction that, now that Bush came to the rescue, a corner has been turned, that help is now being supplied and the crisis is over. It is not. Both Rivera and Smith pointed out that the people there could simply walk to the next town where there is electricity and no dead bodies or filth or stench, they could walk to the Wal-Mart down the street where the people could get out of the horror that the Superdome has become--but troops have set up a checkpoint and will not allow the people there to leave.

While Hannity predictably tries to downplay what they're seeing, neither Rivera nor Smith let him get away with it. Even though Rivera and Smith were not politicizing it ("This is reality, this is non partisan, there's no Democrats or Republicans here"), Hannity tried to make it seem like it wasn't happening:

SMITH: It's the only way out, it's the connection to the rest of the world, and they've set up a checkpoint. And anyone who walks up out of that city now is turned around. You are not allowed to go to Gretna, Louisiana from New Orleans, Louisiana. Over there, there's hope. Over there, there's electricity. Over there, there's food and water. But you cannot go from there to there, the government will not allow you to do it. It's a fact.

HANNITY: I want to get some perspective here, because earlier today, the--

SMITH: That is perspective! That's all the perspective you need!

Hannity then tried to deliver a line of BS that since Fox had shown images of trucks and convoys earlier, that meant that "obviously" things were "getting a lot closer than they were." But watch the whole video, so you can get the true sense of the despair these people are still living in. You can see the video here (Windows Media Player software for the Mac here).

Even CNN has reported on the "disconnect" between the administration version of events and the truth.

But that's not the only evidence that the Bush photo op was full of bull. You probably saw Bush visiting the scenes of damage, with equipment often behind him--like the Coast Guard helicopters and guardsmen who sat idly by as scenery for Bush's photo op while real people still were dying from lack of rescue equipment. The networks have not reported on that, as far as I am aware. They always buy full into the presidential PR and never expose the sometimes obvious harm caused by it. One more example surfaced in a press release from Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who is now livid at Bush for showing up with rescue equipment for the photo op, and then yanking it away as soon as he was gone--or that possibly the equipment originally seen was useless window-dressing, not really good for anything. In her words:

Yesterday, I was hoping President Bush would come away from his tour of the regional devastation triggered by Hurricane Katrina with a new understanding for the magnitude of the suffering and for the abject failures of the current Federal Emergency Management Agency. 24 hours later, the President has yet to answer my call for a cabinet-level official to lead our efforts. Meanwhile, FEMA, now a shell of what it once was, continues to be overwhelmed by the task at hand.

I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims -- far more efficiently than buses -- FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.

But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast -- black and white, rich and poor, young and old -- deserve far better from their national government.

Mr. President, I'm imploring you once again to get a cabinet-level official stood up as soon as possible to get this entire operation moving forward regionwide with all the resources -- military and otherwise -- necessary to relieve the unmitigated suffering and economic damage that is unfolding. [emphasis added]

While Landrieu is appearing on some of the weekend shows and may get more coverage then, right now (from a Google News search) only two small media outlets in the U.S. are carrying the story. There's more press on this in Australia.

And now that Rehnquist has passed away, coverage of the fake Bush rescue will likely get reduced or shunted aside.

Update: A Dutch news viewer reports that foreign media is describing a somewhat different story about the staged Bush "rescue" photo ops than the U.S. media is. He reports this:

There was a striking dicrepancy [sic] between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

West Raps Bush

NBC censored the remarks of a performer on a benefit performance for criticizing George W. Bush. Rapper Kanye West departed from the script during the event, the same kind of scripting that you usually have to endure from star-studded ceremonies like awards shows, where the presenters have to deliver these awful, corny lines. West was trading off with Mike Myers, but West wasn't having any of this cornball crap. He wasn't obscene, he wasn't suggesting violence. He was anguished, and he was angry for good reason. But NBC couldn't bear criticism of Bush, so as soon as they could, they cut off the live broadcast, and on the West Coast rebroadcast they cut the segment entirely. Here's the transcript:

Myers: The landscape of the city has changed dramatically, tragically and perhaps irreversibly. There is now over 25 feet of water where there was once city streets and thriving neighborhoods.

West: I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, "They're looting." You see a white family, it says, "They're looking for food." And, you know, it's been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I've tried to turn away from the TV because it's too hard to watch. I've even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I'm calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help -- with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way -- and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us!

Myers: [speaking quickly, trying to regain the meaning in the script] And subtle, but in many ways even more profoundly devastating, is the lasting damage to the survivors' will to rebuild and remain in the area. The destruction of the spirit of the people of southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the most tragic loss of all.

West: George Bush doesn't care about black people!

Myers did a visible double-take on that one, and that's when NBC cut the feed and switched to Chris Tucker, who was unprepared to take over. NBC later apologized for the criticism, and implied that they censored the comments because it might discourage people from donating money. Pure B.S., of course--what kind of idiot would be ready to give money to save people from starvation, and then hold back because a rapper ripped at Bush? I don't know, maybe the serious wingnuts would--but I'd be willing to bet that more people decided to give more money than others decided not to give, as a result of the comments made by West. They were words that needed to be spoken, and a lot of people admired the rapper's willingness to say so.

To get the full impact and the real nuance and emotion behind the statements, you have to watch the video--it is really quite surreal, watching Myers, knowing he's aware that West is going off script, trying not to react to it. West, meanwhile, seems nervous, emotional, and genuinely upset, but not rapper-style-angry that you might expect. Not "Yo! Kill that motherfucker Bush!" Instead, he's almost guy-on-the-street, relatively mild-mannered, I'm-nervous-but-I-gotta-say-this. Here are the videos from Crooks & Liars; if they don't work here, try them at the original site.

Windows Media Video (Mac software here)
QT Video (if problems, download VLC and the video)

Mars and Saturn

Remember the Mars Rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, which landed on Mars in January of 2004, and were only supposed to last 90 days? They were not expected to survive the cold and the dust of Mars for longer than three months, but the engineers apparently built them a hell of a lot tougher than anyone expected. One year and nine months later, they're still going strong. Engineers usually over-engineer any given project, giving what they build an extra margin of safety--but these rovers are now exceeding seven times their expected lifetimes! Both of them. That is no small feat by anyone's reckoning.

if you want to see the images they're still churning out, including Spirit's magnificent panorama from the vantage point on top of Husband Hill, check out their multimedia page.

Meanwhile, the Cassini probe continues on schedule to send back amazing images from Saturn. Picture below is a view of Saturn's moons Dione and Rhea; the double line cutting through them is an edge-on view of Saturn's rings, with the moons visible behind them. It's practically straight out of Star Wars. For Saturn photos regularly returned from Cassini, visit that probe's multimedia page.

Bush Is "Not Acceptable"

Nine days. Four days before the hurricane hit, we knew that something very bad was coming. Certainly two days before Katrina hit, everyone was seeing the worst coming. And for five days after the hurricane hit, federal assistance was pathetic.

On a variety of forums discussing the disaster response, conservatives are all singing the same song: how dare the liberals "take advantage" of this crisis, and make political attacks while people are suffering. Such calls are so hypocritical, so manipulative, you have to wonder whether to laugh or cry. Of course, it is little more than an echo of the Republican lament that Bush cannot be criticized so long as soldiers are out on the battlefield: in effect, Republicans should be shielded from attack, using the sacrifice of soldiers and the suffering of victims as human political shields. Contemptible. And hypocritical because Republicans never wasted a second attacking Clinton, no matter that there were soldiers on the ground or disaster victims in need of assistance.

And in the response to Katrina, the president deserves no breaks, no grace period, no special considerations because others are suffering because of his ineptitude.

Of course, Republicans will now claim that Bush should be given a break because he "accepted responsibility." Like hell, on both counts. He didn't accept blame or responsibility, he only pretended to. His exact words were, "The results are not acceptable." It was "the results" that were "not acceptable." Very carefully selected language, designed to keep the blame off of himself. Nothing about "my administration," "my response," or anything else that would make anything here his responsibility--it was "the results" which were bad. And the use of "not acceptable" leaves unclear to whom the results were unacceptable, though in context, it would suggest that they were unacceptable to Bush.

These are what you can call "weasel words," words designed to serve a purpose that the speaker wants to avoid (taking responsibility) while at the same time giving a clear impression of the opposite (someone else screwed up, and I don't approve). If Bush wanted to take responsibility like a man and not a gutless coward, he would have at the very least said, "we failed to do what was needed."

And if one reads the transcript of what he said, one will note that this one sentence, "The results are not acceptable," is couched in the middle of 'we're doing everything we can' language. Look carefully, and you'll see the "not acceptable" line is jarringly out of place. "A lot of people are working hard to help those who have been affected, and I want to thank the people for their efforts. The results are not acceptable." Followed by "I'm headed down there right now." In the context of his remarks, that one five-word sentence is alien, so inconsistent and out of place that it was obviously placed there for a very specific reason. In fact, since it followed the comment about people's efforts, it even sounded like Bush was criticizing the people who were on the job and doing things, which he had to later defend himself against. But I don't see it that way. I think Bush was coached to slip in that phrase, and he just fumbled the attempt in the middle of his fictional tirade about how they are doing everything in their powers.

And again, conservatives--Bush most of all--are telling us to focus just on what they're doing now, and not on the failures up until now. "All that can be done is being done," Bush tells us--so what the hell was being done the past five to nine days? He won't answer that one. And let's not even get into the Bush whopper that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." Proof that Bush is full of it here, amongst many, many other places.

What's more is the political backdrop of this whole thing, how Bush has vacillated between showing complete disregard and unconcern for the tragedy, and then taking photo ops and news interviews to make him look endlessly concerned. But the photo ops and interviews paled in comparison to the cavalier attitude Bush and his administration took to the disaster. Bush stayed on vacation for two days after Katrina struck, six days after trouble was first spotted, when he should have been working full-time to assure that all steps for rescue and recovery were being taken; instead, he went to California on a political junket to equate Iraq with WWII, and played guitar with entertainer Mark Wills while people died in New Orleans. Condoleezza Rice was on vacation in New York buying shoes and taking in a Broadway show. From reports, Dick Cheney is still on vacation in Wyoming. So while Bush strums a guitar, Rice buys shoes and Cheney goes fly-fishing, how could this administration say that they have done all they could when it took up to nine days for them to respond? And I have to ask, when Bush diverted Air Force One to fly over New Orleans, were emergency craft told to stand off while the president was occupying the air space?

But it doesn't stop there. While no official comments were made, there were anonymous accusations from the administration that troops hadn't arrived because Democratic governor of Louisiana Kathleen Blanco had not made the necessary request for federal assistance--except that she had already made that request on the 27th, along with other pleas for more troops. Bush similarly knocked Democratic governor Blanco and mayor Nagin; while Mississippi's Republican governor Barbour's handling of the crisis was fine with Bush, "the results can be better in New Orleans." As if it were all the Democrats' fault, not his.

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin was furious to the point of tears at the politics of the whole thing. From a radio interview from September 1:

I told him [Bush] we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice. And that I have been all around this city, and I am very frustrated because we are not able to marshal resources and we're outmanned in just about every respect. ...

I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here. I'm like, "You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans." That's – they're thinking small, man. And this is a major, major, major deal. And I can't emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy. ...

I don't want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city. And then come down to this city and stand with us when there are military trucks and troops that we can't even count. Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.

The most complete transcript I could find is here. To hear the emotion and the anguish, you have to listen to the interview; I have it here on a 12 MB MP3 file--though the beginning and very end of the interview were cut off. It's the best audio I can find. Update: here's one that's only 3 MB, and goes to the end of the interview.

The timing of events on Bush's visit are very suspicious. For five days, people were dying from lack of water and medical attention, lack of buses, transports and troops on the ground. And then, coincidentally at the exact same time that Bush strolled in, five days late, all manner of supplies and personnel streamed into the area. Trucks loaded with water, waves of troops, supplies, and hordes of buses, all with news cameras pointed at them. On the news broadcasts throughout Bush's visit, there were split-screens of the relief coming in and Bush doing his photo ops. What convenient timing--so coordinated that it could not have "just happened." The only question is, did Bush hold back relief until he could be on the ground to take credit for it, or did Bush hold off his visit until he could be seen as the source of the relief? Neither possibility paints a pretty picture.

It has also been pointed out that in one of his photo ops, there are at least two coast guard helicopters and a number of coast guard troops standing idly by to serve as a backdrop for Bush's photo op. These vehicles are not being repaired, and the troops are not resting up. The key fact is that they are standing idle, they are not out there doing work; they are just sitting there so that Bush can look good in front of resources for rescue, so viewers can associate him with helping out. And people are likely dying from lack of rescue while Bush pats himself on the back on national TV with the life-saving resources serving as a backdrop.

In short, Bush has used this trip and these resources for political play, letting people die so he can get some air time. He's overseen a complete failure both in preparation and response, and his concern only comes out to win props, while stepping on the people he's trying to get credit for saving. And he most certainly had enough time for a press interview: "I hope people don't play politics during this period of time," Bush told Diane Sawyer in a fit of unrepentant hypocrisy.

One last comment on this debacle. Something most people have refrained from pointing out in a political context is the fact that the victims here are by majority poor black people. And people are just beginning to ask: had Katrina hit an affluent white area and the victims were a different color, would the preparation and response been exactly as incompetent and far too late in the coming? Part of the answer came in a helicopter rescue. As hundreds of poor, predominantly black patients in Charity Hospital in New Orleans continue to suffer without power, some being given ventilation by hand to keep them alive, the private and more affluent--more white--Tulane Hospital right across the street had gotten helicopter assistance, and had already evacuated everyone. But then Tulane evacuated medical personnel on the helicopters. Instead of sending the desperately needed doctors and nurses to help people dying across the street, instead of using the helicopters to evacuate Charity Hospital patients in dire need, they airlifted "nonessential medical personnel" out instead. Meanwhile, coast guard helicopters which could have been airlifting the Charity patients out sat idle while Bush preened in front of them for the cameras.

None of this is building up to be a pretty picture. But we can be sure of one thing: President Bush will get on with his life. What a relief.

Spammers Now Abusing Bloggers Just for the Hell of It?

From a spate of blog comments spam I just received, it now appears that spammers are no longer just spamming, they are now using spam for no other reason than to abuse bloggers, perhaps even to turn them against each other. I got dozens of blog comment spams which had three URLs in them--all bloggers. I am giving them all the benefit of the doubt, as I sincerely question the idea that these three bloggers all got together and asked for spam to be sent featuring random posts from their blogs. One of them is even a blogger I read regularly.

So that means that some scumbag spammer out there probably chose blog posts from bloggers he usually attacks, and inserted them in the spam. No link to the spammer, no profit to the spammer, no comprehensible reason why the spammer would send such spam--except for the sole reason of pissing off bloggers. One effect may be that the bloggers' URLs may now be added to spam blacklists, meaning that legitimate comments that link to these guys' blogs may be blocked close to everywhere in the blogosphere from now on--the blogosphere's equivalent of a bad credit rating. Hopefully the people who manage these blacklists will realize what's going on and remove the URLs from the lists.

It may even have been a test of a new spam system, just to see if it works. In the past, there have been spam attacks with no rhyme or reason, using an inoffensive link or even having no links at all. I noted that in this attack, each spam had a different fake IP address, and rotated name and email addresses, making it harder to delete from the database; this is not exactly new, but it may be a test of a technique to make it harder to filter and delete the spam. Not that a single one ever got through Movable Type's comment moderation on my blog, and previous versions of MT-Blacklist would have made it easy to zap the common URLs. This is also the second morning in a row I've awakened to a massive spam attack, both of different yet persistent types, so it could be the same sleazeball trying out different methods. If so, the idiot didn't get himself anything. But then, it seems that such was not the point of the exercise.

Oil Deficiency

Remember the good old days, when Republicans railed at Al Gore because gas passed a dollar and a half per gallon at the pump, and oil was at $25 a barrel? Remember how they screamed and yelled about the 4.3-cents-per-gallon tax that was bankrupting the American driver? Remember how Bush skewered Gore for not handling OPEC to get them to lower prices? Remember how refineries were a major issue, especially later in California, where oil and gas companies had shut down refineries there in an effort to gouge Californians, and how Bush completely ignored the crisis and let the companies gouge without restraint because it was Blue?

Ah, the good old days. But now oil prices have tripled and gas prices are on their way to doubling. Life under Bush/Cheney is now far worse.

Under the eight years of the Clinton administration, gas prices at the pump rose just 20%, adjusted for inflation. Under the Bush administration, prices have increased about twice as fast, and that's even before Katrina. Bush has not "handled" OPEC, and not a single new refinery has been built. Bush backers will argue that $20 billion between 2000 and 2010 is being spent on refineries, but don't believe the misdirection: almost all of that money, a tiny fraction of the industry's profits, is being spent of bringing the refineries up to code--it is not being used to increase capacity, nor is it being used to build new refineries. Only one new refinery is scheduled to go online in the future, and won't be operational before 2010. When was the last time you saw Bush get on the backs of big oil to build more refineries?

In 2000, Cheney blasted Clinton/Gore for not doing exactly that:

We don't have refinery capacity. We haven't built a new refinery in this country for over 10 years. And the refineries are now operating at 96 or 97% percent of capacity, which means even with more crude available, they're probably not going to be able to do very much by way of producing additional home heating Oil for this winter.

Well, guess what? Bush and Cheney have not gotten a single new refinery built in the past five years, despite their being best buds with the oil industry. Despite? Because, more like it. Refineries were operating at 99% capacity even before Katrina, not just the 96 or 97 that Cheney wailed about. Oil company and refinery profits have exploded, and Bush just got through giving the industry a $14.5 billion handout--and now they're gouging prices on top of all that, taking advantage of Katrina, and like always, Bush refuses to reign them in.

All this proves is that former oilmen Bush and Cheney haven't done squat to increase capacity, haven't lifted a finger to fix the problems they harshly accused Clinton and Gore of letting slide. And now that Katrina has hit, that failure is going to cost all Americans painfully at the gas pump. The hit to refineries in the south will be blamed on Katrina, but the blame for the country's unpreparedness lies sharply on Bush, Cheney, and the oil industry. An industry whose profits will now soar from the merely usurious to the astronomically obscene. Prices will not go up because it is costing the oil industry more; prices will go up because supply will fall. This is about soaring profits, not rising prices.

And don't believe for a moment that not drilling in ANWR is to blame--oil supply is not what's causing this, it's refining capacity and the national energy policy and planning.

On a side issue, the Iraq War has meant that rescue efforts in the South have been badly weakened--much of the manpower and machinery that should have been available to help victims of the hurricane is now in Iraq. Additionally, Bush's dismantling of FEMA over the past few years has made disaster handling and recovery efforts far more strained and difficult than they should be. On the bright side, Bush is "getting on with his life," playing golf and biking, while the storm victims live through hell.

Next: Why we need an energy Manhattan Project, and why Bush and Cheney will fail miserably at that, too.

Spam Filters Working OK

Good news on the referral spam front: only 6 of the top 25 referrals were spammers, for a total of 187 hits between them. Lots more spammers with only a few hits per in the complete list, but this is a hopeful sign.

On the other hand, comment spam has started rising again, but mostly due to one porn web hosting company which sends hundreds of blog comment spams through each and every day, and has been for a few months now. Not a single one has made it onto the blog, of course, but they continue to spam away.

One more note: after peaking in April, visitor numbers have more or less held steady since then, though in the past month or two the number of spammers in the totals has been cut by the AwStats filter. Nevertheless, this month had the highest number of total unique visitors per month--22,554, a hundred or so higher than April, when spammers were fully counted in that total. Still, with some spammers getting through, the number of real visitors is more likely closer to 20,000, probably under that.

Once Again, Bush Lies to the Nation

Speaking on Iraq:

Sixty years ago this Friday, General Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. With Japan's surrender, the last of our enemies in World War II was defeated, and a World War that began for America in the Pacific came to an end in the Pacific. As we mark this anniversary, we are again a nation at war. Once again, war came to our shores with a surprise attack that killed thousands in cold blood. Once again, we face determined enemies who follow a ruthless ideology that despises everything America stands for. Once again, America and our allies are waging a global campaign with forces deployed on virtually every continent. And once again, we will not rest until victory is America's and our freedom is secure. [Transcript]

And once again, Bush equates 9/11 with Iraq, as if the two were in some way connected. Pearl Harbor led to the American occupation of Japan, and Bush is implying that this is parallel to the idea that 9/11 led to the American occupation of Iraq. A complete and utter lie. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Iraq was not involved in 9/11, and though two years ago Bush admitted there was no connection ("No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th"), the endless hints, innuendo and outright accusations coming from the administration have made most Americans believe there was a connection, to the point where 70% of the American public believed it at one time.

Bush tries to continue the lie by insinuating that while Hussein was not involved directly in 9/11, he had al Qaeda ties. In the same breath in which he admitted Hussein was not involved in 9/11, he also said:

And al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaida operative, was in Baghdad. He's the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat. ... There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties.

However, the CIA disagreed, saying that there was no evidence to support or deny the claim--in other words, Bush was making up the whole thing out of desire, political expediency, and whole cloth. A CIA official was quoted as saying that "there is no clear cut evidence that Saddam Hussein even knew Zarqawi was in Baghdad." Like the first assertion the administration made about Atta meeting with Iraqi intelligence in Prague, the al-Zarqawi claim is just as bogus, trying to claim that Hussein was in bed with bin Laden when in truth the two despised each other and had no working ties. So then the claim goes to Abu Nidal, a terrorist who went to Iraq. There's the tie, said Bush & Co. Except Abu Nidal was killed by Saddam Hussein, unless you accept the idea that he committed suicide for no good reason, and by shooting himself several times.

But Bush will not give up on a lie that has served him so well to this point. He is now refreshing the mendacity by making it analogous to Japan after WWII, saying that there were problems there as well:

President Roosevelt, and later President Truman, wisely resolved that we would not make that mistake in our treatment of a defeated Japan. They understood that the sacrifices of allied forces would mean nothing unless we used our victory to help the Japanese people transform their nation from tyranny to freedom. There were many doubters.

American and Japanese experts claimed that the Japanese weren't ready for democracy.

In a letter to a friend back home, one of our soldiers on the ground offered a different view. Sergeant Richard Leonard's brother had been killed in fighting the Japanese, but after being stationed in Japan and meeting Japanese people, he found he could not hate them. He wrote, "Sure, we've got to occupy their country and watch them. But at the same time, we've got to help them and do everything possible to reconstruct them as a peace-loving nation."

Except, of course, that the two nations in post-war venues were completely different in nature.

• The Japanese were one people, homogenous; Iraq is made up of three very different groups prone to disagreement;
• The Japanese were fiercely loyal to the Emperor, who told them to surrender and cooperate; nothing even similar exists in Iraq;
• There was little or no insurgency in Japan, unlike Iraq;
• In Japan, the people accepted American rule, resigned themselves to it; Iraq is not quite the same;
• In Japan, we more or less forced a constitution on the Japanese, writing in for them and then sitting on them for seven years before ending the occupation;
• In Japan, the obedience and the general makeup of the Japanese people made them far different than the Iraqis today in terms of accepting an occupation;
• Japan was not seen by its own people as oppressive, and had for more than 80 years experienced a parliamentary system, a constitutional monarchy, not a succession of thuggish dictators;
• In Japan, there was absolutely no parallel to the situation of America in the Middle East today in religious, historical, economic or political terms;
• In Japan, we gave massive financial aid, opened up use of patents, and in 1950 used Japan as a staging area for the Korean War, infusing huge amounts of capital into the country, leading to the "economic miracle" which made Japanese more content with the position they had taken on; there is little expectation the Iraqis will so profit even if another war does break out;
• In Japan, the U.S. took on a huge chunk of the country's defense, allowing the country to focus on financial rebuilding; there is no evidence that anything similar will happen in Iraq--in fact, the current stated goal is for the opposite to happen.
• In Iraq, "our enemies" have not been defeated; the enemies that attacked on 9/11 are still on the loose, in large part because Bush took an unnecessary detour in Iraq. In contrast, in post-WWII Japan, the enemies who had attacked us were defeated, and were not fighting back.

I'm sure others like Tim could add a few dozen more points. In general, the idea that Iraq is even remotely similar to Japan after WWII is mind-bogglingly wrong. There simply is no parallel beyond the downright simplistic rendering that we conquered both nations and then tried to set up a Democracy. Any and all parallels end there, and a flood of differences and polar opposites begin.

Iraq is not Japan. Not even close. This is just more posturing, more knowingly false analogies. More lies to the American people.