Daniel Spisak on Technology

John Stewart blasted the heads of DHS and FEMA on September 7ths broadcast of The Daily Show in his segment “Meet the F**kers” an aptly appointed title to any honest news segment talking about the horrible management at the top by these people. Stewart proceeds to give background on the two people and shows choice video segments from other news broadcasts illustrating how incompetent these people were on live TV showing just how unprepared and uninformed they were I think. You can download the segment from my server here if you’d like:

John Stewart blasts DHS/FEMA (37MB MPEG-4)

So apparently as the NOPD and National Guard are forcing the last stragglers to evacuate from New Orleans they are disarming any citizens in the process! What in the sam hell happened to the 2nd Amendment? Is New Orleans no longer a part of the United States? How is this possible? How come the people at ABC News who talked about this in this clip from last nights broadcast doesn’t once mention that this is a violation of our 2nd Amendment rights? You can see the clip from last nights broadcast here:

NOPD/Nat Guard violating citizens 2nd Amendment rights (7.4MB Divx5 AVI)

What is our country coming to?

Ok people, here is the deal. The US government is/has been/and probably will continue to fuck up majorly in its handling of the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina disaster. It seems like every time I come online to get more news and updates I am hearing more and more first hand accounts of how FEMA or the National Guard has been preventing resuce teams from out of state helping.

Think about that last line for a few minutes. The whole world is watching America right now and we don’t have our shit together here people. This is BAD.

There has begun some great work by the Daily KOS people to build up a chronolgy of the Katrina relief efforts or prevention there of to try and get a clear pictures as to where and hopefully who is screwing things up. You can find their great chronolgy here:

http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/Hurricane_Katrina_Chronology

Based on this chronolgy and based on other accounts I’ve been reading I find this op-ed piece that ran in the New York Times to be spot on, and I happen to agree with John Dvorak when he says the following lower paragraphs of the New York Times op-ed piece here I am about to show should have been the opening ones:

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn’t know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo’s on Fifth Avenue and attended “Spamalot” before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

Additionally, that op-ed piece from the New York Times is also being read by Germans in their popular Der Spiegel publication. Furthermore, its not just Maureen Dowd of the New York Times calling for Brown to be fired, but the editors of the paper at the New Orleans Times-Picayune in an open letter to President Bush:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, “What is not working, we’re going to make it right.”

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a “Today” show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: “Buses! And gas!” Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, “We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day.”

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, “You’re doing a heck of a job.”

That’s unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

Frankly, these people are pissed and I can’t say that I blame them one bit! Another group of people incensed about the governments show of inacation has been some of the press corps like Anderson Cooper from CNN who was interviewed on this weeks Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. Bill spent much of this weeks show talking about Katrina and the problems with the “speedy” response for aid. I’ve included a link to download the entire show this time as I feel the whole show is worth listening to if you have the time:

Real Time w/Bill Maher 9-2-2005 (142MB Xvid AVI)

Additionally it looks like my predicition that the presidents approval rating would fall is coming true as we can see here:

Some more information on whats going on in New Orleans. Reports are coming in from people there that they are finally starting to see troops in the city but it remains to be seen how quickly things can be brought under control. Below are links to more photos and video from New Orleans, courtesy of DirectNIC:

Also of special interest is this radio interview with New Orleans mayor as he talks frankly about what he needs to get the recovery under proper motion:

WWL-AM Interview with Ray Nagin 3.2MB MP3

Also here is a new link to a video feed from the DirectNIC guys:

http://video.freevideoblog.com/no2.asx

There is also a hybrid Google Maps made by the guys over here that tries to show the location of everything going on that we know about:

Customized Dynamic map of New Orleans

Things out in New Orleans are an absolute mess. There is someone at datacenter (DirectNIC) in New Orleans that has been blogging about how things are going down there and it doesn’t sound good. You can find their blog here:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor

To give you an idea of how bad things are down there here is a recent entry from Interdictor’s blog.

Jesse Jackson
Dear Sir:

Respectfully, I submit that you should shut the hell up. Looting and lawlessness IS the problem. The National Guard choppers are BEING SHOT AT. The NOPD are BEING SHOT AT. You want to focus on the levee? So do they, but check this out: THEY CAN’T UNTIL THE MOB STOPS ATTACKING THE RESCUE OPERATION.

I know you’re looking at this situation with concern for the racial implications of the deterioration of civilization out here, but this is bigger than whether people are going to be racists after this is over. This is about rescuing the masses i.e. life and death.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and blame your stupid comments on your lack of knowledge of the situation. Don’t prove me a fool for doing so.

Regards,

Michael Barnett

Additionally, you can listen in to a Louisiana radio scanner via Peercast (the other sites are full up on listeners) by downloading a free client at http://www.peercast.org. Once you have the client installed you can listen to the radio chatter with this link:

peercast://pls/007D48952E4E7D0992252C52EAE7C1CF?tip=192.153.154.157:7144

If that link doesnt work, copy it and paste it into a web browser and then hit enter. Listening to the radio chatter over there things are a mess.

Additionally this WIki site is a good source for intel and information for what is going on down there:

http://wiki.nola-intel.org/index.php/Main_Page

Below are some photos that have been taken by the guys at the DirectNIC datacenter to give you an idea of what things are like:

Interdictor also has a live camera feed running from DirectNIC that can be found here:

http://194.97.144.25/NewOrleans
mms://204.251.3.10:2864/
http://old.mises.org:88/NO2

Also, don’t forget to donate to the Amercian Red Cross or The Salvation Army to help out victims of Katrina.