Escape from voice mail hell - a database of tips on how to get a human being

A wondrous net resource, a database of techniques that will bypass voice mail systems and get to a human being. Another advance in the eternal war between vendors and customers.

Find-A-Human

Firefighters deployed to New Orleans -- to walk beside George Bush

I'd like to see some substantiation, but perhaps if enough blogs cite this the press will follow-up for us:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: The Best Use of Firefighters: Props in a Photo-Op

... As specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas....

The allegation is that Bush is all hat and no horse.

Hairworm: another creepy mind controlling parasite

In this case the 'mind' is that of a grasshopper: Parasitic Hairworm Charms Grasshopper Into Taking It for a Swim - New York Times. The hairworm compels its host grasshopper into jumping in the water. Hopper drowns, long creepy worm exits.

I've blogged on a number of these stories -- biologists seem to find examples of parasite mind control or physiologic overrides everywhere they look. Makes me wonder again if we were different back when we had worms.

Which reminds me of Toxoplasmosis. I've been skeptical, but my skepticism is waning.

Which makes me think of HIV. Toxoplamosis is very common in HIV infected persons. Almost ubiquitious. If it does alter behavior, perhaps by making humans more careless and less inhibited, then toxoplama infection in HIV might have the side-effect of spreading HIV (and thus feathering its own bed). Creepy.

Update 9/27/05: On further consideration -- what about Syphilis? That treponeme has enough DNA and species adaptation that it would be a natural host controller. It would be logical for syphilis infection to increase promiscuous behavior ...

Molly Ivins has an article archive at working for change

I used to read Molly at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, but they moved to registration only readership. I've just learned she can be read without registration here: Molly Ivins Archive.

I'll have to add her back to my news page.

FEMA Disabled: LA Times via DeLong

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Why FEMA Was Missing in Action

Old story. Slash budget, appoint flunky. The bureaucrats that actually do all the work, and know what to do, quite.

The agency's core budget, which includes disaster preparedness and mitigation, has been cut each year since it was absorbed by the Homeland Security Department in 2003. Depending on what the final numbers end up being for next fiscal year, the cuts will have been between about 2% and 18%. The agency's staff has been reduced by 500 positions to 4,735.

I know a few federal bureaucrats. Impressive people. Dedicated public servants. Scrupulously apolitical -- as they must be in public. They're the equal of the private sector executives I know. They can take other jobs. Under Bush they've been taking those other jobs.

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.