Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Powerless

Posted on August 27, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Like most of Miami-Dade, we got sucker punched by Hurricane Katrina. Several factors combined to make us overconfident: First, the track showed it going far enough north of us so that we’d only get tropical storm force winds … and we know we can handle that. Second, we had four false alarms last year, each characterized by hysterical warnings to prepare, all of which resulted in us hunkering for naught. Third, and no doubt following from the second, the media played this one very low key. Fourth, having gone through Andrew 14 years ago, a strong category four hurricane, or maybe even a five, the sound of Katrina, a ‘mere’ category one, just didn’t get the panic juices flowing.

It should have.

Katrina went south of the predicted track. The power went out about 8pm on Thursday night. The morning after revealed a scene of devastated vegetation only slightly less than after Andrew. Roads were blocked in every direction. Between here and the law school, for example, about a block and a half, the road is blocked by two gigantic fallen trees. We escaped quite cheaply, losing our favorite frangipani tree. Unfortunately, it landed on the neighbor’s car. Fortunately, the fall was broken by an intervening hedge, and the car has at most a scratch.

Caroline and I had a hard time after Andrew, or at least as hard a time as you could have when you hadn’t lost your roof. We had arrived in Miami only a few days earlier, had no hurricane supplies, not even a candle, and no idea where to go to get food or ice. The entire neighborhood was without power for two weeks; four lucky homes, of which ours was one, were without for five weeks. At night we would lie exhausted, overheated, by the open window that rarely vouchsafed a breeze but certainly carried the enviable and very loud noises of next door’s generator.

It’s not as bad this time: we have hurricane glass instead of those beastly metal shutters, plus after we had kids we bought a generator, and consequently we are able to keep our food from spoiling. There’s ice. There’s a light in the evening. We cook with gas. We can even run (one) fan. And if I manage to post this, we were even able to get the modem and router to wake temporarily.

Florida Power and Light says that 90% of the homes in Miami-Dade lost power. Of them 10% got it back by last night. They predict that 90% of those who lost power will have it back by Tuesday night – still more than 72 hours away – but that the remaining 10% may have to wait as long as Friday. Meanwhile it’s unclear when the schools will reopen (the paper suggests it may be as soon as Monday). And if I can get online, I’ll find out more about whether I need to get my lecture ready for 8am Monday.

I imagine there won’t be much blogging until the power comes back.

Posted in Miami, Personal | 4 Comments

Rain!

Posted on August 25, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

So far, it's just an awful lot of rain and gusty wind. This is the first serious storm we've had since we redid the exterior to our house. It's very nice not to have to put up those metal shutters any more, and quite impressive to see the ferocity of the wind, even when it's just bands from the way outside of the edge of the storm.

The schools are closed again tomorrow. The university closed at six p.m. If the forecasts are to be believed, I think the major danger tomorrow will be the roads,1 which is why everything is closing. The hurricane itself looks most likely to make landfall enough north of us that we will miss the worst — and at Category one, the very large majority of structures are designed to weather this intensity of storm.

What's slightly disconcerting, however, is that NOAA is predicting even more hurricanes than it did last month:

The updated outlook calls for an extremely active season, with an expected seasonal total of 18-21 tropical storms (mean is 10), with 9-11 becoming hurricanes (mean is 6), and 5-7 of these becoming major hurricanes (mean is 2-3). The likely range of the ACE index for the season as a whole is 180%-270% of the median.

This is, I gather, in part due to the warmer oceans, which in turn is due to global warming.

1 And restless children.

Posted in Miami | 1 Comment

It’s Like a Snow Day In Florida

Posted on August 24, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

When I was a kid growing up in Washington DC, they used to close the schools if a snowflake was sighted anywhere in the metro area. It’s true that back then DC had rather primitive snow plowing capabilities, so that a serious snow fall would in deed paralyze the city, first by panicking the drivers and then by blocking the streets, but we must have closed four out every two major snowfalls.

We don’t get much snow down here in in Miami, so the kids don’t get snow days. But it seems they do get hurricane days. The latest weather forecasts don’t show Tropical Storm Katrina hitting in any serious way until fairly late tomorrow — well after school closes — although not all the models agree on whether it will remain a tropical storm or graduate to a full hurricane around when it makes landfall. But the kids are going to get a day off from school anyway, as the Miami-Dade school system has just pulled the plug on Thursday. We used to like playing in the snow when school was closed, but there’s not much fun to be had playing in a tropical storm (much less a hurricane) and it would in any case be unsafe due to the danger of falling and flying objects. The calm before the storm is real, but before the storm hits it can be awfully still and muggy.

The law school, meanwhile, is playing a more sensible game of wait-and-see. As a result, unless something changes overnight, I’m teaching two classes tomorrow morning. But I imagine turnout will be much reduced since those who drive from far away will probably choose to stay home, and those who suddenly find they have to care for their children won’t have a choice. But until further notice, the show will go on.

Posted in Miami | Comments Off on It’s Like a Snow Day In Florida

Shackled For No Crime; Acquitted But Not Told or Released

Posted on August 24, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

A commentator on the previous item points out this story, which I’d missed: Chinese Detainees Are Men Without a Country:

In late 2003, the Pentagon quietly decided that 15 Chinese Muslims detained at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be released. Five were people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, some of them picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters for U.S. payoffs. The other 10 were deemed low-risk detainees whose enemy was China’s communist government — not the United States, according to senior U.S. officials.

More than 20 months later, the 15 still languish at Guantanamo Bay, imprisoned and sometimes shackled, with most of their families unaware whether they are even alive.

Do Americans understand what’s being done in their name?

For more than three years these unpersons were not allowed a lawyer. When they got one, he was appalled.

One of the Uighurs was “chained to the floor” in a “box with no windows,” Willett [his lawyer] said in an Aug. 1 court hearing…

And all this after they had been cleared — not that the US government was willing to admit this little fact:

All 15 Uighurs have actually been cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay twice, once after a Pentagon review in late 2003 and again last March, U.S. officials said. Seven other Uighurs were ruled to be enemy combatants and will continue to be detained.

Even after the second decision, however, the government did not notify the 15 men for several months that they had been cleared. “They clearly were keeping secret that these men were acquitted. They were found not to be al Qaeda and not to be Taliban,” Willett said. “But the government still refused to provide a transcript of the tribunal that acquitted them to the detainees, their new lawyers or a U.S. court.”

Having wrongly imprisoned them, treated them very harshly at the very least, and having held them long after it had reason to do so, the US government’s position is that these victims should return to their home country — China — a place they fled in the first place due to a well-founded fear of persecution, and where their record of having been in Guantanamo is not likely to better their circumstances.

Words really fail me, here. Can anyone seriously claim to be proud of this conduct by our government? Is there no one in Congress who will act to stop the running sores on the national honor? We do still have a national honor don’t we? Or has that gone missing too?

Oh, do I feel shrill today.

Posted in Guantanamo | 6 Comments

Must Not Annoy the Base. Not Even the Racists.

Posted on August 24, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

This is weird and dirty: Profiling Report Leads to a Demotion. The circumstantial evidence is strong that the politicos at the Bush Dept. of Justice are so worried about perturbing white racists that they didn’t want to draw any attention to a report demonstrating disparate treatment of minorities during traffic stops. [Note: Why do I say “politicos” plural, when the article speaks of just one — because I don’t think demoting a civil servant is something that’s easy to do.]

In fairness, one should note that unlike some other reports in other departments (think global warming and pollution), no attempt was made to change the actual wording of the report or its conclusions. Here the fix was just political: first try to tone down the press release, then when the career official objects, decide to issue the report online with no fanfare at all…then demote the official.

Even so, the only motive I can see for not wanting to draw attention to racially disparate actions by local cops — a group over whom the US government has only limited authority, primarily via very rare civil rights lawsuits or prosecutions — is a political fear of annoying white racist voters.

Or is there some other equally plausible explanation I am missing here?

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 2 Comments

ISP Reports 20% of New Accounts are Fraudsters

Posted on August 23, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

In It’s a fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud world, my ISP, DreamHost, gives a shocking statistic:

Nowadays, about 20% of our daily sign ups are with stolen credit cards (or stolen paypal accounts), and are for the express purpose of spamming, conning, storing ‘warez’, or cracking (our system or somebody else’s).

DreamHost is responding by using spamassassin-like techniques to weed out the bad guys; it claims under 1% false positives, and false negatives, and says another 2% fall into a gray area that get flagged for — error-prone — manual review.

Posted in Internet | 1 Comment