News: September 2005 Archives

Last year I noted that a giant pro-abortion protest appeared to consist of nothing but old, infertile women, and this year the old folks are at it again, protesting everything under the sun, and particularly President Bush, despite the fact that he'll never run for anything again. Stupid on the surface, yes, but once you dig deeper you'll see that it's even stupider underneath.

Connie McCroskey, 58, came from Des Moines, Iowa, with two of her daughters, both in their 20s, for the family's first demonstration. McCroskey, whose father fought in World War II, said she never would have dared protest during the Vietnam War.

"Today, I had some courage," she said.

Oh yeah, it takes a ton of courage to walk around Washington DC for an afternoon. How did you manage to avoid Karl Rove's stormtroopers? Weren't you scared that Donald Rumsfeld's death squads would hunt you down? You were really brave to be quoted by name in a major newspaper! Bravest move of all: waiting to protest till your father died.

While united against the war, political beliefs varied. Paul Rutherford, 60, of Vandalia, Mich., said he is a Republican who supported Bush in the last election and still does _ except for the war.

"President Bush needs to admit he made a mistake in the war and bring the troops home, and let's move on," Rutherford said. His wife, Judy, 58, called the removal of Saddam Hussein "a noble mission" but said U.S. troops should have left when claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction proved unfounded.

"We found that there were none and yet we still stay there and innocent people are dying daily," she said.

Right, and if we had left once we'd proven proven that, I'm sure Iraq would be Disneyland Middle-East now and all the ba'athists would be too busy singing "It's a Small Dar al-Islam, After All" to meet their rape quotas and top off Saddam's mass graves.

Anyway, the ages of the people quoted in the article are: 58, 60, 58, 47, whatever age Cindy Shi'ite is (103?), and 48. One has to wonder what government program is enabling all this pointless protesting -- I highly doubt that people who earned their own living would now be wasting their time on this nonsense.

13:16, PDT: I'm receiving reports of widespread power outages across Los Angeles, along with building evacuations. Nothing on the news lines yet. Stay tuned.

13:32, PDT: Drudge links to a brief news bite about the outages. Radio sources indicate that some major power distribution lines were damaged, possibly by LADWP employees. That's exactly what I'd expect to hear if the real cause is terrorism. No word from the LADWP yet.

A major portion of Los Angeles lost power Monday afternoon. Outages were reported from downtown to the San Fernando Valley.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power did not immediately have an explanation for what happened.

Reports are that traffic is [more] snarled throughout the city, with all stop-lights out of commission.

13:36, PDT: Drudge headline says:

Department of Water and Power does not know cause of mass outage... LAPD put on tactical alert... Developing...

13:39, PDT: Just got a report that power is back on. Clayton Cramer emails to say that there are serious solar storms at the moment that could affect power generation and distribution.

13:51, PDT: The California Independent System Operator (Cal ISO) has a system status page that forecasts electricity generation and usage. No real news there though.

Drudge headline now: "Dept of water and power snapped a power line; grid jolted..."

I find it hard to believe that the system is so fragile that a single point of failure could cause such widespread outages.

14:12, PDT: Reuters is reporting that for LAPD to be on a "full tactical alert" means that:

"The city is on a tactical alert and obviously traffic is going to be impacted," Los Angeles Police spokesman Kevin Maiberger said.

Maiberger described a tactical alert as "what happens when the city goes into a state of emergency. Police officers will only be responding to calls where there is a threat to life."

Hopefully no one will take that as a license to start looting.

It's unclear whether or not power is back on. Two of my sources said yes, but I don't see reports of restored power from internet news sites yet.

14:22, PDT: Some Bear Flag League members are still without power. Gary Aminoff in 90067 and the Pirate in 90017 (downtown) have no power or are on backup.

Citizen Smash has a power outage round-up with some quotes and a few links.

14:42, PDT: NBC channel 4 has a power outage map of the affected areas.

14:51, PDT: Reports are that 90% of Los Angeles has power again. Only Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers were affected; Southern California Edison customers didn't lose power. LADWP avoided the power outages from a couple of years ago and avoided being shafted by Enron because LADWP is still highly regulated, unlike the somewhat-deregulated power companies throughout the rest of the state. This time, they were hit while everyone else escaped unscathed.

Boi from Troy reports what he observed downtown.

15:09, PDT: LADWP employees connected the wrong wires together. Don't cross the streams! At least we didn't experience total protonic reversal... try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

15:38, PDT: The loss of power led to loss of refining capacity, which led to a 7-cent per gallon price jump for gasoline. Hm.

17:13, PDT: South Bay residents are advised to stay indoors while local refineries burn off excess gas they couldn't move while the power was out.

23:47, PDT: My final report on the matter... details about why the power went out.

The power outage that affected more than 2 million people in and around Los Angeles on Monday was triggered by an unlikely source: A utility crew installing a system upgrade.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power workers cut several cables incorrectly, slicing the thin wires as a group, rather than one at a time, said Ed Miller, director of Power System Operations and Maintenance for the department. That triggered a short and tripped circuit breakers. ...

Cutting power quickly when these sorts of problems happen "is the correct thing to do," said Jan Smutny-Jones, executive director of Independent Energy Producers, a Sacramento-based trade association that represents power plants.

"If you don't do that, you end up with what happened in the Northeast," he said, referring to the nation's worst blackout in August 2003. "It starts jumping into other regions and control areas and then you have big problems."

AC sent me some screen shots of some AP/Yahoo photos with captions that may reflect racism among the journalistic elite. No links to the original photo URIs were sent, and AC claims they've been taken down.

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

The captions identify black looters as "looters" and white looters as "two residents" "finding" bread and soda in a grocery store. What do you think?

Update:
David Hiersekorn writes:

There are a couple of reasons. First, the two photos were taken by different agencies. The "looters" photo was from AP, and the "finders" photo was from Agence-France Press. There are very likely different editorial standards.

Secondly, the actual photographers were interviewed. The "looters" photographer observed the people entering a store and coming out with the merchandise. On the other hand, the "finders" photographer saw the people actual "find" the food outside a store. They never entered the store.

I think there is a genuine question as to whether a person can "loot" lost items. The different caption likely reflects a difficult editorial decision in an attempt to distinguish what was observed from the common understanding of what "looting" is.

This isn't an example of racism.

Sounds reasonable to me. It appears now that this story got quite a bit of play last week and I just never noticed it.

Continuing my unhealthy obsession with Sean Penn, it looks like he just can't manage to keep his mouth shut long enough to maintain his aura only moderate idiocy: now he's accusing President Bush and the federal government of "criminal negligence" for their handling of the aftermath of the disaster.

Oscar-winning Hollywood actor Sean Penn, who has been assisting rescue efforts in New Orleans, said the US government did not "seem to be inclined to help".

"We were pulling drowning people out of the water, it's the ultimate distress and human suffering ... dead bodies," he told GMTV.

Penn said he had spent nine hours on Monday searching the water for people and during all that time he saw just three boats carrying US officials.

More like he spent nine hours with his personal photographer bailing out his boat with a plastic cup, but why quibble about the details?

"There are people that are dying right now and I mean babies and old people and everybody in between - they're dying. There are people dying and (the US government are) not putting the boats in the water, I think that's criminal negligence. I don't think anybody ever anticipated the criminal negligence of the Bush administration in this situation."

But alas, Mr. Penn is ignorant of the actual definition of criminal negligence.

A gross deviation from the standard of care expected of a reasonable person that is manifest in a failure to protect others from a risk (as of death) deriving from one's conduct and that renders one criminally liable.

So, the federal government's handling of the disaster could only be criminally negligent if Mr. Penn is arguing that President Bush created the hurricane but then failed to operate it in a safe manner.

While Mr. Penn the disaster recovery expert and psychic is handing out blame, maybe he should read up on how poorly local officials have performed, particularly New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin. I'm not arguing that the feds have handled the disaster flawlessly, but all the preparatory work, including an actual evacuation of the city, was the responsibility of the state and local authorities.

In the wake of Katrina I've found this useful: from the American Red Cross, a list of things to include in your disaster supplies kit. Please leave comments with anything you think they may have left out.

We need to do everything we can to rescue people still trapped in that annihilated city, but beyond that I think it's time to face facts: New Orleans should be almost entirely abandoned. Let everyone collect their insurance checks and spend their money how they will, but I don't think I single dollar of public money should be spent rebuilding a coastal city that's 80% below sea level. That's just insane. Experts had been predicting this distaster for decades, and now that it's finally come it's time to cut our losses and pull out. No tax dollars should be spent rebuilding or repairing any structure less than one foot above the high water mark.

Nicole Gelinas has an article in City Journal in which she points out that New Orleans was collapsing before Katrina, and the job of reconstruction will be nearly impossible.

The truth is that even on a normal day, New Orleans is a sad city. Sure, tourists think New Orleans is fun: you can drink and hop from strip club to strip club all night on Bourbon Street, and gamble all your money away at Harrah’s. But the city’s decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can’t take care of itself even when it is not 80 percent underwater; what is it going to do now, as waters continue to cripple it, and thousands of looters systematically destroy what Katrina left unscathed?

A city blessed with robust, professional police and fire forces, with capable government leaders, an informed citizenry, and a relatively resilient economy can overcome catastrophe, but it doesn’t emerge stronger: look at New York after 9/11. The richest big city in the country in more ways than one mustered every ounce of energy to clean up after 9/11 and to rebuild its economy and its downtown—but even so, competing special interests overcame citizens’ and officials’ best intentions. Ground Zero remains a hole, and New York, for all its resources, finds itself diminished, physically and economically, four years on.

In New Orleans, the recovery will be much, much harder. The city’s government has long suffered from incompetence and corruption.

We need to help the survivors rebuild, but somewhere else. The WaPo has an article explaining why most ex-residents won't bother waiting around.

First they have to pump the flooded city dry, and that will take a minimum of 30 days. Then they will have to flush the drinking water system, making sure they don't recycle the contaminants. Figure another month for that.

The electricians will have to watch out for snakes in the water, wild animals and feral dogs. It will be a good idea to wear hip boots and take care of cuts and scrapes before the toxic slush turns them into festering sores. The power grid might be up in a few weeks, but many months will elapse before everybody's lights come back on.

By that time, a lot of people won't care because they will have taken the insurance money and moved away -- forever. Home rebuilding, as opposed to repairs, won't start for a year and will last for years after that.

Even then, there may be nothing normal about New Orleans, because the floodwater, spiked with tons of contaminants ranging from heavy metals and hydrocarbons to industrial waste, human feces and the decayed remains of humans and animals, will linger nearby in the Gulf of Mexico for a decade.

Who'd want to return to that?

(HT: James Taranto for the City Journal link, Orin Kerr for the WaPo link.)

I just received an email from reader JC with a link to a letter of apology by Joshua Heldreth, the 10-year-old buy who was arrested for trespassing while trying to bring a glass of water to Terri Schiavo. LifeSiteNews.com reports:

TAMPA BAY, August 31, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Ten year-old Joshua Heldreth, the eldest of eight children, was arrested on Good Friday of this year for trespassing while attempting to bring a drink of water to Miss Terri Schaivo. Days later Schiavo died of intentional dehydration. In court Joshua pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 hours of community service and ordered to write an apology for his actions.

The boy whose arrest photo was splashed on front pages of newspapers across the nation wrote in his apology letter, "I was arrested on Good Friday for trespassing on the hospice center's property . . . Not giving Mrs. Shiavo (sic) food or water was wrong. The reason I had to go on your property was because Jesus would do the same thing. It made me sad that she was so thirsty and it made Jesus sad too. I knew she would die without water and I am called by Jesus to be a defender of the defenceless. So I had to go on your property to try to bring her a drink."

Joshua added, "I am sorry that you didn't like that and wouldn't allow me to help save her life and one day you will have to tell God why. I won't be able to help you then like I tried to help her. I will pray for you every day . . ."

It may not be a hoax, but I doubt the letter was written by a 10-year-old... and I'm entirely on his side. But hey, I've been wrong before!