Compared to car accidents this is a minicule death toll.
Just nitpicking but few causes of death are not miniscule compared to car accidents. For instance, leukemia has a miniscule death toll every year compared to car accidents. So, should we not try to fight leukemia?
But 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.
What kind of person would think that would be the best use for 50 firefighters as thousands of people were drowning in their homes?
This article is intentionally misleading propaganda.
"New Orleans' local newspaper, the Times-Picayune (search), says every FEMA official should be fired for their, "feeble response to Hurricane Katrina." And the paper's editors say the aftermath is "ultimately the president's failure.""
I don't know if that's true because I can't find any google hits for these quotes. The article where they call for the firing of every FEMA official is here. Maybe they did so also somewhere else, but those quotes are not in the article. The actual article is worth a read, by the way.
"But the paper has had nothing but praise for the performance of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, finding no fault with his failure to enforce the mandatory evacuation order he issued last Sunday."
They only mentioned Nagin once, praising one thing he did, assuming it's the same article as above. This is described as "nothing but praise". They didn't mention the evacuation in this particular piece, this is described as "finding no fault" with the evacuation. Nagin put a mandatory evacuation into effect, but some people stayed anyway, this is described as a "failure" to enforce the evacuation.
"And Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard (search) says officials at the top of the totem pole, "need to be chain-sawed off," federal officials, he means."
Brit Hume knows what he really meant because Brit Hume has PSYCHIC POWERS. Broussard did not specify federal officals. The full quote was "Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership. It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now." see the video. Look at how Brit Hume chose to quote that.
"Senator Mary Landrieu says, if the president criticizes her state's handling of the disaster, she, "might likely have to punch him.""
She was talking about criticizing the sheriff for evacuating the New Orleans prison. This is described as critizing "her state's handling of the disaster". Here's the video
Is there anything more serious you could lie about than this? No really, is there anything more serious you could lie about than this?
I love how quickly and easily all of the myriad failings of the Clinton administration in the area of intelligence, and all the times they classified information, are conveniently forgotten and the sum total of all use, abuse, and misuse of classification quickly and hypocritically glossed over and forgotten.
Download the PDF from the article summary. Go to page 5. You should see a graph of the number of documents classified and declassified.
Notice how from 1994-2000 the number of declassified documents surges well above the number of classified documents, then drops back down again?
And yes, he did specifically call for the death of a Supreme Court Justice: "And we want to pray for the confirmation process that's going on now with Judge Roberts and also the possibility of other Justices who may well step down... in one way or the other"
ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg]
I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared.
It would be a logical fallacy not to trust any other the material that this magazine chooses to publish just based on this one cruel, sadistic diatribe?
If that's true, those cops are not cops, they are armed thugs and they should be shot.
What you're saying is that everyone should be like those armed thugs. Just fight your way out!
And what of those old ladies dying in wheelchairs? "Socialists" or many other kinds of people that might disagree with you don't "want" her disarmed and dependant on the state, the fact is that she is disarmed and dependant on the state.
Should she 1) arm herself or 2) use all that cash she has on her to hire a private contractor to take her out of there? And you're seriously saying that tourists should have come armed? Come visit Louisiana! And bring your gun!
It seems very implausible that many kinds of people such as the sick, the dying, the young, the elderly, the destitute could fight or buy their way out of this hellscape or any other more moderate predicament.
Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. Some 250 emergency officials attended. Many of the scenarios now playing out, including a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, were discussed in that drill for a fictional storm named Pam.
This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens.
Funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response director.
"A lot of good was done, but it just wasn't finished," said Tolbert, who was the disaster chief for the state of North Carolina. "I don't know if it would have saved more lives. It would have made the response faster. You might say it would have saved lives."
FEMA wasn't alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the surrounding area.
Federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Federal hurricane protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers' budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu requested $27 million this year.
Both the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and a local business magazine reported that the effects of the budget cuts at the Army Corps of Engineers were severe.
In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
The Army Corps' New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.
Being prepared for a disaster is basic emergency management, disaster experts say.
For example, in the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby, said James Lee Witt, who was FEMA director under President Clinton.
Federal officials said a hospital ship would leave from Baltimore on Friday.
But the good news is that Congress was able to secure $24 billion (not a typo) in pork barrel projects in the last transportation bill a few weeks ago, including Sen. Don Young's $250 million bridges to uninhabited islands in Alaska.
A few weeks ago, Congress passed probably the most pork-laden bill of all time, a $286 Billion dollar transportation spending bill with $24 billion allocated to more than 6000 pork barrel projects.
Don Young secured $1 billion in pork spending for Alaska, including $250 million for a bridge to an uninhabited island, and another $250 million for a bridge to an island with a population fof 50, to be named "Don Young's Way".
Meanwhile, in Louisiana last year: '
For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won't be finished for at least another decade.
"I guess people look around and think there's a complete system in place, that we're just out here trying to put icing on the cake," said Mervin Morehiser, who manages the "Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity" levee project for the Army Corps of Engineers. "And we aren't saying that the sky is falling, but people should know that this is a work in progress, and there's more important work yet to do before there is a complete system in place."...
"I can't tell you exactly what that could mean this hurricane season if we get a major storm," Naomi said. "It would depend on the path and speed of the storm, the angle that it hits us.
"But I can tell you that we would be better off if the levees were raised, . . . and I think it's important and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status of these projects."...
The Bush administration's proposed fiscal 2005 budget includes only $3.9 million for the east bank hurricane project. Congress likely will increase that amount, although last year it bumped up the administration's $3 million proposal only to $5.5 million.
"I needed $11 million this year, and I got $5.5 million," Naomi said. "I need $22.5 million next year to do everything that needs doing, and the first $4.5 million of that will go to pay four contractors who couldn't get paid this year."
This was only last year. The New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers was slated for a $71.2 million cut next year alone.
There is plenty of negligence to go around. The state and local governments and FEMA seem to have been caught completely unprepared for something that has been expected for decades, the Bush administration changed the National Guard from a "national guard" to an expeditionary military force because the only other option was a draft for Iraq, Bush thanked campaign fundraisers with no relevant experience by appointing them to head FEMA, Allbaugh said upon taking office "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program.... Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level." Look at those grandmothers being plucked off rooftops and tell me it's a bloated entitlement program. Sick bastard.
Don Young and the rest of them should be thrown out. Every single one of them. All of Congress, all of them. They utterly failed the American people.
I really love George Carlin's routine on the environment. He make a single statement that really brings it all into focus. Are humans so arrogant that we think we can destory the earth let alone save it?
Are the humans really so arrogant that they think they can become the most fantastically successful and dominant species on the planet in just a few thousand generations?
Are the backwards Europeans really so arrogant that they think they can dominate the entire rest of the human world in a couple dozen generations?
Are the people really so arrogant that they think they can exhaust fossil fuels, an entire class of the Earth's strata, trillions and trillions of tons of it, in just 3 or 4 total generations?
Arguments like this are trite and useless. The Earth is big. Humans are small! And obviously small things cannot affect big things, right? This is not a scientific argument.
100 years? 200 years? We pluck out a pinhole sized chunk of a 4,000,000,000 year old pie and think that it really tells us anything that's truly long term?
This is wrong and misdirected. Current theories on climate change do not claim to predict long-term (geologically) changes in climate, and they don't have to claim anything that they don't claim to. And short-term changes in the Earth's climate can make a big difference for the planets' inhabitants.
Second, the methods of inference used go beyond direct observation of climate data by looking at the properties of ice cores, sediment strata, etc. So the data here is not limited to the last 100 years.
If a "discovery" is heavily debated and spends a lot of time coming out of the mouths of the far left and/or the far right, I can usually ignore it and move on with my life.
The problem is that this is often a deliberate strategy by anti-scientific or partisan groups in general: make baseless, outrageous criticisms and then claim that the subject is "too controversial" to decide on.
Daniel Dennett recently gave this example in the New York Times:
[T]he proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.
Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.
Stop telling me we know how everything works or that our methods are perfect and all that's left is time and discovery. In 250 years they're going to poke as much fun at what we know now as we do the science of 1750. Our medicine will be viewed as barbaric and primitive and our ideas on things like quantum physics will be viewed as remedial at best. In fact, with the speed discoveries are made now, the gap may be even bigger in 250 years. Again, this doesn't mean everything we know is bogus, it just means you shouldn't treat it like the be all end all.
First, you may have noticed that 1750 medicine looks funny to us because it was non-scientific. People did things based on trial and error, or speculation (just as you are here).
Think of it this way: suppose that in 250 years, scientists do indeed laugh at us in our primitive ways. However, they might be proved utterly wrong by scientists who came 250 years after them. And so on, and so on, and so on. So on the basis o
That would be quite absurd. Obviously they look for chemical qualities that would be implied by ozone level in the atmospohere, not the actual ozone itself.
For instance, you can tell the way the Earth's magnetic field has changed over millions of years by looking at the way iron particles align themselves in volanic rock that formed at different times, even if the rocks themselves do not contain pieces of the Earth's magnetic north pole.
Penguins are a highly successful species order. Evolution at work. Those of use who survive will pass on the traits needed to thrive in the new environment.
Like Mel Gibson, we can evolve. We just need to blow up the planet a few times before Darwin weeds out the traits that are bad for the species.
For this reason it is clear that we need to move anti-intellectuals generally to coastal cities. By their own admission it will do them no harm, and it will be doing our part to speed the process of evolution. In just a few thousand year the human species will have forgotten all about that troublesome bunch, and losing 25% of the Earth's habitable land isn't that much in the grand scheme of things (meaning evolutionary timescales). It will almost be worth it to better the species, who will have been adapted to the new environment with their laser eyes and inch-thick UV resistant skins.
Oh, and Katrina might be as bad as Camille was - but the only way it might be worse is because of increased coastal building. Constructing buildings in areas that have a history of hurricanes and not building them to resist these hurricanes is folly.
Here's a diagram. It has nothing to do with increased coastal construction (but nice one pulling that idea out of thin air). The problem is the entire city is below sea level and the swells may reach twice the height of the sea walls that surround the city.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to car accidents this is a minicule death toll.
Just nitpicking but few causes of death are not miniscule compared to car accidents. For instance, leukemia has a miniscule death toll every year compared to car accidents. So, should we not try to fight leukemia?
I believe this is the book you're talking about.
What kind of person would think that would be the best use for 50 firefighters as thousands of people were drowning in their homes?
Someone should redirect that to whitehouse.gov
Check out http://safetyschool.org/ for instance
We just wonder when private industry will put Nasa out of the game.
When space travel and space telescopes become profitable.
This article is intentionally misleading propaganda.
"New Orleans' local newspaper, the Times-Picayune (search), says every FEMA official should be fired for their, "feeble response to Hurricane Katrina." And the paper's editors say the aftermath is "ultimately the president's failure.""
I don't know if that's true because I can't find any google hits for these quotes. The article where they call for the firing of every FEMA official is here. Maybe they did so also somewhere else, but those quotes are not in the article. The actual article is worth a read, by the way.
"But the paper has had nothing but praise for the performance of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, finding no fault with his failure to enforce the mandatory evacuation order he issued last Sunday."
They only mentioned Nagin once, praising one thing he did, assuming it's the same article as above. This is described as "nothing but praise". They didn't mention the evacuation in this particular piece, this is described as "finding no fault" with the evacuation. Nagin put a mandatory evacuation into effect, but some people stayed anyway, this is described as a "failure" to enforce the evacuation.
"And Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard (search) says officials at the top of the totem pole, "need to be chain-sawed off," federal officials, he means."
Brit Hume knows what he really meant because Brit Hume has PSYCHIC POWERS. Broussard did not specify federal officals. The full quote was "Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership. It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now." see the video. Look at how Brit Hume chose to quote that.
"Senator Mary Landrieu says, if the president criticizes her state's handling of the disaster, she, "might likely have to punch him.""
She was talking about criticizing the sheriff for evacuating the New Orleans prison. This is described as critizing "her state's handling of the disaster". Here's the video
Is there anything more serious you could lie about than this? No really, is there anything more serious you could lie about than this?
I love how quickly and easily all of the myriad failings of the Clinton administration in the area of intelligence, and all the times they classified information, are conveniently forgotten and the sum total of all use, abuse, and misuse of classification quickly and hypocritically glossed over and forgotten.
Download the PDF from the article summary. Go to page 5. You should see a graph of the number of documents classified and declassified.
Notice how from 1994-2000 the number of declassified documents surges well above the number of classified documents, then drops back down again?
Getting crowded? Mar is the size of a planet!
The difference is that almost all of those appointments had to be confirmed by an opposition party.
These will be the first S. court nominations in 40 years where the same party controls the appointment and the confirmation.
Here's the video
He calls it "Operation Supreme Court Freedom"
And yes, he did specifically call for the death of a Supreme Court Justice: "And we want to pray for the confirmation process that's going on now with Judge Roberts and also the possibility of other Justices who may well step down... in one way or the other"
But more like "Your Rights Everywhere"
FYI:
Why is Michael Brown the head of FEMA?
The answer is simple enough: because he was the previous director's college roommate.
Why did it even occur to you to mention that the mayor was a democrat?
So how dumb are you if you just sat around rather than getting the hell out of the city?
"dumb"?
Look at those old, sick ladies in wheelchairs and tell me they were "dumb" for not leaving.
Even in the poorest parts of the country these people obviously all have cars, right?
I want you to turn on the news at look and look at those poor, sick, dying people and tell me that they were "dumb."
Come on, this is a pretty sorry, pathetic excuse on your part, and I'd like to see you try to repeat it in front of these people.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_08_28_corner-
It would be a logical fallacy not to trust any other the material that this magazine chooses to publish just based on this one cruel, sadistic diatribe?
If that's true, those cops are not cops, they are armed thugs and they should be shot.
What you're saying is that everyone should be like those armed thugs. Just fight your way out!
And what of those old ladies dying in wheelchairs? "Socialists" or many other kinds of people that might disagree with you don't "want" her disarmed and dependant on the state, the fact is that she is disarmed and dependant on the state.
Should she 1) arm herself or 2) use all that cash she has on her to hire a private contractor to take her out of there? And you're seriously saying that tourists should have come armed? Come visit Louisiana! And bring your gun!
It seems very implausible that many kinds of people such as the sick, the dying, the young, the elderly, the destitute could fight or buy their way out of this hellscape or any other more moderate predicament.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/125282
But the good news is that Congress was able to secure $24 billion (not a typo) in pork barrel projects in the last transportation bill a few weeks ago, including Sen. Don Young's $250 million bridges to uninhabited islands in Alaska.
Don Young is the Republican Senator from Alaska.
A few weeks ago, Congress passed probably the most pork-laden bill of all time, a $286 Billion dollar transportation spending bill with $24 billion allocated to more than 6000 pork barrel projects.
Don Young secured $1 billion in pork spending for Alaska, including $250 million for a bridge to an uninhabited island, and another $250 million for a bridge to an island with a population fof 50, to be named "Don Young's Way".
Meanwhile, in Louisiana last year:
'
This was only last year. The New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers was slated for a $71.2 million cut next year alone.
There is plenty of negligence to go around. The state and local governments and FEMA seem to have been caught completely unprepared for something that has been expected for decades, the Bush administration changed the National Guard from a "national guard" to an expeditionary military force because the only other option was a draft for Iraq, Bush thanked campaign fundraisers with no relevant experience by appointing them to head FEMA, Allbaugh said upon taking office "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program.... Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level." Look at those grandmothers being plucked off rooftops and tell me it's a bloated entitlement program. Sick bastard.
Don Young and the rest of them should be thrown out. Every single one of them. All of Congress, all of them. They utterly failed the American people.
We could call this site craigslist
and more.
great place to offer what you can
Are the humans really so arrogant that they think they can become the most fantastically successful and dominant species on the planet in just a few thousand generations?
Are the backwards Europeans really so arrogant that they think they can dominate the entire rest of the human world in a couple dozen generations?
Are the people really so arrogant that they think they can exhaust fossil fuels, an entire class of the Earth's strata, trillions and trillions of tons of it, in just 3 or 4 total generations?
Arguments like this are trite and useless. The Earth is big. Humans are small! And obviously small things cannot affect big things, right? This is not a scientific argument.
100 years? 200 years? We pluck out a pinhole sized chunk of a 4,000,000,000 year old pie and think that it really tells us anything that's truly long term?
This is wrong and misdirected. Current theories on climate change do not claim to predict long-term (geologically) changes in climate, and they don't have to claim anything that they don't claim to. And short-term changes in the Earth's climate can make a big difference for the planets' inhabitants.
Second, the methods of inference used go beyond direct observation of climate data by looking at the properties of ice cores, sediment strata, etc. So the data here is not limited to the last 100 years.
If a "discovery" is heavily debated and spends a lot of time coming out of the mouths of the far left and/or the far right, I can usually ignore it and move on with my life.
The problem is that this is often a deliberate strategy by anti-scientific or partisan groups in general: make baseless, outrageous criticisms and then claim that the subject is "too controversial" to decide on.
Daniel Dennett recently gave this example in the New York Times:
Stop telling me we know how everything works or that our methods are perfect and all that's left is time and discovery. In 250 years they're going to poke as much fun at what we know now as we do the science of 1750. Our medicine will be viewed as barbaric and primitive and our ideas on things like quantum physics will be viewed as remedial at best. In fact, with the speed discoveries are made now, the gap may be even bigger in 250 years. Again, this doesn't mean everything we know is bogus, it just means you shouldn't treat it like the be all end all.
First, you may have noticed that 1750 medicine looks funny to us because it was non-scientific. People did things based on trial and error, or speculation (just as you are here).
Think of it this way: suppose that in 250 years, scientists do indeed laugh at us in our primitive ways. However, they might be proved utterly wrong by scientists who came 250 years after them. And so on, and so on, and so on. So on the basis o
That would be quite absurd. Obviously they look for chemical qualities that would be implied by ozone level in the atmospohere, not the actual ozone itself.
For instance, you can tell the way the Earth's magnetic field has changed over millions of years by looking at the way iron particles align themselves in volanic rock that formed at different times, even if the rocks themselves do not contain pieces of the Earth's magnetic north pole.
https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.asp
1-800-HELP-NOW
I don't know, but you just made me think of a clever way to save the rainforests: patent cutting down trees.
Penguins are a highly successful species order. Evolution at work. Those of use who survive will pass on the traits needed to thrive in the new environment.
Like Mel Gibson, we can evolve. We just need to blow up the planet a few times before Darwin weeds out the traits that are bad for the species.
For this reason it is clear that we need to move anti-intellectuals generally to coastal cities. By their own admission it will do them no harm, and it will be doing our part to speed the process of evolution. In just a few thousand year the human species will have forgotten all about that troublesome bunch, and losing 25% of the Earth's habitable land isn't that much in the grand scheme of things (meaning evolutionary timescales). It will almost be worth it to better the species, who will have been adapted to the new environment with their laser eyes and inch-thick UV resistant skins.
Oh, and Katrina might be as bad as Camille was - but the only way it might be worse is because of increased coastal building. Constructing buildings in areas that have a history of hurricanes and not building them to resist these hurricanes is folly.
Here's a diagram. It has nothing to do with increased coastal construction (but nice one pulling that idea out of thin air). The problem is the entire city is below sea level and the swells may reach twice the height of the sea walls that surround the city.