Blame Bush First
By Brian | September 3, 2005
This is not about George W. Bush or his policies. This is about how people respond to a major hurricane and devastating flood. Before I continue, a quick note to those who think the first two sentences are bullshit: This is not about George W. Bush or his policies. This is about how people respond to a major hurricane and devastating flood. If you still don’t believe me, do us both a favor and stop reading now.
What’s going on in New Orleans right now is terrible on dozens of different levels. Just to name a few:
- Atlantic hurricanes have been growing in strength for the last 30 years, and are expected to continue growing for the next 20-30.
- One of these huge hurricanes made landfall in several populated areas on the Gulf Coast, including a major city that is below sea level.
- That city had no practical plan for evacuating all of its citizens in case of emergency, particularly for those who were most in need of help.
- The infrastructure designed to keep the city from flooding was deemed inadequate forty years ago, and no one has done enough about it to this day.
- The various local, state, and federal agencies that typically provide help in these situations appear disorganized, ineffective, and slow.
- Some of the victims are hampering the efforts of the few rescuers that are there by doing things like firing guns at supply helicopters, robbing crippled hospitals at gunpoint, burning down buildings and then shooting at the firemen, and raping women in temporary shelter facilities.
With all this going on, I have noticed a predominant theme in the news coverage, blogging, political speeches and victims’ statements thus far: President Bush is to blame. For everything. He is an incompetent, uncaring, racist, Jesus freak and he is personally responsible for all that has happened. New Orleans will be “his Waterloo.”
This concerns me greatly.
First of all, much of what we’re talking about here are long-term problems that have been ignored by local, state, and federal government officials for decades. Global warming, for instance, which some say has increased the temperature of the ocean and increased the strength of hurricanes, has been a political football for more than twenty years. The disrepair of the New Orleans levee system was first identified in 1965. New Orleans has had decades to formulate an evacuation plan, and had several days of warning before Katrina made landfall to put it into action. Nonetheless, global warming is Bush’s fault because he didn’t sign the Kyoto accords, the levee system is Bush’s fault because he cut funding for the latest round of levee rebuilding, and the people trapped in New Orleans right now are Bush’s fault because he layered FEMA under the Department of Homeland Security and nominated an old college buddy to run it.
Now, lest you start doubting the first two sentences of this post again, allow me to be clear: Bush bears some responsibility for each of these things. But he doesn’t deserve sole responsibility. Many who have come before him, and many who are in leadership positions right now, should be held accountable as well. But commenters of every stripe have been focusing on the president.
When Hurricane Andrew ripped through Florida in 1992, FEMA was harshly criticized for its response, some people were scorned for scamming helpless victims, and the insurance companies were absolutely crucified (we haven’t even reached that point with Katrina yet). Through it all, though, I have no memory of people lambasting Bill Clinton. Yes, the buck stops with the president, but the problems people were having were directly related to the actions of others, and it was those people who bore the brunt of the criticism (justified or otherwise).
So what has changed? Why the need to pin everything and anything on George W. Bush? To be honest, I think there’s an unbelievable hatred for the man. I think it began with the 2000 election, strengthened through 9/11 and the War on Terrorism, and crested mightily with the invasion of Iraq. Those who hate him do so with such a white-hot passion that they cannot possibly believe themselves to be in the minority. They cannot accept that any sane person would not hate him, nor are they willing to believe that he is responsible for anything positive in the world (or, as is the case here, not responsible for anything negative).
These are the people that some have referred to as the “Blame America First” crowd. Now that the bad news is a domestic, natural disaster rather than a foreign policy question, it occurs to me that they are actually the “Blame Bush First” crowd.
This is a bad sign for our country. Much as Watergate lifted the “nod and wink” attitude of the press and the public that John F. Kennedy enjoyed, this willingness to “Blame <whoever the president happens to be> First” threatens to poison our national dialogue for years to come. We’re stripping away yet another layer of logical debate and respect for our leaders, and we’re doing it in a world where our internal squabbles are increasing played out on the world stage.
This is a great country. It’s one of a very few in the world where one can criticize the leadership freely, publicly and without fear of retribution. There was a time where this gave us a great sense of pride and freedom in our nation. Over the past decade or so (one could argue that this attitude began with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky), this right we hold so dear has been hijacked and used to make us feel less free, less secure, and less invested in seeing our government and our nation succeed.
The President, whoever he/she may be, will always have enemies. If those enemies feel free to indiscrimately paint him/her as the cause for all evil and strife in the world, we will all suffer the consequences. We absolutely must find a way to hold the president accountable for his/her mistakes, without clouding the argument with hyperbole that serves only to heap more shit on the pile in hopes that it will increase the stink.
God Bless America. God Bless the people of New Orleans. And yes, dammit, God Bless the President of the United States.
Categories: Political Rantings | 2 Comments »
Experimenting with the Link Exchange
By Brian | September 1, 2005
I got an email from the folks who run The FraudWatcher network. They’ve linked one of my blog entries (What Prevents Crime?) to one of their pages, and have asked me to link back to them. OK, here goes:
Fraud – Crime In Aruba
Description: Fraud Prevention, Information and News about Fraud Online
The page I’m linking to has some formatting issues at best, and at worst reads like it’s written for search engines to find rather than humans (lots of half sentences, no line breaks, etc.). My links is one of 81 links listed at the bottom of the page as “Other Websites.” Also, they want me to “register” my reciprocal link, or they’ll de-link me from their site. On the upside, the e-mail claims they get 1,000 hits a day, and at this point, I’m basically a traffic whore, so I’ll take whatever I can find. If you’re reading this and you came from that site, do me a favor? Drop me a comment on this post & tell me what you think of their site (and mine, if you like). I’m curious if this is a scam or a legitimate operation.
And for the record: I’ve been to Aruba four times in the last five years. The horrible events concerning Natalee Holloway aside, I’ve never seen anything on the island that even comes close to crime, let alone the crime waves and drug problems referenced on the FraudWatcher site. Then again, I spend 100% of my time going from resort complex to resort complex (beach, casinos, restaurants, etc.), so maybe I’d have worse (better?) luck with crime if I strayed off the beaten path a little.
Also, my parents, my wife and I took our kids to Carlos and Charlie’s last year to celebrate Brandon’s second birthday (pictures here – check out the last two for the birthday festivities). We had a great time. And although the restaurant is where Ms. Holloway was before she encountered trouble, and nothing unusual or illegal happened at the restaurant, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to hear that some percentage of people now consider it unsafe. Such is life on the perception/reality continuum.
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Teach Your Children Well…
By Brian | August 27, 2005
OK, so one of our neighbors is having a Discovery Toys party (think old fashioned Tupperware party, but the molded plastic is for the kids, not the parents), and my wife got invited. Here is the front of the postcard they sent to the house:
Speaking as a guy who has some experience photographing children, I’ll betcha a dollar that when they finally got the kid to smile just right, they stopped trying, even though the book she’s reading with her mom is upside down.
Remember folks – your customers may be illiterate, but the folks with the checkbooks aren’t! :-)
Categories: The World Wide Weird | 2 Comments »
The Five Hour Immigration Window
By Brian | August 24, 2005
As that guy on Everybody Loves Raymond used to say, “Holy Crap!” How come I didn’t hear about this when it happened?
A virus caused the U.S. Customs computer system used to process passengers arriving on international flights to shut down for several hours Thursday [August 18th], leaving long lines of impatient travelers, officials said.
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said the virus impacted computer systems at a number of airports, including those in New York, San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas and Laredo, Texas.
The worst delays appeared to be at Miami International Airport, where as many as 2,000 people waited to clear immigration, airport spokesman Marc Henderson said.
At New York’s airports, customs officials processed passengers by hand during the shutdown. In Los Angeles, they used backup computer systems to keep passengers moving.
I can see the future news article now: “The terrorists entered the country by shutting down the immigration computers last August, and then using the confusion and lack of access to centrally stored no-fly lists to sneak through customs undetected. At the time, officials believed the shutdown was due to an otherwise harmless computer virus.”
Shudder…
Categories: Political Rantings | Comments Off on The Five Hour Immigration Window
Guess Who’s On a Stamp? Everybody!
By Brian | August 24, 2005
When I was a kid, they told me that you had to be dead to have your picture on a U.S. Postage stamp. Now, apparently, anyone can do it.
Another meaningless tradition yields to commercial progress…
Categories: The World Wide Weird | Comments Off on Guess Who’s On a Stamp? Everybody!
iBook – The New Cabbage Patch Doll
By Brian | August 19, 2005
OK, so you’re the Henrico County school system of Richmond, Virginia, and you have 1,000 used Apple iBooks on your hands. You decide to sell them to the community for $50 each. What happens? Well, first 5,500 people show up, some of them at 1:30 in the morning to get a good spot on line. Then you open the gates and this happens:
Officials opened the gates at 7 a.m., but some already had been waiting since 1:30 a.m. When the gates opened, it became a terrifying mob scene.
People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl’s stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.
One woman . . . was so desperate to retain her place in line that she urinated on herself.
I think we need to stop calling those folks on the web Mac Zealots…
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Follow the Tipping Hat…
By Brian | August 17, 2005
OK, first things first: Hat Tip to Yishai over at Digital Irony for reminding me that a search for your own URL in Technorati works as a trackback system for folks using Blogger which, as far as I know, doesn’t provide trackback functionality on the individual posts.
Second, a big old “right-backatcha” to Punditmania for giving me my first official Hat Tip.
Let’s hear it for the unknown bloggers – one big happy family…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 1 Comment »
Hey Dude, You’ve Got OS X!
By Brian | August 13, 2005
Well, that was fast:
Several sites reported this week that crackers had managed to install the developer-issued version of Mac OS X for Intel on non-Apple machines, including Dell laptops. One site has posted video purportedly of Mac OS X booting on a non-Apple-approved Intel-based PC.
Apparently, the Apple approved Intel machines have a chip (Intel’s Trusted Platform Module) that the OS is supposed to need in order to run, and someone found a way to bypass this check. This is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as this:
Apple has been vague about whether other operating systems — such as Microsoft’s Windows — will run on the new hardware (it has, however, said it will not sell or support other OSes)
As I’ve written before, this is the real win for Apple. If Apple hardware becomes a direct competitor to Dell and HP, you’ll see entire corporate IT departments doing deals to outfit their users with Apple hardware. Apple will go from a niche player to a major competitor in a multi-billion dollar industry, almost literally overnight.
The articles I read just after the Intel announcement seemed to imply that they were definitely avoiding this scenario, and I’m glad to see that either a) those writers didn’t know what they were talking about, or b) Apple has backed away from that exceedingly stupid stance and is now considering it.
It would be a new user base for them, and they’d have to work out a different customer service model in order to deal with the mass markets. For instance, they probably don’t want to be in the business of supporting Windows, but they have to be able to explain to corporate clients exactly how they’ll get support. Still, even a fairly large CRM investment seems to be worth taking the company’s hardware unit to the next level of competitiveness…
Categories: Tech Talk | 3 Comments »
Sign of the Times…
By Brian | August 12, 2005
HAH!
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 1 Comment »
(Another) First Look at Vista
By Brian | August 12, 2005
InternetWeek has a pretty good tour of Windows Vista, Beta 1 (with copious screenshots).
There’s very little to go on here (you can’t really have an opinion on an OS without actually playing with it), but there are a couple of things that I find encouraging:
— Virtual folders
Longhorn was originally going to ship with Windows File System, which was based on the SharePoint model of storing files. Basically, they were going to hide the Windows Explorer “tree” structure that has become second nature for most people, and ask you to find your files based solely on metadata (author, date, filetype, subject, full-text search, etc.). I believe it was pulled because beta testers couldn’t let go of the tree structure (a group I beta tested SharePoint with actually customized it to put the tree structure back in!), and because people didn’t trust the search functionality to rely on it completely for document retrieval.
Virtual folders seems like a good compromise. They sit side-by-side with the normal tree/folder model, but they aren’t shortcuts/aliases to files – they represent the files themselves (i.e., if you delete a virtual folder, you really do delete the files inside it).
— Integrated Search
The article says the search is integrated in the OS, and works well and fast. Of course, all I can do at this point is trust the author, but given that Spotlight was my favorite feature of Mac’s Tiger OS, I’m glad to hear something similar is coming in Windows.
— IE 7
Everything we’ve been hearing about (although it’s nice to finally read an article about what it can do, rather than rip it to shreds by characterizing beta bugs as evil security flaws). Tabs, RSS feeds, advanced security options, etc. This is catch-up for Microsoft, but at least it’s there.
— Graphical Breadcrumbs
This sounds like a really cool idea. It’s basically the breadcrumbs we’re all used to seeing on the web, but each term in the trail is a menu, giving you options to navigate the tree starting from that point (including the virtual folders). It’s a very simple idea, but it puts the entire tree at your fingertips in a way that even the web doesn’t do. I hope it works as well as it sounds.
— Translucent Window Panes
Silly thing, but I think it looks way cool…
Overall, what’s most encouraging to me is that they seem to have taken the opportunity to introduce new paradigms into the OS that weren’t there before (virtual folders, graphical breadcrumbs, and some smaller things like a revamped Start menu and User Account Protection). When I looked at Tiger, I was happy enough with the experience, but felt as though they missed an opportunity to make positive changes in how we interact with the machine – it was simply a nicer, faster version of what we already had (except Spotlight, as I mentioned above, and the Dashboard widgets, which I think are just a novelty). Maybe Vista will learn that lesson. Time will tell…
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