How Bush Blew It – Newsweek‘s fascinating and balances look at how government handled the storm. It is five pages, but still nowhere near in-depth, gives a lot of information but tries to avoid placing blame, and is an all-around interesting read, even if it is difficult to know how true it all is.
Those who advocate for smaller government frequently suggest that outsourcing things to businesses is more effective. In practice we find a huge number of instinces where outsourcing with federal, state, or even local government oversight leads to gross mismanagement, abuse, price-gouging, and the like. But sometimes the theory makes a lot of sense. If someone had put Walmart in charge of the disaster relief supply chain, those supplies would have gotten there a heck of a lot faster. Even without being in charge of anything, their pre-positioned supplies (foresight, what a concept!) and amazingly well-coordinated global supply chain network allowed them to respond incredibly quickly with much needed water and food to some of the hardest hit areas.
Well, the hardest hit areas that FEMA hadn’t gotten to yet. There have been credible reports that FEMA officials turned away Walmart trucks loaded with supplies. Not to mention Red Cross, firefighters, volunteers, and people with boats. So yay for the morons at FEMA…
I have my problems with Walmart’s labor practices, but I have to give kudos where they are due. Good job, Walmart. You put the federal government to shame.
Pentagon releases new draft rules for the use of nuclear weapons – The short version: making it a lot easier and more likely that nukes will be used, specifically in the “war on terror,” and not as a deterrant. What an absolutely terribly awful, potentially disasterous idea. They sure picked a good time to release this. I can just see the spin: Katrina shows that we need to be ever vigilant to terrorists!
Focus on the Family tries to get Bat Boy: The Musical banned in a California school district, fails – Yay for the school board not caving to crazy religious rhetoric. Do these people even know anything about the show?
How to survive a free fall from 35,000 feet – Won’t you feel silly if you find yourself in that situation and haven’t read this!
Why is FEMA so gosh-darn incompetent? – “They’ve got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified,” said a Texas firefighter. “We’re sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven’t been contacted yet.”
FEMA’s incompetence disrupted dozens of relief efforts – They turned away boats, firefighters, water, food, and the Red Cross, stating that things needed to be managed through a central authority. Great, except that it took that central authority several additional days to figure out what it was doing.
Superdome is seething scene of last resort – The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.
Head of the New Orleans emergency operations described the relief effort as a national disgrace – There is a lot more of this to come. They’d better not get off like they did on 9/11 — people need to pay for this.
bq. 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. 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.
— Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.
More disgusting quotes in this vein that show this administration cut needed funding for incredibly important, science-backed projects so as to preserve tax cuts and pump more money into the war in Iraq.
Poseidon computer system detects drowning girl and alerts pool lifeguards, probably saving her life – Watch the video footage to see how cool and useful this is. It is hard to have any kind of job where you are forced to sit and watch something all day. But not only do computers not have the problem of boredom and split attention, they also have the ability to see things people can’t. A fine supplement to the human lifeguard presence at public swimming pools.
bq. Those of us in New York watch the dire pictures from Louisiana with keen memories of the time after Sept. 11, when the rest of the nation made it clear that our city was their city, and that everyone was part of the battle to restore it. New Orleans, too, is one of the places that belongs to every American’s heart – even for people who have never been there. Right now it looks as if rescuing New Orleans will be a task much more daunting than any city has faced since the San Francisco fire of 1906. It must be a mission for all of us.
Maybe, just maybe, the Republicans will get us out of this Iraq mess – Well, Frank Rich is right inasmuch as the Democrats continue to be completely useless.
The future of television distribution – In a presentation to the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School, Mark Pesce proposes moving back to the 1950s model of television sponsorship, where one advertiser sponsors the entire show. The new twist? The advertiser also provides the distribution — internet bandwidth, millions of free DVDs, etc. — and networks simply aren’t relevent anymore. I love this. I absolutely love this. I think he is right on target here, this model makes more sense than anything I’ve heard of so far.
And The Bandwidth Played On – A 1996 rant about how faster internet connections would be the death of the web. Still an interesting read today. The web certainly is nothing like what it used to be.
The story of Suck.com, possibly the internet’s first blog (among other things) – Unfortunately this article is really, really, really long.