It's because states are capable of doing this:

Myanmar's junta seized U.N. aid shipments headed for hungry and homeless survivors of last week's devastating cyclone, prompting the world body to suspend further help on Friday.

The U.N. said the aid included 38 tons of high-energy biscuits and arrived in Myanmar on Friday on two flights from Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates.

"All of the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated," U.N. World Food Program spokesman Paul Risley said. "For the time being, we have no choice but to end further efforts to bring critical needed food aid into Myanmar at this time."

Myanmar's government acknowledged taking control of the shipments and said it plans to distribute the aid "without delay by its own labor to the affected areas."

In a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press, government spokesman Ye Htut said the junta had "clearly stated" what it would do and denied the action amounted to a seizure.

Yeah, anyone actually believe those last two paragraphs?  Now I'm hesitant to even donate to relief efforts, because the money may get wasted by the bureaucratic meddling of Myanmar's government.  If they truly cared about their people's welfare, they'd let relief workers just do their job.  I think the Burmese are a lot more focused on survival than staging an uprising at this point.

How ironic, that bureaucratic inefficiency leads to rather efficient mass murder.  And it's happened time and again.

The video streaming on NBC's Olympics Web site leaves something to be desired.  I wanted to see video of an American woman luger's crash today, which was supposed to be quite spectacular, but there's something wrong with the playback window (perhaps because they're using Windows Media Player, or because I'm using Firefox).  There were actually several big crashes during the women's luge today.

This led me to realize why I prefer the Winter Games to the Summer Games: the potential for catastrophe on ice and snow is much higher.  I'm a morbid type; I like to watch sports, but I really like to watch people colossally fuck up while competing.  With few exceptions, there just isn't enough speed in most summer Olympic events to satisfy my craving for carnage.

This is why I think NBC could make a metric fuck-ton of money by marketing a DVD catering to my interests.  I can't believe I'm the only one who enjoys crashes, falls and monster hits.  You know they'll be offering Torino's Greatest Moments on DVD about 14 seconds after the closing ceremonies (in fact you can pre-order it already); why not Torino's Greatest Fuck-ups?  Damn near every event, except maybe curling and cross-country skiing, can yield a motherlode of catastrophes: luge, skeleton, bobsled, alpine skiing, snowboarding, ice hockey, speed skating.

Even figure skating can be an eye-opener.  Did you see the pairs' free skate last night?  (Go ahead, laugh, you fuckers; I enjoy watching it.)  This Chinese skater landed on the ice in a split while trying to nail a quadruple Salchow.  That hurt just watching it.  Amazingly, after she took a moment to rest, she and her partner finished their program—and won the silver medal.  That's gutsy.

Anyway, I'd be all over a DVD of the greatest Olympic crashes, fuck-ups and beatdowns.  The rest of it has just become so predictable anyway.

How ironic that after all of the breathless reporting in the mainstream media of rape, murder, 7-year-olds getting their throats cut, and other atrocities committed in the SuperDome following Hurricane Katrina, that one of the UK's most liberal newspapers would have questioned these reports three weeks ago.  They were largely ignored, with the right-wingers preferring to paint the evacuees inside the SuperDome and Convention Center as little more than animals, and the left using the reports to condemn Bush and FEMA for their lackluster response to the disaster.  Even the cops told us that things had descended into senseless brutality.

Yesterday, they were vindicated by the truth:

Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was six, Beron said.

All told, 10 people died at the SuperDome and Convention Center, just one as a result of foul play (another was a suicide).

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome.

Can we move on now?

Office of Representative Tom Tancredo
United States Congress, 6th District of Colorado

For Immediate Release

WASHINGTON — U. S. Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado), a tireless defender of freedom and traditional American values from fanatical Muslims and parasitic Mexicans, today praised Hurricane Rita for its "principled and effective stance against illegal immigration."

"Today we learned that Hurricane Rita has prompted hundreds if not thousands of Mexican nationals living and working along the Texas Gulf Coast to return to Mexico to escape the storm's wrath," spokesperson Will Adams said Thursday.  "Representative Tancredo welcomes this development as a way to minimize the danger to our nation's economy and traditional values posed by the threat of unchecked illegal immigration.

"It also proves that God loves America so much," Adams continued, "that He saw fit to send us one of His most awesome creations in our defense.  God is a true American patriot."

Adams then tied a bandanna around his head, brandished a plastic toy M-16 and shouted "America, FUCK YEAH!"

Rep. Tancredo also plans to work with other Republicans in Congress to continue opposing U. S. participation in the Kyoto Treaty and fund research into accelerating the effects of global warming, in an effort to spawn more patriotic hurricanes to defend the Gulf Coast from further incursions by Mexican illegals.

"A few billion dollars in damage and the temporary displacement of millions of Americans are worth it if it blocks even a single illegal from crossing the border," Adams said.

Rep. Tancredo most recently was praised for his proposal to meet a nuclear attack on America by Muslim fascists with the measured and judicious response of bombing Mecca and other Islamic holy sites.

- 30 -

When asked to respond to Tancredo's remarks, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan gritted his teeth, pinched the bridge of his nose, and replied with a firm "no comment."

Courtesy of altamira16 (who would quickly point out that she got it from someone else, no doubt!), the first tasteless NOLA joke that's actually funny (or at least groan-inducing):

What's George W. Bush's position on Roe v. Wade?

( cue rimshot )

I don't believe in the afterlife, so threats to send me to Hell won't work.  Nyah.

[cross-posted from libertarianism]

From the London Daily Mail comes a report that doctors in at least one New Orleans hospital euthanized patients whom they considered too weak to survive an evacuation:

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

Now, it must be stressed that there has been no independent corroboration of this report, and of course the Daily Mail is withholding the identities of the medical staff it interviewed.  But we do know that more than 40 bodies have been discovered in one flooded hospital, mostly elderly patients, although of course we don't know yet how they died.

If this is true, then this revelation could make the forced disarmament and evacuation of residents seem little more annoying than a traffic ticket.  Even in the extraordinary circumstances of Katrina's aftermath, deliberately administering lethal doses of pain medication isn't just a violation of the doctors' oaths, it's murder if they didn't have the consent of the patients.

Even if it was likely the patients would die anyway, and quite possibly in a slow agonizing manner, the decision to end their lives should never rest with the doctors alone, ever.

(Note: Anyone attempting to draw parallels between this and the Terri Schiavo case gets an F and must stand in the corner wearing the Dunce cap for 10 minutes.)

"Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. And bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today. . . . So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."

— Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard, from an interview on CBS' The Early Show

Go here, and download the coolest virtual atlas ever: Google Earth.  (Sorry, it's Windows-only at this time.  If you have a mega-powerful Mac [or PC running not-Windows] and an emulator, you may be able to get it going.)

After you've installed it, go here and download some imagery from the aftermath of Katrina, particularly the overlays from NOAA satellite imagery from September 3rd.  (Open the .kmz file with Google Earth and it will start automatically and load the overlays.)

When you zoom into the New Orleans area, you'll notice a bunch of red dots scattered all over the place.  Click on one of the dots, then click on the first link in the balloon to load the overlay. (Be careful not to load too many map overlays at once, lest you bring your computer to its knees; these things consume a lot of memory.)

Now, from the Layers window, expand the "Keyhole Community BBS" list.  This is a set of layers contributed by users of Keyhole, which is the mapping engine at the heart of Google Earth (I think).  Scroll through the list until you find "Housing Projects" and check its box to enable the layer.  Zoom out a bit, and you'll see information icons denoting various housing projects in the New Orleans area.  Note how many of them lie in the flood area.

Now, as one example, look for the project called "Florida Homes" (it's just to the northeast of downtown and the French Quarter, in the area known as the 9th Ward, I think).  Click on the red dot labeled "24426954" just to the north of the Florida Homes icon.  Load that overlay.

Damn.  Where'd the housing project go?

Have fun, kids.

From the Times-Picayune blog:

Bush visit halts food delivery
By Michelle Krupa
Staff writer

Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard
Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge
Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s
visit to New Orleans, officials said.

The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville,
and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun
as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana five days after
Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Melancon’s chief of
staff, Casey O’Shea.

“We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and
now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters
fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon.

The food was expected to be in the hands of storm survivors after the
president left the devastated region Friday night, he said.

I'm kind of numb to outrage at this point.

I'll tell you this, though: if I wasn't a full-blown anarchist before, I sure as fuck am now.  This tragedy has amply demonstrated the government's inability to protect its citizens.  If it can't serve even that basic function, then it has no business existing.

Democrats: "This never would have happened if the Bush administration had fully funded efforts to rebuild and strengthen New Orleans' levees and implement a new coastal management plan!"

Republicans: "I don't think it's a good idea to use Federal tax dollars to rebuild a city in an area so vulnerable to this kind of devastation.  It's just gonna flood again."

Libertarians: "It's their own damn fault!  If those fat-ass welfare queens had gotten off the crack and got real jobs, they wouldn't be living in a flood plain and would have been able to leave!  Let them fucking drown!"

New Orleans refugees: . . . they're not saying much, busy as they are fucking dying.

I have no more heroes.

irony, n: keeping a data center fully operational through a hurricane, flooding, looting and madness, only to be brought down by a Slashdot posting.

Yes, it's another Katrina posting.  Maybe you're well and truly sick of reading about it by now, for which I apologize—well, no, I don't apologize.  It's my blog and I'll continue to be pissed off if I want to.

Besides, if you aren't still moved by the plight of the victims of this, the worst natural disaster in modern U. S. history, you must be dead.  (Or maybe a Republican.)  I note that at least one of my LJ friends expressed outrage that there was so little coverage of the bridge disaster in Baghdad, where nearly 1,000 Shi'ite pilgrims were trampled or leapt to their deaths, and I can only suggest that it was the victim of unfortunate timing.  On any other week, such a tragedy might have resonated with at least some Americans (at least those willing to use it against their political enemies).  But I can't blame most people for turning their eyes inward, towards their countrymen.  The impact of this catastrophe will reverberate through the national psyche long after the flood waters recede from New Orleans; will persist, I dare say, long after the last troops finally leave Iraq and return home.

There is no parallel to draw with 9/11.  Those terrorist attacks, the shock of sudden, fiery destruction, can't compare to the human misery on display in the South.  With 9/11, at least, we had a face and a name towards which to direct our collective rage; even later, as the targets became less tangible—the "war on terror," the "axis of evil"—the grief over such senseless death and destruction could be externalized.  Despite the left's attempts to use 9/11 as a springboard into a deeper contemplation of U. S. foreign policy, the attacks engendered a siege mentality among many Americans that persists to this day.

But whom will we turn our shock, grief and rage towards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?  The fact is that we can only blame ourselves: those who defied evacuation orders and then found themsevles stranded in the flood waters; the looters who acted on their most selfish, primal impulses; the government bureaucrats who could only offer incompetence and miscommunication instead of help and hope.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, in an interview with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC tonight, said that while many of the looters were petty criminals who had no excuse for their behavior, many others were simply living paycheck-to-paycheck, paying their taxes, who then watched helplessly as the government infrastructure collapsed around them at the time they needed it most.

This is the first time in memory that I find myself agreeing vigorously with Rev. Sharpton.  The state, for all of its obligations in upholding its end of the "social contract," whatever that means in this context, has utterly failed in its responsibilities.  The response from FEMA and the Federal government has been nothing short of an embarrassment, in the words of Louisiana's emergency management director.  The government can mobilize massive relief efforts for disaster victims overseas, yet when a catastrophe occurs in their own backyard, they can't be bothered to actually truck supplies and bring them directly to evacuees, instead just dumping them off the side of a bridge, where many of the supplies were destroyed on impact.  That has been the government's idea of a "massive" relief effort.

Chaos still reigns on the streets of New Orleans; looting has escalated to rape and murder; the police have been unable to establish any type of command and control (that is, when they haven't participated in the looting themselves), and the National Guard and other military units have been slow to respond.  There is no excuse for this, other than the notion that it's impossible for any entity to be prepared for a disaster of this magnitude.  But if that's the case, then why expect the government to ever be able to help you?  Why not simply take matters into your own hands?

Fortunately, that's what some people have done.  And they are the lone standard bearers for whatever dignity is left for those wretched people who were naïve enough to believe the state could save them.

Looking for more to read?  In the interest of saving my sanity, I've reduced my news sources on Katrina (and in particular its aftermath in the Big Easy) to just three reliable, no-holds-barred Web sites:

• The New Orleans Survival Blog, courtesy of Michael Barnett (aka interdictor) and DirectNIC.com.  Despite my crack at the beginning of this post, these guys are so hardcore they've kept their site up under almost impossible logistical challenges and a Slashdotting.  And what Mike and his crew are reporting from the streets are a very different and more disturbing picture than anything you'll see on CNN.  This has become an international phenomenon, with mentions on CNN, BBC, Slate, and many other sources.  Nearly 2500 LJ users have friended the blog and many thousands more are reading from around the world.  If you want a true sense of the desperation that engulfs New Orleans, you must be reading this.  (You probably already are.)
  
• The Breaking News blog from the Times-Picayune on NOLA.com.  Not only does the T-P deserve a Pulitzer Prize for their efforts to keep their paper running, the fucking award should be retired thereafter.  Despite having to abandon their newsroom and relocate to Houma (where they plan to restart printing of the paper) and Baton Rouge, the T-P staff have kept working in the city, posting stories in real time to the Breaking News blog, and producing electronic editions of the paper.
• A text blog on WWL-TV's Web site.  Not only do they include updates from their own news team, they aggregate stories from other sources, which makes it a convenient stop for surveying the mainstream media's reporting.

That's all I can really stomach now.  I did find one nifty tool, over at Scipionus.com: a Katrina Information Map, which is essentially a Google map annotated with hundreds of notes regarding the condition of neighborhoods and individual houses in Katrina's path.  It can be slow to load, so be patient, but try overlaying the satellite map, and then try imagining what it's like after a hurricane with 150 MPH winds has blown through.

You do still care, right?

From WWL-TV's Katrina blog:

4:15 P.M. - (AP): Police say storm victims are being raped and beaten inside the New Orleans Convention Center.

About 15,200 people who had taken shelter at the convention center to await buses grew increasingly hostile.

Police Chief Eddie Compass says he sent in 88 officers to quell the situation at the building, but they were quickly beaten back by an angry mob.

Compass says, "We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten."

He says tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon.

In hopes of defusing the unrest at the convention center, Mayor Ray Nagin gave the refugees permission to march across a bridge to the city's unflooded west bank for whatever relief they can find. But the bedlam appeared to make leaving difficult.

* weeps *

Well, somebody had to say it:

House Speaker: Rebuilding N.O. doesn't make sense
Thursday, 2:55 p.m.

By Bill Walsh
Washington bureau

WASHINGTON - House Speaker Dennis Hastert dropped a bombshell on flood-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday by suggesting that it isn’t sensible to rebuild the city.

"It doesn't make sense to me," Hastert told the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago in editions published today. "And it's a question that certainly we should ask."

( Read more... )

OK, so he makes a very good point.  Rebuilding New Orleans, at an enormous cost to taxpayers, may not make sense if the same nightmarish scenario can happen in the future, even with improved flooding protection and wetlands management.  The Dutch may have pulled off the trick of living on below-sea-level lands, but they also don't deal with hurricanes.  And it shouldn't be the taxpayers' responsibility to deal with the consequences of the residents' choices.

But to choose this time to make such a cold analysis, when the bodies haven't even been counted or recovered, when a dying city writhes in agony with no food, water, power or sanitation, and when people are risking their lives to save others: to make such a statement now tells you a lot about the priorities of politicians and bureaucrats.  Human compassion doesn't seem to be among them.

Hey, Dennis: shut the fuck up and let people get to work.  You can whine about the cost during your appropriations hearings.  But for now you're simply cementing the reputation that liberals have accused Republicans of having all along: you don't really give a shit about the less fortunate, at least until the next election season.

On the way home from work last night, I noticed that one of the Conoco stations at Sheridan and Dartmouth (yes, there are two of them there, right across from each other) listed regular unleaded at $2.84 per gallon.  That was a 25-cent jump from just the day before.

This morning, as I stopped to pick up smokes before heading into work, the price had risen to $3.05.

Expect prices of many other goods to rise as it becomes more expensive to ship them.

In other words, there isn't a person in this country who won't be affected by Katrina in some way.  Think about that before you say that what's happening in New Orleans and the northern Gulf coast isn't your problem.

Children's Hospital under seige
Tuesday, 11:45 p.m

Late Tuesday, Gov. Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher described a disturbing scene unfolding in uptown New Orleans, where looters were trying to break into Children's Hospital.

Bottcher said the director of the hospital fears for the safety of the staff and the 100 kids inside the hospital. The director said the hospital is locked, but that the looters were trying to break in and had gathered outside the facility.

The director has sought help from the police, but, due to rising flood waters, police have not been able to respond.

Bottcher said Blanco has been told of the situation and has informed the National Guard. However, Bottcher said, the National Guard has also been unable to respond.

***

It's like an entire city is dying before my eyes.

Even the cops have joined in the looting.

EDIT: Apparently the permalink is tempo; text is ( here: )

“It must be legal . . . The police are here taking stuff, too.”

You have to laugh, right?  Right?

I hate my species.

Maybe I should retract my last post.  Nothing about this seems charming at all.

The levees have begun to fail, and even the French Quarter, which had been left relatively unscathed by Katrina's initial blast, is starting to flood.  Some neighborhoods are under up to 20 feet of water.

You should check out interdictor, by the way.  He's been posting live updates since Sunday night, and has a cam up as well.  I note with grim satisfaction the irony of using digital-age technology to drive home the near-apocalyptic survival conditions that the city faces at the moment.

He just updated again, noting that water is beginning to flow into the central business district.