In the forum over at blogHOUSTON, Shreela puts up the kinds of ideas I like to see. Specific ways to improve things that take into account possible snags along the way:

1. Contraflow would have bottle-necked once we got out of Houston/Harris Co if things hadn't been coordinated with the government ahead of time, so what good would it have done without the towns-in-the-evac-route's cooperation. Perhaps if Govenor Perry would have mandated certain routes to be contraflowed until point x, including all small cities along the way, it won't be so difficult next time. One of our neighbors told us that once I-10 had finally been contraflowed, other than getting traffic to the other side, everything went really smooth.

2. 18 wheelers! Everyone I've talked to from my neighborhood commented on the vast amounts of 18 wheelers on the road, some of which broke down or ran out of gas.

Maybe they could come up with some type of formula that "all 18-wheelers not involved with emergency supplies will not be allowed to enter a medium or larger city if they're in a strike zone of a cat3+ hurricane within x number of days (or hours), until a time when the hurricane has shifted to x number of miles of striking that particular city".

3. Country roads with wide shoulders. Many of the routes outside of Houston were two-way roads, but had a shoulder that was as wide as the main lane. We saw quite a few people trying to turn the shoulders into a second lane, but there were line-riders (J. B. Hunt 18 wheeler on 1960 eastbound was the worst I saw) blocking people from trying to use the shoulder as a second lane.

I'm fully aware that bottle-necking would occur at intersections that didn't include the shoulders, but we did see some intersections that DID include the shoulder. So, for the wide-shoulder routes that could be converted to two lanes, the line-riders just slowed things down for everyone (with a few exceptions, most of the wide shoulder routes had fairly level grass easements for the people needing to pull over for whatever reasons).

If these types of routes had been predesignated to be turned into two lanes during emergency evacuations, the press could have informed us which roads were considered two lane routes, and the line-riders might have stopped preventing the flow.

From RedState.org:

On one hand:

The pity is that Republicans who care more about their party than about the cult of personality attendant to its key figures have long warned of this day. We knew all along that Tom DeLay was a bully — ask the Heritage Foundation about his penchant for petty grudges. We knew all along that he was, on a fundamental level, unprincipled — ask him about the fat in the Federal budget. We knew all along that he was mostly interested in power for its own sake — recall, please, that he sought a House rules change to protect his leadership position in this very circumstance. And we knew that if it came to an indictment, it would be the end.

On the other:

As much as I would love for Tom DeLay to quietly fade away from the national spotlight, having him resign over trumped-up and quite possibly fraudulent charges would be a mistake of the highest order.

Trevino is right, he is a liability. However, if he were to step down on these charges he'd be creating an even bigger one.

Given the adage that politics is a slightly more polite version of warfare, what Trevino proposes is another Munich. Bowing to politically-oriented prosecutions like that is only going to emboldened more shamelessly partisan hacks like Earle to go after other Republican leaders with trumped-up charges.

Supporting DeLay may make many of us want to take a shower afterwards, but it's ultimately necessary to prevent others more noble from suffering the same fate.

JUDGE KAREN WILLIAMS
U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, appointed by
G.H.W. Bush, 54 years old
Lots of recent buzz for Judge Williams, known best
in constitutional law circles for writing the
opinion that said the Miranda warnings are not
constitutional requirements. The Supreme Court
reversed her. If you can't beat em, join em!


New World Man presents: My favorite candidate for the Supreme Court
brought to you by Quizilla

[via Judd]

With the exception of my ill-conceived 1996 vote where I'd thought that I was in Ken Bentsen's district and this last election where I voted in Idaho, I've voted against Tom DeLay at every opportunity. I even volunteered for an opponent of his. I take no pride in having grown up in his district. On the whole, though, I think he's been good for congressional Republicans and an effective leader. The absense of such leadership on the Senate side of things has actually made me [mutter, mutter] appreciate him at least a little. On the whole, though, I'd prefer him out.

So what do I think now that he's been indicted? Not much, actually. I decline to believe that his prosecutor's intentions are of the noblest sort. Be that as it may, it DeLay's guilty of the crimes that he's accused of none of this matters.

It's not at all impossible to railroad an indictment of an innocent man, though getting a conviction is much harder. But I believe him guilty. So I'm mostly just waiting to see what comes of it all.

I think he's guilty, but that and thirty-seven cents will get you a postal stamp.

What's interesting and fun and sad is that they'll likely make a big deal of running against DeLay a year from now and still won't win back the House because it's so institutionally favorable to Republicans right now. It's interesting because that sort of stuff interest me. It's fun because... well it's fun for all the wrong reasons. And it's sad because the the no party's control over the House ought to be bulletproof.

I made an unfortunate discovery. A popular sandwich shop up here is Gandolfo's. In the morning they make tasty kaiser-based breakfast sandwiches for a decent price. A coworker and I stopped by there today and I got two breakfast sandwiches. I told my coworker even as I was buying both that it was a mistake. Over and over again, I buy two sandwiches and then feel worse for the wear all day long. But I continue to order two.

So today when I got back I emailed my coworkers and told them that they could buy my second sandwich off of me. No one bit until I had already chomped into the second sandwich (Well I wasn't going to leave it there!). So I sold her half of the second one.

and I'll be danged if 1.5 Gandolfo's breakfast sandwiches isn't the perfect number. One is too small. Two is too much. 1.5 is perfect.

Since they don't sell them in half-sandwich increments, this was quite an inconvenient discovery.

I've more-or-less kept quiet on this site about what I think regarding Katrina and Rita. I pulled on impassioned post almost as quickly as I put it up and I have a couple others in my drafts bin, probably never to see the light of day. I am reluctant to say much because I don't think that there's a dialogue as much as a bunch of folks shouting from the rooftops with megaphones, passionately screaming how this completely validates whatever they thought before the storms even struck. I continue to believe that a lot of people - on both the right and left - would rather shout themselves hoarse than re-evaluate their beliefs enough to understand that crappy things happen and it's not always the other team's fault and your team did not do (or would not do given the opportunity) everything as well as it could have.

Time passes, though, and these days I'm only a little annoyed at those who suggest that the massive traffic buildups caused by over 2.5 million people leaving a city in the course of 48 hours is evidence of gross incompetence on the part of... well, somebody, preferably someone they didn't like before Rita was even christened. As this was Houston's first large-scale evacuation in decades it's a little bit idealistic, in my view, to expect things to go great. The lesson for Katrina was "Everybody get the hell out!" while the lesson for Rita was "Well maybe not everybody!" and "don't forget the contraflow!"

Every mistake, I think, is determined to lead to another mistake of the opposing variety. Unless, of course, enough time has passed that we forgot the original mistake enough to repeat it.

I carry no water for Houston Mayor Bill White or Texas Governor Rick Perry. I voted for Perry, reluctantly, based almost entirely on political ideas and not out of any affection for him (I voted against him in 1998). I didn't vote in the Houston mayoral elections, though if I had I don't know who I would have voted for. I disagree with a lot of White's ideas, but I get the sense of a competent man doing a decent job. I've voted for Harris County Judge Eckles on an occasion or two, but he never faced much in the way of serious opposition. If none of these men are in office two years from now I would likely not really care (depending, of course, on who succeeds them).

I spent much of Thursday worried sick about my brother, headed for San Antonio when there was a hurricane headed right for Galveston Bay. I wasn't stuck out there, but I am not dispassionate about the possibility that things could have gone very, very badly.

But from where I stand the officials involved at least served up par. I know a lot of people are irate, but it's my belief that a lot of people have lost sight that hurricanes suck and they’re difficult to deal when people haven’t in a time, and asking for comfort in the face of Category 5 (or a Cat 4) is asking too much. I'm not saying that things could not have gone better nor that we should not work to improve the plan and make it better, just that this was inherently going to be chaotic.

Katrina helped in terms of dusting off the emergency plans, but it’s also made everything a lot more stressful (As Ethan says, "We've seen this movie before"). They’re all politicians and they all want to avoid the blame that was flung at New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. The fact that so many have basically accused Nagin, Blanco, FEMA, and Bush of murder for failure to act did little to keep heads level this time around. That's not to defend those involved in Katrina, but it is to say that a lot of the rhetoric is utterly unhelpful even when true. Holding a leader accountable for each and every last one of its citizens is unrealistic in the extreme.

The object lesson here for me is that these guys can’t win. Many say Louisiana waited too long to call the evacuation and now many are suggesting that Texas called it too early. Too many people left behind followed by too many people on the road. Officials from all levels were seemingly too lax in Louisiana and it appears they may have been too spastic in Texas. And too slow. And just... imperfect, dammit.

One of the reasons that I fall to the right of center is that I don't expect terribly much from our government. I expect better than Bush's appointments for FEMA, but on the whole I'm not so much outraged that so little was done as I am that the government is spending so much to do so little. It's a point-of-view that I am beginning to understand to be irreconcilable to those on the left. I haven't much interest in having that fight, but Rita at least gave me a clearer idea of where the battle lines are drawn. Rita let me understand that for the outraged on the left it was not all about getting Bush like it seemed to be. They honestly have expectations that they dare to hold even though I personally find them to be unreasonable. I needed to see that, even though I don't know what to do with it having done so.

We've got to get better at this in the ways that we can do better than this. Even though I don't believe it to be nearly as simple as critics of the Houston evacuation believe it to be, maybe there are ways that we can get contraflow open sooner. There ought to be ways to get gas out there quicker. By all means, let's have this conversation. But let's look at the big picture. Let's look at what worked as well as what didn't. Let's look at things we didn't even think about that may be perfectly obvious in hindsight. But that's not going to happen as long as the media and the critics are focused solely on what went wrong. As the Katrina-to-Rita transition demonstrated, in my mind, that only leads to the equal-and-opposing mistakes.

Now, being a heartless, short-sighted conservative, my main interest begins in Houston and ends in Texas (okay, I guess considering my betrothed, ends in Lousiana). That's where Houstonians (even ones that live in Idaho) need to focus. Miamians need to focus on Miami, Mobilians (??) on Mobile, and so on. Just like those on the left seem to honestly believe that the government can work at a level I find to be unrealistic, I hope they understand that I (and many others on the right) honestly believe that this is best handled on the local level with federal assistance but not federal direction. I would honestly rather former Houston Mayor Lee P. Brown lead the evacuation than President George W. Bush.

President Bush has heeded the cries of those who hold the federal government accountable and wants to take complete control of the situation. I'm tempted to say that his critics should be careful what they ask for, but that's not very helpful. Instead I will simply say that I believe that the federal government's ability to handle the situation (under any administration) is limited and that I hope to God that city and state officials are figuring out what to do on their own if and when the federal government is slow to respond. And I hope that individual citizens are trying to figure out what they should do if and when the state and local governments are slow to respond.

I am not very hopeful on all this. While the post-Rita-evac recriminations help me understand how minds that work differently from my own work, it also points out that people are, in general, reactive. We want everything to go flawlessly. When things don't happen that way, we go after one another. We're either too lackadaisal in the face of disaster or we're too panicky. We're whatever we shouldn't have been because that's the only reason that people could be deathly uncomfortable for hours or days on end and could die. Ordinarily I might appreciate a public that refuses to accept things as they are, but in this case they want someone else to change it. And we seem to declare it in such a way that assures we will never get it.

Every now and again I will look back at something I wrote a few years ago and be astounded that I wrote it. I will be astonished at how wrong I was. I really hope that a couple years from now I will look back at this post in a similar manner.

We're having some technical difficulties when trying to update the database and have been since last night. Not sure what is going on, but posts and comments are not going through.

Update: Problem fixed. It seems there was a diskspace limit that I was unaware of. Comments that didn't seem to save apparently did. I deleted the duplicates from those that kept trying. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Nucleus has a glitch. Basically, if I spend too much time writing a post, it will put up an error instead of posting the post. It's a pain, but all I generally have to do is go back and cut and paste it into a new post.

So I wrote up a very, very long post inspired by an article in the New York Times. It errored out after I finished it. It took a little while to error out and then I was experiencing some other problem, so I started surfing and discovered that the article I had based a 1470-word document on was complete bunk.

So thank you, New York Times, for nothing.

And thank you, Nucleus, for sparing my taste buts the bitter flavor of crow.

According to a poll, roughly half of Europeans can speak two or more languages.

Honestly, I thought that number would be a bit higher. I guess it's just my thinking after being drilled and drilled about how "all" Europeans can speak at least two languages and many can speak three. I never expected that all could, but I figured more-or-less all but their underclass could. I was a bit surprised that Britain had the second lowest rate of bilingualism at 30%. I was less surprised that the most common foreign language known and understood was English as the European superiority myth that I was familiar with was that everyone was taught their native language, English, and some other language. But anyway, that actually helped explain the first. People that can speak English have less need to learn another language than those that can't.

That said, America's 9% bilinguilism is abysmal. That's made worse by the fact that we're an immigrant nation and therefore for a large chunk of the bilinguals English is the second language.

I tried to learn Spanish in high school and know some, but never became fluent. Of my closest friends (most of which have college degrees) only a couple are bilingual. Interestingly I know more bilingual people here in Idaho than I did in multiculti Houston. But they did not learn it in school, they learned it while training to become Mormon missionaries abroad. So even that success doesn't vindicate our school system - and ourselves, of course, for not demanding a better school system.

The school systems are, by-and-large, not serious about teaching us foreign languages. It's rarely a requirement and when it is you spend one hour a day spaced out over the course of a couple years starting past the age where our understanding of the world in English has solidified. I suppose I'll eat my words if that's how other nations do it it as well, but that strikes me as a very bad learning schedule. Not only are the schools not serious about teaching it in any meaningful capacity, but students seem to have little interest in learning it. The fact that so many high schoolers and college graduates take the much less useful French and German instead of Spanish or Asian languages and that parents let them make these decisions suggests to me that it's all approached quite leisurely.

We need people learning Japanese and the various forms of Chinese and Indian and increasingly Arabic and other languages of the middle east. This is important stuff for the US to retain its competitive advantage. I don't know if I'm a hypocrite for saying so since I can't speak Spanish or if I'm in a better position to object to the system because I'm a part of it and the mindset because I've lazily conformed to it.

I find myself retaking this quiz once a year or so. The results seem to vary, though I seem to pretty consistently find myself two blocks away or so from the center. First I was in the center economically but libertarian socially. Then I was two in both ways, and now I've shifted to the right economically but in an anti-libertarian direction.

I find it a little bit funky because if anything I feel like I've shifted slightly back in to the libertarian direction from where I was two years ago (though I'm a whole lot less a libertarian than I was in college). If I created an index with a rating of 10 being completely conservative or libertarian and -10 representing being completely liberal or authoritarian, it would look something like the graph to the right

The red represents conservative/liberal and the blue libertarian/authoritarian. This probably lakes me look quite fickle, but the issues of the day change from year to year and a lot of it has as much to do with current events and the issues on the forefront than it does with an actual change in underlying philosophy. That said, my views on specific issues have changed as well. Living out here has given me a new appreciation to the notion of separation of church and state, for instance. Thrifthaven gave me a different view of the poor than I had recieved at the Bingham Barrios back in Houston. I'm sure that once I have children, things will shift again in one way or another.

But all in all, I think the underpinnings of my political philosophy (limited tax and regulation, market-oriented solutions to social problems, and a self-interested foreign policy) have remained relatively constant - much moreso than my personal philosophy and outlook on life. One of the interesting things about the graph - and I didn't intend it - is that the sum of my libertarian and conservative values actually remained 6 for the last few years, meaning that a lot of my shift towards conservatism came at the expense of libertarianism and my shift towards libertarianism came at the expense of conservatism.

By-and-large I tread about halfway between libertarian and conservative political philosophy. There's a little more liberal influence than there was a couple years ago, but even that gets bent in the prism of economic libertarianism and the conservative guarding of moral norms through which I see the world.

UPDATE: Then there's this quiz that Kevin pointed out, according to which I am somewhere between being a centrist and a libertarian. Most of the people who took the quiz and landed where I did apparently voted for Kerry. As Kevin notes, one must be a bit suspicious of a quiz that places John Kerry smack dab in the center. Like the first test, this one seems to lead the taker in a certain direction (some feel like "Do you believe that AIDS is wiping out Africa because god hates gays and blacks? No? Score one for liberal/libertarian").

You are a Social Liberal (60% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (66% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian

I find a couple things interesting here. First that the anarchists seemed somewhat divided between Bush and Kerry. One would suspect that they would lean in favor of the challenger whomever it was. It's extremely difficult for one to be socially conservative and have voted for Kerry, but a fair number of people that registered as socially liberal voted for Bush. This can probably be chalked up to Internet-libertarian bias, wherein most avid Internet users are more socially liberal than the general population at large. Totalitarians leaned towards Bush in the ballot-box, which is kinda goofy to consider that someone that voted for Bush could find their little box landed on Osama bin Laden. I'm not sure whether that was an oversight or whether the author(s) of the test thought that they were being clever.

It's weird. Yesterday just about all my Houston friends logged off throughout the day and didn't log back on.

Most of them talked about leaving town.

Is there a holiday this weekend that I don't know about?

Go (as far away as fast as possible from) Houston Day or something? Maybe Go (as far away as fast as possible from) Houston Weekend?

A few months ago Camille and I went to the community theater and saw a production of David Auburn's Proof. Proof is about a young woman who takes a little too much after her father, a brilliant mathematician that lost his mind. She has the mathematical talent and is worried that the mental instability of her father will overcome her as well. We both really, really enjoyed the play and thought it was brilliantly performed by every cast member.

So I read that a movie was coming out starring Gweneth Paltrow as the daughter Catherine and Anthony Hopkins as the father. The Hopkins choice was great, but I couldn't help but think poorly of the decision to cast Paltrow. The character is rather cranky and malcontentual. Paltrow is just a bit, I dunno, vulnerable?

So I'm prepared to say that they picked the wrong person when I discover that Paltrow was actually the original Catherine in the original production of the play.

Kinda feel stupid for rendering judgment, I must say.

I must declare, though, that casting Kirsten Dunst's boy-toy Jake Gyllenhaal as the father's protege and the daughter's love interest was a total mistake, though.

Total.

From the office of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay:

· Before I begin, I want to reiterate my support for President Bush's address to the nation last week from New Orleans.

· His commitment to helping the people of the Gulf Coast region recover and rebuild is shared by every member of the House Republican Conference.

· Every dime that as been appropriated - and every dime that will be appropriated - from the federal treasury to the people of the Gulf Coast comes from the votes of the House of Representatives, and we are honored to have that opportunity.

o And with that opportunity comes an equally important responsibility to make sure the money comes from and goes to the right places.

· Oversight of the relief funds will remain a high priority throughout the effort.

o The $51.8 billion package we passed two weeks ago set aside $15 million for inspectors general to follow the money.

o The president is also calling on vigorous IG accounting.

o Committees here on the Hill are already following suit, preparing for robust oversight over every dime.

o The Congress' moral obligation to the people of the Gulf Coast is not simply that we send money down there, but that that money does what it is supposed to do for them.

· Just as important as where the money goes is where it comes from.

o Even before the flood waters started to recede, many voices were calling for Katrina-related tax hikes. But those same voices were calling for tax hikes before Katrina was even a blip on the Doppler radar.

· Katrina tax hikes are not about Katrina; they're about tax hikes, and they are not an option.

o Raising taxes would kill jobs, choke off investment, and stifle economic growth. That's not exactly a recipe for the kind of economic renewal that region so desperately needs.

· Instead, I hope some of the money can be the product of spending sacrifices elsewhere in the federal budget.

o There are programs all over the federal budget that are bloated or wasteful or inefficiently using the funds we provide them, and I'm very interested in identifying them.

· We can fund this relief effort without raising taxes or wasteful spending - and it's up to us to do just that.

DeLay has a point that most everyone calling for tax hikes in regards to Katrina were also calling for them before Katrina. But you know all those bloated programs that he refers to later? Yeah, those were there before Katrina, too.

But instead of arguing about the past, let us raise a toast to new beginnings. The beginning of, for instance, of a Republican Party that even remotely cares about bloated, wasteful, inefficient government. The beginning of a Republican Party that's at least a little bit concerned about the gap between accounts payable and accounts receivable - they must be a little concerned, right, or they would write this off as deficit, too, no?

I would hold my breath in anticipation of this New Republican Party, but I don't wanna die.

But in leiu of holding my breath, I will cross my fingers.

Small-government conservatism is my preference. Kicking back more of the taxes and duties to the state and local governments sounds like a good way to go to me. This bloat that we refer to is a lot easier to hide in a larger government than a smaller one, after all. But absent that I will take big-government conservatism as preferable to big-government liberalism. More market-based solutions with more civil servant accountability. But a government that gives lip-service to small government, taxes at smaller government rates, and then operates like big, big government but with small-government efficiency is increasingly unpalatable to me.

The tax cuts won't choke a government that isn't concerned about sound fiscal circulation - and much as I hate to nod in agreement with a largely insincere opposition, the biggest bloat we've got now is interest on the debt that grows regularly from the difference between accounts receivable and accounts payable.

A local meteorologist with NBC-6 has made some national news because of his theories on what is causing these nasty hurricanes: It's the Japanese mafia!

Stevens says the clouds formed by the generators are different from normal clouds and are able to appear out of nowhere and says Katrina had many rotation points that are unusual for hurricanes.

At least 10 nations and organizations possess the technology, but Stevens suspects the Japanese Yakuza created Katrina in order to make a fortune in the futures market and to get even with the U.S. for the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima.

He has a website and also makes his case at UrbanSurvival.com. Here's an article from his site explaining Katrina and Ivan.

Update: Stevens has resigned to pursue his investigations full-time. Here's the video.

"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." -H. G. Wells

"Everybody pities the weak; jealousy you have to earn." -Arnold Schwarzenegger

"Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive" -Havelock Ellis

A bi-partisan commission has listed a series of recommendations to make our elections process more effective.

• Establishment of a "universal voting registration system." States, rather than local jurisdictions, would be responsible for the accuracy of voter lists. State lists should be interchangeable so that "people would need to register only once in their lifetime, and it would be easy to update their registration information when they move."
• A greater role for states in registering potential voters. In addition, states should make it easier for ex-felons who have met their sentencing and parole requirements to register to vote, with the exception of registered sex offenders.
• Implementation of a uniformly accepted photo identification system to ensure that a would-be voter is the person on a voting list. States should establish more offices, including mobile facilities, to make it easier for non-drivers to register and receive photo IDs.

As much as I hate pushing power away from local governments to state and federal governments, I support it here. In national elections, voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio affect voters in Idaho and Texas. Not just for the presidency, but for the House and Senate as well. I'm not excited about it, but I'll take it.

I find the registered-sex-offenders exception to be odd. You can kill someone, but you can't molest them? I understand the rationale when it comes to things such as lists that give parents a heads up about pedophiles or rapists moving in to their neighborhood, but that has little to do with voting. Am I missing something here?

The more controversial part is the requiring of photo identification. I've commented before that any talk of election reform that does not involve requiring photo identification and proof of citizenship is not a serious discussion. As long as there is the insistence among some on the left that such requirements are beyond the pale, there really isn't much to discuss, in my view. Maybe this will prove to be a good jumping point for a discussion and compromise on how the requirement is implemented (such as requiring that the photo identification be without cost and as convenient as possible).

It is important that as many votes cast as possible are counted. Cutting back on voter fraud or giving less leeway to the perception of voter fraud helps accomplish this by cutting down on or eliminating honest-vote-negating fraudulent votes and making it more difficult for those that would use voter fraud as an excuse to suppress the vote by streamlining what is expected of the voter and what is sufficient for the voter to have.

And as someone that's going to be moving a couple times in the next three years, transportable voter registration is an attractive option to me.

"Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." -G.K. Chesterton

Utah's new governor has been flirting with a flat tax since winning office in 2004. As it stands now, Utah has a graduated income tax with most Utahns paying the maximum 7% and Governor Huntsman is trying to flatten it out to 4.6%. But Utah is Utah and when the LDS Church announced its opposition to something, you can stick a fork in it:

Hughes does not lay the death of a true flat-rate tax at the feet of LDS Church leaders. A number of "stakeholders," including other charitable groups, have been lobbying legislators recently over keeping their deductions, he said.

"We want a full discussion, especially by some groups that have an interest in these deductions but who have not been heard before," said Bramble. It will be their chance, he said, to show their concerns, and tax force members chance to show them that even if they lose their specific deduction, income-tax payers who take their deductions will still be better off because of an overall lower tax rate.

A true flat-rate income tax without deductions would have had tough going in the Legislature in any case, with around 80 percent of lawmakers being members of the LDS Church.

Utah is, of course, something of a special case because of its ties with a singular, very heirarchial church.

But it is interesting for a couple of reasons. As I am personally opposed to the Flat Tax, I don't lament its failure there. But I am very much in favor of a simpler tax system analogous to Dick Gephardt's 10 Percent Plan way back before the end of the end of the era of big government. Simply put, it's not so much the "inequities" of different people paying different percentages of their income in taxes - or even the money paid itself - that is utmost on my list of concerns, but rather the extremely complicated nature of the tax code and all the tax cuts and tax breaks aimed at specific interests both business and personal.

And here we have one of the three most conservative states in the nation can't get it passed due to one of the most reliably Republican religious institutions in the country. Utah being a special case aside, a whole lot of Republican support comes from religious organizations. The religious organizations, of course, are helped by their tax-deductable fundraising capabilities. When up against this in their own party, is there really any way that the tax code can be simplified? Only if the Democrats do it, except that as with so many issues, conservatives can only get so frustrated with Republicans because they don't walk the talk before they realize that Republicans are the only ones even talking the talk.

I've been getting a resurgence of google queries involving Kenny Chesney and homosexuality again. I thought it odd till I found out that things weren't going well for Connecticut's country music export and his now estranged wife, Renee Zellweger.

On a side note, looking for the link where I found out something about Connecticut Kenny that explains a lot. The general assumption - on my part, at least - was that he was merely a tool of the Nashville machine. Turns out that he went to college and got a degree of advertising. I guess I didn't give him enough credit on intelligence and gave him too much credit in intention.

Carry on...

Jim Miller takes the counterintuitive position that 48 hours for an evacuation is actually better than 72:

If we put these points together, we see that we want to start our evacuations late enough so that people can be persuaded that the hurricane is likely to hit them, and that the costs they will suffer from the evacuation are worth the decrease in risk. My guess is that about the earliest that this can be done is 48 hours before a hurricane is predicted to hit. Those who think this too late are invited to look at Katrina on Friday morning, 72 hours before it hit New Orleans. At that time, Katrina was a Category 2 storm, hundreds of miles away from New Orleans.

And this is typical of hurricanes; predictions made 72 hours before they strike are not very accurate — and people in hurricane areas know this.

Many of you will already be wondering about this question: Would 48 hours be enough time to evacuate New Orleans? As far as I can tell from these statistics on commuters, the answer is yes. New Orleans Parish has more than 140 thousand workers commuting to work by car, motorcycle, or truck on an average work day. If we assume that those vehicles could carry an average of 4 people, then they could have evacuated the population of New Orleans (about 450 thousand) in a single trip, with the help, of course, of the "contraflow" system that makes the major roads out of New Orleans one-way. Even with slower traffic than usual, they could have gotten to safe areas in a few hours, assuming the state police managed the flow well. (You would want them, for instance, to preposition tow trucks and other emergency vehicles in order to keep the traffic moving.)

Now you would want to do a formal study to prove that I am right, but we should remember that 80 percent, by most estimates, of the population was evacuated. And, although they got warnings beginning on Friday, Mayor Nagin did not order an evacuation until Sunday morning, 23 hours before the storm hit.

He makes a pretty convincing case. As far as getting the commuters out, it's apparent that those that wanted to and were able to got out. That there weren't cars on the road when it hit seems to validate this.

But the bigger issue put forth by Hurricane Katrina is, in my view, those that didn't want to and more particularly those that weren't able to. There are a couple lessons I consider pretty concrete here (and by "concrete" I mean non-political, things both the left and right should agree on), one of which is that an 80% evacuation is not necessarily enough. 100,000 people in the midst of chaos leads to rather unfortunate things.

More lead time would allow a couple of things. First of all, it would allow for more time to mobilize busses and make arrangements for a place for those people to go. The officials dropped the ball on this so we don't really know if there really was enough time. If there was enough time for one run, we don't know about more than one run. That could require more time or it could not. The thing is that we don't really know. Secondly, we don't really know how many people both did not appreciate the severity of the danger and could have been convinced. A certain number (less than 20%, almost certainly) would have stayed behind anyway. But I would like to know the feasibility of some sort of alert system to separate the potentially horrendous from the potentially bad. I'd almost be willing to say that in the case of New Orleans, a level two hurricane that appears to be gaining strength is potentially horrendous. Easy to say now, of course, but I'm thinking of the future here and not looking to condemn what happened when Katrina came ashore.

Basically, Brendon Loy made the outstanding point that if there is a 1-in-10 chance that a nuclear bomb was going off in your city, you evacuate. Mandatory? Well a mandatory evacuation isn't exactly mandatory when lots of people didn't leave. But calling it that does lend a sense of urgency that cannot be defined any other way.

Maybe there is another definition. I don't know the laws in this particular area, so people are more than welcome to tell me that what I urge is already the case. The question I don't have the answer to is whether or not an employee can be fired for leaving town when a hurricane may be hitting. If so then I believe that we need to add a special protection to those that elect to leave early. I'd guess that to be the case in a mandatory evacuation (not an issue for Katrina since the city was destroyed, but it would have been had the hurricane not hit at expected), but I don't know it to be in the case of an "urged" evacuation. Maybe having a "strongly urged" evacuation with employment protection at 72 hours would be sufficient. Closing the city and schools and utilizing busses at that point might also be worthwhile.

Yes, something like this would lead to false alarms, but at least in the case of a city as vulnerable as New Orleans or simply as populated as Houston or Miami, false alarms are better than devestation. One thing we ought to be keeping in mind is that those that live in a coastal area need to factor hurricane scares in the same way that northern schools, business, and government factors in snow days. I don't believe this to be a completely unreasonable expectation.

Miller is concerned that the government may not value the costs of such declaration and declare them too often, presumably as a CYA measure. If anything, the opposite appears to be true. The New Orleans mayor was very aware of the financial repercussions of a mandatory evacuation and it appears that he may have hesitated on account of that. Leaving the decision up to local authorities who would be held accountable by business interests (which the mayor was clearly and understandably worried about) would serve as a balance for a mayor anxious to say that he or she did all that they could.

I wish that blogger had categories. Centinel, for instance, has this great feature where he explores what he heard on NPR on the way to work. He's been blogging for a year now and I would love to go back and catch all of his posts. He reminds me of the intuitive nature regarding what I like about NPR and also the mindset that can be a bit of a turnoff.

I used to listen to public radio a while back because they were one of the only stations to play untested regional and local acts. I also listened to their newscasts off-and-on. Eventually they started playing less of variety of local music, it seemed to me, and it seemed like every time I turned around they were having a pledge drive.

On weekends in Salt Lake City while Camille was doing a rotation down there, I watched non-profit television while she was showering or getting ready for work or otherwise occupied. It had some interesting television that you're unlikely to really find elsewhere. But they, too, were having a fundraising drive. It's the cost of not having advertisers, I suppose. But it's a particularly irritating cost to me.

Commercial entertainment has a reasonably well-outlined end-user agreement. You agree to watch or listen and to occasionally forget or become too lazy to turn the channel during commercial breaks. In return, the advertisers give the station money so that they can continue to entertain you provided that enough people are watching to justify the continuation of the program or station providing the entertainment. Sure, I get annoyed with all the commercial break as well as the nature of the commercials themselves.

There's also direct-to-audience entertainment. The EUA is a bit different here in that you pay a base fee in order to avoid commercials altogether. Premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc.) work in this model, as does satellite radio, pay-per-view, film rental, and film/music purchase. When I get a bit more money freed up I'd like to utilize more of these modes of entertainment, but absent that I can still turn to commercial entertainment.

Public entertainment, however, basically works on the honor-and-shame system. They work on the honor system insofar as no one has to pay for it in order to get it. However, the MO turns to shame every drive. I don't blame them one iota for needing money (we live in a quasi-capitalist country, after all), but it's all so vague. It's sort of like that friend that does you favors and says that you can pay him back later or whenever you can. In some ways I would prefer a tit-for-tat method, whereby I know what I'm going to be paying and when. Unless I'm close to someone, I generally don't like favors that aren't completely necessary. Partially it's because I don't know what they're going to need. Partially it's because I don't want to forget the favors that people do for me and end up seriously in their debt. That latter part is especially true of friends. It's odd in that I don't generally hold others to a particular favor-for-favor standard, but I fear that they will me. I couldn't blame them if they did, but that starts making things more complicated.

With public radio (which I will mostly use as an example here because I've partaken in that a lot more than public television), there is no ledger. I find that off-putting. Every now and again they have a drive, of course, and I'm free to donate at that time. If they had a basic voluntary membership program I might not have such a problem with it. I would have to evaluate it like I would evaluate any other expenditure (and I would try to even though membership would be voluntary), but at least then I could pay my dues and be done with it.

Except that even if I pay my dues, they will continue to ask for more money. They may be talking to me, but I will feel like they are whenever they're listening. They said that they only had the drives a couple times a year, but it seemed like it was quarterly drives lasting three months a piece. And then even to the extent that they have membership programs (where you get a card, some coupons, a mug and a bumper sticker), they often have increasingly elaborate ones so there's always more ways to give to move up the philantropist echelon - and there's always more ways to feel guilty when you can't give.

A long time ago I regularly read the Jewish World Review. Moreso than any other source, it introduced me to a kind of conservatism that I had not really been introduced to before. It had the obnoxious kinds, to be sure, but also really thoughtful conservative and libertarian commentary. I owe a lot of my political and social philosophy to the ideas introduced to me by that site. But after a while it seemed like every time I went on there they were desperately asking for more money. I have no doubt that they were in a money crunch, but eventually the guilt I felt about not being able or willing to help out was more than my enjoyment of the site. I haven't been over there in some time.

I can't blame them for needing money, and if they didn't ask for it they would never get it. But I often find myself preferring the subscription model and/or those that provide commentary and such as a labor of love. And I'll take advertisements. Whatever, so long as we're square by the time I am finished reading, watching, or hearing what they have to say.

Well that was more than slightly agitating.

I stayed after work a couple hours so that I could make my class in Idaho Falls. I mentally checked out at or around five, so I really had nothing to do but sit there and stare blankly at my monitor. Staying at work is worse when you're not going to get paid for it. Then came the trip over to the college. I've mentioned before that Idaho Falls has no right to be as congested as it is for a town its size, but today that really hit home. There are three routes connecting the vibrant east side of town with downtown on the east side. Of the three routes, the one with a 25mph speed limit is the fasted even a couple hours past rush hour.

I scramble in to class at 7:05. They're talking about how the class has been cancelled due to lack of interest. Since I was really counting on this class for a number of things - not least of which clinching the raise I'm about to ask for - that was a bummer. I wasn't as upset as one guy, though, who sounded like he wasn't going to take the class next semester when it will actually be offered. So then the teacher gives a big, long explanation-slash-sales pitch about how great the class is going to be, how many different career paths it can help one with, and blah blah blah. All this on a class that I won't be able to take until next year (and maybe not even then because it might conflict with my wedding and honeymoon... crap... just thought of that... crap).

So it's 9:15 and I am finally home, no more edumicated than I was when I clocked out at work.

Sort of.

One of the lawyers at my company teaches a continuing/vocational education class at Eastern Idaho Technical College. My employer is covering the $90 fee for the class in return for a more skilled staff. Considering how much knowledge of the mortgage industry is helpful to my job and how little I had coming in to it. Since signing on here, I've learned a lot about housing markets, terminology, loan programs, and the financial repercussions of housing loan and purchase. I've found it not only interesting, but things that I want to know more about simply for when it's time for me to buy a house.

So my Wednesday nights are shot for a little while, but I'm really looking forward to it. Would that I had this much enthusiasm for learning when I was in school for real!

"They keep coming" -Ominously said by a narrator in infamous ad by former California Governor Pete Wilson, said to video of immigrants jumping the fence in to America.

"They Greyhounds keep coming, dumping locusts in to the streets till the gutters overflow and Los Angeles thinks 'I might explode some day soon.'" -Death Cab for Cutie

This is getting out of hand. I have no idea what we need all those dang cows for. But every day the Canadians are bringing more and more in to the country. Frankly, it's getting ominous. It's bad enough when I have to drive through their ucky, but much worse when I'm sharing the road.

We don't need this many cows, dangit.

It almost makes me want to become a vegetarian or something. In Wyoming I had a neat chiliburger with elk chili and a buffalo patty. Maybe that's the way to go.

Or do we import those from Canada, too?

Wyoming, like Utah, Texas, Louisiana, and apparently every other state except Idaho, apparently has Livewire.

What did Idaho do wrong?!

I finally tried the new Mountain Dew: Pitch Black II drink. They did punch up the formula somewhat. It has a sour taste to it. Since Pitch Black was originally a grape-flavored drink, I'm surprised they didn't go with a much more obvious name:

Mountain Dew: Sour Grapes

From the latest issue of The Onion:

Refugees Moved From Sewage-Contaminated Superdome To Hellhole Of Houston

HOUSTON—Evacuees from the overheated, filth-encrusted wreckage of the New Orleans Superdome were bussed to the humid, 110-degree August heat and polluted air of Houston last week, in a move that many are resisting. "Please, God, not Houston. Anyplace but Houston," said one woman, taking shelter under an overpass. "The food there is awful, and the weather is miserable. And the traffic—it's like some engineer was making a sick joke." Authorities apologized for transporting survivors to a city "barely better in any respect," but said the blistering-hot, oil-soaked Texas city was in fact slightly better, and that casualties due to gunfire would be no worse.

Awful food? Surely you jest.

Oh, and it's not August.

The Houston one was amusing, but this Onion blurb was hilarious:

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing African­Americans "looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses." "I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I'd managed to find," said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. "Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers." Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.

This post is put up as a monument to cooler heads prevailing...

and as a note to anyone that's been here in the last half-hour or so: You're not imagining things.

Camille and I spent the weekend in the wonderful company of my good friend Linus and his fiance Lucy.

On Sunday we went on a little hike. It turns out that Linus and Lucy are bird people and a yellowish bird caught their attention towards the end of it. They discussed what exactly the bird might be, settling on a yellow or gold finch. I remember at the time thinking that it looks a lot like "The Dustbury bird," the signature image of CG Hill's great site. I did not say as much since I had no idea what the bird was called. When they got home they looked it up in some bird book and confirmed their suspicions.

Today I went to the FAQ on Dustbury and found out that I was right, too.

I was reading a rather impassioned and biased article about a Georgia Tech student whose case helped spur Georgia's acceptance of the "academic bill or rights." What actually caught my interest was this:

Georgia Tech was originally a military school. Even today, the school offers an ROTC program, which is rare in higher education. On the technical side—in the agriculture and engineering departments particularly—the school leans conservative. Nonetheless, the liberal arts departments at Georgia Tech live up to the worst connotation of that phrase. For example, Ruth has even heard one political science professor make fun of some students’ Georgia accents right in their own home state.

Since when are ROTC programs rare? I thought they were pretty commonplace in public schools. In Texas - hardly a representative example, I acknowledge - every university I pinged had some sort of program (possible exception, Sul Ross State, which is half the size of my high school). In California, I'm not sure about the California State system, but every notable school in the University of California system (even Berkeley) has a program.

Am I using a different definition of ROTC than the article is?

The NEA is trying to get NLCB waivers for those schools taking in New Orleans refugees:

Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms, teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.

Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco earthquake and the Chicago fire.

"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan.

I'm quite sympathetic to the dilemma, though I have some questions here. The fall of NO was undoubtedly a uniquely catastrophic event. On the other hand, its damage will presumably be diffused among many schools and the net effect could be no more than that of other circumstances. That's what has me concerned - it opens the door for other exceptions. Some school districts in the southwest may take more first-generation ESL immigrants that could off-set whatever gains that they make. Complaints on that score have been raised before. You could make an exception there, but once waivers start they can be rather difficult to stop.

On the other hand, a school that's barely treading water could really sink for reasons having nothing to do with their competence. An improvement among existing students could be turned in to a downgrade due to the influx of outsiders. That's not particularly fair to anyone.

It's a tough question.

I've been cleaning my bathroom for the past two hours or so.

Well no, not my bathroom, really, but my shower.

Well no, not my whole shower, but about a third of it.

How can cleaning a third of a shower take two hours?

Cause scrubbing won't do it. Nor will scrubbing plus Tilex.

Many of you are computer people, so you might appreciate this. You know those placeholders that come in a case that you take out to replace with PCI cards? Yeah... that's what it's taking to get this crud off my walls. One scrape at a time. For those of you that are not so computer-inclined, imagine a metal piece about half the size of a small comb. Now take 3/4 of that or so and you have what I'm talking about.

This is six and a half times worse than the Thrifthaven bathroom was before I cleaned it. And this time it wasn't my fault -- it came along with the rat terrier pecker when I first moved in. One of these days I'm going to have to take a picture of the water jugs I use to take a shower...

The other day I commented on the Ten Second News sideblog on a NY Times regarding Houston's benefiting from the New Orleans disaster. I said:

I'm a little resentful of the tone of the article, though, as it seems to suggest that Houston has been a vulture at the gate. Rather, the Bayou City has been going far above and beyond the call of duty in helping New Orleanians. Is there an ulterior motive? Not really seeing as how the ones taken in are, to be frank, the ones it's probably least excited about keeping. As far as the scramble, I'd be upset with Houston officials if they weren't taking a longer view of things.

The thing is that these businesses have to go somewhere. It's not a matter of pilfering businesses and people that would otherwise be sticking around. Many of them will move back and I'm sure that we wish them all the best. But Houston has a lot to offer to those looking for a solution, temporary or permanent. It would be a mistake not to point that out.

The article in question was actually not in the NY Times but rather the International Herald-Tribune. This is significant because according to KTRK (ABC), there is some difference between the two:

Houston is home to the largest relief shelter in American history. From donating shelter, clothes, and food to making room in its schools, the city and its people have given of themselves.

So who could find anything bad to say about Houston? Apparently the New York Times could, which on Tuesday printed an article about Houston's response to Katrina in two different newspapers. In one, the article seems relatively even handed. But in the other, some say it is overly critical, ill-timed, and in poor taste.

In the Times, there's an above-the-fold article by Houston-based reporter Simon Romero. And apparently what's in the Times is not all the news that's fit to print.

In The International Herald Tribune published by the Times in Paris, Romero's article is on page 15 and it begins with a line not in the Times, which reads "No one would accuse this city of being timid in the scramble to profit from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."

It later contends, "A surge of business activity in Houston might lift the fortune of a city that is still struggling to recover from the collapse of Enron and two decades of job cuts in the energy industry."

The line about not being "timid in the scrable to profit" really sets a different tone for the entire article. Homesellers giving special discounts to families from Louisiana are not presented as charitable, but almost ambulance-chasing.

I don't know that I've ever been more proud to be a raised Houstonian or Texan as I have been this past week. Houston has gone out of its way to be hospitable to "desirable" and "undesirable" alike. Gov. Rick Perry, Mayor Bill White, County Judge Robert Eckles, and all else deserve a lot of credit not only for being willing to help, but showing a sort of competence that has been hard to find in this whole debacle.

Austin Bay suggests that the object of it might be to knock Houston down a peg:

Tempest in a teapot? Or another example of “mainstream” press bias with a slash and a dram of dishonest editing? It’s both. Call it small potatoes, but indicative small potatoes– and if dishonest is too strong a word, sub “adulterated.” This story (Houston’s business sector post-Katrina) deserved coverage, but not with the rhetorical editorialization. The truth is, an entire swath of the southeastern and southwestern US will eventually “benefit” in the same manner as evacuees arrive and businesses adjust– the first story acknowledges that. Why the editorialization? Here’s a theory: It’s also the NY-DC-LA media axis trying to take Houston down a notch or two. Houston opened its doors and hearts to evacuees. That’s too sweet of a story, especially from a Republican state and a swaggering Texas city. The NY-DC-LA axis responds with: “So let’s suggest that they are really being greedy, eh?” Unfair? Then offer another theory.

I think regional bias may have been involved, but I frankly think a lot of it is a belief that nothing good can come from this disaster. The Americans all have opened their homes and wallets to strangers has been somewhat muffled under the sound of axes grinding.

Things that do not - in and of themselves - constitute having a personality, an incomplete list:

• Wearing all black.
• An unrelenting grumble-and-mutter.
• A "philosophy" of cynicism
• Thinking that conservatives/liberals are soulless, evil entities of which one must spend their life opposing without, you know, actually doing anything to change things.
• Knowing extraordinary amounts of minutae regarding esoteric subjects of minimal use in day-to-day operations.
• Being really, really skilled with computers.
• Knowing six stock philosophical points gleamed from pop culture (Star Wars, Fight Club, Matrix, etc.).
• Believing that information, entertainment, and everything else ought to be free - and believing this to be a profound, revolutionary concept.
• Liking to party a lot.
• Being stuck in the 60's, 70's, or 80's and viewing things from those periods as the pinnacle of... something. Whatever. The decade is over, dude.
• Understanding what irony is and failing to acknowledge that irony may have its limits.
• Loving Jesus totally and making a spectator sport out of your love for Him.
• Apathy as a philosophy.

I've nothing to add this particular Labor Day, so I'll just link to the tribute I wrote a couple years back.

Strang: Oh hey, there's Alex. Maybe he can help us out. Hey man.
RAW: Oh, hey Strang. Hello Quan.
Strang: We're trying to get some money for a combo meal. If you tell me where you live I'll be glad to pay you back.
RAW: Sorry, I've got no cash on me.
Strang: Aww, man. Peace out.
RAW: Later.

I've been at odds whether to write a post about New Orleans. A lot of posts on the subject seem excessively self-indulgent or pseudo-intellectual. I'm not sure what I could say that might not come across as one, the other, or both. My thoughts are not particularly original, well-grounded, or profound. But sometimes the art is in the process and not the product. So here's the partial collection of my scattered thoughts:

It usually takes two or three days for large-scale events to hit me. 9/11 didn't hit me - really hit me - until I was on my way back from a trip brief Waco trip. The tsumani took a couple days as well. Prior to that point, most of my thoughts are hypothetical, distant, cold, and possibly inappropriate.

But it's starting to get through. A little ahead of schedule, if for no other reason than the entire thing being somewhat inescapable due to Camille's ties to the city. Also because of literary comparisons.

What strikes me most about this whole thing is how close we are to anarchy. One week ago, New Orleans was a normal city. Since then, it's sunk in to chaos. It took a massive hurricane a couple snaps in the levee, but it only took a few days. And poof, society was gone.

A few years ago DC's Batman titles had a story arch called 'No Man's Land' in which Gotham is abandoned by the federal government, leaving martial law abound. Take out the masks, remove earthquake rubble and add a bunch of water, and the parallels are somewhat interesting. Denny O'Neill, whom I believe was the architect of NML, was also the cheif writer of a series in the 80's called The Question, which over a three year run followed Hub City's descent in to utter chaos.

Gotham and Hub City are, of course, fictional. While stories that feature superheroes are inherently unreal in nature, even accepting that the stories never felt real. They felt metaphorical. They felt hypothetical. But they're not all that different from what is going on right now. It's taking me a while to come to grips with that.

We take things for granted in this country. We take for granted that whatever corruption may exist in government generally and law enforcement specifically that there are laws that we live by. A lot of people get away with a lot of things, of course, but they do so mostly by being sly, tricky, and quiet. The mere requirement that such actions be kept covert (or at least not chargable or provable in court) keeps corruption, on the greater scheme of things, to a minimum.

When we read about Sudanese warlords or armed struggle in Iraq, there is a certain distance we place between ourselves and those events. That's over there, but over here we have Rule of Law and protections both against evildoers and against or protectors. The system may fail, but at least there is a system.

So what's getting me most about New Orleans right now is the utter lack of a system. Not just the chaos, which we've seen before, but the fact that there is no immediate end in sight. There's not a feeling right now that folks out there can just "wait it out." It's the difference between holding your breath to get the ring under water and being stuck under water, not knowing which way us up, and panicking. The light at the end of the tunnel and the knowledge of how it will play out is all-important. And that's what's lacking now.

People are having to leave their beloved pets to die. They have nothing to drink. Nothing to eat. When something bad happens, there is no one to go to and nowhere to escape to. You know you could be killed and there is nothing anyone can do about it. You know anyone around you can be killed and there isn't anything you can do about that. Eventually, I suppose, the busses will take everyone off to Houston, but dammit we're in America and we shouldn't ever find ourselves in this situation. Ever.

But there are, the lesson to me in this, limits to what a society can safeguard. There are limits to what a society can guarantee to its people at all times. Sometimes we're thrown such a curveball that the unthinkable becomes the pragmatic. The dichotomy of chaos and martial law suddenly becomes one that we have to ponder. Whatever chance we might have had to preserve the civility is gone. Whatever notion we had that we, as Americans, were different from those other people from those other places, or that we, as humans, are capable consistently keeping peace without bouts of chaos or a lot of broken glass, becomes much, much harder to maintain.

In their last season or two as the Montreal Expos, the now-Washington Nationals played at a few locations, becoming Major League Baseball's first vagabond team. Unless one counts the Oilers/Titans 1-year stint in Memphis, the New Orleans Saints may be becoming the first vagabond football team:

While the Saints and NFL officials have been discussing a variety of alternatives, they haven't talked yet with many of the people at the proposed sites.

``We can say is LSU an option, yeah, but is it an option with them?'' Saints spokesman Greg Bensel said Wednesday by phone from San Jose. ``That's the next hurdle. We haven't crossed that hurdle yet.''

Only one hurdle has been crossed.

Following the Raiders game, the Saints will go to San Antonio, where they will stay at the same hotel they stayed at last season when Hurricane Ivan chased them out of New Orleans in the second week of the regular season.

The Saints will also use the same practice facilities at Trinity University, so they will have, as Bensel put it, ``a certain comfort level with where we are.''

That would seem to make the Alamodome, which holds 65,000 for football, a logical alternative, although it's about 550 miles from New Orleans, farther than the NFL would like.

Someone in San Antonio has to be looking at this from a Machiavellian standpoint. Someone in Birmingham, too. I think the chances that there will be a New Orleans Saints a decade from now to be 2-1 against. It's possible, but they are a bubble city to begin with and I have my doubts that the city will ever again be as it was. San Antonio is also a bubble city and one unlikely to get a team while Los Angeles remains vacant unless they can demonstrate a whole lot of fan interest and LA demonstrates more apathy, but even if not the Saints, perhaps the Cheifs or another relocating team. Taking the Saints for a year would give them an opportunity to do that. And Birmingham isn't a bubble city, though it seems to believe itself to be.

To the extent that they've thought about it - and they probably have not since they have much more dire concerns at the moment - New Orleans has got to be pulling for Baton Rouge. It's in Louisiana, drive-able, and cannnot hold an NFL team of its own and so it would clearly be a placeholding rather than auditioning. The problem is that Baton Rouge was slammed pretty hard, too.

My money says that Baton Rouge will get the team or that they'll tour from one city to the next. But it'll be quite interesting to see.