Sending a Little Bump to Katrina's Survivors

Chris Bowers of MyDD is pulling the Liberal Alliance together on Thursday as our day to blogswarm for the Red Cross. I'll have a special button installed that will allow us to keep track of readers who donate through Bump. I'll be driving to the Northern Virginia Headquarters of the Red Cross tomorrow to write them a check. This is something left and right blogs can get together on. The Red Cross has a secure server. I'll also have an address to which you can mail a check if, like me, you don't use credit cards.

In the face of the sort of dumbfoundedness I feel before this tragedy, I want to do something. As a blogger, this is what I can do. Anything you can give will be much appreciated. The people of the Gulf coast have lost everything, over a million have lost their homes. God knows how many have died: it will be weeks before we can tally the human cost.

As I told you at the beginning of August, the National Tropical Prediction Center in Miami predicted that would be an intense hurricane season, and I told you last winter that climatologists have said since 1995 that we have entered into a predicatable cycle of greater hurricane frequency and intensity. All of this is, of course, exacerbated by global warming: the waters of the Gulf were already two degrees warmer this year than any previous record.

Bushco is responsible for a lot of the damage; his failure to fully fund the needed levee improvements (in order to pay for the Iraq war) and to properly staff and fund FEMA took what would have been catastrophe under the best of circumstances into utter devestation.

Just a reminder that this level of preparedness is what we have to look forward to for an avian influenza pandemic. Hundreds of thousands will die from avian flu, in the US alone. The toll could be a billion world wide.

We all saw the videos of the looting. Yes, these kinds of human tragedies can bring out humanity's worst. Let's show the world humanity's best.

The people of the Gulf are going to need help for a long, long time. Remember to give when the cable channels stop running this story wall to wall. No homes, no businesses, no jobs. It's mindblowing.

Gas Open Thread

Along the 3/4 mile of main drag I traverse to get to the grocery store there are a half-dozen gas stations. Normally, regular unleaded varies not more than a penny or two between them. The place across the street, usually the most expensive, was cheapest at $2.89. The price varies .30, to $3.09.

What do gas prices look like in your part of the world?

The Toll

U.S. declares health emergency
New Orleans mayor: Thousands may be dead

Wednesday, August 31, 2005; Posted: 4:28 p.m. EDT (20:28 GMT)

(CNN) -- The Bush administration declared a public health emergency for the entire Gulf Coast on Wednesday in an effort to stop the spread of disease in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

"We are gravely concerned about the potential for cholera, typhoid and dehydrating diseases that could come as a result of the stagnant water and the conditions," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Wednesday after announcing the emergency.

"We are also erecting a network of up to 40 medical shelters," Leavitt said. "They will have the capacity, collectively, of 10,000 beds, and will be staffed by some 4,000 qualified medical personnel." (See the video report of what health assaults the city might face -- 2:18)

Leavitt said the declaration would simplify and speed the relief effort. (Health risks)

Meanwhile, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reportedly said Wednesday that the storm probably killed thousands of people in his city.

"We know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water," and others dead in attics, The Associated Press quoted Nagin as saying. When asked how many, he reportedly said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands."

Nagin and other Louisiana officials had refused to give a casualty count in the past, saying emergency workers were focusing on the rescue effort.

Opportunism

Hands Full, Officials Are Helpless Against Looters

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 31, 2005

Filed at 2:01 p.m. ET

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- With law officers and National Guardsmen focused on saving lives, looters around the city spent another day brazenly ransacking stores for food, clothing, appliances -- and guns.

Thieves commandeered a forklift and used it to push up the storm shutters and break the glass of a pharmacy. The crowd stormed the store, carrying out so much ice, water and food that it dropped from their arms as they ran. The street was littered with packages of ramen noodles and other items.

Looters also chased down a state police truck full of food. The New Orleans police chief ran off looters while city officials themselves were commandeering equipment from a looted Office Depot. During a state of emergency, authorities have broad powers to take private supplies and buildings for their use.

Officials tried to balance security needs with saving lives.

''We're multitasking right now,'' said New Orleans Police Capt. Marlon Defillo. ''Rescue, recovery, stabilization of looting, we're trying to feed the hungry.''

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said she has asked the White House to send more people to help with evacuations and rescues, thereby freeing up National Guardsmen to stop looters.

''We need to free up the National Guard to do security in the city,'' Blanco said.

New Orleans' homeland security chief, Terry Ebbert, said looters were breaking into stores all over town and stealing guns. He said there are gangs of armed men moving around the city. At one point, officers stranded on the roof of a hotel were fired at by criminals on the street.

The Times-Picayune newspaper reported that the gun section at a new Wal-Mart had been cleaned out by looters.

Authorities said an officer was shot in the head and a looter was wounded in a shootout. The officer was expected to survive.

Staff members at Children's Hospital huddled with sick youngsters and waited in vain for help to arrive as looters tried to break through the locked door, Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher told the newspaper. Neither the police nor the National Guard arrived.

The Bush Clusterfsck

Since Bush has gutted FEMA, it is going to be up to us to pick up the slack.

Cash donations sought for hurricane victims

WASHINGTON (AP) — While a variety of government and private agencies are en route to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina, federal officials said Monday people wanting to help should not head to the affected area unless directed by an agency.

Instead, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, urged people to make cash contributions to organizations.

Cash donations "allow volunteer agencies to issue cash vouchers to victims so they can meet their needs. Cash donations also allow agencies to avoid the labor-intensive need to store, sort, pack and distribute donated goods. Donated money prevents, too, the prohibitive cost of air or sea transportation that donated goods require."

FEMA listed the following agencies as needing cash to assist hurricane victims:

• American Red Cross, 800-HELP NOW (435-7669) English, 800-257-7575 Spanish.

• Operation Blessing, 800-436-6348.

• America's Second Harvest, 800-344-8070.

• Adventist Community Services, 800-381-7171.

• Catholic Charities, USA, 703-549-1390.

• Christian Disaster Response, 941-956-5183 or 941-551-9554.

• Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, 800-848-5818.

• Church World Service, 800-297-1516.

• Convoy of Hope, 417-823-8998.

• Lutheran Disaster Response, 800-638-3522.

• Mennonite Disaster Service, 717-859-2210.

• Nazarene Disaster Response, 888-256-5886.

• Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, 800-872-3283.

• Salvation Army, 800-SAL-ARMY (725-2769).

• Southern Baptist Convention — Disaster Relief, 800-462-8657, ext. 6440.

• United Methodist Committee on Relief. 800-554-8583.

Donations can be made online to most of these organizations through Network for Good.

Federal Demise

This op-ed ran earlier in the WaPo. The writer is the one disaster planner in the country who arranged for a meeting between local businesses and emergency managers to prepare for avian influenza. Given what we've learned from Katrina, FEMA is a disaster. We are on our own, folks.

Disasters keep coming but FEMA phased out
Agency responsible for preparedness absorbed into homeland security

ERIC HOLDEMAN

Washington Post

SEATTLE - In the days to come, as the nation copes with the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we will be reminded how important it is to have a federal agency capable of dealing with natural catastrophes of this sort. This is an immense human tragedy, beyond the capabilities of state and local government to deal with. It requires a national response.

Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why the country's premier agency for dealing with such events -- FEMA -- is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security.

Apparently homeland security now consists almost entirely of protection against terrorist acts. How else to explain why the Federal Emergency Management Agency will no longer be responsible for disaster preparedness?

FEMA was born in 1979, the offspring of a number of federal agencies that had been functioning in an independent and uncoordinated manner to protect the country against natural disasters and nuclear holocaust.

All-hazards preparedness

The creation of the federal agency encouraged states, counties and cities to convert from their civil defense organizations and to establish emergency management agencies to do the requisite planning for disasters. Over time, a philosophy of "all-hazards disaster preparedness" was developed that sought to conserve resources by producing single plans that were applicable to many types of events.But it was Hurricane Andrew, which hit Florida in 1992, that really energized FEMA. The year after that catastrophic storm, President Bill Clinton appointed James Lee Witt to be director of the agency. Witt reoriented FEMA from civil defense preparations to a focus on natural disaster preparedness and disaster mitigation. In an effort to reduce the repeated loss of property and lives every time a disaster struck, he started a disaster mitigation effort called "Project Impact." FEMA was elevated to a Cabinet-level agency, in recognition of its important responsibilities coordinating efforts across departmental and governmental lines.

Witt fought for federal funding to support the new program. At its height, only $20 million was allocated to the national effort, but it worked wonders. One example: When the Nisqually earthquake struck the Puget Sound area on Feb. 28, 2001, homes had been retrofitted for earthquakes and schools were protected from high-impact structural hazards. Those involved with Project Impact thought it ironic that the day of that quake was also the day that the then-new president chose to announce that Project Impact would be discontinued.

The advent of the Bush administration in January 2001 signaled the beginning of the end for FEMA. The agency's newly appointed leadership showed little interest in its work or in the missions pursued by Witt. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Soon FEMA was being absorbed.

Agency's death blow

This year it was announced that FEMA is to "officially" lose the disaster preparedness function that it has had since its creation. The move is a death blow to an agency that was already on life support. In fact, FEMA employees have been directed not to become involved in disaster preparedness functions, since a new directorate (yet to be established) will have that mission.

FEMA will be survived by state and local emergency management offices, which are confused about how they fit into the national picture. That's because the focus of the national effort remains terrorism. Those of us in the business of dealing with emergencies find ourselves with no national leadership. We are being forced to fend for ourselves, making do with the "homeland security" mission. Our "all-hazards" approaches have been decimated by the administration's preoccupation with terrorism.

America may well be hit by another major terrorist attack, and we must be prepared for that. But I can guarantee you that hurricanes like Katrina, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, windstorms, mudslides, power outages, fires and perhaps a pandemic will have to be dealt with. They are coming for sure, sooner or later, even as we are weakening our ability to respond to them.

Looking Ahead

Governor: Everyone must leave New Orleans
8/31/2005, 8:58 a.m. CT
By BRETT MARTEL
The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The governor of Louisiana says everyone needs to leave New Orleans due to flooding from Hurricane Katrina. "We've sent buses in. We will be either loading them by boat, helicopter, anything that is necessary," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. Army engineers struggled without success to plug New Orleans' breached levees with giant sandbags, and the governor said Wednesday the situation was worsening and there was no choice but to abandon the flooded city. "The challenge is an engineering nightmare," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "The National Guard has been dropping sandbags into it, but it's like dropping it into a black hole."

As the waters continued to rise in New Orleans, four Navy ships raced toward the Gulf Coast with drinking water and other emergency supplies, and Red Cross workers from across the country converged on the devastated region. The Red Cross reported it had about 40,000 people in 200 shelters across the area in one of the biggest urban disasters the nation has ever seen.

The death toll from Hurricane Katrina reached at least 110 in Mississippi alone, while Louisiana put aside the counting of the dead to concentrate on rescuing the living, many of whom were still trapped on rooftops and in attics.

A full day after the Big Easy thought it had escaped Katrina's full fury, two levees broke and spilled water into the streets on Tuesday, swamping an estimated 80 percent of the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city, inundating miles and miles of homes and rendering much of New Orleans uninhabitable for weeks or months.

"We are looking at 12 to 16 weeks before people can come in," Mayor Ray Nagin said on ABC's "Good Morning America, "and the other issue that's concerning me is have dead bodies in the water. At some point in time the dead bodies are going to start to create a serious disease issue."

Blanco said she wanted the Superdome — which had become a shelter of last resort for about 20,000 people — evacuated within two days, along with other gathering points for storm refugees. The situation inside the dank and sweltering Superdome was becoming desperate: The water was rising, the air conditioning was out, toilets were broken, and tempers were rising.

At the same time, sections of Interstate 10, the only major freeway leading into New Orleans from the east, lay shattered, dozens of huge slabs of concrete floating in the floodwaters. I-10 is the only route for commercial trucking across southern Louisiana.

The sweltering city of 480,000 people — an estimated 80 percent of whom obeyed orders to evacuate as Katrina closed in over the weekend — also had no drinkable water, the electricity could be out for weeks, and looters were ransacking stores around town.

"The logistical problems are impossible and we have to evacuate people in shelters," the governor said. "It's becoming untenable. There's no power. It's getting more difficult to get food and water supplies in, just basic essentials."

She gave no details on exactly where the refugees would be taken. But in Houston, Rusty Cornelius, a county emergency official, said at least 25,000 of them would travel in a bus convoy to Houston starting Wednesday and would be sheltered at the 40-year-old Astrodome, which is no longer used for professional sporting events.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was considering putting people on cruise ships, in tent cities, mobile home parks, and so-called floating dormitories — boats the agency uses to house its own employees.

Everyone in the disaster planning biz has known for decades that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was the nightmare scenario, and this is what we have for disaster planning? Counting on the Feds for a bird flu outbreak is a major joke. We are on our own.

Recession

U.S. Decision to Release Oil Sends Prices Below $70

By VIKAS BAJAJ
Published: August 31, 2005

The Energy Department said this morning it would release oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep refineries supplied, prompting a drop in crude oil prices, the first decrease since Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore on Monday and severely disrupted the energy infrastructure along the gulf.

Appearing on a series of cable news shows, the Energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, said the decision to release the crude oil was made Tuesday night after several oil refiners asked to borrow from the 700-million barrel reserve.

The price for crude oil for October delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell almost immediately, by 18 cents a barrel, to $69.63.

$3.00 gas? Check the price at the corner station. Mine is already there.

Downscaling

The new proletariat

By Robert Kuttner | August 31, 2005

THIS LABOR DAY, wage-workers have little to celebrate. Though unemployment is down, job insecurity is up. Health and pension benefits are dwindling. Weakened worker bargaining power is reflected in flat earnings.

According to a new report from the Census Bureau, real wages of fulltime workers fell 2.3 percent for men and 1 percent for women between 2003-04, and median family income declined by $1,669 since 2000. Productivity is up 15 percent, but gains have gone to profits, not wages.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the median hourly wage, $16.13 in July 2005, is right where it was in November 2001, when the current recovery began. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage back then was $16.15.

One group of workers is particularly hard-hit by multiple trends -- the young.

The young are less likely to have jobs with decent health insurance. If they have pensions at all, they are typically plans at risk for stock-market fluctuations; they are far less likely to have defined benefit pensions whose payouts are guaranteed.

The young have not just lower wages but lower career horizons. Union workers, who enjoy higher average wages, tend to be in their 40s and 50s. When these workers retire or are laid off, either the jobs vanish or their successors typically get lower wages. Even some union contracts have settled for two-tier wage systems, with much lower pay scales for newcomers performing the same work.

Job prospects of the young are only the beginning of their pocketbook challenges. Today's average four-year college graduate has over $20,000 in loans, whose payments cut into disposable income. That figure has nearly doubled in a decade.

The real estate boom has been great for homeowners, but terrible for young families trying to buy in. Homeownership rates among 25- to 34-year-olds declined from 51.6 percent in 1980 to 45.6 percent in 2000. Hard pressed young people purchasing homes are more likely to reduce payments with adjustable-rate mortgages or interest-only loans. These financing mechanisms, however, put them at grave risk of getting slammed when the housing bubble pops.

Their gamble is that appreciation in the value of the house will allow them to build up equity, as the last generation did. But someone who goes deeply into debt to buy at the peak of the market can be wiped out if the property value declines.

The big exception to this story, of course, is young people with affluent parents. Consider two hypothetical 28-year olds, Smith and Jones, who earn identical paychecks.

Smith is paying $200 a month on college loans. His barebones health insurance policy has a high employee premium contribution and costly co-pays. He is paying $600 a month for a one-third share of an apartment, and has no prospect of buying a home any time soon.

Jones, despite identical earnings, has very different financial prospects. His parents paid his tuition, so he has no college loans. His father is offering a ''loan" to help with a down-payment on a condo. His family is also there in case of unforeseen medical expenses.

America has always celebrated its mobility. When my father, back from World War II, became the first member of his family to buy a home, he did it on a modest paycheck with a GI loan. He managed it on one income while my mother stayed home with me.

Seldom in our history were the economic prospects of the young more determined by their parents' status. Children of the elite have always had a head start, but in the past young people without affluent parents could also afford the two big tickets to the middle class -- a college degree and a home.

This new reality is not just a historical accident. It reflects deliberate policy.

Welcome to the 21st Century. It took me 10 years to pay off my college loans. I defaulted twice and haven't had a credit rating worth discussing since. I make less than my parents did at my age. I'm making my COBRA health insurance payment today, it's nearly $300 a month. It doesn't look like it is going to get any better in this life.

Our Boys in Uniform

Overseas deployments hinder
Guard hurricane presence

By Pete Yost
Associated Press

Some 6,000 National Guard personnel in Louisiana and Mississippi who would be available to help deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are in Iraq, highlighting the changing role of America’s part-time soldiers.

“The juxtaposition of the mission to Iraq and the response to Katrina really demonstrates the new and changing character of the National Guard,” Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the private Lexington Institute, said Monday.

The war has forced the Guard into becoming an operational force, a far cry from its historic role as a strategic reserve primarily available to governors for disasters and other duties in their home states.

At 1.2 million soldiers, the active duty military is simply too small to carry the load by itself when there is a large sustained deployment like Iraq. Nationally, 78,000 of the 437,000 members of the Guard force are serving overseas.

As part of the transformation during the war effort, the National Guard has promised governors that at least 50 percent of soldiers and airmen will be available for stateside duty at all times. In most cases, the rate is well above 50 percent.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said the Gulf states have adequate National Guard units to handle the hurricane needs, with at least 60 percent of the Guard available in each state.

In Louisiana, which took the brunt of Katrina, some 3,000 members of the 256th Combat Brigade are in Iraq, while 3,500 members of the Guard were deployed to help hurricane victims and another 3,000 were on standby.

In neighboring Mississippi, the Guard had 853 troops on hurricane duty — a small slice of the more than 7,000 Guard troops in the state’s ground and air components. Some 3,000 National Guard troops from Mississippi are in Iraq, another 300 in Afghanistan.

Feeling safer?

A Lighter Note

The Daily Racing Form turns 100 today. I never go to the track without it and I always make money with it. Consider yourself informed.

The New Reality

Much of Gulf Coast Is Crippled; Death Toll Rises After Hurricane

By JOSEPH B. TREASTER and N. R. KLEINFIELD
Published: August 31, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 30 - A day after New Orleans thought it had narrowly escaped the worst of Hurricane Katrina's wrath, water broke through two levees on Tuesday and virtually submerged and isolated the city, causing incalculable destruction and rendering it uninhabitable for weeks to come.

OIL PRICES The cost of a barrel of oil soared above $70 as the damage to offshore platforms became apparent.

PUBLIC HEALTH Officials warned the health consequences were likely to be enormous.

WHITHER NEW ORLEANS People are wondering what will remain of the city, physically and psychologically.

MILITARY RESPONSE Five Navy ships and eight maritime rescue teams were ordered to the Gulf Coast.

HOW TO HELP A partial list of relief organizations and other information available on the Web.
A mother and her daughter made their way toward the Superdome and shelter.

With bridges washed out, highways converted into canals, and power and communications lines inoperable, government officials ordered everyone still remaining out of the city. Officials began planning for the evacuation of the Superdome, where about 10,000 refugees huddled in increasingly grim conditions as water and food were running out and rising water threatened the generators.

The situation was so dire that late in the day the Pentagon ordered five Navy ships and eight Navy maritime rescue teams to the Gulf Coast to bolster relief operations. It also planned to fly in Swift boat rescue teams from California.

As rising water and widespread devastation hobbled rescue and recovery efforts, the authorities could only guess at the death toll in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast. In Mississippi alone, officials raised the official count of the dead to at least 100.

"It looks like Hiroshima is what it looks like," Gov. Haley Barbour said, describing parts of Harrison County, Miss.

Across the region, rescue workers were not even trying to gather up and count the dead, officials said, but pushed them aside for the time being as they tried to find the living.

As the sweep of the devastation became clear, President Bush cut short his monthlong summer vacation on Tuesday and returned to Washington, where he will meet on Wednesday with a task force established to coordinate the efforts of 14 federal agencies that will be involved in responding to the disaster.

The scope of the catastrophe caught New Orleans by surprise. A certain sense of relief that was felt on Monday afternoon, after the eye of the storm swept east of the city, proved cruelly illusory, as the authorities and residents woke up Tuesday to a more horrifying result than had been anticipated. Mayor Ray Nagin lamented that while the city had dodged the worst-case scenario on Monday. Tuesday was "the second-worst-case scenario."

It was not the water from the sky but the water that broke through the city's protective barriers that changed everything for the worse. New Orleans, with a population of nearly 500,000, is protected from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain by levees. North of downtown, breaches in the levees sent the muddy waters of the lake pouring into the city.

Streets that were essentially dry in the hours immediately after the hurricane passed were several feet deep in water on Tuesday morning. Even downtown areas that lie on higher ground were flooded. The mayor said both city airports were underwater.

Mayor Nagin said that one of the levee breaches was two to three blocks long, and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been dropping 3,000-pound sandbags into the opening from helicopters, as well as sea-land containers with sand, to try to seal the break. Late Tuesday night, there were reports that the rising waters had caused a nearby station that pumps water out of the city to fail.

Site Highlights

Read the palamedes posts, I'll have them better organized by the end of the week with a link in the sidebar. You can find them right now by going to the search function on the sidebar and querying "avian influenza+preparation." Rich is doing a brilliant job.

The Flu Wiki is about to burst on the Flu scene as the ultimate resource. I'm getting invited to conferences and things. This is all very flattering and whatnot, but the job is to save lives. That is what I care about, as do the other posters. Self importance is never attractive, less so when other people's lives are at risk. We aim to give you the straight dope. Act on it and help your friends and family survive and help others through what may be the first pandemic in modern times. We are here to help you survive it.

The Least of Us

There are millions of animals stranded on the Gulf coast. They aren't welcome in shelters and they've been left in flooded homes to fend for themselve.

The Humane Society of the US can help. After you've helped the Red Cross, help them.

Rosa, Eddie and I thank you.

The videos make me cry.

Down, Down, Down

Energy Prices Surge on Pipeline Snags

The shutdown of oil platforms, refineries and pipelines along the Gulf Coast drove energy prices to new highs Tuesday, all-but-guaranteeing a surge in pump prices in the days ahead. Oil prices briefly jumped above $70 a barrel.

The trading frenzy on futures markets reflected uncertainty and fear about the full extent of the damage Hurricane Katrina inflicted on key energy infrastructure, as well as the constraints being felt where actual shipments of gasoline, heating oil and jet fuel are bought and sold.

"This is an extremely serious situation," said Tom Kloza, director of the Wall, N.J.-based Oil Price Information Service.

Analysts said that even if Katrina did less harm than feared its effects would nevertheless tighten the availability of already scarce refined products, such as heating oil and gasoline.

In wholesale markets on the Gulf Coast, some gasoline was being priced as high as $2.85 a gallon and in the Midwest, prices were as high as $2.65 a gallon, Kloza said. Retail costs are typically 60 cents higher, meaning motorists in these regions could very well see pump prices in some markets exceed $3 a gallon.

Light sweet crude for October delivery rose $2.15 to $69.35 a barrel by afternoon on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices had reached as high as $70.85, a new high on Nymex, although still below the inflation-adjusted high of about $90 a barrel that was set in 1980.

September gasoline futures rose 29.94 cents, or 14.5 percent, to $2.36 a gallon on Nymex, where trading was halted briefly after the exchange's 25-cent trading limit was reached. Heating oil futures climbed by 12.12 cents to $2.03 a gallon.

Natural gas futures raced higher as well. Natural gas for October delivery traded at $11.75 per 1,000 cubic feet, an increase of 61.1 cents.

Analysts believe that the operations of natural gas processors and chemical manufacturers, who depend heavily on the natural gas as a feedstock, could be disrupted for days, if not weeks.

The runup in natural gas and heating oil futures may mean sharply higher home-heating bills lie ahead this winter.

In addition to refineries and oil platforms, critical infrastructure that remained out of service included:

- the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the largest oil import terminal in the United States.

- the Colonial Pipeline, which transports refined products such as gasoline, heating oil and jet fuel from Houston to markets as far away as the Northeast.

- the Plantation Pipe Line, which transports fuel from refineries in Mississippi and Louisiana to consuming markets as far away as northern Virginia.

- the Capline pipeline system, which transports crude oil from the Gulf to the Midwest.

"These are pretty challenging circumstances," Kloza said.

Companies are scrambling to assess damage to their platforms, pipelines and refineries - a task easier said than done in some cases because, in addition to flooding, the Gulf Coast has been plagued by power outages.

The economy wasn't so hot before this. Can you say recession? I thought you could.

Catastrophe

Racing to help

President Bush was returning to Washington two days ahead of schedule to help oversee Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, the White House announced. (Full story)

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is preparing to house "at least tens of thousands of victims ... for literally months on end," the agency's director, Michael Brown, said Monday night.

Veteran FEMA staffers who have surveyed the destruction are reporting some of the worst damage they have ever seen, he said. (Full story)

Louisiana and Mississippi officials urged evacuees as well as those stranded by flooding from the storm to stay put.

"It's too dangerous to come home," said Blanco, who ordered state police to block re-entry routes to all but emergency workers.

The American Red Cross said it is launching the largest relief operation in its history. (Full story)

More than 75,000 people are being housed in nearly 240 shelters across the region, and Red Cross President Marty Evans told CNN, "We expect that to grow" as people who can't return home seek somewhere to stay. (How to help)

More than 1.7 million homes and businesses in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida were without electricity, according to utility companies serving the region.

Katrina was downgraded to a tropical depression Tuesday. As of the 11 a.m. ET update from the National Hurricane Center, Katrina was about 25 miles south of Clarksville, Tennessee, moving north-northeast at 21 mph.

On Katrina's way north Monday night through Mississippi, its outer bands spawned tornados in Georgia. Three twisters were reported there, one in central Peach County and two in the northwest counties of Carroll and Paulding. One person in Carroll County was critically injured.

You can see the video on the news and the cable channels. I have a thing about overusing superlatives, bit it really is incredible to see. I remember the video from Homestead, Florida, but the scale and scope of the damage Katrina is something I'm having a hard time getting my mind around.

Disaster

CNN is reporting that Dauthen Island, Alabama, has been wiped bare. Jack Cafferty is saying that gas may go up 20-30 cents a gallon. The damage is incredible. Coastal Alabama has been devastated.

I watch CNN So You Don't Have To

I've done television, I've done radio. Can anyone explain to me why Kyra Phillips has a job? She can't complete a coherent English sentence.

Weirdness

This is going to be one of those days. I'm having problems with the cable broadband. My cable company has been remarkable for uptime, but they are having local problems today. This is independent of any severe storms, which haven't gotten here yet. And the host server for JTF and Flu Wiki is down. They should be back up within a couple of hours, at the latest. I've got a bunch of administrative things to do, so posting might be light for the next few hours.

Among the Ordained

Army, Rabbi at Odds Over Departure

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 30, 2005; Page A04

TORONTO -- The U.S. Army has listed Rabbi Jeffrey Goldman as a deserter, making him subject to arrest if he returns to the United States. But he maintains that he was driven out of the military chaplaincy by anti-Semitic harassment from Christian colleagues.

Goldman, 33, left Fort Stewart, Ga., in January 2002 to return to his native Canada after just one year as an Orthodox Jewish military chaplain. He said that he believes he resigned legally from the Army and that the desertion charge was a vindictive response to his allegations.

While he was posted at the Georgia base, Goldman said, he worked in a "poisonous atmosphere" created by three Christian chaplains. One of the men taunted him by displaying Nazi guard uniforms, he said. His supervising chaplain told him, "Rabbi, if you want to survive down here, this is the South, and you'd better forget you are a [expletive] Yankee rabbi from up north," Goldman said.

"It was a very, very harsh environment. I never had any problems with the officers or the soldiers, only the other chaplains," Goldman said in an interview.
....
Goldman's complaints led to an Army inspector general's investigation. Officials at Fort Stewart declined to discuss the case or disclose the results. Goldman said the inspector general's report "was trying to make this look like I was afraid to go on deployment and I fled and used the anti-Semitic allegations to cover it up."

He said Protestant chaplains resented him in part because Jewish, Muslim and Catholic chaplains are courted by the military to relieve a shortage in those faiths -- a charge the Pentagon denies.

The Pentagon may deny it, but I happen to know that it is true, as a recent seminary grad.

Military Wrestles With Disharmony Among Chaplains

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 30, 2005; A01

The growing influence of evangelical Protestants is roiling the military chaplain corps, where their desire to preach their faith more openly is colliding with long-held military traditions of pluralism and diversity.

After accusations this summer that evangelical chaplains, faculty and coaches were pressuring cadets at the Air Force Academy, the Air Force yesterday issued new guidelines on respect for religious minorities. In the Navy, evangelical Protestant chaplains are fighting what they say is a legacy of discrimination in hiring and promotions, and they are bridling at suggestions they not pray publicly "in the name of Jesus."

Much of the conflict is in two areas that, until now, have been nearly invisible to civilians: how the military hires its ministers and how they word their public prayers. Evangelical chaplains -- who are rising in numbers and clout amid a decline in Catholic priests and mainline Protestant ministers -- are challenging the status quo on both questions, causing even some evangelical commanders to worry about the impact on morale.

"There is a polarization that is beginning to set up that I don't think is helpful. Us versus them," said Air Force Col. Richard K. Hum, an Evangelical Free Church minister who is the executive director of the Armed Forces Chaplains Board. "I don't know whether it's an overflow of what's happening in society. But this sort of thing is so detrimental to what we are trying to do in the chaplaincy."

The Rev. MeLinda S. Morton, a Lutheran minister who resigned in June as an Air Force chaplain after criticizing the religious atmosphere at the Air Force Academy, said there has been a palpable rise in evangelical fervor not just among chaplains but also among the officer corps in general since she joined the military in 1982, originally as a launch officer in a nuclear missile silo.

"When we were coneheads -- missile officers -- I would never, ever have engaged in conversations with subordinates aligning my power and position as an officer with my views on faith matters," she said. Today, "I've heard of people being made incredibly uncomfortable by certain wing commanders who engage in sectarian devotions at staff meetings."
Diversity Without Quotas

The tradition of chaplains in the U.S. military goes back to George Washington, who first sought a minister for his Virginia regiment in 1756. In the early days of the republic, commanders simply chose a chaplain who shared their beliefs. But with the expansion of the military in World War II, the armed services set quotas for chaplains of various faiths, attempting to match the proportion of each denomination in the general population.

In a class-action lawsuit -- filed in 1999 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and still in the discovery, or evidence-gathering, stage -- more than 50 Navy chaplains contend that the formula became a rigid and discriminatory "thirds rule": one-third Catholics, one-third mainline Protestants and one-third everybody else.

According to Hum, the military abandoned numerical targets about 20 years ago, partly for legal reasons and partly because the proliferation of religious groups made the system unworkable. Although chaplains are paid by the armed services, they must be ordained and "endorsed," or nominated, by religious organizations. The number of endorsers has grown from about 10 denominations in 1945 to more than 240 groups today, Hum said.

Like college admissions officers, Pentagon officials now say they seek diversity without using quotas.

"We don't actually say we want to have four rabbis this year, or 20 Catholic priests. What we do is, we look at who is sent to us by our endorsers throughout the country and . . . then we bring the best qualified into the chaplain corps," Rear Adm. Louis V. Iasiello, a Catholic priest and the chief of Navy chaplains, said in an interview at the Pentagon's Navy Annex.

Pentagon data analyzed by The Washington Post show a substantial rise in the number of evangelical chaplains in the past decade, along with a modest decline in mainline Protestant ministers and a precipitous drop in Catholic priests, mirroring a nationwide priest shortage.

Of the approximately 1.4 million people on active duty in the military, 21.5 percent list their religion as Roman Catholic. But of the 2,860 active-duty chaplains, 355 -- or 12.4 percent -- are Catholic priests.

I have a friend, a Unitarian minister, who helped draw up the guidelines for what represents an authentic religion for the chaplaincy corps. The Pentagon is pretty broad, they include Wicca.

I've been hearing stories about tension in the chaplaincy corps for a couple of years now. Never expected to see it on the front page of the WaPo.

Disaster

New Orleans Escapes Direct Hit, but Most of City Is Inundated

By JOSEPH B. TREASTER and KATE ZERNIKE
Published: August 30, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 30 - New Orleans and other areas of the Gulf Coast today began to deal with the devastation caused by one of the worst storms ever to hit the United States.

Some people had to be rescued from their rooftops in New Orleans after the storm passed.

Floodwaters from a canal were sending more water into already flooded areas of New Orleans, and Mayor C. Ray Nagin said in a television interview that the city was 80 percent under water, with some of it 20 feet deep.

Hundreds of residents have been rescued from rooftops, and as dawn broke rescuers in boats and helicopters searched for more survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The death toll in just one Mississippi county could be as high as 80, Gov. Haley Barbour said. Preliminary reports on Monday put the toll at 55.

"The devastation down there is just enormous," Mr. Barbour said on NBC's "Today" show. "I hate to say it, but it looks like it is a very bad disaster in terms of human life," he added, referring to Harrison County, which includes Gulfport and Biloxi.

"This is our tsunami," Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi, Miss., told The Biloxi Sun Herald.

A survey team has been sent to inspect an overflowing canal in New Orleans that is adding to already flooded areas, said Lieut. Kevin Cowan of the National Guard, who is attached to the Louisiana emergency operations office. The assumption is that the canal is "simply overflowing," he said, but the team will also look for possible breeches in the levee system.

Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf coast with devastating force at daybreak on Monday, sparing New Orleans the catastrophic hit that had been feared but inundating parts of the city and heaping damage on neighboring Mississippi, where it killed dozens, ripped away roofs and left coastal roads impassable.

Preliminary reports on Monday said 55 people had died, and Jim Pollard, a spokesman for the Harrison County emergency operations center, said many of the dead were found in an apartment complex in Biloxi. Seven others were found in the Industrial Seaway.

Packing 145-mile-an-hour winds as it made landfall, the storm left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from its center.

The storm was potent enough to rank as one of the most punishing hurricanes ever to hit the United States. Insurance experts said that damage could exceed $9 billion, which would make it one of the costliest storms on record.

In New Orleans, floodwaters rose to rooftops in one neighborhood, and in many areas emergency workers pulled residents from roofs. The hurricane's howling winds stripped 15-foot sections off the roof of the Superdome, where as many as 10,000 evacuees took shelter.

Some of the worst damage reports came from east of New Orleans with an estimated 40,000 homes reported flooded in St. Bernard Parish. In Gulfport, the storm left three of five hospitals without working emergency rooms, beachfront homes wrecked and major stretches of the coastal highway flooded and unpassable.

"It came on Mississippi like a ton of bricks," Gov. Haley Barbour said at a midday news conference "It's a terrible storm."

President Bush promised extensive assistance for hurricane victims, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency was expected to be working in the area for months, assessing damage to properties and allocating what is likely to be billions of dollars in aid to homeowners and businesses.

In Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, the governors declared search and rescue their top priority, but they said high waters and strong winds were keeping them from that task, particularly in the hardest-hit areas.

The Red Cross is already on their way, as are teams from my local utilities (which will mean slower hook-ups here if the severe storms materialize later today.) and the famed urban search and rescue team from neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia. This will be a whole lot bigger than a $9 billion disaster when all the damage is added up. You can help by giving to the Red Cross, online or call 1-800-HELP-NOW. The scope of this disaster is almost unbelievable and it is going to take time for the recovery. Local volunteers from the Red Cross are already staging in Atlanta and Little Rock, ready to move in and provide meals and water. Want to volunteer? Call your local Red Cross chapter. I know people here who are taking time off work to go south and help people resettle and provide them two squares a day. There is no better feeling than helping someone who has even less than you do. Many people will have lost everything. You will work to exhaustion and beyond and you will make a difference.

Also consider this: the hurricane season has barely gotten underway. September and October are the busy season for Atlantic hurricanes. Your help is likely to be needed again before the season is over.

Please give what you can, and do what you can do. The need is nearly unbelievable.

Theater of the Absurd

via Juan Cole:

Iraq parl't absentees thwart vote on absenteeism
Mon Aug 29, 2005 11:33 AM BST164
By Michael Georgy

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's parliament proposed a law on Monday to sack members of the National Assembly who repeatedly failed to turn up for work -- but the decision was put on hold because too many were absent to hold a vote.

The chamber voted 74 in favour and 71 against the legislation, but deputy speaker Hussein al-Shahristani decided to put proceedings on hold because those opposed said the absentees had a right to vote.

It was not clear why the remaining members of the 275-member parliament had missed work.

"We are in a national assembly and we have to obey its rules," said an assembly member.

Iraq's parliament is portrayed by Iraqi officials and their American supporters as a symbol of democracy after decades of iron-fisted rule under Saddam Hussein.

It meets for long hours locked in heated debates on everything from foreign relations to wheat purchases in a conference hall where birthday parties were once held for Saddam.

Just before arguments on absentee members erupted many issues were discussed, including compensation for victims of relentless suicide bombings and shootings that prompted the construction of blast walls around their building complex.

Democracy is hard, dammit.

Service Note

As the remnents of Katrina head north, the local weather service is predicting severe storms here. All of the standard caveats about service outages apply. My local utility goes down if it gets cloudy.

Disaster

CATASTROPHIC
STORM SURGE SWAMPS 9TH WARD, ST. BERNARD
LAKEVIEW LEVEE BREACH THREATENS TO INUNDATE CITY

By Doug MacCash
and James O.Byrne
Staff writers

A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new .hurricane proof. Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina's fiercest winds were well north. The breach sent a churning sea of water from Lake Pontchartrain coursing across Lakeview and into Mid-City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park and neighborhoods farther south and east.

As night fell on a devastated region, the water was still rising in the city, and nobody was willing to predict when it would stop. After the destruction already apparent in the wake of Katrina, the American Red Cross was mobilizing for what regional officials were calling the largest recovery operation in the organization's history.

Police officers, firefighters and private citizens, hampered by a lack of even rudimentary communication capabilities, continued a desperate and impromptu boat-borne rescue operation across Lakeview well after dark. Coast Guard helicopters with searchlights criss-crossed the skies. Officers working on the scene said virtually every home and business between the 17th Street Canal and the Marconi Canal, and between Robert E. Lee Boulevard and City Park Avenue, had water in it. Nobody had confirmed any fatalities as a result of the levee breach, but they conceded that hundreds of homes had not been checked.

As the sun set over a still-roiling Lake Pontchartrain, the smoldering ruins of the Southern Yacht Club were still burning, and smoke streamed out over the lake. Nobody knew the cause of the fire because nobody could get anywhere near it to find out what happened.

Dozens of residents evacuated to the dry land of the Filmore Street bridge over the Marconi Canal were stranded between the flooded neighborhood on their right, and the flooded City Park on their left, hours after they had been plucked from rooftops or second-story windows.

Firefighters who saved them tried to request an RTA bus to come for the refugees, but realized was no working communications to do so. Ed Gruber, who lives in the 6300 block of Canal Boulevard, said he became desperate when the rising water chased him, his wife, Helen, and their neighbor Mildred K. Harrison to the second floor of their home.

When Gruber saw a boat pass by, he flagged it down with a light, and the three of them escaped from a second- story window.

On the lakefront, pleasure boats were stacked on top of each other like cordwood in the municipal marina and yacht harbor. The Robert E. Lee shopping center was under 7 feet of water. Plantation Coffeehouse on Canal Boulevard was the same. Hynes Elementary School had 8 feet of water inside. Indeed, the entire business district along Harrison Avenue had water to the rooflines in many places. Joshua Bruce, 19, was watching the tide rise from his home on Pontalba Street when he heard a woman crying for help. The woman had apparently tried to wade the surging waters on Canal Boulevard when she was swept beneath the railroad trestle just south of Interstate 610. Bruce said he plunged into the water to pull her to safety. He and friends Gregory Sontag and Joey LaFrance found dry clothes for the woman and she went on her way in search of a second-story refuge downtown.

The effect of the breach was instantly devastating to residents who had survived the fiercest of Katrina's winds and storm surge intact, only to be taken by surprise by the sudden deluge. And it added a vast swath of central New Orleans to those already flooded in eastern New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes.

Beginning at midday, Lakeview residents watched in horror as the water began to rise, pushed through the levee breach by still-strong residual winds from Katrina. They struggled to elevate furniture and eventually found themselves forced to the refuge of second floors just when most in the neighborhood thought they had been spared.

The CNN bobbleheads are predicting hundreds dead. 80% of the city is under 20 feet of water, according to CNN.

The Red Cross would love to hear from you.

Readaround and Bleg

Here's the morning read-around of the news. Gas is going up. Iraq continues to go south. Very, very south. The death toll on Katrina begins to come in, as waters continue to rise after one levee was breached. Democrats show signs of life. For jounalists, Iraq is more dangerous than Viet Nam..

Today promises to be nutty again, but I'll be here as much as possible.

I desperately need to upgrade this computer. I'm asking it to do way more than the RAM is capable of. If you can help, please hit the PayPal button at the top of the right side-bar. I'm still not employed and have to hang onto every buck I've got in the bank. I'm just grateful to have some bucks in the bank, but I'm watching the pile go down everytime I go to the market. Yes, I'm applying for jobs, but once you are over 50, interviews get increasingly harder to obtain. Entry level jobs are out of the question. If you can help this blogger upgrade her computer, you'll get a higher level of service (with a computer that doesn't lock up twice a day.) Please help if you can. I haven't asked for money in a long time, but the need is both great and real right now and I still don't have an income stream. I just dumped major bucks into this machine for a new battery, which should arrive UPS today, but it means I'm flat for a memory upgrade. If you can help, thanks. If you can't, believe me, I understand.

Moving Into New Space

Sorry for the dearth of posts today, but it was for a good reason. There is a boatload of work going on about avian influenza and, somehow, this little blogger got included. As you know, I'm not a scientist or a doctor or anything, just a concerned citizen who finds this story under reported and badly reported. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been contacted by journalists and scientists who are paying attention and and are organizing conferences and things. I'll be going to some of them this fall, sometimes as part of the spear carrying ranks, sometimes as a presenter. I spent a whole bunch of time today working with a scientist in Berkeley, CA, to set up a major think tank day in the fall and did a brain dump with him, by phone and email. We aren't done yet. I'm working with the national Red Cross (who, you might notice, have their hands a little full right now.)

I spent most of the day on the phone or email with a bunch of people. Pandemic flu is starting to get some notice. The most productive was with Larry Brilliant, a wellknown epidemiologist at UCBerkeley. I daresay we'll be on the phone a lot in coming days. I suspect I'll be on that panel in November with one of the Reveres. The Red Cross has pushed their flu day off, unsurprisingly. They have their hands a little full right now.

Their interest in me is not that I'm a flu scientist, but that I'm the publisher of the The Flu Wiki, they want the social side of things. If you have thoughts about that, I'd like to hear them. Er, read them. Whatever. Every conversation today has been about communication, mutual support. Virtual casseroles don't feed your naighbors, but right now we are working with the ideas that will make real casseroles possible. Everything I learned today is about being smart and conquering fear. The Wiki is about education and empowerment. Wikis encourage humility, so I'm interested on many levels, secular and religious. Tell me what you hope to accomplish as a Wiki participant.

Melanie

Evil Empire

Corps of Engineers Fires Critical Official

By ROBERT BURNS
The Associated Press
Monday, August 29, 2005; 11:45 AM

WASHINGTON -- A high-ranking Army Corps of Engineers official who publicly criticized the Pentagon's decision to award Halliburton Co. a no-bid contract for work in Iraq has been demoted, officials said Monday.

Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, who had been the Corps of Engineers' top procurement official since 1997, was removed, effective Saturday, for what Corps of Engineers officials called a poor job performance. Her lawyer, however, said her removal constitutes "blatant discrimination" and violates an earlier agreement with the Army to suspend her demotion until "a sufficient record" pertaining to her complaints is complete.

"The failure to abide by prior commitments and the circumstances surrounding Ms. Greenhouse's removal are the hallmark of illegal retaliation," her attorney, Michael D. Kohn, wrote in the letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"Her removal will send a message to all concerned that if they dare stand up to corrupting influences within the Army contracting world their careers will be destroyed," he added.

Greenhouse was reassigned to a lesser job in the Corps of Engineers and removed from the Senior Executive Service, the top rank of civilian government employees.

Rumsfeld's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, referred questions about the Greenhouse matter to the Army.

Carol Sanders, a spokeswoman for the Corps of Engineers, did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

It's W's Amerika. The rest of us only live here.

In the Tank

Oil Breaches $70 as Hurricane Shuts Gulf of Mexico Production

Aug. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil surged, at one point reaching a record $70.80 a barrel in New York, after Hurricane Katrina forced companies to evacuate platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, where 30 percent of U.S. oil is produced.

Oil jumped as much as $4.67, or 7.1 percent, the biggest increase in 29 months. Natural gas, heating oil and gasoline climbed to all-time highs as well.

Investors are concerned Katrina, the fiercest storm to strike the U.S. Gulf coast since 1969, will rupture pipelines, rip rigs from their moorings and disrupt production for weeks. Hurricane Ivan last September cut the region's oil output by as much as 1.4 million barrels a day. The U.S. produces 5.3 million barrels of crude oil a day.

``There is a long list of production and refineries out because of the hurricane,'' said Tom Bentz, an oil broker at BNP Paribas Commodity Futures Inc. in New York. ``The course is similar to what we saw with Ivan last year, which hit production for a long time.''

Crude oil for October delivery rose $2.57, or 3.9 percent, to $68.70 a barrel at 11:17 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices are 59 percent higher than a year ago.

Natural Gas

Nymex declared force majeure on deliveries of natural gas sold under the August futures contract after Katrina forced the Henry Hub in Louisiana to shut. Force majeure allows producers to avoid penalties for failing to deliver supplies because of unforeseen events. Futures contracts settled on the exchange are delivered to the Henry Hub.

Natural gas for September delivery jumped $1.828, or 19 percent, to $11.62 per million British thermal units in New York. Futures touched $12.07, the highest since trading began in 1990. Prices have more than doubled in the past year.

``Natural gas is the real worry,'' said Bill O'Grady, assistant director of market analysis at A.G. Edwards & Sons in St. Louis. ``Unfortunately we can't import the missing production. This is largely a domestic market.''

Going to be a long and expensive winter.

Thunder on the Right

War Supporters Concerned That 'Theocracy' Will Be Final Word in Iraq Saga

By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, August 29, 2005; 6:30 AM

With the original security arguments for going to war with Iraq now undermined, President Bush's sole standing justification is the prospect of spreading democracy through the Arab Middle East.

President Bush this weekend hailed the agreement between Shiite and Kurd negotiators for a new Iraqi constitution, even while expressing disappointment that Sunni negotiators rejected the deal. Voters will have an opportunity to accept or reject the constitution in an October referendum, and it remains to be seen what effect the Sunni rejection will have. But even if the constitution is approved by voters, a large question will remain about exactly what type of democracy will take root in that country.
President Bush hailed the constitution as an "inspiration to all those who share the universal values of freedom, democracy and the rule of the law."

But in recent weeks, some civil rights leaders and social conservatives had raised concerns to the White House over language in the proposed constitution calling for Islam to be the official religion of the state. The concern is that a religion is being specifically named. They note that the drafters of the U.S. Constitution did not name Christianity as the official religion of this country, considering religious freedom a basic tenet of democracy.

"Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation," the constitution reads, according to the Associated Press. "No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed principles of Islam."

Even though the constitution also demands that "no law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy," some in the United States who have typically supported the president's foreign policies worried that the outcome could be yet another Middle Eastern, pseudo-democracy that tramples on the rights of women and religious minorities, including Christians and Jews.

In an Aug. 18 statement, Tony Perkins, head of the conservative Family Research Council, wrote on that group's Web site: "I have sent a letter to President Bush encouraging the Administration to redouble its efforts to ensure that the Iraq Constitution provides genuine religious freedom for all Iraqi citizens. An Iraqi Constitution that does not protect religious liberty will seriously undermine U.S. efforts in Iraq and the larger Middle East. The sons and daughters of Americans are not risking their lives to establish a theocratic government that denies its citizens the fundamental right of religious freedom." (Here's an updated Perkins memo.)

Reached by phone on Thursday, Perkins said he wanted to make sure that the end result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq would not be the establishment of an Islamic state. And he questioned whether America's sacrifice would be worth it if it is.

Perkins is part of the Bush "base," so methinks the Preznit has a wee problem.

In Other News

via Juan Cole:

Democracy-lite for Iraq: women's rights not 'critical'

By Luciana Bohne
Online Journal Contributing Writer

August 28, 2005—So now that Iraq's constitution will abolish the Personal Status Law that gave Iraqi women some self-determination, how are the apologists for "liberating" Iraq spinning it? President Bush says that he asked "Condi"—ain't she a woman?—and she says it'll be okay. He was eager to get on his $3,000 bike in Idaho, so he didn't have time to express himself with his customary clarity.

Former C.I.A. Middle East specialist, Reuel Marc Gerecht, said on "Meet the Press," that U.S. democracy in 1900 didn't let women vote. If Iraqi democracy resembled that "we'd all be thrilled," he said. "I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy."

So why the hell did we go into Afghanistan? We didn't get bin Laden, and the burqa is still the fashion item de rigueur for Afghan women, unless they want to be raped on the spot. What was Laura Bush so excited about, when her husband told her we would be building democracy in Afghanistan by liberating women if it turns out it's not a requirement? It's all too confusing.

But I'm a woman, and I digress.

Yep. The guy really said that. Not critical to the evolution of democracy. Right, because, after all, contrary to what feminists claim, women are not human beings. They haven't got a mind, so society would be better off if they didn't have the "social right" to read and write or speak in public. Societies without women's participation would be ever so much quieter. A president wouldn't have to run away from one vacation spot to another just because some latter-day Joan of Arc decides to liberate the country from an invasion of murderous lies. Little girls should be seen, not heard. Like in Saudi Arabia—another place where the lack of social rights for women is not hindering the evolution of democracy! There, the invisibility of women in the public sphere is probably called "intelligent design." We don't choose our allies at random, after all.

But why stop at women? African Americans are not crucial to the evolution of democracy either. In 1860, there was slavery in the US but we had a "democracy"—though the slaves weren't thrilled. Why not

make the Sunnis the slave class? Then, Iraq can have a civil war just like we did!

We don't want to spare the growing pains of democracy to anyone. We want everyone to come a long way, baby—possibly through pain, humiliation, struggle, and imprisonment. What's a democracy if it doesn't leave casualties behind! I mean, how is one to congratulate oneself on being the best country in the world if one cannot point to the people's blood, sweat, and tears it took to get it.

No, women's social rights may not be crucial to the development of fatuous abstractions of democracy, but their absence is sure instrumental in ramming through this bogus constitution, scoring a quick publicity point for Bush, in a deal with the mullahs and other patriarchs. Regression is a good trade-off, especially if the brunt of it is absorbed by the suffering if irrelevant bodies of women—and foreign ones at that!

I heard Reuel Gerecht on the TV yesterday. It was another of those "throw shoes at the TV" moments. My TV puts up with a lot.

Gulf Oil Platforms

Oil Surges to Briefly Surpass $70 a Barrel

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: August 29, 2005

HOUSTON, Aug. 29 - Energy companies shut down oil rigs and refineries and evacuated employees in the Gulf of Mexico as Hurricane Katrina approached over the weekend, shrinking oil output in the area at a time when markets are already on edge over surging energy prices.

Crude oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange for October delivery were trading at 69.32 this morning after touching $70.80 overnight Sunday as traders factored in the threat to the most important oil-producing region in the United States. That was up $3.19 from the close on Friday. Oil prices have never risen above $70 a barrel, but when adjusted for inflation they are still lower than they were in the early 1980's.

The evacuations, which were mostly completed by Sunday, cut oil production in the Gulf of Mexico by more than 600,000 barrels a day, or more than a third of the area's normal output of 1.5 million barrels a day. Large refining and oil-shipping installations in southern Louisiana, where the hurricane was expected to make landfall early Monday, also shut down over the weekend.

"The oil market is going to be on fire until we figure out exactly what is going on," David Pursell, a principal with Pickering Energy Partners in Houston, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. "There's fear on several fronts, from the capacity of this storm to tear up pipelines on the ocean floor to doing extreme damage to port infrastructure and platforms."

Speculation about a possible release of oil from the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve led to a drop in oil prices at the end of last week, though traders said talk about such a plan was premature. The Bush administration has been hesitant to release oil from the reserve, which has 700 million barrels of oil, despite calls from Democrats in Congress to do so.

The focus on the reserve is bound to intensify as the hurricane takes its toll. The storm is expected to be the biggest disruption to oil production in the gulf since Hurricane Ivan last year, which reduced the area's yearly output by 7 percent after destroying 7 platforms and damaging more than 100 underwater pipelines. The Gulf of Mexico accounts for about a quarter of the nation's overall domestic oil production.

Gasoline prices for consumers may climb further as refining capacity is stretched by the storm. Chalmette Refinery, which is about 10 miles east of downtown New Orleans and processes 190,000 barrels of oil a day, shut down over the weekend. Calls to officials at Chalmette, a venture between Exxon Mobil and Petróleos de Venezuela, went unanswered on Sunday. Valero Energy said it was shutting down its St. Charles refinery in Louisiana, and Chevron was shutting down a refinery in Pascagoula, Miss., Bloomberg News reported.

Fill your tank. Now.

Gulfport and Biloxi

Dr. Jeff Masters is a meteorologist.

via Weather Underground

Katrina is due south of the Mississippi-Louisiana border, and moving northward at 15 mph. On this course, the western edge of the eyewall will pass some 20 miles to the east of New Orleans, sparing that city a catastrophic hit. As the eye passes east of the city later this morning, north winds of about 100 mph will push waters from Lake Pontchartrain up to the top of the levee protecting the city, and possibly breach the levee and flood the city. This flooding will not cause the kind of catastrophe that a direct hit by the right (east) eyewall would have, with its 140 mph winds and 15-20 foot storm surge. New Orleans will not suffer large loss of life from Katrina.

Biloxi and Gulfport Mississippi will take the full force of Katrina's right eyewall, and a storm surge of 15-20 feet is likely along the central Mississippi coast. Katrina is a strong but weakening Category 4 hurricane, and will probably come ashore about noon CDT near Gulfport as a weak Category 4 hurricane with 135 mph winds. The storm has been slowly weakening the past 12 hours, with the central pressure rising more than 1mb/hour on average. The central pressure measured by the Hurricane Hunters has been oscillating the past three hours, jumping from 918 mb to 925, then back to 920, and now 921 mb at 7:30am EDT. The winds measured at flight level on the east side of the eyewall were 134 kt, which translates to 140 mph at the surface. The cloud pattern in satellite imagery has decreased on the west side due to dry air entrainment, and the eyewall has opened up to the south and southwest in radar imagery. With the center passing over mixed swamplands and water, much of the energy that sustains the hurricane will be cut off, making any further intensification unlikely. Katrina is not hitting at maximum intensity and is sparing New Orleans a direct hit, and although the damage will be incredible, it could have been much, much worse.

Tropical Depression 13
A new tropical depression formed in the mid-Atlantic yesterday, and is headed northwest over open ocean. This is one we definitely do not need to worry about for now. The storm may even dissipate due to hostile wind shear within the next few days.

Dr. Jeff Masters

Grateful for small mercies.

After Katrina

Powerful Hurricane Closes In on Gulf Coast, Threatening Havoc
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 29, 2005

Filed at 5:58 a.m. ET

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Hurricane Katrina edged slightly to the east early Monday as it bore down on the Gulf Coast, providing some hope that the worst of the storm's 150 mph winds might not directly strike this low-lying city.

Oil and Gas: Approaching Storm Slows Oil Output in Gulf of Mexico (August 29, 2005)

Katrina, which weakened slightly overnight to a strong Category 4 storm, turned slightly eastward as it closed in on land, which would put the western eyewall -- the weaker side of the strongest winds -- over New Orleans.

''It's not as bad as the eastern side. It'll be plenty bad enough,'' said Eric Blake of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Mayor Ray Nagin said he believed 80 percent of the city's 480,000 residents had heeded an unprecedented mandatory evacuation as Katrina threatened to become the most powerful storm ever to slam the city.

''It's capable of causing catastrophic damage,'' said National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield. ''Even well-built structures will have tremendous damage. Of course, what we're really worried about is the loss of lives.

''New Orleans may never be the same.''

Crude oil futures spiked to more than $70 a barrel in Singapore for the first time Monday as Katrina targeted an area crucial to the country's energy infrastructure. The storm already forced the shutdown of an estimated 1 million barrels of refining capacity.

Terry Ebbert, New Orleans director of homeland security, said more than 4,000 National Guardsmen were mobilizing in Memphis and will help police New Orleans streets.

The Louisiana Superdome, normally home of professional football's Saints, became the shelter of last resort Sunday for thousands of the area's poor, homeless and frail. Some arrived on crutches, canes and stretchers, while National Guardsmen searched everyone for guns, knives and drugs.

''We just took the necessities,'' said Michael Skipper, who pulled a wagon loaded with bags of clothes and a radio. ''The good stuff -- the television and the furniture -- you just have to hope something's there when you get back. If it's not, you just start over.''

Top up your tank. God knows how high gas will go by the end of the week. Do you really think the Dumbya administration will prevent profiteering?

Katrina, Moving In

It isn't over after Katrina.

My prayers are with those on the Gulf, but we aren't done yet.

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Medication and CAM

(CAM is short for Complementary & Alternative Medicine – this is a term the medical community uses, so it behooves us as lay people to know it to when or if we have to talk with them.)

I cannot overemphasize how easy it is to “fall down the rabbit hole” on this topic. My daughter is the most important person in my life, and her welfare is paramount. I have to be a little extra careful for her, because she is allergic to most antibiotics, so for my family, secondary infections as a result of H5N1 are as important as the disease itself to beware of.

On the other side of the coin, as you’ll see below, you can find three different sides on every issue regarding what to do or not do in preparation for H5N1 when it comes to meds and alternatives. You must consider the flu itself, then the “cytokine storm”, then secondary infections which could be as deadly as the flu itself, primarily bacterial pneumonia. All of us will be under enormous stress, which will weaken our immune systems in general. It is far, far too easy to lose hope, focus, or your sanity trying to figure out best options on this keystone of your preparations.

I cannot tell what the “best” options are regarding this topic. I can only tell you what I am going to do and provide you with links to make your own analysis from which to take what you consider proper precautions.

I sincerely and strongly warn you to not fall into the trap of becoming obsessive in the process of seeking answers, because much of this will come down to what your common sense says is worthwhile once you’ve heard all sides. And when you’ve hit a reasonable level of preparation, step back and take a breath or three before you do anything else.

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Introduction and Framework

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Food

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Water

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Medication and CAM

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Emergencies, Evacuation, Protection

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Entertainment & Acceptance

UPDATE:
RELENZA, LIQUID TAMIFLU, STATINS – There have been some reports that Relenza, which is taken presently as a powder nasal spray, may be a better antiviral than Tamiflu. So far, the Effect Measure website seems to have blown the top off of this idea. Apparently, an injectible form of Relenza was being promoted by a Hong Kong doctor as soething that should be produced in order to have an alternative to relatively expensive Tamiflu, and so he referenced, publicly, old reports, never fully verified, that Tamiflu might be losing its potency against the influenza virus.

That said, you can never have enough antiviral options. If Tamiflu is overused, resistence to the drug will follow eventually. If you have the extra cash, consider Relenza as well as Tamiflu, but I also might recommend two other options as well, since you’re Mr. Moneybags and all that.

One is that Tamiflu is now available as a suspension. I very much want some of this, because my neighborhood has both small children and the “elderly-n-frail” in it, and while I had the presence of mind to buy some pill splitters, I really, really think that a fluid version of Tamiflu will help most at preventing overdosing both children and the frail.

Another is that a type of medication known as statins (Zocor and Lipitor are examples) may be able to reduce the effectiveness of “cytokine storms” in people infected with H5N1. This is still in the preliminary stages of verification, but it’s worth noting.

PURELL – Contact via touch will is probably the most common way for you to catch the flu. Purell is a hand sanitizer that I would recommend as a first line of defense, because it both sanitizes and moisturizes. My father used to alternate between this and Jergens Hand Lotion to counter the effects of working in a steel mill on his hands. (Yes, I also mentioned in the past that he was a high school teacher. He worked three-quarter time as the former, full time as the latter for many years. Yes, Microsoft would have loved him…)

MASKS/FILTERS – I meant 60 filters, not masks, for the nanomasks. And to compliment the nanomasks, I recommend goggles or plastic side-shielded safety glasses, as well as shields like this and this one, escpecially with this option, although I was originally thinking about this one. If I have some free cash, I may a few different ones and will tell you all what seemed to work/fit best for me.

ORIGINAL POST:
Flu Pandemic Preparation - Introduction and Framework

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Food

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Water

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Medication and CAM

I tend to prefer to buy my meds and alternatives from Vitacost.com and House of Nutrition Online, with Now Foods an offbeat option:

http://vitacost.com (through August 31st, 5% discount coupon – WZ54ACC)

http://store.yahoo.com/hono/index.htmll

http://www.nowfoods.com (Frustrating because you have to go to an actual bricks-and-mortar store to get their products, but they have some items that are otherwise hard to find)

One final note – when looking at medications and alternatives, realize that children’s dosages could be markedly different from adult dosages. Please plan accordingly.

TAMIFLU OR NO TAMIFLU?

Also known as oseltamivir.

We’re buying it. I know that there is no proof that it will work, but it’s the closest thing we have to a possibly effective antiviral therapy. Frankly, I expect fear to eliminate availability when the flu strikes here, so better safe than sorry.

Now, there are ethical issues with the use and stockpiling on Tamiflu. If there is a shortage, should it not be reserved for those who are ill? However, I expect the present administration, whether via Health & Human Services or Homeland Security, to have their hands full between inadequate dosages being available in the first place, and an inadequate plan for distribution. If I have extra and friends or neighbors fall ill, then I’ll give them any extra Tamiflu I have on hand beyond the two packs for myself and my daughter, and I’ll help them get it if their doctor can’t provide access to the drug. But I do not trust the Federal Government to do their job well or fairly. They’ve let us down for the past five years – why should this situation be any different? I certainly will not trust them to protect my daughter.

There is talk that Tamiflu has a shelf life not of two years, but of five to seven years. Roche will apparently, with new shipments of the drug, state on packaging that the official shelf life is five years, and that with more data acquired regarding the drug over time, it will expand to seven years. So in other words, if you have Tamiflu with an expiration date of August 2005, for example, your medication may actually be good through August 2008, and possibly through August 2010.

I’m concerned that Dr. Woodson (see below) can’t decide if a one or two week supply is necessary for treatment – the standard recommendation is currently one week. If you need to use it prophylacticly, however, (if you’re a doctor, nurse or first responder dealing directly with flu cases repeatedly) the US Department of Defense recommends using it for six weeks. The FDA does not approve beyond an eight week course of treatment.

I’ll be personally buying one week for myself and my daughter, plus one more as either a barter good or to help any friends or relatives who show up at my door sick.

The following is a source I prefer for purchase because they tell you the expiration date for the product up front:

http://www.drugdelivery.ca/s4632-s-TAMIFLU.aspx

MY CYTOKINE STORM PREPARATIONS

Benadryl – Buy lots of it – at least three 24-pill packs per person (25 mg per pill).

Gammalineoleic Acid (GLA) – My daughter and I will take daily dosages, starting now, of borage oil via capsules. We’ll have black currant and evening primrose oil on standby.

Eicosapenthenoic Acid (EPA) – My daughter and I will take daily dosages, starting now, of flaxseed, cod liver and fish oil via capsules.

All oils, where we can find them, will be cold pressed.

Curcumin – My daughter and I will take daily dosages, starting now, of NSI Tumeric (standardized 95% curcumin).

Scutellaria (Skullcap) – My daughter and I will have on hand scutellaria tea, which we’ll take in the mornings or just before bedtime.

As an extra precaution, I’ll have my daughter drink one cup of green tea a day, and will keep a small stash of Kedem Grape Juice on standby for access to Resveratol.

Make sure you have anti-diarrhea pills and the Basic Fluid Solution listed below or such items as Gatorade powder to restore electrolytes. Consider these two items of equal importance to the stuff listed above – don’t wait until the last second to get them.

MY SECONDARY INFECTION PREPARATIONS

Both my daughter and I, but especially my daughter, will be getting a pneumovax vaccination. (Do not consider this for children under six years of age…)

http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Consequences.MedicalTherapy#SecondaryInfections

Make sure that you have, per person, per Dr. Woodson’s recommendations (see below) the following from which to make Basic Fluid Solution to revive sick patients…
1 lb table salt
10 lbs table sugar
6 oz baking soda

I cannot say enough good things about Dr. Woodson’s recommendations in his web-accessible document – I will be buying everything listed in his flu preparation kit - but I really wish he’d change the cover page.

The following are considered either good for dealing with cleaning out the lungs or as “natural antibiotics”:

Guaifensesin (usually found in Robitussin DM, but pills also exist)
Wild Lettuce
Mullein
Pleurisy Root
Slippery Elm
Yerba Santa
Myrrh
Golden Seal
Yucca
Garlic – We take this as pills already, accompanying our daily multivitamin

In addition, saline spray will help kill bacteria in the nasal passages.

I also will be buying two bottles of Sambucol and a half-dozen packs of Schiff ImmunAssure. My logic is that once someone has acquired an immunity to H5N1, there is a chance that they could be hit hard shortly thereafter by a more standard flu virus. Some reports a few months back about a potentially large H5N1 outbreak being reported in Cambodia were later found to actually be a reintroduction of the 1968 “Hong Kong flu” virus. I will not be using these medications against the H5N1 virus.

STRESS

The best thing to do to alleviate stress is to lose yourself in a good book, movie, or the company of friends. Unfortunately, this won’t always be possible, so I recommend the following to help with relieving stress…

Peppermint Oil diluted in water
Ginger tea
Yarrow – Lowers blood pressure, stimulates digestion
Devils Claw – Helps with indigestion and heartburn

MEDICAL ITEMS

Nanomasks are a necessity. Plan on buying at least 60 per person.

http://www.buynanomask.com

Splash shields are a necessary compliment to your nanomasks. I haven’t received a test package yet, but they come 24 to a box, and I suspect that a fresh one every day you are tending someone who is sick is necessary. The same goes for latex or nitrile (if you are allergic to latex) gloves.

I like these folks – Industrial & Safety Supplies…they have other items worth considering.

http://www.labsafety.com

And, of course, you will need a bedpan or equivalent if someone you hold near and dear gets sick. (You, of course, will always make it to the bathroom.) I like these folks for the variety of options…

http://activeforlife.com

OPINIONS/DATA

There is some useful data, but also some arenas for conflict.

1) Flu Wiki primer on “cytokine storms”…
http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Science.PrimerCytokineStorm

2) Flu Wiki notes on medications and alternatives…
http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Consequences.MedicalTherapy

http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Consequences.ComplementaryAndAlternativeMedicine

3) Resveratol, good and bad…
http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Consequences.RedWineAsAntiviral

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/resveratrol.html

4) One person’s views on sambucol…
http://www.med-owl.com/health/H5N1-Virus-Therapy.html

5) And another view, from a personal letter I received from John Hart, creator of one of the first H5N1 preparation booklets…

Rich,
Thanks for asking about cytokine storms.

Thanks,
John Hart

6) Found as a Flu Wiki Forum listing, Dr. Woodson’s recommendations…
http://www.fluwikie.com/uploads/Consequences/Pandemic3Aug2005

7) And last but not least, the Current Events website on Flu preparations (NOTE: Please do not read this until you have a large chunk of time handy, and take it in slowly….)
http://www.curevents.com/vb/showthread.php?t=17139

Hurricane: The Human Cost

Oh, great, we get soggy humidities with the hurricane.

This storm is a killer in New Orleans, it is going to be a major nuisance here. If you are in the path, do some preparation. Make some preparations if you want to spend some decent time with your family. If you are in the evacuation path, get the fuck out.

I'm ready to post your storm stories here. email me. The weather here is going to suck before the storm gets here. Share.

You Can Help

Katrina is going to be a disaster of epic proportions and spectacular economic damage. It will take greater New Orleans years to recover. If you can, contribute to the Red Cross. The size of the storm means that a huge area will be affected: Katrina is twice the size of Andrew. The remnents will be here on Wednesday, but because the storm is so large (half the size of the entire Gulf of Mexico), we'll be feeling the outer edges by Monday night. This storm is almost unimaginable.

For the Birds

All Things Considered had an honest avian influenza story last night. The audio file is here. Needs Real or WMP. Here's hoping that the American media are beginning to waken from their slumber. Google news gives me substantial American bylines today for the first time.

Site News

I'm still fighting a stomach bug so posting will be light today, at least from me. I'm sure you are all absorbing Rich's enlightening series on pandemic planning. Guest posters, the house is yours today.

The Context

Big Guns For Iraq? Not So Fast.

By CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: August 28, 2005

EVEN though President Bush keeps saying American forces won't leave Iraq until its forces can fight on their own, the United States isn't rushing to give the Iraqi military heavy weapons.

There is an official explanation for that - that such things take time.

But there is also another reason to go slow, one that illustrates how tightly American military success is intertwined with the political prospects of Iraq itself. This reason is little discussed in public by military officers, but it was evident last week on the explosion-scarred streets of Baghdad, in the skirmishes between rival Shiite forces in Najaf, and in the confusion of Iraq's struggle to complete a new constitution.

Simply put, Iraq remains too fragile for any planner to know what shape the country will be in six months or a year from now - whether it will reach compromises and hold together or split apart in a civil war.

And that presents a conundrum for American military planners. With those questions up in the air, they have to fear that any heavy arms distributed now could end up aimed at American forces or feeding a growing civil conflict. And the longer Iraq's army has to wait for sophisticated weapons, the longer American forces are likely to be needed in Iraq as a bulwark against chaos.

In public, the commanders cite many reasons for the slow pace of equipping the Iraqis: the supply chain is long, Iraq's soldiers are barely trained and largely untested, and the rebels they face are better fought with rifles than tanks.

In private, some officers acknowledge other concerns, too. "We're worried about civil war or a coup," said a senior American officer in Baghdad charged with outfitting Iraq's new army. He would not agree to be identified because the concerns he was discussing are so sensitive.

Translation: we can't afford to turn the Iraqi Defense Force into a really effective force. It might be used on us. In other words, this is a clusterfuck of truly epic proportions.

Science and Its Discontents

This NYT Op-Ed is so important that I'm tossing "fair use" to the winds and giving you the whole thing.

Show Me the Science
By DANIEL C. DENNETT

Blue Hill, Me.

PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching about "intelligent design" in the schools, said, "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both intelligent design and evolution "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future."

Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.

First, imagine how easy it would be for a determined band of naysayers to shake the world's confidence in quantum physics - how weird it is! - or Einsteinian relativity. In spite of a century of instruction and popularization by physicists, few people ever really get their heads around the concepts involved. Most people eventually cobble together a justification for accepting the assurances of the experts: "Well, they pretty much agree with one another, and they claim that it is their understanding of these strange topics that allows them to harness atomic energy, and to make transistors and lasers, which certainly do work..."

Fortunately for physicists, there is no powerful motivation for such a band of mischief-makers to form. They don't have to spend much time persuading people that quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity really have been established beyond all reasonable doubt.

With evolution, however, it is different. The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists. Nobody is immune to wishful thinking. It takes scientific discipline to protect ourselves from our own credulity, but we've also found ingenious ways to fool ourselves and others. Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more unpacking.

A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:

Test Two

Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO]

Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [YES] [NO]

Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [YES] [NO]

If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:

Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin's great idea. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.

Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.

Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small, unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years on end.

But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work - all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a half-billion years ago - we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while.

We can't yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says.

All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky improvements accumulate - this was Darwin's insight - eyes can automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent designer.

Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.

If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of cognitive illusion that you can feel even as you discount it, you are like just about everybody else in the world; the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, once jokingly credited his colleague Leslie Orgel with "Orgel's Second Rule": Evolution is cleverer than you are. Evolutionary biologists are often startled by the power of natural selection to "discover" an "ingenious" solution to a design problem posed in the lab.

This observation lets us address a slightly more sophisticated version of the cognitive illusion presented by Test Two. When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of natural selection they are not acknowledging intelligent design. The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own.

Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word "design." For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process. But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown to be mistaken.

Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves without purposes and without intelligence. This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not made of tiny hot things.

The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as "some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers." What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings on this planet:

About six million years ago, intelligent genetic engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be a more interesting planet if there was a language-using, religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and genetically re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked.

If some version of this hypothesis were true, it could explain how and why human beings differ from their nearest relatives, and it would disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses that are being pursued.

We'd still have the problem of how these intelligent genetic engineers came to exist on their home planet, but we can safely ignore that complication for the time being, since there is not the slightest shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.

But here is something the intelligent design community is reluctant to discuss: no other intelligent-design hypothesis has anything more going for it. In fact, my farfetched hypothesis has the advantage of being testable in principle: we could compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for unmistakable signs of tampering by these genetic engineers from another galaxy. Finding some sort of user's manual neatly embedded in the apparently functionless "junk DNA" that makes up most of the human genome would be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if they are looking at all, they haven't come up with anything to report.

It's worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks or the classrooms. The scientific participants in these arguments vie for acceptance among the relevant expert communities in peer-reviewed journals, and the writers and editors of textbooks grapple with judgments about which findings have risen to the level of acceptance - not yet truth - to make them worth serious consideration by undergraduates and high school students.

SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.

The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.

Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.

Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on publishing books and articles for non-scientists and on other public relations efforts, the Discovery Institute should finance its own peer-reviewed electronic journal. This way, the organization could live up to its self-professed image: the doughty defenders of brave iconoclasts bucking the establishment.

For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Institute, has said it is: "Intelligent design itself does not have any content."

Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrat- ed?

All articles posted under fair use rules in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, and are strictly for the educational and informative purposes of our readers.

Posted by Melanie at 10:28 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Hurricane Warning

Cat 5? Headed at NOLA? When I learned disaster planning, this was the nightmare scenario.

Hurricane Heading for Gulf Coast Is Upgraded to Category 5

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 28, 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- Hurricane Katrina strengthened to a dangerous Category 5 on Sunday with 160 mph sustained wind as residents of south Louisiana jammed freeways in a rush to get out of the way of the powerful storm.

The National Hurricane Center put out a special advisory on the hurricane's gain in strength just before 8 a.m. EDT. The boost came just hours after Katrina reached Category 4, with wind of 145 mph, as it gathered energy from the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico.

Officials worried that not enough people were taking the monster Category 5 storm seriously enough.

"People need to take this very seriously and get to a safe area while they can," said State Police Sgt. Frank Coates.

Katrina was expected to hit the Gulf Coast early Monday and a hurricane warning was in effect from Morgan City to the Alabama-Florida line.

If you are in an evacuation zone, pack the car and leave now. Please.

Food Memories

This is from an email I wrote to foody liberal friends who are heading to Italy in a couple of months. I decided to share it with all of you. We need to party a little before the bird flu hits.

If you notice the Wiki and JTF go down for a while tonight, not to worry. The server host is migrating to proprietary servers and they promise everything should be hunky-dory by midnite.

How's your Italian?
http://www.umbriaonline.com/article_263.phtml

I really learned to cook on my first trip to Italy in 1980. I was, at best, an indifferent cook before that, a child of my mother's 1950's kitchen (processed foods, very little fresh, she'd never really learned to cook and I didn't learn much from her.) Italy was a revolution in the way I understood food. I was traveling with a festival orchestra for the summer and eating both in restaurants and in people's homes--part of the time the orchestra put us up with the locals. We were in the festival cities of Spoleto and Assisi and they just don't have the hotel stock, part of the local economy is housing the festival crowds in people's homes. We were eating in the cheap local restaurants where the locals ate. The food was unpretentious but delicious, home cooking done in restaurant quantities. Whether in private homes or restaurants which were little more than that, I always asked for a visit to the kitchen and usually got a lesson in their particular speciality. Home cooks don't tend to use Tartuffi Neri, they are dear even in Italy, but in Spoleto La Pozza della Mensa should not be missed. I spent time in that kitchen.

Bring me back some truffles from your Italy trip and I'll make pasta, fresh pasta, I make my own, with truffle sauce the way I learned to make it in Spoleto. This is heaven on a plate.

Fresh tarfuffi don't keep particularly well, so the ones in jars are perfectly acceptable. If anything, the processing intensifies the flavor. Shaved truffles make carboard taste good. You could eat The Washington Post if it had truffles on it.

I had one of the half-dozen best meals of my life at a restaurant in Turino on a later trip but I'll be damned if I can remember the name of the restaurant. Smoked salmon over fresh pasta in a vodka cream sauce. I ate real slow to make it last as long as possible. I don't even like smoked salmon. But I still dream about that meal. It was a peak experience. Yes, I've been to the legendary Inn at Little Washington. It was fabulous, but I can't tell you what I ate. This one meal from Italy really stuck in my memory. I think that's worth something. The trout at the restaurants around Lago Trasimeno remain in memory and I don't like fish.

Sicilian Pizza on the beach in Taormina. "Tosti," the bar food in all of Italy (which I make to this day), and then there was the bernaise sauce at the now-defunct French place in Arlington, Virginia which was a reason to eat beef. I grew up just south of the stockyards in St. Paul, MN, and we had great beef. I can't find anything like it, in flavor or consistency, around here. Friends tell me to try Wegman's. I eat very little meat because I simply don't trust the system which brings it to us. Whole Food's natural and organic case is a resource, but who can pay those kinds of prices on a regular basis? The meows are meat eaters, of course, but this cook is 90% vegetarian out of necessity. I can't trust the food supply.

In the weeks to come, I'll recommend some cookbooks. Rich Erwin is right, one of the things we need to do is prepare ourselves to cook some special meals. When we're in home quarantine, we are going to need to look forward to something beyond peanut butter sandwiches if we are going to have a reason to get up in the morning. I look forward to bringing you a tasket of simple recipes that will allow you to "kick up" prepared foods and make some things simply when electricity is in short supply and you've got a grill or a propane stove (if you don't have one, kick yourself and go get one with a batch of propane bottles. It got me through the last hurricane.)

Add your stormflu recipies in comments. I'll keep this thread live for as long as seems reasonable.

What I do is feed my friends, it is my way of taking care of them and it is real important to me. Sharing recipes is another way we make community.

This is part of my bird flu preparedness, making sure that you are eating well while you are sheltering in place. If you have something to look forward to at the end of the day, you are unlikely to spread the infection. Or get it.

I'm the foody component at The Flu Wiki.

In Flames

The Fragments of Iraq

Published: August 27, 2005

Hopes that Iraq's parliament might find the wisdom and patriotism to improve significantly on the badly flawed constitutional draft it was handed last week have pretty much evaporated. Provisions that could strip away the legal rights of Iraqi women have been left unchanged. The chances of this language being interpreted benignly by a future legislature dominated by Shiite religious parties or a future Supreme Court packed with senior clerics is less than nil.

Days of discussions with Sunni representatives who had been shut out of the drafting process went predictably nowhere when the Sunnis declined to sign on to divisive designs for federalism and vindictive rules for former Baathist supporters.

A loose federal structure with a weakened central government has an obvious appeal for the Kurdish northeast, which wants as much independence as it can get. It also attracts support from Shiites in the southeast, home to Iraq's most productive oil deposits and its main trading ports. But too much federalism would be little short of a disaster for the Sunni Arabs in the western provinces, which are landlocked and oil-poor. Their fear is that despite language apportioning the oil revenue by population, the Shiites and Kurds will manage to maximize their shares.

A fractured Iraq could dangerously destabilize the broader region. Turkish hostility is guaranteed for any Kurdish statelet, which Ankara worries might set an attractive example for Turkey's own restive and oppressed Kurdish minority. Iran would find it irresistible to manipulate a semiautonomous Shiite region dominated by Iranian-financed parties and Iranian-armed militias, and spiritually guided by an Iranian-born ayatollah.

If Iraq starts to fragment along these lines, no one should be surprised to see the orphaned Sunni west looking for whatever allies it can find in Baathist Syria, in the Islamist opposition circles of Saudi Arabia and among Jordan's Palestinian majority. The threat of civil war is obvious.

It seems pretty obvious to me that Iraq is in a de facto state of civil war.

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Water

Water has to be addressed from two points of view. Most North Americans have relatively easy access to water, and we also have relatively efficient means of acquiring potable water. On the other hand, most of us rely on fairly complicated systems, via utilities, to acquire, purify and make accessible that water. Although we are blessed with a great deal of water in North America, a lot of it is harder to get and harder to make potable (or at least acceptable to drink) than you might think. It helps that many systems require few people to operate and are fairly reliable, but it wouldn’t take much of a problem to cause a huge disruption.

Many people will be tempted to just assume that water supplies will be fine and that rainwater or snow will be a valid alternative if necessary. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll have water that’s safe to drink – Giardia is something people are often on the lookout to avoid in my neck of the woods, and that or other water-borne diseases could cause you enough grief, at least via diarrhea, to weaken you enough to become a candidate for other diseases.

So, you can store some beforehand, or have the tools you need to process water as you bring it into your home. I recommend both.

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Introduction and Framework

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Food

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Water

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Medication and CAM

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Emergencies, Evacuation, Protection

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Entertainment & Acceptance

UPDATE:
BLEACH – I can’t find 5.25% bleach anymore – Clorox seems to have led everybody to 6% content. The rules for using bleach to treat water that I’ve stated earlier still apply, but use only bleach that has Sodium Hypochlorite in it. Clorox says that it’s addition of sodium hydroxide to their “Clorox Ultra” and other concentrated bleaches won’t make a difference, but until I see otherwise, be safe – don’t use bleach with sodium hydroxide in it.

CONTAINERS - I, in addition to using Crystal Springs and having two Katadyn options available, will be buying some Nitro-Pack 20-gallon containers. It will cost more than 30 or 55-gallon containers, but, while I live in a house now, I want something a bit more mobile if I ever have to move into smaller dwellings. I can see, with minimal help, moving 180 lbs of water in a container without much trouble, but the much larger weight available via the larger containers gives me pause. Since water is so vital to our welfare, I consider a “three layer” option a necessity, and hope you will as well.

ORIGINAL POST:
STORAGE

Storage is tricky for some folks because of space. The Red Cross considers one gallon of water per day per person to be the minimal amount of water that should be kept on hand in the event of a disaster. Half of that is for drinking, half for bathing, cooking, etc… Assuming that we lose access to potable water for one out of every three days in a 90-day scenario, that’s 30 gallons per person as your minimum requirement.

If you want to do things fast, you have outfits like Crystal Springs that rent water dispensers, five-gallon neoprene water containers and six-container racks. For my area, here’s an example of costs – prices and offerings may vary.

If I purchase an initial 12 5-gallon containers, that costs $90. Every time I replace an empty with a full container of water, that’s $7.50. Dispensers come in room temperature ($4 a month), room temperature/cold ($7.50 a month) and hot/cold ($12 a month). As with food, you’ll want to integrate this option into your daily life.

http://www.water.com

These items can also be purchased now from stores such as Target and the larger hardware stores, though supplies for such items can be spotty in some locales. I’ve seen the neoprene containers go for as little as $5 empty, though seals have been hard to find. The dispensers have been anywhere between $100 and $200, and the apparent quality of the product tends to be reflected in the price.

You can also go the “55-gallon drum” route. Now, I don’t mean this literally – do not buy anything that is not a clean, unused barrel or drum. They just aren’t worth the risk or hassle, period. However, I do like the Nitro-Pak water storage units simply because they are something that has been thought through somewhat. I like their Family Water Storage Package #1, but I’d prefer to buy half of what they’re selling – I don’t know if I want four drums when my need may only be for two.

http://www.nitro-pak.com/product_info.php/products_id/435

And yes, there really is no cheap way to store potable water.

FILTERING/PURIFICATION

We have, in our home, two ancient but very serviceable Katadyn pocket filters. They require minimal upkeep and cleaning, though I would recommend buying extra brushes from them for the latter process, if possible, since we are talking about a 90-day quarantine. They aren’t cheap, but for $200, they are worth every penny.

I especially like and will most likely be buying the Katadyn Camp Filter. For $60-$65, it allows you to process up to 5,000 gallons of water, and would be perfect for processing questionable water supplies.

I would always, however, have some household bleach handy for after processing, just in case. Do not use bleach before running water through any filters or purifiers, and use ONLY bleach that has no additives beyond the basic ingredient, 5.25% sodium hypochlorite, such as Regular Clorox Bleach. I would avoid Clorox Ultra, though some think it is safe, because it includes a slightly higher concentration of sodium hypochlorite (6%) and includes sodium hydroxide.

Let any suspended particles settle to the bottom, or strain them through layers of paper towels or clean cloth. Add eight drops (1/4 teaspoon) of bleach per gallon of clear water, or 16 drops (1/2 teaspoon) per gallon of cloudy water. People should mix the water thoroughly and allow it to stand for 30 minutes before using. Sadly, if it tastes like chlorine, that means adequate disinfection has taken place. Otherwise, try a second time – if that also fails, don’t use the water.

As in the Food section, Campmor and Nitro-Pak have a full range of Katadyn items. Nitro-Pak has some of the more exotic options, but both will have what you need.

Oh, and get a Solar Shower or Sun Shower (or whatever they call them now) if you can. You want to minimize the drudgery of being cooped up somewhere, and hot showers plus hot food, for me at least, will two-thirds of the way towards retaining my sanity while being cooped up inside.

Hurricane News

I guess today is disaster day here at Bump. I've been an amateur meteorologist all of my life, with a particular interest in severe weather. Readers on the Gulf coast: follow your local government recommendations. If you are in a mandatory evacuation area, get out. A major hurricane drawing a bead on the New Orleans metro area has been a disaster planners' nightmare for a long time.

Hurricane watch issued as evacuation begins
Plaquemines issues mandatory order; others leaving voluntarily

Saturday, August 27, 2005--As evacuations - mandatory and voluntary - began in parts of the greater New Orleans area Saturday morning, the National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane watch from Morgan City to the Pearl River, including metro New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain.

Across the area, residents were holding their breath under the cloud of an ominous projection that shows the path of Hurricane Katrina crossing directly over the metro area. Katrina is currently a major Category 3 hurricane, and is expected to continue strengthening, perhaps even reaching Category 5 before landfall.

Plaqumines Parish President Benny Rousselle has issued a Phase I mandatory evacuation for all of Plaquemines Parish.

St. Bernard Parish has issued a "recommended" evacuation for its residents while St. Charles Parish, like Plaquemines has called for a mandatory pullout.

As of yet, no decision has come from parish officials in St. Tammany, Jefferson or Orleans, though announcements are expected around noon.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he probably would call an evacuation Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. He said he was telling residents to "get their supplies, get their medications in order, clean up storm drains and get ready. Because it looks as if we're going to get hit."

Lafourche Parish has not issued an evacuation order, but is asking residents to prepare in case an order is issued.

The latest forecast track for Hurricane Katrina - issued at 10 a.m. CDT - has the strengthening storm crossing lower Plaquemines, then north on a line directly across the New Orleans metro area.

The storm has intensified and is now a Category 3, with sustained winds of 115 mph and higher gusts. Some major models have it strengthening to a Category 4, or even Category 5 by landfall Monday evening. It is moving to the west near 7 mph and is approximately 430 miles southeast on the mouth of the Mississippi River. A gradual turn to the west-northwest is expected during the next 24 hours.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency late Friday, making it easier to implement emergency procedures, including evacuations, if necessary.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he will make a decision about evacuations and other emergency procedures today about noon.

Katrina, the 11th named storm of a busy season, was upgraded to Category 3 as it moved deeper into the Gulf of Mexico, after crossing Florida yesterday. Homes were flooded, fallen trees blocked roads and utility crews scrambled to restore power to more than 1 million homes and businesses Friday as South Floridians coped with Hurricane Katrina's messy aftermath.

Voluntary evacuations for the Mississippi and Alabama coasts. I've ridden out three category one storms in the last 30 years. I did not enjoy the experience.

Flu Update

Deadly flu: `The only question is when'
Avian's arrival called inevitable
Experts fear global pandemic
Not if, but when for outbreak of disease: Experts

Avian flu virus is possible candidate for global infection

LYNDA HURST
FEATURE WRITER

The deadly avian flu virus is slowly but surely making its way around the world.

It now appears all but inevitable that it will arrive in North America this year or next, via migrating birds or, more likely, unwitting travellers, as with SARS in 2003.

The virus has already ravaged the poultry stocks of Southeast Asia and millions of peoples' livelihoods. It has also begun to kill other animals, including pigs, tigers and civet cats.

More forebodingly, if still only sporadically, it has crossed over into humans.

In the last two years, at least 109 people have caught the respiratory virus after being in close contact with diseased poultry. With little or no immunity — and no vaccine — about 60 of them died. Perhaps more.

China isn't saying, though it was there that this year's outbreak began, in April, with 6,000 dead wild birds.

The threat is now on Europe's doorstep, poised to enter when infected wild geese and other birds start migrating out of Russia.

The virus was detected there this month in regions as far apart as Siberia and the Caspian Sea.

When and how the virus will hit North America is unknown.

But if a global pandemic is in the cards, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.

The loss of human life even in a mild pandemic would be devastating; anything more virulent, catastrophic. The cost of a world economy in shambles for several years can only be imagined, say analysts.

Margaret Chan, chief of influenza pandemic preparedness at the World Health Organization, no longer talks about if it is going to happen:

"The only question is: When? I don't think anybody has the answer to it. We have to be on the lookout for it any time, any day."

Specifically, scientists have to be on the lookout for human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 virus, the most lethal of the 16 known strains of bird flu. Once it occurs and is, with luck, detected, the frantic race against time will begin.

It is essential to stop the virus dead in its tracks as soon as it is picked up. Surveillance is key, says Alison Stewart, director of emergency planning at the Ontario Ministry of Health.

"If there's a pandemic, we won't be able to hold it off, so it is really important to contain it to buy time for a vaccine to be developed and distributed."

Still no serious coverage in the American media. This article in the Toronto Star is a real good survey of the topic. This is one to print out and hand to your family and neighbors.

When Dinosaurs Walked the Earth

More incredibly poor reporting about the creationism v. evolution story, this time in the LAT. He said, she said crapola. Why oh why can't we have better science reporting?

Adam, Eve and T. Rex
# Giant roadside dinosaur attractions are used by a new breed of creationists as pulpits to spread their version of Earth's origins.

By Ashley Powers, Times Staff Writer

CABAZON, Calif. — Dinny the roadside dinosaur has found religion.

The 45-foot-high concrete apatosaurus has towered over Interstate 10 near Palm Springs for nearly three decades as a kitschy prehistoric pit stop for tourists.

Now he is the star of a renovated attraction that disputes the fact that dinosaurs died off millions of years before humans first walked the planet.

Dinny's new owners, pointing to the Book of Genesis, contend that most dinosaurs arrived on Earth the same day as Adam and Eve, some 6,000 years ago, and later marched two by two onto Noah's Ark. The gift shop at the attraction, called the Cabazon Dinosaurs, sells toy dinosaurs whose labels warn, "Don't swallow it! The fossil record does not support evolution."

The Cabazon Dinosaurs join at least half a dozen other roadside attractions nationwide that use the giant reptiles' popularity in seeking to win converts to creationism. And more are on the way.

"We're putting evolutionists on notice: We're taking the dinosaurs back," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian group building a $25-million creationist museum in Petersburg, Ky., that's already overrun with model sauropods and velociraptors.

"They're used to teach people that there's no God, and they're used to brainwash people," he said. "Evolutionists get very upset when we use dinosaurs. That's their star."

The nation's top paleontologists find the creation theory preposterous and say children are being misled by dinosaur exhibits that take the Jurassic out of "Jurassic Park."

"Dinosaurs lived in the Garden of Eden, and Noah's Ark? Give me a break," said Kevin Padian, curator at the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley and president of National Center for Science Education, an Oakland group that supports teaching evolution. "For them, 'The Flintstones' is a documentary."

Tyrannosaurus rex and his gigantic brethren find themselves on both sides of the nation's renewed debate over the Earth's origins and the continuing fight over whether Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" or Genesis best explains the development of life.

Science holds that dinosaurs were the Earth's royalty for about 160 million years. Their reign ended abruptly, possibly after a meteorite smacked into the planet, but they're considered the forebears of birds.

Unearthing dinosaur bones that are millions of years old "doesn't prove evolution, but it shows the Genesis account doesn't work," said Nick Matzke, a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education.

Drivers who pull off Interstate 10 in Pensacola, Fla., are told a far different story at Dinosaur Adventure Land. Its slogan: "Where Dinosaurs and the Bible meet!"

The nearly 7-acre museum, low-tech theme park and science center embodies its founder's belief that God created the world in six days. The dinosaurs, even super carnivores such as T. rex, dined as vegetarians in the Garden of Eden until Adam and Eve sinned — and only then did they feast on other creatures, according to the Christian-based young-Earth theory.

About 4,500 years after Adam and Eve arrived, the theory goes, pairs of baby dinosaurs huddled in Noah's Ark, and a colossal flood drowned the rest and scattered their fossils. The ark-borne animals repopulated the planet — meaning that folk tales about fire-breathing beasts are accounts of humans battling dinosaurs, who still roamed the planet.

Kids romping through the $1.5-million Florida theme park can bounce on a "Long Neck Liftasaurus" swing seat; launch water balloons at a T. rex and a stegosaurus, and smooth their own sandbox-size Grand Canyons, whose formation is credited to the flood. A "fossilized" pickle purports to show that dinosaur bones could have hardened quickly. Got an upcoming birthday? Dinosaur Adventure Land does pizza parties.

"Go to Disneyland, they teach evolution. It's subtle; signs that say, 'Millions of years ago' " said evangelist Kent Hovind, the park's founder. "This is a golden opportunity to get our point across."

Carl Baugh opened his Creation Evidence Museum in the 1980s near Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, Texas, where some people said fossilized dinosaur tracks and human footprints crisscrossed contemporaneously. The Texas museum sponsors a continuing hunt for living pterodactyls in Papua New Guinea. Baugh said five colleagues have spotted the flying dinosaurs, "but all the sightings were made after dark, and we were not able to capture the creatures."

I'm a theologian, not a scientist, and none of the theology I know requires any of this bulls&*t. Evolution and theology can live quite nicely right next to each other. Every theologian I know looks at these people and rightly sees them as fundamentalist, biblical literalist nuts. That's what the reporters don't understand, this isn't theology, it is bad Bible study.

Gary Farber has more.

Around the 'Sphere

Wayne at PSoTD has an interview with our partner, revere, this morning. Go take a look.

DemfromCT has more, on the dust-up between the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services about who takes the lead in a flu pandemic. Frankly, the US Government doesn't seem to have a clue, which means we are on our own, Bumpers. But you knew that.

In the Steppes of Central Asia

Roadside Bomb Kills U.S. Soldier, Wounds 4 in Afghanistan

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 27, 2005

Filed at 6:25 a.m. ET

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A bomb killed a U.S. service member and wounded four when it exploded near their armored vehicle in eastern Afghanistan, the military said on Saturday.

The blast occurred Friday in Paktika province near the border with Pakistan. The wounded were rushed to nearby bases for treatment. One was in critical condition, one in stable condition and two have returned to duty, a military statement said.

It said the troops were providing security ahead of landmark legislative elections next month, which Taliban rebels have vowed to subvert.

''Our forces have gained a great deal against the enemy and our actions will ensure a safe and secure election next month,'' said Brig. Gen. James G. Champion, deputy commander of the U.S.-led coalition. ''We will honor our fallen comrade by taking the fight to these cowards who are responsible for this attack. They will not be able to rest until they are either captured or killed.''

The death brings to 188 the number of U.S. troops killed in and around Afghanistan since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban 2001.

We're losing that other war, too.

Ignoring the Obvious

via Susie:

Fury over loss of 9/11 heroes' health program

By MICHAEL McAULIFF DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON — A program supposed to monitor the health of thousands of federal workers who answered the call of 9/11 has been lost for more than two years, the Daily News has learned. "We seem to have inherited our own Loch Ness monster in terms of being able to find this monitoring," said Jon Adler, vice president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers' Association.

Programs were developed to check on the health of every other group that rushed to Ground Zero during and after the Sept. 11 attacks, primarily the World Trade Center Medical Screening Program run by the Mount Sinai Medical Center. Officials involved told The News the feds barred their workers from that program because they were setting up their own.

Unfortunately, that program vanished during the bureaucratic shuffle creating the Department of Homeland Security.

After trying for months to find out what happened, Manhattan Rep. Carolyn Maloney's office was able to uncover only that a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services got $3.7 million for the work. But it started and stopped in 2003, seeing fewer than 600 people.

"I was told there was a 'lull,'" said Maloney, who fired off a letter to HHS yesterday seeking explanations. "This is unacceptable, these men and women are certainly not experiencing a lull in the health effects they are suffering from exposure to toxins at Ground Zero."

An HHS spokesman insisted the program had not been lost, but that screeners with the Federal Occupational Health Service ran into more problems than they expected.

"It was put on a temporary hold while we have been fixing those problems," said Bill Hall, an HHS spokesman. He could not explain the problems or why monitoring stopped for more than two years. He said it would resume soon with workers who signed up originally.

But of nearly a dozen federal law enforcers contacted by The News, only one said he ever got a chance to ask for monitoring.

Still waiting on those explanations.

Good Eating

London Broil for your end-of-the-summer weekend

Serve this with classic summer bounty, tomato slices dressed with classic olive oil and basil, corn on the cob with butter and salt. Marinate this overnight and you have a party.

BARBECUED FLANK STEAK OR LONDON BROIL

3/4 c. vegetable oil
1/3 c. soy sauce
3 tbsp. honey
3 tbsp. red wine vinegar
2 tsp. ground ginger
1 green onion, chopped
1 lg. garlic cloves, crushed
1 (1 1/2 lb.) flank steak or London broil, trimmed and scored

Combine first 7 ingredients. Place meat in large marinade dish and pour marinade over. Cover and refrigerate overnight, turning steak twice.

Prepare barbecue. Grill meat to desired doneness, 4 to 5 minutes per side for rare (best for London Broil). Slice into thin strips across grain and serve.

Serves six. Bigger flank steaks are easy to find and can easily be frozen in their marinade for singles. They thaw nicely and grill in a broiler pan once they have been broken up into meal-sized pieces.

Stick a Yukon gold potato in the toaster oven and, by God, you have a meal worthy of company if you have a cup of sour cream in the fridge and a little fresh pepper and salt resting on the back of the range.

Steak and a Yukon gold? I'd die happy with that.

Stuff and Morale

I'm going to be really busy this weekend: I've got a boatload of preparation to do for this Red Cross panel, major work to do at The Flu Wiki and more avian flu research to do. Pogge is sending me to school on wiki architecture, finding my responses to his probing questions highly inadequate. Guest posters, the house is yours for the weekend. I'll be around but not so much. I'm bringing dinner (courtesy of DemfromCT) to friends tomorrow night. Dem is vacationing with the family in Maine, I teased him about it (I love Maine) and lobster with all the trimmings arrives by FedEx tomorrow. My Flu Wiki partners are awfully nice guys, and I'm lucky to be working with people I know, respect and genuinely enjoy (I don't know what I'd do without pogge. He's not just responsible for my sites' tech work; he's also responsible for maintaining my sense of humor, a much more fragile quality.)

Enjoy the guest posters over the weekend and keep the discussions going. Hurricane Katrina is probably going to drive gas prices higher. We are going to need all the help we can get to keep our spirits up. There isn't a lot of good news out there; we are going to have to BE the good news for each other.

On Sunday, as always, I'll also be at American Street, as well. Enjoy your weekend.

Site News

Bumpers, a pretty cool thing happened today. The American Red Cross, the national people, contacted me today about participating on a panel next month on disaster communication, social software and The Flu Wiki. Lord knows I've attended plenty of these think-tank panels in the last few years. I got to meet one of the revere's at one of them in May. I never thought I would be on one. I'd love your thoughts about the things you think I should address in the 15 minutes or so that I'll get to speak.

You are the most thoughtful bloggers in the 'sphere, so I look forward to your ideas.

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Food

I am working under the assumption that I want to use minimal energy and minimal water to accomplish providing meals for myself and my daughter. I want to be able to provide food for 90 days for two people under a situation of periodically dicey to nonexistent electrical power and a potable water supply that exists no more than two out of every three days.

The following is a base food supply plan. More will need to be purchased to add variety to the diet, but this is a place to start. Get this done and you can relax a bit by choosing the “extras” that will make planning your food storage plans more fun.

I also want to make it clear that this base food supply plan is one idea out of many possible. This will work for myself and my daughter, but if you have ideas or plans that you think are equally viable for the average person, couple or family to emulate, please do share them here.

Finally, eat this stuff as part of your regular diet, before a pandemic starts. Circulate the food through so none of it goes to waste. If you are implementing something new into your diet in case of an emergency, you want to get comfortable with it's taste and texture now. And if it turns out we were all just worried over nothing, you'll have the pleasure of eating most of your "mistakes".

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Introduction and Framework

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Food

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Water

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Medication and CAM

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Emergencies, Evacuation, Protection

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Entertainment & Acceptance

UPDATE:
DRY ICE – Some grocery store chains are now providing dry ice for sale, usually in the seafood section. This will make acquiring it a lot easier than usual.

TASTYBITE INDIAN MEALS – If you order over $50 at the Tastybite website, you get 10% off of the order total. If you spend over $75 between now and October 31st you’ll get a $5 case rebate. The WEBSWEEP coupon code, which takes you up to a 20% discount, still works.

CANADIAN CANNED MEAT – I have noticed, from frequenting a few of the “dollar stores” like Big Lots and such, that they tend to buy Canadian tinned/canned meats. One benefit I’ve noticed so far is that there is a much lower occurrence of hydrolyzed protein in these products. Possibly more salt, for the sake of preservation, I suspect, but I’d rather deal with something I can flush out my system than something with questionable properties.

MEXICAN JUICE EURO-PACKS – Another thing I’ve noticed is that in many of these same stores you can now buy pretty large vacu-sealed containers of fruit juice from Mexico. It’s not often you can find guava juice at a reasonable price, the juice content isn’t bad, and instead of corn syrup, you get to deal with fructose or sugar. To me, the latter two are not nearly as big a problem as corn syrup. (And granted, this is more of a luxury item, but if you want to have a cheap thrill in your emergency pantry…)

SEVENTH DAY ADVENTISTS – I finally got to one of their food storage facilities, and to be honest, unless you’re a hardcore “meat and potatoes” fan that knows they need soy in their diet, it isn’t much to brag about. I’m past my childhood need for Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes, but if you aren’t, look for one of these places.

MORMONS – I haven’t yet had a direct discussion with my local Mormon bishop, but he did tell me via a phone message that many bishop’s storehouses will provide the means for non-Mormons, on request, to preserve any food they wish to take care of with their equipment. I hope to have more information on this front before long, as this is an option we need to be better informed about.

HOT CHOW/DRINKS – The Nuwick option is kinda a bust, as far as I’m concerned. You really can’t cook with it, unless we’re talking water or soups. Trying to use it to cook rice was a no go, in part because it just takes too long to get things hot enough, and when you, you end up, upon cleanup, with a nasty mix of soot and your stove’s protective paint/covering on you and any pots or pans you use.

So, what to do?

It comes down to comfort level and adaptability. How long do you think you might have to do without electric power or natural gas to heat your food? What is your experience with using cooking while camping, if any? How much would you be able to ventilate your place so fumes aren’t an issue, versus letting in the cold?

To keep it simple, I would go with gas container-based camping stoves. I have an old Campingaz Bluet 470, and while the containers are a bit more expensive than other options, they are, I think, a little easier to use. MSR (via the Firefly and the Pocket Rocket) and Coleman also provide what I consider some good options in this arena as well – look for stoves that can use at least two different types of gas containers if possible.

As a backup/alternative, I would check out stoves that can cook using the unleaded fuel in your car. (That means you’d better make sure you get a siphon for removing gas from your car, and pay for the privilege of an automated one that doesn’t require using your mouth to get it started – trust me on this.) Ventilation is even more important than before going this route, and one should consider that the unleaded gas you use cooking is gas that you don’t have if you need to leave the area by vehicle. By the same token, however, if I have to leave my home, I intend to use what’s available, and unleaded gas will be available in one form or another more so than camping gas containers, or white gas, or what have you. I like the Coleman Multi Fuel Stove and 442 Dual-Fuel Stove best.

ORIGINAL POST:
Tastybite (www.tastybite.com) is an excellent source for basic Indian meals that provide the protein you will seek with a minimum of preparation or effort. (They also make some Thai meals which I haven’t tried as yet.) They tend to sell single-course meals or meals which also contain, in a separate pouch, ready-to-eat rice and a container for microwaving the contents of both pouches.

Each single-course meal is in a sealed foil pouch which can last between nine months and one year. They tend toward the mildly-to-moderately spicy, but they also have relatively mellow concoctions such as their Bombay Potatoes. Some of their meals are Vegan if that is your preference, and some have at least a minimal amount of vegetables – I’m checking out their Sprouts and Curry meal presently to see if, given the concentrated nature of sprouts as a food source, it gives enough to make it worth buying.

Tastybite Indian meals can be purchased in individual packs or in six-packs at a slight discount from their website. (Their ready-to-eat meal packs are temporarily not available as six-packs, but probably will be again after the sale mentioned below.)

Right now, through August 31, Tastybite has a special on purchases above $50. On top of that, there is a special coupon code, WEBSWEEP, which will take additional money off the cost of their products. With postage, I’m averaging $1.76 per main course, for a total of around $316, delivered to my door. That covers 180 meals.

But what should go with it? Good question. For me, brown rice will be our family’s anchor for our base food supply. It isn’t hard to buy two 25 pound sacks of brown rice, and I recommend you check out the large grocery store chains first. Where I live, for instance, Fred Meyer has a history of bulk food prices that rival its more well-thought-of food co-ops such as the Puget Consumers Co-op (PCC) and Whole Foods. This will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $55 for 50 pounds of rice. Brown rice tends to have a shorter shelf life than white rice (the price we pay for something with much higher nutrition), so I recommend going to a bulk food or restaurant supply store and getting some large plastic food containers with lids, some dry ice, and large, very strong garbage bags. Set up the garbage bag in the food container as if it were a trash can, put dry ice in the bottom of the container, and pour the rice in. This can be adjusted to suit – for example, if you just don’t have the time to find large food containers, stores like Target and higher-end hardware stores will have more than adequate containers for the task. Keep in mind that you want to stash the rice in containers that are stackable to minimize the space required to keep all of this food in one small place.

The first backup to the rice will be a case or so of Ak-Mak crackers, which can be bought fairly cheaply from the Trader Joes chain. (Most stores, unfortunately, sell these crackers at a much higher price.) The crackers are 100% whole wheat with sesame seeds on top, and they taste great. A case of 42 boxes of the crackers costs about $50 at Trader Joes. There are 20 crackers in a box, so at four crackers a day, you have more than enough for two people over 90 days.

The second backup to the rice will be the bulk purchase of Cheerios or their equivalent. They are easy to digest, have a distinctive taste, and are a relatively healthy snack. Seal these up like the rice if you buy in bulk, but also have some small sealable bags handy. People will get bored sitting in a house for 90 days, and sometimes boredom leads to snacking. Give them something that’s good for them. I’m pricing generic (possibly organic) Cheerios at around $27 for a 9-pound sack, but I’m also seeing sales of the original General Millls version at five 15 oz. boxes for $10 in this neighborhood, or just over $2 a pound.

Melanie mentioned earlier that citrus can keep for a long time, and I would say that that is absolutely true for lemons and some oranges, but not always for limes – mine, at least, always seem to turn bad sooner than the other two. So make sure you buy an adequate supply of each, and if you lose power, keep them in the coolest part of your home or outside if possible/reasonable. And whatever you do, eat the peelings – don’t just use the fruit. Have a hand juicer at home as well to sparkle up your seltzer or water, or to add some extra flavor to your cooking. I’m figuring $200 for citrus, and have found a sale this week of $10 for 10 pounds of oranges. (My local grocery stores seem to have “X for $10” on the brain of late…)

Meat and veggies will always be desired, but are a tougher row to hoe. Yes, you can get canned stuff, and I know we will do this to some extent, but it’s all too easy to get inferior product, especially where canned vegetables are concerned, so be cautious. Right now I’m seeing cans of carrots (8 oz) and asparagus (14.75 oz) going for around 99 cents a can, not on sale. Figure at least $180 for canned veggies.

The cheapest canned meat is probably canned light tuna in water – it’s on sale around here for as little as 44 cents for an eight-ounce can, but for six cents per can more, you can often add a year to the shelf date. Some will worry about the mercury content in tuna due to recent reports, but the following website…

http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article;_id=218392486

….should alleviate these fears somewhat. If you still want an alternative, Keta or pink salmon is going as cheap as $1.50 for a 14.75 ounce can when on sale. (NOTE: Both often still have edible but not pleasant-looking bones in each product. If you have kids, take into account the "ick" factor and plan accoridngly.) I’m also noticing that canned chicken is becoming more common, but to be honest, I’m not comfortable with buying it, since you may be getting disease vectors in a can. Buy 90 cans of tuna and 45 of salmon, and you’re talking around $113. (And consider peanut butter as an alternative or further supplement.)

For women in particular, calcium and soy will need to be considered. Here, Melanie and I are having a discussion over the best path to follow. Melanie recommends buying Parmalat UHF milk – this is milk that has been boiled to kill bacteria and vacuum sealed. It isn’t readily available in my neighborhood, but Amazon.com has it for $1.99 for 32 oz. This can get expensive fast, however - $180 per person. For myself, I’ve drank UHF milk while on a work assignment in Singapore, and my parents used milk powder when my dad juggled going to college full-time with raising a family. Neither experience brings back fond memories, and thus makes it hard for me to say I’d rotate either item into my daily food usage with any enthusiasm. I would suggest trying both in small quantities, preferably with some vanilla extract on hand to adjust the taste, and buying what you think is best. (Forced to choose today, I would personally use milk power and invest the savings in vacu-sealed soups and broths that can last up to seven months.)

And, of course, there is always “soy milk”. Silk tends to have one of the smoother tastes I’ve experienced, but opinions will vary.

With appropriate multivitamins, you have the makings of a good food base supply. You will want to add money for spices and extras – I know that canned button mushrooms will de-grumpify my daughter in a heartbeat, for example. Even so, with thoughtful planning, $700-$900 a head for 90-day coverage, with food that can and should be eaten/rotated as part of the regular routine until the epidemic hits, is possible.

And one area we haven’t touched are the Seventh Day Adventists and the Mormons, both of which take food storage seriously. There is a Seventh Day Adventist food storage facility I’ll be visiting this weekend, and I’ll let you know what I find – much of what will be available will probably be soy-based products. The Mormons tend to have what are known as Bishop’s Storehouses, and I have a call into my area's local Bishop to see if non-members may purchase food at such places.

But, you may ask, what about cooking food? Hot chow can cover a lot of sins in the course of a day, so this must be considered as a vital component of the food supply.

This is something I’ve thought about for a while. I have a few Gaz canisters and related gear to cover cooking food during the aftermath of an earthquake for a few days, but 90 days of white gas or propane doesn’t seem smart to have in your home. A solar-paneled hotplate would be a great idea, or a solar oven for that matter, but I live where cloudy days are the norm.

I’m going to purchase and experiment with Nuwick candles and their folding stove. The candles come in 44-hour and 120-hour versions, they are made so that multiple wicks can be used on the same candle due to their large surface area, and I feel a bit more comfortable with controlling this source for cooking than propane.

These can be purchased fairly reasonable prices via…

htp://www.campmor.com

or

http://www.nitro-pak.com

Both Campmor and Nitro-Pak have been around for a while. Like most such places, Nitro-Pak sometimes wants to “feed your fear” to get you to buy more stuff, but I tend to see them as doing this more by the spoonful rather than in other such places, where it's by the bucketful.

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Introduction and Framework

Hi folks - my name is Rich Erwin and I guess I’m “the unflappable list builder”.

Melanie has asked that I make a few comments regarding preparation for the possible flu epidemic we might have visit us within the next few months or less. What I intend to do is offer up my opinions and plans to prepare for the possibility of lack of access to local goods and services during this period.

From there I hope to get a conversation started on each topic via the comments – there are lots of bright, thoughtful folks here at Bump, and I’m certain many of you will have better or at least more fully developed ideas and options than where I’ll start each conversation.

More importantly, for those of us who feel, at times, overwhelmed by all of this, I want to provide an example, by my tappings on the keyboard and the responses in reply, that preparation is doable. I’m a majority-custody single parent with a periodically demanding job, and while it isn’t always easy to do, I’m taking steps. You can too. If this saves at least one life by convincing someone that they can do this, I'll have done what I’ve set out to do.

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Introduction and Framework

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Food

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Water

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Medication and CAM

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Emergencies, Evacuation, Protection

Flu Pandemic Preparation - Entertainment & Acceptance

UPDATE:
This is an excellent page on flu preparedness guides from the Flu Wiki: use it - please.

ORIGINAL POST:
THE FRAMEWORK

First, let me state that you have to work under the assumption you and I simply don’t know when this problem might strike, but it is a certainty that it will come sometime over the next few years, possibly in multiple formats. I think that the shear concentration of people, pigs, birds and development/pollution in rural China is simply going to turn the place into a vortex for nasty potential, but not certain, diseases for at least a fair number of years. I think we can dodge the bullet for a while, but eventually something bad will get to here, where we have our own high concentrations of pigs, chickens, and (though not nearly as bad as in the Third World) people. We may have nothing happen to us this coming flu season. But it will come - and if we're granted a reprieve this year, all the more time to prepare for next year. Or the one after that. Prepare, accept and pray is my personal path on this one. Fear and nonchalance are unacceptable options.

That said, here are some assumptions I’m making to prepare for a flu pandemic…

1) Your neighborhood is one of your best resources. Most people are desperate to know that their neighbor is a pleasant fellow human being. Cultivate that idea by being yourself publicly and including them in the process. An example – my next-door neighbor forgot to put out her trash can on Monday morning. I was in a rush to get mine out, noticed that hers wasn’t (something I hadn’t seen before), checked her can, saw it had trash in it, and took it to the curb. When I came home from work, I knocked on her door, told her what happened, and got two seconds into apologizing if she had other ideas by being broadsided with a lot of Thank-Yous. If your neighbors have faces and lives attached to your home, they will include you in their conversations, or, with your knowledge of the pandemic, you will be the one that might be asked to lead or anchor the conversations.

2) Share, but don’t be showy. Many, if not most, of your neighbors will get caught flat-footed when this happens. They will appreciate whatever help you can give, but might resent it if life looks “too good” over at your home. A gas-powered generator, in once sense, seems like a good idea, but if you have the only one in the neighborhood, be sure that folks are being invited to save their perishables in your refrigerator, for example. Likewise, have extra items you think others will need but that you won’t, but don’t make a big deal about it. (As a side note, this is why I’m against Melanie’s idea of buying liquor as a barter good during a pandemic – do you really want to learn, the hard way, who your neighborhood’s angry drunks are?)

3) Low profile. This is a little different from 2). In short, don’t appear to be an appealing target. When it’s dark, sleep. When it’s light, do stuff. Minimize your need for electricity and activity immediately outside the home. This is more in concern not with your immediate neighbors, but roamers looking for potentially lucrative targets. The only “loud” thing I might consider is a quarantine sign on or beside your front door. Potential looters, if they come to pass, will want to find empty homes, not ones full of potentially living sick people.

4) “Consume your paranoia.” With few exceptions, everything I’m considering for purchase/stockpiling must be useful outside of pandemic conditions. I can’t think of anything sillier, for example, than buying food you wouldn’t touch under almost any other circumstances.

I can say from personal experience that the ability to go into mental “vapor lock” is an easy reaction to this situation. You start to worry about all of the things you need and how to do it, and it can virtually immobilize you. Add to that, as many do, the daily chores of work, family and friends that expect their fair share from you, and it can seem impossible to react adequately.

My response to this is that you compartmentalize the tasks. Deal with food, then water, then keeping yourself and your loved ones entertained, etc… But breaking the task down into smaller ones can provide you with greater focus and allow you to get the larger job done.

Leave It To The Docs

A job for the experts
Federal health agencies, not Homeland Security, should take charge if avian flu epidemic strikes U.S.

Published on: 08/26/05

The Bush administration needs to make it clear — and soon — that federal health agencies will take the lead if the country is hit by a human pandemic from a deadly new strain of avian influenza emerging in southeast Asia.

But on Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff claimed that his agency would get that overall responsibility.

Homeland Security would certainly play a critical role in such a response — determining, for instance, whether to suspend travel to and from countries where the flu has infected humans and ensuring that vaccine and anti-viral medicines get to where they're most needed.

But given the gravity and complexity of the health issues that accompany a pandemic, agencies such as the U.S. Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must take the lead in securing the country's safety.

The CDC, in fact, was created for such a mission. The Atlanta-based agency has worked closely with the World Health Organization to monitor the spread of the bird flu strain, which thus far has infected 112 people and killed 57 in four southeast Asian countries. Moreover, it already has the expertise and framework needed to gather and analyze the most accurate and up-to-date information from public health officials in the 50 states. If and when it comes time to make hard calls about where to muster resources, it will be the CDC's expertise that government calls upon.

Chertoff may simply have overstated Homeland Security's role in a future pandemic. At least one public health expert, Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, thinks that's the case. He believes the secretary of Health and Human Services (parent agency of the CDC) will make the critical decisions in close coordination with Homeland Security "to make sure all the pieces work together."

The nightmare scenario, of course, is that Bush declares martial law and cancels the 2006 elections.

Weather Report

The remnents of Katrina will get here Tuesday night. The last time this happened, we lost power for 24 hours. My brother and his wife were down for a week. Suffice it to say that there might be a "service interruption" in Bump next week. Time to clean out the fridge.

MSM Killing Self

Dan Froomkin doesn't come right out and say it, but this is really troubling:

Bush's Secret Dinner -- With the Press

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, August 26, 2005; 12:00 PM

About 50 members of the White House press corps accepted President Bush's invitation last night to come over to his house in Crawford, eat his food, drink his booze, hang around the pool and schmooze with him -- while promising not to tell anyone what he said afterward.

It's something of a Bush tradition, a way of saying thank you to journalists for whom an extended stay in the Crawford area is anything but a vacation.

And in spite of all the recent press demands for senior administration officials to stay on the record more often, the press corps can't resist an offer of face time with the president, pretty much no matter what the conditions.

Nevertheless, I'm told that several reporters expressed squeamishness about last night's event, particularly as the press-pool vans drove by antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan's "Camp Casey" site. And later, a small handful watched askance as the rest fawned over Bush, following him around in packs every time he moved.

The Associated Press reports: "President Bush played host to the White House press corps Thursday night for a private off-the-record dinner at his ranch.

"The casual affair of fried catfish, potato salad, coleslaw, homemade cheese and chocolate-chip cookies followed a tradition in which Bush and his wife, Laura, have the press covering his annual August vacation out to the their ranch in central Texas as a sort of thank-you.

"The event was not held last year because of the busy campaign season. The invitations to the reporters were issued on the condition that they not discuss conversations at the event."

My sources (in this case, I should point out, not from The Washington Post) provided a few more details.

The president and the first lady greeted everyone personally in an informal receiving line. Both were dressed casually, Bush in jeans.

The dinner itself was held poolside. The reporters and camera crews were invited to bring swimsuits, but no one opted to strip and swim.

The beer, as usual, was a Texas brew: Shiner Bock.

The topics of conversation included the antiwar protests, the twins, sports, and Bush's summer reading list.

Unlike the event two years ago, there was no tour of the property.

Several senior White House aides attended and also spoke to reporters off the record, including deputy national security adviser J.D. Crouch II and deputy chief of staff Joseph Hagin.

One Bush touch particularly appreciated by the working media: Invitations were sent out at the last minute, so that only the reporters and photographers already in the area could attend -- preventing any bigfooting by the media elites in Washington or New York, or on vacation themselves.

Does anybody in attendance want to tell me more? E-mail me at [email protected] .

Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post about the 2003 barbeque, saying it represented "the time-honored political tradition of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer."

That event later became notorious for an exchange related by Ken Auletta in his seminal 2004 New Yorker article about how the White House keeps the press under control:

"Bush has let it be known that he's not much of a television-news watcher or a newspaper reader, apart from the sports section; and during a conversation with reporters he explained, perhaps without intending to, why his White House often seems indifferent to the press. 'How do you then know what the public thinks?' a reporter asked, according to Bush aides and reporters who heard the exchange. And Bush replied, 'You're making a huge assumption -- that you represent what the public thinks.' "

Incidentally, Bush isn't the only one holding off-the-record dinners with reporters this summer. I'm told senior adviser Karl Rove has held several in the last month himself.

Protesting Limited Press Access

Meanwhile, Ken Herman of Cox News Service writes in a story not available online: "The White House News Photographers' Association, in a letter to top Bush aides, said the administration increasingly is refusing to allow news photographers into some events. Instead, the White House has been releasing photos shot by its staffers, a process deemed unsatisfactory by the photographers association.

"In a letter to White House Counselor Dan Bartlett and Chief of Staff Andy Card, Susan Walsh, WHNPA president, said her organization 'is troubled by the increasing number of photo releases from events involving the president of the United States. . . .

" 'We are quickly losing our ability to gather the news, especially at the White House.' "

As Walsh explained to Herman: "A White House photo release, no matter how accurate the image, provides only one perspective -- one that is carefully screened and approved."

The press is complicit in the demise of the press. You don't ride bikes with him, you don't socialize with him. He's a subject of reporting and I can't think of any other reporters who would do such a thing with the subject of their reporting. This is a substantial breach of journalistic ethics.

Skunkworks

Pacifica Radio reports this morning:

Supreme Court nominee John Roberts may have been a part of the Iran-contra affair. That’s one of 2,000 papers Democrats are seeking that the White House refuses to release. During Robert’s tenure during the Reagan Administration, he authored a paper about an office that was used to side step the ban on funding militias to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Other papers involving Roberts refusing to be released are on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Presidential pardons.

Fascinating. It ain't over yet.

Looking North

Ignatieff coming home to U of T
Speculation on future swirls
Is scholar aiming for Liberal helm?

ANDREW MILLS
OTTAWA BUREAU

OTTAWA—Michael Ignatieff is coming home to Canada — leaving his post at Harvard University for a prestigious position at the University of Toronto, sources close to him say.

This news, to be announced by the university today, will undoubtedly fuel speculation the Canadian-born scholar plans to make a bid for the leadership of the federal Liberal party.

Ignatieff, 58, will become the Chancellor Jackman visiting professor in human rights policy and will also become a fellow at the university's Munk Centre for International Studies.

He and his wife have bought a condominium close to the university's downtown campus, according to a friend who wanted to remain anonymous.

They are expected to spend the bulk of this fall in Toronto as Ignatieff takes on duties at U of T and wraps up work as director of Harvard's Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy in Cambridge, Mass. Ignatieff will take up all his new duties in January.

"His intention is not to make his move back to Canada temporary," the friend said. "His intention is to make it permanent."

Suspicions have swirled through political circles in recent months that Ignatieff has the leadership of the Liberal party in his sights.

Many will see his return to Canada after nearly 30 years abroad as preparation to run for the leadership.

But Ignatieff has denied he has any such plans and his friends say his return to Canada isn't connected to his potential future career here.

"He's been talking about coming back to Canada for a long time," said the friend, who is a member of the Liberal party.

"I think that he is increasingly interested in the public and political debate in Canada, so I think all of these things have led him to make a decision that now is a good time. ... The issue for Michael Ignatieff will be how best for him to make a contribution to public and political debate. That will be a question he asks himself."

Nevertheless, the attractive and charismatic Ignatieff, who is the author of several books, has been quietly circulating in some Liberal circles since March, when he came to Ottawa to deliver the keynote address at the party's policy convention.

In May, according to party insiders, Ignatieff met with prominent Liberals in at least Quebec and Nova Scotia.

And a group of prominent Toronto Liberals — who once supported leadership hopeful John Manley — have surrounded Ignatieff. That group, which includes Toronto lawyer Alfred Apps, has encouraged him to become more involved in the party, which has no obvious heir apparent who will take over when Prime Minister Paul Martin steps down as leader.

Martin, who turns 67 on Sunday, will lead the Liberals into an election expected this winter.

Ignatieff is going to have to build his profile if he wants to succeed Martin. In a poll conducted by SES Research for the Toronto Star this week, only 4 per cent of Canadians said they see Ignatieff as the prime contender to replace Martin.

Since Ignatieff has been a functional Yank for 30 years, I daresay he doesn't have much name recognition above the 49th parallel. That's easy to fix. Prime Minister Ignatieff? That would give Bush nightmares, which suits me fine. Having a real liberal running the show up north might get me to emigrate just yet. [/sarcasm off]

Hey, their flu planning is better than ours.

It is So Over

Before It's Too Late in Iraq

By Wesley K. Clark

Friday, August 26, 2005; Page A21

In the old, familiar fashion, mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq have mobilized increasing public doubts about the war. More than half the American people now believe that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. They're right. But it would also be a mistake to pull out now, or to start pulling out or to set a date certain for pulling out. Instead we need a strategy to create a stable, democratizing and peaceful state in Iraq -- a strategy the administration has failed to develop and articulate.

From the outset of the U.S. post-invasion efforts, we needed a three-pronged strategy: diplomatic, political and military. Iraq sits geographically on the fault line between Shiite and Sunni Islam; for the mission to succeed we will have to be the catalyst for regional cooperation, not regional conflict.

Unfortunately, the administration didn't see the need for a diplomatic track, and its scattershot diplomacy in the region -- threats, grandiose pronouncements and truncated communications -- has been ill-advised and counterproductive. The U.S. diplomatic failure has magnified the difficulties facing the political and military elements of strategy by contributing to the increasing infiltration of jihadists and the surprising resiliency of the insurgency.

On the political track, aiming for a legitimate, democratic Iraqi government was essential, but the United States was far too slow in mobilizing Iraqi political action. A wasted first year encouraged a rise in sectarian militias and the emergence of strong fractionating forces. Months went by without a U.S. ambassador in Iraq, and today political development among the Iraqis is hampered by the lack not only of security but also of a stable infrastructure program that can reliably deliver gas, electricity and jobs.

Meanwhile, on the military track, security on the ground remains poor at best. U.S. armed forces still haven't received resources, restructuring and guidance adequate for the magnitude of the task. Only in June, over two years into the mission of training Iraqi forces, did the president announce such "new steps" as partnering with Iraqi units, establishing "transition teams" to work with Iraqi units and training Iraqi ministries to conduct antiterrorist operations. But there is nothing new about any of this; it is the same nation-building doctrine that we used in Vietnam. Where are the thousands of trained linguists? Where are the flexible, well-

resourced, military-led infrastructure development programs to win "hearts and minds?" Where are the smart operations and adequate numbers of forces -- U.S., coalition or Iraqi -- to strengthen control over the borders?

With each passing month the difficulties are compounded and the chances for a successful outcome are reduced. Urgent modification of the strategy is required before it is too late to do anything other than simply withdraw our forces.

Adding a diplomatic track to the strategy is a must. The United States should form a standing conference of Iraq's neighbors, complete with committees dealing with all the regional economic and political issues, including trade, travel, cross-border infrastructure projects and, of course, cutting off the infiltration of jihadists. The United States should tone down its raw rhetoric and instead listen more carefully to the many voices within the region. In addition, a public U.S. declaration forswearing permanent bases in Iraq would be a helpful step in engaging both regional and Iraqi support as we implement our plans.

On the political side, the timeline for the agreements on the Constitution is less important than the substance of the document. It is up to American leadership to help engineer, implement and sustain a compromise that will avoid the "red lines" of the respective factions and leave in place a state that both we and Iraq's neighbors can support. So no Kurdish vote on independence, a restricted role for Islam and limited autonomy in the south. And no private militias.

In addition, the United States needs a legal mandate from the government to provide additional civil assistance and advice, along with additional U.S. civilian personnel, to help strengthen the institutions of government. Key ministries must be reinforced, provincial governments made functional, a system of justice established (and its personnel trained) and the rule of law promoted at the local level. There will be a continuing need for assistance in institutional development, leadership training and international monitoring for years to come, and all of this must be made palatable to Iraqis concerned with their nation's sovereignty. Monies promised for reconstruction simply must be committed and projects moved forward, especially in those areas along the border and where the insurgency has the greatest potential.

On the military side, the vast effort underway to train an army must be matched by efforts to train police and local justices. Canada, France and Germany should be engaged to assist. Neighboring states should also provide observers and technical assistance. In military terms, striking at insurgents and terrorists is necessary but insufficient. Military and security operations must return primarily to the tried-and-true methods of counterinsurgency: winning the hearts and minds of the populace through civic action, small-scale economic development and positive daily interactions. Ten thousand Arab Americans with full language proficiency should be recruited to assist as interpreters. A better effort must be made to control jihadist infiltration into the country by a combination of outposts, patrols and reaction forces reinforced by high technology. Over time U.S. forces should be pulled back into reserve roles and phased out.

The growing chorus of voices demanding a pullout should seriously alarm the Bush administration, because President Bush and his team are repeating the failure of Vietnam: failing to craft a realistic and effective policy and instead simply demanding that the American people show resolve. Resolve isn't enough to mend a flawed approach -- or to save the lives of our troops. If the administration won't adopt a winning strategy, then the American people will be justified in demanding that it bring our troops home.

Um, Wes? I would have thought you were a better student of military history than that. We've already lost Iraq. We don't have enough troops to pacify a country this size. Period. It was over before we went in.

Iraq was a century-sized error from the get-go, and Donald Rumsfeld should be in jail.

The American Schedule

It's Salon, so watch the ad and then read Joe Conason.

Iraq's unhealthy constitution
The Bush administration's desperate insistence on an instant Iraqi constitution hurts both Iraq and our broader national interests. But when your polls are falling and you need to declare victory, who cares?

By Joe Conason

The Iraqi factions, divided by their bitter religious and ethnic history, feel no similarly unifying purpose, as evidenced in the draft document they have produced. Their most powerful impulse is to split apart -- and in the case of the Shiite Islamists, to impose their own version of theocratic law. Nevertheless, the Americans overseeing the development of Iraqi democracy insisted that the new constitution be written in a few months, amid the worst possible circumstances; Iraqis are scheduled to vote Oct. 15 on the proposed constitution.

This timetable accommodates the needs of the Bush White House and its loyal Republican supporters, who would like to declare a triumph for democracy in Iraq and start to reduce the number of U.S. troops there. Those needs intensify with every new poll that shows the president's credibility falling and the public mood souring. As the antiwar movement gains attention and midterm elections approach, claiming any kind of "victory" becomes imperative -- even if it falls far short of the promised triumph for liberty.

It also seems likely to lead to a constitution of dubious legitimacy and to potential disaster for the Iraqis. Whether the overthrow of Saddam Hussein could ever have led to the rise of a secular democratic Iraq in the initial postwar period, as envisioned by the proponents of the American invasion, is now unknowable. Few Mideast experts ever considered that outcome likely, to put it politely. (Most considered such visions to be utter fantasy.) As in so many other aspects of American policy, however, the mindless chaos of post-invasion planning and the arrogant incompetence of U.S. officialdom have made matters worse.

It has been obvious for some time that the feuding factions in Baghdad are unready for a successful constitutional process, if not for democracy itself. Lacking the mutual confidence and shared interests that are the necessary elements for this fundamental exercise, the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis needed to live and work together for many months and perhaps years before devising a durable charter. They might never have been able to accomplish that ideal, but they needed much more time than the Bush administration permitted them.

The writing of a democratically legitimate constitution must be genuinely inclusive, which means that all the concerned groups have to be represented. The Sunni boycott of the parliamentary elections last winter made that essential prerequisite unachievable for now -- which ought to have encouraged American and Iraqi leaders to reevaluate the most desirable "path to democracy."

What they should have realized is that there is simply no way to write a real and functional constitution for a democratic state while a third of the population or more is in revolt. The Sunnis should have been persuaded to stop fighting and join in reconstruction before the constitutional process began, even if that meant new elections.

By rushing the constitution, the U.S. may well have foreclosed the most plausible means for ending the ongoing violence in Iraq: namely, a cease-fire and negotiations between the interim government (with its American sponsor) and the indigenous Sunni insurgents -- believed to constitute the majority of the problem -- and their greater network of sympathizers and supporters across Iraq. Those negotiations might have achieved reasonable guarantees to the Sunnis about their own future status and an orderly timetable for withdrawal of American and other foreign military forces.

I listened to NR's Steve Hayes on Dianne Rehm this morning deny that Dick Cheney ever said that Iraq would be a "cakewalk." They just make shit up. It's appalling how easy it is to refute the right, but they make up in volume what they lack in facts.

Those Internets

If you have been trouble getting Bump to render in your browser or to post comments, the problem isn't you. Things are funky here at the moment, and pogge is looking into it. Something ain't right.

Facing the World

Charter Talks in Iraq Reach Breaking Point"

By DEXTER FILKINS and JAMES GLANZ
Published: August 26, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 25 - Talks over the Iraqi constitution reached a breaking point on Thursday, with a parliamentary session to present the document being canceled and President Bush personally calling one of the country's most powerful Shiite leaders in an effort to broker a last-minute deal.

Mr. Bush intervened when some senior Shiite leaders said they had decided to bypass their Sunni counterparts, as well as Iraqi lawmakers, and send the document directly to Iraqi voters for their approval.

The calls by Shiite leaders to ignore the Sunnis' request for changes to the draft constitution provoked threats from the Sunnis that they would urge their people to reject the document when it goes before voters in a national referendum in October.

At day's end, American officials in Washington declared that the Iraqis had made "substantial and real progress" toward a deal on the constitution. And senior Iraqi leaders said they would make a last-ditch effort on Friday to strike a deal.

But after so many days of fruitless negotiations, some senior political leaders here suggested that time had run out.

"There are still some negotiations, but if we don't have any compromise, then that's it," said Sheik Khalid al-Atiyya, a Shiite negotiator. "We will go to the election to vote on it."

A decision by the Shiites to move ahead without the Sunnis would be a considerable blow to efforts by the Bush administration to bring the leaders of the Sunni minority into the negotiations over the constitution.

Mr. Bush and American officials here have expressed hope that bringing the Sunnis into the drafting of the constitution could help coax them into the political mainstream, and ultimately begin to undercut support for the guerrilla insurgency. The Sunnis largely boycotted the parliamentary elections in January.

In recent weeks, Sunni leaders across north and central Iraq have begun telling their communities to register for and vote in the Oct. 15 referendum on the constitution and in the parliamentary elections scheduled for December. That trend could be endangered if Sunni leaders are not part of a deal on the constitution.

Indeed, the events of Thursday raised the prospect that the Sunnis would try to reject the constitution when it goes before the voters. Under the rules agreed to last year, a two-thirds majority voting against the constitution in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces would send the document down to defeat. The Sunnis are thought to constitute a majority in three provinces.

By Thursday night, Sunni leaders were declaring that they had been victimized by the majority Shiites, and they were already making plans to sink the constitution at the polls.

Imposed democracies work so well. Remember that "humble foreign policy" with "no nation building" that Bush ran on in 2000?

No

The Last Best Place?
Entrepreneur's Bid to Trademark Slogan Angers Montanans

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 26, 2005; Page A01

GREENOUGH, Mont. -- Rich guys have come west to shop. They have bought ranches with soul-stirring scenery and settled in -- usually for just a few weeks a year -- to savor what Montanans proudly call "The Last Best Place."

David Letterman has done it, as have Ted Turner, Tom Brokaw and thousands of non-celebrities. These high-net-worth interlopers have raised eyebrows and land values, but for the most part they have not raised hackles -- until this summer.

That's when word got out that David E. Lipson, a multimillionaire entrepreneur who was once chairman of Frederick's of Hollywood, the racy lingerie company, was not content with merely owning a big spread in Montana. He wants to trademark "The Last Best Place."

If Lipson has his way -- and six of his applications have been all but granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office -- his various companies would have exclusive commercial use of "The Last Best Place" as a brand name. The phrase could be used to sell anything -- real estate, footwear, maybe a fruit drink.

"It is a normal business practice," Lipson said over lunch at his 37,000-acre ranch, called Paws Up, here in the Blackfoot Valley. "You trademark your brands."

Lipson said he would not try to prevent the state of Montana from using "The Last Best Place" in tourist promotion and was merely seeking to protect his business interests from trademark infringement.

"We were amazed that all the rights to 'The Last Best Place' hadn't been trademarked," he said. "It was shocking."

Shock -- together with shoot-that-varmint anger -- is what many Montanans felt when they heard about Lipson's effort to lock up commercial use of a euphonious and wildly popular slogan he did not invent.

"We just don't like big shots coming from someplace else and claiming they own something they don't," said Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a rancher himself, as well as the first Democratic governor of Montana since 1988. "Who is he? The Wizard of Oz? We don't think he is the Wizard of Oz, and I sure as hell ain't the scarecrow!"

Lipson's reputation in Montana has taken a terrible pounding this summer. Local newspapers keep mentioning the $2.8 million fine he was ordered to pay in 2001 to resolve a Securities and Exchange Commission charge of insider trading in a case involving Supercuts, the nationwide haircut chain of which he was chief executive in the mid-1990s.

Articles also note that Lipson has been sued by a Great Falls contractor for allegedly not paying bills for work done at his ranch. And Lipson generated still more headlines in July when he was fined a record $210,000 by the state for opening a high-end guest resort at his ranch without proper licenses for water.

These public relations problems pale, however, in comparison with the populist rage that Lipson ignited with his maneuvers to corner the market on "The Last Best Place.

These guys are marketing themselves as our "everyman". Maybe it is time to turn off our televisions and tell the marketers, "no."

Bird Flu Day

It's been a bird flu day. Today I wrote the form letter that I'll be sending to friends and relations as we move through the coming weeks. The time to start planning is now. According to my sources, the virus is probably already moving through human populations in Southeast Asia. H2H transmission may not be efficient yet, but it is happening. Revere says:

All previous pandemics have had a subterranean prologue of smoldering human infection, below the radar screen, followed by sudden explosive spread. Given the relative inability most of the countries where the disease is now endemic in poultry to mount effective surveillance efforts, I wouldn't be too confident.

I guess I'm a journalist now because I actually spent the day talking with sources. One of the television producers I spoke with asked me, "How are you sleeping these days?" The answer, "Poorly." The scary conversation I had with the WaPo reporter this morning isn't going to help tonight.

This was a very long day. How was yours?

Same Song, Second Verse

Iraq war woes

Bush can't dodge the sad facts, despite PR spin to rev up support

August 25, 2005

BY JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY

Those of us who are old enough to have seen this movie before were reminded of other presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, who were haunted by another war and dogged by war protesters and a nation that lost confidence in their leadership and wound up divided against itself.

Will history remember this week as the tipping point for George W. Bush and the Republicans who control Congress? Can they stay the course as they head into mid-term elections next year?

One more question: Will our children and grandchildren and their children harvest a bitter crop of budget deficits, higher oil prices, Islamic militancy and a broken Army and Marine Corps that was seeded in Iraq by this president, his vice president and his secretary of defense?

Will that bitter harvest, not a cakewalk, a mission accomplished and a Mesopotamian march of democracy, be Bush's legacy?

Going Backwards

The Equal Rites Awards, 2005
Recognizing those who labored mightily throughout the past year to set back the cause of women

Ellen Goodman

OK, Harvard prez Larry Summers was all set to win the Battle of the Sexes Prize for the brouhaha created by his off-hand and off-the-wall remarks that women might have less "intrinsic aptitude" for science. But what do we give to the Harvard Corporation that saw fit to give him a raise instead of a rap? A grant to study the intrinsic aptitude for male bonding?

Can you advance backward? The Dubious Equality Award for the most unwanted parity goes to the Runaway Bride, Jennifer Wilbanks. She proved that women too can be commitment-phobic -- only they get famous for it.

Justice, wherefore are thou? The Blind Justice Award goes this year to Judge Paul Bastine of Spokane, Wash. The good judge refused to give Shawnna Hughes a divorce because she was pregnant and he didn't want her baby born illegitimate. Never mind that husband Carlos was in jail for domestic violence. We simply bench the judge.

But guess who is next at bat? We award John Roberts, nominee for the Supreme Court, the Let's Hope He Grew Out of It Prize. As a teenager, Roberts editorialized against admitting women to his parochial school because he didn't want to study Shakespeare's racy passages with "a blonde giggling and blushing behind me." Ruth Ginsburg, beware!

Finally, our Knight in Shining Armor Prize goes to George Bush for so many reasons, but especially this one. He didn't follow his wife's advice to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court, but he did let her appoint the first woman chef to rule the White House kitchen. Who said there wasn't progress?

Devolution

Sectarian Violence in Iraq Precedes Submission of New Constitution
Fighters Believed to be From Saddam Hussein's Former Regime Kill Dozens

By Ellen Knickmeyer, Jonathan Finer and Saad Sarhan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 25, 2005; 12:27 PM

BAGHDAD, Aug. 25 -- Fighters believed to be members of Saddam Hussein's former regime killed 13 Iraqi police, 27 civilians and an American security-force member in a concerted attack in a west Baghdad neighborhood, first luring police within range by slaughtering five members of an Iraqi household, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Thursday.

The Baghdad attack, in which witnesses said up to 40 masked insurgents armed with grenade-launchers and AK-47 assault rifles openly walked the streets, came late Wednesday, as political violence and sectarian tensions flared across Iraq on the eve of a decision on Iraq's new constitution.

Two days of sudden clashes between government-allied Shiite fighters and a rival Shiite militia subsided in the south of Iraq by midday Thursday, after appeals for calm by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari and militant Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.

Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Jafari, said the constitution itself would be submitted to the National Assembly on Thursday in its final form, after three days of final negotiations spurred largely by objections from Iraq's Sunni Arab minority.

"The assembly will then rubber-stamp it" with a vote no later than Sunday, Kubba said, making clear the extent to which faction leaders, rather than parliament members or parliament's constitutional committee, are deciding the charter.

Iraqis then will vote in a referendum to ratify the constitution on Oct. 15. Political leaders' negotiations on the charter had gone as far as far as they could, Kubba said. "They've just exhausted it -- they've spent hours debating this," he said.

The main disputes have been over federalism. A federal system called for in the constitution -- as demanded by members of the Shiite Muslim majority and the Kurdish ethnic minority -- would formalize the self-rule of the Kurdish north and allow the Shiite south and any other areas to also create their own federal regions. Sunni Arabs and followers Sadr, the Shiite cleric and key figure in the Shiite clashes, largely oppose federalism.

Kubba linked both the Sunni Arab insurgent attack in Baghad and the Shiite-on-Shiite violence in the south to the constitution, saying disputes over the charter had aggravated tensions in the south.

The Baghdad attack, Kubba said, was a "stage-managed operation" meant to overshadow progress on the constitution. "They wanted the writing on the wall, that they are still there."

Looks like we're into full-scale civil war now.

The American Media

The Vancouver Sun is on top of avian influenza. You might well ask where are the US papers? I just got off the phone with the WaPo writer who is on the flu beat and he isn't taking any of this seriously. He thinks this will be a 5-6 day event.

Morons.

(Link fixed.)

Black Hat Exploits

via my old friend Lex Alexander:

Hatin'

I'm in a hatin' mood right now, which is not like me. I can't tell whether I'm more hatin' on the fuckwads that write viruses and worms like the 87 variants of Zotob out there or on Microsoft for being so incredibly security unconscious. I sometimes get to hatin' on my own group for being too damn slow to respond to publication of exploits and the patches to secure them, but this time the malware came so fast and furious that it is unreasonable to think that we could have prevented the outbreak that has affected many of our customers, including the one that I support. I personally have only been inconvenienced, but many, maybe most, of the folks in my company have gone through sheer hell the last week, many logging as much as 100 hours in the week, and it ain't over yet.

Every time we go through one of these episodes (and this is turning out to be one of the worst), the question is raised as to whether we should continue to use/support Microsoft products. While I'm still not sure that Linux is ready for prime time as a user platform (I'm fully supportive of it as a server platform), I am thinking that moving from Microsoft applications is something that we could and probably should do today. Very few of my technically-inclined friends run MS browsers or email clients or productivity products at home. I've been running an old free version of StarOffice (the Sun version of OpenOffice) for a couple of years and it is almost indistinguishable from MS Office and does a tremendous job of converting from one to the other. I've been running Firefox and Thunderbird instead of IE and Outlook for months and there are only about 2 websites that I need to visit that don't format properly on Firefox and force me to use IE. So while I'm not quite ready to dump the Windows OS (there's no version of Dungeon Siege for Linux yet that I'm aware of), I'm fully supportive of dumping every other piece of crappy code they sell and will continue to suggest that my company and our customers do the same.

I know for some that it sounds like I'm blaming the victim (if you can imagine Microsoft as a victim) and I really do want to avoid that. The fuckwads (I can think of nothing else to call them) cost the global economy millions of dollars but what's even worse, they cause a lot of good innocent people to work their asses off, cancel vacations, miss their families, get stress-related illnesses and generally be miserable mostly for some dickhead's kicks. When they're caught, they should be punished commensurate with the crime - I'm thinking at least 30 years of hard time. If you just take one of our customers and add up the lost productivity of people who either had an infected PC taken off the network or a server that was critical to their work out of commission and add to that the hours spent remediating the problems caused by the malware or in preventing its further spread, you'd be up to 3.5 years of wasted time. And we had more than one customer affected. So maybe putting them away for life would be more appropriate. And it might save them from the angry mob of my fellows who would be more than willing to rip them apart limb from limb and hang them from butcher hooks in the town square.

Every infosec guy I know feels pretty much the same way. I'm not personally ready to head for Open BSD just yet, but I'm getting there. I hear Open Office is pretty nice stuff.

The Critical Information

Ian Welsh has an excellent post up this morning on avian influenza and economics this morning. Go read him. I missed the BMO presser yesterday with a bad stomach, Ian caught the transcript.

Yes, you are probably going to get a bird flu post a day. As the reveres point out this morning, we are really on day to day status with the birds now.

Time to kick your stockpiling into high gear.

Amerika

American Legion Declares War on Protestors -- Media Next?

By E&P; Staff

Published: August 24, 2005 4:20 PM ET

NEW YORK The American Legion, which has 2.7 million members, has declared war on antiwar protestors, and the media could be next. Speaking at its national convention in Honolulu, the group's national commander called for an end to all “public protests” and “media events” against the war, even though they are protected by the Bill of Rights.

"The American Legion will stand against anyone and any group that would demoralize our troops, or worse, endanger their lives by encouraging terrorists to continue their cowardly attacks against freedom-loving peoples," Thomas Cadmus, national commander, told delegates at the group's national convention in Honolulu.

The delegates voted to use whatever means necessary to "ensure the united backing of the American people to support our troops and the global war on terrorism."

In his speech, Cadmus declared: "It would be tragic if the freedoms our veterans fought so valiantly to protect would be used against their successors today as they battle terrorists bent on our destruction.”

He explained, "No one respects the right to protest more than one who has fought for it, but we hope that Americans will present their views in correspondence to their elected officials rather than by public media events guaranteed to be picked up and used as tools of encouragement by our enemies." This might suggest to some, however, that American freedoms are worth dying for but not exercising.

Without mentioning any current protestor, such as Cindy Sheehan, by name, Cadmus recalled: "For many of us, the visions of Jane Fonda glibly spouting anti-American messages with the North Vietnamese and protestors denouncing our own forces four decades ago is forever etched in our memories. We must never let that happen again….

"We had hoped that the lessons learned from the Vietnam War would be clear to our fellow citizens. Public protests against the war here at home while our young men and women are in harm's way on the other side of the globe only provide aid and comfort to our enemies."

Resolution 3, which was passed unanimously by 4,000 delegates to the annual event, states: "The American Legion fully supports the president of the United States, the United States Congress and the men, women and leadership of our armed forces as they are engaged in the global war on terrorism and the troops who are engaged in protecting our values and way of life."

Cadmus advised: "Let's not repeat the mistakes of our past. I urge all Americans to rally around our armed forces and remember our fellow Americans who were viciously murdered on Sept. 11, 2001."

Let's fight for our freedom by not exercising it. Right.

Where do these loonies come from?

The Book Club

The Visual Display of Information by Ed Tufte.

Let's start the Bump Book Club with this one for next month. We'll worry about the time and place later. Those of you out out of town can participate by computer, I'll make sure the venue is wi-fi enabled. I won't be able to order you a mojito at the bar, you'll have to take care if that, but we can use some chat software to have an engaging discussion

Those of you in town, I'm taking nominations for a great location with WiFi. My local Panera is in the mix.

If you don't have chat software, consider downloading Yahoo IM. It works pretty well and isn't a trojan horse for bad exploits by blackhats.

(Link fixed.)

Hiding in Plain Sight

Why we can miss 'obvious' sights

BBC August 24, 2005

Scientists say they have pinpointed the brain region involved in a curious phenomenon called "change blindness".

Most of us know what it is like to look at something but fail to see the obvious, such as a traffic light turning green.

UK researchers at University College London, along with US colleagues from Princeton University, have located the brain's parietal cortex as key.

Switching this area off causes change blindness, Cerebral Cortex reports.

There has been increasing evidence from brain scan studies to suggest that awareness of what we see is not only down to the part of the brain that processes visual information - the visual cortex - but also other brain regions.

Using a process called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which delivers currents to the brain, researchers were able to temporarily switch off the parietal cortex in nine healthy volunteers.

When they did this, the volunteers failed to notice big changes in visual scenes, such as when one of four faces on a video screen was replaced by another face.

The exact critical spot in the parietal cortex lies just a few centimetres above and behind the right ear - the area many people scratch when concentration.

The researchers believe their findings explain change blindness, a phenomenon often exploited by magicians.

Professor Lavie said: "The finding that this region of the brain has both these functions, concentration and visual awareness, explains why we can be so easily deceived by, say, a magicians' trick.

"When we're concentrating so hard on something that our processing capacity is at its limits, the parietal cortex is not available to pay attention to new things and even dramatic changes can go unnoticed.

This is simply fascinating and can easily explain why people who drive while talking on cell phones can completely miss what is going on around them.

Maybe this is why so many smart folks are absent minded.... they are thinking so hard that the rest of the world vanishes.... hmmm....I wonder if my wife will buy that one.....

Being Left Behind

Education Chief Criticizes Connecticut

By DOUG GROSS
The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 24, 2005

ATLANTA -- Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday called claims that the No Child Left Behind Act isn't fully funded "a red herring," and suggested states that are balking may simply fear seeing the test results.

Connecticut filed a lawsuit Monday that claims the federal government has not provided enough money to pay for the testing and programs associated with the 2001 law.

Spellings, speaking to the Atlanta Press Club, said the lawsuit "does trouble me a little bit" and, afterward, suggested states that oppose the law simply fear the results of its accountability measures.

"I just see that as a red herring," she said of Connecticut's claim that this year's federal funds will fall $41.6 million short of paying for staffing, training and tests for No Child Left Behind.

"What are they afraid of knowing, I guess, is one of the things I'd like to know."

Connecticut officials responded sharply to Spellings's comments.

"Three words for federal officials _ read the law," said Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. "Under the law, the federal government must pay for any additional testing. They have not done so."

It really is that simple. If you want to reform the schools, and I mean REFORM them, it's going to cost $$$$ and lots of it. And it's going to tick people off, especially the so-called experts who talk a good talk but won't walk it. More tests aren't the answer and it's nice to see that SOMEONE has gotten that message.

I've spent the last couple of days in multiple meetings and planning sessions about how to reform high schools, instead of being in my classroom getting ready. I really want to ask these "experts" that if they are serious about reducing the drop out rate and reducing violence, then why are 1/4 - 1/3 of our Freshmen reading 1-2 grade levels below what they should despite the fact that the feeder schools do so damn well on the state tests? How do we cover US History in 90 days or less if the textbook and primary sources are too complex for them to read?

How am I going to turn around a 14 year old that's been ignored and suffered from "the soft bigotry of low expectations" when no one has ever expected anything from them or made them face consequences for the actions (or inactions)? The answer I get back from administrators is, "Well you know that in our county, we believe that every child can learn. What kind of teacher are you to question that?"

It's not a question of if they can learn, because they can, it's will they be willing to do what is necessary to learn the information that is taught in the classroom. And the fact of the matter is that many of them have not learned the skills necessary to learn at this level. When will the responsibility to open their textbook or notes fall on them? And if it doesn't, than what kind of lesson have we taught them?

End-of-the-Summer Cooking

The humidity has gone way down and the temperature has dropped to something humane, so my appetite is back. This is on the menu for the weekend. It's time to mix some of that end of the summer vegetable bounty with the herbs in the herb garden. If temperatures are range-top tolerant this weekend, make this and freeze it. You'll serve it as a superb late summer first course now and you'll be so glad that it is in the freezer for that first cold and rainy October day. This is the best Minestrone I've ever eaten and the pesto is what makes it. When the stock pot comes out, it's a sign I'm ready for the season to change.

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
6 cups low-salt chicken broth
2 carrots, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch-thick rounds
2 celery stalks, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
4 small red-skinned potatoes, quartered
1/2 pound green beans, trimmed, cut into 1-inch pieces
3 small zucchini, halved lengthwise, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 15-ounce can cannellini (white kidney beans), drained
2 tomatoes, peeled, crushed
2 cups fresh spinach leaves, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
6 tablespoons Classic Pesto
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Heat olive oil in heavy large pot over medium heat. Add onion and sauté until soft, about 4 minutes. Add broth and next 7 ingredients. Increase heat to high and bring soup to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low, partially cover pot, and simmer until potatoes are tender, about 10 minutes. Stir in spinach; simmer 3 minutes longer. Season soup to taste with salt and pepper. Ladle soup into 6 bowls; garnish each with 1 tablespoon pesto. Serve, passing cheese separately.

Pesto

4 cups fresh basil leaves (from about 3 large bunches)
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup pine nuts
6 garlic cloves
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1/4 cup freshly grated pecorino Sardo or Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon coarse kosher salt

Combine first 4 ingredients in blender. Blend until paste forms, stopping often to push down basil. Add both cheeses and salt; blend until smooth. Transfer to small bowl. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Top with 1/2 inch olive oil and chill.)

Makes about 1 cup.

Harking back to an earlier food post, pesto can be considerd "Melanie Butter." I use it on lots of things (even just spread on bread, or spooned into white lasagna with spinach.) There is no such thing as too much pesto. It's in the fridge at all times. My neighbor wanted to know why I'm letting my basil get so big rather than clipping it for meals: because I need a boatload to make a huge batch of pesto to start the fall. I won't harvest it until just before the freeze, and then the Cuisinart gets put to use. I like a coarse, Ligurian pesto. If you like it smoother, use a blender. Yes, I've done it in a mortar and pestle, but it is hard to get a regular consistency with those, particularly if you are making a large quantity.

Use high quality extra-virgin olive oil for this, the kind that you would never let anywhere near a saute pan, the fruitier the better. Yes, I keep multiple olive oils in the house. I use the Greek stuff for cooking and the Italian for salads and sauces. With those and a bottle each of peanut and canola oils, your cooking needs should be covered.

Minestrone makes a superb first course (serve with a Pinot Grigio) for a transitional summer to fall menu. It will compliment everything from barbequed chicken to flank steak. Or for a light dinner or lunch, serve it with a salad of wild field greens dressed with lemon vinaigrette, crusty bread (more pesto for the bread please) and some fruit and mild cheese. Sliced figs with smoked Gouda are a surprise.

Minestrone is versatile. To the veggies in the recipe above, you can add nearly anything. It's a vegetable soup on a stout chicken stock and takes on a completely new character with the addition of, say, asparagus. Add clams and clam juice and you have a Manhattan clam chowder with decidedly Sicilian feel.

Panda Blogging

Public to Vote on Panda Cub's Name
Five Names Suggested for National Zoo's Special Baby

By Karlyn Barker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 24, 2005; 3:00 PM

The name of the National Zoo's new giant panda cub has come down to a choice of five -- and the general public gets to make the final decision from among those possibilities.

Friends of the National Zoo, the non-profit support organization for the zoo, today released five names suggested by the China Wildlife Conservation Association and National Zoo staff. Panda fans have until Sept. 30 to vote for their favorite one via the zoo/FONZ Web site at www.fonz.org/cubname.htm.

The choices:

# Hua Sheng (pronounced HwaH-SHUng), which means China Washington, and also magnificent, according to FONZ.

# Sheng Hua (pronounced SHUng-HwaH), which means Washington China, and also magnificent.

# Tai Shan (pronounced Tie-SHON), which means peace mountain.

# Long Shan (pronounced lohng-SHON), which means dragon mountain.

# Qiang Qiang (pronounced chee-ONG chee-ONG), which means strong, powerful.

The male cub, the first surviving cub birth in the zoo's history, was born July 9.

FONZ said it will randomly select one voter, who will receive a trip for two to Washington for a "private visit" with the giant panda family and other prizes.

FONZ is also holding a contest for youngsters aged 6 to 14 who create successful campaigns to raise money for the zoo's Giant Panda Conservation Fund. Called "Pennies for Pandas," winning entries will be selected in each of two age groups, 6 to 10 and 11 to 14, based on the campaign that raises the most money and the campaign deemed most creative.

The four winners also will each receive a trip for four to Washington for a private tour of the Panda House as well as other prizes.

An entry form and more information about the fundraising contest can also be found at the zoo/FONZ Web site at www.fonz.org/penniesforpandas.htm.

The cub's name and the winners of both contests will be announced in October.

I thought you'd want to know and maybe enter the contest. I'm up for meeting the panda family

Make Believe

I'm sitting here listening to W give his "greatest force for freedom" speech to the National Guard out in Idaho, while reading Jeff Morley's world press roundup in the WaPo. Dissonance, anyone?

Pessimism Clouds Constitution's Prospects

By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 24, 2005; 10:30 AM

As the Iraqi National Assembly considers the latest draft of the country's proposed constitution, Tuesday's headlines in Baghdad suggested a capital city close to meltdown.

The minister of electricity was fired, said Al-Bayyna, a weekly paper published by the Hezbollah movement, because power is off 11 times more often than it is on. The power shortage caused a water shortage and completely halted oil exports from the southern part of the country, according to translations in the Iraqi Press Monitor.

And the independent daily Addustour added that radical cleric Moqtada Sadr has called for a silent protest against the country's poor public services.

About the only good news was Addaawa's report that the first phase of the war crimes investigation against Saddam Hussein is complete. But that was matched by Al Mashriq's story that the National De-Baathification Committee, which is supposed to purge the country of Hussein's influence, has been shut down.

This portrait of Iraq today, compiled by Iraqis, underscores the pessimism, among Iraqi and non-Iraqi observers in Baghdad, that has greeted the news that the National Assembly will vote Thursday on new national charter.

The combination of two missed deadlines, continuing violence, the very visible role of U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, and the objections of secular Sunnis and women's rights groups explains why the reaction from Baghdad falls short of the positive statements emanating from Washington.

"There is no doubt the U.S. war on Iraq is still raging and that the boots of foreign troops are running the country rather than a national government," wrote columnist Fatih Abdulsalam Tuesday in Azzaman, one of the city's biggest circulation dailies. "Is it right then to write a constitution under such circumstances?"

"Imagine the Germans or the Japanese writing a new constitution while battles were still raging across their countries and their major cities were under the mercy of violence and insurgent attacks," he wrote.

"But that is exactly what is happening in Iraq. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who invaded the country, realize the war they started is still on but act as if was not."

"The point is how to stop this war and bring peace and stability to the country. We are afraid a constitution written under such circumstances will not do it," he said.

"In that case we will be left with the only alternative: a timetable for a quick departure of U.S. and British occupation troops," Abdulsalam concluded.

Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar complained last week that "the US ambassador to Iraq attends all the constitution meetings and gives the Iraqi stakeholders some printed 'suggestions' to break the deadlock, while the Iraqi resistance's assassinations and attacks are getting stronger and more effective."

"US decision makers are still refusing to face the truth," he wrote from his home in Amman, Jordan. "The premature elections this year were more than enough to convince anyone of the fact that Iraq won't be rebuilt if we continued working on the same path: Bush's path of lies and failure.

"The Iraqi constitution shouldn't be rushed through. Iraqis have the right to take as much time as they need to write their country's constitution," he said.

Keep Him Out

Mary Conroy: Roberts is no friend of working people

By Mary Conroy
August 24, 2005

Let's consider John Roberts as a job candidate. He's applied for a spot on the Supreme Court. Does he qualify?

First comes his experience. Roberts has only been a judge for two years. Not too many workplaces would suddenly propel a manager with that experience to the top echelon. Imagine Madison hiring a school principal with two years' experience to replace the current superintendent. Not too likely.

Besides the length of experience, consider Roberts' type of experience. Nearly all of it has been advocacy work, either for Ronald Reagan or for George H.W. Bush. In both cases, he acted to forward the president's agenda. He has also pushed the agendas of the arch-conservative Republican National Lawyers Association and the National Legal Center for the Public Interest and the Washington Legal Foundation, groups friendly to corporations and hostile to workers' rights. All of this shows he has the temperament to be an advocate, not a judge.

But those aren't the only reasons we should push our senators to vote against his nomination. If you work for a living, Roberts' nomination should alarm you. Roberts' work shows he thinks civil rights laws are too broad, corporate interests supersede those of individuals, and that companies can fire workers disabled on the job.

Roberts argued against programs for hiring minority contractors (Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Mineta) and (Rothe Dev. Corp. v. United States Dept. of Defense). Roberts also wrote that paying women the same as men for jobs of comparable worth was "staggeringly pernicious" and "anti-capitalist." He also urged the administration not to intervene in a sex discrimination case regarding job training for female prisoners, even though Attorney General William French Smith disagreed. Equal pay and access to job training don't just affect people of color and women; they affect their families as well.
....
If that's not enough to convince you, consider Roberts' supporters. Workforce Management, a publication of Crain's Chicago Business, has already trumpeted Roberts as "a likely ally of employers." It quotes Catherine Fisk, law professor at Duke University and co-editor of Labor Law studies. She reviewed nine cases heard by Roberts on the court of appeals in the last two years. He ruled in favor of a corporation each time.

"He is going to be a fairly reliable vote against workers' rights across the board," the article quotes Fisk. "My suspicion is that the pattern won't change when he joins the Supreme Court. He is a rock-solid conservative."

Besides Workforce Management, keep an eye on Roberts' endorsers. For the first time in its 110-year history, the National Association of Manufacturers, the largest lobbying group supporting industry, has supported the nomination of a Supreme Court justice in backing Roberts.

Anti-woman, anti-worker. Time to call your Senators.

Repub PC

The un-empirical presidency
By Bruce Fuller, BRUCE FULLER is a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley.

PRESIDENT BUSH'S love affair with the scientific community is awkward at best. The White House science advisor, John H. Marburger III, is on record as saying that "in this administration, science strongly informs policy." But where's the romance for scientists if Bush casts a blind eye over evidence of a human role in global warming or the difference between evolution and intelligent design?

Now the administration's propensity to ignore empirical data threatens the search for effective school reforms. The latest case of science snubbed emerged last week and involves the quiet quashing of new findings on the success of bilingual teaching in the nation's classrooms.

Californians understand how important such research is — almost two-fifths of the state's schoolchildren come from non-English speaking homes. And parents and employers everywhere want to know what advances children's reading and language skills. Figuring that out was the charge given, along with 1 million in taxpayer dollars, to Bush's prestigious National Literacy Panel, appointed three years ago.

Panelist Robert Slavin, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University, was asked to review the best-designed experiments, where children were randomly assigned to either bilingual or English-immersion classrooms. The administration, rightfully, wanted to test reforms with the same rigor with which it tests new drugs. Or so it said.

Slavin found that, according to the best data, children's early literacy skills climbed at a faster rate in bilingual classrooms. He wanted to publish his findings immediately; the Education Department said to wait until the panel's full report was done.

"From the perspective of academic freedom, I didn't like the idea of something being held up," Slavin said. He resigned from the panel.

Now the panel's report is finished. Another of its members extended Slavin's research, with the same results: Good bilingual education programs produce faster results than good English-only programs. These findings (and others — for instance, that reading is best taught via basic skills, like phonics) have been peer-reviewed, but Bush's Education Department won't make the report public.

"They said they weren't going to release it," the panel chairman, University of Illinois psychologist Timothy Shanahan, told me last week.

Kathleen Leos, who heads the Office of English Language Acquisition in the Education Department, denies the report is being deep-sixed. "We are in negotiations, it's just not ready," she said. But another panel member, David Francis of the University of Houston, said the negotiations are over getting the government to relinquish copyright, so that the findings may be published independently.

Why would the administration sideline its own report? It's possible that the bilingual education results weren't what it wanted to hear. "English only" is a rallying cry in the culture wars, and evidence that works against it also works against such Bush allies as English First, which has lead the charge against bilingual education.

This is a no-brainer. Anybody who has studied a foreign language knows that it strengthens your English skills.

Cognitive Dissonance

Two extra US battalions to Iraq
From: Agence France-Presse
From correspondents in Washington

August 24, 2005

THE Pentagon plans to deploy two additional battalions to Iraq amid rising insurgent attacks ahead of an anticipated referendum on a constitution, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said today.

Mr Rumsfeld expressed confidence that public support for the war effort in Iraq will hold despite polls showing growing disenchantment in the United States.

"I think it'll have the support of the American people, and it will be sustained, and we will be successful," he said.

CNN/USAToday Poll results.

"And the alternative would be to turn that country and 25 million people over to terrorists and the kinds of people who have used chemicals on their own people and chemicals on their neighbours," he said. "That would be to turn to darkness."

An unfinished draft of the constitution was presented to the Iraqi parliament late yesterday, but deep differences remain between Sunnis and the Shiites and Kurds.

Mr Rumsfeld discounted concerns that Sunni rejection of the charter could leave US forces caught in the middle of a civil war.

"It hasn't happened yet. It is not happening now," he said.

"And, obviously, it is something that one has to be attentive to and be concerned about. But I haven't seen anything to indicate that the risk is greater today than it was yesterday or the day before," he said.

His comments came on a day in which two more Americans, a soldier and a contractor, died. They were killed in a suicide bombing in Baquba that also claimed the lives of five Iraqis.

Around 60 US troops have been killed so far in August, making it one of the deadliest months of the war for the US military since it invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The US death toll now stands at 1868.

New World Order

Constitution on the Brink

Wednesday, August 24, 2005; Page A14

WHILE TALKS over the Iraqi constitution continue in Baghdad, the results so far can only be worrisome for those who hoped the process would help consolidate a new democratic political order and alleviate the Sunni insurgency. The completion of a constitution in the coming days would keep Iraq on track toward holding elections and forming a permanent government by early next year, a timetable the Bush administration has made an overriding priority. Yet both the means adopted to complete the draft and some of the language reported to be in the document risk exacerbating the divide between Iraq's majority Shiite and Kurd communities and the minority Sunnis, thereby adding fuel to the insurgency. Iraqis and U.S. officials need to make good use of the brief time between now and the scheduled meeting of the National Assembly tomorrow if that outcome is to be avoided.

After missing the first deadline for completing the constitution, Shiite and Kurd leaders submitted a draft to the National Assembly Monday only after excluding Sunnis from their negotiations. Many Shiite leaders appear to favor ratifying that draft over Sunni objections. In part the sentiment is understandable: The mostly unelected Sunni representatives, who tacitly and sometimes explicitly seek to use the insurgency as leverage, have been uncompromising. They demand a powerful central government that would be incompatible with a democratic and pluralistic Iraq; some no doubt still dream of restoring Sunni dictatorship. Still, the stabilization of Iraq requires Shiite, Kurd and Sunni leaders to compromise on such crucial questions as the degree of federalization and sharing of oil revenue. By forcing through their own solutions, the Shiites and Kurds will merely forestall any compromise, while giving Sunnis a more tangible cause for rebellion than mere nostalgia for Saddam Hussein.

No reliable text of the constitution had been made public by yesterday evening; various drafts, both old and new, were said to be circulating in Baghdad. Much of the language obtained by Iraqi and Western media outlets appeared similar to that of the temporary constitution approved by Iraqi leaders under U.S. supervision in March 2004. In both the temporary constitution and the new draft, Islam is cited as one source of legislation, and they prohibit laws that conflict with Islamic principles, democratic standards or a bill of rights that includes freedom of religion. That's comparable to the new Afghan constitution and more liberal than the charters of most Muslim states, including such U.S. allies as Egypt and Jordan. However, complicated provisions for family law cited in some drafts could restrict rights for women in parts of Iraq; and much could depend on the interpretation of the competing clauses on Islam and human rights by a court that reportedly could be made up at least in part by clerics.

Of even greater concern are some of the provisions for local rule reportedly agreed upon by the Shiites and Kurds. While the temporary constitution already allowed the formation of regional governments, several reports said Monday's draft would allow those governments to form and control their own security forces. By some accounts, they would also obtain revenue from new oil wells. That raises the prospect of Kurdish and Shiite mini-states in the north and south that would eventually control a disproportionate share of Iraq's wealth, at the expense of Baghdad and Sunni areas. A Shiite region in southern Iraq also could move quickly toward de facto Islamic rule, regardless of the constitution's language or decisions by the national government.

Juan Cole warns:

Al-Hayat: President Jalal Talabani began a last push to convince the Sunni Arabs, the Sadr Movement, and the Iraqi National Accord (led by former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi] to accept the new constitution. The government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari said it was unlikely that substantial alterations would now be made to the draft.

This, despite the threats of those who oppose it to mount a "popular uprising" (Intifada) and to "set the streets afire." Sunni Arab politician Salih al-Mutlak predicted that the falsity of the consitution would be demonstrated in the October 15 referendum, which he said it would fail.

Muqtada al-Sadr organized crowds to protest the constitution in several Shiite cities. (Crowds in Najaf have come out in favor of the constitution). Muqtada warned that if it looked as though the country were heading toward a break-up, he could not sit idly by, but would have to take action.

I am told that the situation in Latifiyah, a battleground between Sunnis and Shiites, continues to deteriorate.

On the Line

Who Will Say 'No More'?

By Gary Hart

Wednesday, August 24, 2005; Page A15

History will deal with George W. Bush and the neoconservatives who misled a mighty nation into a flawed war that is draining the finest military in the world, diverting Guard and reserve forces that should be on the front line of homeland defense, shredding international alliances that prevailed in two world wars and the Cold War, accumulating staggering deficits, misdirecting revenue from education to rebuilding Iraqi buildings we've blown up, and weakening America's national security.

But what will history say about an opposition party that stands silent while all this goes on? My generation of Democrats jumped on the hot stove of Vietnam and now, with its members in positions of responsibility, it is afraid of jumping on any political stove. In their leaders, the American people look for strength, determination and self-confidence, but they also look for courage, wisdom, judgment and, in times of moral crisis, the willingness to say: "I was wrong."

To stay silent during such a crisis, and particularly to harbor the thought that the administration's misfortune is the Democrats' fortune, is cowardly. In 2008 I want a leader who is willing now to say: "I made a mistake, and for my mistake I am going to Iraq and accompanying the next planeload of flag-draped coffins back to Dover Air Force Base. And I am going to ask forgiveness for my mistake from every parent who will talk to me."

Further, this leader should say: "I am now going to give a series of speeches across the country documenting how the administration did not tell the American people the truth, why this war is making our country more vulnerable and less secure, how we can drive a wedge between Iraqi insurgents and outside jihadists and leave Iraq for the Iraqis to govern, how we can repair the damage done to our military, what we and our allies can do to dry up the jihadists' swamp, and what dramatic steps we must take to become energy-secure and prevent Gulf Wars III, IV and so on."

At stake is not just the leadership of the Democratic Party and the nation but our nation's honor, our nobility and our principles. Franklin D. Roosevelt established a national community based on social justice. Harry Truman created international networks that repaired the damage of World War II and defeated communism. John F. Kennedy recaptured the ideal of the republic and the sense of civic duty. To expect to enter this pantheon, the next Democratic leader must now undertake all three tasks.

But this cannot be done while the water is rising in the Big Muddy of the Middle East. No Democrat, especially one now silent, should expect election by default. The public trust must be earned, and speaking clearly, candidly and forcefully now about the mess in Iraq is the place to begin.

The real defeatists today are not those protesting the war. The real defeatists are those in power and their silent supporters in the opposition party who are reduced to repeating "Stay the course" even when the course, whatever it now is, is light years away from the one originally undertaken. The truth is we're way off course. We've stumbled into a hornet's nest. We've weakened ourselves at home and in the world. We are less secure today than before this war began.

Who now has the courage to say this?

It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was part of a good platoon.
We were on manoeuvers in Louisiana,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain said, "We've got to ford the river",
That's where it all began.
We were knee deep in the Big Muddy,
And the damn fool kept yelling to push on.

The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,
This is the way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, I once crossed this river
Not a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but we'll keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fool kept yelling to push on.

"Captain, sir, with all this gear
No man'll be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Follow me, I'll lead on."
We were neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fool kept yelling to push on.

All of a sudden, the moon clouded over,
All we heard was a gurgling cry.
A second later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.

We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Than the place where he'd once been.
For another stream had joined the Muddy
A half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to get out of the Big Muddy
When the damn fool kept yelling to push on.

Well, you might not want to draw conclusions
I'll leave that to yourself
Maybe you're still walking, maybe you're still talking
Maybe you've still got your health.
But every time I hear the news
That old feeling comes back on;
We're waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools kept yelling to push on.

Knee deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools keep yelling to push on
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools keep yelling to push on
Waist deep! Neck deep! we'll be drowning before too long
We're neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools keep yelling to push on

c Pete Seeger

Our Blue Dot

Crisis in the delta

FISH LIFE IN THE SACRAMENTO-SAN JOAQUIN DELTA is declining at crisis levels, and state officials are at a loss to explain why, or what to do about it. The situation has potentially grave implications for an estimated 24 million Californians who get some or all of their water from the Rhode Island-size estuary south of Sacramento and east of San Francisco Bay.

The crisis received little public attention until Assemblywoman Lois Wolk (D-Davis) probed the situation Friday with a hearing of the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, which she chairs. Wolk concluded that the state needs a long-range plan to ensure the health of the delta. If such a plan required greater natural flows, that could cut into supplies diverted to farmers and to Southern Californians.

The delta crisis provides a critical test of CalFed, the multibillion-dollar, multi-agency program created by the state and federal governments to end the continual water wars focusing on the delta. The health of the delta depends on leaving sufficient water to wash naturally into San Francisco Bay.

The viability of CalFed is in question because Congress has not come up with the promised federal share of its costs, future state funds are threatened by budget shortfalls and water interests — farmers, urban water districts and environmentalists — can't agree on how future projects should be financed.

Meanwhile, state and federal experts are baffled by the decline in fish life. The populations of striped bass, the endangered delta smelt, the threadfin shad and a variety of plankton are at record lows, and the problem seems to be getting worse. This is all the more puzzling because, unlike previous species declines, this one doesn't appear to be drought-related.

The experts are reluctant to propose changes in delta operations until they know for sure what's wrong. Environmentalists and the sportfishing industry blame too much pumping. The fishermen want to cut off water exports, which is impossible. But there's no question that the pumps have affected the delta over the last 35 years, at times reversing natural stream flows.

Steve Hall, head of the Assn. of California Water Agencies — a coalition of urban and farming districts, including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — says that exports have not been a factor even though pumping reached record levels over the last three years. Hall said the decline in fish life is caused by toxic blooms triggered by "alien" algae, possibly introduced by the purging of ship ballast. Water agencies are arguing for even more pumping.

Wave of Marine Species Extinctions Feared

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 24, 2005; Page A01

BIMINI, Bahamas -- The bulldozers moved slowly at first. Picking up speed, they pressed forward into a patch of dense mangrove trees that buckled and splintered like twigs. As the machines moved on, the pieces drifted out to sea.

Sitting in a small motorboat a few hundred yards offshore on a mid-July afternoon, Samuel H. Gruber -- a University of Miami professor who has devoted more than two decades to studying the lemon sharks that breed here -- plunged into despondency. The mangroves being ripped up to build a new resort provide food and protection that the sharks can't get in the open ocean, and Gruber fears the worst.

"At the end of my career, I get to document the destruction of the species I've been documenting for 20 years," he lamented as he watched the bulldozers. "Wonderful."

Gruber's sentiments have become increasingly common in recent years among a growing number of marine biologists, who find themselves studying species in danger of disappearing. For years, many scientists and regulators believed the oceans were so vast there was little risk of marine species dying out. Now, some suspect the world is on the cusp of what Ellen K. Pikitch, executive director of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, calls "a gathering wave of ocean extinctions." Dozens of biologists believe the seas have reached a tipping point, with scores of species of ocean-dwelling fish, birds and mammals edging toward extinction. In the past 300 years, researchers have documented the global extinction of just 21 marine species -- and 16 have occurred since 1972.

Since the 1700s, another 112 species have died out in particular regions, and that trend, too, has accelerated since the mid-1960s: Nearly two dozen shark species are close to disappearing, according to the World Conservation Union, an international coalition of government and advocacy groups.

"It's been a slow-motion disaster," said Boris Worm, a professor at Canada's Dalhousie University, whose 2003 study that found that 90 percent of the top predator fish have vanished from the oceans. "It's silent and invisible. People don't imagine this. It hasn't captured our imagination, like the rain forest."

Many activists have focused on the plight of creatures such as the ivory-billed woodpecker and the grizzly bear, but relatively few have taken up the cause of marine species. Ocean dwellers are harder to track, and some produce so many offspring they can seem invulnerable. And, in the words of Ocean Conservancy shark fisheries expert Sonja Fordham, often "they're not very fuzzy."

Although a number of previous extinctions involved birds and marine mammals, it is the fate of many fish that worries experts. The large-scale industrialization of the fishing industry after World War II, a global boom in oceanfront development and a rise in global temperatures are all causing fish populations to plummet.

"Extinctions happen in the ocean; the fossil record shows that marine species have disappeared since life began in the sea," said Elliott A. Norse, who heads the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Redmond, Wash. "The question is, are humans a major new force causing marine extinctions? The evidence, and projections scientists are making, suggest that the answer is yes."

The WaPo story has some aching photos, click on the link. What kind of planet we are leaving our children?

computers, god and other short topics

The new laptop battery is on the way and I'll be ready to take on the Roberts' fight in all the remote locations where think tank and advocacy organizations will be holding events in DC. Right now is the deadest week of the year in DC. Some of the school systems go back to work with students next week (banking their snow days) but most return after Labor Day. That's going to change dramatically after Congress returns on September 6 and it is going to get really busy. My friend in New York tells me the city is dead and theres no rush hour to speak of. Hmmmm. DC staffers must have stayed around to research the Roberts fight, the traffic is awful as always here.

My friend pogge hasn't had a vacation since he went into business for himself back in the day. Most of the small business people I know can never afford to take them, either. Here in the States, they rarely have health insurance, either. If small business is the thing which made this country great (how many Bush campaign speeches did we hear about that?) why on earth do we kick the hell out of them and their employees? The next presidential campaign has to be about making this country safe for both big and small business. Neither party has a clue about that one.

If you are new to this site, go over to the search function on the right sideboard. It's below the ads. Type in "avian influenza" and you will get most of what you need to know, to date, from the postings there. For more information, thread your way though The Flu Clinic at the CurEvents bulletin board.

Want more information? Visit the Other Resources page at The Flu Wiki and add to it. Together, we are wise.

Now I need to go balance my check book and see if I can afford another month of health insurance. The Reveres may not think much of god or Gods, but they are a fully insured family. My Cobra benefits run out in 12 months. At that point I'll start burning incense to the Monkey God.

At $300 bucks a month, this can't go on forever.

Pain at the Pump

Gasoline Prices Rise 6 Cents to New High

The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 23, 2005; 6:39 AM

NEW YORK -- The retail price of gasoline rose more than 6 cents last week to an average $2.61 a gallon nationwide, a new record, the Energy Department reported Monday.

The previous record high was $2.55 per gallon, established the previous week. Adjusting for inflation, retail gasoline prices peaked above $3 a gallon in March 1980.

Despite soaring fuel prices, AAA expects an increase in the number of Americans taking road trips over the upcoming Labor Day holiday weekend.

The Orlando-based travel agency estimates that 34.5 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home, an increase of about 1 percent from last year. More than 80 percent of those trips will be by motor vehicle. AAA said the rise in Labor Day travel was not as large as in previous years because of the higher prices and the increase in the number of school systems that start before the holiday.

The latest weekly government survey said the average price nationwide of regular-grade gasoline rose by 6.2 cents to $2.612 per gallon, or 72.8 cents a gallon higher than the same time a year ago.

The price at my corner Exxon this afternoon was $2.70. I have no memory of the 1979-80 gas shock because I was car-less in graduate school at the time and using public transit in Boston. I have a small, fuel-efficient car (35 city, 40 hiway) and I nearly had a heart attack at my last fill up. Up until a year ago, I could always fill my tank for $20. The last fill cost me nearly $35. I'm re-thinking driving to Toronto in October: it might be cheaper to fly and rent a car.

Getting rid of the car altogether and using Zip Car for those rare occasions when nothing else will do is also an option. I can use the bus and cabs for grocery shopping.

Worm Turning

Jerry Dolittle over at Bad Attitudes caught something I missed on television the other night.

Night before last, Law and Order: Criminal Intent ran an episode in which New York detectives break up a ring of brutal corrections officers. The guards had been torturing American terrorism suspects secretly disappeared by Bush’s agents. Naturally the victims had no lawyers; naturally the agents had no warrants.

Of the “Patriot” Act under which all of this was done, one of the detectives said, “I read it before. It was called 1984.”

Even a year ago, no writer for network television would even have dared to write such a line, or to suggest such a plotline. And if she had, no producer would have given it the green light. We are seeing more and more of this sort of wimpthink on mainstream TV, now that Bush’s tide is moving out.

From the White House point of view, this development isn’t as bad as Walter Cronkite’s public defection from Lyndon Johnson’s war. It’s worse. Nobody much watches the news these days, but everybody watches Law and Order.

Dog Days

You can tell it is the end of August and there is no news when this stupid Pat Robertson story goes wall-to-wall at CNN. It's not like we're sitting here awaiting a pandemic flu or anything.

Thomas Index

My judicial nominations blog, Judging the Future, has been selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress's Minerva Project. I've written to them to get more information about what this will mean and who else will be in the neighborhood. The Minerva Project is the LOC's attempt to capture the information that never shows up on dead trees. I think this is pretty cool.

Here is the list.

Life in Baghdad

WaPo Baghdad Bureau Chief took questions in a live chat earlier today.

Seattle, Wash.: Hi, Ellen!

With all of the conflict and unrest, how dangerous is living in Iraq right now? Are residents able to go out and about? Are they able to work and go to school?

Take care of yourself!

Ellen Knickmeyer: I'd say it's people trying to live their normal lives under the gun, and in threat of bombs and greatly increased crime, and they've had to make a lot of compromises.
The Iraqis I know have to pay to have armed guards on the vans taking their kids to school, for fear of kidnapping. Many parents, for more than a year now, are keeping their children indoors, also for fear of kidnapping and violence. Girls especially are confined almost entirely to the home _ not out of belief they shouldn't be out there in public, but because of fears for their safety. You can imagine what kind of summer kids are having when it's 120 degrees, no electricity or limited electricity, and they can't leave their house.
I talked to one mother at an amusement park earlier this summer, who told her children she was taking them to the candy store, and the children were terrified _ "Won't we be kidnapped?" they asked, she said.
Basically, they're going about their daily lives as much as they can, but all the time they're out they're on the lookout for U.S. convoys that will attract car-bombers, or that might open fire on civilians who got too close...And there's plenty of other armed groups around here that are very quick to fire while they're on the road, including Iraqi police. It seems everyone has stories about close calls, or deaths in their families. And people ignore the sounds of gunshots close-by now, and hardly flinch at the sound of car bombs.
So how dangerous? It's not Sniper Alley in Sarajevo, but it's a hard way to live.

By the Friends You Keep

My old friend and professional colleague Lex Alexander has an absolutely brilliant post up on his Blog on the Run on the psychological and social effects of being made into a killer has on members of our armed forces. As they say, read the whole thing. Lex put a whole lot of research into that one and he is one hell of a writer.

Anti-Virals

Sales of key antiviral drug soar as awareness of flu pandemic potential rises

Helen Branswell
Canadian Press

August 23, 2005

TORONTO (CP) - North American sales of the drug oseltamivir have more than tripled in recent months, a trend public health experts see as evidence individuals are stockpiling the once little-used antiviral as a hedge against a possible flu pandemic.

With similar reports emerging in other countries as well, a leading advocate for pandemic preparedness is concerned public demand could soon outstrip the limited global supply.

"We are on a collision course to panic," warns Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

"I think that what's going to happen is . . . that this drug - which has yet to really be demonstrated to have any clinical impact on H5N1 infection - is now going to become the 'I can't get product, therefore I must have it right away product.'

"The reality is going to come through that there is only so much available."

H5N1 is the avian flu strain experts fear may be poised to trigger a pandemic. It has been decimating poultry stocks and infecting small numbers of people in Southeast Asia for the last 20 months and recently spread to parts of Russia.

Swiss drug maker Roche won't say how much oseltamivir - sold as Tamiflu - it can make. But the company insists individuals don't draw from the same pool as the lengthening queue of governments placing stockpile orders.

"We allocate seasonal use product based on forecasted figures and have separate pandemic supply," Roche Canada spokesperson Leigh Funston explained by email.

Canadian Tamiflu sales jumped to more than 76,000 prescriptions in the 12-month period ending in June, compared to 22,000 prescriptions in the entire 2004 calendar year, says IMS Health, which compiles drug sales data.

U.S. sales have surged as well, to nearly 1.7 million prescriptions in the first half of 2005 from just under 500,000 in 2004.

Public health officials are torn over what advice to give on the issue of personal stockpiling. Many are uncomfortable with the notion, but understand that planning for a virulent flu pandemic may mean departing from traditional models of care delivery.

Dr. David Butler-Jones, Canada's chief medical health officer, rhymes off a long list of reasons why people should think hard before laying in antivirals.

It's not clear the H5N1 strain will cause a pandemic, or that the drug will be effective if it does. Stockpiled drugs might pass their expiry date before a pandemic starts. People might confuse a cold with the flu and waste irreplaceable drug. There may be side-effects that haven't yet come to light because the drug has not been widely used.

But Butler-Jones stops short of asking Canadians not to stockpile Tamiflu, which costs about $60 for one course of 10 pills.

He admits antiviral experts advising the country's pandemic planning committee are working on a recommendation for the public on stockpiling.

"I think most of us recognize the pluses and minuses. The challenge is: What's the saw-off?" notes Butler-Jones, who says he has not stockpiled Tamiflu for himself or his family.

"My personal recommendation would be: No, I wouldn't rush out and do anything about it. But stay tuned. Things may change."

Andrew and Emma aren't waiting for an official go-ahead. Like many who follow developments with H5N1 through Internet bulletin boards and flu blogs, they fear it's now or never with this drug.

Neither wants to be identified by their real name and Andrew asks that the name of the Prairie community he lives in be withheld.

"I thought it would be best to get in early," says Andrew, 41, who has bought Tamiflu from three separate Internet pharmacies.

"I basically look at it from the point of view that the government is not going to be able to take care of everyone. And so you're on your own."

Canada currently has about 22.5 million pills stockpiled, enough to treat nearly eight per cent of the population. It's estimated between a quarter and a third of people will fall ill if a pandemic hits.

Judging from the numbers above, Americans are beginning to get the message from the Internets, in spite of the crumby coverage by the American media.

The advice of my doc partners at The Flu Wiki: save your money.

Bush the Fantasist

The war of words

PRESIDENT BUSH'S SUNNY DECLARATION on Monday that Baghdad's leaders were "defying the terrorists and pessimists by completing work on a democratic constitution" was unfortunate not only for its timing but for its willfulness. Just hours after Bush's speech, Iraqi leaders announced (again) that they were unable to agree on a draft constitution. Just as disturbing, however, is the continuing disconnect between the president's perspective and Iraq's reality.

In his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Bush again conflated Al Qaeda and Iraq, neglecting to note that Al Qaeda put down roots in Iraq only after the invasion or that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 or Osama bin Laden. His description of Iraq's constitutional negotiations — "a difficult process that involves debate and compromise" — understates the depth of animosity in Iraq. On Monday, representatives submitted an incomplete draft to the National Assembly because of continued disagreement on basic issues such as the strength of a central government and the role of Islam.

The United States has 138,000 troops in Iraq; Bush said Monday that they'd come home when Iraqis "can defend their freedom" by taking more of the fight to the enemy. But he was silent on when that might be.

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" that the U.S. "should start figuring out how we get out of there" because American involvement "has destabilized the Middle East." That's a fair assessment. When Congress returns soon from recess, members who have heard an earful from their constituents about the war can be expected to demand a more coherent strategy. Even former supporters of the war, such as Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), are questioning the administration's plans; Jones has co-sponsored a resolution demanding a plan for withdrawal by the end of the year.

Setting a deadline now would be a mistake, allowing insurgents to wait for the U.S. withdrawal before increasing their suicide bombings. But the American presence cannot be open-ended; we need ways to measure progress. How many Iraqi police and troops must be trained and ready before substantial numbers of U.S. forces can start withdrawing?

Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said Saturday that the Pentagon was making contingency plans to keep more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq through 2009. It is a fantasy to think an all-volunteer force that's unable to meet goals for new enlistments can stay in Iraq in such numbers for so long.

I really can't listen to W anymore. He does terrible things to my blood pressure.

An Unbroken Streak

A Purrfect Storm

By Eugene Robinson

Tuesday, August 23, 2005; Page A15

Iraq is beset with an insurgency that defies Bush administration attempts to belittle its extent or staying power. Vice President Cheney's smug assertion that the violence was in its "last throes" has become a morbid joke. The insurgents -- mostly Sunni Muslims, Baathist die-hards and foreign jihadists -- are getting more effective at their mayhem, not less. Their roadside bombs are deadlier than ever now that they are somehow getting their hands on higher-quality explosives.

Shiites and Kurds are making progress toward organizing a new Iraq, but it's a far cry from the latter-day Athens envisioned by the neocon architects of the war. It looks as if the new Iraq, or at least the biggest chunk of it, will have an organic relationship with next-door Iran, another charter member of the Axis of Evil. So one result of invading Iraq, which had no weapons of mass destruction, was to drive its Shiite majority closer to Iran, which is doing its best to build a nuclear bomb. Gee, that really worked out.

The new Iraq will also be teeming with terrorists. The nascent Iraqi government is hardly likely to impose order, since 138,000 well-trained and well-equipped American troops can't do the job. The administration never sent enough troops to occupy and pacify the country, but now the U.S. military is stretched so thin that many analysts say the administration will have trouble maintaining the current presence, much less augmenting it.

Sending more troops isn't a real-world option anyway, not with public opinion undergoing a tectonic shift. In a Newsweek poll conducted at the beginning of August, 61 percent of those Americans surveyed disapproved of the way Bush is handling Iraq; when asked whether the Iraq war has made Americans safer from terrorism, 64 percent said no. A full 50 percent said they would not support having "large numbers of U.S. military personnel" in Iraq beyond one more year. Only 26 percent echoed the president's view that U.S. troops should remain "as long as it takes."

We didn't even get any oil out of the deal. Remember how much of the war's cost was going to be repaid by a generous new Athenian-style government from its bountiful oil revenues? Because of the insurgency and the general state of disorganization, the Iraqis can barely keep the oil pumps and ports functioning at a minimal level. How much did you pay the last time you filled up?

The Democratic opposition is in its usual disarray, but even the Democrats can't blow this one -- a Republican president mired in an unpopular war with no end in sight and no real plan for an exit. Republicans are looking nervously at the 2006 midterm elections. Keeping U.S. forces at current levels for four more years, as a top Army official predicted recently, would be "complete folly," Hagel said. "It would bog us down. . . . It won't be four years. We need to be out."

And right outside Bush's ranch, Cindy Sheehan's antiwar protest continues in her absence. It's as if the Analogy were stalking the bike-riding president like a hungry bobcat.

Down, kitty.

This is consistent with the rest of Bush's career. He screwed up every job he ever had. Now he's screwing us.

Downplaying Flu

Scientists Race To Head Off Lethal Potential Of Avian Flu

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 23, 2005; A01

Robert G. Webster is watching his 40-year-old hunch about the origin of pandemic influenza play out before his eyes. It would be thrilling if it were not so terrifying.

Four decades ago, Webster was a young microbiologist from New Zealand on a brief sojourn in London. While he was there, he did an experiment that pretty much set the course of his scientific career. In just a few hours, he showed that the microbe that swept the globe in 1957 as "Asian flu" bore an unmistakable resemblance to strains of virus carried by certain birds in the years before.

Webster's observation was a surprise -- and a troubling one. It suggested an origin of the unusually virulent strains of influenza virus that appear two or three times each century. His hunch, that at least some of these pandemic strains were hybrids of bird and human flu viruses, was correct.

Since then, Rob Webster has become arguably the world's most important eye on animal influenza viruses. These days, he is deeply worried about what he's seeing.

Strains of influenza virus known as A/H5N1 have been spreading in wild and domestic birds across Southeast Asia and China since 1996. In recent weeks, the virus has apparently struck poultry in Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Since late 2003, about 100 million domesticated birds -- mostly chickens and ducks -- either have died of the virus or have been intentionally killed to keep the viruses from spreading. But what has Webster and other experts so worried are the 112 people who have been infected with the H5N1 "bird flu," more than half of whom have died. The fatality rate of 55 percent outstrips any human flu epidemic on record, including the epochal Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919 that killed at least 50 million people.

Why this new virus is so deadly is not entirely understood, although scientists have hints.

Influenza viruses invade cells lining the throat and windpipe, where they replicate and cause inflammation but are eventually suppressed by the immune system. In some cases, the microbe invades the lungs and leads to viral or bacterial pneumonia. Some H5N1 strains, however, have two features that make them even more dangerous.

Normally, the flu viruses can replicate only in the throat and lungs. With H5N1, however, the protein that triggers replication can be activated in many other organs, including the liver, intestines and brain. What is usually a respiratory infection can suddenly become a whole-body infection. Simultaneously, a second "defect" in the virus unleashes a storm of immune-system chemicals called cytokines. In normal amounts, cytokines help fight microbial invaders. In excessive amounts, they can cause lethal damage to the body's own tissues.

The trait H5N1 has not acquired is the ability to spread easily from person to person. The 112 human cases since late 2003 may turn out to be simply rare events in a bird epidemic that will eventually subside, as all epidemics do.

What is worrisome, though, is evidence pointing the other way.
Working Full Tilt

Webster's insight about the origins of pandemic flu led to an unavoidable conclusion. If scientists had any hope of preventing the pandemics, they had to keep watch on influenza in many species, not just human beings.

Learning how the virus is changing in birds, and what it may need to get real traction in people, are what keep Webster, 73, working full tilt at an age when many people are slowing down or have retired.

"I probably have more energy than is good for me," he says, sitting in his glass-walled corner office that looks out over green suburbs.

Since 1968, he has been at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, a cancer hospital established by the late actor and comedian Danny Thomas in gratitude to the patron saint of hopeless causes, whom Thomas credited with rescuing his career. It's an unlikely landing spot for Webster, who grew up on a 240-acre farm on New Zealand's South Island. But then, he came to the object of his scientific work mostly by chance, too.

After getting a doctorate in microbiology at the Australian National University in Canberra, he went to work in the laboratory of Frank Fenner, an expert on pox viruses. (Fenner would later help lead the 10-year campaign that successfully eradicated smallpox.) Webster expected to work on that family of microbes.

"On the day I arrived, Frank had me into his office and said so-and-so needs help in influenza virus. That's where you're going to go," he recalled.

Today, Webster heads his own lab of four principal investigators, a dozen graduate students and post-doctoral researchers, and a $7 million annual budget. The lab has chambers for handling high-risk pathogens and uses nearly 3,000 fertile chicken eggs a week for growing influenza viruses. Elsewhere on the St. Jude campus is a small plant licensed by the Food and Drug Administration to make experimental vaccines. The "seed strain" of virus used to make an H5N1 vaccine now in human trials in the United States was made at St. Jude by one of Webster's colleagues, Erich Hoffmann.

Since 1997, Webster has also spent three months a year as a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong. That gets him closer to the historical breeding ground of new flu strains: China. With H5N1 steadily gaining momentum this year, he has returned to Asia twice since his Hong Kong stint ended in March. One trip was to brief prime ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) about what they can to do to stanch the spread of H5N1.

The World Health Organization "will help in the initial outbreak," he says he told them. "But if it breaks through, guys, you're on your own."

On this day, Webster is back in Memphis. Pointed ears and a puckish smile give him the look of a superannuated pixie, perhaps a character out of "The Lord of the Rings," which was filmed on his native ground. But his words these days are dark, his outlook grim.

He thinks an avian flu pandemic "is just inevitable. One of these is just going to blow."
A Question of Opportunity

H5N1's potential as the next pandemic virus is all a matter of probability and opportunity.

Influenza A is a simple virus. That is one of the things that makes it so adaptable and potentially dangerous. It flourishes in hundreds of animal species with only 10 genes and a genome of 13,600 nucleotides, or "letters." (The human genetic code, in comparison, has about 25,000 genes and 3 billion nucleotides.) Of course, influenza virus needs more than 10 genes to replicate itself and spread. Like all viruses, it gets what it needs from the cells it invades, hijacking their molecular machinery.

Influenza A's adaptability arises, in part, because its genes are carried on eight unconnected strands, called "gene segments."

The segments can be traded like cards in a game of hearts, producing new strains of flu, the equivalent of new hands of cards. But that can happen only if two different viruses find themselves in the same cell, which is a very rare event. However, when millions of people, chickens and pigs -- the last animal can be infected by both human and bird influenza viruses -- live close together, as they do in China, rare events happen.

This gene-trading is called "reassortment." In the 1960s, Webster hypothesized that something like reassortment -- the process had not yet been discovered -- must explain the really big changes that appeared every once in a while in human flu viruses. This is the theory he tested in his London experiment decades ago.

There he asked for a little space at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill and access to the famous lab's collection of human serum and influenza viruses.

He mixed antibody-rich serum from victims of the 1957 flu pandemic with samples of avian flu viruses. In a matter of hours, he saw the human antibodies attack some of the microbes. This showed that the 1957 human virus shared features with some of the bird viruses.

"It's the only paper I've ever done based on just one day of experiments," he recalled recently, still both proud and amazed.

It turns out that of the Asian flu's eight gene segments, three had recently arrived from birds, according to an analysis of the genes' molecular fingerprints that was done much later. Two of the bird genes were for surface proteins that give a flu virus its immunological identity -- hemagglutinin and neuraminidase (denoted "H" and "N").

Something similar happened in 1968, when the Hong Kong flu strain got a new "H" from birds through reassortment, as well as a bird version of another, less important, gene segment. That strain, too, caused a pandemic.
Small Changes Add Up

The other way avian flu viruses can adapt to become human viruses is by slowly acquiring mutations. As small changes pile up, the virus's behavior can evolve. One trait that can appear is the capacity to enter human cells easily. That, and the ability to replicate efficiently once inside, are the two requirements for contagiousness.

Evolution of flu viruses is inevitable because the microbe is prone to making mistakes as it copies its genes. The more times a virus replicates, the more opportunity there is for a new mutation to arise that allows easy person-to-person transmission. For that reason, suppressing H5N1 outbreaks in birds -- where the microbe is replicating trillions of times a day -- is a crucial tool in preventing a human outbreak. China and Indonesia have vaccinated poultry flocks against H5N1, and Vietnam this month is starting a two-year, $35 million campaign to do so, too.

The highly lethal H5N1 viruses isolated from last year's human cases of avian flu were genetically 99 percent identical to each other. The slightly less lethal -- but perhaps more transmissible -- virus taken from patients in northern Vietnam early this year is only 98 percent identical to last year's; more important, it isn't completely inhibited by antibodies to last year's strain. It may be on its way to becoming a new, human-adapted strain.

At least WaPo's noticing, but this story does absolutely nothing to talk about what humans need to do to get ready for quarantine in place, stockpiling or the risks of Tamiflu and Relenza. I may give David Brown a call.

UPDATE: Okay, I've got a call into Mr. Brown. We'll see what happens.

The Right to Be Left Alone

Does privacy still matter?

BY CAROL TOWARNICKY

Knight Ridder Newspapers

(KRT) - Tell me again, what's wrong with "judicial activism"?

In recent years, those have become dirty words, with even liberals attacking conservative judges for being too "activist."

But thank goodness that, 40 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court didn't shrink from what some people call activism when it overturned a Connecticut law that made it a crime for married couples to use contraception - or for others to help them get it.

In Griswold v. Connecticut, the court said that guarantees inferred, although not precisely stated, in several constitutional amendments make up a "right to privacy," a right to be protected from government interference in intimate decisions.

The right was cited in the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, of course, but also in a 1971 decision that said contraception is a private matter for unmarried individuals.

The right to privacy also was the basis for a 2003 decision that overturned a Texas law that outlawed gay sex, and it undergirds decisions affirming an individual's right to refuse medical treatment.

What would this country look like without it?

Many extreme conservatives can't wait to find out.

They have demonized Griswold and the right to privacy as the root of all modern evil.

For example, The American Life League: "In this one decision, the court set the stage for the growth of moral relativism and hedonism in this once great Christian nation."

It's a critically important question right now: Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' past writings suggest he doesn't think there is a right to be let alone by government, referring instead to a "so-called right to privacy."

So let's go back to 1965: The law against birth control seemed idiotic even then.

Justice William O. Douglas wondered if, to enforce it, we would allow the police to search bedrooms for signs of contraceptive use.

Apparently so. Although the two minority justices in Griswold agreed that the Connecticut law was "uncommonly silly," they insisted that it couldn't be overturned.

The Constitution, after all, doesn't mention privacy. It doesn't expressly forbid states to mandate bedroom behavior. Their reasoning sounds an awful lot like the speeches of today's conservatives.

If that side had won, would the state Legislature have pushed through a law allowing couples to decide on their own whether to use birth control? I don't think so, either.

Justice Arthur Goldberg's concurrence put it in plain terms: If the government can interfere in a couple's decision on whether to use contraception, couldn't it also tell couples they had to be sterilized after having two kids?

Fast-forward to 2005. If a Roberts confirmation helps create a Court majority to overturn the right to privacy, what then?

While many states would outlaw abortion, they probably wouldn't pass laws forbidding married couples to use condoms. We hope.

After that, who knows?

Just look around: Even with a right to privacy, some states already are on the attack against emergency contraception (high-dose birth control pills) by protecting pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions.

This is what's at stake with "unenumerated rights." Yes, the crazies are attacking your ability to get contraception and they won't stop there. They do it by degrees.

Menu Alert

via Susie:

Beef recalled under mad cow rules
U.S. cites 'minimal chance' for risk from Canadian animal

Tuesday, August 23, 2005 Posted: 1139 GMT (1939 HKT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Beef banned under mad cow disease rules was shipped to wholesalers in a half-dozen states and is now being recalled by a Wisconsin beef plant.

The 1,856 pounds of beef included meat from a Canadian cow that inspectors in Canada determined was eligible for shipment to the United States. A Canadian audit two weeks later found, however that the cow was too old to be allowed entry to the U.S.

"There is a minimal chance, given the age of the animal and the health of the animal, that there was any risk whatsoever" to people, Steven Cohen, spokesman for the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said Monday.

The U.S. restricts shipments to younger animals because infection levels from mad cow disease are believed to rise with age. The cutoff is 30 months of age.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is investigating and has suspended the veterinarian who certified the cow, said Francine Lord, import-export manager for the agency's animal health division. She said the agency finished its audit last week and notified U.S. officials Thursday. The Agriculture Department said Canadian officials verified the cow's age on Friday.

The cow in question was 31 months old. Two other Canadian cows less than 30 months old were processed with the older cow, and USDA recalled meat from all three animals as a precaution.

Green Bay Dressed Beef of Green Bay, Wisconsin, processed the cow on August 4 and distributed the meat to wholesalers in Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The department and the company are trying to find out how much beef wound up in retail stores, Cohen said.

The department issued code numbers for recalled cases of beef sent to distributors, but it was unknown whether beef that reached the retail level would have carried the same numbers.

Consumer groups have criticized the government for not revealing the names of retail stores involved in food recalls.

Small government conservatives like less regulation. This is what it gets you.

Finger Sandwiches for Hot Days

Pass this at a cocktail party or put on crunchier bread for a football party.

AVOCADO AND TURKEY COCKTAIL SANDWICHES

loaves very thin white bread 1 loaf very thin dark bread 1 lb. wafer-thin turkey or chicken slices Wafer thin avocado slices (about 2 lg. or 3 sm. avocados)

Spread white bread with seasoned butter and mayonnaise (softened and mixed). Place turkey slices on white bread.

Spread butter mixture on dark bread and put slices over turkey. Spread butter on upperside of dark bread and place avocado slices on top of dark bread.

Spread butter mixture on white bread slices and trim crusts. Wrap in damp towel and refrigerate a few hours. Cut into small wedges and set upright in tiny pyramids on tray decorated with parsley.

Avocado and turkey will work just fine on good homemade white bread with spicy mustard before the game. On crusty white bread, pass the mustard. Tomato slices and some nice nice leaves of wild field greens turn this into a sandwich for grownups. Add a slice of red onion for some additional fine finish, along with a little corrander from your garden. That's why you planted it, right?

Easy First Course

GRILLED SHRIMP WITH GARLIC AND LIME

1/4 c. fresh lime juice
1/4 c. olive oil
1 tbsp. chopped parsley
1 sm. onion, minced
4 very lg. cloves garlic, minced
1 jalapeno pepper, minced
24 lg. or extra lg. shrimp, peeled and deveined
1/2 lb. andouille or other smoked sausage

Whisk together juice and oil. Stir in next 4 ingredients. Marinate shrimp in this mixture for 1 hour. Alternately thread shrimp and andouille on skewers. Do not crowd shrimp. Grill over medium coals until shrimp are opaque, about one minute per side. Serve with warmed marinade on side. Yield: 4 servings.

Yumm. And this is fast, a great first course with Pimms cup.

Flu Update

I spent a long time on the phone this morning with a producer for Discovery Canada cable channel. She's pitching a "docu-drama" about avian influenza to her network. That led to a whole bunch of other email interchanges today which took away from posting time. The flu community is beginning to move into high gear as we get closer to a possible start date and the news outlets finally begin to take notice. This producer is pretty new to the story, but the Canadians are 'way ahead of Americans in their awareness of the potential of pandemic flu. Anyway, I got her hooked up with the major players in the flu community (it feels weird to type that, but it is true, we all know each other and keep in touch) which led to other conversations. Canadian Bumpers, if the CBC ever comes off of their strike, they are scheduled to air a documentary on bird flu on October 1. Heads up. Helen Branswell at The Canadian Press learned about it back in April when she was at an infectious disease conference here in DC. As we get closer to the air date, Canadian readers, please keep your eyes peeled for a link so that we can all watch it on-line. Helen's latest article is here. It's about Tamiflu and Relenza. A number of you had questions about the drugs today. Helen's piece is a very good overview. Damn, she's good.

For those of you who are having a hard time getting the attention of your friends and neighbors about the gravity of a possible pandemic, you aren't alone. Helen tells me that her newsroom looks askance at her, and this is one of the best medical reporters in North America. She's their resident "flu nut."

Pogge has now set up RSS feeds on all the major categories at The Flu Wiki, so those of you using aggregators can add it to your feeds. If anyone can tell me how to use one of those things, I'd be grateful. I'm not very geeky.

Add your flu questions in comments. If I don't know the answer, I'll go find it. Other than answering emails, I'm taking the rest of the night off: running a couple of blogs, a wiki and keeping the conventional part of my life going while doing a boatload of research has taken its toll and I'm tired. I want to watch a little TV, have a glass of wine and veg out for the rest of the evening.

Update: It's a lockout, not a strike. Having been on the receiving of those for years, and spat on by fur-clad Republicans, those class acts who have little better to do than hate the working class, I'm sorry for the mistake. Have you been spit on by a Republican in a fur coat? I have. The police tied our arms behind us with plasticuffs and loaded us into the Black Maria after that. I'm sorry for the mistake.

Reading List

WaPo's Froomkin:

Book Notes

Disregard what you may have read about Bush's highbrow reading list. (See my Aug. 16 column.)

Bumiller notes in the New York Times that Bush told a small group of reporters a week ago: "I'm reading an Elmore Leonard book right now."

Behind it All

What boneheaded design guides Dubya's moves?

LINWOOD BARCLAY

How does one explain all the misguided, unwise, sometimes outright boneheaded things the Bush administration has done since taking over nearly five years ago, and continues to do on a pretty much daily basis? How is it possible for a group of supposedly intelligent, experienced individuals to take this many wrong turns? Wouldn't you think that once in a while, even by accident, that George W. Bush and his advisers would make a decision that made sense?

Can this much mismanagement happen totally at random? Would the occupants of the Bush White House have us believe that all these things, these missteps, these miscalculations, these attempts to deceive, that they all, you know, just kind of happened?

I'm not so sure. And I'm not the only one starting to ask questions. More and more, it seems unlikely that mere human beings could make this many mistakes without some sort of misguiding force, a kind of supernatural entity that has trouble remembering where it put its car keys.

That's where unintelligent design comes in.

Once one embraces the concept of unintelligent design — a kind of doofus-like cosmic force — it becomes much easier to get your head around the operations of the Bush administration.

I mean, making executive decisions randomly would still probably result in doing the right thing 50 per cent of the time. So how does one explain such consistent goofiness, like invading a nation based on evidence that the administration knew didn't exist in the first place?

Or exposing a CIA employee's identity just to settle some personal scores?

Ignoring international trade agreements you've signed on to?

Adopting a head-in-the-sand approach to the connection between human activity on the planet Earth and global warming?

Letting the boss be photographed on the ranch, golfing and cutting brush and chilling out and generally having a good ol' time while young Americans die overseas?

Not having the media savvy to have that same boss take a stroll down the driveway and chat with a woman whose son was one of those young Americans?

Doing an end run around the Senate to send a loose cannon to the U.N., while supposedly promoting democracy abroad?

Not firing a defence secretary who totally misjudged how many troops would be needed to secure Iraq?

Giving rich folks back home huge tax cuts while soldiers go without adequate body armour?

You have to read the foreign press, you really do. While I'm cutting and pasting this, CNN is on in the background with Kyra Phillips uncritically reporting all the lies in W's latest speech today. He says all the same shit and CNN doesn't seem to feel the need to do any fact checking at all. Horrendous "reporting."

Bottom Line

Truth in Recruiting

By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 22, 2005

Most Americans will tell you that they believe in honest, truthful, straightforward, ethical behavior.

So here's a question: Should people who are being recruited into the armed forces be told the truth about the risks they are likely to face if they agree to sign up and put on a uniform?

Right now, that is not happening. Recruiters desperate for warm bodies to be shipped to Iraq are prowling selected high schools and neighborhoods across the country with sales pitches that touch on everything but the possibility of being maimed or killed in combat.

The recruiters themselves are under enormous pressure from higher-ups who are watching crucial components of the all-volunteer military buckle under the strain of a war that was supposed to have been won in a jiffy, but instead just goes on and on.

So the teenagers who are the prime targets for recruitment are being told just about anything to ward off whatever misgivings they may have. Need money for college? No problem. You want to go to a nice place? Certainly. Maybe even Hawaii.

A young man who recently registered, as required, with the Selective Service System received an upbeat brochure in the mail touting the military's 30 days of annual "paid vacation," its free medical and dental care, its "competitive retirement" benefits and its "home loan program."

There was no mention of combat, or what it's like to walk the corridors and the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where you'll see a tragic, unending parade of young men and women struggling to move about despite their paralysis, or with one, two or three limbs missing.

I am not at all opposed to the military. I was in the Army for two years, and I've personally known many people who have had long and honorable careers in the service. I've known many men and women who made almost unimaginable sacrifices - including, in some cases, giving up their lives - while in uniform.

But I think it is precisely because the stakes are so high that we should be straight with potential recruits. Instead we present them with a lollipopped, sugarcoated, fantasyland version of what life in the military is like.

In a segment on PBS's "NewsHour" last December, an Army recruiter said: "I joined because I was seeking some adventure, all right? And I've been to a lot of different countries - Athens, Greece, Ireland, Rome. Been to Egypt twice, to the pyramids. All sorts of fun stuff."

The Army actually has an online video game that it likes to brag is one of the "top five" on the Web. Geared to children as young as 13, it has more than five million registered players.

But war is not a game. Getting your face blown off is not fun. The fundamental task of the military is to fight and kill the enemies of the United States, and fighting and killing is a grotesquely brutal experience. Potential recruits should be told the truth about what is expected of them, and what the risks are. And they should be told why it's a good idea for them to take those risks. If that results in too few people signing up for the military, the country is left with a couple of other options:

Stop fighting unnecessary wars, or reinstate the draft.

Seems like a reasonable bottom line to me.

Posted by Melanie at 12:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Foundational Things

Ivo Daalder asks"What's Plan B?"
August 17, 2005

The Iraqi constitution—and presumed election of a constitutional government in December—is turning out to be the key to Bush's exit strategy from Iraq. This explains the air of desperation that wafted through Crawford, Foggy Bottom, and the Green Zone earlier this week as the deadline for agreeing on a constitution came and went. Now, the desperate hope is to get it done by next Monday. But if, as seems likely, the constitution is not agreed, what's Washington's Plan B?

The Bush administration hasn't been very clear on what its exit strategy for Iraq actually is. Bush's general mantra—"We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed and not a day longer"—hasn't been particularly helpful. And when he has been specific, he's set very different objectives. At times, Bush has suggested that we will leave only when democracy in Iraq has been fully established. ("Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.") At other times, he has implied that the insurgency would have to be defeated. ("When that mission of defeating the terrorists in Iraq is complete, our troops will come home.") At yet other times, Bush has argued that the troops would come home when Iraqi security forces have been fully trained. ("Our troops will come home when Iraq is capable of defending herself.")

It's clear, though, that the insurgency cannot be defeated by military means alone—it requires a political process. As Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military public-affairs official in Iraq, said the other day, "this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations. It's going to be settled in the political process." That is why the military, the Pentagon, and the White House are so desperate to get done with writing the constitution, because that, they believe, will start the political process that will defeat the insurgency. The sooner the constitution is done, Rummy said yesterday, "the fewer Iraqis will be killed and the fewer Americans and coalition forces will be killed."

So the constitution, and a government elected under it, are Bush's George Aiken moment—it will allow him to declare victory and go home. It would, conveniently, allow the president to announce troop reductions in an election year. (This also explains why Bush slapped down talk of troop withdrawals earlier this month. It isn't that the withdrawals won't happen as planned, but now is not the time to announce that.)

I have a more fundemental question: will the constitution work? Will people believe in it and live under it?

Time Out

Fight over Roberts memos doesn't end with deadline
By Kathy Kiely, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Monday's deadline for the White House to turn over records of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' work for past Republican administrations seems likely to pass without Democrats receiving the documents they requested.

The deadline was set by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to give the panel enough time to read the documents before hearings begin Sept. 6.

The White House has released more than 66,000 pages from Roberts' tenure as a Justice Department and White House lawyer in the Reagan administration. These documents have been made public at the same time they have been given to the committee.

But the Bush administration has refused to give the Senate memos that Roberts wrote when he was deputy solicitor general for the president's father, President George H.W. Bush, from 1989 to 1993.

The White House argues that releasing internal memos from the solicitor general's office — an arm of the Justice Department that represents the government in court — would discourage the kind of honest discussions lawyers must have with one another and their clients before deciding whether to take a case or how to argue it. "If attorneys believe that their communications with each other and with those whom they represent will become public, they cannot help but be chilled from expressing their candid views," Assistant Attorney General William Moschella wrote to Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

That refusal will be an issue in Roberts' confirmation hearings. Leahy accuses the White House of "stonewalling" on "documents that would help illuminate Judge Roberts' views and choices on important issues of concern to all Americans — civil rights, privacy and access to justice."

Leahy insists that the public's need to know more about Roberts' legal philosophy trumps the Justice Department's desire to protect internal communications.

Democrats on the Judiciary Committee want documents connected with 16 cases that Roberts either argued himself, or approved the government arguing, as the top deputy for Kenneth Starr, then solicitor general. The cases involve questions about the rights of women, minorities, and defendants.

The White House says nya-nya. What do the Democrats say?

People At Work March On

via Suze:

In globalization twist, unions target Wal-Mart worldwide

Sun Aug 21, 3:56 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A global coalition of unions is launching an unprecedented campaign to organize workers around the world at US retail giant Wal-Mart, seeking to bring a new level of globalization to the labor movement. ADVERTISEMENT

The Wal-Mart campaign was set to be officially launched at a meeting in Chicago Monday of Union Network International (UNI), a group that includes 900 unions in some 140 countries.

The campaign aims to draw from labor organizations around the world to pressure Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer and largest private company in terms of revenues, and a frequent target of unions for driving down wages as well as prices.

Union leaders said they hope to bring collective bargaining or other improvements to the estimated 1.6 million Wal-Mart employees around the world -- possibly even in countries such as China, where western-style unions are non-existent.

"Our message is that unions are adapting to a borderless world," says UNI general secretary Philip Jennings.

UNI said it "wants to stop the Wal-Martization of the world by bringing together unions in different countries to organize the retail giant's workers and bring them the benefits of collective organization."

The global effort on Wal-Mart escalates a longstanding feud with the retailer and the US-based United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which has accused the retailer of "union-busting" efforts to keep US stores from unionizing.

Wal-Mart maintains that it has no official ban on unions, but in a statement on its website argues that in the United States, "we simply do not believe that unionization is right for Wal-Mart."

Globally, Wal-Mart spokeswoman Beth Keck said, Wal-Mart "is seen as a model and premier employer in many of the countries around the world."

She added: "Our policy is to operate within regulatory and customary business practices everywhere we operate. Our employees can choose whether they want to be union members or not, and overwhelmingly they have not."

The union gathering comes as UNI is currently presided by UFCW chief Joe Hansen, who has led campaigns against Wal-Mart in the United States.

According to a statement from UFCW, Wal-Mart "pays poverty wages, ships jobs to countries where sweatshops are prevalent and, in the US, shifts enormous health care costs onto taxpayers."

Additionally, the union said that because of its size, Wal-Mart is able to drive down wages and benefits, which "has become the new global economic model" followed by many other firms.

"This meeting is about creating more effective global unionization," UFCW spokesman Jim Papian said earlier. "It's the only answer to meeting the challenges of the global economy."

"We reject the Wal-Mart way and, at Chicago, UNI will be imagining a better future for working people everywhere," added Jennings. "We will work with the UFCW and those unions already established in Wal-Mart in Europe and elsewhere to stop a damaging race to the bottom."

According to UNI, Wal-Mart employees have formed unions in Germany, Japan, Brazil and other countries.

War and Law, V. 3.0

Democrats Split Over Position on Iraq War
Activists More Vocal As Leaders Decline To Challenge Bush

By Peter Baker and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 22, 2005; Page A01

Democrats say a long-standing rift in the party over the Iraq war has grown increasingly raw in recent days, as stay-the-course elected leaders who voted for the war three years ago confront rising impatience from activists and strategists who want to challenge President Bush aggressively to withdraw troops.

Amid rising casualties and falling public support for the war, Democrats of all stripes have grown more vocal this summer in criticizing Bush's handling of the war. A growing chorus of Democrats, however, has said this criticism should be harnessed to a consistent message and alternative policy -- something most Democratic lawmakers have refused to offer.

The wariness, congressional aides and outside strategists said in interviews last week, reflects a belief among some in the opposition that proposals to force troop drawdowns or otherwise limit Bush's options would be perceived by many voters as defeatist. Some operatives fear such moves would exacerbate the party's traditional vulnerability on national security issues.

The internal schism has become all the more evident in recent weeks even as Americans have soured on Bush and the war in poll after poll. Senate Democrats, according to aides, convened a private meeting in late June to develop a cohesive stance on the war and debated every option -- only to break up with no consensus.

The rejuvenation of the antiwar movement in recent days after the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq set up camp near Bush's Texas ranch has exposed the rift even further.

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) broke with his party leadership last week to become the first senator to call for all troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by a specific deadline. Feingold proposed Dec. 31, 2006. In delivering the Democrats' weekly radio address yesterday, former senator Max Cleland (Ga.), a war hero who lost three limbs in Vietnam, declared that "it's time for a strategy to win in Iraq or a strategy to get out."

Although critical of Bush, the party's establishment figures -- including Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) -- all reject the Feingold approach, reasoning that success in Iraq at this point is too important for the country.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who rose to public prominence on an antiwar presidential campaign, said on television a week ago that it was the responsibility of the president, not the opposition, to come up with a plan for Iraq.

"Clearly Democrats are not united in what is the critique of what we're doing there and what is the answer to what we do next," said Steve Elmendorf, a senior party strategist whose former boss, then-House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. "The difficulty of coming to a unified position is that for a lot of people who voted for it, they have to decide whether they can admit that they were misled."

The internal disarray, according to many Democrats, reflects more than a near-term tactical debate. Some say it reveals a fundamental identity crisis in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world for a party that struggled to move beyond the antiwar legacy of the 1960s and 1970s to reinvent itself as tougher on national security in the 1990s.

But historic fault lines in the party run deep. Along with high gasoline prices, the war has fed public discontent that is expressing itself as members of Congress tour their home districts during the August recess. Democratic officeholders watched carefully last week as peace demonstrators -- inspired by grieving mother-turned-activist Cindy Sheehan outside Bush's ranch near Crawford, Tex. -- staged more than 1,000 candlelight vigils across the country.

What part of "why are we in this war" do Democrats not get? Cindy Sheehan asked the question. Democrats, answer this question: "We are in Iraq in order to ______________." Joe Biden please stay home and Hillary, please come up with a better answer than "stay the course." We are in Iraq for no good reason. Killing people and being killed for an illegal war can't be sustained by any candidate. Get a clue, please, about international law.

Answer the Question

Democrats Split Over Position on Iraq War
Activists More Vocal As Leaders Decline To Challenge Bush

By Peter Baker and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 22, 2005; Page A01

Democrats say a long-standing rift in the party over the Iraq war has grown increasingly raw in recent days, as stay-the-course elected leaders who voted for the war three years ago confront rising impatience from activists and strategists who want to challenge President Bush aggressively to withdraw troops.

Amid rising casualties and falling public support for the war, Democrats of all stripes have grown more vocal this summer in criticizing Bush's handling of the war. A growing chorus of Democrats, however, has said this criticism should be harnessed to a consistent message and alternative policy -- something most Democratic lawmakers have refused to offer.

The wariness, congressional aides and outside strategists said in interviews last week, reflects a belief among some in the opposition that proposals to force troop drawdowns or otherwise limit Bush's options would be perceived by many voters as defeatist. Some operatives fear such moves would exacerbate the party's traditional vulnerability on national security issues.

The internal schism has become all the more evident in recent weeks even as Americans have soured on Bush and the war in poll after poll. Senate Democrats, according to aides, convened a private meeting in late June to develop a cohesive stance on the war and debated every option -- only to break up with no consensus.

The rejuvenation of the antiwar movement in recent days after the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq set up camp near Bush's Texas ranch has exposed the rift even further.

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) broke with his party leadership last week to become the first senator to call for all troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by a specific deadline. Feingold proposed Dec. 31, 2006. In delivering the Democrats' weekly radio address yesterday, former senator Max Cleland (Ga.), a war hero who lost three limbs in Vietnam, declared that "it's time for a strategy to win in Iraq or a strategy to get out."

Although critical of Bush, the party's establishment figures -- including Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) -- all reject the Feingold approach, reasoning that success in Iraq at this point is too important for the country.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who rose to public prominence on an antiwar presidential campaign, said on television a week ago that it was the responsibility of the president, not the opposition, to come up with a plan for Iraq.

"Clearly Democrats are not united in what is the critique of what we're doing there and what is the answer to what we do next," said Steve Elmendorf, a senior party strategist whose former boss, then-House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. "The difficulty of coming to a unified position is that for a lot of people who voted for it, they have to decide whether they can admit that they were misled."

The internal disarray, according to many Democrats, reflects more than a near-term tactical debate. Some say it reveals a fundamental identity crisis in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world for a party that struggled to move beyond the antiwar legacy of the 1960s and 1970s to reinvent itself as tougher on national security in the 1990s.

But historic fault lines in the party run deep. Along with high gasoline prices, the war has fed public discontent that is expressing itself as members of Congress tour their home districts during the August recess. Democratic officeholders watched carefully last week as peace demonstrators -- inspired by grieving mother-turned-activist Cindy Sheehan outside Bush's ranch near Crawford, Tex. -- staged more than 1,000 candlelight vigils across the country.

What part of "why are we in this war" do Democrats not get? Cindy Sheehan asked the question. Democrats, answer this question: "We are in Iraq in order to ______________." Joe Biden please stay home and Hillary, please come up with a better answer than "stay the course." We are in Iraq for no good reason. Killing people and being killed for an illegal war can't be sustained by any candidate. Get a clue, please, about international law.

A Little Relief

With so much of the news being so awful, it's nice to take a break now and then. The WaPo has a front page story on the National Zoo's new panda cub. Here's a link to Animal Planet's panda cam. Mother and son are very snuggly, which, if you think about, is the way that pandas should be.

Flu "Planning"

When a Bug Becomes a Monster

By MARC SANTORA
Published: August 21, 2005

Health officials in New York are working with increasing urgency to develop a defense in case a deadly strain of influenza begins to spread widely.

The city and state health departments are concerned about a dangerous strain of avian flu that continues to sweep across Asia, infecting millions of birds. While the virus is not easily transmissible from person to person at this point, scientists are worried about the theoretical possibility that it could combine with a more common form of influenza and become a rapidly spreading killer.

New York City health officials have been meeting every two weeks since February to develop a response plan. They hope to have an updated draft ready in the next few weeks. At about the same time, the state hopes to have its draft plan ready as well.

"It may never happen," said Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a deputy city health commissioner who is leading the flu planning, referring to the development of the strain. "But on the scale of emergency planning, this is high on the list."

As part of their preparations, the leaders of the frontline forces of New York's disaster preparedness teams will run a "tabletop" simulation involving more than a dozen city and state departments next month that will envision the city facing a situation similar to the outbreak of Spanish flu in 1918, which left at least 33,000 dead in the city alone. At least 20 million to 40 million people died worldwide. The exercise is designed to test the emergency response system by challenging leaders to make quick decisions and seeing if and where communication breaks down or resources run out.

If a pandemic similar to the one of 1918 occurred today, as many as 2.8 million New York City residents could be infected within months, sending more than 200,000 to the hospital and clogging the morgues with 400 deaths a day during the peak infection period.

The plans being developed by the city and state are likely to include recommendations on the stockpiling of equipment and drugs. However, those decisions may be delayed as city and state officials wait to see federal plans.

Good luck, New York. The federal plan is going to be a fairy tale, if it is ever developed at all. No vaccine and we're in line behind most of the rest of the developed world for Tamilfu, which can't be manufactured fast enough to do any good.

The End, Not "The Light At The End of the Tunnel"

Militias on the Rise Across Iraq
Shiite and Kurdish Groups Seizing Control, Instilling Fear in North and South

By Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 21, 2005; Page A01

BASRA, Iraq -- Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country's divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials.

While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, the militias, and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them, are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said. In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents have said they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.

The parties and their armed wings sometimes operate independently, and other times as part of Iraqi army and police units trained and equipped by the United States and Britain and controlled by the central government. Their growing authority has enabled them to control territory, confront their perceived enemies and provide patronage to their followers. Their ascendance has come about because of a power vacuum in Baghdad and their own success in the January parliamentary elections.

Since the formation of a government this spring, Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, has witnessed dozens of assassinations, which claimed members of the former ruling Baath Party, Sunni political leaders and officials of competing Shiite parties. Many have been carried out by uniformed men in police vehicles, according to political leaders and families of the victims, with some of the bullet-riddled bodies dumped at night in a trash-strewn parcel known as The Lot. The province's governor said in an interview that Shiite militias have penetrated the police force; an Iraqi official estimated that as many as 90 percent of officers were loyal to religious parties.

Across northern Iraq, Kurdish parties have employed a previously undisclosed network of at least five detention facilities to incarcerate hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and other minorities abducted and secretly transferred from Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and from territories stretching to the Iranian border, according to political leaders and detainees' families. Nominally under the authority of the U.S.-backed Iraqi army, the militias have beaten up and threatened government officials and political leaders deemed to be working against Kurdish interests; one bloodied official was paraded through a town in a pickup truck, witnesses said.

"I don't see any difference between Saddam and the way the Kurds are running things here," said Nahrain Toma, who heads a human rights organization, Bethnahrain, which has offices in northern Iraq and has faced several death threats.

Toma said the tactics were eroding what remained of U.S. credibility as the militias operate under what many Iraqis view as the blessing of American and British forces. "Nobody wants anything to do with the Americans anymore," she said. "Why? Because they gave the power to the Kurds and to the Shiites. No one else has any rights."

"Here's the problem," said Majid Sari, an adviser in the Iraqi Defense Ministry in Basra, who travels with a security detail of 25 handpicked Iraqi soldiers. Referring to the militias, he said, "They're taking money from the state, they're taking clothes from the state, they're taking vehicles from the state, but their loyalty is to the parties." Whoever disagrees, he said, "the next day you'll find them dead in the street."

British officials, whose authority runs through Basra and parts of southern Iraq, have called the killings "totally unacceptable."

"We are aware of allegations that men in police uniforms, whether they are genuine policemen or not, are carrying out serious crimes in Basra," said Karen McLuskie, a British diplomat in Basra. "We are raising our concerns with the Iraqi authorities at the highest level."

This war is