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The words of the Australian journalist who toured the Gulf coast state a truth that most of America would like to ignore. Get over it.

The Gretna Police would not have let Oprah Winfrey or Bill Cosby walk over that bridge.

How many of the talking heads couldn’t understand that some people just didn’t have the money to evacuate. There were people who thought they needed money to be rescued. The working poor get bills for ambulance rides and emergency room visits. If the poor fit the stereotype of the talking heads they would have called limos for a ride.

The old get to lie down and die from dehydration while the people who are supposed to be in charge argue about who should be bringing in clean water.

The sick or disabled lay in nursing homes while the owners dither about evacuation. As the floodwaters rise, unable to escape, they drown.

If you voted for Bush/Cheney, this is your fault. This is what you voted for.

If you claim to be a Christian you know the moral answer to: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

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While the governor of Mississippi is busy sucking up to the Shrubbery, the people of southern Mississippi have been forgotten by FEMA.

Locally we are gathering supplies and shipping them West while providing refuge to many displaced people from the coast and New Orleans. We are working full out because they helped us after Ivan. The road is open now and we can ship things to them without having to go through the Federal or state government for distribution. Our county treasurer is a leader in the effort, spurred on, no doubt, by the lack of response he has seen from FEMA since Ivan. He is a local elected official, so it would be redundant to say he was a Republican or conservative. He knows what the local governments in Mississippi can expect so he has turned to raising funds and goods to help.

I whipped by Sam’s Club to get some towels for the last load because everyone knows the importance of a towel.

This is the area that the Australian reporter went to from Mobile, and there aren’t enough local government resources left to do people much good.

When comes to the fuel pipeline that runs from Texas to New Jersey, Dick Cheney manages to pop-up from his hole in the ground to harass the local power company to restore power to the pipeline before hospitals, claiming that it’s a matter of “National Security” that the Northeast not suffer from an inconvenience while poor people in Mississippi are suffering.

If Dick knew to call on August 30^th, what happened to the rest of his administration.

Utility companies have detailed plans for restoring power after a hurricane. Those plans are given to other companies who will come in to help. They have been created using computer modeling to get power to shelters, hospitals, and nursing homes first, then restoring lines in a predetermined order based on where there are outages and where power is available. When the plan is altered and the sequence changed, that has a ripple effect on the entire plan.

There is some good news in Mississippi: State to sue insurers over flood damage

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood plans to sue insurance companies to force them to pay for flood damage to homes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a source familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

The Democrat[sic] attorney general believes that Katrina’s horrific winds caused the flooding, said the source, who declined to be named.

[I notice that CNN/Money is also unaware of the adjectival form: Democratic.]

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I haven’t read anything suggesting that we are having a greater number of tropical waves because of global warming. The frequency of tropical waves is cyclical and we are in a period of more frequent storms after nearly two decades of calm.

Global warming affects the surface temperature of the oceans, and while a single degree of increase may not seem like much, it has been sufficient to turn more of those waves into depressions, more depressions into storms, more storms into hurricanes, and more hurricanes are becoming major hurricanes. There is more energy available. It is the intensity of the storms that has increased.

Four of the eight most expensive storms in US records hit Florida last year.

Andrew, in 1992, was the first named storm of the season when it hit in August. There were only six named storms that year. Katrina was the 11 named storm in August of this year, and we have had four named storms since.

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The Day of His Noodly Appendage

The holiest of holidays for Pastafarrians, is of course the birthday of His Most Holy Prophet, Marco Polo (b. Sept 15, 1254), who brought the word of his Noodly Appendage back from the East. As Talk Like A Pirate Day falls on September 19th, this five-day period constitutes Holy Pasta Week, during which spaghetti is consumed liberally. With a nice Chianti, of course.

[…and people think librarians lack a sense of humor.]

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