Survival of New Orleans Blog

The Interdictor (some Special Forces terminology I think) has some simply amazing commentary from a high-rise office building in NOLA right now. A truly staggering account.

Rapid Fire

• Anti-rape condom aims to stop sexual assaults - it's a female condom, and it would be quite effective
• Storms Vary With Cycles, Experts Say
• Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
• Pizza Man Bombing Remains Odd Mystery - This is still the strangest crime of the new century.
  

Amazing

I go to check on some domains today and what do I see "directNIC Versus Hurricane Katrina"

Apparently they're in New Orleans and they're toughing it out on the 26th floor of a non-flooded area. It would seem to be just a few people doing it. They are currently running a blog, a photo gallery, and a video feed (!!!) is here.

Solid Quality

Dearborn Animal Hospital (no site that I know of) gets a solid thumbs up from me. I just got back from Drex's first appointment there, and I'm very impressed. Good people, knowledgeable and kind, and surprisingly well priced.

Social Decline

From the article Police: Witnesses mum in rap mogul's shooting

"It's disturbing that someone can let off six shots in a packed club and can escape without being arrested," said Elliott Wilson, editor in chief of the rap magazine XXL. "The hip-hop community doesn't trust the police to confide info to them, and in turn the police have done little to make us feel like they give a damn about our safety. It's a vicious cycle."

He said this out loud. As if giving information on someone who had shot a member of the "hip-hop community" was some sort of deep favor to the police. Sigh.

Horrible people

3 stories, all found in one day,

First the merely classless
Osbourne Says She Evened Score With Maiden -

Sharon Osbourne says she cut Iron Maiden's power during a concert on this summer's Ozzfest tour. The wife of rock icon Ozzy Osbourne has accused the heavy metal group's singer Bruce Dickinson of badmouthing her husband on stage.

"Dickinson got what he deserved," Osbourne wrote in a letter to the group's manager. "Was Dickinson so naive to think that I was going to let him get away with talking ... about my family night after night?"

During the same show in Devore earlier this month, Iron Maiden's members were pelted with eggs and debris from the crowd.

Not that I care that much about Iron Maiden these days, but that was just ridiculous. It's an insult to any notion of professionalism.

To the horrible and sordid

Word that Sgt. Dan Kennings had been killed in Iraq crushed spirits in the Daily Egyptian newsroom. The stocky, buzz-cut soldier befriended by students at the university newspaper was dead, and the sergeant's little girl--a precocious, blond-haired child they'd grown to love--was now an orphan.

They all knew that Kodee Kennings' mother had died when Kodee was about 5. The little girl's fears and frustrations about her father being in harm's way had played out on the pages of the Daily Egyptian for nearly two years, in gut-wrenching letters fraught with misspellings, innocent observations and questions about why Daddy wasn't there to chase the monsters from under her bed.

It turns out Daddy didn't exist. And neither did Kodee.

The Tribune went to southern Illinois to learn about the bond between Kodee and Dan Kennings, and the life Kodee would face without her hero.

Instead, eight days of reporting revealed elaborate fabrications and intricate lies. There is no soldier named Dan Kennings. The charming girl people came to know as Kodee Kennings is someone else entirely, a child from an out-of-state family led to believe that she was playing a part in a documentary about a soldier.

I recommend reading the whole article (fairly short).

To the truly despicable

Funeral protests merciless

Small, pitiful groups of perverse traitors cloaked in a warped, hate-filled and degraded version of Christianity are tirelessly traveling across America, cruelly protesting at the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq.

They are scheduled to stop in Middle Tennessee today, in Smyrna and Ashland City, to dishonor the solemn services and add to the horror and grief of those who mourn Staff Sgt. Asbury F. Hawn of Lebanon and Spc. Gary Reese Jr. of Ashland City. The Army National Guardsmen served together in the 278th Regimental Combat Team and died in an enemy attack Aug. 13 in Iraq.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., will be there, not to spread the comforting Gospel of Jesus Christ, but to spew a disgustingly vulgar and crude message of gay hatred while celebrating the death of U.S. soldiers.

This evil little congregation, led by Fred Phelps, gained infamy for showing up at the funerals of homosexuals to taunt family and friends and to promote their own unique brand of hatred. This summer they started picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in battle with placards that say, "We hate gays" and "Thank God for dead soldiers."

I did some research, and its' a Kansan named Fred Phelps and his cult, oddly called Westboro Baptist Church. It's a very strange group, even for cults. Most of the members (around 100 or so) are related to Phelps by either blood or marriage, and a disproportionate number of them are lawyers. One of the main reasons they do this sordid display is to incite violence against themselves and later lawsuits against official entities who "let" it happen.

Wife beating and child abuse are seemingly specific tenets of the faith and there is some weird alignment with the Nazi Christian Identity groups as well. It's hard to imagine a more loathsome group of people.

Original links via Instapundit

Interesting

A New Orleans webcam, where it looks quite rainy.

Oddness

As of right now, Kinkos.com has expired and would seem to be available.

Annoyances

I was looking at CNN.com today and came across the article "Report: More journalists killed in Iraq than Vietnam". I thought it interesting that CNN wasn't even willing to stand behind a finding of fact, hence they put the "Report:' in the headline.

Then I read the article, relevant quote

Since U.S. forces and its allies launched their campaign in Iraq on March 20, 2003, 66 journalists and their assistants have been killed, RSF said.

The latest casualty was a Reuters Television soundman who was shot dead in Baghdad on Sunday, while a cameraman with him was wounded and then detained by U.S. soldiers.

The death toll in Iraq compares with a total of 63 journalists in Vietnam, but which was over a period of 20 years from 1955 to 1975, the Paris-based organization that campaigns to protect journalists said on its Web site.

During the fighting in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995, 49 journalists were killed doing their job, while 57 journalists and 20 media assistants were killed during a civil war in Algeria from 1993 to 1996.

Note the separate but sometimes equal "assistants" in the math. They seem to have the figures available (journalists killed during the Iraq War so far) to do an apples to apples comparison but choose not to do so. Also they artificially limit the "fighting in the former Yugoslavia" to a four year period which strikes me as quite fishy as well.

On the whole shabby work from CNN.

Much Quieter

I finally installed my new case fan and it works very well, the entire workstation is much less noisy than before.

What an exciting life I lead.

Thursday rapid fire

• Shoplifting as Social Commentary - We truly have it easy and are getting soft when we (the West that is, not the US) this happens. Germany should sentence them to live in Darfour for a year as punishment.
• E-Machine Shop - It would seem that Instapundit's era of cottage industry here. Originally from a Wired article (not online yet). You can design something entirely online, they fab it and ship it off.
• Men Smarter than Women in Australia - The article doesn't actually provide much useful information on the distribution. It also doesn't address Paulos' notion that the reason women aren't at the good end of the Bell curve is a matter of personal taste and habit (i.e. they are more likely to occasionally clean (taking up valuable time) and maintaining personal relationships whereas men are more likely willing to live in filth and lose everyone in their lives in the pursuit of a goal.)
  
• Cars, PHEV, and Green Tuning
• Another superb article + photos from Michael Yon always worth reading
  

New Gallery Uploaded

I recently visited historic Oakland Cemetery in downtown Atlanta, some of the shots turned out okay.




View Gallery

Boaz on PBS

From a good article by Cato's David Boaz

Sometimes the bias is not quite so obvious. Rather than imbalance within each report, the bias is reflected in the choice of topics. A careful listener to NPR would notice a preponderance of reports on racism, sexism, and environmental destruction, but very few reports on the burden of taxes and regulation, or the unconstitutionality of most federal programs, or the way that state and federal governments increasingly abuse the rule of law in going after unpopular defendants such as tobacco companies and Wall Street executives.

Anyone who got all his news from NPR would never know that Americans of all races live longer, healthier, and in more comfort than ever before in history, or that the environment has been getting steadily cleaner.

In the past few weeks, as this issue has been debated, I've noted other examples. Take the long and glowing reviews of two leftist agitprop plays, one written by Robert Reich and performed on Cape Cod and another written by David Hare and performed in Los Angeles. And then there was the effusive report on Pete Seeger, the folksinger who was a member of the Communist Party, complete with a two-hour online concert, to launch the Fourth of July weekend.

The real problem is not liberal bias but the inevitability of bias. Any reporter or editor has to choose what's important. It's impossible to make such decisions without a framework, a perspective, a view of how the world works.

Something else to bean in mind is that by subsiding an "independent media" the government can ensure that while having representation of the left or right in the media, they can make sure that the people they actually fund are lightweights who pose no threat.

Thoughts on Gaza

For the past few generations Israel has occupied the Gaza strip (and other areas) and the Palestinians have been doing their intifada and generally becoming resentful. Now the Israelis are pulling out and leaving them their own area. The generally cited reason is that this shorten the Israeli security perimeter and makes it easier to defend.

After decades of occupation the main Palestinian "natural" skill would seem to be rock throwing and suicide bombing. What if the Israeli end game is to give the Palestinians what they want, and then let the various groups compete for dominance in bloody fashion? This keeps them divided and busy for years and the Israelis could offer weapons and intelligence and weapons to keep the fight going (like they supposedly did during the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s). All this would leave Israel relatively secure with the Palestinians taking themslves out of the picture.

Just a thought.

Still!

I'm still doing data recovery. Still! I have no idea why all this crap is taking so long.

Curses

So, it would appear that my data drive has joined the choir invisible. I think I only dropped about two days of data, but most of that was two days worth of editing Silver Photos AND all of my time tracking stuff, which totally sucks.

The natural life cycle of American causes

They begin in tragedy and end in farce.

Joan Baez performs for Crawford War protesters.

While there are many actual events happening (see Michael Yon and a A Day in Iraq for more), here in America we concetrate more on aging baby boomer nostalgia, taking the form of listing ways that Iraq is similar to Vietnam (oddly never comparing it to the Philippines, where we also fought a Muslim insurgency.). We're also careful to take note of both opinion polls and posturing, specifically this article which had the quote:

The protesters at "Camp Casey" can claim some victory for forcing Bush to talk so extensively about the military deaths when he'd rather focus on indicators of progress in Iraq. The campers' call to bring the troops home now dominated news coverage out of Crawford this week while Bush stayed on his ranch with no public events.

A fixed date withdrawal deadline vs a benchmark withdrawal deadline? Can we live with Hyper-federalism or an Islamic republic in Iraq? How far are we willing to go to capture bin Laden, and what if we're wrong? What kind of error rate in military endeavors are we willing to live with?

All these things pale in comparison to such gripping matters as the exact verbiage of a speech and who is on vacation.

Quality from the East

I've always enjoyed analysis of world events from Asia. Der Spiegel has an insightful interview with founding father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew.

SPIEGEL: How do you explain that China is spending billions on military modernisation right now?

Mr. Lee: Their modernisation is just a drop in the ocean. Their objective is to raise the level of damage they can deliver to the Americans if they intervene in Taiwan. Their objective is not to defeat the Americans, which they cannot do. They know they will be defeated. They want to weaken the American resolve to intervene. That is their objective, but they do not want to attack Taiwan.

SPIEGEL: Really? They have just passed the aggressive anti-secession law and a general has threatened to use the nuclear bomb.

Mr. Lee: I think they have put themselves into a position internationally that if Taiwan declares independence, they must react and if Beijing's leadership doesn't, they would be finished, they would be a paper tiger and they know that. So, they passed the anti-secession law to tell the Taiwanese and the Americans and the Japanese, "I do not want to fight, but if you allow Taiwan to go for independence, I will have to fight." I think the anti-secession law is a law to preserve the status quo.

A fine post from Steve Levitt

Solid work explaing why the "Peak Oil" notion is wrong, a summary quote.

So why do I compare peak oil to shark attacks? It is because shark attacks mostly stay about constant, but fear of them goes up sharply when the media decides to report on them. The same thing, I bet, will now happen with peak oil. I expect tons of copycat journalism stoking the fears of consumers about oil induced catastrophe, even though nothing fundamental has changed in the oil outlook in the last decade.

Curiously unmentioned is that oil demand usually peaks in the month of August (it's lowest in February). I actually read all of the comments thread, which wasn't terribly illuminating. Few addressed the point in the post. It was surprising how attached people are to particular doomsday scenarios.

Technical Adventures

Here's the sequence of events

1. My CD burners stops working (not really a big deal at this point)
   
2. Some drive starts making a weird clicking sound (no other side effects).
3. I incorrectly assume that the clicking noise is coming from the inoperative CD burn
4. My computer starts to freeze for tiny periods of time, in rough accordance with the clicking noises. I also acquire a need to burn a CD, I decide to fix the problem.
   
5. I got to Comp USA at Lenox to get a new CD Burner but their power is out and I can't buy the one I wanted, so I head to Circuit City.
6. While on the way over there a guy runs into me (very lightly). Happily no harm done to either of us or our cars, so I continue on my journey.
7. At Circuit City I get a new CD Burner one that does dual layer DVDs as well, which is pretty cool. I also get a new "quiet" case fan.
   
8. Once home I install the fan and the Burner, the fan does not work (is there some secret to installing a fan besides plugging it in?
9. I also discover that the problem drive is not the broken burner, but my main data drive
10. Which leaves me moving data from one drive to another before the drive dies entirely. I also must re-activate windows and redo all of my drive letters. This is an annoying way to spend a Sunday evening.
    

Wow

This is very interesting

But will the History Channel revise their documentary?

Yet more things that annoy me

I was listening the ever earnest radio program Democracy Now on the way from my the guitar lesson and I heard for the third time today the phrase "Oil driven inflation".

Inflation is a general rise in prices, which is the same thing as a decline in the purchasing power of the dollar (or whatever currency). A rise in the price of oil does not cause this. If it did then wages would be increasing due to the oil price increase as well. It is a transfer of wealth from oil-consumer to oil-producer, which is not inflation.

Tuesday rapid fire

I suppose it's Wednesday

• Chris Nolan has some good thoughts on the Cindy Sheehan business, dubbing her the Terry Shiavo of the left. This whole matter has gotten sordid faster than I thought it would. On the whole Nolan does fine media criticism.
• A well written (for the genre) analysis of Google Search mechanisms.
• An interesting post on making the word contextual via applied technology (my phrase not theirs) at DefenseTech.
• "the law of averages catches people at the worst times, and survival favors the protected." and more insight, particularly about IEDs from Michael Yon. The photography is particularly good.
• Articles such as "Officials: Inmates used cell phones to coordinate riots" and many others like tend to confirm the Global Guerillas blog notion of disruption and Open Source warfare
  

More on the magic car

Asymetrical Information has an average post (which for them is of high quality) on the article on hybrid cars I mentioned yesterday. However the really interesting part is in the comments. That site really does have the best and most reasoned commenters.

One thing the blogosphere has left unsaid so far is: What changes can we expect with a year or two of gasoline at $2.50 a gallon? Presumably it won't stay that high for much longer, but if it did, how much more bottom-up innovation becomes feasible?

Cool and needed

I came across an interesting article on Fox News

Experimental Hybrid Cars Get Up to 250 Mpg

It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid (search), but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret — a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that boosts the car's high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel.

Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car.

Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency (search) by harnessing small amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. The extra batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car into a wall outlet at his home in this San Francisco suburb — all for about a quarter.

He's part of a small but growing movement. "Plug-in" hybrids aren't yet cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models have gotten up to 250 mpg.

...

University of California, Davis engineering professor Andy Frank built a plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since built seven others, one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were converted from non-hybrids, including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Suburban.

Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, but believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just $6,000 to each vehicle's price tag.

Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles hailed by President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though hydrogen's backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely available for years and would require a vast infrastructure of new fueling stations.

"They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, and that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick this kind of target to get the public off their back, essentially."

Curiously missing from this article is any mention of a break-even point. Namely that at some price per gallon a $3,000 add-on is well worth the expense. Granted, it comes on top of an already high hybrid price, but a back of the envelop calculation would be welcome.

It sounds very intresting, though I am a bit dubious about the "quarters worth of electricity" bit. If true, that is just staggering.

Happy 32 Mr Leland

I just got back from dinner with the House of Leland (celebrating Adam's recent birthday) at Manuel's Tavern. I had a nice time. Upon my return through the ever-flooded Dekalb County streets I find that Drex has torn down more of the blinds. Oh well.

Here are the photos I took

Friday rapid fire

• A super sonic blaster in Los Angeles (and Iraq)
• Cool military gear
• Practical and unsubsidized solar power
  

Found some old photos from 2001

I was looking for another file and stumbled across these two photos. Add in that new Photoshop action and you get one cool image. These photos were taken from Bishop Street in Midtown, and the subject is what is now Atlantic Station.



and

My favorite commies and the Blasters

Out soon

• 4-11-44 by the Blasters will soon be released ! Their first studio album (with both Dave and Phil Alvin in decades)
  
• Freedom and Weep by the Waco Brothers (my favorite left wing band who sadly only makes it to Atlanta every 5 years or so) is finally putting forth another new record.
  

Nice

A guide to Black and White photography with digital cameras.

Light blogging lately

I finally got the prints in (yay!) and now I just need to get more frames from Sam Flax, but they look very nice.

Blogging has been very light as I deal with the work that has been piling up lately. And as I spell check this before I post it I see that the word "blogging" is flagged as a misspelling.

And happy birthday Adam.

They said it

From Paul Krugman's latest column, where insists that there is a housing bubble, albeit not in areas with better geography

Housing prices move much more slowly than stock prices. There are no Black Mondays, when prices fall 23 percent in a day. In fact, prices often keep rising for a while even after a housing boom goes bust.

The bubble (construct that it is) pops and prices still increase? We have such happy problems in this country, it reminds me of our obesity "epidemic". It reminds me of the old adage "Economists have predicted 14 of the last 5 recessions".

Computer annoyances

Last night my computer was randomly freezing. I reboot and find that my two CD-rom drives are no longer working. Not really a huge problem.

I wake up today one of the CD-rom drives door is locked open. Later email goes down. What's the deal?

Ordering prints

I'm ordering more prints from the Kodak Gallery, who has done good work for me in the past. I took/created the photo above which will pair with the similar photo (with the same text) that I have of Schaef.

To upload the photos (65 megs this go-round) Kodak asks you to install an Active X control, making this the first time I've used Internet Explorer in around a month. It seems to work quite well.

In related news, Sam Flax has some extremely good deals on picture frames. While the high end frames are quite pricey, the medium is extremely low in cost.

Last call for Freedom Parkway

I think this will be my last photo expedition to Freedom Parkway for awhile. I have been photoshopping the photos a bit more.

See the Gallery

The Lonesome Fiddler Series begins

I hereby launch my lonesome fiddler photo series. The goal is to have many different people and places playing fiddle in silhouette. The below is the first draft. Much thanks to Jason for his help.




What I was shooting for is the image below. For this happen with a real person and not my angry nun bottle opener I would need a light bulb 4 feet tall. All thinks in time I suppose.

Wednesday Rapid Fire

• From Yglesias

  ...The article claims that "In Israel, American Jewish men are considered nerds," which seems reasonable. To this Jewish American man, Israelis seem like goyim. The older Ashkenazis, often born abroad, still have some connection to the tradition, but your average Israeli makes a mockery of Jewishness. The idea of a Jewish fireman or a Jewish sailing instructor is ridiculous, and everyone knows it. Of course to many American Jews the very outlandishness of the notion that you could not only have an entire army filled with Jews but that it could actually win wars is much of the appeal of the Zionist enterprise. Still, not the sort of thing real Jews do. One wonders how they find enough non-nearsighted fighter pilots.
  

• Sand Bullets in Israel - which is conveniently close to many deserts.
  
• .Net DNS component - and only six months after I wrote my own. This one looks better than mine though.
  
• Sortable Lists via CSS and Javascript
  
• This editorial from the Middle East Times discusses the possibility of the West closing the door to immigrants and visitors (which is probably what will happen if current trends continue) and this one from the Belgravia Dispatch deals with similar matters. I think history will eventually judge the current European assimilation problems as a failure of the welfare state. I was going to do a longer post on nationality and self-identified moral class but I think that will have to wait.
  

Best selling artists

I recently stumbled upon this list of top selling artists of all time. While it was pretty much what I expected there were some notable surprises, most notably, Leonard Cohen is in the top 20! He's ahead of Mettalica, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen.

I then go to the Leonard Cohen page on Wikipedia, and see this quote:

"I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work. Just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege."

which is as good a theory of working I've seen in quite some time.

Now readers, whose presence surprised you the most on the list of best selling artists? Comments are open.

The Appalachians

I just finished watching The Appalachians on PBS. On the whole, it was good, but had a few glaring flaws namely:

• Why was it funded by the Department of Veteran's Affairs and NASA?
• The failure to draw the conclusion that successful unionization was the cause of the increased wages for the coal miners, hence the increased mechanization (and safety) of the mines, and also the drop in the people needed to work the mines. The producers treated these as unrelated events.
• No music past the Carter Family, which is quite notable since there is much footage of Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson available.
  
• No mention of traits that carried over from Scotland and Ireland, namely a desire to be on the far edge of society (and I'm sure many others, such as whiskey making) Instead they concentrated just on the music as the only carryover. While important, it was hardly the whole thing.
  
• No mention of bluegrass music; they stop at string bands.
• They omit the details of the modification of the banjo over time. Originally it was a four sting instrument made from gourds. It evolved into a 5 string instrument made from cats, and now leather. They present it as coming into existence fully formed as a 5 stringed instrument. It's an interesting progression and on that stuck out by it's absense.
  
• And most importantly, they omit the importance of the cultural factors and the terrain in explaining the hardness of their lives. They wanted their independence at any cost, and living on land inhospitable to mankind was the price they paid.

Something worth reading

I finally checked out the website of Michael Yon. He's a photographer and a former special forces officer who's rambling around Iraq not embedded with any American unit. The commentary is quite different than what one ordinarily sees (it's more a here's what I did today in Fallujah) and the quality of the photography is unmatched.