48 would be gr8. Well, at least as long as the buses have drivers and armor plating. (HT Glenn)

When does reality become fake? When al-Reuters covers it...

Whoops

"Regular reader who just got internet access in South Mississippi tonight! I hope it does not go out before I finish this email. I live in Gautier, just north of I 10 on the gulf coast. Unlike many, I can plead personal knowledge.
...

There was literally no way into the area for convoys that did not involve clearing hundreds of miles of roads. The bridge between Mobile and Pascagoula was closed, due to fear that it would collapse. It is still only one lane each way. I 10 was, in places,under water until Tuesday.

So where did this idea of a slow response originate? I believe it came from fearful local politicians, mostly in Louisiana, eager to deflect blame to anyone else. It was picked up enthusiastically by the media. The Cindy Sheehan story was rapidly fading, so this was simply another attack by the media, beleieving they have finally got Bush. The Plame story, the Rumsfield story, Cindy Sheehan, Abu Graib, etc… etc…

I saw emergency personnel on Tuesday evening, and I was quite happy with the response."

RTWT.

"And now the maggot of Holocaust denial has emerged from within this filth finally to reveal, to those who would not believe it, just what it is that we are up against." (HT Glenn)

AT LAST: The real blame name.

Intro And Kipling Redux

"From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.

This is garbage. ...

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise..."

Glenn Bus(ts) WaPo

"Fully evacuate?'' Yes. As Brendan Loy noted, even 48 hours is really too late -- though Nagin waited much later than that. (I've seen people doing math to the effect that you could have gotten everyone out in 24 hours, but I doubt that New Orleans could have mustered the necessary degree of organization for that.) But certainly a lot of people could have been evacuated who weren't, and that would have improved conditions for the rest, and reduced the burden on relief services. And if Nagin had gotten the buses out, they would have been available for further evacuations after the storm had passed, instead of him having to call for Greyhounds.

This is, of course, all water over the dam in the most literal sense, but given all the finger-pointing going on, it's hard to ignore this issue. Had more people been evacuated, as they should have been, before the storm hit, conditions in the city would have been better, and relief services less stressed, afterward. [My emphasis]

The Smartest Man In America

Thomas Sowell is not only smart but concise:

People who talk about a need for "change" in the law are off on a tangent, if not cynically confusing the issue. Nobody denies the need for change. The Constitution itself provides a process for its own amendment.

The real question is who should make those changes -- "we the people" through elected representatives or unelected judges?

Those who think that judges need to update the law have claimed that it is hard to amend the Constitution. But what is the evidence for that? That it hasn't been done very often?

People don't often put on one red shoe and one green shoe. But that doesn't mean that it is hard to do. It just means that they don't want to do it.

To show that it is hard to amend the Constitution, you would first have to show that the public wants it amended more often but somehow just can't seem to get the job done.

There are 27 amendments to the Constitution, which is to say 17 have been added since the original ten in the Bill of Rights. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were all ratified within 5 years of one another. The 16th and 17th were ratified the same year.

There is far less evidence that the public is dying to amend the Constitution, and just can't do it, than there is that they resent judges amending it by "interpretation."

The fact that judges feel a need to deny doing this suggests the same thing. The time is long overdue to stop repeating shopworn sophistries in defense of lawless judges.

RTWT.

A Nerdly No

Glenn points out that us nerds have an even stronger opinion than the rest of the country:



But realistically, the insurance companies are the only ones who can stop the rebuilding -- the politicos certainly won't. Including W of course...

NYeT Again

So the latest hit piece on W from NYeT begins:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 - American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark," according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission. The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11 attacks that two of the three airports used in the hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses.

And we all know that BusHitler won in that election mess in Florida in 1992, right?

Hellloo-ooo!!??

Slick who?

"The real wealth of nation lies with its people, who are forged in part by the expectations we hold of them. The Left has expected so little of those they've named as victims: they will not be disappointed."

Bus(ted) again.

UPDATE: Be sure to follow the link to the Superdome survivor's perspective.

QOTD: "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." --Albert Einstein

I passed neo's surprising test -- can you? And while you're at it you might want to examine whether Jews are generic...

Barging Out Of The Levee Canal Wall MSMemory Hole

Imagine just how amazed I am to discover this story in something vaguely resembling the MSM:

Barge could have crashed through canal's floodwall

Tuesday, September 06, 2005
BY JOHN McQUAID
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
A loose barge may have caused a large breach in the east side of the Industrial Canal floodwall that accelerated Hurricane Katrina's rising floodwaters in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and adjacent St. Bernard Parish, Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi said yesterday.

Naomi said the barge was found on the land side of the floodwall, leading Army Corps officials to believe it could have crashed through the wall and sent a huge amount of water -- which was already pouring over the top -- into the neighborhoods immediately downriver.

"We have some pictures that show this very large barge inside the protected area. It had to go through the breach," Naomi said. "The opening is a little bit wider than the barge itself. One would think it's the barge that did it." ...

Amazingly, we have here an entire story dedicated to the barge theory! And even some speculation at the end of the story that the 17th Street canal breach was caused by a barge:

Leonardo Ramirez, a construction worker and Metairie resident who lives on the Jefferson Parish side of the 17th Street Canal near the breached area, said he thought he heard a barge hitting the levee early Aug. 29, though he did not see it happen.

"At quarter to six in the morning we heard a huge bang, and then we heard another," he said. "It was so loud. It scared us."

Check it out!

And there are now some other MSM stories that actually contain barge references. But nothing from the NYeT al heavy MSMajors.

And as near as I can tell, The Rail was on top of this very early:

A prediction, levees and the levee breaks are going to be extremely big news in the next few weeks.

We’ve already heard some of it. And frankly a lot of the news will likely criticize the failure to upgrade them. But, the levees are going to be big news because the body count will be significant. And the outcry will grow, as tragic discoveries of people drowning in their homes will be trumpeted by an outraged media.

We will learn, as if it is new news, that the major levee failure was the result of empty barges broken free by the hurricane ramming the concrete retaining walls. Survivors in Baton Rouge who relayed the stories to reporters in the evacuation centers have already reported it.

And there's a very interesting comment there by an ex-FEMA employee too.

But you've got to do some serious Googling to find this stuff.

NYeT/(C)BS/CNN doesn't want you to know that even the proposed Cat 5 flood wall wouldn't have helped since it wasn't going to be built where the canal walls broke! Much less that even if Bush was clairvoyant and made everything including canal walls Cat 5 reinforced (why everyone knows that Slick Willy was going to get right on that if he could have just had ANOTHER term!) little details like barges cause just a slight complication to the "W eats babies for breakfast" narrative.

But yall just go right ahead and turn your brain to risible MSMush.

And while youre at it don't forget: I control Karl Rove.

"No doubt all of this will appear in the New York Times tomorrow." NYeT!

ABLE CONDI may not be true after all? If not, then what on earth DID Sandy stuff down his pants anyway that he'd be willing to risk that horrific $50K fine???

Karl homers agin': "But in what solar system would a four-day job interview include a solid day in which the interviewer talks about himself?"

Re-Hijacked and praying to Mecca.

Those poor, oppressed drone pilots. And you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out who supplied them...

TIMELINE OF HELL.

Oh yeah, I remember that.

The “journalism” continues -- Jeff has the takedown. (HT Glenn)

NEVER FORGET WHAT?

Why The MSMedia Are The Enemy

Terrorists can be a very small group of people or a politically weak organization. What makes the small and anonymous appear powerful and strong? In the 21st century, intense media coverage magnifies the terrorists’ capabilities. This suggests that winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately means accomplishing two things: denying the terrorists’ weapons of mass destruction and curbing what is currently Al Qaeda’s greatest strategic capability: media magnification and occasional media enhancement of its bombing campaigns and political theatrics.

(HT Glenn)

Check out my update to "Intent On Burying Drowning The Lede Leader". It gains new relevance with the emerging "breaching vs. overtopping" meme.

Steyn Rolls

And, as the years go by, it becomes clearer that the war aspects -- the attacks in New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London -- are really spasmodic flashes of a much more elusive enemy. Although Islamism is the first truly global terrorist insurgency, it shares more similarities with conventional terror movements -- the IRA or the Basque separatists -- than many of us thought four years ago. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. That's what the Islamists have bet.

Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers, and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers, but big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists' strategic goals: For example, according to a recent poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That's a "moderate" Westernized Muslim: He wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he's a "moderate" because it's not such a priority that he's prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper.

RTWT.

Yahoo - A Good 1940s German Company

I Would Call This Devastating

... except that would be a vast understatement:

Did Louisiana and Governor Blanco follow any of its plan? Based on the report we read in the New York Times yesterday, it appears that Blanco didn't even know what the plan required, or even have any knowledge of the resources and responsibilities that the state government had.

Also note the date on Lousiana's EOP. Its last revision came in January 2000. No one in Louisiana has updated this plan despite the events that followed after that date:

* 9/11
* Hurricane Ivan (Sep 2004)
* Natural Hazards evaluation of LA/NO response (Nov 2004)

Florida officials have called this correctly. The response to Katrina and its unnecessarily deadly consequences started years ago, when Louisiana and its officials refused to take emergency planning seriously and neglected to make what slight planning did take place known to the various agencies expected to respond. No amount of federal intervention could have overcome the mistakes made by state and local response agencies in the days and hours before landfall, and even afterwards the reluctance of Blanco to allow federal authority to take over the area cost more time and lives while she dithered.

Sheer incompetence. Louisiana needs to ask itself why their elected officials left them so vulnerable to this kind of disaster.

RTWT. Of course, Florida doesn't know anything about hurricanes so why listen to them?



UPDATE: Did I mention ghost trains and liability yet? (HT Glenn)

All You Need To Know About The War's Progress Since 911

... is contained by the fact that CNN's photo 911 photo gallery contains no pictures of what the end of life was like for 911 victims:



But they're eager to show dead bodies in NOLA since they think they can hurt Bush with them.



After all, those pictures of buses were just Photoshopped by conservatives.



And doesn't everyone know that the leadership of the Red Cross and Salvation Army are just right-wing shills?

Their puerile fascifism is never ending. They believe that just as they have for now stuffed Orwell into his own Memory Hole, they will be able to do the same with 911.

The venal vultures of the MSM and their Gramscian Neo-Syndicalism is part and parcel of the enemy. Now it is true that many of them are unwitting, brainwashed dupes of Gramscianism.

It's an "arc of embrace", not a crescent! Never mind that we call it a crescent. You're just taking us too literally. What's the matter with you?

Nothing's the matter with me. But the MSM needs to become unemployed from any position shaping public opinion forthwith...

4. We do not yet have teleporter nor replicator technology like you [MSM'ers]
saw on "Star Trek" in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your
worthless communications degree while the grownups actually engaged in the
recovery effort today were studying engineering.

As I pointed out just a few posts ago, Scrappleface has the best remembrance of 911 in the midst of the continuing insanity.

Let's roll and honor their bravery and sacrifice.

And turn off CNN for good.

Katrina Takes On The Tinfoil Apocalypse

Here's some perspective on just how massive Katrina was:



This is taken from the Katrina Information Map -- it's pretty cool. (Don't abuse it by adding garbage notes of course! There seem to be too many on it already.)

Now here's the same map with the effects of a small fission nuke (Hiroshima sized) superimposed in red:



When you consider how much infrastructure was taken out fairly far inland and the extent of power outages in the immediate aftermath, and then pile on the flooding of NOLA you get something that in many respects humbles the Apocalyptic effects of a small nuke.

In fact, the only small nuke hit that would even rival this would be one in NOLA that would (of course) have flooded the city. At least then folks would have realized not to pump the water out into the lake since it would be radioactive. (This idea of pumping the NOLA witch's flood brew out into the lake is going to end very badly I think; but that's a topic for another post.)

But for most cities that would be nuked, you just have to think about a nanosecond to realize that while the death toll would be hugely higher given the likelihood of no warning at all (it's now looking like the low thousands at worst), it would actually be a lot easier to get help to the survivors on the fringes since the damage would extend only to approximately the outer red ring rather than the huge rounded rectangle of the Katrina map. In general, you could get there from wherever the supplies were since the infrastructure damage would be much more localized.

Aside from the whole issue of Federalism and whether W should have invoked the Insurrection Act -- and perhaps also aside from the general pychological effects of nuclear weapons -- it would be easier to get aid to the survivors of a nuke than those from Katrina.

Tinfoil Apocalypse? Yes, the Apocalypse is coming folks. But not in the fantasmagorical imagery of Revelations. In the form of insane, nihilistic Islamic lunatics wearing "Tinfoil Hats" finally getting their fingers on the "red button" and treating it like a door knocker.

It might take Iran a number of years to develop them themselves. Or maybe OBL has already acquired them from the NorKorComs or the Russian Mafia.

Who knows? Certainly not the CIA, that's for certain.

But too much technology in the hands of the too very intensely insane can only end badly.

Very badly.

But, surprisingly, in many ways possibly not as badly as Katrina...

Let's Roll!

Today In The Memory Hole

"Four years after 9/11 the postmortem of that disaster continues to focus on the institutional failures of our intelligence agencies and government bureaucracies. Yet the larger intellectual and cultural corruption that in part made possible many of those misjudgments and mistakes does not receive the public attention it deserves. The politicizing of the academy, for example, that accelerated in the sixties had compromised the study of Islam and the Middle East long before Islamic terrorism appeared on our cultural radar. Because of this ideological distortion, centuries of consensus about the aggressive, intolerant, and expansionist nature of Islam — an agreement reflecting both the facts of the historical record and the words themselves of the Koran and Muslim theologians and jurists — were discarded in the service of an anti-Western political and ideological agenda."

And where else would an incompetence distillery be found than at the NYeT?

Head-On In Iraq

As Wretchard points out, there is a critical aspect where Iraq IS like Vietnam: focusing on the US electorate:

The enemy has not been without successes, proving tactically adaptable and ruthless. Yet at heart his strategy was static: it was to inflict a low but continuous rate of casualty on US forces and broadcast that fact to the world. The enemy center of gravity was the US electorate. They attached video and camera crews to their striking units in the same way that US forces attached supporting weapons to theirs, creating the first combined media-military arms in history. Using these new type of formations they relentlessly projected the message, 'we are in charge'. And people believed them.

Those two competing strategies met each other head-on in Iraq. The US strategy was far superior in the conventional sense. The enemy strategy was arguably the more creative and daring; with a far larger "information" dimension than the American. Each approach had its strengths and weaknesses. The American approach emphasized changing reality and letting perception follow. It played to American strengths: logistics, training, advanced weapons, tactical speed. The enemy approach was to manage perception, both among its own base and in the field of public opinion, while striving to inflict as much damage as it could on US forces. Although it was America that first used the term, it was the insurgents who truly perfected the process of "shock and awe": the mind-altering application of battlefield force. But shock and awe are evanescent while dying tended to be permanent. My own guess is that the issue is no longer in the balance. While some combination of political or military blunders could still save the insurgency the fundamentals are against them.

Luckily, the enemy hasn't yet converted to Christianity -- so dying does tend to be permanent for them. And better yet, they still seem to be stupid enough to be striving for it.

Lefties and their Islamofascist idols are just are too dense to understand the wisdom of Patton and how seriously the American military has come to take it:

"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country fantasy caliphate."

You need to read this perspective on the CNN ghouls from Charles. And Power Line points out Glenn has it right. If you don't know now that the MSM has to be utterly put out of business, I would suggest you may look like a human -- but you're really a "Kodak fiend" with no human decency.

No surrender. But can you afford the new insurance premium?

Keep Those Hoods On Boyz!

Did I forget to mention that it's no coincidence the KKK and the Islamofascists all seem to be wearing the same fashionable hoods?

In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Kreis [head of the Aryan Nations] said of al Qaeda, "You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah." Going a step further, Kreis told CNN that he had a message for Osama bin Laden: "The message is, the cells are out here and they are already in place. They might not be cells of Islamic people, but they are here and they are ready to fight."

...

Ummm -- well, actually no, I didn't forget to mention it. Look over right at "The Previous Jaw Dropper":

"I was stunned to learn the story of Haj Mohammad Amin al-Hussein, which I tell at great length in Preachers of Hate. Not only did he meet with Hitler in Berlin in 1941: he became the Arabic voice of Nazi Germany in all their broadcasts to the Arab world, exhorting Muslims to murder Jews and enact Hitler’s final solution. Not by coincidence, one of his greatest students is Yasser Arafat, who in moments of weakness claims (wrongly, I believe) that he is Haj Mohammad Amin’s nephew."

And in one of God's great jokes on the violently insane, the Islamofascists are heavily recruiting from yet another type of hoodz that may have been related to just a wee bit of an evacuation failure recently. (Hint: Buses were NOT involved.)

The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans's "projects" trying to enforce the mayor's evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his "mandatory evacuation" order.

It will be very interesting to see if THIS circle can remain unbroken.

I'm guessing only if they never take their hoods off in private...

UPDATE: A commenter over at Roger's adds some relevant perspective about just how bad NOLA's "third world" neighborhoods were:

the laissez faire attitude doesn;t end with thje cops; it PERMEATES the whole city. it's like this:

i remember a few weeks back, somebeody somehwere published results of an experiment in which they fired 700 rounds of blanks in bad nola neighborhoods to see how many calls the NOPD would get about gunfire.

they got NONE. bupkus. Zilch. nada.

this says a few things: (1) the people in these criminal infested neighborhoods have (a) no faith in their police, and (b)they have stopped fighting back, and (2) these are PROBABLY the SAME people from the same neighborhoods who "acted out" so badly in the Superdome and Convention Center.

Sounds about right to me... (Not that Nagin and Blanco shouldn't have allowed them resupply!!! Du'oh!)

UPDATED AGAIN: Welcome COTV readers! If you liked this, you might want to take a look at "Katrina Takes On The Tinfoil Apocalypse", "NOLA Machine No Go", "Projections From The MSMemory Hole" and "Barging Out Of The Levee Canal Wall MSMemory Hole".

And yes, Fascifism, Gramscian neo-Syndicalism, Islamofascism, the MSM, Totalitarianism and generally all things leftist corrupt take quite a licking here even on a slow day...

What Buses?

Glenn has the best FEMA roundup.

This has me thinking about the big picture. Us righties, being the last refuge of the analyticals, have process improvement and self analysis as one of our SOPs. So when the lefties throw the usual blizzard of FUD to distract us, we laugh most of it off but when we find one of them to be a possible chink in our armor we actually dissipate some of our resources taking a look so we don't do that again.

Then when we actually admit we may not be perfect in all respects the lefties use their MSMegaphone to translate that into us righties being the corrupt scum of the earth.

All the while those buses are left there by the left in plain view...


UPDATE: More evidence on what we face. It would be sad if it weren't so predictable....

The Old Jew strikes again.

NOLA Evacuation Watch

It starts like this:

New Orleans ignored its own plans
By Audrey Hudson and James G. Lakely
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 9, 2005

The city of New Orleans followed virtually no aspect of its own emergency management plan in the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans officials also failed to implement most federal guidelines, which stated that the Superdome was not a safe shelter for thousands of residents.

The official "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan" states that the mayor can call for a mandatory citywide evacuation, but the Louisiana governor alone is given the power to carry out the evacuation, which Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has yet to do.

This is jaw dropper material folks.

What is this? Day 13? And Day 15 from when she should have declared a mandatory evacuation?

AND THERE'S STILL NO MANDATORY EVACUATION?????????

With this kind of performance I guess I now have to agree that W should be impeached -- for not invoking the Insurrection Act...

(HT Power Line)

Oil for Food offered a lifeline of cash and influence to a regime that was starving its people. The program did not corrupt the U.N. so much as exploit its essential nature. Now Mr. Annan wants to use this report as an endorsement of his "reform" proposals. Only at the U.N. could he dare to think he could get away with this. (HT Roger)

Chickenbeavers!

It's Not Just Africa

Tim Worstall has a nice little summary of some work Bill Easterly is doing about the real root causes of poverty in Africa:

I think of this as a simple descriptive exercise to compare two alternative hypotheses: (1) Divergence Big Time was due to a savings/technology poverty trap or (2) it was due to bad government/institutions. The stylized facts emerging from this exercise support (2) strongly over (1), confirming previous literature on institutions and development.

I use three widely used measures of institutions: (1) the Polity IV measure again, now averaged over 1960-2002, (2) the Freedom House measure of political liberties (with the sign reversed, since an increase in this measure means less liberty), averaged over all available years, which are 1972-2002, and (3) Economic Freedom in the World from the Fraser Institute, averaged over all available years, which are 1970-2002. All measures of institutions are strongly significant predictors of growth 1960-2002, and make initial income negative in the regressions (significantly so in the IV regressions). The institutions story makes Divergence go away in the more recent data as well.

So which is it, bad government or the poverty trap? When we control for both initial poverty and bad government, it is bad government that explains the slower growth. We cannot statistically discern any effect of initial poverty on subsequent growth once we control for bad government. This is still true if we limit the definition of bad government to corruption alone. The recent stagnation of the poorest countries appears to have more to do with awful government than with a poverty trap, contrary to the Sachs hypothesis.

What do I mean it's not just Africa? For openers, I'm a believer in Strategy Page's long running take that corruption in the Middle East is at least a comparable obstacle to the terror masters themselves to the progress of freedom and democracy there.

And NOLA has a long and well-earned reputation in the U.S. as a corrupt gangland. Is the long-term poverty and recent abysmal leadership just a coincidence?

They Were

Cell Phones Of Smart Death

While we realized with Katrina what trouble we get into when our cellphones go down, it turns out they work to our advantage pretty nicely in Iraq in a way you may not have considered:

September 8, 2005: There’s an elaborate chess game going on in central Iraq, and along the Syrian border. Actually, it’s more of a “chase game,” as the al Qaeda and Sunni Arab terrorist groups attempt to maintain control of the shrinking number of areas where they can establish their safe houses and bomb making workshops. This process began last Fall, with the battle for Fallujah. While this left several thousand terrorists killed or captured, at least two thousand, including most of the terrorist leaders, fled Fallujah before the city fell. Over the next few months, the terrorists tried to take over another town, or portion of a city, like Mosul. This didn’t work, although it generated some great headlines about a terrorist "comeback". If the terrorists tried to hold ground, American troops came in and killed or captured them. Increasingly, the Americans arrived with Iraqi police or soldiers along, who were able to quickly canvass the liberated area to find out who might be pro-government. There were always a few. Names were taken and phone numbers given out. Sometimes, cell phones were given out as well.

The enemy became like nomads, with their caravans of cars, SUVs and pickup trucks moving at night from one sort-of-safe area to another. Increasingly, the caravans of gunmen rolls into areas containing a higher proportion of people hostile to them. The Sunni Arabs have become anti-terrorist for very pragmatic reasons; money. When the caravan of gunmen shows up, they bring with them bullies, religious fanatics and, eventually, American smart bombs. But the terrorists, and their attacks on reconstruction efforts, have also brought over two years of poverty. The Sunni Arabs used to get most of the oil revenue, now they get practically nothing, because the terrorists won’t let any goodies in. Sunnis Arabs note that when the Americans come, they bring goodies. If the Americans stay, they bring in Iraqi cops and money for jobs and building things. This is another case of money as a weapon.

The terrorists fight back by making raids of their own. They will drive into a town or neighborhood in strength, usually a few dozen gunmen. They will stay for hours, days, or even a week if their presence is not reported (which quickly brings American or Iraqi troops, and damn smart bombs.) The terrorists will try to intimidate people, to encourage them not to call the government and report where the terrorists are. More and more Sunni Arabs know the Americans will pay for information, and what the phone numbers are to call. For this reason, the terrorists are very hostile to the spreading cell phone service. Cell phones too often mean death for terrorists, as they are used by angry Iraqis to report where the terrorists are hiding. Terrorists have long used cell phones in Baghdad to set off bombs, but in the towns outside of Baghdad, and along the Syrian border, where the terrorists like to hide out, cell phones are viewed with great suspicion.

The tips have led to more reports of smart bombs hitting safe houses in towns where there are not American troops or Iraqi troops. These 500 pound bombs often often arrive unexpectedly at night (to limit civilian casualties), and set off secondary explosions, as terrorist munitions explode. Another recent tip, from an arrested suspect, led to a hiding place for two kidnap victims, including an American contractor who had been held for ten months. Most of the kidnap victims freed are Iraqis, and these rarely get reported in the American media. But kidnapping rescues are big news in Iraq, because most of the victims are Iraqis.

Terrorists are spending more of their time running, and less time planting roadside bombs or attacking Iraqi police and government officials. In the last two weeks, attacks are down by about half. Some believe that the terrorists are massing their strength to try and disrupt next months voting. But on the ground, there are more and more towns are patrolled by Iraqi police, or pro-government tribal militia, and not al Qaeda or Sunni Arab terrorists. It's becoming more and more difficult for the terrorists to hold ground, much less build and use roadside or car bombs. The objective here is to turn central Iraq into an area where the terrorists are constantly on the run, and eventually run right into the ground and out of business.

Excellent.

You Know The MSM Story Line Is Falling Apart

When even the NYeT is running stories with graphs like this:

While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.

But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.

"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.

being integral to the article rather than a buried lede!

WHOOPS. (HT WND)

And US News has an article claiming that this should have been easier to deal with than a large scale WMD event. Umm, not exactly. In fact the size of the affected area is much larger than that of most conceivable WMD scenarios -- including use of nukes. The only good news with Katrina is that the death toll is likely lower than we would see from a nuke -- but might have been fairly comparable if Bush hadn't prevailed to have Nagin and Blanco at least call for a (busless) evacuation.

More Tinfoil thoughts to come...

Looks like most are with me on not rebuilding the bulk of NOLA... (HT WND)

Time for a laugh:

"When my husband was president, we were ready for the end of the
world," said Mrs. Clinton. "And if Bill should ever become the First Gent, we'll
be ready again."

A Bush administration spokesman agreed that "having a Clinton in
the White House does create a certain sense of expectation."

Read it!

"No amount of spin will overcome the heads of the Red Cross and the Salvation Army telling this story."

How Fake Time Flies

Just in case some suspicious docs appear about how W personally ordered the levees blown up by Karl Rove, it will be Ra^ther easy to notice they're fake:



The definitive analysis is here.

You Don't Deploy Troops Beneath A Bombing Run

I'm not sure that this is an open access article so I'm going to post a good chunk so you see it:

"When you fly over the Gulf, it looks like a WMD exploded," Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul McHale told me this week. "Katrina very nearly approached the operational requirements of a WMD event; this was the first test of the high-end capability envisioned by the strategy."

The "strategy" is a three-month-old document called "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support." It describes the Defense Department's plans to defend the U.S. from a WMD attack or deal with the rubble and mass casualties of such an attack. Traditionally DoD has always helped civil authorities contend with the ruin of natural disasters. That Katrina's massive scale mirrored a WMD attack, obliterating a city, is a coincidence. But it raises the question of whether the states, or relatively vulnerable states like Louisiana, are up to the job of being "first responders" to a WMD attack or its natural equivalent. If they are not, we need to change some laws.

The popular impression left the past week-- that the government was wholly unprepared for Katrina--is not true. Significant U.S. military assistance was on alert throughout the week prior to Katrina's landfall. Why those highly trained and drilled assets did not move into New Orleans sooner is a question that should now sit at the center of a debate over who should have the authority--the states or the federal government--to be the "first mover."

According to accounts provided by several sources involved with preparations for Katrina, the Pentagon began tracking the storm when it was still just a number in the ocean on Aug. 23, some five days before landfall in Buras, La. As the storm approached, senior Pentagon officials told staff to conduct an inventory of resources available should it grow into a severe hurricane. Their template for these plans was the assistance DoD provided Florida last year for its four hurricanes.

And a week earlier than this, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an executive order delegating hurricane decision authority to the head of the Northern Command, Adm. Timothy J. Keating. Four days later, as the tropical storm soon to be named Katrina gathered force, Adm. Keating acted on that order.

Before the hurricane arrived in New Orleans, Adm. Keating approved the use of the bases in Meridien, Miss., and Barksdale, La., to position emergency meals and some medical equipment; eventually the number of emergency-use bases grew to six. And before landfall, Adm. Keating sent military officers to Mississippi and Louisiana to set up traditional coordination with their counterparts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As well, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered the movement of ships into the Gulf.

By the Pentagon's account, it carried out these preparations without any formal Katrina-related request from FEMA or other authorities. The personnel behind the massive military effort now on display in Louisiana--airlift evacuation, medical, supply, and the National Guard--was on alert a week before the hurricane. According to Assistant Secretary McHale, "The U.S. military has never deployed a larger, better-resourced civil support capability so rapidly in the history of our country."

So where were they on the two days of globally televised horror? Why, for instance, didn't DoD fly all this help close to New Orleans as soon as it saw Katrina coming? The answer, in military argot, is that you don't deploy troops beneath a bombing run; Katrina predictably would have wiped out any help put in her uncertain path, just as she rolled over the Big Easy's wholly unprotected "first responders."

Then there's American history, tradition and law. Once disaster arrives, several federal laws designed to protect state sovereignty from being swept aside by a Latin-American-style national police force dictate that a state's officials, specifically the governor, is supposed to phone the federal government and describe what they need. If asked by Homeland Security, DoD will send in the cavalry. But this is one audible at the line even Don Rumsfeld doesn't get to call.

The MSM has bungled perspective on this whole thing so badly it just defies comprehension. Although I WAS quite amazed tonight to see CNN actually showing the submarine buses. I guess even they have to start getting it when the web has material like this (HT Hugh):



(OK, OK ... I have developed a fixation with buses...)

And yes, this was a dry run for the full-on Tinfoil Apocalypse -- we will be updating the implications soon...

Bus Case Closed

Finally we have closure on the swamped NOLA buses. A caller to the Tony Snow show just pointed out that "if it was an election, those buses would have been running" [bringing the Democrat voters to the polls].

No. Kidding.

Nagin. Guilty.

Of course, you still do need to read "NOLA Machine No Go". And "Kneebones and Thighbones" for the latest on Blanco.

NOLA Machine No Go

I have been just speechless about the pitiful inching of Mayor Nagin toward mandatory evacuation. I'm still not certain he's ordered it yet! And as posts on this blog point out, it should have been ordered the second Bush and the meteorologists asked for it BEFORE the hurricane.

And I just can't bear to talk about the buses anymore. Apparently, Nagin is now claiming that school and city buses just weren't good enough -- he was waiting for Greyhounds from all over the country to converge on NOLA and save his people. It was more important for his residents to be saved in "style" than to be saved at all, apparently.



This man is just beneath contempt -- and has no ability to do any commonsense reasoning about logistics whatsoever. For instance, even if Greyhound dumped all its current passengers out on the side of the road wherever they were (unprecedented and crazy in and of itself) and headed straight for NOLA, how long would it have taken them to get there from hundreds if not a thousand or more miles away? Simple division will tell you this is just simply nuts on first glance.

This is why first responders have to be local: moving great quantities of ANYTHING over large distances may take much more time than you have in an emergency.

Now I will give you that the first responders in NOLA were themselves casualties as well as their families. But they wouldn't have been if they had planned to get everyone including their own families OUT OF THERE.

But now Thomas Lipscomb brings us some fresh perspective with "The Machine Stops". Now we can understand why there was no evacuation to start with -- as well as why it hasn't happened yet and reports of shooting at relief workers continue:

Of course behind all this is a dirty little secret well-known in New Orleans
which is also the reason almost 30% of New Orleans police precinct members
deserted during the Hurricane Katrina emergency. The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans's "projects" trying to enforce the mayor's evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his "mandatory evacuation" order.

More reinforcement for the "NOLA is two cities" concept: one a "Europe-like" tourist destination and the other fetid terrorist gang-land in the swamp. Apparently, the best course of action is to let these terrorist thugs die of disease in filthy squalor due to their complete inability to operate as rational beings. I guess I can't argue too much with that.

But did so many others have to die for this small piece of justice?

Kneebones and Thighbones?

The Captain has the best short summary of the madness in NOLA so far:

UPDATE II: Let's see if we can't paint the picture for Rev. Bobby K in the comments. FEMA positioned their assets in the area prior to the storm hitting, but not inside the impact zone, as that would have rendered them useless afterwards. A major component of that comes from the Red Cross. The Red Cross expected that either the local authorities would get the last of its citizens out of New Orleans or allow them to set up their relief provisions inside the city. To this day, the city and state have done neither, nor have they allowed the federal government to take control of the relief effort to make these decisions themselves. That means that the Red Cross personnel (and the relief provisions that FEMA helped them stage) have no way to reach those in the city anywhere, including the Superdome, the Convention Center, or any of the other shelters in New Orleans. Until Nagin and Blanco allow them to go to the victims or act to bring the victims out to them, the residents will not see any relief supplies except that dropped to them by air, a dicey proposition at best when facing toxic flood waters.

Of course, you won't hear about any of that in the MSM. How can anything not be Shrub's fault after all?

And even more amazing, even Glenn is linking to this post about racist misconduct by some local LA law enforcement. As Glenn points out, it's very possible that this is fakery of course. But it shows the utter incompetence of the MSM that they aren't all over something like this that fits their story line.

Unless they already investigated and discovered the Gretna Sheriff was a Democrat -- so they spiked the story of course...

"The Democrats may need to re-think their calls for an investigation." Of course, that makes the unrealistic assumption that they think in the first place...

Welcome to the land of the Kosmik Kuckoo Klock -- where the time is never korrekt. And the bongs are always filled. Time to go to bed folks -- can't top it...

Haiku! ... Excuse Me!

Thanks for the haiku complimenting my fonts Keith! I'm 4th from the end of this week's COTV:

Lefties blame the Bush
We were screwed from the word go
Nice use of fonts, Bob

At least I think that's haiku -- or possibly the sound I make when I sneeze ;)

Projections From The MSMemory Hole

Cold Fury has a nice little post pointing out that Tom Ridge's survival guide at Ready.gov -- including the supposedly stupid duct tape -- may not be looking quite so stupid anymore. (HT Glenn)

Even better, he digs out all the holier than thou comments from the Fascifist Gramscian Syndicalists such as Atrios and Kos mocking the whole concept of self sufficiency. (Well, OK, it probably gives them too much credit for actually having brains to call them Gramscian Syndicalists -- some of them are simply flighty emotive dupes; and they may not be self-aware Fascifists but more on that later.)

Anyway, what leaped out at me was a nice little 1-2 comment punch from Francis and sf responding to Cold Fury's post:

Francis W. Porretto 9/4/2005 2:15 pm
– You know, it never occurred to any of our leftist friends in the blogosphere or the MSM, that maybe Secretary Ridge went to the trouble of preparing a readiness web site with emergency kit lists, in the public interest. It never occurred to them that it could be anything other than partisan fear mongering. –

But this is because, were they in Ridge’s place, the use of the office to enhance their power, prestige, and partisan objectives is the only thing that would concern them. We always suspect and fear in others the darkness we know to be at the core of our selves.

Can you say "psychological projection"?

And then "sf" chips right in out of the "hole":

sf 9/4/2005 3:48 pm
Nice work!

Before the internet existed, Dems and leftists could (and did) say any outrageous thing they wanted without having to worry they’d ever be called to account, because they knew their Dem/left friends in the MSM would never publicize any spectacular goofs or outrageous comments.

While the latter is still true, fortunately for our nation the internet lets us find what they wrote and drag it out into the sunlight for all to see.

They’re like children caught doing something wrong: ‘No, really, I didn’t do it. It was, uh…my invisible friend Ralphie.”

Surely on an intellectual level they know that the ‘Net stores their past writings, but their old habit of saying anything outrageous to knife the GOP hasn’t changed yet. Oh well..

I call this the "MSMemory Hole" (in honor of Orwell, of course -- look up at that masthead folks). It's actually another form of projection in that the reason they don't believe anyone will call them on such risible hypocrisy is that many of them are simply unaware of it themselves. As emotives with basement level emotional intelligence scores (foul-mouthed Mayor Ray Nagin seems to be their current front man) they simply don't have the discipline to even check what they're saying from day to day for consistency.

After all, that wouldn't make them feel good.

And even if they did, they "project" that us righties are too stupid to call them on it.

I would suspect it's their intellectual brethren at Yahoo and Microsoft that are busy working to widen that Memory Hole.

My yardstick on when we'll actually have a chance to reverse this insanity is when Orwell's "Pacifism and the War" finally becomes widespread reading. It's barely over a page and is not all that highbrow:

The life of a clique is about five years and I have been writing long enough to see three of them come and two go — the Catholic gang, the Stalinist gang, and the present pacifist or, as they are sometimes nicknamed, Fascifist gang. My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking.

The problem of course, is that the Fascifist Gang has not yet gone lo all these many years -- and have managed to flush Orwell himself down his own Memory Hole!

Or as I've updated its name: the remodeled but perhaps even more dangerous "MSMemory Hole".

Tear Down That Levee -- Another Reason

Glenn links to this post on Rishon-Rishon pointing out that we should listen to Hastert and just buy out most of NOLA -- in the main NOT rebuilding it. He points out that this should simultaneously appeal "to both small government supporters and environmentalists" and points out the complications they were already facing just dealing with the channeling of the Mississippi. (I was also hinting at this in my "Intent On Burying Drowning The Lede Leader" post.)

I agree with all of that.

But there's another reason:

Unless we really have lost our marbles, we will not only have to ring a rebuilt NOLA with Cat 5 levees EVERYWHERE (like I said), but those levees will all have to be double/triple ringed and/or heavily patrolled IN ORDER NOT TO BE JUICY TERRORIST TRUCK BOMBING TARGETS.

The terrorists have just gotten one hell of lesson on the use of floods as a terror/economic weapon in NOLA. Imagine what the death toll would have been if there was NO WARNING AT ALL.

Culpable as I think Nagin and Blanco are (finally, even ABC has noticed), at least MOST PEOPLE GOT OUT!

And sadly, it appears the terrorists are/were already there with all the reports of shootings at emergency and repair workers!

The only good news is that NOLA is (was) uniquely vulnerable to this threat. We need to take it off the table -- but frankly, I'll be surprised if we do. The only hope I see to do the right thing is if the insurance companies start charging NOLA rebuilders a premium commensurate with the real risk.

"The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day."

"If Liberals could somehow be persuaded that Osama Bin Laden threatens their cherished social policy -- the ability to "make soup" -- then America might go to war against Islamic terrorism in peace."

Prepare for the new ice age melting of the ice caps all because of Clinton W.

Of gangs and kindergarten physics.

First we learned that Microsoft licks Chinese butt big time -- now we learn that Yahoo is objectively pro-fascist.

And, no, I DID NOT imply that FEMA is perfect! It's a big, lumbering mess just like ALL government agencies. And for all I know, Brown is incompetent. The difference between this blog and the lefty blogs is that over there you will find ZERO self criticism. Michael has a good take on it also. 'Nuff said...

What 500 Buses?

Time to expand the looney bins and finally get serious about stocking them with the MSM:

Before residents had ever heard the words "Hurricane Katrina," the New
Orleans TIMES-PICAYUNE ran a story warning residents: If you stay behind during a big storm, you'll be on your own!

Editors at TIMES-PICAYUNE on Monday called for every official at the Federal
Emergency Management Agency to be fired. In an open letter to President Bush,
the paper said: "Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were
not. That's to the government's shame."

But the TIMES-PICAYUNE published a story on July 24, 2005 stating: City,
state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give a historically blunt
message: "In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own."

Staff writer Bruce Nolan reported some 7 weeks before Katrina: "In scripted
appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red
Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas
drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of
harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation." ...

That's some REALLY SERIOUS PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION going on there. Looks like a case study for the record books to me.

Look, if you were complicit in the deaths of thousands of people because you were too lazy as a reporter to question Nagin about alternatives (like buses!) to this sort of lunacy, just think how your brain would re-wire itself with denial in order to avoid resorting to self-inflicted harm.

"The Coast Guard evacuated over 7,000 people the first three days. That probably would have been sufficient if THEY [Mayor Nagin et al] HAD FOLLOWED THE EVACUATION PLAN. "

That's Odd ...

... somehow I haven't heard about any of this on the MSM:

As a former Air Force logistics officer, let me clarify the following for the idiots in the Left Wing Media:

1. Things can get destroyed far more swiftly than they can get fixed.

2. The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

3. You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

4. We do not yet have teleporter nor replicator technology like you saw on "Star Trek" in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grownups actually engaged in the recovery effort today were studying engineering.

5. Getting people out of the stricken areas is the most pressing concern, since we cannot get enough supplies into it to safely sustain them.

6. Getting the airport, bridges, and roads repaired is the next priority, since the supplies and people needed to fix levees, drain the city, and repair the infrastructure cannot be transported via aircraft. You need to truck them in.

7. Once the infrastructure is repaired, it is vital to get the ports in working order. Equipment and supplies can only be moved into the area in large quantities by sea.

8. Only then can recovery efforts begin in earnest.

9. The above will take weeks and months, not days or hours.

10. No amount of yelling, crying, and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above. Facts are facts. Opinion is cheap.

11. You could do more help actually keeping your damned satellite trucks out of the way of the folks doing the real work.

12. If you must vent your indignation, how about targeting the Louisiana officials who did absolutely nothing to protect their constituents? At least you can help ensure the populace doesn't elect these clowns again.

Oh, yeah. Doesn't fit the storyline, does it?

"... see, ya, we're goin' to Disneyworld." There are simply no words to describe my reaction to this so I won't. But you might have some words come to mind when you read it. And they won't be advised for use in polite company...

Denial Ain't Just A River In Egypt

From Drudge comes this incredible picture:

If he sits there like that for another couple of years, things may get better.

Or the bulldozers may knock down his house -- apparently with him in it.

Or he may die of dehydration and disease somewhat sooner than that...

No Parting By Moses W Allowed

`As I said in my post, "I swear, if President Bush had shown up like Moses, parted the waters and led the people to safety, the liberals would have sued him for violating the separation of church and state."`

Speaking of Biblical references, did I forget to mention that little note about Caesar and Jesus that Lee wrote recently? Well, no, but you really need to read it...

You might want to take his blather about what a great country Iran is with a grain of salt also...

The Soaking Surge Versus The Splintering Surge: What Will Be Learned?

Glenn links to a post today from Brendan Loy:

It is true, as some have pointed out in comments, that Katrina was not "likely" to hit New Orleans as of Saturday morning, or even Sunday morning for that matter. New Orleans was the hurricane's most likely target -- it remained in the crosshairs of the official forecast track all weekend -- but in terms of statistical strike probabilities, even the most likely target at 24-48 hours out still has a less-than-50% chance of getting hit, thanks to the uncertainties inherent in hurricane forecasting. However, given the technology that we currently have, you simply could not have a greater threat to a specific location, 48 hours before landfall, than the threat that New Orleans faced on Saturday morning. It was, as I said, a "high-confidence forecast," and one with enormously catastrophic potential. Thus, if an evacuation was not appropriate then, then it follows that an evacuation must never be appropriate at 48 hours. And that can't be, because really, 48 hours is already too late; studies have long shown that it would take 72 hours to completely empty the city of New Orleans. So unless the city's hurricane strategy was to throw up its hands and say, "there's nothing we can do," a mandatory evacuation -- school buses and all -- was most certainly called for on Saturday morning. As I wrote on Saturday afternoon, "If you knew there was a 10 percent chance terrorists were going to set off a nuclear bomb in your city on Monday, would you stick around, or would you evacuate? That's essentially equivalent to what you're dealing with here. I sure as hell would leave."

Finally, one last point. As horrible as the catastrophe has been, please realize that it actually could have been far worse. What occurred was not the long-feared "worst-case scenario," which involved not a levee breach equalizing the water level in Lake Ponchartrain and "Lake New Orleans," but rather a storm surge over-topping the levees and causing the water level in "Lake New Orleans," hemmed in by the still-intact levees, to rise substantially higher than the water level in the lake. If the storm had wobbled a meteorologically insignificant 20 or 30 miles to the west, and/or had not weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 4 at the last minute, that scenario would have occurred, and instead of a slowly developing 10-20 foot flood, New Orleans would have suffered a rapidly developing 30-40 foot flood. (Jackson Square would have been underwater, whereas in the real-world scenario it remained high and dry.) The whole thing would have happened Monday morning, and at the same time as the city was rapidly and massively flooding, the devastating winds that demolished the Mississippi coastline would have been tearing New Orleans apart instead. All of those attics where people took shelter would have been either submerged or shattered to bits. The French Quarter would have been swamped, instead of mostly surviving the flood. Second-floor generators in hospitals might well have drowned. Bottom line, there would be a lot fewer refugees and a lot more corpses.

I alluded to this worst case in my "Intent on Burying Drowning the Lede Leader" post. I also pointed out that even IF the Cat 5 flood walls HAD ALREADY BEEN BUILT they would not have stopped the current form of the disaster (the "soaking surge scenario") -- even though what we are seeing now is not actually the worst case that could have happened NOW given that there are no Cat 5 walls yet (the "splintering surge scenario").

As my modified graphic from the May 2005 Popular Science points out, the location of the levee breaks (indicated by the red rectangle added by me) was NOT where the Cat 5 levees were projected to be built (the red line separating NOLA from the Gulf to the right):

(Note that this graphic is not available in the on-line article at PopSci -- only in the print version)

So the the only way to avoid what just happened would have been to have spent the (probably) billions of dollars it would have taken to upgrade EVERY LEVEE IN THE NOLA AREA to Cat 5 levels!

And even then -- and assuming perfect engineering and flawless levee construction virtually throughout -- if the hurricane had shifted 20 miles to the west NOLA would be a lot less flooded but still be looking nearly as splintered as Mississippi looks like right now and likely with a still awful loss of life.

As Brendan highlights -- and I pointed out in my post -- the only way to avoid serious loss of life was to get everyone out of there in the first place.

Including the use of these now useless buses:


The "hurricane sensationalism" of the media and its creation of a Chicken Little mindset dulling the urgency of evacuation needs as much examination as what could have been done to physically protect NOLA.

Makes sense to me -- but I've figured out how bad it really is. Most folks are doing their best ostrich imitation...

I would say "significantly degraded" would be quite an understatement...

EMAIL of the day at the Corner:

If Bush was a Dictator things would have gone smoother:

- He wouldn't have had to ASK Gov. Blanco to order a mandatory evacuation, he would have done it himself.

- He wouldn't have had to ASK Gov. Blanco to send in her National Guard, he would have done it himself.

- He wouldn't have to ASK Gov. Blanco to let the feds come in and run the show. (below) If Bush was a dictator he could have FORCED residents to evacuate at gunpoint. He would be giving orders to the Governor, not requests. It may come as news to the moveon.org crowd, but BUSH IS NOT A DICTATOR!

Well, yeah...

UPDATE: Boy am I slow lately. Just wait a few news cycles and the MSMeme will be: Bush didn't declare himself dictator because he wanted all those poor black folks to die! Just watch...

"An older equilibrium is returning."

... the same square mileage as England.

Don't forget to keep giving -- this is going to be a long haul...

Burying the lede part 45,589: Blankety Blanco!

Intent On Burying Drowning The Lede Leader

(UPDATED 9/11/05: With the latest leftie attack about Bush being a liar for saying that nobody anticipated the levees would breach now heating up, I went back to the PopSci article and added the relevant paragraph RE overtopping versus breaching to my excerpt. No surprise: it talks about overtopping, not breaching -- and then goes on to suggest that the levees would "serve as a bathtub"! They couldn't do that very well if they were breached could they now? It then goes on the say that this is a "highly improbably event" to close it out. But please do continue on to read at least the last half of this post -- I guarantee you'll still learn something interesting even if the first half has become somewhat dated!)

Since we have the Gramscian, emotive MSM and lefty bloggers spending most of their coverage playing the "blame game" with their bully pulpits,



us poor stupid righty bloggers are all that remains to actually consider the facts.

The two main MSMemes of the disaster are of course:

1) BusHitler hasn't done enough to cope with the immediate disaster (and what "little" has been done has come too slowly)

and

2) Shrub McChimpy is giving all our money to those da*n "brownies" in Iraq that are too stupid to be interested in democracy and therefore he's the one responsible for killing New Orleans since everything would have been just fine if part of the Louisiana National Guard wasn't gone and all that money hadn't been diverted from levee construction

Let's look at each in turn:

1) BusHitler Hasn't Done Enough Right Now!

Well, let's open with this from Power Line:

The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

Whoops! The MSM has been trying to bury that one BIG TIME through the whole disaster. Unfortunately for them, that will likely mean they will have to stop covering Chertoff's press conferences since he made a point this afternoon of mentioning that W made the call!

So the left has done a face plant right out of the gate but are either too self-deluded, venal or dim to realize their position.

Did I forget to mention that both the governor and mayor are Democrats? And did you notice this little newsflash from Drudge?

WHY DIDN'T YOU DEPLOY THE BUSES DURING THE MANDATORY EVACUATION, MAYOR?...

Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00

'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...

Then Drudge shows the picture of the New Orleans buses:



WHOOPS!

So W is supposed to sit on their shoulders and make the local Dem politicos implement their own plan? Junkyardblog has the nutshell:

As for Mayor Nagin, he and his profile in pathetic leadership police chief should resign as well. That city's government is incompetent from one end to the other. The people of New Orleans deserve better than this crowd of clowns iscapable of giving them.

If you're keeping track, these boobs let 569 buses that could have carried 33,350 people out of New Orleans--in one trip--get ruined in the floods.

In other words, we have the "Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool" -- but of course it's all W's fault... (More here, here, and here.)

And then after the fact we have the MSM TV airwaves filled with right after reports of how things aren't so bad on Canal Street. Everybody just calm down. Just more of our standard fare of "Hurricane Porn".

Whoops! Maybe not this time. What the h**l? Why wasn't the National Guard here already? What? It takes more than a day to mobilize and move HUNDREDS of helicopters? Incompetence I tell you! Incompetence!

For every hurricane we're supposed to have sufficient resources constantly on the move for optimal delivery to disaster areas hundreds of miles on each dimension even if all the roads and bridges are wiped out? I'll make a deal with you to do this for only, oh, say, a cost equivalent of 10% of the U.S. GDP. Chinooks aren't cheap folks. And just imagine what shape we'd be in if we were France and didn't have a military capable of flying out of a brown paper bag!.

Did I forget to mention that all new buildings in the southeast may have to look like concrete bunkers? What's that? You say you're thinking of moving to Denver instead?

2) Without Bush, all the money for levee construction would have been there!

Being the nerd I am, and with a budding nerd 8-year-old son, you won't be surprised we have a subscription to Popular Science. Well, smart as David is, wouldn't you know that he pulls out the May issue with this little gem in it:

Hurricanes
At 20 feet below sea level, new orleans is a prime target. An ambitious new levee system would decrease the risk

By Michael Behar April 2005

It takes Scott Kiser only a split second to name the one city in the U.S., and probably the world, that would sustain the most catastrophic damage from a category-5 hurricane. "New Orleans," says Kiser, a tropical-cyclone program manager for the National Weather Service. "Because the city is below sea level—with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other—it is a hydrologic nightmare." The worst problem, he explains, would be a storm surge, a phenomenon in which high winds stack up huge waves along a hurricane’s leading edge. In New Orleans, a big enough surge would quickly drown the entire city.

...

UPDATE 9/11/05: ADDED THIS GRAPH TO THE QUOTE: The Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale defines a category-5 storm as one with "winds greater than 155 miles per hour and storm surge generally greater than 18 feet." Although hurricanes of this magnitude slamming directly into New Orleans are extremely rare—occurring perhaps every 500 to 1,000 years—should one come ashore, the resulting storm surge would swell Lake Pontchartrain (a brackish sea adjoining the Gulf of Mexico), overtop the levees, and submerge the city under up to 40 feet of water. Once this happened, the levees would "serve as a bathtub," explains Harley Winer, chief of coastal engineering for the Army Corps’s New Orleans District. The water would get trapped between the Mississippi levees and the hurricane-protection levees. "This is a highly improbable event," Winer points out, "but within the realm of possibility."

New Orleans has nearly completed its Hurricane Protection Project, a $740-million plan led by Naomi to ring the city with levees that could shield residents from up to category-3 storm surges. Meanwhile, Winer and others at the Army Corps are considering a new levee system capable of holding back a surge from a category-5 hurricane like Ivan, which threatened the city last year.

Now, needless to say, my eyebrows nearly shoot through the ceiling! But not primarily because of the text of the article. (As I looked for blog links to this article, I found a number of folks like Jeff and Carol linking through to the Redstate reference to the PopSci article.)

But it turns out that the online article doesn't include the graphic -- and what REALLY blew me away was the graphic (that I have slightly modified here by adding a red rectangle):



Look at where the upgrade to Cat 5 protection (indicated by the red line) was planned to be built: between the city and the Gulf of course. What kind of dummy would do otherwise? But check out the location of the big red rectangle that I have added on the north side of N.O. That's where at least one of the major levee breaks was! As we all know now, the city was flooded at least largely by Lake Pontchartrain, not from the Gulf!!!

So basically the only prayer in h*ll we had to save the city from Katrina's trajectory would have been a complete upgrade of the levee system to Cat 5 protection!

And even that looks questionable to me if Katrina had hit N.O. full on like it did Mississippi. Look at how buildings there were just utterly splintered by the storm surge.

I hate to tell you this, but if you think the fact that that complete Cat 5 upgrade wasn't up yet was because of W and the war, you deserve the stupor you live in. This was a problem that stretched through multiple decades and multiple city, state and federal administrations. And even if W made saving N.O. from hurricanes his #1 priority in life immediately upon election in 2000, the odds of it being ready for Katrina are about the same as N.O. ever being restored to its former glory.

NIL.

And I leave the whole topic of rational cost/benefit analysis and scoping of various types of natural and man-made disasters for further posts. Lucky y'all...

The Perfectly Predictable Perfect Storm

Via Power Line, City Journal has something you need to read about the looting portion of the New Orleans Apocalypse:

This week’s looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute) was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the storm, but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.

Was this week’s looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans’ officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims—according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.

WOW. RTWT.

My Good Friend James?

You know something's wrong with the picture when James Carville is your ally:

I think CNN would turn Noah's flood into a partisan attack on George Bush. Even such a hardened politico as James Carville had to tell their brain dead reporter to shut up and deal with the reality in front of him, rather than casting blame. What is wrong with these CNN people? What culture do they come from? Their lack of moral and psychological sophistication is truly stunning.

When I see this kind of reporting, I know we are doing the right thing at Pajamas Media in trying to organize the blogosphere, just a little bit, as the beginning of an antidote.

Keep your eye on the Pajamas. The one that remains after watching too much Communist News Network.

Perspective From The Trenches

This is straight through from one of Glenn's readers. You need to read the whole thing:

I run a trade association of tank truck carriers trying to assist in the relief efforts by transporting food and potable water. I'm in regular contact with many of the companies, and here are some "on the ground" facts: 1) Large trucks (80,000 lbs. gross weight) almost always have to use the Interstates. For trucks attempting to come in from outside the area, most of those roads (approaching the disaster area) are either closed or have bridges out. The so-called secondary roads may be somewhat passable, but their bridges (over rivers and streams) are not built to sustain such loads. Simply stated, you can't get there from here.

2) Trucks domicled in those areas (because that's where the companies traditionally serve customers) are still underwater, thus the equipment is not accessible;

3) Nobody in their right mind is going to take loads of gasoline and fuel oil into a city controlled by unfriendly folks carrying automatic weapons. A tank truck loaded with 8,000 gallons of gasoline can produce a very impressive fire;

4) Those local trucking companies can't contact their drivers. There's no power, thus (even) cellular is unavailable, and many of the drivers homes (in places like Kenner, Slidel, Metarie, etc) have been destroyed and families dispersed. I have one member with about 120 drivers and mechanics in that immediate area. To date, management has been able to contact 12. Those in the National Guard have been mobilized and are not available to drive.

5) Pumps -- needed to load the vehicles -- don't work because there's no power.

UPDATE: It keeps getting better and better:

Oh yeah, it [the venality of the press coverage] is just that bad. If anything Jeff understates the case. One begins to wonder if the founding fathers got that freedom of the press thing right, after all.

Okay, it's not that bad, but it has been pretty shameful. When all is said and done the press will be stunned to discover that the only people they have impressed are themselves.

Yup.