FEMA Nixes Grassroots Radio Station for Hurricane Evacuees
Bureaucracy KO's info source at the Astrodome
by Sarah Ferguson September 8th, 2005 5:04 PM
Although the effort was http://?www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la -na-radio8sep08,1,6993197.story?coll=la-headlines- nation>trumpeted in the media as an example of grassroots ingenuity in the face of disaster, local officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency have nixed an attempt by Houston activists to set up a low-power radio station at the Astrodome that would have broadcast Hurricane Katrina relief information for evacuees.
The project was unplugged even though it had key support. On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission quickly granted temporary licenses to broadcast inside the Astrodome and the adjacent Reliant Center. The station was also backed by the Houston Mayor's office and Texas governor Rick Perry. But local officials said FEMA bureaucrats KO'd the station--dubbed KAMP "Dome City Radio"--because of "security concerns."
"They wanted unlimited access to the buildings, which we could not give to anyone in the media," said Gloria Roemer, a spokesperson for Harris County, which has jurisdiction over the Astrodome complex. Currently reporters are allowed in only on 15-minute guided tours.
According to Roemer, FEMA officials also believed they could not allocate "scarce" electricity, office space, and phone and Internet access to the volunteer station--even though activists say they offered to run the station on batteries and use their own cellphones.
Supporters of KAMP, which was set to launch at 95.3 FM, blame red tape and bureaucrats seeking to "manage the news."
"I'm very disappointed," said Councilmember Ada Edwards, who represents a mostly black district in central Houston and had issued a letter of support for the station. "One of the real challenges of this big tragedy has been access to communication--open and honest communication. I really hoped this would be an open outlet for people to get information that was unscripted and that would really address their needs.
"But it seems par for the course in terms of how this whole thing has been rolling out with FEMA and the Red Cross trying to keep tight control and manage the news," Edwards complained. "It's really sad when these people feel they have to sanitize all the time."
Activists with Houston Indymedia and Pacifica radio first brainstormed the idea over the weekend when they visited the Astrodome and spoke to swamped relief workers and survivors desperate for information about emergency services and news from back home.
"People were asking things like how can I get my FEMA check, do my kids need shots for school, can I get a free cellphone, how do I get out information about missing family members," says Jim Ellinger, a freelance radio consultant from Austin. "This is complicated stuff that you can't really address on a booming public address system. The mainstream radio stations are more focused on broadcasting to the general public about where to donate to hurricane relief, so there was no place for survivors to go to get what they need. "
"We talked to cops, volunteers, church groups--everyone said it was a good idea," Ellinger added.
But Astrodome officials were apparently more concerned about evacuees fighting over the radios. "They were worried about noise and people stealing them or that people would be tuning in to gangsta rap on other Houston stations, which they said could incite violence," says Tish Stringer, a graduate teacher at Rice University and organizer with Houston Indymedia. After several days of back and forth, activists agreed to provide 10,000 cheap, Walkman-style radios with batteries.
Google is now implanting itself firmly in Firefox - which is way uncool. If MS behaved like this, we'd have a freakout.
From Google watch:
When a Firefox user clicks on an ad from a Google-box search, Mozilla gets a cut of Google's profit. A couple of months ago it was discovered that Google is also prefetching the top result for all searches done from the Google search box. This means you end up with cookies from sites you never visit, and much bandwidth is wasted in the process. Fortunately, you can disable this "feature" by entering about:config in the address bar and then scrolling down to network.prefetch-next and toggling it to false. You can also change the default search box to any of nearly 2,000 plug-ins that can be downloaded from Mozilla.
There are other Google connections in Firefox. If you enter search terms in the location bar instead of a web URL address, Firefox goes to Google and picks off the top link, and takes you directly to that site. A surprising percentage of web surfers don't know the difference between a location bar and a search box, which makes this is a major concession to Google. If you try the same thing in Explorer, you get a search preview from MSN, but you aren't sent directly to the top site. Microsoft's behavior is less intrusive because it gives the user more options, and therefore has less of an impact on traffic patterns. Google and Firefox are behaving the way that Microsoft used to behave in the days when it forced manufacturers to bundle certain software. This behavior is unacceptable.
If you don't wear tin-foil, you haven't been paying attention.
Sometimes an emailer says it better than I ever could. Read this. Read all of it. You know why I endorsed Kerry last time? Not because I liked Kerry or ever dreamed of backing him. I'm not a liberal. I'm not a Bush-hater. I backed the war. Initially, I trusted and supported this president to the hilt at a time of great danger. But I was forced to back Kerry of all people because Bush's gross incompetence at a time of national peril was simply too great a risk to continue. Now we have the proof:
"I've considered myself a socially libertarian, fiscally conservative Republican for a very long time. I got along with the idea that I wasn't going to get a whole lot of help. College wouldn't be free. Job training would cost money and time. And I'm probably a decent example of up-from-not-much.
But after watching what's happening in New Orleans-an American city that I've loved, visited and have always wanted to return to - I can't ever vote for these people again.
Being a Republican means that you expect the government to do just a couple things for you and nothing else. Build a road. Defend us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Stuff that would be a lot less organized if we all had to do it ourselves. Everything else is just gravy.
And as we poured money into Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I thought, "Right on," because some of that money's bound to fall on my head.
Well, something else would fall on my head first.
I work for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And that means that if something really catastrophic happens in MY city, and they ask me to stick around, that's the job. We have A and B teams and I'm a disaster recovery specialist on Team A. I've drawn up plans with names like Drawbridge and Smoldering Crater.
Here's what these people would do for me.
They would leave me there to die.
Look at the facts. There's no coordination on the ground right now. The city has no fresh water, no electricity, no services. The floodwater has so much oil and toxins in it that it's flammable.
In psychology they have what is called a fight-or-flight response. When faced with danger, do you subdue it or do you flee? Some of it has to do with risk assessment, but in this case, there is no flight. There is nowhere to run. So flight means die. If my choice was to pull a pistol on a truck driver or Nat, Jarren, Jayson, or any of you dies, that's no choice at all.
I'm not talking about the looters grabbing big-screen televisions and basketball hoops. I'm talking about the ones that are chest-deep in water carrying bottled water and diapers. You can't tell me for three days to be patient, the bus is coming, and they're piling up bodies in the street median.
We have known that this sort of disaster could occur for a century. Hell, the tour bus driver told me about it on the plantation tour. This means that we have been able to envision the stark reality of this occurring for a week-the newspapers all said the storm would hit New Orleans last Thursday.
A week to get buses? A week to get fishing boats? Trucks? This is the United States! I read someone who said, "All the people who weren't bedridden, or had money, or had cars left. The people that are left had none of those things."
There are people tonight who are going to sleep on overpasses for the fourth straight night. There are prisoners who will do the same. There are people dying at a convention center because no one will tell them that no one is coming for them, and the National Guard is protecting the kitchens. There are police officers who are turning in their badges because they've lost everything, have no guidance, and don't want to be shot by a looter.
There are people tonight inside a concrete domed stadium with holes in the roof and no air conditioning who were told the buses are coming today, and they might, or they might not. There is no food. There is no water. There are bodies floating through the
Not just any tab - that's been patented by some godless son-of-a-whore. I mean the specifics of an implementation for tabs at the top of a row of virtual document "panes". Tabs that contain a control for managing the tab state, and an iconic representation of the tab content and context.
"If you didn't see the movie (when it aired in mid-June), here it is in a nutshell: a category four hurricane destroys a vital pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico...panic sweeps of the nation...speculation drives the price of crude higher and higher...U.S. government turns to Saudi Arabia for oil...Saudi extremists commit terrorist attacks, killing 300 American oil workers...America sends troops to Saudi Arabia...still major lines at gas stations...Americans begin to turn against each other...the U.S. government decides to turn to Russia for oil...the Russians help in return for an investment in the upgrade of their pipelines...oil falls from it's high of $153 a barrel down to around $77...and all is right with the world."
It might be true, I haven't demonstrated the veracity of the claim myself. It does seem to resonate with a number of my prejudices - so I think it's safe to air this as a greivance to presumably sympathetic readers.
Some of you can probably supply anecdotal evidence, No? I'd like to make broad reccomendations in the future, and hope that some of you have little else to do.
Oh yeah - all that 196 KHz sampling has done so much good now! Play this thing over the wireless headset, and all music deteriorates to the quality of the "lite rock" loop they are playing to keep you on hold.
These guys need a place to put their money, and avoid paying taxes on it "while it's doing some work," again.
"One more bubble, and we retire with half-a-billion."
Tiresome. The ideas are as fruitless as before - many more of us will go broke working 75 hour weeks, while big investors walk off with a tax break, if not the rewards for effort.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Villiage Voice:
Your GUI now ships out anywhere you like, via HTTPS! Of courese, you are hosed once you fire up a GDI app.
From Google watch:
If you don't wear tin-foil, you haven't been paying attention.In the future, everyone will get hard over InterPr0n for 15 minutes.
Open isn't open, when you have MS RMS encrypting HTML for all but the intended recipients and output devices.
Pity the nearest significant body of water seems to be Lake Erie.
You remind me again, why I "friended" you.
I read it all over:
Google is the new Echelon.
What's the Libertarian position on aid to NOLA?
I wet my pants on that one, too. Incompetence instead of malice....
Now, go change your soggy trousers.
"I've considered myself a socially libertarian, fiscally conservative Republican for a very long time. I got along with the idea that I wasn't going to get a whole lot of help. College wouldn't be free. Job training would cost money and time. And I'm probably a decent example of up-from-not-much.
But after watching what's happening in New Orleans-an American city that I've loved, visited and have always wanted to return to - I can't ever vote for these people again.
Being a Republican means that you expect the government to do just a couple things for you and nothing else. Build a road. Defend us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Stuff that would be a lot less organized if we all had to do it ourselves. Everything else is just gravy.
And as we poured money into Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I thought, "Right on," because some of that money's bound to fall on my head.
Well, something else would fall on my head first.
I work for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And that means that if something really catastrophic happens in MY city, and they ask me to stick around, that's the job. We have A and B teams and I'm a disaster recovery specialist on Team A. I've drawn up plans with names like Drawbridge and Smoldering Crater.
Here's what these people would do for me.
They would leave me there to die.
Look at the facts. There's no coordination on the ground right now. The city has no fresh water, no electricity, no services. The floodwater has so much oil and toxins in it that it's flammable.
In psychology they have what is called a fight-or-flight response. When faced with danger, do you subdue it or do you flee? Some of it has to do with risk assessment, but in this case, there is no flight. There is nowhere to run. So flight means die. If my choice was to pull a pistol on a truck driver or Nat, Jarren, Jayson, or any of you dies, that's no choice at all.
I'm not talking about the looters grabbing big-screen televisions and basketball hoops. I'm talking about the ones that are chest-deep in water carrying bottled water and diapers. You can't tell me for three days to be patient, the bus is coming, and they're piling up bodies in the street median.
We have known that this sort of disaster could occur for a century. Hell, the tour bus driver told me about it on the plantation tour. This means that we have been able to envision the stark reality of this occurring for a week-the newspapers all said the storm would hit New Orleans last Thursday.
A week to get buses? A week to get fishing boats? Trucks? This is the United States! I read someone who said, "All the people who weren't bedridden, or had money, or had cars left. The people that are left had none of those things."
There are people tonight who are going to sleep on overpasses for the fourth straight night. There are prisoners who will do the same. There are people dying at a convention center because no one will tell them that no one is coming for them, and the National Guard is protecting the kitchens. There are police officers who are turning in their badges because they've lost everything, have no guidance, and don't want to be shot by a looter.
There are people tonight inside a concrete domed stadium with holes in the roof and no air conditioning who were told the buses are coming today, and they might, or they might not. There is no food. There is no water. There are bodies floating through the
To learn more about Hugo Chavez's term as President of Venezuela, go to:
"Why Hugo Chavez Won a Landslide Victory"
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0817-01.htm
or:
"Hugo Chavez is Crazy!"
http://www.alternet.org/story/16255/
To learn more about George Bush's term as President of the United States, go to any gas station.
Not just any tab - that's been patented by some godless son-of-a-whore. I mean the specifics of an implementation for tabs at the top of a row of virtual document "panes". Tabs that contain a control for managing the tab state, and an iconic representation of the tab content and context.
They still port the world - via BSD pkg_util onto Winders.
Kurt,
Perhaps this explains the mythic origin of the "Cain and Abel" story...
All accesed from an Apple ][+ with an 80-column card and 300 Bps modem.
"If you didn't see the movie (when it aired in mid-June), here it is in a nutshell: a category four hurricane destroys a vital pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico...panic sweeps of the nation...speculation drives the price of crude higher and higher...U.S. government turns to Saudi Arabia for oil...Saudi extremists commit terrorist attacks, killing 300 American oil workers...America sends troops to Saudi Arabia...still major lines at gas stations...Americans begin to turn against each other...the U.S. government decides to turn to Russia for oil...the Russians help in return for an investment in the upgrade of their pipelines...oil falls from it's high of $153 a barrel down to around $77...and all is right with the world."
Some of you can probably supply anecdotal evidence, No? I'd like to make broad reccomendations in the future, and hope that some of you have little else to do.
Thanks!
No, but Troll Tuesday(tm) has its own rewards!
Run DMC? sounds like Kenny G!
Conservative Scottish Newspaper Goes Public with a Bombshell that No One Hears
It's a pyramid scheme, like Employee Stock Purchase - which floats up the volume of trades for your company, using you as the captive audience!
"I'm afraid you can't change your ESPP options until the next enrollment period, after the second quarter..."
"One more bubble, and we retire with half-a-billion."
Tiresome. The ideas are as fruitless as before - many more of us will go broke working 75 hour weeks, while big investors walk off with a tax break, if not the rewards for effort.