Dark Clouds Form Over White House

An editorial in Wednesday's Manchester Union Leader criticizes President Bush for "aloofness" in response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster:

As the extent of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation became clearer on Tuesday -- millions without power, tens of thousands homeless, a death toll unknowable because rescue crews can’t reach some regions -- President Bush carried on with his plans to speak in San Diego, as if nothing important had happened the day before.

Katrina already is measured as one of the worst storms in American history. And yet, President Bush decided that his plans to commemorate the 60th anniversary of VJ Day with a speech were more pressing than responding to the carnage.

A better leader would have flown straight to the disaster zone and announced the immediate mobilization of every available resource to rescue the stranded, find and bury the dead, and keep the survivors fed, clothed, sheltered and free of disease.

The cool, confident, intuitive leadership Bush exhibited in his first term, particularly in the months immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, has vanished. In its place is a diffident detachment unsuitable for the leader of a nation facing war, natural disaster and economic uncertainty.

Wherever the old George W. Bush went, we sure wish we had him back.

This kind of criticism would not be surprising from a liberal rag, but the Union Leader's a staunchly conservative paper that endorsed Bush in both 2004 and 2000. Insight magazine rated it one of the top five conservative papers in the country along with the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, New York Post, and Daily Oklahoman.

I think it's safe to assume that President Bush's post-election political capital has all been spent, unless aides can find a little in coat pockets and couches around the White House.

Politics · 2005/09/01 · 39 COMMENTS · Link

Wikipedia: The Agony of Delete

The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article on Wikipedia are disputed.

I have been recommended for deletion from Wikipedia. For the next five days, Wikipedians will be having a public debate about whether I am too obscure to be included in the world's largest encyclopedia.

Weak Keep: Not as important as the author seems to think ...

Delete: Writing a book itself does not mean the person should be included. I looked up the books on Amazon and their sales rankings are #30,000 and #80,000.

Ouch.

The suspicion that I wrote my own biography is correct. I've been educating myself lately about Wikipedia and its founder Jimmy Wales, the subject of a great profile in Florida Trend magazine this month.

I was expecting Wales to be a Stallmanesque hippie in a hemp pancho who makes ends meet through the kindness of strangers and occasional hair-clipping sales to wigmakers. He's actually a millionaire former options trader who looks like an international man of mystery and runs a new for-profit wiki startup.

I contributed my biography to Wikipedia in July, and I was beginning to think it would be accepted without controversy, which was a huge letdown.

Wikipedia runs on a process that should never work -- any idiot can create or edit a page, and volunteer contributors act as white blood cells, attacking foreign invaders such as spam, factual errors, biased writing, and self-glorifying authors.

Yet work it does. As Trend points out, Wikipedia's one of the 100 most-visited sites on the web, according to Alexa, steamrolling such esteemed competition as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I tried to write my biography as objectively as possible, leaving out the fourth place I won in the national Hearst Foundation writing competition in college, my modest success in elementary school spelling bees, and the fact that seven Today Show viewers sent e-mail complimenting my looks this past April (six female, one male).

If I have not accomplished enough in 38 years to be included in such company as Gene Ray, Wendy Whoppers, and Triumph the Insult Dog, I can accept the judgment of the Wikipedia collective.

If deleted, I'll submit my biography to people.wikicities.com, a new wiki I have proposed for people who are not famous enough for Wikipedia.

As a make-work project for unemployed arts majors during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration once sent writers to collect the first-hand life stories of ordinary people, creating a significant oral history of the era.

My proposed wiki would attempt to do the same thing for the 21st century, providing a commons where everyone can describe themselves and the people of their acquaintance.

The wiki could have a symbiotic relationship with Wikipedia.

People who are not famous enough to be on Wikipedia could be moved to people.wikicities.com via the magic of transwiki.

People whose biographies receive the most traffic on people.wikicities.com are probably too famous to be included, so they would be suitable for adoption by Wikipedia.

If my request for this new WikiCities site is approved, there's a danger that I might become too notable for inclusion. I'm prepared to take that risk.

Wikipedia · 2005/08/31 · 19 COMMENTS · Link

Katrina Volunteers Needed in Houston

The water overflowing through the broken levee on Lake Pontchartrain has crested, which gives officials a better chance to complete the evacuation of New Orleans and end the increasingly post-apocalyptic situation in the city.

A server admin holed up in the central business district reports no increase in flooding.

The evacuees in the Superdome, who number more than 23,000, are being taken by bus to the Houston Astrodome.

The Red Cross in Houston needs volunteers to help these people. Call (713) 526-8300 to register as a volunteer with the Greater Houston Area Chapter of the Red Cross. There's also a phone bank set up at (713) 313-5480 and people can donate directly to this chapter.

The Red Cross expects the Katrina effort to be the largest mobilization in its 124-year history.

Here in Jacksonville, residents were just asked to turn up our air conditioning to conserve electricity. The shutdown of natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico may cause fuel shortages.

I know there's a weird aversion to '70s-style energy conservation in this country, but I suspect that those of us in Southern states spared by Katrina can help by reducing our consumption during this crisis.

Hurricane Katrina · 2005/08/31 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

I own a Linksys WRT54G, a 802.11g wireless access point, router, and four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch that runs Linux.

InfoWorld columnist Robert X. Cringley singes the praises of the WRT54G, which is an amazing little Linux device that can be hacked to function as an Internet server. I've been using it on a Windows XP network to share a broadband Internet connection over several wired and wireless PCs around the house.

As amazing as this device is, I learned something this morning: Even when you have reset the modem, tested all the cord connetions, reset the router, and set the proper Ethernet mode, the WRT54G performs poorly when it has been filled with cat vomit.

Linux · Networking · Windows Xp · 2005/08/31 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Reading this Katrina weblog entry reminded me that Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was one of only three category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S. in the last century.

My wife M.C. Moewe covered that monster storm for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She interrupted a Disney World vacation with her parents, driving to South Florida in time to experience the eyewall passing overhead in the company of local police. For most of the three-hour trip, her car was the only one heading south.

Covering the story was my suggestion. Back in Fort Worth, I told her Andrew was becoming humongous and she'd be asked to report on it if she told her editors where she was. Her mother was not happy about my idea, as I learned the next time we met. I am fortunate that she is not predisposed to violence.

I didn't know anything about hurricanes at the time, having lived my entire life in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metromess. Now that I'm an eight-year Floridian, I am known for premature evacuation. I was the first person to leave for Hurricane Frances last year, taking off 24 hours before TV news channels began covering the exodus, and I went one state more northward than anyone else.

In retrospect, sending the future mother of my children into this wasn't the best idea I've ever had.

Hurricane Katrina · Florida · Journalism · 2005/08/29 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Hurricane Katrina: 'Do Not Call 911'

LiveJournal business manager Mark Kraft is gathering information for Gulf Coast residents bracing for Hurricane Katrina, collecting reports from several LiveJournal diarists who are fleeing or preparing to ride out the storm.

Kraft passes along a grim prediction from meteorologist Jeff Masters:

I put the odds of New Orleans getting its levees breached and the city submerged at about 70 percent. This scenario, which has been discussed extensively in literature I have read, could result in a death toll in the thousands, since many people will be unable or unwilling to get out of the city. I recommend that if you are trapped in New Orleans tomorrow, that you wear a life jacket and a helmet if you have them. High rise buildings may offer good refuge, but Katrina has the potential to knock down a high-rise building.

The 4 p.m. National Weather Service warning for New Orleans was equally foreboding:

Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks ... perhaps longer. At least one half of well constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail ... leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed.

The majority of industrial buildings will become non functional. Partial to complete wall and roof failure is expected. All wood framed low rising apartments will be destroyed. Concrete block low rise apartments will sustain major damage ... including some wall and roof failure.

High rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously ... a few to the point of total collapse.

Government officials did their best to scare the hell out of residents all Sunday morning, hoping they'd leave by any means possible. One told holdouts to make sure they had a hammer or some other tool that's strong enough to break through an attic roof. "You don't want to drown in there when the water comes," he said.

Several parishes in Louisiana have closed emergency services, giving their residents a discordant bit of advice: Do not call 911.

Hurricane Katrina · 2005/08/28 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

In January, the PBS series Nova broadcast a 12-minute segment that illustrates the nightmare scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans: 50,000 dead, one million homeless, and a new lake where New Orleans used to be.

By my estimation, the water level would be high enough after a levee overflow to put this Bourbon Street webcam underwater -- even though it's 20 feet off the ground.

Sven Latham found more New Orleans bloggers in a latitude/longitude search of Blogwise, including one who feared being trapped there before neighbors offered a ride out:

There are about one-hundred thousand people in New Orleans with 'no place to go and no way to get there'. I'm one of those people.

Hurricane Katrina · 2005/08/28 · Comment · Link

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