I started seeing a very strange untruth being pushed in a number of blogs: that everyone thought that New Orleans was going to be fine until late Tuesday night. I originally spotted the reference over at Maggi Katzen's blog while looking for a cat picture she had posted. That led me to find that statement repeated at Scribal Terror, and the incorrect timeline posted at the much more famous Captain's Quarters.

I had an interesting encounter today, returning from CompUSA where I was returning a few video cards from work. I encountered a hitchhiker with a heavy backpack, and since I had plenty of room, I offered him a ride. He was a refugee from New Orleans, who had been on the road since early morning. Along with a small group of others, he had taken a canoe from his neighbor, who had told him it was his if he could use it. Together, they managed to make it to a dry section of highway and hitched a ride out of the city, leaving the canoe to some others who were staying.

There have been a lot of problems in New Orleans and Mississippi getting needed support, from helicopters for rescue and evacuation, to sandbags to help plug broken levees, to simple water supplies. A lot of frustration has been expressed by rescuers about how long it has been taking for help to arrive.

It turns out that a good part of the reason is that FEMA was enveloped by the Department of Homeland Security and diverted to dealing with potential threats from al-Qaida. In addition, funds were diverted from emergency management and storm preparedness — including massive budget cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers responsible for maintaining the levees in New Orleans. The budget cuts were so severe that in 2004, they were forced to abandon work on the levee system for the first time in 37 years. Now, two of those levees have failed, and there is neither manpower nor equipment coming in a timely fashion to fix them.

The social situation is deteriorating in New Orleans, with the looters now including police officers. Officials are saying that the city may be uninhabitable for a month.

If you have funds to spare for the relief effort, the Red Cross is taking donations.

It appears that contrary to what I heard earlier, New Orleans did not escape after all. One or more levees have failed, and the city is flooded.

No death toll is available yet, but rescue operations aren't going very well, as the bulk of the National Guard and their equipment, that normally would be deployed to help deal with things like this, is off in Iraq.

David Bernstein is blogging again about the collapse of the housing bubble, which has led me to check into exactly how much value I can lose on a house and still break even over a given period of time.

The average price of a house in the Baton Rouge area appears to be about $220,000. I'm currently paying $510/month on rent. The shortest period in which I could end up staying here is probably six months, one hiring cycle in academia. This means that if I end up losing more than $3,060, or about 1.4%, in the difference between my buy and sell price plus whatever I ended up paying interest-only, it's cheaper to rent.

In the most spectacularly unnoticed shifts of the United States towards becoming a police state, the House voted today not only to renew the Patriot Act provisions for another four years, but to make most of them permanent, with a few to be checked again in ten years.

Billmon has a summary of exactly what this allows the government to do, for those that haven't been paying attention.

It's time to write to your senators (at least those of you not living in a place where even the Democratic senators are hopeless, such as I am), since that's the only place where the damage can even be mitigated at this point. That and make sure your passport is up to date, and you've got a clean exit plan from the country.

If my reading is correct, the proposed rule changes by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in the Department of Commerce that were posted in the March 28 Federal Register contain changes that appear to be designed to prevent many foreigners in the US, specifically including foreign students, from having access to more than very basic computing power. I have written a quick analysis.

The problem with claims of assassinations, conspiracies, and coverups is that there have been a number of such claims over the ages, few of which have managed to come up with enough evidence to implicate someone for wrongdoing, and often lack such basic components as motive. One of the better examples of how a long list of "suspicious" deaths can be easily generated is the solid debunking of the deaths surrounding President Clinton. Similar attempts date back to the JFK assassination (and forward to the Bush administration), and while there is somewhat significant evidence that the commonly accepted version of how the actual JFK assassination itself played out is incorrect (and there's certainly no shortage of motive), nobody has come up with any evidence of wrongdoing against any individuals involved.

A paper is now available in PDF format from the National Election Data Archive Project.

I think this cartoon from 2002 applies quite nicely. If we don't get a way to verify our votes soon, we may never recover.