I can’t stand watching Anderson Cooper. But he apparently gave a tongue lashing to Senator Mary Landrieu about the federal government’s criminal lack of response to the refugee crisis in the South while patting each others’ backs for their great jobs handling the crisis. Kudos, Mr. Cooper.

Read about it here.

I posted a link to this guy’s blog yesterday and I have been caught in its grips ever since. I still don’t understand how the guy maintains an internet connection, though one commenter mentioned that fiber only needs power at its access points, so if the fiber isn’t cut then as long as there is power (and the guy has a generator) then connectivity is unbroken.

The violence and anarchy is extremely disheartening. This is the kind of stuff that kills my faith in humanity. This is the time to rise above the catastrophe and help your fellow man, yet the New Orleans refugees have in large part reverted to savagery.

The world needs more people like the man writing the blog. It is absolutely heroic that he would maintain his position to keep his company online, knowing how his clients count on him. As well, I am counting on his perspective on the “real story” inside New Orleans. While not a journalist, for whatever reason his story has conveyed far more to me than all the sensationalized headlines and rumor-mongering that cnn has spewed.

Don’t get me started on Anderson Cooper. What a melodramatic turd that guy is.

I don’t want to launch into any unconstructive diatribes about Bush’s policy in Iraq weakening the National Guard’s ability to handle domestic emergencies. I’ll save that for later.

At any rate, Bush needs to send the military into New Orleans right now. He should have done so immediately after the hurricane hit, or at least once the major flooding began and we realized the impending humanitarian crisis at the Superdome. He needs to stop with his “zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this” platitudes and take decisive action to restore order to the city. NOW.

Order needs to be restored. Bodies need to be picked up and given due respect. The levees need to be fixed. The city needs to be cleaned and infrastructure fixed. It can be done. The Army Corps of Engineers is well trained and ready to tackle the challenge.

This is a trip: directNIC, an internet hosting services provider, is based in New Orleans, and with the help of a dedicated staff and a generator, has kept its servers online for its customers despite being located in an office building in the Central Business District of New Orleans.

A very interesting blog about it can be found here.

Thoughts and prayers to all affected by hurricane Katrina.

Watching the video of New Orleans, I can’t see a future for the city. New Orleans will be under water until the levee between the city and Lake Pontchartrain is fixed, and it doesn’t look like that will happen anytime soon. Until then, what will residents do? Will there be anything to come back to?

I hope that New Orleans is rebuilt, and that it is done in such a way as to be able to weather hurricanes in the future. It would be a shame to lose one of America’s cultural and historical treasures.

While the media focus continues to be on New Orleans, I don’t want to overlook the devastation in Mississippi and Alabama. Gulfport (news link; news link; Damage report; Google news) , where I visited a couple of years ago, took a horrendous beating and I heard that several of the buildings that I remember are simply gone. There was a casino built on the water to escape zoning regulations (basically a six-or-so story floating building) and I heard it had washed ashore and was somewhere near highway 90.