I was congratulating myself on a sail well done when the wind completely died 1.5 miles away from the pier... I thought that I might as well try and have the swell vector me towards the Santa Monica Pier anchorage... I made the mile in 3 hours (after dark), barely missed the submerged breakwater, and dropped the anchor a good ways off the pier....

I cleaned up a bit, got the sails secured, and blew up my pool raft. I put some clothes in a bag, and set off in the raft... Just like every other pier, there were a bunch of shops and stuff on this one, people fishing off the side, and a ladder that went up from the water. I rowed over to the ladder and started to tie the dingy off when all of a sudden I was spotlighted by a police officer with pistol drawn, screaming at me to back away from the pier! I was pretty surprised, and asked if there was another ladder that I was supposed to use. He was saying "You can not approach the pier, stay 150 feet away from the pier at all times, you can land on the beach if you want to." I'm trying to ask what the deal is with a beach landing when another guy shows up over the side and starts screaming that if I continue to disobey their orders that they will impound my boat.

So I turned around and rowed away. I looked towards the shore and saw some breaking waves... So I waited for the end of a set, and started rowing as fast as I could... Finally an overhead wave hits me, tosses me out, and I wash up on shore - completely soaked - with an overturned dingy and a bag full of wet clothes...

Someone was screening Star Wars on a HUGE screen right there, so I decided to wait a while for the tide to come up and the swell to go down before trying to go back out. There were a number of people standing around, wondering how I just materialized from the dark ocean with a little pool raft...

Just then, the cops roll up. The big cop comes over and starts screaming at me again, right in front of these other guys (who turn out to be lifeguards). I'm looking at the lifeguards like "Holy shit, can you believe this?" and they're looking at me like "Dude, we're sorry."

It turns out that it's a magenta alert or whatever right now, and the Santa Monica pier is a "major terrorist target", so it's not OK to have a boat anchored near it, and that I have nothing to say about it because I don't know the status (pronounced stay-tus) of this "structure." The cops called the lifeguards, because they have a boat capable of towing mine away. "The fuck you're towing my boat, I'm going back out right now." "If you attempt to return to your boat, I will arrest you." "For what?" "I don't need a reason."

Moxie is awesome!

And Together We'll Face The World!

The Navy does not now train, nor has it ever trained, its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any fashion or to carry weapons to destroy ships.

KILLER DOLPHINS FROM OUTER SPACE.. .we'll.. ok they are from Earth but this relates to another one of today's memes.

U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program

Usually dolphins were controlled via signals transmitted through a neck harness. 'The question is, were these dolphins made secure before Katrina struck?' said Sheridan.

This is really interesting, but one suspects wildly inaccurate. Dolphins that are trained to shoot people? Really? Even if its true I find it hard to believe that the Navy would have left them armed as the storm approached. They tend to have fairly careful security proceedures.

The Observer | International | Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina

The Google Blog has a post about their use of prediction markets to forecast certain events that are relevant to their business.

Slashdot | Google Putting Crowd Wisdom to Work

The Secretary "is reviewing a wide range of possible changes in the way the
military could be used in domestic emergencies," Di Rita said Friday.
He said these included "possible changes in the relationship between
federal and state military authorities." Di Rita called the Posse
Comitatus Act "very archaic," and stated that it limited the Pentagon's
flexibility in responding.

I was thinking about this as I watched events unfold in New Orleans. I wanted the military to respond, but in the back of my mind I was concerned about the legal implications of that. I think the right way to handle this is to have federal first responders with security capability, perhaps organized by FEMA. There is a totally different tone that you take with domestic catastrophies versus enemies in war, even when people are rioting or shooting at rescue teams, and it is appropriate to have a rapid response capability that is properly trained to handle domestic threats.

Furthermore, Posse Comitatus is founded on solid philisophical principals that prevent the state from finding itself in a position where it is waging war on its own citizens. There is no reason emergency congressional authorization could not be obtained for the use of military force domestically if required. If Congress can't pass bills fast enough I can build a computer system that will fix that problem.

[Politech] How the Bush administration is eroding Posse Comitatus

Jared Diamond, Ph. D. is trained in physiology and membrane biophysics, and well known as a groundbreaking ecologist and evolutionary biologist.

Jared Diamond is on NPR in Atlanta tonight.

Public Broadcasting Atlanta

janelane wrote:
In my "Engineering Design" class, we have to figure out what the world of 2020 will be like.

Brilliant. This is the sort of question we all should be asking. I'd like to see the final results.

communication: No one will have a POTS line. You'll have a digital network connection in your house, maybe ip6, all voice traffic will be carried over that digital network, your cellphone will be like a sidekick, it might have thin parts that fold out to make the realestate bigger when you need it, it will use your home network when at home and other networks when not at home. It will be able to project content onto the wall. Long Distance will be included in the price of whatever you pay for network access. Its possible that the internet will submerge into a MMORPG style virtual reality environment, but it remains to be seen. There might be a standards war over that in 15 years.

The media industry will be quite blurred with blogs and independent music/film. The copyright battles will be near their peak at that time. Movies, music, and news will come as often from proam indies then from "industry," but you'll turn to the same source for both kinds of information and it may be hard to tell them apart. You'll have internet radio in your car. Reputation systems will matter more then editors.

Comptuer security problems will constantly plauge what we'd today call telecom and television infrastucture.

South Korea will do for communciations technology what Japan did for manufacturing in the 80s.

information availability: You'll search wikipedia instead of searching google. You'll pretty much have everything instantly available to a device that fits in your pocket. We're almost there today. A lot of the good information will be produced by proams.

geographic location: What do you want? Your digital devices will know where they are. Your cellphone will easily map your location, show you where you want to go, and give you directions. You'll be able to leave virtual notes for people connected to physical locations, like a bulletin board connected to every bar. Often, the way to get news about major events will be to ask an internet service what pictures were submitted from a particular physical location at a particular time. Everyone will have devices in their cars which report their driving habits to their insurance company, in exchange for a cost break for most. Some orwellian use of this technology will go on, particularly with regard to minors.

government structure: This is a US centric response: I don't see many structural changes occuring in a 15 year timespan, other then the final nails in the coffin of the idea that the commerce clause restricts federal authority. Politics will increasingly be influenced by internet based open information sources like blogs and wikipedia. Voters will be more informed about particular issues. You will see more ballot refer... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: The Year 2020

Brown is being sent back to Washington from Baton Rouge, where he was the primary official overseeing the federal government's response to the disaster, FOX News has confirmed. Brown will be replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, who was overseeing New Orleans relief and rescue efforts.

Like it matter this late in the game.

FOXNews.com - Politics - FEMA Chief Taken Off Hurricane Relief Efforts

Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations

The counter point to this perspective usually consists of "sick people aren't my problem" or "wealthy people get more convenient healthcare in the US then in Canada." I am constantly amazed to talk to Americans who actually beleive that Canada is a socialist country. This spin is the product of Rush Limbaugh's rantings during the Clinton years. "Socialism is bad, right? Thats what the communists did, and they were evil!"

The American healthcare system is both heavily regulated and wealth redistributed. Its just as socialist as anyone else's healthcare system. But it has the additional feature of generating a class of people with serious medical problems who are too sick to work and therefore don't get to participate in the wealth redistribution. Oh, and its more convenient for the wealthy because they never have to wait in line behind someone with a more serious problem unless they are at an ER. And its a hell of a lot more expensive.

Gripping onto a ideology for ideology's sake while it is literally killing you seems the very definition of irrational behavior. On the issue the United States is like the last guy back in the hood in New Orleans, sitting on his couch with a foot of standing water in his living room, slowly succumbing to the E.Coli because its his damn town and he'll be damned if he is gunna leave, even after everyone else is long gone...

Sounds like the Administration wants to get up off the couch and go for a swim. Don't worry about Europe hating us. If we keep going down this path they'll be laughing at us instead.

The New Yorker: The Moral Hazard Myth

Michael Brown also agreed with other public officials that the death toll in the city could reach into the thousands."Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN."I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said.

They are not letting people leave. The Astrodome has stopped accepting people. Rattle's theory is that they have a disease problem and so they don't want to evac people until they are ready to quarantine them. This spin, however, is terrible. Some people couldn't leave. Some people didn't get the memo. The Governor of Mississippi has gone on record saying that as of Friday they had no idea it was going to be this bad, so blaming the people on the street is unconsionable.

CNN.com - FEMA chief: Victims bear some responsibility - Sep 1, 2005