boing boing has been publishing a lot of useful info about Katrina. Meanwhile New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered police to stop rescue operations so they can protect private property from looters. That doesn't strike me as the right priority, but looters were evidently armed and potentially violent.

George Bush was on the scene, taking a break from his long vacation for a flyover in Air Force One. Bush released some of the emergency oil reserves and the EPA announced a temporary waiver of pollution standards covering gasoline and diesel fuels, ostensibly to ramp up production.

Various news reports have been running in the background today, and a few bits stood out for me, such as Mike Brown of FEMA telling Paula Zahn on CNN that FEMA had no idea the New Orleans Convention Center was housing thousands of refugees who'd been without food or drink for 100 hours - they'd just found out this afternoon. Said Brown, "Those people have suddenly appeared." When asked why help is so slow in coming, he he said that the American people just has to understand how bad it is in New Orleans. Especially when you haven't planned and your flood control budget's been cut by 44% to fund a certain war (I said that, not Brown). A National Guardsman who'd been in Iraq said he'd rather be there than New Orleans, where there's "mass chaos." No one seems to be in control.

You might expect George W. Bush to provide some leadership. He was quoted today saying that nobody would've expected the levees to break. I know he doesn't like to read newspapers or dry factual stuff, but he could've asked my wife, who knew enough about it to've been talking for several years now about the danger of just this occurrence.

I halfway expect to see an aircraft carrier parked somewhere in the middle of New Orleans so that Bush can fly in and declare the disaster over.

Okay, that was a cheap shot, but I can't help but think that, under someone else's watch, we'd see more organization than chaos and an orderly evacuation already under way.

Florida's Freedom4Wireless is sending a team to build ad hoc wireless networks in New Orleans so that emergency workers can use voice over IP to communicate. MIT Technology Review reports this development, and the possibility that WiMax and mesh networking might be used to build emergency data networks.

Motorola put its mesh networking technology into place in Florida last year after Hurricane Charley. It was used to monitor staging areas that were vulnerable to looting. Rather than positioning a dozen police cruisers around a parking lot filled with food and water, public safety officials positioned mesh-network-connected video cameras around the lot. The cameras fed a video stream to a police crew in a single cruiser, thereby freeing up other officers for more pressing concerns.

Bruce Sterling on New Orleans after Katrina:

I wonder how many of these "unprecedented" events
the American public is going to take before they get
it about climate change. And what then? It's going
to be interesting to live in a society where climate change
and energy are the major everyday topics. "Nine-eleven."
We lost a couple of buildings then. This is an
entire city.

I got a private email yesterday from someone who said "I'm amazed that the liberals have taken the President to task for not doing something to stop the hurricane," and I replied that it's not a liberal/conservative thing at all. And it wasn't about stopping the hurricane, it's about what's happened since. From Salon:

Of course, it's unfair to blame the president for an act of nature like Katrina. And yet it's irrefutable that this administration's backward policies and politics made this disaster worse than it had to be, and its belated response will do nothing to address the problems that have suddenly been flushed out into the open. The death toll from Katrina is likely to be higher than 9/11, but most of its victims will be black and poor, and I doubt we'll wage a war on poverty and neglect to match the war on terror launched after al-Qaida struck -- and if we did, I doubt it would be any more effective. The president, who continued his vacation while Katrina raged, just the way he kept reading "My Pet Goat" on 9/11, is headed for the Gulf on Friday. I'd like him to bring some answers, but I don't expect him to.

What I'd really like is to see him head today for the Superdome, bring his dad, and Bill Clinton, and John Kerry and Howard Dean -- any Democrat or Republican who cares, really –- and go to work, feeding and comforting the refugees and finding out what they need. Then I'd like to see them put people to work, rebuilding the amazing historic city we've apparently lost.

The Toney Burger Center in South Austin will temporarily house refugees from New Orleans. People have been dropping stuff off... clothes etc. The Red Cross says please don't, it's creating a fire hazard... give money instead. [Link]

WorldChanging contributor Alan AtKisson worked with regional leaders in New Orleans on a plan for southeast Louisiana's future, sponsored by Greater New Orleans, Inc. Alan says his team had to overcome a surprising sense of fatalism within the region before the project could move forward. But "there was hope stirring in the city"...

When we recently updated the indicators for Top 10 by 2010, we were ourselves amazed to discover that whatever was happening in New Orleans was quickly being noticed elsewhere. In just three years, on the Forbes/Milken list of Best Places for Business and Careers, the New Orleans region had climbed from number 194 (out of 200) to number 110, a jump of 84 places. Suddenly, cracking the Top 10 by the year 2010 -- a goal that looked wildly ambitious and unrealistic in 2001 -- actually seemed possible.

A New New Orleans must be a city dedicated to the genuine well-being of all her citizens. Poverty had been reduced in the 1990s; but pockets of terrible, entrenched poverty were still far too common in that city prior to its deluge. Those pockets are the one thing that must not be restored; instead, the city must charge into rebuilding with an eye to reducing poverty drastically, by reducing the conditions that create it. The now-destroyed, once-crumbling houses in the 9th Ward (the poorest section of the city) must be replaced with decent, modern, and yes green housing (see below). The people who live in New Orleans must be employed in rebuilding it, thereby gaining marketable skills in the process.

While simple morality should make this principle clear and sufficiently compelling, it also behooves the nation to rebuild the city in a way that uplifts even its poorest residents, for simple security reasons. The alternative is chaos, and the scenes of looting, shooting, armored vehicles and violence that followed eerily in the hurricane's wake are but a foreshadowing of what New Orleans could become, semi-permanently, if a truly visionary and socially just rebuilding does not occur.

Got this tonight from Dale Thompson at Austin Free-net:

The City of Austin is about to open the Palmer Center and the Convention Center for Hurricane Katrina refugees. The Burger Center is already in use for this purpose as you probably know. The computer banks are now being installed in the Palmer and Convention Centers and the refugees will be arriving soon.

They need volunteers to help these folks put their information into a web site that is tracking the refugees so that their loved ones can find them and vice versa. Many of the refugees have no computer skills. If you can volunteer any of your time and skills to help out, please e-mail:

eric.garnel@ci.austin.tx.us (Note that the email address originally posted was incorrect; this is the correct email.)

Eric will e-mail you back to let you know when you will be needed.

UPDATE: Just found a News8Austin.com link – 5,000 refugees on the way.

A bit of weirdness on the Fox Network tonight... Geraldo Rivera appeared to be in tears over conditions at the Convention Center in New Orleans, and Shepard Smith just outside the Center was also clearly angry – both mortified at government inaction, and the fact that people in the Convention Center were not permitted to leave. Back at Fox HQ Sean Hannity, clearly uncomfortable with the intensity of emotion in these reports, focused elsewhere. Some time later another reporter was interviewing a black woman who'd just arrived in Houston, and who started dissing GW Bush, at which point the sound and then the image faded. I can imagine it's hard to be Fox covering New Orleans right now...

UPDATE: I was checking to see where Fox was with all this, and caught Bill O'Reilly, who had some interesting thoughts. He says the people who are stuck and suffering in New Orleans right now have only themselves to blame, because they chose not to leave. He says the mess in New Orleans is the fault of Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin, who weren't up to it. The guys who really know what they're doing, the Feds, waited a bit too long to step in make it happen. He then explains that the real problem is that too many people depend on government! This from the "no-spin zone."

The Army is referring to citizens of New Orleans as "insurgents," a very weird choice of words reported by Xeni at boingboing.net.

More Spin, mixed with a bit of historical revisionism: Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security simply denies that anyone had predicted a storm like Katrina and its impact on New Orleans. He says it was "breathtaking in its surprise," which is similar to Bush's statement that no one expected the levees would break.

When I was just a tad, I heard over and over how the evil Soviets would revise "history" regularly to fit the politics du jour, and this was considered a great sin and an indictment of communisim. Seems to be de rigueur for 21st century USA, however.

The good news is that CNN is calling bullshit on Chertoff.

New Orleans, state and federal officials have long painted a very different picture.

"We certainly understood the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans, Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Thursday, Cox News Service reported.

Reuters reported that in 2004, more than 40 state, local and volunteer organizations practiced a scenario in which a massive hurricane struck and levees were breached, allowing water to flood New Orleans. Under the simulation, called "Hurricane Pam," the officials "had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed more than half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents," the Reuters report said.

In 2002 the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series exploring the vulnerability of the city. The newspaper, and other news media as well, specifically addressed the possibility of massive floods drowning residents, destroying homes and releasing toxic chemicals throughout the city.

Scientists long have discussed this possibility as a sort of doomsday scenario.

A distributed group from within the tech community is working on a project to gather unstructured data from various missing and found persons lists in a large structured database that'll be more useful in tracking Katrina survivors who are spreading in many directions from Louisiana and Mississippi. Ethan Zuckerman posts about the project here and here. David Geilhufe of Social Source Foundation is leading the charge, along; other organizations involved are Salesforce.com and CivicSpace. Ethan's been taking responsibility for chunking data sources and adding them to the KatrinaHelp wiki's PeopleFinderVolunteer page. I've been coordinating data entry. If you want to help, all the info you need is on the volunteer page. It's a daunting project, but I just heard we've entered 15,200 records in less than 24 hours!

I wouldn't bet on Michael Brown's future at FEMA. Even the folks on the right are calling for his dismissal, and many very angry blog posts are popping up.

This is completely and utterly outrageous. If the director of FEMA really thought on Saturday and Sunday that Katrina would, if it followed the predicted path, be a "typical hurricane situation," and that "the water would drain away fairly quickly," then he should be fired on the spot for being ignorant and incompetent to the point that he has no business working as a low-level functionary at FEMA, let alone as its director. And if he didn't really think that, but is just saying it in order to spin the political fallout from the hurricane, then he should be fired on the spot for being a dirty, filthy, stinking liar.

Either way, Michael Brown must go. This man has no business running FEMA, especially not at a time like this. My God.

Unbelievable.

Katrina has exposed the "dithering and incompetence" of current U.S. government, according to Matt Wells, writing for BBC.

Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.

Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.

For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been – as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be – whether or not I voted for this President – he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government – our government – "New Orleans."

For him, it is a shame – in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."

In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself – it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

President Bush and his peeps don't want to play the blame game. This is Scott McClellan et al in a surreal press conference. [Link]

Q One last question. The person who says that he found out about the Convention Center seeing it on the media -- that is to say the FEMA Director -- is still in place. Is that satisfactory that somebody would have responded like that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, this is getting into -- we're somewhat engaged in a blame game. We've got to --

Q It's not a blame game. That's accountability --

MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, we've got to --

Q It's accountability.

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes.

Q Is "Brownie" still doing a "heck of a job," according to the President?

MR. McCLELLAN: We've got to continue to do everything we can in support of those who are involved in the operational aspects of this response effort. And that's what we're going to do. There will be plenty of time --

Q If he fails at it, he's not going to be good at it going forward. That's what Bob is saying.

MR. McCLELLAN: There are people working round-the-clock with FEMA. The Secretary, the FEMA Director and many others who are working round-the-clock. And we've got to do everything we can in support of their efforts to make sure people are getting what they need.

Q Does the President really believe we could respond to a terrorist attack with any -- amount of weeks, months?

MR. McCLELLAN: We've actually done a lot of exercises, David, to prepare for possible attacks, but --

Q Do you think most Americans agree, based on --

MR. McCLELLAN: But the most important thing we've got to do is focus on --

Q You mean exercises for Hurricane Katrina.

MR. McCLELLAN: We've got to focus on prevention, and that's what we're doing by staying on the offensive.

Q Well, let's talk about it. Are you saying the President is -- are you saying that the President is confident that his administration is prepared to adequately, confidently secure the American people in the event of a terrorist attack of a level that we have not seen? And based on what does he have that confidence?

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, and that's what he made clear earlier today, that obviously we want to look and learn lessons from a major catastrophe of this nature.

Q Yes, but you're telling us today there will be time for that somewhere down the road. Well, what if it happens tomorrow?

MR. McCLELLAN: We can engage in this blame-gaming going on and I think that's what you're getting --

Q No, no. That's a talking point, Scott, and I think most people who are watching this --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, that's a fact. I mean, some are wanting to engage in that, and we're going to remain focused --

Q I'm asking a direct question. Is he confident --

MR. McCLELLAN: We're going to remain focused on the people.

Q -- that he can secure the American people in the event of a major terrorist attack?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are securing the American people by staying on the offensive abroad and working to spread freedom and democracy in the Middle East.

Q That's a talking point. That's a talking point.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, that's a fact.

Go ahead.

Q No, it's not. And you think people who are watching this think that's -- from what does he derive that confidence, based on the response --

MR. McCLELLAN: David, I'm interested in the people in the region that have been affected and getting them help. We can sit here and engage in this back and forth --

Q The whole country is watching and wondering about some --

MR. McCLELLAN: The time for bickering and blame-gaming is later. The time for helping people in the region is now.

Evacuees from New Orleans, who've lost everything and been displaced after a nightmare storm and a week abandoned in the ruined city should perk up. According to Barbara Bush, this scenario is working very well for them.

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I've talked to says we're going to move to Houston."

Then she added: "What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

Data entry for the PeopleFinder project was suspended temporarily tonight to try to get a better, more understandable data entry interface. Because the project is so distributed people are having to step up and make decisions and try not to reinvent the wheel. You can search all records here, though I've suggested we need a more focused search that is name only in addition to the broader search of all data. Meanwhile Rebecca posted an appreciation of the volunteers and their accomplishment. Jon Garfunkel says the Red Cross database is better; Ethan and I say that's an apples and oranges comparison. My comment was held as spam; I finally got it to post by removing my url. Couldn't figure that one out at the end of a long day....

Data entry should be back tonight at some point, but I'll be sleeping and trying not to dream about all this.

Pfizer is giving Katrina victims emergency supplies of medicine. (Thanks, Britt!)

Paul Krugman has more on the "blame game" and where we're headed with the current administration post-Katrina. Here's a good excerpt, but you should read the whole thing...

As Bloomberg News puts it, the agency's "upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management." By now everyone knows FEMA's current head went from overseeing horse shows to overseeing the nation's response to disaster, with no obvious qualifications other than the fact that he was Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate.

All that's missing from the Katrina story is an expensive reconstruction effort, with lucrative deals for politically connected companies, that fails to deliver essential services. But give it time - they're working on that, too.

Why did the administration make the same mistakes twice? Because it paid no political price the first time.

I posted an update on the Katrina PeopleFinder Project at SmartMobs.com. There's also a press release on the project at Network Centric Advocacy.

Ebay is thinking to buy Skype, and Vint Cerf has joined Google. Consolidation. Web 2.0. Wheeee!

Much of the time I would have spent blogging the last few days I've committed to the Katrina PeopleFinder project supporting the data entry process. When I see what other people are doing, I realize that I'm being selfish, doing too little by comparison. I'm not taking people in or going to the sites where evacuees are staying. I haven't even donated any money yet, though I intend to.

I've been thinking a lot about what's happened in the wake of Katrina, though, and I'm trying to write a longer piece for WorldChanging.com with some thoughts about government, volunteers, and a world where disasters may become commonplace events due to climate change and possibly other stuff &ndash terrorist attacks, atomic bombs, earth's magnetic field or lack thereof...

I may never finish that piece, but here are some random notes from today's media.

Barack Obama, talking to George Stephanopoulos on This Week about the limited and late Federal response response to Katrina, said passive indifference is as bad as active neglect. He said that the current administration has excellent responses when it come to PR, but detachment when it comes to goveringing.

Later, Fareed Zakaria noted a 30-year de-funding and shrinking of government in the USA, and a growing supposition that the government doesn't have and shouldn't have solutions. Newt Gingrich then said that it was never the attention to make government impotent; rather, we should h ave a small but energetic and effective government.

I like what Fareed said to George Will: You need people taking pride in the execution and delivery of government...

Web 2.0 as seen by danah boyd is a negotiation between global and local – not so much geographically but virtually. "Think of it," she says, "as a complex tango with information constantly flowing between the global and the local, altered at each junction."

The complex relationship between personal, local collectives, and global must all be modeled in glocalized networks for Web2.0 to work. We need to break out of the global village model, the universal "truth" approach to information access. We need to situate information access in glocalized culture. Folksonomy is emerging as a dance between the individual and the collective; remix occurs as individual and collective responses to the global. They are forms of organizing and situating global information in a glocalized fashion.

David Kline, co-author of the soon to be released book Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, And Culture, criticizes a new study, "The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere" by Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, who argue that progressive bloggers are good guys, conservative bloggers are bad guys. David, who interviewed me for the book, asked me what I thought of his analysis. I agree that the Bowers/Stoller report is just more divisive partisan rhetoric. I hear various arguments that the right/the left (pick one) has taken control of the narrative, but I figure the real problem is that they're talking past each other and drowning out more balanced, moderate voices. Meanwhile the world's seeming pretty fragile at the moment, and in the wake of a major trauma like Hurricane Katrina, the partisan stuff feels petty and false. [Link]

But even if it's true that conservatives tie their blogging activities to offline political organizations more closely than progressive bloggers do, what's wrong with that? I mean, the point is to actually organize people to WIN elections, right? Which, in case Bowers and Stoller hadn't noticed, still take place offline, in the real world, where flesh-and-blood people actually live.

The main problem with Bowers and Stoller's so-called "strategic overview of the comparative advantages of the progressive and conservative [blogosphere]" is its head-in-the-sand avoidance of the real reason why conservatives -- online and off -- have been kicking progressive butt in recent years.

I'm referring, of course, to the maddening inability of progressives in general -- and Democratic candidates like Kerry in particular -- to connect with the majority of heartland voters on the issues that they most deeply care about.

New Orleans' Times-Picayune "is expanding the number of pages and the number of copies it is printing as residents return and businesses reopen in the metro New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina." [Link] Today's front-page news: citizens learn that their insurance coverage may not provide the coverage they expected. [Link]

Carol Hess and her husband, Bobby, have paid $364 a year for their flood policy. And State Farm adjuster Steve Evans said his week that the Hesses will be able to recover a maximum of $155,800 for damage to their Eden Isles home and its contents under the policy. If the adjuster had blamed the damage on the hurricane, the Hesses could have gotten as much as $277,918, according to their homeowners' policy, which cost $1,640 annually.

The news blew them both away.

"My house is demolished and you're telling me it was a flood," complained Bobby Hess, 58, a retired air-conditioning mechanic. "But water didn't pick up this roof and dump it in my back yard. This furniture didn't come by water. It was pushed here by the wind. It makes no sense to me. I am totally disgusted with the whole thing."

Austin may just be moving ahead of the curve where citizen journalism is concerned: the Austin American-Statesman will be hosting blogs for registered users of its site, thank's to Austin's Pluck and Adam Weinroth, who joined Pluck when the company purchased his blog platform EasyJournal. Adam offers links to several articles about the project, Austin360 Blogs. [Link]

Jennifer Granick's started a column at Wired News with a piece about the many challenges to the concept of a free and open Internet, focusing on the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and Katrinalist.net as "tangible evidence of the beauty and power of internet technology in the hands of well-meaning citizens," which she says is "also an endangered species."

...many ISPs and some prosecutors are arguing that it's a crime to use unsecured wireless access points without the explicit permission of the owner. Antispam crusaders advocate blocking any e-mails that haven't been whitelisted first. Airlines like American and auction sites like eBay -- which want customers to visit their websites, view their ads and "join the community" -- have won court injunctions against companies that collect price information on plane fares or auctions to help consumers comparison shop.

Under ancient legal theories like "trespass to chattels" and ill-advised modern laws like the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime statutes, courts are holding that if you don't have authorization, you can't access computers

And if you can't access computers, you can't collect data about airfares, auctions or evacuees.

Malaysians have a very democratic approach to space travel: they're electing their first astronaut. We could do that in the U.S., too – know anybody you'd like to send into space? [Link]

Joel Sternfeld's new photo exhibit, "Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America," is a series of photos from the sites of utopian communities throughout the U.S.

In 1982, while Mr. Sternfeld was still working on "American Prospects," he visited a socialist thinker, Scott Nearing, then 99, in Maine. Looking through Mr. Sternfeld's images for that series, Mr. Nearing advised that they were too critical of America. "Picture an ideal world and photograph that," he told the photographer. Mr. Sternfeld evidently took his advice, capturing in this body of work if not an ideal world, at least the idea of it.

Corpses in the Katrina zone are being chipped with RFID tags to expedite identification.

“These bodies are in an advanced stage of decomposition,” said John Procter, VeriChip’s director of communications. “Many of them have no identification marks, no wallets, no IDs. In some cases a toe tag is not even viable.”

Joke's on me: an apparently serious article about astronomers' discovery of a "chaos cloud" that dissolves everything in its path and will reach earth in 2014 turned up as I was poking around in the nooks and crannies of the web, and I wondered why it was on Yahoo under "Entertainment News and Gossip." Turns out it was a Weekly World News piece. This is the publication that tracks Bat Boy, a creature who is half-human, half-bat. (The recently speculated that Bat Boy and James Carville are related, heh.)

Cream has a reunion tour booked, or perhaps not a tour – looks like the only dates are set for Madison Square Garden. I logged a lot of hours with Fresh Cream and Disraeli Gears, but never saw the band live, and would almost acquire a mortgage to pay the price for the reunion concert (which for me would include a jet to NYC and a night at the Mayfair. If you look at the reunion tour writeup at onlineseats.com, you'll see two photos, the second of which, aligned right with Cream's bio, looks suspiciously like Queen.

I had a bit of a senior moment when I saw the Cream tour info, trying to figure out which member of the band had died. Naw, they're all still more or less alive. Jack Bruce turned up on Rising Low, Phish bassist Mike Gordon's excellent documentary about Allen Woody of Gov't Mule, organized around the recording of a tribute album/DVD recorded by Mule with Woody's favorite bass players sitting in for him. Mule was another great power trio in the Cream tradition (but with Southern Rock roots via history with the Allman Brothers).

Jay Rosen believes that journalists have such a fear of "getting it wrong" factually that they no longer try to tell the truth, according to Ethan Zuckerman.

As a response to the perpetual fear of being wrong, journalists have stopped taking responsibility for the truth claims of their reports, just that they’ve followed the rituals correctly: “We called you for your reaction on the story. We followed our rules.” These rituals - many of which focus on reporting what a person said without an analysis of whether it’s factually correct - are designed to prove “the political innocence of the press”.

Truth is elusive; I would argue that you're more likely to approach it from an aggregate of many sources.

Ethan and Jay are among those who seem to have a powerful belief in what they know, but as the sages say, everything you know is wrong.

Depending where it hits, Hurricane Rita, now a category 4 hurricane, could devastate parts of the Texas Gulf Coast. A projected landfall at Galveston could flood the city that was slammed once before, in 1900, the infamous "Isaac's storm." Taking no chances in the 21st Century, Galveston's evacuating. Many evacuees are heading for Austin, which will already be crowded with the Austin City Limits Festival happening. Could be a real mess if Rita hits Austin as a strong tropical storm.

Starting with a critique of Lakoff's Elephant, Frances Moore Lappé, gets to an interesting point: if we focus more on communities than "nuclear families," we "grow up" and get to a different dynamic that's not so bipolar. (Thanks, Alex!) [Link]

Third is the "revolution in human dignity." We've lived so long under the spell of hierarchy – from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses – that only recently have we awakened to see not only that "regular" citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high. Besides, few of us – unless we're scared into it�are prepared simply to take orders.

It's sunny and hot in Austin, though we're starting to see the clouds thrown forward by Hurricane Rita as she approaches the coast. The only real effect of storm preparations I've seen is in the grocery stores: our local HEB had no water on the shelves when I was last there, and no bread. It was packed, too, with many dutifully buying a week's supplies, as instructed by local news anchors and the experts standing somewhere, invisible, behind 'em. It hit us as we left the store that we couldn't imagine a scenario for Austin that would require a week's supply of food.

Knowing we'd be busy this year, we'd already decided to sell our ACLFest tickets. We were glad to find a buyer - it's uncomfortably hot and humid today, more so that we expected this late in the month, and tomorrow we'll be slammed by wind and rain, though we'll miss the full force of the hurricane after its right turn (an earlier path projection had it reaching Austin, possibly as a cat 1 hurricane).

I'm still not making any bets on landfall or path. I figure at this point we can officially classify Rita as Texas weather, therefore completely unpredictable.

Virtual plague's broken out in the massively multiplayer World of Warcraft. BBC has the full story, and Joi, who's got into WoW recently, blogs about it with, with a funny quote from the infected Jonas Luster:

The idea was, to move all infected players into instances, where we could be by ourselves, so we hooked up into large raid groups, rezzed instead of corpse walked, and re-infected ourselves before hearthstoning back into Org. Bog Troopers, a huge horde guild in Org, raided Stormwind, which was almost empty, and killed the child king (no HK, there, you have to kill the Guardian) before walking into the Stockades, farming gold. The GMs congregated up on Honor's Stand, so we had a handful of players up there, stealthed, and infecting them. It was more fun than any other world event EVAR!.

Cameron Sinclair's Architecture for Humanity just won the Index Design Award, is the world's largest prize for design. Cameron is also a WorldChanging.com contributor. The winning project: Siyathemba Football Club, designed by Swee Hong Ng of Edge Studio in Pittsburgh for AFH's Siyathemba competition.

President Bush is making a lot of noise about government's preparedness for Hurricane Rita, which seems to've been named for the national drink of Texas. Ultimately Rita, at one point the third largest storm in recorded history, lost its punch, but it still made a mess of Texas and Louisiana along the Gulf of Mexico. At the Texas Emergency Operations Center in Austin, Bush said "I'm really here to let the folks in Texas know that the federal government knows we have a responsibility to support you in the mission of saving lives – first and foremost – and then help to rebuild their lives." The telepundits agree that Bush was more responsive this week, attributing his burst of energy to his attempt to recover points lost to his Katrina nonperformance. Nobody mentioned that Rita struck his home state, near Houston, where he used to live. My bet is that he would've been Johnny-on-the-spot (or Georgie-on-the-spot) even if Katrina had never happened, so I wouldn't read too much into it. Meanwhile the Texas evacuation was as orderly as anything that impossible could be, though evacuees heading for Austin found "no vacancy" signs, with the city already booked for the Austin City Limits Festival.

Xeni at boingboing.net is having a field day here and here with Joseph Medawar's proposed television fantasy D.H.S. - The Series, quoting a BBC article saying that Medawar has been charged with bilking investors, taking money for series development and spending it on himself. Medawar claimed he had President Bush's backing. I found an NPR Interview by Brooke Gladstone with Medwar and his co-producer, Alison Heruth-Waterbury (also a series co-star) from March 2004:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now you'll remember that the creation of the Homeland Security Department was not without its share of debate, and one year later there continues to be real questions raised about its overall effectiveness. Are you at all concerned that the unvarnished heroes of the plotlines in your shows will eclipse the very legitimate real life concerns about the DHS?

ALISON HERUTH-WATERBURY: You know what, DHS is, you know, from our point of view, is very strong for us in the U.S. We need it. Is it perfected to where we want it to be? I think there's always room for improvement in every area. But it's not a show about promoting the government. It's about educating--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But don't you think the education value is somewhat impaired if you don't show any of the warts?

ALISON HERUTH-WATERBURY:Yes, of course those need to be displayed and shown, so you can learn from 'em. I cannot judge, and I wouldn't even want to say publicly where I feel their weak areas are, because there's very few people that are there, I believe, for the wrong reason. Now whether they are right or wrong, again, is a perception. But they have to believe in what they're doing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:You know, it's not inconsistent to recognize the heroism of participants in an agency and yet raise questions about the efficiency of an agency. The trailer that you posted on your website, if it's any indication of the overall flavor of your series -- we see an almost invariably effective endeavor, and the power of fiction might lead viewers to think that that is the way the Homeland Security Department operates when in fact there are some very real problems that if the public were aware of they might help to address.

ALISON HERUTH-WATERBURY: We have every intention of bringing those things to the air. You've merely seen a two to three minute trailer, and you don't have our story line and, you know, that is changing every day.

Hurricanes either are or aren't affected by global climate change, according to a CNN article. Meteorologists are saying wild and woolly hurricanes like Katrina and Rita are part of a natural cycle that could last another decade or two. Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center in Miami sez "The increased activity since 1995 is due to natural fluctuations (and) cycles of hurricane activity driven by the Atlantic Ocean itself along with the atmosphere above it and not enhanced substantially by global warming," This is despite a study suggesting that global warming is making hurricanes "more ferocious." And CNN has a quote from that side of the aisle, too:

Brenda Ekwurzel, climate scientist of the Union of Concerned Scientist National Climate Education Program, told CNN that while global warming might not be causing hurricanes, it already is making them more intense.

"We would never point to a single weather event and blame global warming," she said. "While hurricanes have bedeviled the Gulf Coast region for years, global warming is making matters worse."

• global climate change is a fact
• human impact on climate change is arguable
• impact of climate change on hurricanes is arguable

Earlier tonight I saw a presentation on 4th generation computing by Jim Brazell. Jim mentioned how we're at a point of "renewing our contract" with machines, revising the line between machine-driven decisions and human decisions. Afterward Jen Hamre and I discussed our skepticism about computers making critical decisions; I've just seen that Jamais posted a thank-you to Stanislov Petrov, whose human override of a computer's erroneous suggestion that the U.S. had launched a missle attack on the then-Soviet Union saved the U.S. from nuclear annihilation.

Rumors of violence, including rape and murder, at the New Orleans Superdome were evidently without basis, more likely a manifestation of fear + imagination under intense pressure. nola.com reports on investigations that yielded only six bodies, four dead from natural causes, plus a suicide and an overdose.

That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

Google Video is interesting... I didn't find much compelling content via random search, but I could imagine using it at some point. Put television shows online for viewing on demand, for instance, and you get another instance of time shifting (similar to Tivo and others DVRs) which could mean a 'longer tail' for television programming that might otherwise fade away. I'm waiting for someone smart with a lot of server power to put the jillions of television programs from the "golden age" online, including shows that did well critically but died after half a season (there's a few of those I wouldn't mind checking out.)

My Worldchanging colleague Alan Atkisson's "Dreaming New Orleans" post inspired a piece in Business Week as " one of the most ambitious post-Katrina blueprints." He's posted a follow-up:

What is not yet clear is how to invest that money in such a way that the New New Orleans is indeed both wonderful and sustainable, in the eyes of the world, and in the eyes of its most loyal inhabitants.

The pressures to rebuild quickly are great, and quick decisions, especially about long-lived infrastructure, are often not the most strategic. What can one do to influence the process constructively, now, while the key decisions are still in the process of formation?

In April 2000, a data mining and analysis project within the Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) was shut down because it had "evolved into an abuse of Constitutional Rights." Recently Anthony Shaffer has said that the project, called Able Danger, uncovered data linking Mohamed Atta to Al Qaeda. William Arkin in the Washington Post suggests that the it's arguable whether Able Danger produced meaningful data (few who were involved share Shaffer's memory of data about Atta), but it's not arguable that the project, as William Dugan, Pentagon chief of intelligence oversight, said, "evolved, through mission creep, lack of clear rules, and the lack of meaningful oversight, into an abuse of … Constitutional rights…,"

Shaffer and others use words like "out-of-the-box" and "entrepreneurial" to describe the LIWA intelligence collection. The buzz words suggest, of course, that other intelligence efforts were in-the-box and boring, that only the LIWA and other compartmented workers were motivated and insightful enough to take chances, that if the lawyers and the bureaucrats and the Clintonistas and the other villains had just gotten out of the way, there would have been no 9/11. If only…

But in 2000, the problem was also a pretty simple one: An off-the-books intelligence effort once again abused the "force protection" justification to collect information on Americans. Military commanders, mindful of the law and regulations, shut down the operation.

The Arctic is melting, and it's melting fast. According to MSNBC, "scientists stopped short of directly blaming the melting trend on global warming but said they have few other explanations at this point." It's important to note here that scientists hypothesize rather than proclaim, which is why they "stop short." That doesn't mean that they don't think that the global climate is changing - it's obvious. Laymen will try to tie specific events to that change, but most scientists won't leap without more data, whatever they might suspect. (The Union of Concerned Scientists is a little more forthcoming: "Global warming is one of the most serious challenges facing us today. To protect the health and economic well-being of current and future generations, we must reduce our emissions of heat-trapping gases by using the technology, know-how, and practical solutions already at our disposal."

While we're here, I should mention the post at Realclimate yesterday on pseudo-scientist Michael Crichton's visit to the U.S. Senate, joining global warming skeptic Senator James Inhofe and hurricane forecaster William Gray in a parade of "half-truths and red herrings."

First, let's be clear where there is agreement. Climate science doesn't deal in certainties - it deals in probablities and the balance of evidence. We agree with Crichton's statement that 'Prediction is not fact'. That certainly doesn't mean, however, that projections of possible future climate changes are not meaningful or useful, as Crichton claims.

Crichton seemed to imply that "prediction" (such as that provided by weather or climate models) is useless in the decision making process. (As an aside, we wonder how Gray, who is largely known for prediction of hurricane behavior based on (statistical) modeling, felt about this?). We fundamentally disagree. All science is about observation, understanding and prediction. When those predictions work, you make new predictions. When they don't, you revisit the observations, attempt to improve your understanding of the underlying processes, and make a new prediction. And so on. In the case of climate models, this is complicated by the fact that the time scales involved need to be long enough to average out the short-term noise, i.e. the chaotic sequences of 'weather' events. Luckily, we have past climate changes to test the models against. Even more to the point, successful climate predictions have actually been made in past Senate hearings. The figure at the end of this comment by Jim Hansen demonstrates that projections of global mean climate presented in a 1988 senate hearing (17 years ago) have actually been right on the money ...

Via Polycot I'm all over Web 2.0 in a very practical sense but not doing the conference circuit or waxing theoretical about it, for the most part. Who has time for theory when you're chopping the wood and carrying the water (or Kool-Aid)? Anyhow Nancy White pointed to a swell mememap overview at blog.forret.com, seen larger here, by Peter Forret. "Get/Remix/Deliver"! This is a better version of Tim O'Reilly's attempt, which emerged from a FOO Camp brainstorm.

Short on time, so this is a quick one... but I just got these links to posts about a meeting of bloggers with mainstream media (via Jay Rosen). The links are to Jay's comments, David Weinberger's, Jeff Jarvis', and something from the Business Week blog. So this meeting was mainstream media talking to mainstream media people who've become bloggers, and it was all folks from the east coast. Looks like an interesting discussion, but I can't help but note the ivory tower aspect. I think MSM and, to some extent, east coast bloggers still believe, however subconsciously, that nothing's "real" unless it emerges from the first thirteen... This may well be where blogs make a difference, by bringing so many others into conversations that were traditionally restricted to the east coast or east and west coasts, and restricted to writers and pundits who could publish via mainstream media. (Note that I understand the objections to that term "mainstream media," but I don't know what to offer in its place.)

The briefest summary was Weinberger's:

The MSM were not univocal in their reaction to the Web and blogs. That's appropriate and it's progress. There are still some who think they "get" blogs because they're using blogs as stringers. But others are genuinely uncertain about the future of mainstream news, which is (imo) also appropriate. They're facing the possiblity of genuine discontinuity.

There's a lot of experimentation on all sides here. Appropriate.

No one knows what the business model(s) will be. Appropriate.

The bloggers didn't have to spend half the morning explaining that most bloggers aren't journalists, that bloggers are in conversation, etc. Progress.

There were still elements of hostility and misunderstanding, especially around the question of accuracy. But there is definitely progress...