You know the drill. The night before you shut down the computer everything is hunky dory, and the next morning you hit the on button and go sit down to read the paper and have a cup o’ Joe, only to come back a bit later to — the logo screen and the first line of the bios boot routine. Uh Oh! Let’s try that again . . . yipes, logo screen and freeze! Once again, this time to listen for any beeps for a clue as to what is not successfully passing the boot analysis. Nada on the beeps — just that confounded logo screen.

OK, crack the case. You see, this is a self-built system, so I don’t have the luxury of calling tech support and spending the better part of the day talking with someone from India or Indonesia and still not solving the problem. First, pull the video card and connect with the on-motherboard video outlet. Logo screen. Doah, Okie — you had a screen, so it wasn’t video related. Alright, pull the memory cards and re-seat. Logo screen. Try them in pairs for all possible combinations of the four — logo screen. Arrrrrrrgh! Wait a sec. The motherboard battery for the bios. Pull that, clean and replace. Logo screen. Shoot, why not go for a cheap diagnostic step — off to Radio Shack for a new one. Slap that sucker in and . . .

Logo screen!

You see, way before this I would have just gone online and looked around for answers to this problem, but that was problematic as the $#%&** wouldn’t boot. Wait a sec. The six & 1/2 year old tower that this puppy replaced has Kubuntu Linux on it. Linux is great on older hardware as it’s more efficient than Windows. If I could run my software on it, I would probably do so. Anyhow, boot up the old gal and fire up Fire Fox and sure enough, after a half-dozen forum reads a clue.

“Remove all USB connections.”

So, I dig up an old PS2 mouse and keyboard and pull the USB hub — I get past the logo screen and end up with some failure notices about corrupt bios calls. Reboot and go into the bios setup and save and then on to a clean boot. Now, it’s time to go out and do the week’s marketing. Arrrrgh! All I really want is to figure this out and see what’s not working. Guess that will be later.

Later, hook up the wireless mouse and keyboard — clean boot. Then the USB hub with no devices — clean boot. Then add the devices one by one until on the last one — logo screen. I moved it to a USB outlet on the front of the case and — clean boot with everything attached.

You see, I had worked myself up into a pretty wild state — Okie was cranky yesterday. For quite a while I thought that the motherboard had died, and that I’d either have to go out and get a new barebones chassis and rebuilt with what components I had or order another computer. It’s not like I don’t like new computers — they’re quite cool — but this isn’t the time for the expense and the 2-3 day loading of software is daunting on the spur of the moment. “Why me? Why Now? What have I done to deserve this?” Me thinks Okie was feeling a bit sorry for himself. Silly Okie.

It was Boxing Day. Worse things can happen — really worse, terrible things. Like on Dec. 26, 2004:

What is being reported as an 8.9 magnitude earthquake just off Sumatra, Indonesia spawned tidal waves that have killed over 10,000 and counting in Indonesia, India, Thailand, and as far west as Africa.

Vacationers snorkeling and just sunbathing on the beaches were swept out to sea, and their bodies brought back and thrown up on shore. The devastation is going to be enormous

The largest quake in 40 years, this is the 2nd over 8.0 quake in a week. It’s reported that the earth’s rotation has even been affected.

The toll of death and destruction reached proportions of magnitude nearly unimaginable. The coastal city of Banda Aceh was virtually scrubbed from the face of the Earth. Yesterday the survivors and families of the victims prayed and remembered.

Anytime that WE think that WE are in control — WE need to take a step back and consider the history of mankind, of our planet. Although we think, and feel, and love — we are as flecks of dust caught up in the maelstrom of events beyond our imaginings, let alone our own control.

However, all is not hopelessness. All is not insignificant. At least, not if you believe that we were created by a Creator for a purpose, that our insignificant, far-too-short lives have true meaning beyond our own wants, needs and desires.

Christmas day celebrated the beginnings of our pathway to achieving a state of grace. Best to keep that in mind, Okie — especially on Boxing Day.

Anothers’ thoughts on Christmas and the meaning/importance thereof: The Anchoress finds that the Christmas story is but the prologue to a larger narrative, one that may be meaningful even to non-believers in Christmas, Doubt and Downturns.

Problem: ASUS T3-M2NC51PV boot failure — Boots to logo screen only.

Solution: Remove all USB devices and hubs. Replace singly until problem device or configuration is found. Add self-powered USB hub to take power load off motherboard.

Hope that someone finds this info useful — not just the computer related stuff, either . . .

Technorati Tags: Banda Aceh, Boxing Day, ASUS T3-M2NC51PV, boot failure

[Update: I was under the impression that the Obama campaign had pulled the reprehensible ad that makes fun of John McCain not being able to use a computer or send email -- but NOPE! The ad is still up on the official Obama campaign website with the disclaimer, "I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message." Disgusting!]

Hurricane Ike has slammed into Texas, flooding Galveston Island and leaving most of Houston without power. Our prayers go out to those who, however foolishly, rode out the storm, and to those now out there trying to help put the Texas coast back together. Michelle Malkin has tons of links.

Out here in the West, we’ve had the biggest rail disaster in LA history, with the head-on collision of a Metrolink train and a freight train. The death toll is now at 18, with 135 seriously injured. From the picture you can see here, one would imagine those numbers to be much worse — the search for victims is ongoing. It’s hard to tell from that image, but the engine for the Metrolink train was driven backwards into the first passenger car, collapsing that one over half its length like so much tin foil. We will be praying for the victims and their families and will hope that our officials will quickly find out why these two trains were on the same track but going in different directions.

On to some campaign items. The Obama brain trusts came up with a great new ad yesterday, slamming John McCain for not using email — you know, trying to make it look like he’s computer illiterate and such. As one commenter I read somewhere put it, “Obama can email, but he can’t Google!” You see, the reason McCain doesn’t actively use the computer all the time is because he physically CAN’T because of his war injuries, inflicted on him by his captors in his Hanoi Hilton imprisonment. Michelle Malkin puts it this way:

What a week for the Gaffe Twins.

First, Joe Biden bone-headedly urges a disabled veteran in a wheelchair to “Stand up” during a campaign rally.

Next, Barack Obama mocks John McCain for not using a computer to send e-mail — despite mainstream media articles dating back to 2000 that report he can’t type because of the war injuries inflicted by his Vietnamese torturers.

Who will their next victims be?

Keep these bunglers away from Walter Reed.

No kidding! On top of that gaffe, Obama tried out a new stump speech idea, questioning the patriotism of John McCain. Gee, does the Obamessiah think that’s really such a good idea? I guess that desperate times calls for acts of desperation — poker just isn’t Barry’s game.

Looks like The Anchoress has been up all night with lots of tasty linkage on Palin/Gibson/Obama/McCain. (Thanks Elizabeth for the quote and great link yesterday!)

Last note for now. The new Watcher of Weasels posts a remembrance of former Watcher’s Council member Maj. Andrew Olmsted, who was killed in Iraq last January 2nd. The good Major gets the last word . . .

Technorati Tags: John McCain, Obama, Palin

. . . and does a right proud job of it, too!

Yet there is another way of looking at things; a way that says every problem has a root cause. By searching and examination, all may be known–in justice and morality, as well as in science, for there is no distance between the two. That is the vision of the secular world, and it is a profoundly hubristic one. We may discern every human fault, and prevent it. Such is the myth that inspires awful movements like the Eugenicists and their racist nightmare vision of breeding the evil out of the human race.

This is also the lie that motivates the totalitarian impulses behind Islamic fundamentalism–that by more complete control we may extirpate sin and heresy. There is no role for freedom in such a vision; what role does freedom play when all has been revealed? You may choose correctly, or you may choose evil, the mullahs surmise, so let us remove the choice altogether.

“We may discern every human fault, and prevent it.” SeeDubya understands that mankind will never prevent all human faults. Being human means being imperfect. It is our quest to strive to be like Christ, or to strive to be as a god, but madness waits for all who never understand that they aren’t gonna make it! (db)

To family, friends and community the unexpected death of a single individual is a tragedy — the unexpected death of ten, an unimaginable horror that cries out for justice, or maybe vengeance! At least this was the case yesterday in a Santa Monica courtroom where 89 year-old George Russell Weller was found guilty of 10 counts of felony vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence in the conclusion of his trial for the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market tragedy that happened on July 16, 2003. Weller’s car ran through the public-street market at high speeds, killing 10 and injuring 63. I stood on my balcony and watched about a dozen helicopters hover around and over the scene, and the ambulances drove past our block continuously for about an hour. It was indeed an horrific event — one that this community has decided must be paid for — evidently with an 89 year-old man’s liberty, meaning most likely with his life.

I say that because the prison sentence being thrown around in media reports is likely to be 18 years — which would make him 108 upon his release, if he had to, or was able to, serve the entire sentence. I actually don’t think that the judge will put him into the CA prison population, but out here, who knows?

At this point you might be asking, “Okie — you’re sounding apologetic for this mass-murderer — what’s up?” Well, I know that a jury has spoken, and I wasn’t in the court room to hear the testimony — but I do know a lot about automobiles, and I have read the articles covering the story, and I have seen the reports of the expert witnesses at the trial — and I am not one of these West-side LA Liberals that must affix blame to every action of life. Let’s go over a couple of these.

In the ’80s, a little German car company called Audi was nearly destroyed by a 60-Minutes expose that accused the company of selling cars that would accelerate uncontrollably, all on their own. Indeed, the anecdotal evidence shown on-air showcased previously terrified drivers relating their stories of frantically pushing on the brake, with their Audi 5000s continuing to accelerate — into walls, into garage doors, into other cars. 60-Minutes — yeah, that same ol’ reliable outfit that brought us the “fake-but-accurate” National Guard memos” about this time in 2004 — did follow-up stories on this Audi disaster, making the Audi execs out to be automotive anti-Christs. The piling on spilled over to Cadillac, among others, with their own “unintended acceleration” problems reported. As you might imagine, it was trial lawyer bonanza time! Wikipedia has this wrap-up:

Unintended acceleration

On November 23rd, 1986, 60 minutes aired a segment greenlit by Don Hewitt, concerning the Audi 5000 automobile, a popular German luxury car. The story concerned a number of incidents where the car purportedly accelerated without warning while parked, injuring or killing people. 60 Minutes was unable to duplicate this behavior, and so hired an outside consultant to modify the transmission to behave in this manner, and aired a story about it.

The incident devastated Audi sales in the United States, which did not reach the same level for another fifteen years. The initial incidents which prompted the report were found by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Transport Canada to have been attributable to operator error, where car owners had depressed the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. CBS issued a partial retraction, without acknowledging the test results of involved government agencies[4].

Regardless of the bleatings and caterwalling of the MSM at the time, not to mention the outright fabrications of incidents and evidence, the NHTS and TC performed their due diligence and found out the real problem — “operator error” — pressing on the gas pedal instead of the brake, all the while thinking that they were on the brake. Put yourself in that position and try to imagine what kind of panic you would be experiencing. The harder you would brake, the faster your car would go! Now, imagine your 86 year-old grandpa having this happen to him.

The LA Times writes that according to the expert witnesses at Weller’s trial, this accident was caused by pedal error.

Defense lawyers Overland and Mark Borenstein presented several expert witnesses, including former top California Highway Patrol officials and a UCLA professor, who asserted that Weller experienced the confusion of pedal error. State and federal investigators concluded the same.

So, even though “California Highway Patrol officials and a UCLA professor” testified under oath that George Weller mistakenly thought in his mind that he was trying to brake his car to a stop, a so-called jury-of-his-peers has convicted this old man of “intentional” vehicular manslaughter. An accident deemed intentional assault. How could this be? That, my dear readers, is the real point of this post. In today’s modern Liberal Progressive world, there are no accidents in life. There are no unintentional events, no actions without blame or recourse. You see, everyone and everything must be held accountable, not on a moral sense, but on a monetary sense. Torts rule over all in the Liberal mind. Hey, it’s how they get things done! But, I’m getting a bit off track. In this case, what to my mind was a most awful-tragic accident was not thought of that way by the prosecutor and the jury. They saw a crime.

But prosecutor Ann Ambrose, eight months pregnant with her second child, delivered a closing argument opposing the idea that 10 violent deaths could be a simple accident. She said she was satisfied with the verdict.

In a follow-up article examining the jurors in this trial, the Times covers this concept of our not being able to comprehend that accidents happen in life, that there must be blame addressed to all bad that happens to us.

Jurors weighing the fate of 89-year-old George Weller had a mountain of evidence to consider, but only one real question to answer: Was the deadly crash at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market three years ago an accident, or was it a crime?

They came down firmly on the side of it being a crime, finding Weller guilty of the most serious charges and rejecting defense evidence that Weller, an upstanding citizen whose lawyer said he has been destroyed by the accident, succumbed to “pedal error” — a driving mistake that happens when a person becomes disoriented and mistakes the gas pedal for the brake.

The jury was evidently having a lot of trouble deciding just how much negligence was involved and had to ask the trial judge for guidance.

UCLA law professor Peter Arenella said the jurors’ difficulties suggested that they simply could not accept that “human life can be lost in a tragic accident where no one is at fault.”

“The jury finds it hard to believe there might be a noncriminal explanation for this.”

Three things swayed this jury to convict an old man of homicide for committing the sin of confusing the gas pedal for the brake. It was testified that he made some damning statements just after the accident (think he might have been just a little bit upset and confused?), about how that the people should have gotten out of his way, and that no one saw any brake lights during the event (pedal error sure explains that!), and the jury was shown many graphic-bloody images taken of the victims at the scene.

Garvey, the Cornell law professor, said he was not surprised at the verdict but rather saw it “just as a matter of human psychology.”

“If something bad happens, there has to be somebody who is culpable for it,” he said. People can’t accept that “bad things happen. There has to be reasons for them.”

“People can’t accept that “bad things happen. There has to be reasons for them.”

Like I wrote at the beginning of this post, I wasn’t there in the courtroom. I didn’t see the graphic images, didn’t hear the testimony of the witnesses, didn’t sit in that jury room with 11 others debating the fate of a sick old man. But, I do know that sometimes “bad things happen”, and there is no one, or nothing criminally to blame. No one to sue, no one to send to prison. If I had been on that jury — the county of Los Angeles would be having to determine if they wanted to try George Weller again . . . (db)

Technorati Tags: George Weller, Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Tragedy

And you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.” — Matthew 24:6

Bird flu, tornadoes, Iraq War, gas chamber, severe weather, mad cow disease in Alabama, and did I mention Bird Flu? When I clicked on Drudge today, the above is the passage that came to mind. Many see hints of the Apocalypse in the events of our age, but I, the ever-depressed-yet-still-eternal-optimist take comfort in the part that says, “but the end is not yet”.

Still, a damn-frightening Drudge Report! (db)

Technorati Tags: Drudge Report, Matthew 24:6

Was President Bush warned about the possibility of the New Orlean’s levies being breached, or was he warned about something else, not nearly as disastrous? That’s the question now being asked and answered after the Lefties went wild over the edited version of a tape shown on ABC. Seems they left out the most important part, the actual wording of the warning that spoke of overrunning, not breaching — just a slightly different type of event — maybe a parish, or two, or five — give or take a thousand lives. Not to mention that the good Governor of Louisiana then gave our Pres the all-clear on the breaching thing the morning of the event. Gotta love here sense of timing — almost as good as NO Mayor Nagin’s ability to drive a bus!

So, in the face of all this, where does our local rag-of-record go to? Oh, maybe lies and deception, just for grins I’m sure. The Los Angeles Times once again takes a big swipe at George Bush, and once again gets caught in its overwhelming Leftist bias. Patterico has the breakdown — here’s a taste:

Far from showing us that Bush lied, today’s story tells us that L.A. Times editors and reporters are willing to lie to their readers.

Same song, second verse. Could get better — but, I(db)

Technorati Tags: Patterico, Los Angeles Times, Katrina, levy breach, levy overrun, Blanco, Nagin

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, having raised $400,000 for Hurricane Katrina victims, still hasn’t released any of the funds to the victims, all the while criticizing the Bush administration for its slow response to the disaster. An excerpt from Brit Hume’s reporting on this story:

[T]he CBC member Jesse Jackson, Jr., called the government’s lack of response, quote, “shockingly awful,” and Carolyn Kilpatrick said she was, quote, “ashamed of America.”

Say what?

Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles has the info.

The CBC — what a bunch of disingenuous, two-faces horses arses! (db)

I’ve gotta stop having those incendiary daydreams . . .

Last night while being driven to a Christmas party on the Palos Verdes peninsula, as we drove past one of the big refineries in the Carson area, and while looking at the vista of humongous tanks just off the freeway, I had a most terrible vision — that of terrorists driving past this beast and firing rpg’s or stinger missiles into the refinery from the open door of a commercial van. Needless to say, if we were witnessing that kind of attack, we wouldn’t be getting out of there in one piece. It was a harrowing fantasy without the inherent feelings of dread associated with prescience.

No one so far is saying that this enormous explosion near London is anything but an accident, but it does make you consider the terrible.

A series of large explosions at a fuel depot which injured 43 people has been described as the “largest incident of its kind in peacetime Europe”.

The blasts near Hemel Hempstead were so powerful it rocked houses up to 40 miles away and was heard in Holland.

More than 60 billion gallons of fuel erupted in a ball of flames hundreds of feet in the sky, creating an acrid cloud of smoke which is stretching for miles and moving south-eastwards.

Thank God that no one has been reported killed, but there are injured, some seriously. Not too hard to image that one — with “60 billion gallons of fuel” involved! Will have to keep tuned to see what develops and is given as a cause.

Fuel is an absolute necessity for modern existence. All the nutters and NIMBY activists that have successfully stopped any new refineries being built in the U.S. for over 30 years are probably ecstatic this AM, and just can’t wait to use images from this blast to further their cause. All this really shows us is that we live in a world of risk. Always have! Always will.

The first conscious thought that I had on awakening this morning was of different ways to die. We have close family members nearing the end of their days, and friends with illnesses that have no positive prognosis, so they were on my mind. The way the thoughts floated through was like this — Back in the day, for most of humanity death came suddenly, violently, without overly-long-extended debilitation and suffering. Modern civilization and advanced medicine has changed that.

We trade some discomfort and diminished capacities for time — sometimes a lot more time. Sounds like a deal to me.

The Islamofascists terrorists want to take us back to harsh lives, with deaths strictly on their terms. Sounds like something definitely worth fighting back against!

Now in that vein, I sure hope that we are protecting our refineries. Never liked driving by one of those things before, really don’t now . . . (db)

Greta Perry, the Hooah Wife, gets a first hand interview from her hubby, LTC Perry, who is stationed in Lake Charles, Louisiana and working the Hurricane Katrina cleanup. She called for questions from her readers to go along with a couple of her own.

If you want to get some straight poop on what is going on back there, be sure and check out her post. (db)

Captain Ed focuses on the reality of Katrina’s devastation across income lines, and what seems to be the complete failure of mass media to have gotten anything right!

Without a doubt, the Ninth Ward got hit hard by the levee break, but from the previous media coverage, Americans had the impression that the poor of New Orleans comprised the only demographic of the dead. We heard nothing but how the hurricane had pulled back the sheet on the deep secret of American poverty and how the government doesn’t care about its poor citizenry. Now what are we to believe — that they don’t care about the rich either? Will Shep Smith cry in the Louisiana rain about the unfairness of the high death rate among the wealthy of Lakeview, too? [emph mine]

I, like many bloggers, bought into the madness during the height of Katrina coverage, and passed along too much of the now-found-to-be-bogus information. Thanks Capt. for continuing to bring to our attention what the MSM doesn’t feel deserves to be known. (db)

In his post on reasons for such a high death-toll in the 7.6 Pakistan earthquake of yesterday, fellow SCBA blogger Laer Pierce at Cheat Seeking Missiles makes the following observations:

You can be poor and happy, but not if you’re a nation. High standards of construction — not to mention education or medicine — require money.
(…)
Politics has consequences, sometimes life and death consequences. Hard environmentalists and anti-globalists want people in poor countries to stay poor, just like they want people in rich countries to become poorer. But they hatch these schemes in their well-engineered, reinforced, heated and cooled homes.

Let them try to stick to their beliefs in the village of Garhi Habibullah, where 300 bodies have been recovered from the ruins of a girls school.

Laer has a good bit of wisdom in the the rest of his post, and I highly recommend that you go there and check it out. The death toll was being estimated at over 30,000 this AM on FoxNews, which seems like a staggering amount for a 7.6 magnitude quake. Laer explains a lot of the reason for this, and perhaps, assigns some blame.

And truth be told — I, just like Laer, continue to procrastinate in being prepared for LA’s inevitable Big One! (db)

In light of hurricanes Katrina & Rita, Miami preacher and radio talk show host Doug Giles has a few words for surviving disasters great and small:

No where in the scripture has God ever assured anyone, baptized or not, of a carefree, no conflict existence. Televangelists might have sold that sack of crack to preening narcissistic apostates, but Christ never marketed that kind of deceptive dope. Ever since Adam and Eve derailed in the garden we have had to pay retail to live on this planet, and we will continue to do so until the credits run on this fallen-earth flick.

Whoa! Never one to back away from tellin’ it like it is, Doug continues with three bullet points for successful survival techniques:

1. Don’t curse God when things go south. (…)
2. Realize how short and fragile life really is. (…)
3. Bank treasure in heaven. (…)

I’m gonna let you go over to Doug’s place and read the fullness of each point, and they are required reading, gonna be a test later . . . for each of us! But I will let Doug’s closing words be the last here:

Regardless of how disheartening the difficulties can be, they should not send us into a tailspin. Rather, they should bring out the best in the believer. They can, if played correctly, bring us back to the biblical basics of faith, hope and love. If engaged properly they can serve us by shaking us down, shaping us up, softening our hearts and steeling our will in a right direction. And that’s exactly what I am praying for during this historical moment.

(db)

Much has been made in many news reports of the disproportionate ratio of blacks to the rest of the Victims of Hurricane Katrina. The MSM has ballyhooed this fact in its relentless castigation of President Bush over the initial rescue and supply efforts for New Orleans. There does seem to be some other explanations for why so many poor black folks found themselves in such dire straights, and one interesting observation that has not been widely discussed in the press is that most of them were women and children. Wonder why? So did John Leo, who answers this question in his Townhall.com column.

It took the media a while to acknowledge that most of Katrina’s victims were black. Apparently, it will take longer to mention that most of the victims were women and children. I noticed three commentators who brought up the delicate subject of the mostly missing males–George Will, Gary Bauer, and Thomas Bray, a columnist for the Detroit News. Will noted that 76 percent of births to Louisiana’s African-Americans are to unmarried women, and probably more than 80 percent in New Orleans, since that is the usual estimate in other inner cities. Will wrote: “That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males, and that translates into chaos, in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine.” [emph mine]

Also seems to explain the horrendous crime problem that NOLA had before the storm, and the looting and sniping afterwards. Hope the powers that be take this into consideration as they start to rebuild and repopulate the place! (db)

Those poor folks that rode out hurricane Katrina in the hell that was the Superdome, and made it to Houston and are staying in the Astrodome must feel like they’re cursed! Hurricane Rita seems to be coming straight at Houston, and the Texas officials are already doing the advance work.

Some Katrina refugees in Houston-area shelters will be flown on commercial airliners to Arkansas.

The first busloads transporting Katrina evacuees arrived this afternoon at Houston’s Ellington Field.

They were being processed in the same hangar that NASA uses to welcome home astronauts following shuttle missions.

Officials have said Arkansas is preparing to accept as many as four-thousand Katrina refugees.

Texas Governor Rick Perry is asking visitors and residents in Rita’s path to make plans to evacuate to safer areas and Galvaston county has already been ordered to evacuate.

In Galveston, officials ordered a mandatory evacuation of Galveston County as Hurricane Rita threatens the coast.

That evacuation order takes effect Wednesday. Gov. Rick Perry asked President Bush to approve a disaster declaration for Texas in anticipation of Rita. Bush has taken it under advisement.

Mandatory evacuation of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in Galveston County, where Rita could hit, begins Wednesday morning.

The evacuation of the general population begins 12 hours later at 6 p.m.

Here we go again! Let’s hope we all learned something since the end of August . . . (db)

Mark Steyn posits that the political fallout of the Hurricane Katrina disaster will not hurt Bush much.

I’ll leave it to future generations of historians to settle the precise moment at which Hurricane Katrina finally completed its transformation into a Kansas-type twister, and swept up the massed ranks of the world’s press to deposit them on the wilder shores of the Land of Oz. But for a couple of weeks now they’ve been there frolicking and gambolling as happy Media Munchkins, singing and dancing “Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead”.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the storm is exhausted, meteorologically and politically. Power has been restored to the whole of Mississippi (much quicker than in Euro-style big-government Quebec during the 1998 ice storm, incidentally), the Big Easy is being pumped free of water far ahead of anybody’s expectations, and, as the New York Times put it: “Death Toll In New Orleans May Be Lower Than First Feared”.
(…)
. . . But that wasn’t good enough, and the more they tossed in to damage Bush, the more they drowned any real controversy in the usual dreary pseudo-controversy. After watching Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu threatening to punch out the President, a reader e-mailed me Kipling: “If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”

That’s all Bush had to do. The storm has passed.

Steyn is great! You owe it to yourself to go and read the rest.

In his speech to the U.N. this week, President Bush discussed the potential of a world-wide pandemic that could be caused by the H5N1 virus, known as the Avian Flu. In a news article today, Avian Flu: Is the Government Ready for an Epidemic? ABC News presents a most frightening scenario, in fact it is reminiscent of the Stephen King novel, The Stand.

It could kill a billion people worldwide, make ghost towns out of parts of major cities, and there is not enough medicine to fight it. It is called the avian flu.

This week, the U.S. government agreed to stockpile $100 million worth of a still-experimental vaccine, while at the United Nations Summit in New York, both the head of the U.N. World Health Organization and President Bush warned of the virus’ deadly potential.

“We must also remain on the offensive against new threats to public health, such as the Avian influenza,” Bush said in his speech to world leaders. “If left unchallenged, the virus could become the first pandemic of the 21st century.”

According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Bush’s call to remain on the offensive has come too late.

“If we had a significant worldwide epidemic of this particular avian flu, the H5N1 virus, and it hit the United States and the world, because it would be everywhere at once, I think we would see outcomes that would be virtually impossible to imagine,” he warns.

Already, officials in London are quietly looking for extra morgue space to house the victims of the H5N1 virus, a never-before-seen strain of flu. Scientists say this virus could pose a far greater threat than smallpox, AIDS or anthrax.

“Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects,” says Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow on global health policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That makes it the most lethal flu we know of that has ever been on planet Earth affecting human beings.”

Think about that last ‘graph and consider this. Look at your husband or wife — if you both get sick with Avian Flu, statistically, only one of you is going to survive. Look at your kids — if all of them get sick, you’ll be burying half of them. Look at your office — 1 out of 2 of each person that you see, would be gone — dead — in just a few short weeks, or maybe even in as little time as a couple of days.

The draft report of the federal government’s emergency plan, obtained and examined by ABC News’ “Primetime,” predicts as many as 200,000 Americans will die within a few months. This is considered a conservative estimate.

“The first thing is everybody in America’s going to say, ‘Where’s the vaccine?’ And they’re going to find out that it’s really darned hard to make a vaccine. It takes a really long time,” said Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In fact, the draft report says it will not be until six months after the first outbreak that any vaccine will be available, and then only in a limited supply.

“I imagine that not a lot of poor people will get vaccinated,” Garrett says. “If you think about New Orleans, this is a similar situation.”

Hugh Hewitt is talking about this on his show today, and wrote about it on his blog this AM. He writes:

. . . Given that everyone who follows the subject sees the threat of an epidemic as a real possibility, the Administration simply has to have a plan and it has to work.

Well, if the ABC News story is correct, they don’t, and it won’t. There simply won’t be enough time to concoct a viable vaccine, especially if the virus mutates to a point of making the earliest ones ineffective. The only real way to fight back is Tamiflu, made by Roche pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, which has been on the market for several years. There’s just one problem:

Only recently, however, did scientists learn of its potential to work against the killer flu, H5N1. That has since created a huge demand and a critical shortage.

“All of the wealthiest countries in the world are trying to purchase stockpiles of Tamiflu,” says Garrett. “Our current stockpile is around 2.5 million courses of treatment.”

Uh oh! Catch that number? There’s over 300 million of us in the U.S., and they have only stockpiled enough Tamiflu to treat 2.5 million. How to decide who to treat? This is sci-fi almost come to life.

Faced with worldwide demand, the Roche company, which produces Tamiflu, has organized a first-come, first-served waiting list. The United States is nowhere near the top.

Seems like it would be an excellent time for Roche to license the production of Tamiflu by all the major drug and generic drug companies, so that many hundreds of millions of courses can be made post haste. Figure out the numbers so that all can make money, and get it done. Or, if they won’t do it, then steal or reverse engineer the formula and get it done that way. One half of the world’s population is not worth a single company’s healthy balance sheet. If the pandemic happens and there’s not enough Tamiflu, no one will care about the torts issue anyway, those that live will all be too busy trying to survive in a hostile, barbaric world.

We’ve just been bombarded with the horrible scenes of disaster courtesy of Hurricane Katrina and the lack of efficient disaster plan implementation by NOLA, the state of Louisiana and the feds. If the death toll is in the tens or hundred of thousands, instead of 700, I can’t begin to imagine the horror — yes, I can. Talk about a Biblical scale event. Not since Noah and the flood will there have been such a great percentage of the human population decimated in one short time frame.

Rick at Stones Cry Out also shares my concerns:

Politics aside – the President must make this the nation’s top priority. When the ABF mutates to allow human-to-human transmission, it will bring a ~50% mortality rate. The potential threat to this country is far far greater than any act of terrorism I can imagine.

I certainly hope that this is all super hype and malarkey. But — it sure seems like the time for earnest prayer . . . (db)

This is encouraging, no?

However, Nagin was emphatic state and federal officials would not railroad through city reconstruction until it had passed city muster.

“I don’t want anybody outside of New Orleans planning nothing as it relates to how we’re going to rebuild this city without us signing off on it,” Nagin said.

Hell no! New Orleans is bankrupt, out of cash since sometime last week, its population is scattered to the four winds, tourists all gone, no sales tax revenue being generated at all.

Hey, at least the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport is open again, barely.

But, back to Mayor Nagin. Just what does it take to pass city muster? If you look back at the history of NOLA and of Louisiana itself, it don’t take much, that’s for sure. So, the Federal Gov’ment better keep a sharp eye out on its collective wallet, and We the People of the United States had better institute some goads and enforce some guidelines on how all that reconstruction money is gonna be spent! Reconstruction, is that a loaded term, or what!

When you consider trying to help all the displaced Gulf Coast refugees, (yeah, I used that nasty word!), especially the poor and destitute from NOLA, you realize that many will never go back, and some will never be able to go back due to decisions that need to be made in regards to what areas can be repopulated and those that shouldn’t. The LA Times ran a story this AM which told that Much Wider Damage to Levees Is Disclosed.

Miles of levees that protected the eastern flank of the region, which borders Lake Borgne, washed away in the storm surge from Katrina, which swept inland and caused deep flooding in St. Bernard Parish and the 9th Ward of New Orleans.

Army officials disclosed the destruction of the city’s eastern levee system in a detailed helicopter tour of the region Monday. Unlike some of the levees in New Orleans that continuously hold water back from areas below sea level, these levees exist mainly to repel storm surges.

The loss of the levees has left portions of New Orleans with little or no protection midway through the hurricane season, senior Army officials said. And rebuilding the levees will be a massive undertaking that could take years, meaning the city could be vulnerable for a long time.

No matter how much pressure is put on the local officials to reopen the whole community, anyone with a brain can see that these areas should not be rebuilt until those systems of levees are completely reconstructed, if they should be rebuilt at all. After all, the entire city’s levee system is only designed to withstand a category-3 level storm — this cat-4 Katrina left NOLA in ruins — one can only imagine what a direct hit from a cat-5 would do. Kinda like what a magnitude 8+ will do when the San Andreas snaps directly under San Francisco, only a whole lot wetter!

Then there is the racial/poverty aspect of the whole disaster. There are multitudes of reasons for the 100,000 + poor folk that found themselves trapped inside the city when the storm hit, and after as the city flooded, a lot of those reasons center on poverty. A debate of why those living in poverty in NOLA were doing so is another debate, but this wiping clean of the slate in an entire U.S. city certainly gives us an opportunity to try some things. The New York Times quotes Condoleezza Rice as she discussed this very topic yesterday. Here are some excerpts:

“When it’s rebuilt, it should be rebuilt in a different way than it was at the time that this happened,” Ms. Rice said in an interview at The New York Times, adding that “maybe now on the heels of New Orleans” there could be an effort to “deal with the problem of persistent poverty.”
(…)
“Yes, we have a problem when race and poverty come together. We really do. It’s a vestige of our history. It’s a vestige of the Old South in this case. But don’t misread that there has been no progress on issues of race in America.”
(…)
“I find it very strange to think that people would think that the president of the United States would sit deciding who ought to be helped on the basis of color, most especially this president,” she said. “What evidence is there that this is the case? Why would you say such a thing?”

They say such things because of the anti-Bush bias of the MSM, and because they are all et up with the condition that she discusses next when she brings up this very important point, one that President Bush made in his 2000 campaign.

Ms. Rice said she was first impressed by Mr. Bush in the 1990′s, not because of any foreign policy issues, but because he spoke of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and the phrase meant something to her. She recalled being told by a high school teacher “that maybe I was junior college material” and added:

“I know about the soft bigotry of low expectations. And it’s not in this president. It is, however, deeply ingrained in our system, and we’re going to have to do something about it.” [Emph. mine]

It most certainly is deeply ingrained in modern Liberalism, or as they like to be called today, Progressives. It’s a good thing when the oppressed stand up and cry out “We’re not going to take it anymore!”, and then do something about it. It’s also most helpful if we actually help them, instead of keeping them indebted to a systematic way of thinking, just to garner votes for the Dems. Condi — you go girl — keep telling it straight! (db)

[h/t The Anchoress]

In his column The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed, Jack Kelly, national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio gives us some much needed perspective on the constant MSM criticism of our federal government’s hurricane relief efforts.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

“The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”
(…)
I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:

“We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on ‘Star Trek’ in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.” (…) [Emph. mine]

Ain’t that the truth! (db)

In Where To Point The Fingers, Washington Post Op-ed columnist Charles Krauthammer has the following to say about all the anti-Bush finger-pointing rhetoric going on regarding the Katrina disaster:

The three current favorites [of human sin and perfidy] are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.

This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I’ll give it a paragraph. There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period. The problem with the evacuation of New Orleans is not that National Guardsmen in Iraq could not get to New Orleans but that National Guardsmen in Louisiana did not get to New Orleans. As for the Bush tax cuts, administration budget requests for New Orleans flood control during the five Bush years exceed those of the five preceding Clinton years. The notion that the allegedly missing revenue would have been spent wisely by Congress, targeted precisely to the levees of New Orleans, and that the reconstruction would have been completed in time, is a threefold fallacy. The argument ends when you realize that, as The Post noted, “the levees that failed were already completed projects.”

He then gives a 6-part list of who was/is still responsible for augmenting, aiding and abetting the suffering. Might be a good idea to read it all . . . (db)

All of us who live through times of major events remember where we were upon first learning of them. I was sitting in a sixth grade classroom in Collinsville, OK when the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was announced and sat with friends in a newlyweds’ spartan apartment to watch the resignation of Richard Nixon. Four years ago today, 9-11-2001, I awoke early as usual, fired up the workstation in my office, checked email, then opened my browser to its setup page at myway.com, which contains sections of news headlines.

The words “World Trade Center Bombed!” screamed out at me, with a shot of Tower One with a black hole in its side, smoke billowing out. I was able to just get the TV turned on in the living room literally a minute or two before Tower Two was hit, and saw what is shown at right happen live. Stunned — shocked – those words don’t seem strong enough to describe my reaction to what I was seeing. It was now apparent that the first tower was not the victim of a bomb, but of a coordinated attack of some kind using commercial aircraft. Although hundreds of people had just perished, no one at that moment had any understanding of the totality of the disaster yet to come. Emergency personnel were rushing to lower Manhattan to help evacuate the buildings while we watched those trapped on the upper floors jump to their deaths rather than be consumed by the flames.

Then we learned that a third plane had just hit the Pentagon in D.C. — “Oh – My – God!” I thought to myself, “It’s a doomsday scenario right out of one of my beloved novels.” It was only a matter of time before something like this, or worse, happened to us. I had already experienced it many times, via the world of techno-military fiction from the likes of Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, Patrick Robinson and Stephen Coonts. But this was actually happening, and in my mind, was far from being over. I went to wake up the wife.

“Baby, you need to get up. Something horrible has happened in New York and in Washington, something terrible but historic, and you need to come and see this now. No one’s going to go to work today anywhere, so you might as well plan to close your office.”

So she did, and we, like Americans all over the country, sat before our sets and watched this huge cataclysmic drama play out. Tower Two collapsed, the magnitude of the event minimized by the small screen of TV, looking like a Hollywood special effect. With no reference of scale, you could forgive yourself the fantasy of hoping that many survivors would be found in the rubble. Days later, when you saw alternate views of ground zero, you realized how foolish those hopes were. Then, the report of hijacked Flight 93 going down in Pennsylvania after a group of brave passengers rushed the cockpit, willing to die in order to prevent that plane from hitting the terrorists’ intended target, our nation’s Capitol building. And then again, when we thought that we could take no more, the tower hit first, Tower One, began to crumple, and proceeded to collapse, joining its sister tower in a smoldering pile of death and destruction.

That morning I predicted at least a dozen attacks, with strikes on the west coast and in the Midwest. I usually am not glad to be mistaken, but I thank God that I was that day. Much later we learned that it was supposed to be an International day of misery, courtesy of the Islamofascists terrorists intent to down planes in London and Australia, but that didn’t happen either — thank God again.

What we did learn on 9/11, about our government and ourselves was dear to the hearts of most Americans. We saw the first responders risk, and many lost all, to save their fellow men and women. We saw the brave sacrifice of those on Flight 93, to save the lives that had been targeted for certain death. We witnessed 24-hour rescue, then recovery efforts until ground zero in NY and the Pentagon were cleared. We saw our newly elected President Bush seem to finally find himself and discover the mission that would drive the rest of his presidency. We saw for a too-brief time, our country pull together — rich and poor, right and left — much as our parents and grandparents, the greatest generation, did during WWII. We spoke to the world with one voice, and demanded that our message be heard!

You who have attacked us on this terrible day, have attacked ALL of us, and as Americans we will hunt you down without remorse, and eliminate you from the face of the Earth!

And that’s the way it went that day, 4 years ago. The day that everything changed. (db)