(Sun Sept 25 1:30am): It looks like Rita countered some expectations by not stalling over northeastern Texas, moving away into Louisiana and Arkansas, avoiding the problem of dumping 30+ inches of rain in the same limited area. It was still a very wet storm, though -- all the reporters covering it commented on it being different that way from other hurricanes, the rain being so continuous -- so I'm a little concerned about the amount of rain that's being introduced into the Mississippi watershed, and what that might mean for New Orleans. Still, I assume that the Army Corps of Engineer can shunt off a lot of that into the Achafalaya via the Old River Control Structure, so I'm not dwelling on it too much.
I did catch a whiff of what could be another potential scapegoat being readied to be trotted out, in the implied criticism of the National Hurricane Center for not providing their watches and warnings sooner, so that local officials could make their determinations of whether to evacuate or not. (This was raised in connection with the botched evacuation of Houston.) I have to say, I'm not impressed at all by this piece of opportunistic buck-passing. I was watching the NHC's forecasts and tracking models as closely as any non-meteorologist citizen (professional or amateur), and I can't see where they made any mistakes. They didn't say they were sure until they were sure, and they provided the probabilities of what might happen until then. You really can't ask for anything more -- it's scientific forecasting, not witchcraft. Politicians can pretend to be certain and have all the answers, but scientsist don't generally have the privilege of pretending such certainty, they have to report instead what they know, and what they don't know, they can only make educated guesses about.
It's been fun today watching politicans, weathermen and reporters all tap dance around one brutal fact: Rita hit in a prtty good place, because it missed major population areas. Yeah, people in Lake Charles and Port Arthur and Beaumont and Vermillion Parish suffered and will continue to bear the brunt, but that's a hell of a lot better that Houston. Of course, no one wanted to come out and say that, out of delicacy and concern for the sensibilities of those who lifes have been turned inside out by Rita, but I can say it.
Oh, and will someone at CNN please put Larry King out to pasture? I'm not going to make nice and talk about his long and distinguished career, because I've never liked him as an interviewer, and I never understood how he fit into CNN's programming philosophy (except that he was popular and brought in advertising revenue), so let me just say this: he used to stink, but now he's just atrocious. Watching him trying to anchor the Jet Blue emergency LAX landing story the other day was painful. If they're going to keep him on as an interviewer, they should make hm throw to someone else for any breaking story.
One more thing: Did anyone else find Anderson Cooper's "reporting" from Beaumont, Texas when Rita was approaching landfall really, really embarrassing? I mean, I was embarrassed for him, he seemed so fragile and about to crack at any second. And what did I learn from his "reporting"? I learned that it's hard to stand up in a very very very very strong wind, that it's scary to be in the dark during a hurricane, and that Cooper is comforted by the sound of other people's voices in his earpiece -- it makes him feel less lonely.
If Anderson was the weaker sister of the team, none of CNN's reporters really provided much information from their various scenes. We got feelings, impressions, demonstrations that it's really really really hard to stand in the wind, amazement that a tree branch can fall and just miss the vehicle ("If we had come by just a second later...") and other bits of not very interesting factoids. At some point, they all turned into local cub reporters, chasing after fires and reporting on the rescue of dogs and cats (OK, and people too) from various predicaments -- not exactly the overarching coverage I expect from a major news organization.
In truth, these hurricane stand-ups are pretty damn useless -- if occasionally entertaining.
Perhaps CNN was working so hard because they really didn't have a New Orleans-sized story to report, once the storm missed Galveston (which would have provided plenty of tasty comparisons to 1900) and Houston ("Windows are breaking in a building around the corner, Aaron"). They would be better off giving all those reporters the night off to get some rest so they can attack the next day with a little more energy.
One final point -- recently, someone made the point that journalists are, as a group, more hostile to the military today than the had been in the recent past, because most of them have never served, and they have no feeling for what it means to be in the military, what it stands for and the importance of the job it's asked to do. The scuttling of the draft and the institution of the "all-volunteer army" (ignoring the bald fact that much of the fighting is done by reservists and the National Guard) assured that most people will never know what the military is all about, and that lack of understanding and empathy (and sympathy) shows up in the media's reporting. (Full disclosure: I never served in the military.)
Well, I want to make a similar point about science. It's clear to me that many, if not all, anchors and star reporters in the electronic media have no feel at all for science, don't have a clue how it's done, can't hold their own in a conversation about even vaguely scientific topics, and certainly don't know how to interview a scientist, because they don't understand the scientific method or the thought processes at work. I assume these folks all took "Geology for Poets" in college or journalism school, and don't know beans from bacon about what it all means -- and, boy, does it show.
This is not an inconsequential subject, by the way. The media's ignorance about science (which it tends to think of as soothsaying or to confuse with the wonders of technology) mirrors the public's, and it's the public's ignorance about basic matters of science methodology and thinking -- not to mention the actual content of scientific knowledge -- that allows the Bush administration to get away with warping and misusing science for its own purposes, substituting science-lite and pseduoscience for the real thing whenever it suits its agenda or that of its corporate clients (which is basically the same, anyway).
The media cannot serve as a watchdog (if it even has the desire to do so) over something it doesn't understand and isn't, apparently, willing to stretch out to try to understand. Having allowed itself to be sucked into the relativistic world of contemporary power politics -- where he who spins the best creates the reality he wants -- and having let go of any notion of truth in the process (if it ever had any), the press can't conceive of a circumstance in which in most cases there is something more to a story than "he said, she said" -- there's actual, indisputable, provable (or at least evidentiarily supportable) fact.
Until the media gets a little science-savvy, we're going to continue to be vulnerable to mendacious partisans and misguided zealots who will use science, or the aappearance of science, to further their aims.
(More full disclosure: I am not a scientist, but I did attend MIT for about 15 minutes in the 70s, before changing my subject to theatre.)
(Sun 2:30am): Just a word in defense of David Paulison, the acting head of FEMA, who came in to replace the unqualified bungler Michael Brown. Paulison has been widely derided for his recommendation that households should stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting in case of terrorist emergencies -- he's been called "Mr. Duct Tape" and worse.
In truth, Paulison's suggestion was a good and appropriate one -- duct tape and plastic sheeting is very useful to have around, and it would come in handy in an emergency. What was wrong was not the content of Paulison's suggestion, but the weight that was put on it by the administration, because they weren't providing any other concrete suggestions as to what we, as citizens, could do to help in the fight against terrorists. In the absence of anything remotely helpful, they offered the duct-tape-and-plastic-sheeting package, and it was hooted down, not because it was wrong, but because it was so little so late. I'm going to give Paulison the advantage of the doubt, and assume that he was responsible for the content of the suggestion, and not for the absence of any other functional advice.
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
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recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.
Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
