September 2008 Archives

Wall Street Journal on millionaire haven Greenwich, CT:

Greenwich, Connecticut is a rich enclave of hedge fund managers- and thus is feeling the pain of the current financial crisis like a ton of bricks. Ned Lamont, a Greenwich resident who ran for Senate in 2006, says, 'This is our Katrina.' ...

First Selectman Peter Tesei said Wall Street affects everything from philanthropic contributions to a potential increase in public school enrollment if some families can no longer afford private schools. A recently laid-off trader who was making several million dollars annually 'is not going to be able to donate the $200,000 they did in the past' to charities, Tesei said.

Ned Lamont, you are hereby designated Fuckmook of the Week. And in a week where Sarah Palin is going to actually attend the VP debate, the world economy is crashing into dust, and Joe Torre is going to to the playoffs in a Dodgers cap, that's saying a fucking lot.

If this was really your Katrina, then you would feel more pain than not being able to donate $200,000 to charities. You'd be looking to charities to feed you. Your kids would not be going to public schools, because there wouldn't be any more public schools. You wouldn't be looking at downsizing your house, your house would be gone, you would be unemployed and homeless and still making payments on a mold-infested wreck while your insurer ass-raped you and Congress and the President didn't think your problems were worth more than a few floor speeches, never mind a special session to hand out $700 billion to you and your friends.

If this was really your Katrina, I would feel for you, man. Because you would be facing such total destruction and demoralization, and you would have to face it without being able to take solace in brass bands or real food or Mardi Gras, because when all is said and done, you still live in a shithole called Connecticut.

Worse, the Yankee half of Connecticut.

[Readers with memories stretching back further than last week will remember that Lamont was pulled out of his attic by Coast Guard divers after standing in water up to his neck for four days the DailyKos golden boy pushed to replace Joe Lieberman in the Senate in 2006. A fucking Kossack. Figures.]

Thanks to Sarah for the morning linky eye-opener.

So I get a recorded call from Wee Walker Hines on my cell, urging me to vote for James Carter for District 2.

Oddly enough, the call came from a 202 (Washington DC) number.

Hines is already part of the Beltway elite? Jeez, boy, don't they still card you at Georgetown bars?

It at least helps me tell the Carters apart a little more, and leads me like an Achaean towards Troy, as the (possibly? hopefully? please god?) leastest of seven evils.

First Draft:

Right. It's just so tiresome. See this, this thing right here, is what is wrong with our mainstream commentary, what is wrong with the people who supposedly make decisions in our discourse, one major part of what is wrong with newspapers. This thing, right here. This elevation of detachment and dispassion into a virtue of its own over and above passionate intensity so that the first person who raises his voice in the argument loses no matter who has possession of what facts.

Our only hope:

LOLFed.com: makin ur economy betters

Ike three days before landfall:

Rita three days before landfall:

NHC has a great explanation of the vocabulary and usage of the various storm models we've all been following:

Technical Summary of the National Hurricane Center Track and Intensity Models

It'll help you understand statistical vs. dynamical models, early vs. late models, why the GFDL always takes so long and doesn't get included in the latest NHC forecast, etc.

If you read that, it will help you better understand the spaghetti as you follow Ike's progress here:

storm_09.gif

As far as I can tell, the curfew doesn't keep cars off the road, and doesn't keep gangs of kids from congregating either outside bars or on random neighborhood corners.

What it does do is make all the stores close at 8:00pm. Which sucks when you threw away everything in your fridge last week, the schools are opening tomorrow but are non-committal about cafeteria services, and you need to cobble together enough foodstuffs to make bag lunches for the kiddos.

Finally found some grape jelly at a Quicky Mart on Claiborne (paid through the bullet-proof glass), so that plus the leftover hurricane supplies ought to get us by for tomorrow. I suppose they won't be the only kids bringing canned fruit to school for dessert.

I feel SO much more secure knowing that my city government is keeping me safe from people who buy deli meats after dark.

Last night I had to get up to refuel the generator at 3am. I use it for a CPAP since I have sleep apnea, so when it shut down I woke up real fast. Sleepy, using an LED lantern for light, spilled gas everywhere obviously.

This morning it ran out of fuel again at 8. Woke up. Still no power. I threw on some filthy clothes (can't do laundry), and took a can of Starbucks and a can of peaches and a cereal bar and my crank radio out to the porch for breakfast. Creepy sun is out, it's going to be very hot today. Extremely depressed and tired. Entergy trucks were cruising the neighborhood.

10 minutes later my power was on, and suddenly I'm not depressed any more. Plug in the fridge, crank the AC, turn on the cable and WAH! I have cable and internet!

Today I do a couple of work conference calls and then clean up. Between the mess made prepping for evac, the mess made by the storm, and the mess made living like a pioneer this place is a dump.

My kids get back today and they can watch TV on my couch. I don't care if they don't speak a word to me because they're watching "Zack and Cody", as long as they're near me and I can hug them.

I'm unbelievably happy right now. Night and day since yesterday. Night and fucking day. Just because of some electricity.

All the way home just to learn to survive. No power in our neighborhood, no ETA on getting any. I drove up to Zotz on the rumor of AC and wifi and found it to be true. So did dozens of other people.

When I get home, I get to rig up a security system for my alleyway out of rope and cans so that nobody tries to steal my generator. I get to figure out if my generator works and figure out how to protect it from both rain and rising water while keeping it properly ventilated. Check all my batteries and flashlights. Clean all the backyard plants and furniture out of my kitchen so that I can store all my dry goods, canned peaches, and tuna. Get the rest of my windows unstuck so that I can get some air inside. And then get my ass inside for the dusk to dawn curfew so that I don't get tagged by the po-pos, who seem to be really disappointed that they didn't get a Katrina-style looter war and are all keyed up to invent one. Will take cold shower and then read by LED lantern light until my meds kick in and knock me out. In the morning, I go search for more ice and do the whole thing over again.

Work says I'm free to burn the rest of my vacation time (yay! vacation! not!) during the recovery and then I get myself back to work or I stop getting paid. So if power and internet aren't more easily available by Sunday, I have to leave for Austin in order to keep my job. Assuming I can find enough gas to get there, and places to stay when I get there.

I'm home but I'm still in exile. The immense downside of telecommuting. Where I am, it's one of the largest natural disasters in US history. Where the job is, it's Wednesday. The two halves of my split personality are too far apart this week.

Haven't seen my kids in almost two weeks. I suppose three or four more weeks is neither here nor there. Daddies are expendable. Daddies' jobs are not.

Bloody weather.

I'm out. Back to the hotbox. The land off the grid. Text me if you need me, not sure if I'm up for the twitter noise tonight.

Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, St. John, and St. Tammany Parishes are all allowing residents back in at 6:00a.m tomorrow morning.

Orleans, which was arguably the least damaged parish in the metro area, is holding residents out until midnight tomorrow night.

This is ludicrous on several levels. One, that they would keep us out later than the other parishes at all, as if any danger that exists in Orleans somehow exceeds what is going on in other parishes. Two, the lack of general population actually impedes the recovery process. We are being kept out because there aren't grocery stores open, but there aren't grocery stores open because stores don't have enough employees to open. This is true Nagin-think.

Three, they are letting us in at MIDNIGHT, while enforcing a DUSK TO DAWN CURFEW. Please explain to me exactly how this works. If I wait until I am legally allowed to cross the parish line, then once I cross I am immediately subject to arrest for violating the curfew. This is beyond Nagin-think. This is just completely fucktarded.

Fuck all this shit. I'm going home tomorrow. Sarah Elise Lewis is escaping Pensacola with me. We've got legitimate reasons to enter Jefferson Parish (family there) and then the parish border is pretty porous in several places. We'll leave before dawn tomorrow, top off the gas and ice, probably sit in traffic all day, but I'm sick of being told I can't go home because I'm not capable of living without air conditioning. Hell, when I was a kid, none of the schools were air conditioned. We survived.

My house has no power. No internet. I might clean up, stay for a week and then be forced by my employer to relocate to a wired town for the duration of the recovery, but fuck it. I miss my kids. I miss my city. I miss my home and my new neighbors.

Thanks to Pat and Kathleen for the wonderful hospitality, and Allen, Meghan, and Bev for being there and getting it. But I'm too antsy to stick around.

See y'all tomorrow afternoon at the Maple Leaf. Karen, I got you fruit and candy.

Sinn Fein, motherfuckers.

Broussard is on 870 AM right now with info on re-entry timetable for Jefferson Parish.

Tier 1 and Tier 2 people with placards can enter at noon today. If you're Tier 2 and don't have a placard, you can get one at http://www.jumpstartjefferson.com.

At 5PM tonight, Broussard will announce the timetable for general population to re-enter. He suggests that right now, you pre-position yourself to be within a day's drive of the city.

Waiting on similar announcement from Nagin, obviously. I'm east of the city, so no real way to sneak in if the bridges are closed.

Got cell phone report from East Baton Rouge (Highland Road area) from my brother Billy's Crackberry:

"Windy as a MF! Ronnie is down 4 trees and part of his fence. Good news is we are on a generator and are earning an "A" in beer management. Sitting on his porch watching the scrum."

Not sure if the scrum is the storm or the big pile of kids they've got there, but they're on high ground in well-built and well-supplied structures, and this is as bad as the wind will get for them judging from where the eye is now.

Ronnie has some big-ass trees on his property, though, so that's a shame.

I got BoingBoing-ed.

As Unapologetic said, "Great. We finally get on Boing Boing right when we stop talking about the storm to talk about lunch."

FYI, if you're coming here from BoingBoing, most of us are not on the ground there, we evac-ed to safety. The best advice I can give you on getting real information is to turn off the major TV networks entirely, and go to nola.com, streaming audio from wwl.com, and streaming video from wwltv.com. Then follow the New Orleans blogo- and twittersphere for our analysis of the news we're getting from those outlets.

The problem is that the CNN, etc, reporters fly into town and don't understand the complex geography or how the flood control system works (something every normal citizen understands) and so they stand on bridges in their raincoats making statements that are factually nonsensical. If you can't even reliably tell me where you're standing and which direction you're looking, or which side of the river you're on, you can't possibly analyze the situation for me. "You lack basic situational awareness", as General Honore says.

Lee Zurik on local CBS affiliate WWL TV is a sharp cookie, as is Garland Robinette on WWL 870 AM radio.

The only reason to watch CNN is for the occasional glimpse of General Honore in a very spiffy civilian suit. The guy cleans up real nice and he knows what he's talking about.

CNN has a reporter on the I-10 high rise over the Industrial Canal, and he is showing water to the south of him and calling it "catastrophic flooding of the port of New Orleans".

Look at this map, he's on the I-10 bridge facing south:

http://www.google.com/maps?q=New+Orleans,+LA,+USA&ie=UTF8&om=1&ll=30.002182,-90.027916&spn=0.009756,0.022745&t=h&z=16

He's showing water covering that industrial gravelly area over to France Road and calling that flooding.

You need to know that that area is INSIDE the flood wall, i.e., on the wet site. Look west between France Road and Alvar Road. Where you see all the box shipping containers near Alvar Road, those containers are just outside the flood wall, and if you zoom you can see the vertical grey line which is the flood wall. All the water is on the canal side of the flood wall. So this CNN guy hyping this as "flooding" is inaccurate. This area is expected to flood. It's not within the flood protection area. It does not indicate a failure of flood protection.

CNN's reporter does not have even basic "situational awareness", as General Honore would say. He needs to shut up and hand his microphone to a local. Grab a local crackhead who knows the geography, it'd be an improvement.

Don't watch CNN if you want accurate information. Go to wwltv.com and get the streaming video from the local news.

CNN correspondent was just on camera at Children's Hospital (uptown, near Audubon Park), standing outside trying to dramatize how windy it was, and while she was talking some dude in a grubby t-shirt walked behind her and stood there talking on his cell phone in the wind.

I could swear I've seen that on Family Guy or something.

Anyway, power out at Children's but they are back on generators, I assume that means power out for Uptown/University area.

It's raining hard here in Pensacola, some wind gusts some times but the rain is primarily down, not sideways, so Pat and I are going out to look for a proper sit-down breakfast. PCola fugees, text me if you read this. I miss y'all again already.

You know it's a real storm when Gulf Sails starts blogging again.

Heard from Benz, one of my "correspondents" out at the Lakefront. He said, "It's pretty windy." I laughed and told him that's not very descriptive. He replied, "It's pretty fucking windy."

GS is the eye witness on the ground in River Ridge (east bank of Jeff Parish near the river, if you're from out of town). He's uploading video.