Fiat Lux

Krugman today:

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans.

I think it's time to update the disaster preparedness supplies in the house.

He also makes a very good point:

I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government.

A double dip of kitteny goodness to help counteract the ongoing bad, bad news out of the Gulf region today.

This is Marcus, the feral kitty who came to us so shy he curled up into a little fearful ball anytime you got near him. He's got far to go before he can be called a fully socialized cat, but his progress towards normalcy and the hope of a happy life have improved dramatically. This is him, after he explored my desk and found the happy spot on the shelf above my monitor.

His coloring makes figuring out his origins a bit of a puzzle. He's definitely got some longhair, and if you look closely he has dark points on his face and ears, which would suggest Persian or a related breed. But he also seems to have a bit of orange tabby markings. At any rate, he is going to be one gorgerous cat.

There's a lot being said in the blogosphere right now. There's a lot of anger, frustration, grief, and pain. But Ezra wrote something this morning that I particularly like. I'm quoting the majority of it here:

George W. Bush is not up to the task of leadership. That's not said as a criticism, actually -- I am not up to the task of dancing, or running marathons. We all have failings, and Bush's essential flaw is an inability to project himself, an inability to grow in dimension during a crisis, an inability to sense that catastrophes serve as opportunities for strengthening the American community. I dislike Bush for mean-spiritedness, for his incompetence, for his smugness. But I deplore him for his smallness. That the 2004 election was a 51-49 affair is shocking. Had John McCain won in 2000, his response to 9/11 would have toasted the Democratic party for the next 20 years. Had Al Gore been in office, his leadership in the moments after would've changed the world, or at least the international community. Both of them would have brought Americans together. But Bush simply invited us to malls, wedged us apart, snookered us into a disastrous war that didn't need to be fought. For a President to hold office during a crisis of that magnitude and do as little, both socially and politically, as Bush did is almost unprecedented.

I don't blame Bush for Katrina -- he does not control the weather. And I don't blame him for the levees -- even with full-funding, they weren't scheduled to be completed for years, the levee that broke was actually one of the renovated ones, and so on; his funding decisions were criminal, but they would only have been causal five years from now. I blame him for the national guard being absent, but that's a secondary problem. What I blame him for, what I hate him for, is for not stepping up to the job of President right now. For being a small man when a big one is required. For offering a laundry list of supplies-on-the-way when his job is uniting the American people and helping them give aid and comfort to their countrymen. A President can't stop a disaster, but he can coalesce the citizenry to ease its aftermath, he can take catastrophe and use it to reknit the nation's community.

Bush didn't. He didn't do it here and he didn't do it on 9/11. In America, great things can come out of great calamity. Bush has had two opportunities to create something lasting, he has failed both times. For most else, I forgive him. For that, I never will.

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.

Source: the Boston Herald. I'm sitting here shaking my head. That's just ... wow. I mean, WOW. Exactly how is this man even remotely qualified to run FEMA?

It gets better.

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

"We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,'' explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner's office. "This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,'' she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

Now, the calibre of the political appointees to a government agency do not necessarily reflect on the calibre of the agency's staff, but it does have an impact in terms of the ability to keep key members of that staff, as well as in policies, priorities, and planning. We're seeing that impact played out in excruciating detail this week on the Gulf Coast.

This guy need to be fired.

Good one from The Sideshow this morning:

Mr. Sideshow came in earlier and quoted to me a permutation of Arthur C. Clarke's famous formulation that I'd never heard before:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I like it.

And on a related note, this little gem from TBogg:

So here's an e-mail I received today:

Hoping you'll host a link to my blog on your site -- and not too proud to beg! ;-)

[links redacted]

Lots more original art and commentary that pulls no punches. All a solo effort.

peace,
[name redacted]

After checking the blog in question out, I decided that there was nothing wrong with it, but that I didn't want to add it to my blogroll. So I sent the following response:

Thanks but no thanks.

Maybe I could have been nicer about it, but hey, it was an unsolicited e-mail. A bit later in the day I get this back:

Wow, nice snotty reply.

I'm sure your "blog" will do well with more nice widdow kitty pix...

LOL

At which point I got annoyed. Talk about being unable to handle rejection!

So here was my response:

You know something? You need to check your attitude.

YOU sent ME an unsolicited e-mail asking for a blogroll link. I could
have just ignored your request but instead I took the time to visit
your blog, read your most recent posts, and decide not to blogroll
you. I then sent you a short and somewhat flip, but not impolite,
e-mail telling you so.

Your response is to call me snotty and make fun of the fact that I
post photos of the work I do for the SF SPCA on my blog. That kind of
response does not incline me to change my mind. It makes me think I
made the right decision in the first place.

One of us has a problem, but somehow I don't think it is me.

It takes a lot of nerve to turn around and insult someone that you'd just asked for a favor.

As the semester has started to pick up steam, my calender has started to fill up with classes and study group meetings, due dates and reminders, as well as regular non-school stuff. Normally I'd be loading all of this into my trusty Tungsten C, but this semester I've been strangely reluctant to do so. In fact, for the first time in about a decade, I found myself yearning for a simple paper calender to write my appointments down in.

Then today, I found out that PalmSource, makers of the PalmOS, has been acquired by a Japanese software company. What exactly that means for people who care about PalmOS-based PDAs is unclear right now, but my guess is it doesn't bode well.

My Tungsten C is a couple of years old now. It's still chugging along quite nicely, but eventually it will need to be replaced. What's going to still be on the market when I go to replace it? And will what's out there meet my needs?

I've pretty effectively reduced my dependence on Microsoft products over the past year. Thunderbird has been working well as my e-mail client, and the Palm Desktop as the PC side of my PIM. In addition, Firefox has replaced Internet Explorer as my browser of choice, and iTunes does a fine job of managing my MP3s, although those apps are not going to be affected by my choice of PDA. If I were to buy a Microsoft-based PDA, I'd have to switch back to Outlook, and I never liked Outlook. I used it because I felt that I had to.

Microsoft's PDA OS has improved significantly from what I saw when I used it back in 2000, but I'm just not very enthusiastic about the idea. Given the choice of getting an MS-based PDA and going back to Outlook, or going to a paper solution, paper looks like a much better choice.

There are other alternatives. By the time my Tungsten finally rolls over and dies, Apple may well have come out with an iPod capable of being an effective PIM as well as a music storage device. Or other new devices may come out that work for me. We'll have to see.

UPDATE: Amid a bunch of self-congratulatory "I told you so's", David Berlind at ZDNet agrees that this is definitely not good news for the PalmOS.

Gimi and Marcus hang out on our bed. Aaron has gone back to the SPCA and Marcus, now our only foster, has decided he hates being alone in his cage. We're keeping him out as much as possible.

In his weekly radio adddress, President Bush said that Americans would come together and make the Gulf Coast "more vibrant than ever," just as they rebuilt after the devastation brought by terrorist attacks four years ago this weekend.

Last I checked, Ground Zero was still a big gaping hole, and plans for what's going to eventually go there are still very much in flux.

Oh, and Charles Krauthammer is a jerk.

In less enlightened times, there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews). A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy.

The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.

Cricitism of the President is in no way, shape, or form even remotely similar to the slaughter of unknown thousands of innocent victims. It's an odious comparison and Krauthammer ought to be ashamed of himself for making it.

They say Time heals all wounds. I suppose that's true; the pain 9/11 caused me is not as sharp as it used to be. But still, 9/11/01 was the worst day of my life.

God bless you, Kath, wherever you are.

UPDATE: Read Pete Hamill today.

I can't believe the White House let this get out.

I've been meaning to link to this Digby gem for a few days now. Here's a snitppet:

For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he's racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years. The coded language that signals tribal ID has obscured it, but don't kid yourselves. It is a party that became dominant by exploiting the deep cultural fault of the mason dixon line.

Better late than never. It's long but well worth the read.

per Brad Plumer, Bill Clinton says that Area 51 has no aliens and who know what happened at Roswell....

CLINTON: (Laughing and blushing) Well I don't know if you all heard this, but, there was actually, when I was president in my second term, there was an anniversary observance of Roswell. Remember that? People came to Roswell, New Mexico from all over the world. And there was also a site in Nevada where people were convinced that the government had buried a UFO and perhaps an alien deep underground because we wouldn't allow anybody to go there. And uhm… I can say now, 'cause it's now been released into the public domain. I had so many people in my own administration that were convinced that Roswell was a fraud but this place in Nevada was really serious, that there was an alien artefact there. So I actually sent somebody there to figure it out. And it was actually just a secret defence installation, alas, doing boring work that we didn't want anybody to else see.

...

The Roswell thing, I think, really was an illusion. I don't think it happened. I mean I think there are rational explanations and I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that revealed things. If there were, they were concealed from me too. And if there were, well I wouldn't be the first American president that underlings have lied to, or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere, hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents. But if so, they successfully eluded me…and I'm almost embarrassed to tell you I did (chuckling) try to find out.

For the record, I've always thought that the 'weather balloon' thing sounded fishy, but I'm not much for theories of vast government conspiracies either. Sooner or later, people will talk or paperwork will come to light. So chalk this one us as "who the heck knows for sure".

Still, it's kind of cool that he actually asked.

It's a measure of how normal kitten fostering has become for us that I realized I'd forgotten to mention our most recent foster. Mabel (the black kitty on top of the box) has only been with us for about a week. After Aaron went back to the SPCA, Marcus was crying pretty much non-stop. We asked for another kitty to give him a companion, and picked up Mabel.

They've been romping and playing like crazy, are gaining weight rapidly, and should both be ready to go back to the SPCA in the next few days.

Here's another item I've been meaning to link to but didn't get around to; this time from the Washington Note: Osama bin Laden's public FBI file needs a serious updating.

The ensuing comments are also worth a read.

Busy week ahead. Luckily for me, Maha has done an excellent piece about how Iraq is coming to resemble Vietnam more and more every day -- this time, by reintroducing a focus on body counts.

Isn't there ANYONE in the US armed forces who remembers ANY of the lessons we learned so painfully in Vietnam? It's not exactly ancient history, you know.

*sigh*

Back to class readings & prep for our upcoming weekend trip to Miami.

Simon Wiesenthal, who waged an untiring campaign to track down Nazi war criminals and keep alive the memory of six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, died on Tuesday at the age of 96. Full obit here.

Zecher tzaddik livracha.
(The memory of the righteous is a blessing)

A friend in NY used that phrase the other day and it's very apt. I'm on cusp right now. Waiting to see what Rita will do, waiting to see if we can get to Miami for a cousin's wedding this weekend (I unwisely chose to be changing planes in DFW right about the time Rita is supposed to be making landfall & who knows how backed up the DFW airport will be with rerouted HOU flights), and waiting to see what will happen when we get back.

Scott is (fingers crossed!) starting a new job next week, we're probably going to be moving to a new place outside the city.... in short, there's a lot going on. On a personal level, most of it is good, but for the nation, not so much.

At any rate, blogging will probably be light the next several days.

Mabel has gone back to the SPCA and we hope she will be adopted out quickly. Marcus (soon to be renamed Bear) is remaining with us pending our permamant adoption of him.

*sigh* As the person who posted it said, it makes perfect sense if you're a certain kind of person.

Of course, being a 'heretic' Jew I'm probably wrong, but somehow I suspect Jesus wouldn't approve.

Addendum -- Just realized I was not being clear enough above. I don't think Jesus would approve of wanton warmaking, not of wishing blessings on the poor bastards who are being forced to fight it.

The Republican leadership in the Senate, House and White House are ALL officially under investigation.

Heh. dKos has the details.

We're flying out tonight and I've got laundry to do.

We're home. Miami was hot as hell but it was great to see the family. I have a huge pile of catching up to do, yet we were only gone for three days!

So while snaking through the security line on the way home from Miami, my knapsack/laptop case got dropped on the floor somewhat hard. Once I'd booted my laptop and discovered that the laptop was OK I promptly forgot all about the incident. I also forgot that my Tungsten C was in the bag and was not as padded as the laptop.

I powered the T|C up today and discovered this:

Fortunately the T|C can still sync, so if I choose to pay $125 and go without my TC for about 2 weeks I can once again have a functioning T|C. Right now I'm not convinced it's worth it.

However, I'm a bit annoyed by the news that, as rumored, Palm is indeed going to be making a Windows Mobile version of the Treo, and that's affecting my judgement.

This will be fun...

A Texas grand jury on Wednesday charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme.

... but the AP has a pretty good track record of not running hoaxes:

"Leaving Brooklyn? 'Oy vey!'" That's what motorists now see as they cross the Williamburg Bridge into Manhattan.

There's a new member of our household!

When the time came to send Marcus back to the SPCA, we couldn't bring ourselves to let him go. So this week we went through the adoption process, got him neutered, and now he's ALL OURS.

He's still quite scared of strangers, although hopefully that will change over time, but he follows us around, jumps on any available lap, purrs and plays happily, and is generally a sweet, loving cat. His permanant name is Bear, and we couldn't be happier that he'll be spending the rest of his life with us.

As you might expect, since he's been here a month already, Tommy and Gimi aren't complaining at all.