No pictures, please.

I just happened to see these two at the same time. They go together so well, I thought I'd show them to you at the same time too.

First up was "Blinded By The Light?" from BAGnewsNotes which observed that there aren't any pictures in the news of the horrors of the Superdome.

So my question is, weren't any "non-romanticized" photos taken inside the Dome after the first day or so? And if so, why haven't we seen any? And if not, why not?

Certainly, there were quite a few news photographers inside the building throughout the week. Would these intrepid people argue that photos could only be taken from a symbolic Green Zone? And what about amateur images? I understand most local residents arrived with next-to-nothing, but what about those tourists who still had their luggage? In light of the images that emerged during the London subway attacks, is it possible there weren't even any cell phone photos?

Next up is "FEMA Wants No Photos of Dead" from the Los Angeles Times (which I found via this post at ThinkProgress):

"We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media," the spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

I don't think these are necessarily related. The request from FEMA appears to post-date what happened at the Superdome. Still, I thought it was interesting, the two of them right together like that.

Oh by the way, which one's Pink?

I found "Oh by the way, which one's Pink?" via this post at Thou Shall Not Suck. It's images from current events mixed with lyrics from "Us and Them" by Pink Floyd. Have a look.

Cuba evacuates better than we do.

JeSurgisLac wrote:

Cuba handles hurricanes better than the US. (Recently, Hurricane Dennis hit Cuba: one million people evacuated, 16 people killed. Compare and contrast.)

So I looked it up.

Cuba evacuated 600,000 people in preparations for Hurricane Dennis according to Wikipedia. Also according to Wikipedia, "The 2000 census put New Orleans's population at 484,674 and the population of Greater New Orleans at 1,337,726." (I added up the populations of New Orleans and the parishes that were ordered evacuated and got 1,354,638.)

Wikipedia says that roughly 150,000 people did not obey the order to evacuate (mostly because they couldn't). So the number of people who did evacuate appears to be more than those who evacuated in Cuba. On the other hand, the people in American basically evacuated themselves whereas, according to Reuters, "Storm fatalities are rare in Communist Cuba where the authorities can muster all state resources to evacuate hundreds of thousands from the path of hurricanes."

Only ten people died in Cuba during Hurricane Dennis (a category 4 storm at the time).

I don't just lie in bed.

Twice recently I've seen remarks saying, basically, "visitors from our site are being blocked by this other site." I haven't had this problem, personally, and I'm pretty sure the reason is that I use Privoxy, which lies like a bear rug to the rest of the Internet. It lies about where I've come from, it lies about what software I'm using. Coupled with Tor, it even lies about where I am.

I believe in obeying access restrictions even when I can evade them (I haven't made any attempt to evade my ban at RedState, for instance), but in this case I wind up evading without even noticing it.

Give it a try. Lie your ass off, and forget about being judged by where you come from.

Biblical.

A disaster of biblical proportions......

They keep saying it .... "This is a disaster of biblical proportions." "This is a catastrophe of biblical scope." What do you suppose they think they mean by that?

I suppose -- in the spirit of "Mistakes were made" and "It's just plain astonishing how quickly we've moved to Reach Out to the people trapped in New Orleans!" -- what they mean is "Don't blame me, blame God."

Biblical proportions! I want to throttle these people.

We are the gods here. The world is what we make it. We soar over God's Earth in machines of our creation. We can slay any living thing on Earth from those too tiny to see to those too massive to lift. We've harnessed God's own lightning. We've visited the heavens and split the "indivisible" atom. We work miracles.

This is an absolute disgrace. Humanity is better than this.

The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

I'm just livid. There's no excuse for this.

Obsidian Wings: Explanation, Justification, Blah Blah Blah

I highly recommend taking the (considerable) time to read "Explanation, Justification, Blah Blah Blah" over at Obsidian Wings which discusses in some depth the difference between explanation and justification and associated topics.

So why do people tend to confuse the two? One easy reason is that both, when applied to people, can cite the reasons why those people did what they did.

This is another way of saying they both answer the question "why?". Many times I've answered the question "why did you do this?" honestly, explaining what I think happened, only to hear back, "but that's no excuse." I wasn't trying to justify it.

One other thing that's stuck with me quite a bit is the characterization of responsibility as not zero-sum:

People sometimes think that if one person is responsible for something, no one else can be responsible for it; or (alternatively) that there is a fixed amount of responsibility for each thing, such that if I am partly responsible for something you did, your responsibility must be lessened. More briefly: they think that that responsibility is zero-sum. If someone thought this, then she might see any attempt to say that I am to any degree responsible for something you did as tantamount to partially excusing you.

Reading this, I find that, yes, I have often viewed responsibility as zero-sum. Even having realized this is an error, I have trouble shaking the idea. It makes diffusion of responsibility make sense, and we know that diffusion of responsibility really happens. It "makes sense" for people to "share" responsibility. Nevertheless, I'm convinced now that responsibility is not zero-sum, and I need to make the corresponding attitude adjustment.

Anyway, it's a good article, if long.

This is not a post about Katrina

What are we seeing in New Orleans?

In actual fact, we are discovering that with a crisis of this magnitude, government's influence falls far short of guranteeing order or virtue. For many Americans, this won't make them want more and better government; it will make them want less, and even none.

The Gulf (of Mexico) War

the right has gotten their wish. they successfully made government ineffective. this is what happens when you take away the power of government. the point of effective government is to keep this from happening to society.

I find it fascinating that people look at the same events and come to the opposite conclusions about them.

Katrina and New Orleans

I've been avoiding the coverage. By all accounts, it is horrific.

Anyone who thinks that the blame game rhetoric is running a little too hot right now, wait until we have a final death toll. I've been avoiding the coverage, true, but it sounds to me as if it's already an outrageous disgrace out there. There won't be any "it's really Clinton's fault" this time.

The toy snake anecdote.

My daughter got a toy snake made of wood that's very realistic-looking with its paint job and articulation. Shortly after getting it, she lost it.

On the phone to Grandma, she talked about having lost her snake. Of course, she doesn't call it a toy snake, just a snake. Her mom confirmed, yes, we got it at the store, and it has indeed been lost.

So Grandma was left with the impression that a living, breathing snake was lost in the house. A pet snake wouldn't be dangerous, but we wouldn't want it roaming the halls where a dog might find it. I also wouldn't want it to find our hamster.

That's not a concern, though, because it's a toy snake.

The next day, we still hadn't found it, and my darling daughter reiterated to her grandma that the snake was lost. The misunderstanding was finally cleared up when she became concerned and asked my wife, "you still haven't found the snake loose in your house?"

It tastes just like chicken!

This is the reason our Comcast service has been so lousy. Well, it's part of the reason. According to the tech who was here, there's still more wrong with our connection, but splicing out that little segment should make a difference. It was one of those "I'm surprised it works at all" problems.

Squirrels—self-propelled short circuits—don't conform to network guidelines. — Cliff Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil