Watch the math sparks fly

The best commentary on the Bill Bennett comments have come from the Freakonomics guys, who did seem to start the entire thing.

Bennett's offensive commentary

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Now mind you, nowhere does he point out the obvious point that even if we did successfully prohibit abortions in this country we would only move the bankruptcy date of Social Security back a few years, having not changed the pay-in to pay-out ration that much.

One point that Leavitt makes is quite interesting, to wit:

4) When a woman gets an abortion, for the most part it is not changing the total number of children she has; rather, it is shifting the timing so those births come later in life. This is an important fact to remember. One in four pregnancies ends in abortion and this has been true for 30 years in the U.S. But the impact of abortion on the overall birth rate has been quite small.

This is unsourced and I would like to see some data and theory on the matter.

Beyond that, it's amazing how large the indignation industry is in this country. Here was a statement which, true or false, kind-hearted or malicious, did not kill or hurt anyone, and left no one richer or poorer. The fact that many people got exorcised about this empirically meaningless statement is amazing. It says a lot about the wealth we have as a society when we can afford the endless chattering classes.

Fun with education

While it's strange that the priests of the education establishment always maintain that the presence of middle and upper class students helps out lower-class students, what is actually most interesting about this article is that the misspellings of "lose" (as in not win) are equal to it's correct spellings (3 apiece).

Two unrelated things

Via Instapundit, some thoughts on profiling and lawsuits

As I recall, though, the detainees were charged with various crimes -- such as immigration law violations, etc. -- not simply with "being Muslim." And, in fact, these guys were apparently guilty: "Elmaghraby and Iqbal were deported to their home countries after serving time for charges unrelated to terrorism -- Elmaghraby for a counterfeiting charge and Iqbal for fraud."

Prosecutors enjoy nearly unlimited discretion on whom to prosecute, and if federal prosecutors chose to prosecute people they feared might have terror connections for unrelated crimes I don't see how that can make out a constitutional violation. Perhaps, though, I misunderstand the claim, as the story isn't very clear.

And my favorite Irish band from Wisconsin, the Kissers have an interesting tour blog.

Before anyone asks

Before anyone asks, I'm very fine with DeLay being indicted. Particularly after his "no more fat to cut" statement.

Further on that thread, see the Franklin Delano Bush by David Boaz of Cato and this column by Mark Steyn, money quote:

Big-time Republicans tell me Bush's profligacy is doing a great job of neutralizing the Dem advantage in the spending-is-caring stakes. This may have been true initially -- in the same sense as undercover cops neutralize a massive heroin-smuggling operation by infiltrating it. But, if they're still running the heroin operation five years later, it looks less like neutralization and more like a change of management.

Well put

From Dr Sowell

It is a shame that ancient history is seldom taught in our schools. Finding out that people thousands of years ago were basically pretty much the way they are today — people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual orientation — would reduce our chances of having Utopian hopes for big changes any time soon.

A useful vicious

This month's winner for biting commentary comes, not surprisingly, from Jeff Clark who dubbed The Aristocrats "an endurance contest for chronic masturbators".

I haven't actually seen the movie., but I haven't heard much good about it.

And speaking of endurance contests, September is conspiracy to stop me from getting more than 5 hours of sleep a night. I finally have a light day and I get a new client with a crash and burn project that keep me up till 5:30, writing a blog post while files upload.

Deep thought

If you had to think of a name for a band or rugby team, you could do a lot worse than the Green Apple Splatters.

Rambling thoughts on hearing peace speeches

I apoligize for the rambling nature of this post, but my brain is a bit foggy right now.

Two notable things.

• If Cynthia McKinney is going to have a hyperbolic denunciation of the past 5 years, she should really get the details right. Cheney is from Wyoming, not Montana.
  
• "people signaling passing helicopters with gunfire" is the most ludicrous statement ever made.

There some other weird things such as Ramsey Clark's statement that "We'll only be safe when the defense budget is cut by 90%", the weird attempt to link Haiti and the Palestinians to anything and everything, the endless self-congratulation and so much more.

I suppose the underlying (and unconscious) theme behind all of the speeches was the need for authenticity, which really wasn't there.

I was reminded of the "Fingerbang" (they form a boy band) episode of South Park when the mall manager pans their audition. One of them says "But we tried out best!" The mall manager: "Really? That was your best? Wow."

Well put by Kaus

The ever-readable Mickey Kaus has some good insight

Escape from TimesSelect: The NYT's Tom Friedman, in an exceptionally blowhardish appearance on Meet the Press, laments the effect of massive U.S. borrowing from China:

I think we have--we are now in a position where China has-- they're heading for $1 trillion, OK, of our--in reserves that they're going to be holding, basically. And the leverage that is going to give China over the United States in the coming years, God knows where-- how that's going to play out.

Hmm. If you lend a trillion dollars to someone, does that give you leverage over them or them leverage over you? I'd always thought it was the latter, especially when the debtor is a sovereign nation. (Keynes: "Owe your banker 1000 [pounds] and you are at his mercy; owe him 1 million [pounds] and the position is reversed.")

It's worth noting that the Chinese (and whoever) are gambling on the US Government keeping it's word and paying back all of their debts, which seems a bit iffy.

Vegan fist

Naturally I was drawn to Vegans file lawsuit over surveillance at ham store.

That day, two vegans — vegetarians who eat only plants and plant products — were wrapping up an animal cruelty protest with a handful of other vegans when they noticed a man in a CVS pharmacy parking lot taking pictures of them.

Later, they would learn that the man was an undercover homeland security detective, according to a federal lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia filed Thursday on the vegans' behalf.

Short version: they have some protest, some guy takes pictures of them, they get the photographers tag number, photographer has them pulled over and then takes paper containing tag number.

Grievances: They claim their right to privacy was violated, he claims he needed the car to be used in further undercover work (which is to say he regarded his earlier actions as private).

There are too many annoyances to list individually so I'll just stick with this one.

The primary complaint of both parties was that the other violated their right to privacy in some way. While the abortionistas have been trying to define privacy as inherently vaginal this goes even further in lunacy.

Both parties were obviously and self-consciously in public when all of this happened, namely in the Honeybaked Ham parking lot.

One can't be in private and in public at the same time.

However isn't it nice these three found each other?

The Hendrix Show

I just returned from the Hendrix show. I had a good time, there was a good turnout and all in all it was a success. It was surprisingly well documented both in audio, video and photo.

Gallery Here (or just click on the Photo.) The photos didn't turn out to be that notable, but not bad all things being equal.

Random sample of reaction to the "Weekend of Protest"

Or whatever it's called.

Daily Kos Guidelines
The Crazies as seen by the shrill (in this case Malkin)

Politics in the style of Runyon

From the Belmont Club, channeling Damon Runyon

The Gaza withdrawal may turn out to be far more dangerous to the Palestinian Authority than to Israel because it unleashed powerful forces which Abbas has been unable to control. It now threaten to drag him like a man whose foot has been caught in the traces of runaway horses. The sad trainwreck unfolds. Hamas blows up its own parade through stupidity. Unable to lose face, Hamas rockets Israel from Gaza. Sharon, loathe to concede the Gaza withdrawal may have endangered Israel, will kill a score of terrorist leaders and hit the Palestinians in the pocketbook to show he's tough. That will get the 'militants' all jumping up and down, while the PA teeters like a house of cards in a Category 4 hurricane and the peace movement hums an inspirational hymn indistinguishable from the shrieking of the wind.

Phil Ochs said it first

The world began in Eden and listed in Los Angeles was one of Phil Ochs' later and unremarkable songs.

That was in the sixties. Now I see these two headlines

• Jihad' prevented in Los Angeles
  
• Mosque bombing plotter gets 20 years

Members of two of the worlds major religions, both getting caught trying to commit terrorism in the same city making news on the same day. Weird.

Everything's bigger in Texas

I was just watching MSNBC's storm coverage. They sent all 5 foot 4 inches of Rita Cosby to Galveston to be buffered by the wind, eerily resembling a Saturday Night Live skit.

They later cut to a local affiliate who also had sent people to Galveston. Texas newscasters, at least the hurricane covering variety, were around 230 pounds each and barely moved. It was a weird contrast.

Friday rapid fire

• Assess your risks! - this is the first time I've said this, but there is a very good series over at the Daily Kos about disaster preparedness
• Pay for blog pay rates
• Texas Emergency Management blog - oddly enough I've heard of this guy before. Good stuff, he quotes Clausewitz with

  Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war...
  
  Friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper. The military machine, the army and all belonging to it, is in fact simple; and appears, on this account, easy to manage. But let us reflect that no part of it is in one piece, that it is composed entirely of individuals, each of which keeps up its own friction in all directions...
  
  This enormous friction, which is not concentrated, as in mechanics, at a few points, is therefore everywhere brought into contact with chance, and thus facts take place upon which it was impossible to calculate, their chief origin being chance, As an instance of one such chance, take the weather...

  
  Which is a quote well worthy of reflection.
  
• GreenPeace vs Kennedys - about time.
• An oldie but a goodie by one of my favorite lefties, David Corn, about the infrastructure of the modern anti-war movement.
• Federalism RIP - mandatory evacuations of pets? debated in the US Senate.
• In this rather ordinary column by Steven Moore in Opinion Journal, he does the math and finds that the current numbers currently slated to be spent on Katrina work out to $400,000 to every family displaced by Katrina.
  
• The AJC on school "Resegregation" - Education central planners are a plague upon our society, a quote

  Typically in New York, they'll go to a high school in which there are 4,000 kids, all black and Latino except for maybe 10 whites and 15 Asian kids, and they'll say, "This is a diverse population, with many minorities." Diverse has come to be a euphemism for segregated. And when they say many minorities, it's very deceptive to readers, as if these were Albanians. No, these are apartheid schools. But if you won't name reality, you can't change it.

  Why does anyone take these people seriously, let alone regard them as humanitarians? They want to micromanage society in ways that Mussolini only dreamed about, but they precede it with 5 fuzzy adjectives and they're heroes.
• Kaus has a nice post about the serious and long-term effects of the Davis-Bacon Act
• Chris Nolan has an incoherent post in favor of (as near as I can tell) inertia and the status quo. The criticism she replies to does seem to be very valid though.
  

Hehe. I do a spell check and the spell checker wants to replace Micromanage with "necromancer".

Oddly enough

I decide to check and see exactly where in Texas my upstream web host is located and I see

Many of VIP-Hosting's customers have been requesting information regarding our data center operations during hurricane Rita. The VIP-Hosting data center is in a reinforced building and is equipped with a generator that will come online within ten seconds of a power outage. All servers are on UPS backups that will sustain power for the few seconds it will take for the generator to come online.

The voice communication system in the Houston area is experiencing heavy traffic so we ask that any non priority support issues and other requests be submitted through the integrated ticket system during this time.

Which is a good sign. It would seem that Texas is much more prepared than Louisiana for one of these things.

Go Dell!

To my great surprise I received my new laptop today. I hadn't even received a notice that it had shipped! Actually they said it would ship this coming Monday.

My first impression is quite impressed. The machine is tiny and light, and from what I can tell quite fast. The keyboard is going to take some getting used to, but I think this will work out quite well. And as it turns out I have 2 unsecured wireless access points within range (though I'm currently using my wired network as I type this blog post on the new machine).

Any suggestions as to what a laptop needs?

The West turns into Rome

Dutch Talk-Show Host Plans to Take Heroin on TV

I'm not one to interfere with evolution, but if there is an audience for this sort of reality TV, it's a very sad sign.

Get riled up with the AJC!

Naturally I was drawn to Cynthia Tucker and her column "So . . . illegals can work but can't learn?"

Since 2000, Georgia's colleges have employed a sensible policy that recognizes the academic potential of some illegal immigrants without swamping the state treasury. The Board of Regents voted to allow public colleges and universities to admit them if they pay out-of-state tuition rates. But the regents also gave each college president the latitude to waive that higher tuition for a limited number of students. That policy has worked well.

When I took a public finance class (around 1995 or so) at UGA I remember hearing that tuition covered about 20% of the actual cost of college for the average student. Out of state tuition was about two and a half times that of in-state tuition, so even if illegals are paying the out of state rate taxpayers are still picking up part of the bill. They are also displacing legal students who would otherwise be accepted. Also note how government acceptance of illegal activity doesn't faze her at all.

She closes with

But Johnson has described employers who hire undocumented workers as only "part of the problem. If they [illegal immigrants] are here working and not using taxpayer funds, that's not as much of a burden." So, he said, he and his colleagues will take a close look at any proposal to crack down on hiring practices, making sure new laws don't "impose an undue burden" on employers. After all, business executives are a reliable GOP constituency, and they fight any move to curb their access to cheap labor.

Apparently, Georgia's official policy is this: We like illegal immigrants just fine, as long as they work for dirt and stay out of sight. They're welcome to pay state income tax and local sales taxes, but that's where the welcome ends.

Well, yes. You try to maximize the benefits while minimizing the price. How revolutionary. One thing to note, is that the current situation is entirely dependent upon the voluntary behavior of the illegal immigrants. Under the reign of cruel business they still don't have to come here.

About 9 years ago I attended a Future of Freedom Foundation seminar on illegal immigration led by Jacob Hornberger (who, if memory serves was a really nice guy and a class act in general) who suggested that we let them come over to work but deny them all health, social and educational benefits. His prediction was that our kids would work for their kids.

I think that's worth a shot. It's certainly better than the look the other way policy we have now. It would also keep the self selection going in the right direction.

Stuck on stupid

One of the generals in charge of the NO cleanup delivers a smackdown to some earnest reporter type.

I think we'd all be better off with more of this. Journalists seem to think their entire job consists of asking loaded questions at press conferences instead of actually going places and discovering things.

I would also like to see the dollar cost of each story to the network or paper. Are you listening PJ Media?

Merits a read

This story about a carjacking in North Cobb is quite worth the read.

When I just ran the spell check the Blogger software wanted to replace "carjacking" with "churchgoing".

Got the laptop case

Oddly enough, I got the laptop case today. Still no word on when the new Dell will ship.

Emo Reporting

The current trend of newscasters morphing into viewer advocates is shameful to behold. Instapundit put it very well in his latest MSNBC column.

Sheehan gets weirder

From her blog on the Huffington post

if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power.

Pull out of New Orleans? How would we feed the hungry there? The conspiracy theories of New Orleans have gotten downright incoherent.

Prediction

Bush will nominate Janice Rogers Brown to take over the Sandra Day O'Connor slot. Three names must replace 3 names. Also she's a black woman, and pleasantly libertarian as well.

You heard it here first. I also think she will be announced right after Roberts is confirmed.

A pleasant surprise

For no particular reason I happened upon on the Tracy Chapman on the Tavis Smiley Show. I barely remember any of her songs, but I recall not liking any of them in particular (too earnest). So I was pleasantly surprised by her performance on the TS show. It was polished, refined and overall a very fine performance.

What struck me most was the difference her guitar made. I've been accustomed to hearing dreadnoughts for so long that the sound of a regular OM (I think) was striking, particularly since she did not belt out the song (she sang at a fairly moderate intensity). Now I really want to get an OM model as a third guitar, but I probably won't.

Observation about Clinton

I saw Clinton (Bill) on This Week yesterday. Stephanopolous was giving one of his usual sympathetic interview to his old boss. Clinton said nothing surprising, the only memorable quote was that "we should not allow the enterprise in Iraq to fail".

The amazing thing though was his ability to turn every question into a discussion revolving around himself. Be it the Tsunami, Katrina, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, it all soon became "What I would do" in such and such situation. Every single topic. Amazing.

Statement of no progress

The Erie PA pizza bomb case remains unsolved with no leads. It's good people are still paying attention to it. My original post about it was here.

Ouch

So, I finally fell off the bike. I forgot I was clipped in after I came to a stop and wound up jamming my arm a bit. Hopefully it will be better tomorrow.

Hookers for the handicapped

No, really it's true. Be glad you don't pay taxes in Denmark.

The Danish government is under attack for paying for its disabled citizens to have sex with prostitutes.

The official 'Sex, irrespective of disability' campaign pays sex workers to provide sex once a month for disabled people.

The legal guidelines advise: "It could be of great importance that the carer speaks to the prostitute together with the person in their care, to help them express their wishes."

Via the Kaus of Slate

Well put

From Reason's interview with NYT columnist John Tierney

I find it ironic that after half a century of the golden age of urban planning, people all want to live in neighborhoods that were built before then—that the planners are now trying to recreate. They were built by private developers and private streetcar companies, and the market guided it. I've heard it argued that urban planning is one area where the market really doesn't work that well, that you find in great cities that there was a lot of central planning of the street grids. I'd like to know more. You obviously need someone to set some rules, but I still tend to think that the really successful cities and neighborhoods are the ones where there's a lot of trial and error, people trying things on their own.

Which brings to mind the programming definition of creationism

The (false) belief that large, innovative software designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has shown repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population -- and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong.

It's annoying that the current design v evolution debate consists of spastic posturing, it's really an interesting topic.

Thursday rapid fire

• Bush Urges End of Trade Tariffs, Subsidies - this would actually be a legacy worth remembering, and probably the first "Conservative" thing he's done (with the exception of the tax cuts) since becoming president.
• You Don't Save What You Don't Own - a nice summation of the bus thing in NOLA
  
• Trial Of The Century: Keillor V. MNspeak.com - Someone else approximately shares my feelings about Garrison Keilor
  
• Via the Agitator
  

  ...if I can't have a libertarian paradise where state power defers to social power, or use recent events to urge others to the wisdom of such a state of affairs, I'm willing to propose a second-best for America: replace the three branches of republican government with permanent joint rule by Wal-Mart and the Salvation Army. Go on, tell me you could honestly do worse.

  From Colby Cosh
• I can't find a link to this anywhere, but Commie-Rocker Steve Earle sold one of his songs to be used in a truck commercial. It was quite the talk of the DBT email list (which I still read periodically)
• Since we don't hear anything about hurricane relief in Alabama and Mississippi can we assume that state and local government did their jobs there?

Katrina satellite photos

Google Maps has satellite photos of New Orleans from Aug 31 of this year.

Vile

Amid Katrina Chaos, Congressman Used National Guard to Visit Home

This same guy is under investigation by the FBI as well. The shamelessness of some people is without peer. Makes you wonder how much of the upcoming billions of dollars to be spent on relief is going to swallowed in outright fraud. 30% is always a safe assumption, but in the case of NOLA you have to wonder how high that percentage is going to go.

An amazing conflict of interest

Family of Red Sox fan sues gun maker

In May, the city of Boston settled a lawsuit by Snelgrove's family for $5 million. As part of the settlement, the city cooperated in the suit against the gun maker and will receive half of any damage award, up to $2 million.

Is it me, or switching sides like that a monumental conflict of interests?

Things that currently annoy me

• Ebay is having some sort of malfunction with one of their DNS servers and I can't up a bid on a cool tripod


• This article

  An air purifier helped suck up some of the errant smoke, but not all of it. Newly pregnant, Kump began thinking about a story told to her by a pregnant co-worker at the Tides: After her first visit to her obstetrician, the doctor was convinced that Kump's co-worker was a smoker, when in fact she had never touched a cigarette in her life.
  
  Kump began eyeing those ashtrays more perilously, concerned about her exposure to secondhand smoke and the consequences to her health and that of her unborn child.
  

  It actually uses an unnamed friend of someone as a source, and it uses the phrase "began eyeing those ashtrays more perilously"? Have these people no respect for the English language?
  


• This article "Katrina raises Hillary Clinton's profile" in the Houston Chronicle. It contains 11 paragraphs and 11 sentences.

Low expectations

From the article Palestinians Celebrate Freedom in Gaza

Palestinians torched empty synagogues in the Morag, Kfar Darom and Netzarim settlements, as well as a Jewish seminary in Neve Dekalim. Later, a Palestinian bulldozer knocked down the walls of the Netzarim synagogue.

In Netzarim, two young Palestinians waving flags stomped on the smoldering debris outside the synagogue, and others took turns hitting the building with a large hammer.

"They (Israelis) destroyed our homes and our mosques. Today it is our turn to destroy theirs," said a man in Neve Dekalim who gave his name only as Abu Ahmed.

Israel removed some 8,500 Gaza settlers from their homes in 21 settlements last month, and razed homes and most buildings in the communities. However, the Israeli Cabinet decided Sunday to leave 19 synagogue buildings intact, drawing complaints from the Palestinians and criticism from the United States.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Israeli decision "puts the Palestinian Authority into a situation where it may be criticized for whatever it does."

So this behavior was expected and excused before the fact.

As Tom Palmer remarked about Chechnya, what do you do when it's too late to do the right thing?

Althouse says it better

When did you stop watching "The Daily Show"?

This week's show, the first post-Katrina coverage, has been just blatantly telegraphing from the very first moment that the whole point of the show is to slam Bush. I'm upset about the hurricane and find it very off-putting to see political ideologues salivating over a chance to get Bush over this. I'm not even sure that's what the show goes on to do. I just can't bear to watch it. Instinctively, I don't want to watch.

I've found that I mostly Tivo through most of it to get to some of the interviews and sketches. It's also a bit strange that they've cut down on the sketches (they've gone from every episode to less than half) in favor of Stewart holding forth on some topic or another.

To quote Greg Geraldo on the late and lamented Tough Crowd

Most comics, they just go for the laugh, but you, you like to tell a story....

Sunday rapid fire

• Big Lebowski Fest - I peruse Wikipedia trying to find the population of Louisville and find their entry on the annual Big Lebowski festival.
• A fine post by Dave Kopel on the current gun grabbing in New Orleans.
• And would you believe that a Hot Brown isn't a term for some vile act?
  

Jane Galt at her best

From one of several posts recently about poverty and culture

In other words, middle class culture is such that bad long-term decision making also has painful short-term consequences. This does not, obviously, stop many middle class people from becoming addicted to drugs, flagrantly screwing up at work, having children they can't take care of, and so forth. But on the margin, it prevents a lot of people from taking steps that might lead to bankruptcy and deprivation. We like to think that it's just us being the intrinsically worthy humans that we are, but honestly, how many of my nice middle class readers had the courage to drop out of high school and steal cars for a living?

I'm not really kidding. I mean, I don't know about the rest of you, but when I was eighteen, if my peer group had taken up swallowing razor blades I would have been happily killed myself trying to set a world record. And if they had thought school was for losers and the cool thing to do was to hang out all day listening to music and running dime bags for the local narcotics emporium, I would have been right there with them. Lucky for me, my peer group thought that the most important thing in the entire world was to get an ivy league diploma, so I went to Penn and ended up shilling for drug companies on my blog.

Friday rapid fire

• The Laws of Cartoon Physics

• Do you believe that no one can voice support of the IRAQ war UNLESS they are willing to serve in it?
  YET when it came to the flood, you readily assumed an expertise in crisis management within hours of the disaster?
  

  From Greg Gutfield on the Huffington Post
  
• Interesting post on the previous strife between the NO mayor and the LA govenor.
• Useful post on disaster preparedness.
• This is bad
• Commercial geo-coding of photographs makes it's first appearance.
• Very good article in the NYT on the legal issues of using the National Guard and regular army troops in disasters.
  

Water bleg

Do any of my vast legions of readers have any thoughts on water purifiers? Comments are open. To my knowledge there is the Pur filter system and one other brand, but I don't really know anything about the topic.

Quotes of the moment

"Credit you give yourself is not worth having"
Irving Thalberg

"We don't' want our slickness and professionalism to overwhelm you."
Norman Blake.

Reactions to Katrina

A person's reaction to Katrina seems to vary in direct proportion to their average daily time spent with people. The more time with people, the more likely one will see it as a human problem, either with Bush or the N.O. Residents. The less time one spends with people, the more likely to see it as an engineering (both physical and social) problem.

Oddly, I've been hearing the idea that we should not rebuild New Orleans (at least nowhere near as it was) from some surprising quarters, including me. For a good summation of the main argument, see Josh Trevino's article.

For more literal reactions, see the Agitator's post on what WalMart has done so far. It's quite staggering. The business community has done a great deal already.

Reunion photos are up

One the whole I think they turned out fair. There were about 35 photos (mostly from the reunion but a few from the day before) that turned out very poorly due to my mistakes with the Auto Exposure Lock (AEL) feature of the camera. I need to read up a bit on how to use that.

Most of the AEL problems occurred when I was trying to photograph people in the shade while still capturing a lot of the sunny landscape. I deleted the over/under exposed photos from the gallery. Very little retouching has been done to the photos.

When viewing the gallery please note that clicking the main/large image will take you to the next image in the series.

With no further ado

The 2005 Johns Family reunion

As it should be

Just got back from the vet to pick up Drex. He seemed very calm and good spirited and had has his nails cut (which makes me think they drugged him). All is back as it should be here in Steveland. It's amazing how much of an empty space is created when pets aren't there.

I'm back

Expect mucho photography to come.

Back in a bit

I'm off to the old country. Expect lots of photos.

Update: I've added word verification for commenting. Everyone keep following the saga of DirectNic vs Katrina.

And before you complain about "gouging" please read this post from Jane Galt..

History in the making

I think we'll be learning the "lessons" of Katrina for years. The chief one being to take care of the low-hanging fruit of pump maintenance and levee inspections. Most of it will be of this variety. I'm sure there will be a left wing version of the same list soon.

I think some of the unobvious lessons of the current New Orleans debacle will be

• Failure to show a police and National Guard presence in the early hours
  
• Allowing the perception of preferential treatment to go unanswered (I'll have a much longer post on self-selection in who stayed and who left when this is all done)
• No mass communications, either through megaphones on boats, or Donald Sensing's leaflet idea. This gives the impression that society has ceased to exist, hence more lawlessness and looting. For a lot of these people the more "social" people left, which altered the composition of the folks remaining. More thoughts on this later.
  
• Leaflets could also be used to convey simple instructions on how to survive in this situation. This would let people do something to improve their situation instead of just waiting there (specifically the people waiting at the convention center) feeling like suckers. Much disease prevention could be handled in this manner, for that matter a solar still (for water) seems quite possible as well.
  

Best put down I've seen in a while

From the comments on this blog post discussing shooting looters in New Orleans.

I'm so glad you aren't in charge of anything more important than your opinion...

Get ready to recoil in horror

When you see this column by Christopher Hitchens.

The market clears

I went to the bank to make a deposit (Kroger ATM) and then drove around a bit. The lowest I saw gas was $2.89, the highest was $3.41 (at a place that is always the highest) and the average was around $3.15. At least in the Avondale-Decatur area.

All of the places seemed to have gas though, which would indicate that the biggest problem didn't happen. For more on the Atlanta area situation see this post on VodkaPundit.

Fifty cents in one day. I do realize that recent events were the result of a supply disruption, and not a long-term trend, but can we drill in Alaska now? I thought that would arise in the national conversation but it seems like it won't.