New Orleans: The Problem of the Weak

Ayn Rand had a simple solution for the "weak" -- they died. She had more than a passing love for social darwinism.

This is not rare. It is deeply embedded in the modern Republican party: Gordon's Notes: What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?. A variant of this, that wealth is God's blessing upon his chosen, is at the core of theocratic capitalist fundamentalism.

New Orleans is the lesson for America on what this principle means in practice. The elderly, the young, the disabled, the poor -- the weak and those who love them -- they were stuck. The lack of systems to protect them, the slow response to their distress, is all consistent with Rand's Objectivism and Bush's odd blend of libertarianism and theocratic capitalism. I'm sure racism played some role, it's a part of every aspect of our life -- but I think that the deeper issue is a universal disdain for "the weak".

The catch is, if one accepts Ayn Rand's worldview, one must be comfortable with the suffering of "the weak". Those inclined this way will find many powerful allies. Perhaps they will adopt a badge so that all may know who they are.

Evacuate and abandon the children?

Well, they do allow children on New Orleans evacuation buses. Pets, however, are forbidden.

Reading the Washington Post this morning (no link, Blogger is barely functioning right now) at least a few families are resisting evacuation because it means abandoning their pets to certain death.

My doggie is gone, but were she were alive I would not leave her without a significant struggle (It's a bit more complex now since our kids need me alive too, but I'd try to save everyone.)

Is there some middle ground that could be taken for late evacuation? Some shading of the rules? Something like "come back when you're done with everyone else"?

Heck, most dogs are better bus companions than my kids.

Update 9/6/05: A Humane Society story tells us sometimes the rules do get bent ...

...Moret Williams and Sebastian left New Orleans together. Sebastian floated on an air mattress at his owner’s side as Moret Williams waded through polluted, neck-deep floodwater, pulling the mattress along with him. Man and beast managed to reach an elevated portion of Interstate 10, but the helicopters that were taking evacuees to buses weren’t allowing pets on board.

“There was no way I was leaving without him,” Moret Williams says, and so he did what so many have had to do in the past week: He improvised. He put Sebastian in a large black trash bag and begged him not to make noise.

Amazingly, the dog obeyed, though he did squirm at one point—a point that could have ruined the whole plan. “He bumped against the pilot,” Moret Williams says, a small smile creeping onto his face. “The pilot just goes, ‘I didn’t see nothing.’”

They need donations. I'll do one in honor of our old doggie.

Commie liberals defend Hastert

Gillmore, a liberal sort, defends Dennis Hastert:

Gillmor:
Why Isn't House Speaker's Observation On the Table? | Bayosphere

Washington Post: Hastert Tries Damage Control After Remarks Hit a Nerve. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert began his day yesterday explaining that he really does not want to see New Orleans bulldozed, and he ended it defending his absence from the Capitol when Congress approved a $10.5 billion hurricane aid package. In between, a former president hinted he would like to throttle the Illinois Republican.

It was undoubtedly a hasty and off-handed remark, but why should Hastert's initial reaction be so easily dismissed?

The only reason New Orleans came to exist at all as a major city was people's determined effort over the past several centuries to ignore reality. Motivated in large part by commercial greed, powers-that-be thumbed their collective noses at geography, weather and just about every other rational notion of city-building, putting New Orleans in a bowl, below sea level, that was sinking further every year.

We commie liberals are notorious for ripping into right wing theocrats. We're certainly laying into Brown and Chertoff and Bush. So why give Hastert a break? DeLong, for example, has said nothing ...

Truth is, unlike most of America, we do believe in reason. Hastert, oddly enough might have been making sense (stuck clock you know ...).

If our best computer models were to predict a 20% probability (made up number) of a cat 5 hit within 10 years (global warming, etc), then is it reasonable to rebuild below Lake Ponchetrain? Would it make more sense to give every household a $100K housing certificate and low interest 50 year loans and enocourage rebuilding better homes elsewhere? The losses of community would be staggering, but there is some cost at which rebuilding doesn't make sense.

Blogger is coming apart at the seams -- again

Blogger: Create your Blog Now -- FREE

From November of 2004 to February of 2005 Blogger was in pathetic shape. Then they recovered. I was about to post a congratulatory note, when they went under again -- about 3 weeks ago.

This can't be impacting every blog, but I'm experiencing two kinds of problem:

1. With both Firefox and Safari, on OS X and XP SP2, a BlogThis! post created immediately after authentication is defective. The body is empty and the what should have been in the body is stuffed in the URL field.
2. With Safari on Tiger and Panther, a few seconds after creating a post, and starting to write, the post is wiped out. (I haven't seen this with Firefox yet.)
3. In Firefox the WYSIWYG editor takes minutes to appear.

Blogger's support for Safari is actually declining -- it was quite a bit better in the middle of last year. I think their support for Firefox is weakening too. I don't use IE at home, so I can't test there. Since Blogger is a Google company, it suggests all is not well in Google-land. If I had shares, I'd be selling a few.

American Shame: Money for empty Alaskan islands, nothing for the levee

United States of Shame - New York Times

Maureen Dowd continues to show signs of talent. She's the first I've read to connect the dots between underfunding levees in New Orleans and Bush rewarding corrupt senate allies in Alaska.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

That Alaskan region is actually not uninhabited; but the people living there don't particularly want the bridge.

Maureen continues in fine form ...

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

Can we buy Bush a subscription to Scientific American?

I doubt Bush would know what "Scientific American" is. It's not that he's dim, it's that he's deeply anti-intellectual and fundamentally anti-science. So it's not surprising that non-one in his administration seems to have been aware than the New Orleans disaster was well understood.

The fixes are not cheap ...

They Saw It Coming - New York Times
September 2, 2005
By MARK FISCHETTI

... (I wrote an article for Scientific American in 2001 that described the very situation that was unfolding) but because I knew that a large-scale engineering plan called Coast 2050 - developed in 1998 by scientists, Army engineers, metropolitan planners and Louisiana officials - might have helped save the city, but had gone unrealized.

The debate over New Orleans's vulnerability to hurricanes has raged for a century. By the late 1990's, scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of New Orleans had perfected computer models showing exactly how a sea surge would overwhelm the levee system, and had recommended a set of solutions. The Army Corps of Engineers, which built the levees, had proposed different projects.

... Fed up with the splintered efforts, Len Bahr, then the head of the Louisiana Governor's Office of Coastal Activities, somehow dragged all the parties to one table in 1998 and got them to agree on a coordinated solution: Coast 2050. Completing every recommended project over a decade or more would have cost an estimated $14 billion, so Louisiana turned to the federal government. While this may seem an astronomical sum, it isn't in terms of large public works; in 2000 Congress began a $7 billion engineering program to refresh the dying Florida Everglades. But Congress had other priorities, Louisiana politicians had other priorities, and the magic moment of consensus was lost...

... Cut several channels in the levees on the Mississippi River's southern bank (the side that doesn't abut the city) and secure them with powerful floodgates that could be opened at certain times of the year to allow sediment and freshwater to flow down into the delta, re-establishing it.

Build a new navigation channel from the Gulf into the Mississippi, about 40 miles south of New Orleans, so ships don't have to enter the river at its three southernmost tips 30 miles further away. For decades the corps has dredged shipping channels along those final miles to keep them navigable, creating underwater chutes that propel river sediment out into the deep ocean. The dredging could then be stopped, the river mouth would fill in naturally, and sediment would again spill to the barrier islands, lengthening and widening them. Some planners also propose a modern port at the new access point that would replace those along the river that are too shallow to handle the huge new ships now being built worldwide.

Erect huge seagates across the pair of narrow straits that connect the eastern edge of Lake Pontchartrain, which lies north of the city, to the gulf. Now, any hurricane that blows in from the south will push a wall of water through these straits into the huge lake, which in turn will threaten to overflow into the city. That is what has filled the bowl that is New Orleans this week. But seagates at the straits can stop the wall of water from flowing in. The Netherlands has built similar gates to hold back the turbulent North Sea and they work splendidly.

Finally, and most obviously, raise, extend and strengthen the city's existing but aging levees, canal walls and pumping systems that worked so poorly in recent days.

Practice the controversy

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.

'No no, Giblets,' says me. 'Not if we 'practice the controversy.' Everyone's beliefs can find a place in pluralistic medicine!'

Brain surgery without science. Modern Republicans are the true Deconstructionists.

Battle hardened BBC reporters are stunned

BBC NEWS | Americas | Reporters' Log: Katrina's aftermath

These are the words of several veteran BBC journalists who've covered battle scenes and disasters the world over:

...The historic French quarter is reduced to a disaster zone and is beginning to look like a war zone. Some people have lost everything and are now beginning to lose their minds.

... If Bush set foot here he'd see something which no longer resembles the country he was elected to govern.

... There's a very aggressive police presence. They don't stop and talk to the refugees at all and they don't communicate with them. They just speed by in their pick up trucks and their cars pointing shotguns out of the window as they go. It's quite extraordinary behaviour.

.. I went to the superdome and there are about 15,000-20,000 people. The pace of evacuation there is unbeliveably slow....

... Elsewhere at the Convention Centre, there isn't a bus in sight. The only thing you see out of 2,000-3,000 people is police cars going through pointing shotguns. These are unbelievable conditions. Words begin to fail me.

... It is total mayhem. I have been to many disaster zones in Asia and a few in Africa and I must say considering the resources available here and all the rhetoric we've heard from Washington the situation here is much worse than comparable situations for these sort of crises in the Third world. It is quite frankly an indictment.

... I think people here would tear Bush apart if he came here, verbally if not physically.

But Bush has to show his face, be visible and show leadership. I am beginning to feel this could be a very serious political moment for him.

... There are now 1400 national guard troops arriving in New Orleans each day over the next few days. This is just in one city. Washington authorities say people will notice a show of force in the area. There will be a change. Hundreds of people will be moved out of refugees and evacuated out.

But that doesn't answer the question of why it has taken so long. And a lot of American commentators are saying - well these are scenes from the developing world rather than the world's only superpower....

... If it weren't for the water this could be Baghdad, with troops wearing body armour, trying to regain control from armed gangs.

Bodies are crudely wrapped where people died. These are the poorest, who couldn't leave the hurricane, and now have nowhere to go. In a hospital the most needy were lined up for evacuation. They waited, but the promised helicopters didn't come. The world's richest country is not able to help its sickest people.

Sometimes shame is the only way to reach a delinquent. America should be deeply ashamed.

William Gates: Destroyer of wealth

In OS X when you drag a bunch of documents to the printer icon, they print. In XP when you do that you get a dialog asking if you really want to print multiple documents. Then Word starts printing. And then it hangs. Eventually something happens, then it aborts.

I run into various bugs like this with XP all the time. Once you move away from the routine stuff people do every day, you find that Microsoft products often don't work. Word is the worst, Excel is the best, and XP is in between.

It wasn't invention or excellence that made Microsoft so dominant. It was ruthless economic warfare by a brilliant strategist and tactician who understood how to leverage every possible aspect of file format and API lock-in, and had no interest in the niceties of ethical business practice. I respect that brilliance and focus, but the combination of Microsoft's utter dominance, and their mediocre products, has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity. Bill Gates has destroyed more wealth than any other capitalist in history.

New Orleans: did the disaster plans include operating under fire?

We'll be figuring out what went wrong for years. The analysis will move faster if honest senate hearings take place, but I figure the Bushies will block those. Still, it will happen.

My gut sense is that a large number of people, starting with George Bush, should lose their jobs. However, there is a mitigating wild card:

Fifth Day of Disaster Begins With Fire

Chris Lawrence of CNN reported on the fire from a rooftop on a police station, where he said officers were 'barricaded' because of people 'shooting at the station'.

'It's very hard to tell [what's happening],' he said. 'The Fire Department can't get near the building without a police escort.'

My employer sent very important and appreciated truck loads of supplies to some of our hospital customers. Those trucks required poice escorts.

Dud disaster scenarious anticipate urban warfare? Does that helps explain, in part, why FEMA has failed so catastrophically. Beyond, of course, having their budgets stripped for Iraq and "Homeland Security".

Update 9/2: I think another factor that was not considered was how many of those who remained required medical attention. The victims of 9/11 were largely vigorous, healthy, middle and upper class men and women. The victims of Katrina are often disabled, sick and elderly -- and there are many infants and children. The combination of a population with a high proportion of vulnerable persons and an urban warfare environment together may have produced a disastrous effect outside of what planners were considering. Even in the nations struck by the Indonesian tsunami would not, by virtue of less advanced medicine and a younger demographic profile, have had such a high proportion of sick and elderly persons (also, they didn't display our talent for urban warfare). I wonder if the Kobe earthquake would have been a better lesson. I recall that Japan's response to that disaster was considered to be mediocre and inadequate.

Hell to pay: The day after tomorrow

Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | New Orleans Police Told to Stop Looters

A UK newspaper reports on New Orleans:

...On some of the few roads that were still open, people waved at passing cars with empty water jugs, begging for relief. Hundreds of people appeared to have spent the night on a crippled highway...

Infant bodies abandoned in shelters. People in attics and rooftops days after the hurricaine. Evacuating functional hospitals because of roving armed gangs. Weapons everwhere.

Elsewhere ...

Charity Hospital evacuated its “healthiest patients” last weekend, but about 600 staff members and “immobile and unmovable” patients including amputees, stroke patients, and ICU patients still await evacuation. The facility remains without power or the use of phones, X-ray machines, CT scans, or computers. Physicians are transporting additional medical supplies by canoe from three nearby medical centers.

HCA has hired 20 private helicopters to evacuate patients at Tulane University Hospital and Clinic and carry food and medical supplies to the hospital, but officials report that “progress is slow” because only one or two patients can be airlifted at a time.

The hospital association said Tulane is in a “bad security situation” because of looting from individuals seeking prescription drugs.

...The head of the hospital association says Chalmette Medical Center is surrounded by water and unable to evacuate “hundreds of patients, staff, and family” because the roof is full of people, leaving nowhere for helicopter transports to land.

and from the convention center ...

Probably the most disturbing thing is that people at the convention center are starting to pass away and there is simply nothing to do with their bodies. There is nowhere to put them. There is no one who can do anything with them. This is making everybody very, very upset.

Not Mogadishu.

New Orleans.

Hell to pay.

Why so many stayed, and what they saw

NOLA.com: T-P Orleans Parish Breaking News Weblog

Detail that can't be obtained elsewhere:

..."The rescuers in the boats that picked us up had to push the bodies back with sticks," Phillips said sobbing. "And there was this little baby. She looked so perfect and so beautiful. I just wanted to scoop her up and breathe life back into her little lungs. She wasn’t bloated or anything, just perfect."

... Phillips’ downstairs neighbor, Terrilyn Foy, 41, and her 5-year-old son, Trevor, were unable to escape, Phillips said. By late Monday the surging waters of Lake Pontchartrain had swallowed the neighborhood. The water crept, then rushed, under the front door, Phillips said, then knocked it from its hinges. In less than 30 minutes, Phillips said, the water had topped her neighbors’ 12-foot ceiling and was gulping at hers.

"I can still hear them banging on the ceiling for help," Phillips said, shaking. "I heard them banging and banging, but the water kept rising." Then the pleas for help were silenced by the sway of the current, she said.

... For Phillips, evacuation seemed too costly. She and her family evacuated for Hurricane Dennis earlier in the summer. The few days in Houston cost her $1,200...

.. "I know this storm killed so many people," Phillips said. "There is no 9th Ward no more. No 8th or 7th ward or east New Orleans. All those people, all them black people, drowned."

.. Like so many other survivors, Phillips and family were picked from the flood and dropped off downtown, which was slogged with thigh-high waters, but had the Superdome and some hotels giving solace to refugees.

By early Tuesday evening, officials estimated that about 20,000 people were packed inside the Superdome. Most were hopeless, hungry and increasingly desperate, witnesses and officials agreed. Rumors of murder, rape and deplorable conditions were circulating.

"After all we had been through, those damn guards at the Dome treated us like criminals," Phillips said. "We went to that zoo and they gave us no respect."

The family slogged down Poydras Street to the Hyatt. The hotel didn’t have electricity or water, and nearly every glass window on the Poydras side had been blown out by the hurricane, but it was secure. Ranking officials from City Hall across the street had been evacuated there, including Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass.Evacuation is impossibly costly for people with few resources. It is understandable why so many poor residents, virtually all black, decided to risk staying.

Regenerating mice? I don't believe it

The Australian: It's a miracle: mice regrow hearts [August 29, 2005]

The web is alive with news of a gen-engineered mice that can regrow organs (except, most interestingly the brain -- as though the brain has a deep commitment to unaltered structures). It smells like cold fusion to me. Too incredible, too unanticipated, too revolutionary.

We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow," she said.

"It is quite remarkable. The only organ that did not grow back was the brain.

"When we injected fetal liver cells taken from those animals into ordinary mice, they too gained the power of regeneration. We found this persisted even six months after the injection."

Professor Heber-Katz made her discovery when she noticed the identification holes that scientists punch in the ears of experimental mice healed without any signs of scarring in the animals at her laboratory.

The self-healing mice, from a strain known as MRL, were then subjected to a series of surgical procedures. In one case the mice had their toes amputated -- but the digits grew back, complete with joints.

In another test some of the tail was cut off, and this also regenerated. Then the researchers used a cryoprobe to freeze parts of the animals' hearts, and watched them grow back again. A similar phenomenon was observed when the optic nerve was severed and the liver partially destroyed.

The researchers believe the same genes could confer greater longevity and are measuring their animals' survival rate. However, the mice are only 18 months old, and the normal lifespan is two years so it is too early to reach firm conclusions.

I'd bet my $10 there's something funny here.

Human evolution: fascinating things that won't be taught in Kansas

In Chimpanzee DNA, Signs of Y Chromosome's Evolution - New York Times

This discussion of the evolution of the Y chromosome is fascinating, but I was more struck by some off-handed comments about current hypotheses on human and chimpanzee evolution (none of which will be taught in Kansas). Chimpanzees, are closest relatives, are monsters -- or at least the males are. They slaughter infants of other males, they kill one another frequently, they are murderous to outsiders, their transgender relationships make human males appear enlightened.

Six million years ago, what was our common ancestor like? Did chimpanzees become nastier over time, or did we become (hard to believe) "nicer" -- or is the truth more complex than we can imagine? Was neandertal gentle, and cro magnon viscious (it appears we ate the neandertals)? Six million years is a long time -- even if it is a tiny fraction of the history of large animals.

Incredibly, genetic data and studies of ancient skeletons may combine to give us some clues to a story of a 300,000 generations...

Scientists have decoded the chimp genome and compared it with that of humans, a major step toward defining what makes people human and developing a deep insight into the evolution of human sexual behavior.

The comparison pinpoints the genetic differences that have arisen in the two species since they split from a common ancestor some six million years ago....

... The chimp Y chromosome has lost the use of 5 of its 16 X-related genes. The genes are there, but have been inactivated by mutation. The explanation, in his view, lies in the chimpanzee's high-spirited sexual behavior. Female chimps mate with all males around, so as to make each refrain from killing a child that might be his.

The alpha male nonetheless scores most of the paternities, according to DNA tests. This must be because of sperm competition, primatologists believe - the alpha male produces more and better sperm, which outcompete those of rival males.

This mating system puts such intense pressure on the sperm-making genes that any improved version will be favored by natural selection. All the other genes will be dragged along with it, Dr. Page believes, even if an X-related gene has been inactivated.

If chimps have lost five of their X-related genes in the last six million years because of sperm competition, and humans have lost none, humans presumably had a much less promiscuous mating system. But experts who study fossil human remains believe that the human mating system of long-term bonds between a man and woman evolved only some 1.7 million years ago.

Males in the human lineage became much smaller at this time, a sign of reduced competition.

The new result implies that even before that time, during the first four million years after the chimp-human split, the human mating system did not rely on sperm competition.

Dr. Page said his finding did not reach to the nature of the joint chimp-human ancestor, but that "it's a reasonable inference" that the ancestor might have been gorillalike rather than chimplike, as supposed by some primatologists.

The gorilla mating system has no sperm competition because the silverback maintains exclusive access to his harem.

Frans B. M. de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta said he agreed with fossil experts that the human pair bonding system probably evolved 1.7 million years ago but that the joint ancestor could have resembled a chimp, a bonobo, a gorilla, or something else entirely.If ourcommon ancestor was gorilla like, then chimps have taken the nasty road ...

Poisoned soils of New Orleans 8

Extraordinary Problems, Difficult Solutions

It may be that the final blow to New Orleans won't be the floodwaters, but rather what the waters turned up ...

...Louisiana, a center of the oil, gas and chemical industries, "was known for its very weak enforcement regulations," Kaufman said, and there are a number of landfills and storage areas containing "thousands of tons" of hazardous material to be leaked and spread...

...Given New Orleans's desperate straits, recovery teams will not be able to do anything with the toxic mess except pump it into the Gulf of Mexico, ensuring that the contamination will spread to a larger area, he said. "There's just no other place for it."

Once the water is gone, environmental officials will likely undertake a "grid survey," sampling the formerly flooded areas to get soil profiles and determine how safe it is for residents to move back or rebuild.

The survey is likely to take six months. "If it were me, I wouldn't go back until there was a solid assessment of contamination of the land," Kaufman said. And even then, he added, authorities will be monitoring levels of water toxicity along the coastline for years: "There is no magic chemical that you can put in the Gulf to make heavy metals or benzene go away. You're stuck with it."

Toxic soils might end up being what turns much of what was city into undeveloped lands or nature reserves.

Update 9/4/05: Happily, this may not come to pass.