On occasion, we are presented with an insoluble, intolerable dilemma. We are witness to things we truly understand, and our heart cries out that we can do something to make a difference for the better.

Our head knows better, though, and comprehends that any action, no matter how seemingly beneficial or at worst benign, in the end will make things worse.

Through an unknowable, vile combination of nature and nurture, some are burdened with more than their fair share of demons haunting their lives. Most have the great good fortune to be blissfully ignorant of this doom and cannot truly comprehend the existence of one so afflicted, for it is nothing more than an existence, certainly not what those unknowing would call a “life”.

The torments never go away, dimming the vibrance and joy in life into a black pit of despair.

It cannot be escaped through drugs; the pain cannot be washed away by alcohol.

Witnesses, no matter how compassionate, no matter how comprehending, cannot help.

Nothing outside the black pit can illuminate the path of escape, because the darkness comes from within.

The message was terse, she “passed away on August 30.”

Passed away, a euphemism frequently exercised because it is impolite to use the hard word “died”, a delicate diversion of attention away from the harsh fact of life, that it ends. Also, a deflection from acknowledgment of things that society has chosen to cast shame upon, a refusal to even see the choices made in despair, in the loss of all hope, thereby creating dark secrets of the departed life of pain and the new ache of loss now the affliction of those who survive them.

The witness has a burden, too, for in understanding what led to the choice made, yet in also knowing that no action could have prevented it, the true tragedy of the black pit of despair is revealed.

I was once in the black pit of despair; somehow, through both luck and perseverance originating I know not where, I managed to crawl my way out. With the comprehension gained through having once been inside the pit, it is in some ways harder to see the situation from the outside than to experience it from the inside.

I met her four years ago at work. I recognized where she was, understood some of what she was feeling (only a partial resonance because each of us has our own, unique demons), and came to know that nothing I could do would help her life; the change needed to come from within, not from without, not from me.

I watched, and was forced to re-experience vicariously and helplessly the progressive deterioration of relationships with others, the blackness crushing her spirit, the inability to see things other than through the distorting lenses of despair and hopelessness.

After little over a year, she could no longer function and left her job. I never saw her again, and I only heard of her indirectly. What little I had heard was hopeful: counseling and other treatment, a new job.

Out of sight, out of mind, until today, renewed as a distant apparition in a tersely worded email message.

If there is some existence after this life we know, I can only hope that in that existence she finds some small measure of peace that was denied her in life.

However, even if there is nothing but oblivion after our life here, I cannot fault her choice; I confronted the same choice, and I know.

Sometimes, oblivion is preferable.

In the wake of hundreds dead in Iraq because of a panic on a bridge, and hundreds or possibly even thousands more dead and certainly millions of lives unalterably changed in the wake of hurricane Katrina, tragedies on a large scale affecting millions, what is one life ended by choice to escape the back pit of despair?

What is one life, filled with darkness and pain not understood by those closest, what is the legacy other than how we who remain choose to remember and learn from them?

On occasion, we are witness to things we truly understand, and our heart cries out that we can do something to make a difference for the better.

Our head knows better, though, and comprehends that any action, no matter how seemingly beneficial or at worst benign, in the end will make things worse.

We can choose to rage against things we can never hope to change, an action that creates much heat but little good.

Or… we can choose differently.

We can make a choice that provides a legacy of some meaning, not of meaningless darkness.

But in the shadow of a choice made out of hopelessness, what is left?

All that remains is for us to strive to make our minute part of the world a better place in whatever small ways we can.

Otherwise, nothing remains for us but the black pit of despair.

Technorati Tags: general, personal

…in times of devestation and despair, perhaps, just perhaps, there is a merciful God.

Hurricane could have been even worse
Puff of dry air weakened storm just before it hit land, meteorologists say

By Matt Crenson
Associated Press
Updated: 1:38 p.m. ET Aug. 31, 2005

Devastating as Katrina was, it would have been far worse but for a puff of dry air that came out of the Midwest, weakening the hurricane just before it reached land and pushing it slightly to the east.

The gust transformed a Category 5 monster into a less-threatening Category 4 storm, and pushed Katrina off its Big Easy-bound trajectory, sparing New Orleans a direct hit — though not horrendous harm.

“It was kind of an amazing sequence of events,” said Peter Black, a meteorologist at the Hurricane Research Division of the federal government’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.

On Sunday, meteorologists watched in awe as one of the most powerful hurricanes they had ever seen churned northward over the Gulf of Mexico on a direct bearing for New Orleans. Fed by unusually warm waters in the central gulf, Katrina easily pumped itself up to a Category 5 monster, with top winds approaching 175 mph. That afternoon a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration aircraft flying through the storm pegged its minimum barometric pressure at 902 millibars, making Katrina the fourth most powerful hurricane ever observed.

But by the time it reached land Monday, Katrina was no stronger than any of a dozen or more hurricanes that have hit the United States in the past century. Hurricane Camille had a substantially lower central pressure when it slammed into Mississippi in 1969. Hurricane Charley blasted the Sunshine State with higher winds when it came ashore near Tampa last year.

So if it wasn’t so powerful, how did Hurricane Katrina inflict so much destruction?

The storm’s sheer size was one factor. As powerful as Hurricane Charley was, that storm’s swath of destruction was only about 10 miles wide. Katrina battered everything from just west of New Orleans to Pensacola, Fla., a span of more than 200 miles. At noon Monday, hurricane force winds extended to 125 miles from Katrina’s center.

“This storm was quite a bit larger, so the extent of the damaging wind field would have covered a much larger geographic area,” said Marc Levitan, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Louisiana State University.

Geography also played a role in the hurricane’s destructiveness. The Gulf of Mexico’s northern fringe is an extremely shallow shelf extending up to 120 miles offshore. That makes the region’s coastline extremely vulnerable to the storm surges that hurricanes create as their winds and low pressure pile up water and push it ashore.

And Katrina was moving fairly slowly, about 12 to 15 mph. That gave the storm surge more time to build up as the hurricane approached the coast and then moved inland.

Those circumstances made Katrina “nearly a worst-case scenario,” said Hurricane Research Division meteorologist Stanley Goldberg. Some witnesses reported storm surges of more than 25 feet along the Mississippi coast, among the highest ever recorded. The waters around New Orleans rose as much as 22 feet.

But the catastrophic sequence of events that appeared highly likely on Sunday afternoon — a Category 5 hurricane washing over the Big Easy’s ramparts and filling it like a bowl — did not come to pass.

Instead, a different scenario unfolded. Several levees failed on Tuesday, unleashing floods that placed the city of 480,000 in peril long after Hurricane Katrina had dissipated.

We can only hope and do our best in what we can do.

Technorati Tags: hurricane Katrina, hurricane Katrina news, New Orleans, news

In order to achieve what I desired for my original weblog here at Random Fate to be, I wanted to separate my political views from my other posts into my other weblog, Radio Saigon and my non-political or most balanced analyses into Random Fate.

What I have read in the past few hours goes beyond all comprehension, beyond all belief, beyond all limits, and cannot be restricted to one venue.

I cannot separate the political from the personal.

Some have said that “cultural relativism is evil”. If what they say is true, NO CULTURE DESERVES TO SURVIVE.

I have been reading weblogs on both the left-wing and the right-wing.

What do I encounter in response to the effects of the hurricane Katrina?

Instead of “here is what you can do to help those stricken in New Orleans, Lousiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and other areas” I find “what is (insert enemy point of view here) doing about this?” and “they (the opposition) are wrong because they are not doing (whatever)”.

There it is…

Do your own God-damned math, and tell your fellow travelers to SHUT THE FUCK UP if they can do nothing more than to cry how the “other side” is inadequate in their response to this disaster.

If you cannot do the math, if you cannot see the problem, then let me tell you something:

YOU ARE THE FUCKING PROBLEM.

Then shut the Hell up and let the adults take care of things, you pitiful, pitiful, hopeless children.

There is nothing more to say, and if you do not understand, you are not intelligent enough to be a full member of the human race.

Technorati Tags: left wing, left wing weblogs, left-wing, left-wing weblogs, right wing, right wing weblogs, right-wing, right-wing weblogs, weblogs

…as the continued deterioration of the situation in New Orleans dominates the news of the aftermath of Katrina that there are other areas that were hit even harder.

Do not forget them.

Donnie has rounded up some disaster relief information links.

This evening, in my mind as I was busy doing other things I had been working on a post for Radio Saigon, but now that I have a few moments to write before I go to bed the outrage underlying the points I wanted to make has fled, leaving only an exhaustion at the slow-motion horror now inundating New Orleans.

I wrote earlier about how I hoped the predictions of watery disaster from levees being overtopped by storm surge waters would prove to be false. That hope was fulfilled, but we all forgot about how weakened levees can be breached in the aftermath of a major storm.

Then I read some comments at another weblog that attempted to put a political spin on the disaster, blaming Democratic policies for all manner of things.

The anti-Democrats are not alone, however, for I have seen similar anti-Republican screeds in other circumstances where the more appropriate reaction is horror and offering of help and prayers, not seeking political points in what some treat as a “grand game”, discussing strategies for victory instead of determining what policies are truly the best for the nation.

I am reminded of something said by a gentleman from the Indian subcontinent on a television show discussing relations between cultures in that troubled region.

He asked with great vehemence, “Is there no limit?”

My reply to his question: No, there is no limit, nor is there an end.

Technorati Tags: commentary, politics

The danger to New Orleans is not over yet.

From CNN.com:

Tuesday, August 30, 2005 Posted: 0751 GMT (1551 HKT)

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — As the death toll from Hurricane Katrina reaches at least 56, a levee holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain has reportedly sustained a breach two blocks long in the Lakefront area of New Orleans.

The breach has triggered rapidly rising floodwaters in the city’s downtown and prompted at least one hospital to evacuate patients by air.

Also being reported are rescuers tearing open holes in roofs to pull people out of the attics they took refuge in when the waters rose too high.

MSNBC.com has a very good map and graphic that illustrates exactly how New Orleans is situated between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.

An aside - one of the few instances of humor in this disaster arises when listening to the anchors on the international news stations try to pronounce “Pontchartrain” and butcher it completely. One ended up trying twice to pronounce it before saying, “A nearby lake.”

I fear that things in New Orleans will get much worse before any recovery efforts can begin.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.
   -Karl Kraus

Never hit a man with glasses; hit him with your fist.
   -Anonymous

On my other weblog, Radio Saigon, I made an argument I plan to expand upon, an argument that may surprise some who have read me consistently over the past three years:

Sometimes, you must forget history.

Those on the left-wing, frothing at what they perceive to be the perfidy of the Bush administration in the lead up to the war in Iraq make statements that on the face of them are unhelpful at best and in general counterproductive to resolving the situation as it stands now.

That is what is important, the situation as it stands now, and how we can move forward from here to the prolonged success of our nation. Finger-pointing and blame-assigning are merely tactics for short-term partisan advantage.

To put it in blunt terms:

Yes, we can learn from how we got to this place, but at the moment that is far less important than answering the question of how do we move forward from the now that we are confronted with.

The Bull Moose does provide some context:

During the Kosovo conflict, many Republicans allowed their blind hatred for a Democratic President to cloud their judgment about national security. As much as we oppose the policies of this President and Administration, we must not allow our country to suffer a catastrophic defeat that will have implications for years to come.

Those on the left-wing should not allow their anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-Republican fervor to overheat their minds to the point where they advocate policies that are destructive to our national security and ultimately, our future.

Yet, neither should those on the right-wing let their pro-Bush, pro-war, anti-Democrat fervor to overheat their minds to the point where they advocate policies that are destructive to our national security and ultimately, our future.

I continually exhort “THINK” for a reason.

So…

THINK…

Technorati Tags: commentary, left-wing, left-wing politics, politics, right-wing, right-wing politics

I’ve been working on something that has been simmering for quite a while in my mind, but it is not ready yet and will not be until tomorrow at the earliest.

In the meantime, while you enjoy my new random banners and layouts, here is something to ponder:

Step outside your partisan box and think about it…

Technorati Tags: commentary, politics, right-wing, right-wing politics

I widened the main column (sorry to those of you with only 640X480 resolution on your monitors, it was just TOO narrow before, and I don’t know HTML well enough to make it flexible for one column and not the other in a two column setup), and I added a plugin that gives a random banner.

If you don’t like the banner you get, you can always refresh, and besides, you really shouldn’t complain. My original Blogspot setup had a background color that slowly changed while you had the weblog displayed. It could be disconcerting if some unpleasant colors came along (the links changed color along with the background, at random….), so be happy that I haven’t tried to recreate THAT.

The title of the weblog is RANDOM Fate, you know….

Try the prices in Europe for a while.

PARIS – When Guy Colombier pulls his economy car up to a Paris pump, he allows himself just 15 Euros ($18) worth of gas - barely enough for three gallons. Since prices started rising rapidly earlier this year, says Mr. Colombier, a printing press worker, “I drive a lot more slowly … and I’m looking for a place to live closer to where I work.”

Colombier’s pain is shared by drivers all over Europe, where fuel prices are the highest in the world: a gallon of gas in Amsterdam now costs $7.13, compared with just $2.61 in America. The contrast in prices and environmental policies - and the dramatically different behaviors they inspire - signals a widening transatlantic energy gap. And it raises the question: Does Europe offer America a glimpse of its future?

Indeed, while Europeans have learned to cope with expensive fuel (mostly due to taxes), there’s scant evidence yet that US drivers are adopting their conservation tactics.

“Societies adjust over decades to higher fuel prices,” says Jos Dings, head of Transport and Energy, a coalition of European environmental NGOs. “They find many mechanisms.”

Chief among them, say experts, is the habit of driving smaller and more fuel-efficient cars. While the average light duty vehicle on US highways gets 21.6 miles per gallon (m.p.g.), according to a study by the Paris based International Energy Agency (IEA), in Paris, its European counterpart manages 32.1 m.p.g.

“European consumers are very sensitive to fuel economy and sophisticated about engine options,” says Lew Fulton, a transport analyst with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). “European car magazines are full of comparisons of fuel costs over the life of a vehicle.”

There are fundamental reasons, though:

But efficiency alone does not explain the huge disparity between fuel-use figures on either side of the Atlantic: European per capita consumption of gas and diesel stood at 286 liters a year in 2001, compared to 1,624 in the US, according to IEA figures.

The nature of cities plays a role, too. “America has built its entire society around the car, which enabled suburbs,” points out Mr. Dings. “European cities have denser centers where cars are often not practical.”

In Paris, for example, about half the trips people make are by foot, by bicycle, or on public transport, says UNEP’s Mr. Fulton. In America, that figure is more like 20 percent.

Read the entire article. There is a very interesting graph at the end, showing how current fuel economy in Europe is higher than the supposedly “impossible” fuel economy standard set by California for 2016.

Impossible, hmmm?

No.

Europeans feel they have a “right” to government-provided social services such as “free” health care.

Americans feel they have a “right” to cheap gasoline.

Think about it the next time you hear someone complain about the price of gasoline and the “gouging oil companies”.

…and not those arising from natural disasters:

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
   -H. G. Wells

I really do hope these predictions regarding the effects of a hurricane the size of Katrina are wrong:

The first warning shot came in 1969.

Sound from an old newscast with Walter Cronkite on CBS:

“The remnants of killer Hurricane Camille continue to spread death and destruction today, triggering flash floods in Virginia…”

Hurricane Camille shook the country, it was one of those rare Category Five storms, and here’s the problem: When the government built the levees to protect New Orleans, they designed them to handle much smaller storms. Government officials did not expect that such a massive hurricane would hit the city in our lifetimes.

Sound from old newscast:

“The country’s chief hurricane experts declared today that Hurricane Camille was the greatest storm of any kind ever to hit the nation…”

It missed New Orleans, but only by a hundred miles, which suggested that officials had been short sighted.

—

Maestri says imagine what happens if a huge storm hits just to the east of the city.

“The hurricane is spinning counter-clockwise, it’s now got a wall of water in front of it some 30 to 40 feet high, as it approaches the levees that surround the city, it tops those levees,” describes Maestri. “The water comes over the top - and first the communities on the west side of the Mississippi river go under. Now Lake Ponchetrain— which is on the eastern side of the community—now that water from Lake Ponchetrain is now pushed on the population that is fleeing from the western side, and everybody’s caught in the middle. The bowl now completely fills and we’ve got the entire community under water, some 20 to 30 feet under water.”

Remember all those levees that the U.S. Army built around New Orleans, to hold smaller floods out of the bowl? Maestri says now those levees would doom the city, because they’ll trap the water in.

“It’s going to look like a massive shipwreck,” says Maestri. “Everything that the water has carried in is going to be there. It’s going to have to be cleaned out— alligators, moccasins and god knows what that lives in the surrounding swamps, has now been flushed -literally—into the metropolitan area. And they can’t get out, because they’re inside the bowl now. No water to drink, no water to use for sanitation purposes. All of the sanitation plants are under water and of course, the material is floating free in the community. The petrochemicals that are produced up and down the Mississippi river—much of that has floated into this bowl… The biggest toxic waste dump in the world now is the city of New Orleans because of what has happened.”

Even though I was very young, I recall Camille hitting the Gulf Coast. I recall the image in the Memphis newspaper of a map showing the position of the storm a day after it had hit land, and it showed the hurricane in the south of Mississippi, apparently moving north towards Memphis, where I lived.

Terrifying, that, for a four-year-old.

Now, I’m thousands of miles away.

Yet, I fear for those in the path, especially in that grand city of New Orleans, so vulnerable.

Some have linked to a previous post here at Random Fate stating that they doubt this storm “will cause widespread damage”.

I dearly, truly hope they are correct.

Disregarding the potential loss of life and culture if New Orleans is heavily damaged, there are other aspects that might affect the United States as a whole (see the last paragraphs of the link).

The Commissar of The Politburo Diktat has been converted to the one true faith…

Technorati Tags: commentary, humor

I’ve been playing around with my graphics since I had to create a new masthead when I changed over to WordPress.

Here is my first attempt (which extracted elements of my old masthead):

And here are several others I’ve played with, using different fonts in Photoshop:

The origin of most of the fonts should be obvious to the average geek, although the font used in the current masthead may not be quite so apparent to younger geeks:

There is a plug-in for WordPress that randomly changes the banner image, but I wasn’t able to get the plug-in to work on my weblog Radio Saigon, which has been my WordPress test-bed.

Hopefully, I can get it to work here, and I can get some professional graphics out of those folks I paid long ago! Until then, suggestions and criticisms are welcome.

Technorati Tags: general

Unless there is a miracle, a disaster slow-approaching yet inexorable will wreak havoc on a scale not seen in the United States for decades. People alive today will be dead soon, and New Orleans as we have known it will no longer exist by Tuesday.

All we can do is hope and pray.

Technorati Tags: general, hurricanes, New Orleans, news

After the trouble with the comments in MovableType, along with the endless time needed for continual rebuilds, I decided to switch to WordPress. Yes, I know version 3 of MovableType allows dynamic web page generation, but that transition and the havoc it would have wreaked on my templates made switching to a new weblog management system easy.

I think I managed to switch over without breaking any links (including to images), but if you find something not working, please let me know.

I’m still in the process of updating and refining the template until the professionals I’ve paid to make me a “real” graphics set are finished, so don’t be surprised if the site changes a lot in the few weeks.

(Bonus points for whoever identifies the associations of the fonts I’m using in the different banners I’ll be putting up. Of course, I don’t know what you’d use these bonus points for…)

Technorati Tags: general, weblogs

I figured it out, my image for the Valour-IT post below was too wide for Internet Explorer to handle gracefully.

Which means:

IE is not a standards-compatible web-browser and should be accordingly shunned.

Every other browser, regardless of platform, could handle this “problem”.

So…

The 800 pound gorilla apparently can ignore issues that other browsers handle gracefully.

I wonder how long before the “invisible hand” of the market slaps Microsoft…

I’m trying to get everything ready to change over to a WordPress weblog, and I try the setup on every browser I have available.

Opera on BOTH Mac and PC: OK

Mozilla on BOTH Mac and PC: OK

Firefox on BOTH Mac and PC: OK

Internet Explorer: NOT OK…

Damn it!

For whatever reason, the sidebar doesn’t appear on the top, but instead at the end of the posts on IE on the PC.

I have not yet discovered the reason why.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this peculiarity of WordPress with IE, please let me know.

Of course, it is likely because IE does NOT follow standards…

Sometimes, I really hate Microsoft.

Now I need to go kill a lot of things in a game…

Technorati Tags: general, weblogs

I wonder if this will give the Darwin Fish a run for the money?

Jim Leftwich’s Flying Spaghetti Monster T-shirt at Boing Boing store

Just what is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you ask?

Well, here is one depiction:

From Wikipedia:

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is a parody religion created to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to allow intelligent design to be taught in science classes alongside evolution.

The “religion” has since become an Internet phenomenon garnering many followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (sometimes referring to themselves as “Pastafarians“, a pun on Rastafarians) preaching the word of their “noodly master” as the one true religion.

It originated with an open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education:

I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith.

Given how poorly most American high school students understand the science that is taught in the schools, what sane person wants their faith taught in the schools?

Their beliefs would get distorted beyond all recognition. Believe me, I had to “unteach” all the strange things that the students in my college class had “learned” in high school about science; it was not pretty.

Be careful when you advocate teaching belief in a science class.