Grim Meathook Future Defined

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JWZ sometimes marks his posts with “grim meathook future.” In response to many queries, he’s posted a bit of the piece that phrase is from, written by Joshua Ellis. It’s fanTAStic. And true.

Feeding poor people is useful tech, but it’s not very sexy and it won’t get you on the cover of Wired. Talk about it too much and you sound like an earnest hippie. So nobody wants to do that. They want to make cell phones that can scan your personal measurements and send them real-time to potential sex partners. Because, you know, the fucking Japanese teenagers love it, and Japanese teenagers are clearly the smartest people on the planet. The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another. Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.

The comments on that post include another fine acronym: TSOR, or Thirty Seconds of Research. Excellent and useful.

In which BoingBoing propegates a scary meme

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There’s a post at BoingBoing wherein a reader in Houston states that he’ll be at Fitzgerald’s during the storm:

I am currently in the Heights in Houston, which is at the highest elevation in the city; about 50 to 60 feet above sea level. I’m still not sure if I’ll evacuate. If not, I’ll be at Fitzgerald’s on White Oak Drive, which is a very strongly built building that has weathered several strong hurricanes and has never flooded.

Um, we’ve been in Fitz. You can see the outside from the inside thanks to shoddy construction and holes in the walls. While we’re pretty sure we’re safe at Heathen HQ, we’re unsure about entering Fitz when there’s no wind at all, let alone a hurricane.

FEMA: Still a clusterfuck

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Via JWZ:

FEMA Sends Trucks Full Of Ice For Katrina Victims To Maine The trucks started arriving this weekend, and they’re expected to keep coming through Sunday. City officials say they have no idea why the trucks are here, only that the city has been asked to help out with traffic problems. But the truck drivers NEWSCENTER spoke to said they went all the way down to the gulf coast with the ice — stayed for a few days — and then were told by FEMA they needed to drive to Maine to store it. The truck drivers, who are from all over the country, tell us they were subcontracted by FEMA. They started arriving over the weekend, and city spokesperson Peter Dewitt says as many as 200 trucks could come to the city by the end of the week. The trucks are storing the ice at Americold, a company with a warehouse on Read Street in Portland. People who live nearby say all the traffic has been baffling them for days. The trucks can only unload 4 at a time — so the city is allowing some of them to sit at the International Marine Terminal and at the Jetport’s satellite parking lot. No one NEWSCENTER talked to has any idea when, or even if the ice will go back to the gulf coast. cite

I’ll Take Remedial Texas Coastal Geography for $1,000, Alex

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(or: How to Tell Everyone You’ll Be Just Fine)

The major theme of this morning has been “people have no idea how big Houston is, or where urban Houston is relative to the Gulf, and consequently fear the country’s 4th largest metro area is in danger of being Katrina-ized by Rita.” Let’s clear things up a bit.

  • While Galveston is part of metro Houston, the island is easily 60 or so miles due south of downtown. Houston is big.
  • Which brings up the other point: Galveston is an island. I think they evacuate for Category 2 if not 1.
  • The mainland areas being evacuated are all near the gulf or the large inland bay/lake called Clear Lake (it’s not, FYI). That makes them vulnerable to the storm surge.

Put simply:

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p class=”center” style=”font-weight: bold;”> WIND is not the evacuation driver.
People flee the SURGE,
and we’re a long-ass way from that.

It’ll take more than a Category 4 to force an evacuation of urban Houston. In fact, according to the evacuation planning map, not even a Category 5 storm does it (on the map, Heathen World HQ is under the I-45 icon at the center). All the areas named in the Chronicle story are pretty far away from our home and my office, both of which are near downtown and therefore very far away from even a Katrina-sized surge.

There are areas in urban Houston that are prone to flooding, and they get water every now and then — and may well as a consequence of this storm — but they’re known to be low, so this surprises no one. They abut bayous or the drainage system, e.g. The vast majority of Houston stays very dry — no one in my neighborhood, for example, had water during Allison in 2001. Allison was only a tropical storm, but she moved slowly and came on the heels of a very wet month; there was nowhere for the water to go. This summer, on the other hand, has been pretty dry (VERY dry lately, in fact).

It’ll get windy. Some trees may fall. Some streets will flood, some fools will try to drive in it, and some people may die through foolishness or bad luck. But Erin and I aren’t planning on going anywhere. Hell, we’ve got a party on Saturday.

Now: where’d I put the rum?

Well, sure, but some of it was boiled, for crying out loud

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The Feds have incinerated tons of rations sent over by the Brits to help Katrina refugees because they’re “unfit to eat.”

The food, which cost British taxpayers millions, is sitting idle in a huge warehouse after the Food and Drug Agency recalled it when it had already left to be distributed. Scores of lorries headed back to a warehouse in Little Rock, Arkansas, to dump it at an FDA incineration plant. The Ministry of Defence in London said last night that 400,000 operational ration packs had been shipped to the US. But officials blamed the US Department of Agriculture, which impounded the shipment under regulations relating to the import and export of meat.

“I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror”

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The FBI is ramping up an anti-porn squad to pursue material marketed for and by consenting adults. The title is an anonymous agent quote from the linked story.

Popular acceptance of hard-core pornography has come a long way, with some of its stars becoming mainstream celebrities and their products — once confined to seedy shops and theaters — being “purveyed” by upscale hotels and most home cable and satellite television systems. Explicit sexual entertainment is a profit center for companies including General Motors Corp. and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (the two major owners of DirecTV), Time Warner Inc. and the Sheraton, Hilton, Marriott and Hyatt hotel chains. But Gonzales endorses the rationale of predecessor Meese: that adult pornography is a threat to families and children. Christian conservatives, long skeptical of Gonzales, greeted the pornography initiative with what the Family Research Council called “a growing sense of confidence in our new attorney general.”

Fear anyone that the FRC claims “a growing sense of confidence” in.

The wit and wisdom of sysadmins

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This certainly cannot be original to me, but I keep quoting it to people anyway. It’s particularly apt in the wake of Katrina, and with Rita bound for Texas:

Measure your backups in spindles and timezones.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, think on it until enlightenment comes. (Or ask a geek.)

In which we are public about our admiration for our friends

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Some truly fine people threw me a tremendous three-day bachelor party last weekend. They know who they are. It was really an amazing, wonderful weekend full of excellent food and too-much-is-not-enough fine-ass booze. It was also pleasantly devoid of scary Galvestonian strippers, for which we are eternally grateful.

So: again, heartfelt and profound thanks to Eric and Frank, my Best Men, for helming the whole deal, and to Carl, Carlos, Chris, David, Joachim, Peter, Thunder, and Tony (and Chelsea) for making the trip past the following sign, which sane people would view with sincere trepidation:

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p class=”center”> Not a Hurricane Evacuation Route

Dept. of Art Immitating Life (or, “OMG! WTF?”)

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The fantasy/medieval-themed MMORPG known as World of Warcraft is the most popular such game ever for good reason. It’s friendly to the casual player as well as the hardcore, and breaks new ground in terms of how immersive and detailed the virtual world can be. Now publisher Blizzard has (deliberately or inadvertantly) introduced another staple of medieval life: a communicable plague (all errors in the original; [comments added] for clarity:

Heres the skinny: Blizzard adds in a new instance [Ed.: special dungeon zone], Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff [magical curse] called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs [non-player characters, such as shopkeepers, trainers, quest givers, etc], who can out generate the damage [meaning the NPC doesn’t die, but does continue to spread the plague via proximity]. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). [WoW only goes to level 60] GM’s even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarentine and infect other players. ShackNews forums

The official forums have word of it as well. It seems likely they meant at least some of this to happen, but it’s clearly gotten out of hand on some servers (8MB Windows Media with poorly written text).

(via MeFi)

Pilot Uber Alles

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We Heathen are gadget people. No surprise there; we have a blog, for crying out loud. It should therefore come as no surprise that we have, over the years, had a metric shitload of personal digital devices into which we twiddled or scribbled or download the personal, trivial equivalent of the Library of Congress over the years. (Yes, we even had a Newton. Three, in fact. Two of them we still have; the third we traded for some massages several years ago. No, we are not making this up.)

What finally pulled us away from the Newton — which, despite its awful debut, finished life as a spectacular and useful device we’ve still not seen the equal of — was a combination of factors:

  • Steve Jobs came back to Apple and killed the Newt because it was a John Sculley project, and he hated Sculley; nobody wants to use an orphan. (Newton geeks, do not bother me with the no-doubt still “vibrant” online community of die-hard Newton afficianados who make the Comic Book Guy look suave and urbane. We do not care.)
  • The Newton, great as it was, had moved in the opposite direction of the market — instead of small, syncable, and cheap, it got bigger, more expensive, and ditched desktop sync. The latter was a serious, serious flaw — backup is one thing, but desktop access to personal data is key.
  • The rise of the Pilot, which was all the things the Newt wasn’t — i.e., small, syncable, and cheap.

We first used a Palm between our last two Newts in about 1997. Now, 8 years later, we stil use one. This article is a great summary of the history and development of the platform, including its origins with GRiD and Tandy (!) before Palm became its own firm, under the care of US Robotics. (We really wish we still had the first Pilot we used, with THAT logo in it, before 3Com bought ’em.)

(Local PDF copy, in case that one goes away.)

Really, these people have no shame at all

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In the wake of the Federal clusterfuck that is his administration’s response to Katrina — including everyone noticing he’d put a guy incompetant to run horse shows in as head of FEMA — Bush announced yesterday that the new point man for the Gulf Coast reconstruction effort will be…

Karl Rove. What. The. Fuck? First he suspends Davis-Bacon, thereby ensuring that whoever does the rebuilding gets to pay the local workers — the ones with no homes, remember — less than the prevailing local wage. Then he puts another non-disaster-qualified guy in charge, who if anything is worse than Brown. Rove is a political hack with a track record of politicizing everything he touches. He does no substantive work; his job is to get somebody elected and protect them once they’re in place. What the hell he can bring to a reconstruction effort — beyond spin for Bush — is a mystery to us.

Josh Marshall:

There’s real news to be reported — how the president is approaching the reconstruction, what plans he’s putting in place right now. He’s put his chief political operative in charge of running the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast. Shouldn’t that be raising a lot of questions — a man whose entire professional experience is in political messaging and patronage? He’s also at the center of on-going criminal investigation and the target of a much-rumored indictment. But set that aside. Then there’s what Rep. John D. Dingell (D-MI) said in his statement out this evening. “With a stroke of the pen, in one of his first Katrina directives, the President cut the wages of the workers who will undertake our largest reconstruction project since the Civil War.” That cuts right to the heart of the matter. The president’s first major initiatives were deep wage cuts for the people who will do the reconstruction.

Things we thought we blogged long ago

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Warren Ellis pointed us at this post on another blog that begins:

so i was in the basement touching myself while dressed like a skeleton because it’s the only way i can get off anymore…

Because it’s beautiful, too, we’ll provide a copy of our favorite Edison Hate Future for your enjoyment; it’s linked back to the omnibus all-Edison post at Mr Ellis’ site, in case you want more:

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p class=”center”>

Apparently, there’s a t-shirt in the works.

In we note two things that make us ashamed

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First, we were an Eagle Scout.

Second, this makes us downright ashamed of our answers to this pop quiz over at Accordian Guy’s place very much at all, and will strive to improve. Take a look; it’s worth your time. Something on the scale of Katrina could happen in literally any location. Safe from hurricanes? You’ve got something else to worry about, so don’t get smug. Just be prepared.

Now: we’re off to stock up on food, batteries, and finally get that fire ladder Mrs Heathen-To-Be keeps hassling us about.

If you like the funny… and I think you do…

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The Axis of Nielsen-Hayden points us to Ship of Fools’ The Laugh Judgement, an effort to find the ten funniest and ten most offensive religious jokes. We are amused. A sample or two:

One, from the Funny list:

A man ran through a crowded train looking very agitated, calling out, “Is there a Catholic priest on board?” When he got no reply, he ran back up the train shouting, “Is there an Anglican priest on board?” Still no reply. By now becoming more desparate, he ran down the train shouting, “Is there a Rabbi on board?” Eventually, a gentleman stood up and said, “Can I be of any assistance, my friend? I’m a Methodist minister.” The man looked at him and said, “No, you’re no bloody good. I need a corkscrew!”

Another:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said: “Stop. Don’t do it.” “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked. “Well, there’s so much to live for!” “Like what?” “Are you religious?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Me too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?” “Christian.” “Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?” “Protestant.” “Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?” “Baptist.” “Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?” “Baptist Church of God.” “Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?” “Reformed Baptist Church of God.” “Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?” He said: “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915.” I said: “Die, heretic scum,” and pushed him off.

And finally, one from the Offensive list:

An Indian man dies and arrives at the Pearly Gates. “Yes, how can I help?” asks St Peter. “I’m here to meet Jesus,” says the Indian man. St Peter looks over his shoulder and shouts, “Jesus, your cab is here!”

Salon on the GOP’s Hostility to Facts

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Go read this; here’s a great excerpt:

…[I]ntelligent design has been vigorously supported by the Discovery Institute, a formerly moderate think tank that has now become the intellectual home of antievolutionism. In 2001, Discovery took out a newspaper ad signed by roughly 70 scientists, who declared that they were “skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life” — in other words, they rejected Darwinism. This list has become Exhibit A in the argument that genuine scientific controversy exists over evolution, and to the layperson it certainly looked impressive. Bush and Santorum are not likely, however, to mention the National Center for Science Education’s hilarious response. The NCSE began gathering names of scientists who agreed that evolution was “a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences” — but restricted membership to those whose names were Steve, Stephanie or some other variation of Stephen. As of Monday, “Project Steve” — named in honor of the late Stephen Jay Gould — had 600 signatories.

Two from TPM

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Josh Marshall has a couple winners today.

First, he illustrates why Brownie, incompetant though he was, may not have been the whole problem at DHS:

DHS Secretary Chertoff didn’t declare Katrina an ‘Incident of National Significance’ until late on Tuesday August 30th, almost two days after the hurricane hit. That’s the administrative trip wire that sets off the standing government plans for a coordinated national response to natural or man-made disasters. As Jonathan Landay, et al. explain, the now-reviled and discarded Michael Brown only had limited authority to act prior to Chertoff’s determination on the night of the 30th. Chertoff was the one in charge of the response before that. TPM

Chertoff, of course, still has a job.

Second, Mr Marshall calls our attention to a piece from our hometown paper with some very odd power-priority goings-on:

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina roared through South Mississippi knocking out electricity and communication systems, the White House ordered power restored to a pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast. That order – to restart two power substations in Collins that serve Colonial Pipeline Co. – delayed efforts by at least 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt. […] Dan Jordan, manager of Southern Pines Electric Power Association, said Vice President Dick Cheney’s office called and left voice mails twice shortly after the storm struck, saying the Collins substations needed power restored immediately. […] [Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Mike] Callahan said energy officials told him gasoline and diesel fuel needed to flow through the pipeline to avert a national crisis from the inability to meet fuel needs in the Northeast. Callahan said the process of getting the pipelines flowing would be difficult and that there was a chance the voltage required to do so would knock out the system – including power to Wesley Medical Center in Hattiesburg. With Forrest General Hospital operating on generators, Wesley was the only hospital operating with full electric power in the Pine Belt in the days following Katrina. “Our concern was that if Wesley went down, it would be a national crisis for Mississippi,” Callahan said. “We knew it would take three to four days to get Forrest General Hospital’s power restored and we did not want to lose Wesley.” Hattiesburg American

Fuck the hospitals and the poor people! We needs us some fuel up north first!

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

Dept. of Animals Made From Spare Parts

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JWZ points us to this discussion of monotremes. Monotremes are a sort of pre-mammal; they’re weirder even than marsupials. One species, for example, is poisonous. Both — there are only two — lay eggs, whereas live birth is the rule for true mammals. It gets freakier:

The platypus is one of two surviving types of creature called monotremes, which, in case you were unaware, are kind of marsupials plus, or maybe minus. They have fur, and some of them sometimes have pouches in which their young develop, but they also lay eggs and have bills, sort of like birds, and in the case of male platypuses poisonous ankles also. They also have teeth, but only when young. The platypus is the famous monotreme; less well known for some reason (though even weirder in my opinion) is the echidna, also known more descriptively as the spiny anteater. Together, they are the only surviving examples of the oldest mammals ever to exist. Echidnas and platypuses, as well as several extinct species of monotreme, shared the Earth with the dinosaurs. Monotremes are really weird. Everything about them seems to have been thought up past some kind of deadline. Take the method by which they reproduce: after mating, the female lays an egg (echidna) or two (platypus). Then she carries them around until they hatch. Monotremes are mammalian, even if what they have is a kind of free demo version of mammalianism without the really useful features like live birth, so they lactate. But they have no nipples. The milk just leaks right out of glands in their skin, and the baby monotreme laps it up with sweeps of its tiny bill. (A baby echidna is called a puggle. There is no official name for a baby platypus, though “platypup” has been suggested.) The platypus doesn’t even have a pouch, so after the eggs hatch — after the female has incubated them by pressing them to her belly with her tail — the babies must lap up these rivulets of milk while clinging to her fur for dear life. Not that having a pouch simplifies the process any. The echidna (which comes in three varieties, short-beaked, long-beaked, and cyclops long-beaked) doesn’t usually have a pouch but grows one as necessary. After mating there is a gestation period of about three weeks, and then the female lies down on her back, doubles over, and lays her egg right into her own temporary pouch. After a while the egg hatches in the pouch. And echidnas are covered with aggressive spines, which adds a new wrinkle, as the mother cannot carry her puggle once these start to develop. So she buries it. (Echidnas are good diggers; if you startle one it will sink as if by magic into the ground until only its spines are exposed. In this position it is all but unassailable.) Alternately, she hides it under a bush. Every five to ten days she unburies it and lets it nurse for a while before burying it again. Keep in mind that the puggle, like a joey, is still somewhat fetal while this is going on. It’s a half-fetus half-baby thing buried in the dirt. The echidna is therefore “born” three times — once as an egg, once when the egg hatches, and once when the puggle is evicted from the pouch and hidden by its mother. It’s a good thing placentalism came along, or we’d all have to go through something like this. Echidna mating is mysterious and primordial. It is also rarely observed, but the following seem to be the basics. It begins when the female goes into estrus. Males, usually three or four of them, but sometimes as many as eleven, start following her around in a long single-file line called an “echidna train” (or even “echidna love train”). It seems very civilized, though it can go on for as long as six weeks, during which time the otherwise solitary animals eat and sleep in each other’s company, and the males nip the female’s tail, which seems to be a kind of foreplay. Eventually the female echidna climbs partway up a tree, or buries part of herself in the dirt, leaving the males to walk around and around her until they have created a circular rut in the ground. (Sometimes there’s only one male, in which case, nothing daunted, he kind of walks back and forth by himself until he has created a little ditch.) Then they engage in a shoving contest. The males that get shoved out of the ditch acknowledge defeat and leave peacefully until only one, the best shover, is left. He gets to mate with the female — very carefully, because they are both covered with spines. (Understandably, echidnas do it face to face, so don’t listen to anyone who tells you that this is a uniquely human behavior.) The male’s four-headed penis, which he does not use to urinate, emerges only during the act of mating; the rest of the time he is indistinguishable from a female echidna, as his testicles are also inside his body. Basically what I’m trying to say is HOLY CRAP MONOTREMES ARE WEIRD WHY DO THEY EVEN EXIST. Also that I really admire them, these life-forms that seem to be built out of spare parts, that refuse to be daunted by the convoluted systems they must use to propagate themselves, that seem as if by rights they really ought to have died out millions of years ago but haven’t. Life just won’t give up! Life has webbed feet, a bill, a pouch that comes and goes, waterproof fur, spines, poisonous ankles — whatever it takes.

As the saying goes (and the first commenter to JWZ’s entry reminds us), “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose” (JBS Haldane). I mean, come ON: poisonous ankles and a four-headed penis?

Smut returns to New Orleans, and we couldn’t be happier

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It appears French Quarter icon Big Daddy’s will be among the first to re-open. If you don’t know which club we mean, this should clear it up for you:

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) — There’s no water for the “wash the girl of your choice” service and there aren’t any girls either, but Big Daddy’s strip club on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street is getting ready to bring back erotic spectacle to the devastated city. Friday night on Bourbon Street, usually a throbbing artery of the party-going French Quarter, was pretty grim this time around in what has become a foul-smelling ghost town partly covered with a swamp of filthy water. Police patrol cars and military Humvees made up most of the traffic on the street. But Big Daddy’s general manager, Saint Jones, and a band of helpers defied an evacuation order by arriving to clean up their premises in the historic French Quarter, which escaped largely unscathed from the floods. Jones told Reuters he would open for business as soon as he could get electricity, water and dancers. He already had electricity from a generator, which was moving a pair of robotic woman’s legs, in stockings and pink high heels, waving invitingly on the street by the sign for Big Daddy’s.

Bru. Tal.

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My attorney stopped yelling about the goddamn mescaline long enough to point out this rosy bit of football fan brutality, presumably inspired by the fact that Vandy actually beat someone this weekend. Click the pic for a full-size version.

eBay screen cap of auction for Houston Nutt's testicles.

Four Years Later

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It’s been a few years, Ground Zero is still empty, 3,000 people are still dead, and Osama Bin Laden is still uncaptured. We did, on the other hand, start a whole DIFFERENT war someplace else in lieu of, you know, focussing on actually catching the bastard. We reckon ought to be more forgiving on this, as it’s not like Bush vowed to capture this murdering freak dead or alive, right?

The NYT had a piece yesterday about losing OBL in Tora Bora. Read it. (Local PDF.)

NYT on Gretna

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Let’s hope this gets some traction; it’s simply unacceptable that American law enforcement behaved in this manner. This goes well beyond simply failing to render aid. (Local PDF copy here.)

The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people, who, instead of complying immediately with orders to leave the bridge, pleaded to be let through, the paramedics and two other witnesses said. The witnesses said they had been told by the New Orleans police to cross that same bridge because buses were waiting for them there. Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.

In which we Bush uses Katrina as an opportunity for Federal giveaways to corporate interests

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Bush has suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates that contractors for Federal projects pay their workers the “prevailing local wage” or better. This typically keeps the Halliburtons of the world from dragging in cheap labor from elsewhere rather than pay local labor their normal wages.

The NYT has already weighed in; we duplicate their editorial here because the Powers That Be at NYT are notoriously stupid in re: archive access:

A Shameful Proclamation Published: September 10, 2005 On Thursday, President Bush issued a proclamation suspending the law that requires employers to pay the locally prevailing wage to construction workers on federally financed projects. The suspension applies to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. By any standard of human decency, condemning many already poor and now bereft people to subpar wages — thus perpetuating their poverty — is unacceptable. It is also bad for the economy. Without the law, called the Davis-Bacon Act, contractors will be able to pay less, but they’ll also get less, as lower wages invariably mean lower productivity. The ostensible rationale for suspending the law is to reduce taxpayers’ costs. Does Mr. Bush really believe it is the will of the American people to deny the prevailing wage to construction workers in New Orleans, Biloxi and other hard-hit areas? Besides, the proclamation doesn’t require contractors to pass on the savings they will get by cutting wages from current low levels. Around New Orleans, the prevailing hourly wage for a truck driver working on a levee is $9.04; for an electrician, it’s $14.30. Republicans have long been trying to repeal the prevailing wage law on the grounds that the regulations are expensive and bureaucratic; weakening it was even part of the Republican Party platform in 1996 and 2000. Now, in a time of searing need, the party wants to achieve by fiat what it couldn’t achieve through the normal democratic process. In a letter this week to Mr. Bush urging him to suspend the law, 35 Republican representatives noted approvingly that Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and the elder George Bush had all suspended the law during “emergencies.” For the record, Mr. Roosevelt suspended it for two weeks in 1934, to make time to clear up contradictions between it and another law. Mr. Nixon suspended it for six weeks in 1971 as part of his misbegotten attempt to control spiraling inflation. And Mr. Bush did so after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, two weeks before he was defeated by Bill Clinton, who quickly reinstated it after assuming the presidency. If Mr. Bush does not rescind his proclamation voluntarily, Congress should pass a law forcing him to do so.