Yes. Perfectly stated.

First, FEMA incompetence in small things as well as large:

FEMA changing locks on trailers

WASHINGTON (AP) - FEMA will replace locks on as many as 118,000 trailers used by Gulf Coast hurricane victims after discovering the same key could open many of the mobile homes.

One locksmith cut only 50 different kinds of keys for the trailers sold to FEMA, officials said Monday. That means, in an example of a worst-case scenario, one key could be used to unlock up to 10 mobile homes in a park of 500 trailers.

FEMA officials said such a situation was unlikely, but they still moved to warn storm evacuees living in Louisiana and Mississippi trailer parks of the security risk.

"We are working aggressively to establish the extent of the problem and determine the best solution for the safety and security of those who now reside in these trailer units," said Gil Jamieson, deputy director of Gulf Coast recovery for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He said FEMA was "asking residents to be extra vigilant and take precautions to secure the trailer that they occupy."

"We encourage them to work together to promote a neighborhood watch and help ensure the safety of all residents," Jamieson said.

It is unknown how many trailers will need to have their locks replaced, said FEMA spokesman Pat Philbin.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., called the lock risk "very troubling."

Remember, FEMA is part of DHS, the nice fellows in charge of all our national security. Wonderful to know that "security" is foremost in their minds.

Next, to show that DHS is incompetent in large things as well as small, do y'know how they found out that the levees were broken? By watching CNN. And since CNN Headline News didn't have the word that the levees were broken for 30 hours after they went down, DHS didn't get the word either. Here's the story on that.

Broderick [told] investigators that he rarely looked at his e-mail and had received seven hundred e-mail messages during the disaster that he had never even bothered to open. He admitted that he didn't read the New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, which on the day Katrina hit had treated the collapse of the 17th Street Canal as fact and had written a long story describing the scene after two reporters on bicycles had visited the area. . . .

Finally, asked by exasperated Senate investigators what evidence he had collected showing the levees had not breached, Broderick said he had relied exclusively on two sources. The first was the Army Corps of Engineers, but the former general suspected even that agency of hyping the situation, since it had reported "extensive" flooding in New Orleans and "'extensive' is all relative," Broderick said.

The second source, Broderick allowed, was unimpeachable: CNN Headline News. Late Monday afternoon, the network aired a report from New Orleans. The focus of the video snippet was a scene on Bourbon Street, near the highest spot in the city, where people "seemed to be having a party," Broderick said.

"The one data point that I really had, personally, visually, was the celebration in the streets of New Orleans, of people drinking beer and partying because -- and they used, they came up with the word -- 'we dodged the bullet,'" Broderick said. "So that's a pretty good indicator right there."

So simply stated, BushCo is focusing attention on a long-range, high-cost solution (the massive levee) while ignoring the immediate solutions (wetlands, NOLA levees, etc). The long-range solution lets them posture, but doesn't require actual effort, because by the time it's meant to be getting started there's another THE SECURITY ALERT LEVEL IS ORANGE!

This is the case in much of Bush's environmental policy, not just the hurricane response.

Example: The so-called hydrogen economy. Sounds like a positive environmental step on paper, right? Wrong. The hydrogen economy is at least twenty years away; by focusing on it rather than immediate measures (encouraging hybrid tech, real research money for alternative power generation), BushCo preserves the current energy economy as it is today. And even when that hydrogen economy is in place -- guess what? The hydrogen will be generated either by fossil fuels or by electricity generated from fossil fuels. All it does is move the carbon emissions around. Without research into carbon sequestration, generating the fossil fuel emissions in a different place won't do a damn bit of good.

That's the pattern. Long-range, improbable project to garner good press and provide cover for the fact that smaller, more effective projects are being stonewalled. Once you know what to look for, it's striking.

Spent & approved to spend in Iraq - $435 billion of US taxpayers' money

Lost & Unaccounted for in Iraq - $9 billion of US taxpayers' money and $549.7 milion in spare parts shipped in 2004 to US contractors

Halliburton Overcharges Classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported - $1.4 billion

Halliburton Overcharges Classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported - $1.4 billion

Value of President posing in front of that clock tower: Priceless

http://www.counterpunch.org/bradberry08192006.html

4 - Well, they could always go down to the hardware store and get new deadbolts. Oh wait, no. What are they supposed to do, put padlocks on the door? *shakes head*

I feel like starting a newspaper strictly to follow-up on stories like Katrina to show the actual follow through ("Get your news here last!"). The fact that Halliburton hasn't been crucified for overcharging our troops for MREs is obscene, considering the "Support Our Troops" fervor.

No, I'm not saying they're stupid; they're just not paying attention. Why should they? They don't have to. We don't have a draft.

And when we do, it'll be called the Overseas Opportunity AmeriCorps ("Challenging Inner City Youth to Excel since 2007").

If we assume this locksmith provided the locks for all 118,000 trailers mentioned, then 10 out of 500 isn't a worst-case scenario, it's a _best-case_ scenario. If fewer than 10 of 500 can be opened with key A, then more than 10 can be opened with some other key.

I'm not seeing how to do the math offhand, but with 236 500-trailer sets, it seems pretty likely there's at least 1 where more than 250 of the trailers share a key.

The fellow who calls himself "un travesti executif" is the fabulous British comedian Eddie Izzard.

Cheers

Assuming BEST case, 500 trailers in an area would have 50 groups of trailers, 10 trailers per group, with each group sharing the same key.

Even if the keys are distributed 2360 trailers in a group with the same key, non-random lock assignment could give sequential trailers the same lock, and you might have a group of 500 trailers that ALL use the same lock.

If the locksmith did it in assembly line fashion, he likely did a bunch of locks with the same key, before switching locks. If those trailers were keyed in sequence and distributed in sequence, then there's a good chance there are large groups of trailers that can all be opened with far fewer than 50 keys.

Absolute WORST case would have 49 trailers with unique keys and 117951 trailers all working on the same key. At which point, 99.9% of all trailers have the same key.

This is completely ignoring the fact that the same locksmith keyed all the locks, which means every single person has a key that could be ground down to minimum values and used for key "bumping" as per an earlier thread. So unique key distribution is probably fairly mute for anyone with a file.

fabulous fabulous!

And when we do, it'll be called the Overseas Opportunity AmeriCorps ("Challenging Inner City Youth to Excel since 2007").

And you can bet that the children of High Government Officials will be exempt.

The words "travesty" and "transvestite" have the same Latin root, and "travesty" (travestir in French) once meant to disguise as well as to parody.

Well, aren't we cynical. Of course these young people will be called on to serve. In the Future Leaders of America Cultural Enrichment Program, which offers opportunities to serve our country while learning about the ways of other lands. Staffing consulate offices in Canada, for example.

Disney World is quite foreign enough, thank you.

*Or "neosons," in the will-based language of tomorrow.

Dress to Kill.

Watch. NOW.

"Did I leave the gas on...?"

It's not good to think that I probably knew more about what was happening than the people running FEMA, and I'm not even on the same continental plate as New Orleans.

It's even less good to think of some of the other things that weren't being reported, like the prisoners in the local jail, left locked in their cells as the flood waters came in.

And I wonder how many people died in New Orleans, after the levee breaches, because the usual emergency resources available to a government, the military, were devoting so much effort to killing people in Iraq. It's easy to believe, a year later after all the stories of the slow cleanup, that nobody knows the real death toll.

It's easy to believe that Katrina killed more Americans than Osama bin Laden, and Bush can't blame that on the malice of outsiders. But it gave him a whole city as a photo-op.

And when we do, it'll be called the Overseas Opportunity AmeriCorps ("Challenging Inner City Youth to Excel since 2007").

And you can bet that the children of High Government Officials will be exempt.

And that one of the big selling points to Middle America will be "getting gang activity off the streets". Yeah, just put 'em in the military instead of in jail; after all, since all references to the Geneva Convention have been removed from the Official Handbook, there's less need for soldiers not to be hoodlums.

Based on another report from Reuters, Mayor Ray Nagin’s deflector shield is fully operational. However, it does not compare to Governor Blanco’s. While Mayor Nagin is still keeping the blame game pointed at President Bush and the rest of the federal government, Blanco appears burdened with local politics and re-election with the exception of filing a lawsuit to preserve gulf acreage. While the federal government has plenty to be ashamed of in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. All parties to the natural disaster share the blame for ignoring the fact that a city was built in a cereal bowl and Mother Nature poured the milk. Mayor Nagin, have you spent any time on addressing permanent solutions or is rebuilding before the next hurricane your plan. That way it can happen all over again.

What's even more disgusting is that there are still FEMA trailer parks from 2004 in Florida!

One of Congress's jobs is to approve the funding for the various government agencies before the next fiscal year starts. To the best of my knowledge, none of the appropriation bills for Fiscal Year 2007 (starts October 1, 2006) have been discussed, much less approved.

Now, with all the security theater going on, can you imagine what will happen if they have to shut TSA down on October 1st?

Let's talk about cities that ought not be where they are. Let's talk about Los Angeles. It sits on a relatively narrow strip of land that has mountains on one side and the sea on the other, with notably unstable faults running underneath. Geologically, the area is being lifted up so fast that its cliffs and hillsides are bound to crumble and slide. It's subject to prolonged droughts. The original settlement here was small and poor because it had to rely on the local water supply. The native vegetation is so adapted to drought and brushfire that some species won't reproduce properly without being burned. When Los Angeles does get rain, it sometimes gets it in unassimilable amounts, causing floods, mudslides, and all manner misery. And then, of course, there are the earthquakes.

LA is nevertheless one of the great American cities. This has been made possible by more than a century's worth of water projects -- dams, reservoirs, canals, pipelines, and LA's mighty storm runoff system -- plus hill stabilization, firefighting and fire prevention, building for earthquakes, rebuilding after earthquakes, and a myriad other measures to make this area reasonably habitable.

A lot of that has been the work of the State of California, but the federal government has been right in there all along. In fact, the entire Southwest United States, and all the cities therein, owe their prosperity and their population levels to a vast system of federal water projects. What they pay for water does not and never has reimbursed the cost. It's been a vast government handout, if you want to call it that; or a vast government investment in the national infrastructure, if you'd rather put it that way instead.

Smirking about how New Orleans was built in a cereal bowl, but Mother Nature poured in the milk, is (1.) blaming the victim; (2.) a vast abrogation of responsibility not seen in the aftermath of other infrastructural disasters; and (3.) historically illiterate.

I don't think it would be considered a satisfactory response, the next time Southern California suffers some natural disaster, to stand off piously and suggest that since this part of the country is a house built on sand, we're justified in writing it off.

I am petrified by the thought of an earthquake or a hurricane, but I accept without blinking an eye the fact that we routinely get weather here below freezing, with snaps down into the single digits, and with 2' snowfalls.

Teresa is right, no matter where one chooses to live, a natural disaster is just waiting to happen. This is why I was annoyed at my mother, who says, "Why should they rebuild New Orleans? Those people should have known better!" when she lives 8' above sea level herself (NYC). I remember Gloria in 1985; a hurricane can hit NYC!

I read where the Corps is now saying the levees have been "repaired" around New Orleans to where they will withstand a Category II hurricane. Uhhh, weren't they supposed to have protected the city from a Cat III storm (and didn't) last year?

Teresa, thank you for your defense of CA. I get tired of 'it's raining and people in xyz are having their houses slide' in the winter and 'there's a fire and people in xyz are having their houses burn' coupled with the implication - sometimes they say it straight out - that *we deserve it*. (The people who say this mostly seem to have never been closer to CA than their television sets.)

The only alternative to New Orleans that I can see is to allow the Mississippi to enter the Atchafalaya Basin, and then choose somewhere to build a port there. I don't think the residents of either area would approve of it.

Note -- this will not stop floods or hurricane damage, it just shifts the area where the disaster is likely to occur. I suppose it could be argued that if you're building from scratch, you can build with these problems in mind, and therefor will have solutions in place.

We have in this country a mutual association called "government" one of whose tasks is "ensure domestic tranquillity" and another is to "promote the general welfare." As far as I'm concerned taking care of each other in natural disasters (which includes the clean-up and planning for the next one) falls squarely into those categories.

By the way, I find it instructive that for the last 2-3 years one of my two copies of the Constitution of the United States has taken up what seems to be permanent residence in the little bookshelf next to my desk, and I probably refer to it and/or quote from it at least once a week. I am not complaining. With all its flaws, it's one hell of a document, and in reading and rereading it I have learned and continue to learn a great deal.

Damn these people building cities where there are no natural roads, no natural water delivery systems, no natural sewage disposal systems, and no natural electrical grid!

And don't even get me started about those fools who build cities where there is no naturally occuring hospitals, no naturally occuring education system, no naturally occuring police system, and no naturally occuring military defense.

Do they actually expect us to pay for them to build this stuff???

Uh, here we get weather that routinely drops below zero F, and a cold snap in January is 20 below, F.

I've seen three feet of snow in 48 hours. And had to shovel it.

Worse, there were a series of tornadoes yesterday that seemed to have flattened parts of a few small towns and killed at least one person.

I still prefer Minneapolis to most parts of the country. I live on high ground, I can prepare for blizzards, and the tornadoes usually get stopped by the heat dome.

The New Madrid fault occasionally worries me, though.

Emma (30) - You're welcome. I just read it for the first time about a week ago (he says, hoping his fan license isn't suddenly revoked).

PS - Love the numbering system!

Uhhh, not quite. Deltas naturally flow out to sea gradually, from the bottom. Additional silt accumulates on the top, which keeps the height of the delta more or less constant, and creates the illusion of a stable surface.

The leveeing of NOLA halted the second process, but not the first. NOLA is at about the level that the silt at the top of the delta would be by now had the city not been built, but it would be under a great deal of silt had the levees not been.

New Orleans is an essential city. It's not just a place to visit for fun; it's needed as a port for the US economy. To someone in Kansas who gripes about paying for the rebuilding of NOLA, I say "OK, you can quit bothering to grow corn and wheat, because it's gonna rot before you can transport it anywhere you can sell it!"

or an earthquake

Tracie (46), I remember one at 6 AM when I was a child. It sounded like a subway train passing through my room.

And Buffalo is on a major fault line, which is why the National Earthquake Engineering Laboratory is located here.

Brava!

By the way, I've often felt that if California (especially the Bay Area) was hit by a major quake, Bush would fly over it and urinate out the plane door. He'd later claim that he was attempting to assist the firemen on the ground and wrap himself in a hero's mantle.

Come to think of it, he'd probably do the same if we had a quake here in Seattle.

[/rant]

"And all those flat roofs in LA will collapse under the first good blizzard," I reply.

"There have been earthquakes in New York!"

"There's been snow in LA," I point out (of all the cities in the continental US, only one has always been snow-free, and it's not LA, or even Miami).

Actually, there are brick buildings in LA. A lot of them are very old, and (by now, I hope) have been reinforced ('Frankenstein bolts'). But we do tend to cringe at the thought of Unreinforced Masonry, knowing what happens to brick buildings when they get shaken hard enough.

On the flip side, I recall driving up Potrero hill in SF and thinking, "What happens when it snows?"

Why? Because FEMA used to have this thing called "Project Impact", where they worked with local authorities to find the most important areas to prepare for a forseeable disaster.

Things like retrofitting buildings.

"With the help of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the city of Seattle has spent $50 million since 1994 retrofitting public buildings, fire stations and bridges. By coincidence, the quake struck on the day President Bush proposed to kill a federal program designed to help communities protect themselves against the effects of natural disasters."

Let's add Minneapolis/St.Paul to the list as a junior partner. It is estimated that a storm equal to the blizzard of 1940 would kill 4,000-8,000 people. Still wouldn't trade all our winters for one nasty hurricane season though.

For God's sake, RAISE THE SECURITY LEVEL!!! What if it happened AGAIN TOMORROW??? We need to take more money from our over-funded schools, maybe cut more doughnut-munchers from our over-staffed police forces, defer ALL ecological and non-Bunyon related science research endeavours and devise a really huge and technologically advanced defense against further Bunyon or neo-Bunyonist incursions! Immediate laws, with massive government enforcement efforts, must be passed to outlaw the sale, distribution, and ownership of 40 foot long, 3,000 lb wood axes! OUR SAFETY DEPENDS ON IMMEDIATE ACTION! Don't waste valuable resources worrying about past disasters, or future disasters that might never happen! THE DANGER IS HERE NOW!!!

Effective Pretty Darn Soon, After Dinner at the Latest

Security Alert Level raised to Blue Ox.
IDS Center lowered to let moon and stars go by.
Metrodome filled with Powdermilk Biscuits and Summit IPA, just in case.
Don't worry too much about it, Babe's pretty nice if you don't make any sudden moves or smell like a bear or things.
Looks like rain, though.

Perhaps we should create a special military division to handle giant cow tipping as a way of at least incapacitating the blue ox.

I suppose it does have a martial ring, and the alternative is probably something like "TRI Adjuncts, a division of Unspecified Services SA."

*Who, like Custer, graduated last in his class at West Point.

"The company's founders are Scott Custer, a former US Army officer and defense consultant, and former CIA officer Michael Battles."

Nonetheless, if I were naming a security company I'd think twice about using the founders' names if they added up to that combination.

By the way, the "About Us" page at the company's website makes no mention of its founders.

"It may be spelled like that, but it's pronounced 'so-DINZH wan-KEH'."

big enough to run a drag race in, as seen in Grease -- as an Easterner, I didn't understand that scene until years later.

Magenta@41: does New Madrid really run that far north? There's a geekish ~story "The Great Nebraska Sea", in which the fault gives way -- turning the twin cities into a seaport, but not doing much other damage. New Madrid's reach is often overestimated; a seismologist lecturing at the Boston Museum of Science last year said the stories about the last big one ringing the church bells in Boston were nonsense, but the bells \might/ have ring later because there are additional faults, stretching through and beyond bluegrass country, that were shaken up enough to let loose in subsequent ~weeks.

There is (or was) a web site that had a lot of the original newspaper accounts of that set of Big Ones (big enough to scare this Californian). It's hard to tell how much to believe, because the stories got passed from one newspaper to another, usually without attribution, and sometimes with no placename attached either. The whole site was very interesting; there was even a map with estimated intensities from the reports that could be pinned down. (I can try tracking it down again.)

It was pretty oblique. The point was pretending that an unfortunate name is something else, for some sidewise reason.

I can see that those guys simply called the company after themselves, like Hart, Schaffner & Stalin,* but did it never occur to them that it added up to a phrase?

*"We are not to be taking our suits in. Let yourself out."

Re disasters waiting to happen:
"Three of the most catastrophic volcanic eruptions in geologic history occurred at a place now visited by over three million people a year."

BTW, tropical storm Ernesto is strengthening and heading in the general direction of New Orleans. Predictions have it possibly reaching Cat III by landfall next week.

On your Hart, Schaffner and Stalin line, at least I've seen the ads for those suits and can make the connection.

That's a world of hurt waiting to happen.

Nope, no climate changes here.

(Only Wake Island is under threat at present; it's 2000 miles west of Hawaii, and Pacific hurricanes tend to move east-to-west. Nonetheless, a hurricane this big in this location is a Bad Sign.)

That was exactly the reaction I saw over here. This isn't a flood-free part of the world by any means, and everyone was horrified at such a monumental miserable cock-up in America.

Florida's problem with hurricanes is not so much that it has cities below sea-level as that most of the state is pretty flat and big storms pass over it relatively easily (and can, in fact, cross and recross). Paving over the Everglades certainly does not help.

I would note that before a tropical storm reaches Florida it has usually caused devastation somewhere else then picked up strength in the Florida Straits or in the Gulf.