Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Any Sufficiently Advanced Incompetence is Indistinguishable From Malice

I promise that my next two posts will have NOTHING to do with Katrina, and hopefully a lot to do with comic books. I'm still furious about this disaster and the murderers in our government who made it so much worse. But I'll follow John Ford's advice and pull away from it for a couple of days... and not speak about it at all in my next two posts.

Give to Operation USAGive to The Red Cross

"Any Sufficiently Advanced Incompetence is Indistinguishable From Malice"

Roz Kaveney:

It is sufficient to point out that if you take a job involving life and death, and go on doing it when you are clearly incompetent, then you are morally responsible anyway. There is a duty not to be crap at what you do. Which is the short form of all the analyses we are going to get for the next month.

In what may go down as the worst misuse of resources ever, firefighters are told to distribute FEMA fliers instead of fight fires in NOLA. D'oh! What idiot is in charge of FEMA down there?!!!??? Firefighters are needed in the city NOW, not propagandists. Sheesh.

More firefighters desperate to help are kept waiting by FEMA.

FEMA blocks experienced help from entering NOLA. There are almost too many of these stories to keep straight. From cutting communication lines of local jurisdictions to turning away desperately needed help, FEMA has managed to turn a natural disaster into a national disgrace.

Another story about FEMA and how the agency has gone from useful to completely unhelpful in less than nine years.

Kevin Drum explains how he thinks FEMA was gutted by Bush.

The rot in FEMA goes deep. Time to clear them all out and find qualified people to take their places.

Mark Evanier link to Keith Olbermann's Commentary on what happened in NOLA.

E. Coli in floodwaters.

More lies from Bush about why he couldn't send in troops to help.

CNN reports:

I am stunned by an interview I conducted with New Orleans Detective Lawrence Dupree. He told me they were trying to rescue people with a helicopter and the people were so poor they were afraid it would cost too much to get a ride and they had no money for a "ticket." Dupree was shaken telling us the story. He just couldn't believe these people were afraid they'd be charged for a rescue.

CNN reports:

This medic has been to Baghdad and seen people decapitated. But he said this is so much worse because it is so disorganized and because it is on American soil.

TalkLeft on FEMA.

The head of Homeland Security, desperately trying to shift blame, seems to indicate that his office gets all of its information from the media. Apparently, DHS has no channels of information of its own. But that doesn't explain how they didn't know there were people at the Convention Center when every news channel was reporting it for days. It's also exposed as yet another lie by Chertoff when Wonkette can't find the headline he's talking about.

Boing Boing reports on the status of the nuke power plant near NOLA.

Timothy Naftali calls Katrina our Chernobyl... stretching the comparison further, it was Chernobyl that revealed the USSR to be a shell of its former strength. Is this the end of the US as we know it?

Refugee camps and how people are mistreated there.

The Interdictor continues to blog from the heart of New Orleans.

Snopes tackles the reliability of dispatches from a physician in NOLA.

Give to Operation USAGive to The Red Cross

And lastly, it took several days for Bush to react to the disaster in New Orleans, but Rehnquist's body is barely cold before he nominates a replacement. It shows where Bush's priorities lie.

0 comments: