CLICK to enlarge photos.

Along the canyon via Potrero Road.

This canyon had thick brush.

I bet these will be revived with the next rain.

At Cal State Channel Islands (CSUCI), the fire came right up to the edge. Notice the tree at right is scorched its left half, but not its right.

Just a few feet from the tree shown above I found this collection of burnt golf balls. I have no idea why they are there.

This field is directly across from CSUCI. The hills in the background were completely burned. The fire swept south 3.5 miles to the sea.

Santa Ana winds have started a fire in Camarillo Ca., which is just over the hill from Thousand Oaks. Hill? It’s a 900 foot elevation change.

I took this photo at 11:50, shortly after fetching my granddaughter from preschool, which closed early as a precaution. It was a 2000 acre fire at the point.

One hour later, it’s become a 6,000 acre fire burning toward the ocean. Fortunately, there is mostly farmland and uninhabited mountains in its path.

Meanwhile, the fear of radiation caused Germany and others to radically curtail their nuclear power generation. Thus we have people with “green” sensibilities, moving away from the one reliable power source that does not emit carbon.

And they fancy themselves the “reality-based community.”

Robert Peter Gale & Eric Lax at Bloomberg News

It is two years since Japan’s 9.0- magnitude earthquake, one so powerful it shifted the position of the Earth’s figure axis by as much as 6 inches and moved Honshu, Japan’s main island, 8 feet eastward. The tsunami generated by the earthquake obliterated towns, drowned almost 20,000 people and left more than 300,000 homeless. Everyone living within 15 miles of Fukushima was evacuated; many are still in temporary housing. Some will never be able to return home.

More than 300,000 buildings were destroyed and another million damaged, including four reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the northeast coast. The earthquake caused the immediate shutdown of this and three other nuclear-power facilities.

Since the earthquake, a powerful movement gained momentum to halt Japan’s use of nuclear energy, which provided 30 percent of the country’s electricity. The last of 54 nuclear reactors was shut down in May 2012. Two facilities were restarted in June 2012; 52 remain shut. Japan has therefore had to increase its imports of natural gas, low-sulfur crude oil and fuel oil at a substantial economic and environmental cost. Seventy-five percent of the country’s electricity now comes from fossil fuels.

Accustomed to large trade surpluses, Japan, in 2012, had a record $78 billion trade deficit, thanks to increased energy imports and a drop in exports as Japanese goods became more expensive to produce.

Radiation Threat

And what of the lasting threat from radiation? Remarkably, outside the immediate area of Fukushima, this is hardly a problem at all. Although the crippled nuclear reactors themselves still pose a danger, no one, including personnel who worked in the buildings, died fromradiation exposure. Most experts agree that future health risks from the released radiation, notably radioactive iodine-131 and cesiums-134 and – 137, are extremely small and likely to be undetectable.

Even considering the upper boundary of estimated effects, there is unlikely to be any detectable increase in cancers in Japan, Asia or the world except close to the facility, according to a World Health Organization report. There will almost certainly be no increase in birth defects or genetic abnormalities from radiation.

Apparently 42% of voters thought Obama’s handling of the Sandy aftermath qualified him for another four years.

Go figure.

A blog comment from Small Dead Animals

FEMA, while it is a clusterfrig of titanic proportions, could not cause this much misery on its own. Although they FAILED to have emergency generators at key fuel distribution points (read gas stations) and although they FAILED to have any kind of plan to move food and fuel to the affected areas, and although they FAILED to even have a forward based supply of bottled water and ran out last Friday, even these gold plated MORONS couldn’t have frigged things up this badly alone.

Do you want to know why the power is STILL off on Long Island, Davenport? Read this here: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Sandy-LIPA-Outages-Power-Long-Island-Defense-Military-178115341.html

In it you will find reference to a report from 2006, SIX YEARS AGO, which found that Long Island Power Authority had not done the basic maintenance required to secure the power grid from weather damage. The maintenance they’re talking about here is tree cutting mostly, and replacing bad power poles.

I lived in New York in the 1990’s. I could have written that report. The f-ing power went off every time it snowed because they didn’t cut trees and the trees ripped the lines down. They also didn’t plow the roads, but that’s a story for another day.

You want to know why they don’t cut the f-ing trees Davenport? It isn’t because they are stupid, it isn’t because they don’t know, it isn’t because private enterprise is inherently corrupt, it isn’t even because union workers are a bunch of rent-seeking layabouts. Its because every time they go to cut down a tree, some local Greenies get up a petition or a court order to make them stop. So they stop. So the trees break and knock down the power lines. Same thing all over the North East until you get up into snow country, where even the f-ing tree huggers know better.

Well -this- time it all came home to roost the same day, and every overhanging (more…)

New York Post

NYC Marathon canceled, but generators and supplies still sit unused in park

What a run-around!

The city left more than a dozen generators desperately needed by cold and hungry New Yorkers who lost their homes to Hurricane Sandy still stranded in Central Park yesterday.

And that’s not all — stashed near the finish line of the canceled marathon were 20 heaters, tens of thousands of Mylar “space” blankets, jackets, 106 crates of apples and peanuts, at least 14 pallets of bottled water and 22 five-gallon jugs of water.

This while people who lost their homes in the Rockaways, Coney Island and Staten Island were freezing and going hungry.

Michael Murphy, of Staten Island, who had no power and no heat, said yesterday, “We needed 100 percent of the resources here.”

“If those generators were here, we maybe could have had some light for the cleanup effort,” he said. “Those generators would really have come in handy.’’

Larry Gold, 61, of Rockaway Park, who has difficulty breathing, can’t use his oxygen tank without electricity.

“I need power to breathe,’’ he said.

“Right now all I can do is sit outside my house and pray that they bring us a generator.’’

A marathon security worker still working yesterday from a generator-powered trailer in the park, said the power sources had not been moved to devastated areas of the city because of an impromptu race run by marathon holdovers in the park.

“Once we found out they’d still be running a marathon, we had to call all the towing vendors and tell them they couldn’t come,” he said.

“We can’t have these trucks coming in with the runners. It’s a safety issue.”

But most runners in the non-sanctioned run around the park were upset to learn they were being held responsible for disrupting rescue efforts.

“I’m sure they could have asked the runners to pause to remove the things,” said Scott Hawley, 31, of Hell’s Kitchen.

“It shouldn’t take long, and if any of us knew this, we would want that to be the priority.”

Jazz Shaw at HotAir

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been on the receiving end of a firestorm of criticism lately, particularly for his ham handed handling of the Hurricane Sandy recovery. But this story is almost too stupid to check.

Mayor Bloomberg has snubbed Borough President Markowitz’s impassioned plea to bring the National Guard to Hurricane Sandy-scarred Brooklyn — arguing that approving the Beep’s request would be a waste of federal manpower and turn the borough into a police state.

“We don’t need it,” Mayor Bloomberg said on Wednesday during a press update on the city’s ongoing Hurricane Sandy cleanup. “The NYPD is the only people we want on the street with guns.”

I’m not sure, but I think we’re witnessing the complete implosion of somebody who was once considered a pretty influential politician on the rise. Yes, Bloomberg doesn’t much care for the Second Amendment and doesn’t want people to have guns. We get it. But we’re talking about the National Guard here. Has this guy completely lost his mind?

This is a time when leaders up and down the east coast are loudly singing the praises of the National Guard for their rapid deployment and efficient rescue, recovery and security work. It’s also a time when people out on Staten Island are hanging on by a thread, with looting and violence being a serious threat on top of the hurricane’s destruction. Who in their right mind even suggests that Guardsmen carrying their weapons is an issue at a time like this? I understand wanting to express your support of and confidence in the police department and the firefighters, but even some of the finest first responders in the nation are completely swamped by the magnitude of this disaster. They could use the help and the Guard stands ready to provide it.

Jay Nordlinger at The Corner, reminisces about Katrina and its finger pointing.

…Has it really been seven years? Seems like yesterday. I wrote about the political aftermath in an NR piece called “All the Uglier: What Katrina whipped up.” It contained many quotations such as the ones you have in your post.

The Boston Globe ran an op-ed piece that said, “The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.” I was shocked when I read that, and things like it, considering it crudest propaganda. Now it is routine (and still crude propaganda). A writer in the Huffington Post said, “Would New Orleans and the nearby Gulf Coast be suffering so terribly today if President Carter [had] beat[en] back Reagan in 1980?” And so on.

I wrote, “To an amazing extent, global warming has become all-explaining. It is the cause of our natural ills, in all their diversity. It is an idée fixe, a universal bogey. Just as the Jew is both a communist and a capitalist, and the American both a materialist and a puritan, global warming is responsible for heat and cold, drought and flood — anything nature might be throwing at us at the moment. When Al Gore gives a speech on global warming, he is apt to say, ‘We’ve been having some weird weather lately, haven’t we?’ The word weird covers a multitude of conditions.”

If Romney is elected, Guantanamo Bay will be bad again. The Patriot Act will be bad again. Drones will be very bad. The media will notice the homeless again. They will rediscover the poor in general. And, of course, hurricanes will be the fault of the president — just as Katrina was in 2005 (although, it’s true, the one writer blamed Reagan too, giving George W. Bush some company).

I’m not sure the Left is ever so maddening, and mad, as when they talk about the weather. No, race is No. 1. Long has been, long will be. The weather, possibly No. 2.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Just wait until the government controls healthcare. Wired reports on plans to send NY National Guards troops out of state for a training drill even as the region reeled from Hurricane Sandy.

Updated 8:42 a.m. Hours after being contacted by Danger Room, the New York Army National Guard on Tuesday night abruptly reversed a decision to send hundreds of soldiers out-of-state in the midst of the Hurricane Sandy relief effort.

The troops were previously declared unavailable to help New York recover from the state’s biggest hurricane in centuries. Instead, they were assigned to fight a fake disaster.

But hours before they were set to deploy, the troops’ participation in a week-long exercise in Missouri known as “Vigilant Guard” was cancelled. The exercise is designed to test the response to a mock earthquake in the Midwest. Until Tuesday, that previously scheduled drill took precedence over the real-world catastrophe that struck the East Coast. It was declared a bureaucratic near-impossibility to redeploy hundreds of guardsmen at a moment’s notice, even at a moment when so many are in need.

Troops from the New York Army National Guard’s 104th Military Police Battalion, the 1156th Engineer Company – 450 soldiers in all — were poised to head to the middle of the country. Dozens more from the 42nd Combat Aviation Brigade were supposed to train in Pennsylvania this weekend. ”At this point in time, we’re still sending our soldiers to Vigilant Guard,” Eric Durr, a spokesman for the New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs, told Danger Room late Tuesday afternoon.

Hours later, that changed. “Last night the decision was made to cancel New York National Guard participation in Vigilant Guard,” Durr emailed on Wednesday morning. “The adjutant general [the Guard's commanding officer] decided to keep troops in state in case they are needed.”

The New York Army National Guard has about 10,600 troops in total. Of those, about 2,100 are either in, or are waiting for, basic training. Another 400 to 500 are medically unavailable. And an additional 3,500 troops from the 27th Brigade Combat Team are either just back from Afghanistan or still there. Which means that New York’s Army National Guard had, at most, 4,500 troops at its disposal — before the assignments to Vigilant Guard began. About 2,300 Army and Air National Guardsmen are currently deployed to the hurricane relief effort.

Angelenos, earthquake veterans that we are,  enjoyed a good laugh at the expense of folks back east experiencing their first earth shaking moment.

My favorite was the assurance that there was no threat from a tsunami. No kidding, not huge wave generated by a quake at least 100 miles inland?

Then I heard Jennifer Griffin of Fox News describe the scene at the Pentagon. The building shook much as it did on 9/11. Given that no one expected an earthquake in that neck of the nation, fearing the worst is natural.

LAT columnist Steve Lopez was in Manhattan and had some wry observations.

…Harry Giannoulis, a political consultant, lit a Camel and sucked hard.

“It was terrifying,” Giannoulis said.

Excuse me, but heavy objects falling off shelves during a hard shake is terrifying. An overpass tumbling is terrifying.

This was next to nothing, although people estimated that the 30-second quake had to have lasted a minute and a half, easy.

Sarah McClutchy, 25, wore a look of mild distress as she held onto a fence for stability.

“Do you guys still feel it shaking?” she asked me and others.

I didn’t feel a thing. But McClutchy wasn’t sure we were in the clear.

“I don’t know if it’s because I just banister-slid down 20 flights of stairs, or if it’s because it’s still shaking,” said McClutchy, who does credit research for Moody’s.

She had run several blocks from her office in the heart of the financial district to get away from tall buildings, but now she faced a different fear.

“A tsunami would come from the east,” she said, pointing beyond the Brooklyn Bridge to an imaginary wall of water.

All right, so for some of these people, 9/11 is still fresh in their minds, and when the earthquake hit, some of them thought it could be another attack. But over at Ground Zero, the muscled, dust-covered construction workers seemed to be holding up just fine.

“I’m embarrassed to admit this,” said an electrician named Pat, who had been in a fourth-floor bathroom. “But I didn’t know it was an earthquake. I thought the toilet bowl was coming loose.”

I think you’d need at least a 6.5 for that.

Carpenter Scott Murphy was on the 68th floor of One World Trade Center, the tallest building going up on the former site of the Twin Towers, and thought someone had dropped a load of steel on another floor, no big deal. Carpenter Benny Direnzo was on the 70th floor and knew it had to be an earthquake, but he calmly exited the building and was ready to take advantage of an early quitting time.

Those guys, it seems to me, could make it in California, and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

The Chilean volcano blows its stack. Many more photos here.

There’s almost no visual in this video, but the voices and the sound of the tornado in Joplin are chilling.

The author of the video wrote:

The video i took while at Fastrip on east 20th street. We huddled in the back of the store until the glass got sucked out , then ran into the walk in storage fridge. Sorry for the lack of visuals but the audio is pretty telling of how intense the storm was. The tornado hits at around 1:20 seconds

the London Daily Mail has some spectacular photos of man vs. river.

Via Vanderleun, one of the most telling videos of the tsunami.

US pilots surprise Japanese in Sendai with supplies.

The utter corruption of New Orleans was mostly overlooked in the Katrina coverage. Certainly a corrupt and incompetent government contributed to the misery.

A few years before, “60 Minutes” had done an expose on the corruption of its police force.

Blogger Bus Error brings us this.

As the news media wallows in Katrina stories (ignoring the 23,000 jobs The One just killed in the region), we bring you this from 2006.

Katrina: What the Media Missed

by Lou Dolinar

Remember the dozens, maybe hundreds, of rapes, murders, stabbings and deaths resulting from official neglect at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina? The ones that never happened, as even the national media later admitted?

Sure, we all remember the original reporting, if not the back-pedaling.

Here’s another one: Do you remember the dramatic TV footage of National Guard helicopters landing at the Superdome as soon as Katrina passed, dropping off tens of thousands saved from certain death? The corpsmen running with stretchers, in an echo of M*A*S*H, carrying the survivors to ambulances and the medical center? About how the operation, which also included the Coast Guard, regular military units, and local first responders, continued for more than a week?

Me neither. Except that it did happen, and got at best an occasional, parenthetical mention in the national media. The National Guard had its headquarters for Katrina, not just a few peacekeeping troops, in what the media portrayed as the pit of Hell. Hell was one of the safest places to be in New Orleans, smelly as it was. The situation was always under control, not surprisingly because the people in control were always there.

From the Dome, the Louisiana Guard’s main command ran at least 2,500 troops who rode out the storm inside the city, a dozen emergency shelters, 200-plus boats, dozens of high-water vehicles, 150 helicopters, and a triage and medical center that handled up to 5,000 patients (and delivered 7 babies). The Guard command headquarters also coordinated efforts of the police, firefighters and scores of volunteers after the storm knocked out local radio, as well as other regular military and other state Guard units.

Jack Harrison, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Virginia, cited “10,244 sorties flown, 88,181 passengers moved, 18,834 cargo tons hauled, 17,411 saves” by air. Unlike the politicians, they had a working chain of command that commandeered more relief aid from other Guard units outside the state. From day one.

There were problems, true: FEMA melted down. Political leaders, from the Mayor to Governor to the White House, showed “A Failure of Initiative”, as a recent House report put it. That report, along with sharply critical studies by the White House and the Senate, delve into the myriad of breakdowns, shortages and miscommunications that hampered relief efforts.

Still, by focusing on the part of the glass that was half-empty, the national media imposed a near total blackout on the nerve center of what may have been the largest, most successful aerial search and rescue operation in history. (more…)

Via Powerline, this video is from Minnesota.

The world’s biggest, and it was cleaned up.

JH: The work going on to close the well is taking multiple approaches, and I am aware that BP has sent out a message to all the oil companies asking for help and advice.

And I actually sent some people to BP in terms of the spill response cleanup to try to get them aware of a process that has been used in the Arabian Gulf that has not been used in the Gulf of Mexico, and that is to use supertankers, empty supertankers, to suck up the oil off the surface, where they can store the oil, they can treat the water, they can discharge the water and then they can either salvage the oil or destroy it, as the case may be. And I know the mayor of New Orleans and a few other officials are now asking BP about that process as a result of these engineers coming forward from Saudi Aramco.

ES: When did that spill happen, John?

JH: I don’t actually know, but it was sometime back, there was a huge, huge spill that never got reported, because they don’t have an open press, obviously… But I was told it was a 700-million-gallon spill.

ESQ: That would be the biggest, right?

JH: That would be the biggest the world has ever known. And they used six supertankers to clean up the oil and were very successful. We’d do well to get supertankers in the Gulf.

New York Times:

Over the weekend BP learned that its latest effort at stanching the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — placing a huge metal dome over the leak — had failed. With the oil slick now washing up on the Louisiana shore, the Op-Ed editors asked five experts for their thoughts on what should be done now — and how we can avoid future catastrophes.

Avoid Dispersants

ONE of the oil industry’s favorite tools in fighting oil spills is chemical dispersants — indeed, over 300,000 gallons have been used so far in the Gulf. But as anyone who studied high school chemistry knows, like dissolves like: crude oil responds only to oil-based solvents, which are extremely toxic.

The first dispersants, released in the late 1960s, were quickly shelved because they turned out to harm wildlife more than crude oil did. Drums of Corexit 9527, a dispersant used to clean up the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, came with warning labels: “prevent liquid from entering sewers, watercourses or low areas.” Little has changed in 20 years. Even worse, spraying dispersants in the Gulf in an attempt to minimize the oil’s damage to the coast would kill shrimp eggs and larvae and young fish in the open water. They can linger in the water for decades, especially when used in deep water, where low temperatures can inhibit biodegradation. Dispersants may sound like a good idea, but they’re bad news, and their use should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. — RIKI OTT, marine toxicologist and author of “Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill”

•

Forget Acoustic Sensors

IN Norway and Brazil, offshore oil rigs are required to have switches that close valves whenever they sense an acoustic pulse in the water, which could signal a blowout. In the wake of last month’s accident, many have argued that similar switches should be required on American rigs.

But the Deepwater Horizon was hardly without safety precautions: it had manual switches at several different stations and two backups — a “dead man” switch that would automatically send a shut-off signal to the valve if there was a loss of electrical communication from the surface, as well as a mechanism to allow a remotely operated vehicle to shut it off. Either these all failed, or they worked and the valve still failed to close. Would a third backup sending yet another signal reduce risk? Maybe. But it would be of marginal benefit, and could result in a false alarm or premature signal. When a safety switch is thrown, a device cuts the drill pipe, letting it fall into the hole. Fishing it out, and even testing it regularly, is a dangerous proposition, putting worker safety at risk — precisely what such systems are designed to avoid. — KEN ARNOLD, energy industry consultant

•

Stop Outsourcing

LIKE many other American corporations, oil and gas companies have been outsourcing critical, high-risk operations for several decades, sacrificing control to save money. Today, platforms like the Deepwater Horizon resemble small villages, home to distinct chains of command from several different subcontractors. Workers for different companies may hardly know one another despite working side by side; they often answer to different bosses.

Some argue that the level of specialization and technical expertise required to run a platform demands teamwork by different companies, each with its own research and development and command structures. True, but specialization and cost-cutting can go too far. Fragmented control is not likely to blame for the Gulf spill, but it is likely to hamper the search for the real cause and the effort to enact reforms to keep such disasters from happening again. Slowing, or even reversing, the outsourcing trend is a critical next step for the industry.

— JOHN HOFMEISTER, former president of Shell and author of “Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider”

•

Soak Up the Oil

ONE tactic for reducing the amount of oil in the Gulf would be to seed the affected waters with absorbent materials — for example, cellulose fibers or animal hair — that can soak up oil. Once they’ve done their job, these materials can be retrieved and either compressed into blocks for burning or, better still, fed to microbes in quarantined spaces. Absorbent materials are cheap and readily available, and there’s a fleet of commercial fishing vessels already in place for dispersing them. — TERRY HAZEN, microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

•

Do Nothing

THE best thing to do in response to the Gulf spill’s landfall is … nothing. Sure, larger oil concentrations can be sopped up, and large animals can be cleaned. But cleanup efforts can do only so much: evidence suggests that they reduce hydrocarbon concentrations only over the short term. And many responses have harmful side effects. Controlled burning spreads toxic materials and kills plants that retard erosion, thus hurting the very lands we’re trying to protect. Nutrient-rich detergents or active bioremediation — which encourages the growth of bacteria that can break down oil — can fundamentally disturb the ecological balance for decades.

Instead, we should recognize that nature can do many things far better than we can, and with less collateral damage. Oil is a natural byproduct of biological and geological processes; if left alone in coastal environments, wave action, the sun and microbes in the sediment will naturally break down hydrocarbons. Meanwhile, money saved can go to helping local economies deal with the loss of income, improving safety regulations and enforcement and developing a clean energy policy. — KEVIN M. YEAGER, assistant professor of marine sciences at the University of Southern Mississippi

Christian Science Monitor:

The deadly flood that soaked Nashville, including iconic music dives like the Grand Ole Opry, may become the worst disaster to hit the state since the Civil War, and one of the worst non-hurricane disasters in US history.

So where was the 24-hour blitzkrieg news coverage of a major US city under water?

With the Gulf oil spill and the Times Square bombing attempt dominating the news cycle, maybe the relative lack of coverage and attention can be chalked up to disaster overload or the lack of a broader political and social narrative of the kind that drove hurricane Katrina coverage.

But one Facebook group still wondered, “Pardon us, did you notice Nashville is drowning?”

Fortunately, it turns out anonymity suits many Tennesseans fine. Chalk up the ambivalence about the relative lack of national coverage and attention to good old country grit – and a city’s determination to take care of its own.

“A large part of the reason that we are being ignored is because of who we are,” writes Patten Fuqua on the hockey blog Section 303. “Did you hear about crime sprees? No … you didn’t. You saw a group of people trying to move two horses to higher ground. [We] weren’t doing anything to draw attention to ourselves. We were handling it on our own.”

With a record 13-inch rain, the Cumberland River overflowed its banks last Sunday, yielding dramatic pictures of houses floating along interstates and residents stuck in torrid waters. Ten people died in Nashville alone of 31 total. The cleanup could be one of the costliest in US history.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano went to Nashville Saturday, and President Obama has declared 53 counties as federal disaster areas, clearing the way for residents to receive federal aid.

Political response has been mostly by the book. Relief efforts have been intensely local. Water, food and money have come mostly from individuals, including country singer Taylor Swift, who contributed $500,000 to the effort. The brawny NFL Titans football team will be in town this weekend, helping with the cleanup.

Read it all.

Enemies of President Bush used the natural disaster of hurricane Katrina to cripple him politically. Big Baloney helped out, capped by a sobbing performance by Oprah at the Superdome.

But presidents cannot be everywhere and know everything. They have people for that, and sometimes those people are asleep at the switch or incompetent. With Katrina, most of the blame rightly belonged on the state and local level anyway.

Now some are calling the leaking oil rig in the Gulf, “Obama’s Katrina.”

Should the feds have done more and sooner?

I don’t know, but just because Bush was mistreated it’s no reason to do it to Obama, much as I dislike him as president. One thing we can count on is the media being much more forgiving of The One.

Still, for those who are interested, here is an illistrated time-line of events.

Much more here.

Here at Boston.com

This event started three weeks ago, when this video was shot.

Guess how that name is pronounced. Hear it here.

Obama defends the “Lousiana Purchase” the $100 million bribe to get Senator Landrieu’s healthcare vote. The absurdity is his claim about Hawaii’s earthquake. Which earthquake is that?

Whew!

But setting aside Obama’s fabulism, why should healthcare bills double up as relief bills? And why should Lousiana’s 4.4 million citizens get a $100 million gift from the other 49 states? Why, especially, when only part of the state was affected by Katrina?

Haiti Earthquake Aftermath Montage from Khalid Mohtaseb on Vimeo.

I’ve experienced a number of earthquakes over 23 years in Southern California.

Most are amusing in an odd way: Angelenos feel the quake, quickly ascertain whether it’s big or not, then start offering their Richter guesses.

The 1994 Northridge quake was different. It felt like a bomb exploded and no one was laughing. In an instant we knew it was serious.

Northridge was a 6.7 quake, or the equivalent of a 16.2 megaton explosion.

Last night’s 8.8 quake in Chile was the equivalent of a 15.8 gigaton explosion.

New York Times:

It was more than a year ago that the core of this city was submerged to its rooftops, a result of record flooding on the Cedar River that caused an estimated $6 billion in damage — among the most costly natural disasters since Hurricane Katrina.

The outpouring of attention toward New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, ratcheting up again now as the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, has not been seen here. In fact, the people of Cedar Rapids are feeling neglected.

The recovery here is only limping along as waterlogged buildings are still being gutted, thousands of displaced families remain in temporary housing, and large-scale demolition to make way for a new downtown has just begun.

Federal financing for long-term recovery is trickling in, with the government having committed money for about half of what the city says it needs. And only a fraction of that has actually arrived.

“We really feel that we are the forgotten disaster,” said Greg Eyerly, the city’s flood recovery director. “We don’t make sexy products. We make starch that goes into paper, we make foodstuffs, ingredients in crackers and cereal. We make ethanol. The sexiest thing we make is Cap’n Crunch. We’re not a beachfront property. We make an anonymous contribution to our country, and people forget about us.”

To be sure, Hurricane Katrina’s huge reach and a botched emergency response devastated a far greater swath of the country than did the flooding in the Midwest, and no one here is trying to make tit-for-tat disaster comparisons. No lives were lost in the flooding in Cedar Rapids, and the government’s initial response to the crisis was generally considered a success.

But over the long term, the tone has changed, and the feeling of neglect amid devastation is palpable now. Five weeks of severe weather in the summer of 2008 made disaster areas out of 85 of the state’s 99 counties.

“We’re not making a lot of noise about it,” said Gov. Chet Culver, a Democrat, reflecting on a sense of Midwestern stoicism. “We’re going about our business. That’s a determination that’s impressive, but it doesn’t attract attention.”

The fact that the media and Democrats cannot find a racial angle might have something to do with it.