Escape Routes

I just read an excellent series of posts by Doc Russia.

He was in a situation that involved leaving Houston and setting out for Dallas. Usually not a challenging trip--but when everyone in town is running away from Hurricane Rita, it is a different story.

The four-part series was written up in stages after Doc arrived at his destination.

The series improves as it goes on--parts III and IV contain a lot of observation and analysis about taking part in an emergency evacuation. Some of the knowledge from Doc's life as a Marine grunt is also shared along the way. His frustration, successes, failures, and innovation on-the-spot make for interesting reading. It is also informative.

Congrats to Doc Russia for leaving the city of Houston safely. Here's hoping that when he returns, there aren't any more troubles waiting for him.

Surprise

A surprising essay, found where I usually find acerbic humor and sarcastic wit about life Down Under.

At Silent Running, an essay titled Confidence.

The thesis is simple: civilization exists because people are confident about the future.

The exposition is done quite well, and the attendant thoughts are illuminating.

That other terrorist group

I recently ran across a good post at Dafydd ab Hugh's blog.

The post is about the claims of disarmament by the Irish Republican Army. Of course, the trouble is, which Irish Republican Army?

Apparently, once upon a time, the IRA was actually an army.

At one point, during the days of the Irish Revolution (from 1916 to 1921), the Irish Republican Army was more or less an actual army; an army of insurgency, of course, but insurgency in its proper meaning: a native uprising against an oppressive government, in this case the occupation government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The war -- fought against the backdrop of World War I and the collapse of the British Empire -- led to the founding of the Irish Republic.

After the Revolution ended, the IRA dissolved. According to Wikipedia, A faction in favor of the treaty that ended the war formed into the Irish Defense Forces. A faction against the treaty formed into a different IRA. This group stayed coherent for 40-odd years, but eventually ran into trouble.

The current multiple terrorist organizations that confusingly use the name Irish Republican Army are the remnants of the split in the Irish nationalists from 1969 through 1998. The nationalist movement became Socialist in politics (possibly reacting to student leftist movements in the United States) under the leadership of Cathal Goulding. The IRA then split into two warring pieces: the Official IRA, which was the Marxist branch led by Goulding, and the Provisional IRA, also called "Provos" or "Provies," the hard-core warriors.

Dafydd claims that the Official IRA has disappeared as a terrorist group, but that the Provos took the center ring. However, it seems that no peace agreement has been universally accepted by the Provos.

The Provos themselves split in 1986, when the more-radical Continuity IRA peeled off; and again in 1998, following the Good Friday Agreement with the UK, when the likewise radical Real IRA (which opposed the cease fire) declared itself.

Considering that most of these groups still hold the others to be traitors to the Irish Cause, I doubt that they are all disarming together.

But who is disarming?

(And why don't any news reports contain even a mention of this 3-way split? If the groups, their names, and their leaders are well-known to Wikipedia authors, can't the press at least ask who has been involved?)

Media inaccuracy, anyone?

This story reminds me of the policemen who shot a man in the British subway system this summer.

You see, right after the event occurred, lots of people are quoted as saying that they had seen or heard a good deal of incriminating evidence. Only to have the official police records (or videotapes) contradict those claims weeks later.

This isn't one of those cases of newspeople using faked footage, as has happened at least once in Israel. But it is a case of newspeople repeating hearsay as sourced allegation. Or amplifying hearsay and rumor into actual events.

I'm not surprised when the local gossip-mill does this. I don't think I should really be surprised when an organization that lives and dies for instant reports and TV ratings does this.

But why do we pretend that these new organizations are trustworthy or accurate? And why don't they have the courage to put this corrected (and encouraging) news in the public eye the same way that they put the original rumors in the public eye?

Big Lizard in the Blogosphere

There's a new blog in town (and the blogroll).

Dafydd ab Hugh, a fellow student of mathematics, a sci-fi author, and long-time guest blogger for Captain Ed and Patterico's Pontifications, has finally created a blog of his own.

I was somewhat surprised when I first saw his name on Cap'n Ed's blog. It made me remember a time a decade ago when I plowed through a series of novels based on Star Trek. Some of them were mediocre, some were strange, some were poorly-written, some were well-written. The name Dafydd ab Hugh stuck out both because of its strangeness, and the quality of his story-telling. His stories were at once unpredictable and exciting, the kind of stories that satisfied me with their inventiveness, character exposition, and clever use of events.

When I read his blog-posts, I was pleasantly surprised at his combination of clear thoughts, careful use of logic, and panache of writing style.

I'm happy to see that he has a (virtual) home of his own now. I'll probably be visiting it regularly.

Breaking News (updated)

As an update about New Orleans and gun confiscation:

(Fairfax, VA) -- The United States District Court for the Eastern District in Louisiana today sided with the National Rifle Association (NRA) and issued a restraining order to bar further gun confiscations from peaceable and law-abiding victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Spotted by the Geek and Say Uncle.

In recapping my earlier thoughts about this issue, I realize that the evidence that confiscation had actually been occurring on any large scale was remarkably thin.

Well, thin except for the Police Comissioner making an announcement on the news that his men would be disarming citizens, up to and including confiscating legally-owned guns.

And a news video of an elderly woman tackled by a pair of policemen before they summarily removed a revolver from her house. (This is the only one that I've seen referenced specifically. I can be generous and say that for every videotaped, newsworthy scene of a gun confiscation, there were five to twenty more...but that's a wild guess. Still, it gives me a ballpark to work in for actual confiscations that occurred.)

(UPDATE: The NRA claims about 40 cases occurred. It also claims that about 100 guns were taken. )

The Geek put up a very good timeline of events up a couple of weeks ago, with lots of good data and a few conjectures.

(UPDATE: A good collection of links is available at the Gun Owners of America site.)

Whatever the number of confiscations, the fact that a Police Comissioner would go on the record supporting such a thing angered many people. The NRA stepped up to the job of challenging the acts of confiscation in a court of law, and apparently have won handily.

Will this important re-affirmation of the Constitutional Rights of US citizens show up on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow? Or will they have other news, more fit to print, in that position?

Double Whammy

As possibly the last blogger in the nation to mention this, there is a second hurricane headed for the American coast in the Gulf of Mexico.

This time around it's hitting Texas, and it's called Hurricane Rita.

This isn't the first year that something like this has happened. For example, 1926 was an exceptionally bad year for hurricanes and tropical storms in the Gulf. From my skimming of this database, last time we had two Cat-4 hurricanes on the Gulf was 1915. That pair also divvied up Texas and Louisiana between them.

Every so often, it seems, we get a reminder that no matter how impressive a city or a nation is, it cannot be protected from a natural cataclysm. This year, Katrina and Rita singing a duet about that.

Small pieces of news on Worldwide Terrorism

I am still not quite clear whether what I posted about yesterday--an apparent string of attacks against British targets--is an actual trend, or just something that appears to be a trend.

However, I am seeing news around the blogosphere about changing tactics in the Iraq theater of the Global War on Terror.

First off, the British soldiers in Iraq are definitely doing things differently than the American soldiers. Some questions have been posted by Grim and by one of his associates at Grim's Hall about recent events in Basra.

I don't know if Grim is right or wrong. My gut feeling is that the Brits may be treating this situation like another version of Northern Ireland, while the American military is treating it like a learning experience in nation-building.

The British in Northern Ireland seemed more interested in exerting force than in making friends. This story about special agents, spats with local police, and freeing special agents from prison through military action seems to fit the same mold.

On the other hand, the American military hasn't done much of what they're now doing in Iraq elsewhere. (Unless you count Afghanistan.) So they're playing by ear, and working hard to gain the trust of locals while carefully but thoroughly destroying terrorist cells. Many stories about the this policy and its results can be found at Michael Yon's blog. The effects of American policies on terrorist recruitment and tactics is summarized here by Donald Sensing.

I do note that we've had several instances this year of Iraqi forces supporting American forces in the field, and at least one of American forces supporting Iraqi forces. I can't recall reading about many elements of cooperation between British forces and Iraqi forces or Iraqi regional police.

Perhaps that's because I don't pay as much attention to news about British operations in Iraq, also.

Breaking News

Looks like someone doesn't like the British Embassy in Croatia...

A small explosion with minimal injuries, if Sky News and Scotsman are accurate.

Hat tip: MyPetJawa and Conservative Thinking.

Is it just me, or are the Brits getting more heat from international terrorism than the Americans?

The biggest attacks in Iraq in the past month have been on Iraqis. Despite staging several operations with many terrorists killed/captured in Iraq in the past month, American casualty rates per month are lower than they were a year ago.

On the other hands, the new Iraq is the most-well-known target of terrorism in the world today. Perhaps its because we don't hear a lot about things like bombings against British Embassies. This is apparently not the only attack on embassies or consulates of the British government in the past year, although no deaths have occurred in the recent attacks.

That other thing about New Orleans

I am still partly in the dark on this subject, which leads me to be hesitant.

But I have known for some time that certain visiting police officers in New Orleans went out of their way to confiscate legally-owned handguns. (Excellent article on Reason.com here, handy timeline provided by the Geek with a .45 here.)

The news is surprising.

First, let me mention that almost every civic official in the United States--from elections inspectors to the President of the United States--swears an oath to support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. At least, it's in the President's oath, most governor's oaths I've seen, and I had to swear to it when I became in election inspector. (For the uninitiated, the election inspector works at the polls during an election. He or she signs you in, checks your name against the voter registration list, instructs you how to use the voting machinery, and confirms that the voting results are accurate.)

I have little doubt that the oath of office for the New Orleans Police Comissioner included a statement about the U.S. Constitution. If not, he or she is still bound by the Federal Constitution and the Louisiana State Constitution, and Laws of the State of Louisiana. (Said laws and constutions are studied in depth by a team of lawyers here.)

All of the constitutions and laws I mention forbid the action which the Police Comissioner tried to do--confiscate legally-owned firearms from law-abiding citizens of New Orleans.

The fact that city of New Orleans is in a state of emergency (not martial law), and that the governor, mayor, and police comissioner are experiencing tremendous difficulty communicating clearly to their constituents does not let them off the hook.

The fact that they may have been removing the last line of defense from citizens under threat of their lives makes it even more despicable.

I could rail on at length about this, but the facts are very simple: these men tried to disarm otherwise-helpless citizens.

They must be confronted with their deeds in a court of law.

It would also be nice if they were hounded with half the intensity that the Main-Stream Media gives to President Bush and his deeds. But the court of law is a must.

Hurricane relief effort: support stage 2

After a week of work by about a dozen volunteers, local efforts to collect canned food for victims of Huricane Katrina ended today.

I ended up involved in the "Box up and stack on the pallets" phase of the operation yesterday and today. Our local contact is taking a semi-trailer carrying many pallets of canned food and other necessary goods. Tarps for roofs, insect repellent, diapers, toiletries, a handful of can openers from a camping-supply store--all of these things ended up in boxes. The boxes ended up stacked on pallets in a shipping area of a local business.

I was surprised at the way that the local communty rallied to donate money and time to support the team of men who are going. Before the end of the operation today, I became aware of three local efforts to collect funds on behalf of those who suffered from the hurricane.

The group that I helped has been working in partnership with a church in Jackson, MS. That particular church has adopted several smaller communities in the hurricane-affected region of southern Mississippi, as well as giving material and financial assistance to several shelters that are not receiving support from a larger organiztion (i.e. Red Cross). Our contact on-the-scene in the damaged area says that he is surprised at the large number of workers that have poured into the area. I was unable to glean how many are local to their city, local to the state, or from out-of-state.

At any rate, there is apparently a large influx of volunteers and charitable donations to that area of the United States. I am very happy to do my small part helping with the grunt-work and logistics on this end of things.

As a humorous side-note to my previous post about international TV news: we had a TV news crew visit our collection/packing location this morning. When the reporter arrived with a camera, we had successfully packed all of our goods in boxes. No more donated material had arrived, so there was little for our crew of 5 or 6 volunteers to do. After a moment's thought, we unpacked and re-packed two boxes, so that the reporter would have some useful footage to splice into her interviews.

I now wonder: why did it not seem strange to anyone else involved that we faked (or un-did and re-did) our work for the camera?

Speechless

A day or two ago, I noticed an article referenced by Michelle Malkin about an alleged atrocity in Palestine. One in which a child had apparently been shot for no reason by Isreali soldiers.

The article wasn't bad--it detailed the evidence on film, the evidence given by the Israeli army, and the claims of the cameraman. It stated very clearly that the Isreali army could not have done anything to harm the child--he was not in their line of fire. It also stated clearly that if deception had happened, it had begun and ended with the cameraman.

It was the incidental references in the article that shocked me. Apparently, once investigators started asking for the films that news agencies used that fateful day, they got much more than they had bargained for. Apparently, most of the film had been shot by Palestinian locals who sold footage to international news agencies. When the hours of "background film" was viewed, it became apparent that most of the news footage had been faked.

Faked, as in a Palestinian falls to the ground, apparently wounded. His friends load him into an ambulance which has conveniently rushed to the scene. A minute later, the same Palestinian re-appears in full health, to attempt another attack on an unseen enemy.

Faked, as in the Palestinians are in a square that is out of sight of the Isreali outpost.

These manufactured battle scenes have apparently been collected for download at Pallywood. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)

This reminds me of something I saw at the end of February. In Haifa in Iraq, a group of election workers were publicly executed. Someone snapped pictures of the event and sold them to the Associated Press. Jim Wretchard of the Belmont Club started asking questions. How did the AP photographer get such a good set of pictures from the event? Was he lucky? Had he been tipped off? Was he a relative or member of the team that did it? Were the deaths staged for the photo op, or because someone wanted the men dead?

The AP never identified the man who took those pictures. The questions were never settled.

Now that I know a little more about how media-relations work in Palestine, I wonder if they work in a similar way in the rest of the Middle East. Local stringers get connected to events--whether real, or faked scenes related to a real event--and they get paid for their footage and film by the local representative of AP, CNN, or France 2 television. The images are rapidly broadcast as news, and the news company moves on to the next big event.

How much television news is fact, and how much is image?

Hurricane: Food for Thought

[edited for clarity and correct spelling]

In all the news about Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans, I had almost lost tra[c]k of the fact that [the area around] Biloxi, Mississippi was also hit hard.

Maybe the news event that no one noticed--the dog that didn't bark--was the fact that the community in that area was better preparedwas the fact that the community and government responded in a less-catatonic way. Of course, they might not have had to deal with being a large city on a sinking river-delta...

But I digress. Mississippi came to mind because I know someone who is going down to help down there. He is taking a team of three, a tent, several weeks of supplies, and a trailer full of tools, generators, and other handy items. He is planning on connecting to a network of churches in the area, finding a place to stay, and finding people who need a little yard-cleaning work, or some house demolition/rebuilding work, and doing what he can to help.

Along the way, he has also networked with another local man to deliver as much canned food as can be purchased to the same network of churches in Mississippi.

Do I have to mention that neighborhood churches are amazing in their ability to organize humanitarian aid? My locality is 1,400-odd miles from Biloxi, Miss. I cannot name any other connection between the local church that is organizing this effort and the Mississippi church that is apparently the distribution point for the aid than the fact that they share a common subculture of general American Protestant belief. (It's an overtly non-denominational pattern also; this group of churches share a common vision but have no over-arching denominational structure to bind them together.)

Perhaps there are other connections between these churches, ones that are not obvious.

At any rate, these churches are stepping up to the role of helping others. On the supply end, the local church's elders and minister quickly made a decision to support the effort. A special offering was taken, and a decently large sum of money was collected on short notice. On the distribution end, the church has managed to find a way to publish their "needs list" on the World Wide Web. They probably have manpower and logistics networks ready to go--or at least, ready to distribute available goods where need is most apparent.

And none of these people are doing what they are doing to build up their own image, to make a name for themselves, or to gain prestige.

I am humbled, and almost willing to throw away a semester of school so that I can go help.

Perhaps I have learned an important lesson here. Even in my inability to lend a hand directly, I can lend a hand to support the logistics/supply end of things. Perhaps I can even give out of my small salary as a graduate TA.

And I have learned that being alive, and in a house with a roof, a toilet, and running water, is a very good thing. Even though it is stastically highly unlikely that a natural disaster will destroy them anytime soon, it is not impossible. And there is nothing I can do to make it impossible.

So, where were you?

Tonight, I had a short conversation with a few friends. Eventually, we got around to the world-changing event that occurred four years ago.

We told stories of whole campuses immobilized, standing around the single TV screen outside the cafeteria. (You know, the TV screen that seems to always show news/talk shows, and is never paid the least attention to by passing University students?)

Someone mentioned watching a live interview after the first plane hit, and hearing the interviewee scream about a second plane. Suddenly, they knew that the event was no accident.

Someone mentioned hearing about a previous airplane-buildng collision in New York City (Empire State Building struck by a B-25 Mitchell bomber on a foggy morning in 1945...the building survived relatively unscathed.) Others mentioned the tensions between Arab-Americans and their neighbors.

I reminisced about that situation a little bit, myself. At the time, I was attending a University in the Detroit metro region. About 15 miles south of the Universty's campus lies the city with the largest population of Arabs in North America: Dearborn, MI. The most shocking thing I can remember hearing about was an event when rocks were hurled through the windows of an Arab-American community center. After plywood appeared in said windows, the regular users of the hall decorated the bulding with American flags.

Someone else commented in passing that the Arab-Americans had gotten off rather well. I had to agree. No lynch mobs, no riots or looting, no prominent leaders dragged through the streets by angry young men...

If the comparison is deemed fair, the city of Dearborn was a much safer place the week after the Twin Towers fell than the city of Los Angeles was the week after the Rodney King trial ended.

At any rate, the general consensus in the air was that "back to normal" won't be a return to the normal way of life before the 11th of September, 2001. Normal is something entirely different now.

Can I trust my neighbors?

The problems in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in New Orleans are apparently legion.

I have actually been avoiding most of the details, partly due to my suddenly-busy school schedule. Mostly due to my desire not to immerse myself in something that I already feel I know too well.

Admittedly, I (like most Americans) have been spared such tragedies. In my case, geography has ruled out most weather-related disasters. Tornadoes and hail-storms are recurring problems in the Great Lakes regions, but the devastation wrought by them is miniscule in comparison. Everyone knows what to do, and even if the electric-power supply goes down, it is usually back in service within a couple of days.

No matter what the scale of the catastrophe, or what usual parts of 21st-Century life are missing, everything boils down to a simple question:
can I trust my neighbors?

When the electricity is dead, when the phones won't go through, can I trust my neighbor? Will we stay out of each other's way, or help each other? When the police aren't in sight, will either of us help himself to the other's property? When roving looters and scavengers walk down the street, will I protect my neighbor's things as well as my own?

These questions tell us what kind of people we are, and what kind our neighbors are--and how well we know our neighbors.

I do find myself agreeing with Kim duToit, Eric Raymond, and Eric Zorn from the Chicago Tribune. A firearm in my hands is worth more than a hundred police officers at the station downtown, when it comes to protecting myself from the untrustable. And an ounce of preparation and prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Noteworthy thoughts

It's been another weekend away from computers for me...

I return to find the blogosphere abuzz with a noteworthy (almost)-retirement from blogging, the aftermath of a Category-5 hurricane, and a few thoughts about the passing of the Chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The more surprising event is the retirement status of the inimitable Kim DuToit. At least, he's not doing his usual rants; we're seeing old re-runs, Quotes of the Day, and maybe a Gratuitous Gun Pic or two. But it appears that his hunt for employment and a positive cash flow have taken precedence over active weblog publishing.

Admittedly, a categrory-5 hurricane slamming into New Orleans is surprising. But predictions about such an event have been floating around scientific journals for at least 3 years. The surprise is that it happens now, and not next year...when people would probably have been equally unprepared for it.

Lastly, it appears that Justice Rehnquist passed away in his sleep. Even for a man of his age and health, the moment of passing is entirely unpredictable. May he rest in peace--and may his successor as Chief Justice fill his shoes well.