Air America online sure has a lot of commercials...

I'm here in the Hotel Francs in Kahim Makuhari, and while preparing for my meetings (don't ask what time it is... when you're in as many time zones as I've been in during the past week the only thing to do is work with the jet lag), I've got Air America on through BB.

They've got lots of commercials now.

Not that the righties will admit it, but evidently there's a huge market for Air America.

Just when you think you heard everything...

Denial ain't a river in Egypt, as some folks say...Joe Carter thinks that the problem with the New Orleans massacre was a failure of conservatives to back "a true leader – whether a Democrat or Republican – and [to have] supported them in the New Orleans mayoral race."

I'd start looking at one's own political and moral eyeplanks a bit deeper than that...

For one thing, the undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to disaster to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA's preparedness programs.

You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago.

But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown as Mr. Allbaugh's successor.

Mr. Brown had no obvious qualifications, other than having been Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate. But Mr. Brown was made deputy director of FEMA; The Boston Herald reports that he was forced out of his previous job, overseeing horse shows. And when Mr. Allbaugh left, Mr. Brown became the agency's director. The raw cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the administration felt for the agency; one can only imagine the effects on staff morale.

Really, do conservatives take responsibility - ownership of anything???

More travel blogging...

Nara, Japan:

• Murasaki is missing. This is a tragedy, as it is the only izakaiya restaurant in the immediate area that takes American Express, my "corporate credit card."
  
  
• There is a two "new pence" coin that keeps diffusing into my Japanese coins; it feels and weighs too much like a 10 yen coin. But it's not exactly a 10 yen coin. It would be nice if there was one global money system, so folks who travelled wouldn't have to constantly fumble for the right change. But that won't happen in my life.
  
  
• My room wasn't ready when I arrived, so, sweaty and jet lagged, I decided to finally make it to Hohryuji temple. (法隆寺) (Not that most folks who regularly reads this blog probably aren't much aware of it, but regardless, please forgive the redundancy.) 法隆寺 (Flowering of the Dharma Temple) is 2 train stops from Nara, and happens to be the oldest still-standing wooden structure in the world. It looks like any of the other temples in Nara, but, well, a bit older. What is odd - or perhaps wise is a better term- about 法隆寺 is that one part of 法隆寺 contains what seems to be a cross between a museum and a Buddhist temple; there are statues of Kannon (Avolokitesvara) and other Boddhisattvas that are "under glass" in temperature/humidity/security controlled conditions with offering paraphenalia outside the glass. This is good; what shocked me about Tiantong temple in China was the complete openness of fragile scrolls, etc. 法隆寺 was built by a Prince Shotoku in the Heian period - when the Japanese government was ruled from Nara- and there is much folklore about Prince Shotoku. What is interesting to me is the distance, though. This - two trainstops from Nara- was not, actually, like you find in Warsaw today, with the Catholic Churches "merged" with the Presidential houses. Say what you want, but even the devout Prince Shotoku must have realized that at least a spatial separation of church and state wasn't entirely a bad idea.
  法隆寺 is worth the trip; it is a huge complex, actually, almost in itself as big as the temple complexes in Nara (which were built a couple or three hundred years later than 法隆寺.
  

By the way, there'd be a lot more standing wooden structures in the world if people didn't keep invading each other and if people werent' careless with fires. Kiev, apparently in the 9th century, was a huge metropolis by Dark Ages standards, but it all burnt down.

Dow 8,000? 7,000?

Really, Rhenquist has died, the entire world thinks we're a 3rd world country it seems- on the plane rides over, people were reading about Bush's disasterous presidency in English, German and Japanese.

Really, there's no question now, whatever may be the responsiblity for prevention (of which Republicans bear more than a little bit), how but can the markets shun the US market if the clown who's responsible for this is going to "lock up" the court - especially if he puts in a shoddy thinker like Scalia? (Shoddy- yes- read his opinions. They may be "witty" but they are utter nonsense.)

America is screwed.

Heathrow Airport blogging - and now for something completely different

Everybody else in the blogosphere can write about the terrible situaton in the south better than I can at this point, so I might as well try "local color" for a bit.

I am waiting in the Star Alliance lounge at Heathrow for my flight to Kansai (Osaka, Japan)- which, unfortunately, is Lufthansa. But at least the internet access is free.

As it happens, I was staying at the Hilton London Metropole hotel for my meeting here in the UK. As it also happens, that hotel is located right near the train station made famous by one of the London bombers. As it also happens, this hotel is right smack dab in the middle of an Arab/Muslim neighborhood. We have a saying back in New York- you don't shit where you sleep. Even though the bomber, Mohammed Sidique Kahn, wasn't from the neighborhood, he must have known - how could he not?- that he would be doing this nasty deed in the middle of a Muslim neighborhood. What an asshole, is all I can think. At any rate, the people in the Lebanese restaurants were warm and friendly, and the food was first rate. I had only found out about the newsworthiness of my immediate locale on the last day I was here, but to be honest, it didn't bother me a bit. Why should it? I'm here to do a job, and have much more tangible issues to concern me in my life. But I can't help but think of what Scotty Peck wrote about evil: not only is evil, well, evil, but it's almost always glaringly stupid and ignorant as well.

Anyway, I'll be glad to get out of the UK, and go to a country where I can exist within my per diem. Japan. Geez, London is expensive.

Can you imagine what the French are saying about us now?

From the Financial Times (subscription required):

European coutnries were yesterday preparing to release emergency stockpiles of petrol as the US confirmed that some refineries hit by Hurricane Katrina would stay shut for months.

US officials had estimated that the closures would last only one to two weeks. Officials from member governments of the International Energy Agency, the energy watchdog of indulstrialized countries, said they were waiting for a formal US request.

The IEA is thought to be close to agreeing to release petrol and other products that could either be sent to the US or used to reduce European imports, thus making more oil products available for the US.

Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Canada all have large emergency reserves.

One European goverment official cautioned that approval was needed from all IEA energy ministers and that any release might be delayed until the weekend.

America has had conservative goverments relative to the "old Europe" French and Germans for decades, and recently we've been getting nasty with Canada.

The country that did the Berlin airlift can't - or won't- even help the folks in New Orleans now. None of this is lost on our "old allies."

Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

Apparently a regular at Kos thinks so....I bet if I google the news he'll turn up right... Shall we see?

Holy cow, he sure did.

You'd think that after 9/11 his writers would have done a new schtick.

This is bad for him politically. Right below the bible belt bad.

And yeah, we will politicize it.

Lest anyone think Bush is not full of sewage, click here.

Sky News: Katrina makes the area look like a "3rd World Country"

Link

You simply have no idea what this looks like from the UK. Terms like "helpless giant" are being thrown about by Rupert Murdoch's network with abandon.

Cindy Sheehan was sort of right- Bush bears some responsibility for the disaster in New Orleans...

Sorry Mossback, but Cindy Sheehan's right and you're wrong. We
already have in the public record the equivalent 9/11 Aug 6 PDB for New Orleans:

Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."


The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

One of the aspects about being a responsible adult is that one tends to prepare and defend one's life and loved ones against the "system shits the bed" sceneario.

Bush and his supporters haven't been the types of folks who go in for ...well... planning.

Not that he's completely to blame: New Orleans is one of those places that people 500 years from now will consider and say, "How could they have been so stupid as to build a city there in the first place?"

We now have a disaster on a par with the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. It could have been prevented.

London blogging...New Orleans panic...

London- It's kind of odd to be in a London Hilton that doesn't have CNN, but does have Dubai TV. (It doesn't have al Jazeera either, for that matter.)

I finally got internet access today. (Getting into my hotel room was an ordeal in itself- suffice to say though, that after years of doing this, I know that when they say they "don't have a room available," if you have a reservation, and are a frequent stayer, they do indeed have a room for you. All you have to do is apply polite stress to the system, watching, measuring results, and they will come through. It's one of the side benefits I got from reading Herb Cohen's book on negotiating. It's a fine room, too.)

It appears from the UK, - seeing the first headlines in the NY Times since I left the US, that New Orleans is this years' 9/11.

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 31 - Chaos gripped New Orleans on Wednesday as looters ran wild, food and water supplies dwindled, bodies floated in the floodwaters, the evacuation of the Superdome began and officials said there was no choice but to abandon the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina, perhaps for months.

President Bush pledged vast assistance but acknowledged, "This recovery will take years."

For the first time, a New Orleans official suggested the scope of the death toll. Mayor C. Ray Nagin said the hurricane might have killed thousands in his city alone, an estimate that, if correct, would make it the nation's deadliest natural disaster since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which killed up to 6,000 people.

"We know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water," and others hidden from view in attics and other places, Mayor Nagin told reporters. Asked how many, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands."

As survivors struggled with a disaster that left damage of up to $25 billion, a gargantuan relief effort began. Ships, planes, helicopters and convoys of supplies and rescue teams converged on the Gulf Coast, and Pentagon officials said 30,000 National Guard and active-duty troops would be deployed by this weekend in the largest domestic relief effort by the military in the nation's history.

With police officers and National Guard troops giving priority to saving lives, looters brazenly ripped open gates and ransacked stores for food, clothing, television sets, computers, jewelry and guns, often in full view of helpless law-enforcement officials. Dozens of carjackings, apparently by survivors desperate to escape, were reported, as were a number of shootings.

Having been to New Orleans in the past year and 1/2, I'm pretty shocked by this; not surprised- after all, New orleans was a low lying city in Hurricane Alley- but this is pretty devastating.

Very Brief Hiatus...

I'm off on a rather extensive business trip (出張で). In a couple of days I'll be blogging from London, then Japan, then Beijing.

Beijing should be cool...

"I'll see you Cindy Sheehan and I'll raise you Hugo Chavez..."

Seriously, though, Jesse Jackson's meeting with Chavez might be able to do some good.

It can't hurt. And who knows? And maybe Al Sharpton will galvanize African American sentiment for a reasonable exit from Iraq. It'd be nice though, if he seriously addressed Tawanna Brawley for us European Americans. I know he's older and wiser, and, frankly, would have made a better president than the current one. (Who'd doubt Al Sharpton would use force against our enemies?)

With Jackson meeting Chavez, and Martin Sheen and Cindy Sheehan engaging in a "bearing witness" as well, it's good to see the best traditions of progressive Christianity in action (and not surprisingly more people seem to approve of Sheehan's practices than Bush's at this point), as opposed to the folks who want to repeal the 14th Amendment and bring back the confederacy. (Also see this.)

With regard to that last link, I agree with Joe Carter when he asserts that the "dominionists" make up a small percentage of evangelicals. Having said that, I suppose it would be good now and then if one were truly able to actually uninvite one's self from another's blogroll...

What else would it do but be able to download directly?

I usually don't blog about technical issues, for the same reasons that flowers don't make noise. (Actually, I've never blogged about what I actually do...and the recent stressful spate of work has set up something rather cool for me. If I can pull it off. And now back to something completely different...)

Link

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 29 - Apple Computer and Motorola plan to unveil a long-awaited mobile phone and music player next week that will incorporate Apple's iTunes software, a telecommunications industry analyst who has been briefed on the announcement said on Monday...

It was not clear whether the iTunes phone would allow users to download songs directly from the Internet onto the phone, though music industry analysts said they doubted that such a capability would be immediately available. Mike McGuire, an online-music analyst with Gartner Inc., a research firm, said that so-called over-the-air downloads would first require ironing out technological and music-licensing issues.

But the day of wireless downloads of full songs is not far off, according to major wireless carriers. Sprint said on Monday that by the end of the year it planned to offer phones that allowed users to download full songs wirelessly. Mr. Nelson of Verizon Wireless said his company was also in the final stages of developing such a capability.

Oh, yeah, right the "technological" issues stem from the fact that infrastructure for high bandwidth apps sucks in the US...it's that wonderful, magical, mystical, hidden hand of the "free" market there...

Carrying one less device would be a wonderful thing.

"What I am feeling is water falling on my head"

First words from live video feed from MSNBC on Katrina.

Maybe they'll have updated the link by the time you read this but the very silliness of real-time reporting on this is absurd...

Hurricane thoughts...

New Orleans is a cool city; it's too bad they're going to get at least partially slammed.

It'll be bad because of its topography, but they'll survive.

I wonder if the above ground cemeteries will be OK. I don't know, but that seems kind of important to me.

I've always liked hurricanes (it's like an imposed party complete with candles if you're not being flooded or otherwise in a precarious state of life), but they were a pain in the but if you had a real life to live when they hit.

One other question: what's happening to the folks in jails?

Suicide bombers, poor rural military recruits and sex

Richard Bennett correctly identifies the sublimation of sex as a rationale for suicide bombers; what he missed is the connection between sexual potency and poverty and lack of opportunity. Lack of opportunity- it can be religiously imposed or due to poverty; but you know what? This exists everywhere - even in the US- and one side effect of poverty is alienation from one's self and one's community and society, with the resulting either a gross over-exaggeration of sexual performance or impotency. Either way, it's dysfunctional sexual behavior.

Rx: Gang of Four's songs:

• I Love a Man in Uniform
  
  
• Damaged Goods
  
  
• 5:45
  
  
• At home he's a tourist...
  
  

They were probably after Richard's time...

Why the price of oil will continue to go up - part III

This Kos diary says almost all of it.


The only other thing I'd add: there are still media business types saying prices might go down.

That's how you know that even if it's a bubble, it's not near bursting yet.

Why the price of oil will continue to go up - part II

I was but a young lad so it seems, when I left my first company after some 8 years of service...I remember a meeting I had with the VP of R&D, and discussed the many ills that company had, and after the meeting, I had realized a fundamental truth: often dysfunctional organizations are intentionally planned to be that way.

With Iraq having massive demonstrations in opposition to its proposed new constitution, it might be asked, "Was this planned?"

I suspect so, and so does Tom Hayden...

Far from planting democracy, US policy is squelching what little democracy there is, threatening to dismember Iraq, causing a civil war that will be the pretext for US troops to remain, and re-arranging the Middle East to include a de facto Shiite alliance from Teheran to Basra. That's why Bush can find no "noble purpose". It is about a war for dominance, not democracy.

The only problem, though, is that continuing civil war will mean continuing threats to oil supplies. There can't be "dominance," because the civil war has in it the prospect- pointed out months ago by Gwynne Dyer- that the Iraqis will eventually realize this is a suckers' game.

In the meantime, there will be threats to oil supplies- because that's why we're there.

If they can stop the oil flow, they win against this gambit. But we lose, and lots of folks die. As long as there's no clear resolution, there's uncertainty and oil will be pricey.

"Porn makes you bind" - distractions distract...

Link

Vanderbilt Uni psychologist David Zald and his team exposed [human] guinea pigs to a barrage of "disturbing" images interspersed with landscape or architectural snaps, telling them to scan the images for a certain target image. The press release explains: "An irrelevant, emotionally negative or neutral picture preceded the target by two to eight items. The closer the negative pictures were to the target image, the more frequently the subject failed to spot the target. In a subsequent study, which has not yet been published, the researchers substituted erotic for negative images and found the same basic effect."

The bottom line is, says Zald: "We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images."

So, what's it all about? Well, the boffins reckon it's related to the "rubbernecking" concept - the process whereby you try and drive by an accident without having a shufti but "our emotions of concern, fear and curiosity cause us to stare out the window at the accident and slow to a crawl as we drive by"...

In the second experiment, the researchers sought to determine if individuals can override their emotion-induced blindness by focusing more deliberately on the target for which they are searching. In this experiment, the subjects undertook two different trials. In one they were told specifically to look for a rotated photo of a building; in the other they were told to look for a rotated photo of either a building or a landscape.

The research team hypothesized that the more specific instruction - to look for the building only - would help the research subjects override their emotion-induced blindness. After running the tests, the researchers discovered that they were partially right: specific instructions helped some subjects control their attention, but it didn't help others.

There's reasons people spend time on cusions cultivating ki...

While oil will keep going up until at least 2006

Oh, there'll be ups and downs, but the long term trend is up, up, up.

Yes, part of ihe story is peak oil, about which nobody's doing anything yet.

But the main reason oil will continue to go through the roof is Iraq.

Some points:

• America's energy policy at the business end has always been pretty savage: from killing off lots of whales, to enslaving coal miners, America has always turned a blind eye towards the ruthless extraction of energy to fuel economic growth. You could include slavery too, in that I suppose.
  
  
• Jimmy Carter- speaking honestly - declared the middle east an area of "strategic importance" to the US- which it was and is at the moment: dry up the oil, and we're screwed big time; and this time it won't be somebody doing an embargo on a whim (which was billed as being peed at Israel but actually had something to do with being paid off in worthless dollars).
  
  

This time it is about our very hegemony in the region that's at stake: our task is either to make Iraq a stable, prosperous, "Germany-like" (that is, the Germany of today) American "friend" or - or- give up the very way of life as we've known it for about 60 years.

Now... how likely do you reallythink that Iraq will be "Germany-like?" How about Saudi Arabia?

See where I'm heading?

The whole world knows, dammit, that our Achilles heel is cheap oil at the hands of religious fundamentalists and people who've been screwed by our policy of coddling dictators.

They're not likely to turn into "Germany-like" overnight.

So oil is going up, up, and away.

It was better to let sleeping Saddam Hussiens lie if ther wasn't an exit strategy from imported oil.

Period.