Bwah-hah-hah-hah!!!!!

Two key brain-building genes, which underwent dramatic changes in the past that coincided with leaps in human intellectual development, are still undergoing rapid mutations, Bruce Lahn and his University of Chicago colleagues report in today's issue of the journal Science.

The researchers found that not everyone has the genes, but that evolutionary pressures are causing them to increase at an unprecedented rate. Lahn's group is also trying to determine just how smart the genes may have made humans.

Everybody now, sing: "In the year 2525, if man is still alive . . . "

Sandy Berger fined $50,000. The Berger Affair apparently ends without any indication as to why it happened in the first place. What was Sandy doing, stealing and destroying classified documents? Will we ever know?

Berger's associates admit he took five copies of an after-action report detailing the 2000 millennium terror plot from the Archives. The aides say Berger returned to his office, discovered that three of the copies appeared to be duplicates and cut them up with scissors.

The revelations were a dramatic change from Berger's claim last year that he had made an "honest mistake" and either misplaced or unintentionally threw the documents away.

What has it gots in its pockets, gollum, gollum . . .

I posted a story here about California EMT's supposedly caught in the chaos that New Orleans descended into. Now, a UPI story appears to confirm at least one part of the story--that local law enforcement officials were not letting people out of the City of New Orleans:

"We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been "a closed and secure location" since before the storm hit.

"All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down," he said.

The bridge in question -- the Crescent City Connection -- is the major artery heading west out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River.

Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.

This is utterly intolerable. Those involved should be brought up on criminal charges--Arthur Lawson at the top of the list. This is misfeasance of office at least, and quite possibly negligent homicide

Via Instapundit.

Reason Hit and Run writes on the core of the fouled-up Katrina response, pointing out that there were and are real impediments to bringing the full capabilities of the Federal Government to bear on the recovery effort. This isn't an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin discussion, either, but one with extreme ramifications for our republican/federal form of government:

Bush could have federalized the relief effort, but had Blanco rejected this, it could have created the kind of state vs. federal crisis that the U.S. hadn't seen since the civil rights era--though the context was obviously quite different.

So, there was a giant screw-up because most people were too busy reading the fine print to figure out what to really do. But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff didn't help things by being quoted as saying: "The unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model, one for what you might call kind of an ultra-catastrophe."

One of have thought that the "traditional model" of disaster relief, even short of an ultra-catastrophe, meant precisely knowing how to engage in massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood.

Opinion Journal takes a look at the issue too:

The media message was "do something!" In fact, the president does have "do something" authority. It's called the Insurrection Act, which is what John Kennedy used in 1963 against Gov. George Wallace, ordering the governor's own National Guard to turn against him and forcibly integrate the University of Alabama. As to the looters, who were breaking no evident federal law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 explicitly forbids using the military (unless a governor uses her National Guard under "state status") in a domestic police function.

The question raised by the Katrina fiasco--and by the Pentagon's new Homeland Defense Strategy to protect against WMD attack--is whether the threat from madmen and nature is now sufficiently huge in its potential horror and unacceptable loss that we should modify existing jurisdictional authority to give the Pentagon functional first-responder status. Should we repeal or modify the Posse Comitatus Act so homicidal thugs have more to fear than the Keystone Kops? Should a governor be able to phone the Defense Secretary direct, creating a kind of "yellow-light authority" and cutting out the Homeland Security or FEMA middleman? Should presidential initiative extend beyond the Insurrection Act?

These are the deadly serious questions we need to ask in the Katrina aftermath instead of dwelling on paranoid ravings about racism and rabid Bush-hating.

Not for the queasy:

SHANGHAI, China (AP) - A restaurant in northeastern China that advertised illegal tiger meat dishes was found instead to be selling donkey flesh - marinated in tiger urine, a newspaper reported Thursday.
. . .
The sale of tiger parts is illegal in China and officers shut down the restaurant, only to be told by owner, Ma Shikun, that the meat was actually that of donkeys, flavored with tiger urine to give the dish a "special" tang, the newspaper said.

The report didn't say how the urine was obtained.

Let's be careful out there . . .

With government bureaucracy everywhere doing what it does best--slow things down and waste time and money--it is so refreshing to read about Lt. General Russel Honore, who isn't wasting time:

Currently, the Department of Homeland Security, through FEMA, is running the operation, and the Army gets its orders from DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. But it's the Humvees, five-ton trucks, and the spirit of the leader that are changing attitudes on the ground, and are largely responsible for bringing a sliver of hope to the shell-shocked victims of Katrina - and bolstering weary relief workers. Willing to get into even the dirtiest task, the general has, by force of personality, changed the pace of the operation as he zips by helicopter from New Orleans to Biloxi, from Gulfport to the canteen of the USS Iwo Jima tied up to the New Orleans docks. His energy is infectious. "There's hope in his message," says Lt. Col. John Cornelio.

As head of the First Army, the job fell to him. Before heading up First Army, the 34-year infantryman had done everything from commanding troops in Korea to developing readiness plans for improvised explosive devices in Iraq. The fact that he's a black Cajun, one of 11 children from Lakeland, La., hasn't hurt his efforts in dealing with the large numbers of blacks along the Gulf Coast. His daughter, out of town during the storm, and extended family live in and around New Orleans.

There are lots of people from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Washington who look like incompetent fools right now. General Honore is not among them. "We're not stuck on stupid."

The Mayor says he'll start enforcing the evacuation order. Meanwhile, I overheard on Fox News this afternoon Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco saying "I have to order any evacuation of New Orleans."

WTF?

Right now, confusion reigns. Are they clearing out the city, or aren't they? The Washington Post wasn't sure this morning, either:

Ed Jones, chief of disaster recovery and mitigation for the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security, said the decision to use the military and state rescue personnel to forcibly evacuate citizens from New Orleans lies with the governor, not with the mayor.

National Guard and state rescue workers have not received any communication from Mayor Nagin about forcing people out of their homes and an order to take such action would need to come from the governor, said Jones at disaster headquarters in Baton Rouge.

More, from Reuters:

Art Jones, a senior official with the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said state authorities, who are in command of the Louisiana State Police and National Guard, have no plans at the moment to participate in a forced evacuation.

"We personally will not force anyone out of their homes," he told reporters at a briefing, adding that "for their own common sense they should get out as quick as they can."

Jones said Nagin was the ultimate authority in New Orleans at the moment.

Clarifying the state's position later, Mark Smith, a spokesman for Louisiana Homeland Security, said Nagin would have to formally request that state authorities help him to force people out, but as yet no such request has been made.

"If it is made, it is still up to our discretion whether we would support the request," he said. "We are not required by law to provide military troops to force people from their homes."

U.S. active-duty troops will not take part in a forced evacuation. Under the Posse Comitatus Act, active troops are not allowed to take part in law enforcement unless ordered to do so by the president in an extreme emergency.

"If the authorities in the state of Louisiana chose to use their National Guard in a state status that would certainly be permissible and their call," said Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Inge, deputy commander of the U.S. Northern Command, which is coordinating military relief efforts.

The question which has dogged the entire Katrina disaster in Louisiana is: who's taking charge? Thousands of dead and evacuated victims later, we still don't know for sure. Mayor Nagin thinks he is. Governor Blanco thinks she is. General Honore probably should be, given the relative performances of these three major actors in this real-life drama.

Update: The collective jaws of our Free Republic friends are on the floor over the Blanco-Nagin Keystone Cops act.

Napolitano on Fox News says that neither the governor nor the mayor have the authority to force people out of their homes. He's probably right. But is there any point in staying in a city which will be essentially dead for at least three months?

One of the bigger stories to be addressed after Katrina victims are out of harm's way is: what caused the meltdown of the New Orleans Police Department? The New York Times had this story:

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 3 - Reeling from the chaos of this overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked away from their jobs and two have committed suicide, police officials said on Saturday.

Some officers told their superiors they were leaving, police officials said. Others worked for a while and then stopped showing up. Still others, for reasons not always clear, never made it in after the storm.
. . .
Some patrol officers said morale had been low on the force even before the hurricane. One patrolman said the complaints included understaffing and a lack of equipment.

"We have to use our own shotguns," said the patrolman, who did not want to be identified by name. "This isn't theirs; this is my personal gun."

Another patrol officer said that many of the officers who had quit were younger, inexperienced officers who were overwhelmed by the task.

Some officers have expressed anger at colleagues who have stopped working. "For all you cowards that are supposed to wear the badge," one officer said on Fox News, "are you truly - can you truly wear the badge, like our motto said?"

Those NOPD officers who stayed at their posts are among the greatest heroes of this entire dreadful tragedy. But, somewhere on the list of things to dig into as we review the runup to this disaster, has to be "why did the NOPD collapse?"

When I received this story via e-mail, I was not inclined to believe it. First, it was sent without attribution. Second, there are certain elements of the story which do not ring true for me--both factual statements and the selection of language:

"real heroes and sheroes"

"So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money."
"These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans."

"Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts. Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles."

"The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned."

". . . our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. "

The overall timeline of the story also has some problems in my opinion. All of this conspire to make me skeptical. Subsequently, I discovered via Free Republic that the article was written by two California EMT union shop stewards, who said that they were attending an Emergency Medical Services conference in New Orleans (ironically enough) which wrapped up just as Katrina bore down on the city. So it is plausable that the authors were in fact in New Orleans. My initial skepticism has moderated somewhat but I am not yet entirely convinced that this is a completely factual first-person account of EMTs caught in the disaster.

I don't need to be convinced that New Orleans was a cluster**ck of the highest order. I do not doubt that elements of this story, perhaps the majority of the story, is plausable. I hope the media (traditional and new) chase this story down. But for now, I'll let it stand on its own. You decide. Here's the article:

A Gallup poll shows that the American public is again more temperate and rational than media reporters or bloggers:

When asked to identify who was most responsible for the problems in New Orleans after the hurricane, 38% of Americans said no one was really to blame, while 13% cited Bush, 18% the federal agencies, and 25% state and local officials.

The 13% who blaming Bush are the Loony Bush-hating left and can be dismissed as irrational, knee-jerk partisans. If you think of the 38-18-25 division as being an approximate estimate of where the responsibility lies, I think that would be just about right.