NOLA Outrage Roundup

I can't believe it. Robert Siegel, the calmest man on radio, the talking head for NPR's All Things Considered, totally loses his shit and plows into Bush crony-with-no-experience-at-disaster-management Head of FEMA Michael Chertoff and refuses to take blather for an answer. I was listening to this last night and my jaw hit the floor. Whet Robert Siegel is mad at you, you're doomed.

Ned Sublette wrote:

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. And there is no better poster boy for the ineffectivity of government than the sitting president.

The literal meaning of homeland security is that you secure the land you live on, no? By now the absolute vacuum of leadership is becoming apparent even to TV viewers.

In his eerie disconnectedness to what's going on around him, isn't it starting to seem like bush is heavily medicated? He's zonked, right?

Boing Boing offers access to a hairy collection of NOLA Scanner Streams.

Interdictor reports that the city is on fire and the cops' morale has plummeted as a third day goes by without the promised troops.

The Wall Street Journal has left open its Timeline feed of events on the ground in NOLA. Sounds like a lot of people-in-power patting each other on the back about how great their reaction to the crisis has been. Meanwhile, pretty boy reporter Anderson Cooper mirrors Robert Siegel's anger and launches into Mary Landrau about how tired he is of hearing that crap while, as he puts it, "He is standing here watching a woman's body being eaten by rats."

If you have bittorrent, download this torrent and listen to the mayor of New Orleans' uncensored opinion about how fucked up emergency response to this has been.

And the last word for now from John & Belle:

Say what you like about casting blame for the unfolding tragedy in NO, the bare facts of the matter are these: America suffered a serious attack on Sept. 11, 2001. That was four years ago. I think we had all assumed that in the meantime a lot of wargaming and disaster-mitigation planning and homeland security gearup had been going on. If this is what the Federal and State governments are going to come up with when the suitcase nuke goes off in D.C., then we are well and truly fucked.

Indomitable Spirit

While we're all distracted elsewhere, the toughest freakin' robots in known space just keep going. The Mars Spirit Rover, which landed on January 3rd 2004 and was expected to last "maybe 90 Martian days, if we're very lucky," ended it's 593rd Martian (606 Terran) days today. For months, it's been driving around the base of a collecting of hills five kilometers from its landing spot and the crew on Earth finally ordered it to climb to the top. It made it today.

The view from Spirit atop Husband Hill, Mars.
Hosted by NASA. Click to enlarge.

Despite having a broken wheel necessitating often driving backwards, despite a crashed filesystem early on that gave it seziures, despite losing one of its spectrometers, and despite being over its warranty ten times, Spirit endures.

Opportunity had a software crash last week, but it seems to have recovered. It too is still going, and at the same rate as Spirit. Spirit is getting fabulous views but Opportunity landed in a geologically diverse area and is returning a lot more science. The pictures aren't as interesting so it gets less attention, but it's still there and still widening our understanding of the universe.