Er, helpful advice for New Orleans residents from Avi Zenilman. The bottom line is
Those who can’t get insurance coverage or federal help in time to pay their mortgage are personally liable for their homes and are possibly vulnerable to foreclosure. Some banks have already begun to assuage these fears by granting borrowers at least a 90-day extension for their payments.
Wow! 90 whole days! Who says bankers have no hearts?
Surprise, surprise: a Republican zombie. Splendid Boston Herald story by Brett Arends:
The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.
And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.
The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.
Brett goes on to record that
Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders’ and horse-show organization based in Colorado.
“We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,” explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner’s office. “This was his full-time job … for 11 years,” she added.
Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.
“He was asked to resign,” Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.
Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president’s re-election campaign.
Lovely stuff! Pity there isn’t more of it in the US media.
Here’s an interesting quote:
The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. “As the water recedes,” says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, “we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.”
Q: Where did this appear?
A: in an article in Scientific American — published in October 2001.
Here’s another interesting quote:
It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV “storm teams” warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
Q: Where and when was this published?
A: In National Geographic Magazine, last October. Thanks to Dave Winer and Doc Searls for the links.
Terrific NYT column by Paul Krugman. Sample:
I don’t think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor.
At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
On September 15, Nikon is launching an 8 megapixel camera with inbuilt WiFi.
Update: it seems that Kodak is also launching a WiFi camera in October.
[Intelligent Design] no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for “both theories” would be ludicrous.
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, writing in yesterday’s Guardian.
Well, well. This from Good Morning, Silicon Valley…
Massachusetts has announced plans to back OpenDocument, an open file format for saving office documents such as spreadsheets, memos, charts, and presentation. In an announcement made Wednesday, state representatives said that to ensure their wide accessibility in the future, all government documents must be created in open formats by 2007. The proposal has vast implications, for the state and for open standards. “Given the majority of Executive Department agencies currently use office applications such as MS Office, Lotus Notes and WordPerfect that produce documents in proprietary formats, the magnitude of the migration effort to this new open standard is considerable,” state officials wrote in a document laying out the new strategy. “Agencies will need to develop phased migration plans with a target implementation date of January 1, 2007. In the interim, agencies may continue to use the office applications they have currently licensed. Any acquisition of new office applications must support the OpenDocument standard.”
For Microsoft, whose Office suite accounts for as much as 30 percent of its revenues, news that a populous state dumping its software is decidedly unwelcome. “I think it would be pretty risky for the state of Massachusetts to go in a direction like this without a clear look at the costs first,” Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft’s Office division, told the Financial Times. “It would seem to me that before taking such a big shift, they would look into it further.”
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he! But this is just an interesting illustration of a trend we’ve been seeing for some time.
I’ve seen some daft signs in my time, but this takes the biscuit. ‘Bigger’ I can understand. But ‘fresher’?
Cambridge on the first day of Autumn with the Gibbs Building in the background.