FEMA in New Orleans

I won't bother listing all the incidents here.  You've read about them all.  Water shipments turned back by FEMA.  Emergency communication lines cut by FEMA.  The Coast Guard told by FEMA not to unload diesel fuel for Jefferson Parish officials to keep emergency services running in their parish.  Stranded elderly, sick and disabled surviors promised pickups by FEMA, but no-one ever came.  Red Cross and Salvation Army disaster-relief terms ordered by FEMA not to enter the city.  Amtrak offering to run trains in to evacuate people, and FEMA telling them"No."  The Forest Service offering water bombers to fight fires raging on the New Orleans waterfront, and FEMA saying "No."  FEMA's apparent complete ignorance of the actuality of what was happening in New Orleans.

I'll say it clearly, and I'll say it once:

FEMA is not part of the solution in New Orleans.

FEMA is part of the PROBLEM.

Their bumbling incompetence and their bureaucratic obstruction is doing more harm than good, and they don't appear to be accomplishing a damned thing that's actually useful.  The question is, is it just thet they're being completely incompetent -- or are they being ordered to be obstructive and ineffectual, as a scapegoat?

This is the most appalling travesty of responsible government I have ever seen.  The Boy Scouts of America could probably do a better job of rescuing Katrina survivors than FEMA is.

Oh, but wait.  Is rescuing survivors actually any part of FEMA's mandate?  They're not the Federal Emergency RELIEF Agency.  They're the Federal Emergency MANAGEMENT Agency.  You all know what "managing" something means in government-speak.  "Manage" is one of those verbs sorta like "spin".

"Hi.  I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

The horns of a dilemma

I'm baffled.

On the one hand, I find it difficult to conceive of this massive level of organized, concerted, bumbling incompetence taking place without those at the top of the command chain -- and here, the command chain goes from Michael Brown, Director of FEMA, to the Director of Homeland Security, to George Bush -- raising all kinds of holy hell to get effective action underway.  (Edit:  It's been observed that Brown's previous job was running the International Arabian Horse Association, which he ran into the ground and got fired from for it, then pumped it up on his resumé to make it sound like a more important and better-connected job than it really was.)  On the other hand, I find myself unable to conceive of any plausible hidden agenda -- be it financial or political -- that could lie behind the slowness and obstructiveness of the Gulf Coast hurricane disaster relief being intentional.  Surely any possible hoped-for political gain would be neutralized by the negative effect of the worldwide visibility of the complete incompetence our government has displayed.  It's disasters of this scale that the Department of Homeland Security was chartered to handle and prevent; you can't prevent a hurricane, but as far as handling response after the event, it looks as though you're better off not being protected at all than being protected by Homeland Security.  (As an aside, interdictor says it's very easy to tell the folks who joined Homeland Security out of a desire to protect and serve from those who joined to bully and intimidate people under the color of authority.)  The lesson of Homeland Security so far seems to be that the efficiency and effectiveness of any government agency fall in geometric proportion to its size, and when you put together a department as big as Homeland Security, its actual usefulness asymptotically approaches zero.

Something needs to change, and it needs to change soon; but I don't know whether America as it now is has the spirit and the determination left to go through its government from top to bottom and cut out all the deadwood.

DVD piracy

Piracy by the distributors, that is, in some telling comments during a discussion about Blu-Ray high-density DVDs:

"We sell 20,000 DVDs a year in China, and they're priced at just $4.99. Just to prove a point," [Andy] Setos [president of engineering at 20th Century Fox] said.

So if you can sell them at $4.99 each in China and still make a profit on it after shipping them clear to China (because I don't for one second believe you're selling them at a loss), how come they retail for $20 each in the US?  Did you ever consider that maybe that's why people pirate them?

And forget about playing that foreign DVD on your Blu-Ray DVD player.

On top of that, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players, for instance to remove regional coding.  The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any "hack" and the device can be disabled remotely.

This, when they're debating whether to scrap regional coding anyway.  You'd think the decision would be an obvious one -- to anyone but Hollywood executives.