The waxing and waning of FEMA

Kevin Drum points to a few articles that seem timely. Read his post, read the linked articles (D. Franklin in the Washington Monthly, July/August 1995; E. Holdeman in WaPo, August 30 2005), and then read the comment from someone who claims to have worked with FEMA in the past:

I used to work with FEMA, and what is reported is absolutely true. Clinton built up FEMA by expanding the ability to plan for disasters, react to coming disaster, mitigate future disasters and build the preparedness infrastructure at both the Federal, State and Local level.

Bush destroyed it. He appointed a hack who was universally detested to run the agency. Then it got swallowed into Homeland Security and all the plans got garbled. And almost all of the most experienced and best managers left. Last year, FEMA rated DEAD LAST among Federal agencies in terms of employee job satisfaction.

The Mitigation program - ie the program to try and reduce the risk and impact of future disasters was scrapped entirely. The Directorate shut down, Project Impact cancelled.

The Preparedness program was moved out of FEMA.

And of course the ability to handle the onrushing storm was crippled because all the crafty vets were gone. All those guys who had been trained in that little thing: If its raining in New Orleans, for god's sake don't let the dykes burst! - were gone.

We see the evidence already.

Exhibit A - they diverted the helicopters who were doing the absolutely essential thing. And clearly there was no effort to ensure that there was a substitute.

Exhibit B - There was completely inadequate planning for law and order. Remember New Orleans has about the highest crime rate in the country - but despite that there's no evidence that there was a major effort to set some controls. Would have been tough anyway with the National Guard in Iraq. But something could have been done.

Exhibit C - Presidential interest. In every major disaster event that was happening (ie while the hurricane was coming), the President and/or VP personally intervened to find out what was going on and to check if there was anything they could do to help. And there almost always was a need for them to push along some other Federal Agencies. Clearly there was none of that this time.

This is a massive failure. A bureaucracy was crippled and failed because of top level negligence. It did NOT have to be this bad.

The comparisons to the planning failures in 9-11 and Iraq are obvious.

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UPDATE 4 Sept.: Susan B. Glasser and Josh White at WaPo have more. Why are none of the other major papers on top of this? There were many political failures behind the unnecessary magnitude of this disaster, but the gutting of FEMA seems to me the most dramatic and most avoidable. It takes a lot of political will to raise taxes and sink money into big construction projects, like rebuilding levees, but FEMA was already there, it was already prepared and in top operational condition when the Bush administration moved in, and it was simply gutted.

Meanwhile the Times, in typical fashion, picks Elisabeth Bumiller and Adam Nagourney, the nation's reigning queen and king of shallow horse-race political reportage, to write a piece on the White House spin operation. As one would expect, the piece is short on dissection of substantive policy failures, and long on Kremlinological analysis of the administration's public relations situation. Yet another reminder of why I suspended my subscription to the Sunday Times.

Also, Kevin Drum has an easily-digestible chronology of the decline of FEMA under Bush. Via Talking Points Memo, The Independent Weekly, Sept. 2004 and Knight-Ridder, Aug. 31 also report on FEMA.

Lastly, I'm reading some conservative comment to the effect that somehow it's too soon to judge whether FEMA's response has been adequate, and we should all wait a week before passing judgment. Erm, right. Here's what FEMA used to be like (from the Washington Monthly article linked above):

Consider the Oklahoma City bombing. Tom Feuerborne, director of Oklahoma's Civil Emergency Management Department, can cite the events of April 19, 1995 almost down to the minute. It was 9:02 a.m. when a truck bomb ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in downtown Oklahoma City. At 9:30, Feuerborne placed a phone call to FEMA's headquarters in Washington. At 2:05, FEMA's advance team arrived, complete with damage assessors and members of Witt's staff. Six hours later, at 8:10 that evening, Witt himself arrived to be briefed on the situation. By 2:30 a.m. April 20, the first of FEMA's search and rescue teams had arrived to supplement the efforts of the Oklahoma City fire department. Says Feuerborne, "My office is very happy with the quick response of FEMA."

Ellen Gordon, administrator of Iowa's Emergency Management Division, has a similarly uncanny memory when it comes to FEMA's response to the Midwestern floods of 1993. Shortly after midnight on Sunday, July 11, she received a call from L.D. McMullen, the general manager of the Des Moines Water Works. Their operation was at the point of collapse, he said. The 250,000 citizens of Des Moines would soon lose all of their water.

One year earlier, Gordon would have mailed federal relief request forms to Washington, where, as Puerto Rico's Governor Hernandez-Colon discovered, they may have received a less-than-speedy response. But all Gordon had to do was place a phone call to the FEMA disaster field office located in Davenport. Early Sunday morning, FEMA officials arrived in Des Moines, and, by 11:30 a.m., they had determined a plan of action. By that evening, 29 water distribution centers had been established. The next morning, the first of 30 self-contained water purification machines arrived. For the next two-and-a-half weeks, the Des Moines Water Works was inoperable, but the city had all the water it needed. "Nothing sticks out in our minds that we had to haggle over or justify," says Gordon. "Whenever we asked for assistance it was there."

FEMA's response time used to be measured in hours. Katrina's scale may be unprecedented, and so one might excuse a slightly greater delay in coming to terms with it, but nothing I've seen or read indicates even a hint of the responsiveness and competence described in this article. And primary responsibility lies squarely with the executive branch --- Congress budgeted plenty of money for the Dept. of Homeland Security (which is now FEMA's parent department), and it was the Bush administration's responsibility to make sure that DHS used its funds properly.

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UPDATE 2 (4 Sept.): The litany of failure never stops. BoingBoing quotes from a Chicago Tribune article (emphasis added):

While federal and state emergency planners scramble to get more military relief to Gulf Coast communities stricken by Hurricane Katrina, a massive naval goodwill station has been cruising offshore, underused and waiting for a larger role in the effort.

The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.

But now the Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship. (...) The role in the relief effort of the sizable medical staff on board the Bataan was not up to the Navy, but to FEMA officials directing the overall effort.

On Eric Byler, and Asian-American sex relations

Just got back from a trip to find that Charlotte Sometimes arrived from GreenCine while I was gone. I can't really say that I like it, but it has some virtues, and it's interesting at least. It's a super-low-budget film that, apparently, made a splash on the festival circuit, won a couple of awards, and was championed, with effusive praise, by Roger Ebert. It's also one of the rare American movies with Asian-American lead characters who are distinctive individuals, with real dialogue, complex motivations, etc., rather than stock caricatures or representatives of Archetypal Ethnic Verities.

Anyway, I'm posting about this only because I'm watching one of the DVD extras, an interview by Roger Ebert, from a post-screening session at Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival, with the director, the producer, and two cast members. The director, Eric Byler, who also wrote the film, turns out to be an unexpectedly thoughtful person.

More precisely, it is not the fact that he's thoughtful which surprises me (many directors are), but rather the manner of his thoughtfulness, which seems writerly, almost novelistic. When most film directors give interviews or DVD commentaries, they seem preoccupied with the nuts-and-bolts craft of filmmaking. They'll go on and on about the travails of shooting in some special location, or building some peculiar set, or how the gears of a plot's mechanics mesh together. Film directors also tend, on average, to be primarily visual thinkers, and so --- aside from the obvious fact that they talk more about the visual aspects of a film than its verbal aspects --- they're often pretty bad at expressing complex thoughts in words. For example, I think that Quentin Tarantino, despite his gift for writing dialogue and his extraordinary personal loquaciousness, sounds completely goofy in interviews. Byler's different --- he seems preoccupied, above all, with the interiority of his characters, and he's reasonably articulate at explaining his thinking about them.

Byler also has interesting things to say about Asian-American inter-sex relations (he is mixed-race, by the way):

EBERT: You mentioned, at Hawaii, that there were what you felt were specifically Asian-American gender issues in the film, which you doubted that would be obvious to every audience. You said something about that.

BYLER: Yes.

EBERT: Could you talk about that?

BYLER: You know, I didn't, I didn't really think about the audience very much in any of the artistic choices that I made. But what sort of inspired the beginning, and I have to go all the way back to there to talk about it, 'cause I don't like to, myself, deconstruct the movie, but when I started, the way that I saw the world was, I saw a lot of couplings between Asian-American men and Asian-American women that were platonic, or that's what they called them. But there was always this tacit understanding that, uh, he would pretend not to love her, and she would pretend not to know.

And it's not necessarily an Asian-American thing, I betcha everybody here has been in a situation like that. But there's sort of a suspicion among Asian-American men, I think, that somehow the choice as to whether this new person who comes into your life is gonna be a lover or a friend is somehow contingent upon race. And, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, I was growing up south of the Mason-Dixon line on the East Coast, before I moved to Hawaii. I looked a lot more Asian when I was young, and the, uh, well there's a certain sense of isolation when there's only two other specimens in the whole school. And, of course, there's a little bit more isolation when you're not the same race as your, either one of your parents. So then your siblings, if you have them are the only, you know, the only being that you know when you're a child that's like you. But, you know, as you come of age and you start to say well, how, what kind of sexual being am I gonna be? You look at the images that you see on television. And you know, usually an Asian man is a technician, and he's never a lover. And if he does express sexual desire, it's ugly or unwanted. So if you're an Asian boy and you're growing up in this country, and you're thinking how do, where do I fit, as a sexual being, the message is the more you repress your sexual desire the more you'll be able to be accepted, or be able to fit in.

And, if you think about the messages that Asian girls get in this country, watching the images that we have on television and movies of Asian women, it seems as if sex is the only thing we want from them. The more sexy, the more beautiful you are, the more we want you. And so they misinterpret, I guess what we'd call exotification, as acceptance.

And so these two creatures, this Asian-American boy and this Asian-American girl grow up, and he's a little bit more tied to traditional values, and not surprisingly, because the traditional values, whether they're Christian or Buddhist or Shinto religions, those values are more in line with what, I guess, mainstream society wants from Asian men. And Asian girls are sort of encouraged to be more sexual, and so they're sort of breaking through into another more, I guess, Western set of values, or more like, Greek or, you know, the hedonistic sense of values that have overcome Christian values here. And so these, these creatures don't know how to interact very well. They sort of slide into this, they're attracted to each other, they want to be together, but they slide into this friendship thing. And I think there's a fundamental lie at the core of that friendship. And it often leads to some very difficult emotional situations.

Now, I should make a few things clear. First, I usually try to avoid generalizations about Asian-Americans as a whole. Second, I usually feel that I, personally, am pretty atypical for almost any recognizable subgroup of Asian-Americans, or stereotypes thereof (for those who don't know me, this claim probably sounds incongruous coming from an Asian-American grad student in computer science, but if you knew me better I hope it would seem less so). Third, I've never been the male half of the above-described quasi-platonic unrequited-infatuation friendship situation.

Nevertheless, I find Byler's statements very astute. Byler's saying, out loud and in public, things that are rarely said, even though (I think) nearly all young, adult Asian-Americans today recognize them on some level, whether they consciously acknowledge them or not.

---

Note, by the way, that one should be wary of confusing the view Byler expresses with a superficially similar sentiment that is unfortunately rather common among Asian(-American) men: the belief that Asian(-American) women are effectively a form of racial property, and therefore for an Asian(-American) woman to refuse an Asian(-American) man is an infringement on that property right, and a form of betrayal. This sentiment is, of course, reprehensible for all sorts of reasons that should be obvious.

The superficial similarity to Byler's view is that both views describe circumstances that seem potentially frustrating for Asian-American men. The difference, however, is that Byler doesn't indulge the racist, sexist premise of racial ownership of women. He merely acknowledges the obvious fact that sexual attraction, like all human emotions and behaviors, can be modulated by cultural influences, including racist assumptions embedded in the culture, and that the results can be painful for all involved.

How Commoners can beat the Mafia (most of the time)

For those who have never played the party game Mafia, here are the rules:

1. An arbiter is selected at random from the players. Call the other players "townspeople".
2. The arbiter uses some random, secret procedure to designate some small fraction (say, 1/4) of the townspeople as Mafia, and the rest as Commoners. One way that works is to take one slip of paper for each player, write down "Mafia" or "Commoner" on each slip, and have players draw from a hat.
3. All the players to close their eyes. Then, at the arbiter's signal, only the Mafiosi open their eyes and look around, so they know the identities of all the other Mafia.
4. The play proceeds in rounds. Each round goes as follows:
   1. First, all the players discuss who might be Mafia, and then vote to execute one person as a Mafioso.
   2. The person who gets the most votes is executed. If there is a tie, the arbiter should flip a coin. The dead player leaves the game, at which point the arbiter informs the town whether that person was a Commoner or a Mafioso.
   3. Dead players tell no tales. Once dead, a player may not communicate with living players for the remainder of the game.
5. Play proceeds until either the entire Mafia is dead, or all the Commoners are dead. The living team wins.

In practice, the Mafia wins as soon as they're a majority, because then they can always outvote the Commoners and execute them all.

What makes this game fun is the social interaction and politicking that goes on when you're deciding whom to execute. The Mafiosi are all trying to influence the voting so that a Commoner gets executed on each round. Meanwhile, the Commoners are trying to detect excessive certainty or bloodlust (which probably indicates a Mafioso --- after all, only Mafia know for certain whom they want executed), so the Mafia can't appear too eager or obvious. It's also a game of teamwork --- a lone clever Commoner can't beat the Mafia unless (s)he can also convince the other suspicious townspeople to trust him/her. A cleverly played game of Mafia will ultimately be won by the Mafia, if they're better actors, or by the Commoners, if they're better at "reading" people. With the right group, this can be lots of fun.

Now I'm going to tell you how to take all the fun out of Mafia. Propose the following strategy to your fellow townspeople:

1. During the first round of discussion, use some mechanism to produce a random ordering of players. One way that works is for everyone to roll a pair of dice, and sort people from highest to lowest roll, rolling again to break ties. Note: if you use this method, you must decide on the exact method for sorting, including whether you're going from low-to-high or high-to-low, before you actually roll the dice.
2. Agree that everyone will vote to eliminate the players in order. Anyone who dissents from this plan must be a Mafioso, and becomes the next target of execution instead of the scheduled player.

Why does this work? Notice the victory conditions: the Commoners win when 100% of the Mafia dies; the Mafia wins when when they outnumber the Commoners. Given that the Commoners have a large majority, most random orderings of the townspeople will list 100% of the Mafia before any point where the remaining Mafia outnumber the remaining Commoners.

Proving this claim formally requires some fairly intense math. I looked at it for a few minutes with one of my friends (who was also a computer scientist). We decided it was hard, and just handwaved our way through it.

(If you're curious, here's the handwaving: on average, over all random sortings, you expect the proportion of Mafia and Commoners in the remaining population to remain roughly constant as the population decreases; so the Mafia will usually not attain a majority. Then, once you get down to a small number of remaining players --- say, N, where 1/N is the fraction of Mafiosi in the original population --- then you expect that, on average, there will be 1 Mafioso left out of those N players. The chance that this Mafioso will be the last one standing is 1/N. Since N > 2, the last Mafioso probably doesn't survive.)

So, on average, over a large number of games, this is a winning strategy for the Commoners. Only Mafiosi would dissent from it; but the really cool thing is that they can't do anything about it, because if they dissent then they reveal that they belong to the Mafia. Even if all of them dissent together, they're outnumbered, so the Commoners will just execute them all. And even if the Mafia win --- as they sometimes will --- the win doesn't give them much satisfaction, since it wasn't through the exercise of wit and deception but just a random roll of the dice.

When you play the game by this strategy --- and I have done it once --- the game goes pretty fast. Everyone votes unanimously to execute the next player on the list. There's no discussion, no politicking, no doubt, and the game becomes a rather grimly fatalistic exercise until the arbiter calls the end. On the other hand, as the person who devised this strategy, I enjoyed watching it play out.

The Commoners won, by the way. Ironically, I was on the Mafia team that time.

---

UPDATE 9:30 p.m.: I got curious, so I wrote a Python script to simulate many games of Mafia in aggregate. Basically, the handwaving analysis above is a decent approximation of the actual results for typical party-sized populations (6-30 people) and small fractions of Mafia. At a population of 25% Mafia, the Mafia wins about 25% of the time. As the number of Mafia increases, however, the results begin to diverge from this analysis, due to the asymmetry in winning conditions: the Mafia win at a rate that exceeds their fraction of the population. At about 39% Mafia, the game becomes 50/50 Commoners v. Mafia.

The source for the script follows. It's a pretty direct interpretation; I haven't tried to do any of the obvious optimizations for simulating games.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import random

TRIALS         = 100000
MAFIA_FRACTION = 0.39
MIN_POP        = 6
MAX_POP        = 30
HIT_VARIANT    = 0

COMMONER = 0
MAFIA    = 1

maf_wins = 0
com_wins = 0

def init_town():
    popsize = random.randint(MIN_POP,MAX_POP)
    town = [COMMONER for j in range(0,popsize)]
    maf_count = int(MAFIA_FRACTION * popsize)
    for j in range(maf_count):
        while 1:
            idx = random.randint(0,popsize-1)
            if town[idx] != MAFIA: break
        town[idx] = MAFIA
    return town

def hit_commoner(town):
    if COMMONER not in town:
        return town
    else:
        com = town.index(COMMONER)
        return town[:com] + town[com+1:]

for i in range(TRIALS):
    town = init_town()
    while len(town) > 0:
        town = town[1:]
        if HIT_VARIANT: town = hit_commoner(town)
        maf_left = town.count(MAFIA)
        pop_left = len(town)
        if maf_left > (pop_left/2):
            maf_wins += 1
            break
        elif maf_left == 0:
            com_wins += 1
            break

print "Commoner wins  : " + str(com_wins)
print "Mafia wins     : " + str(maf_wins)
print ("Mafia fraction : " +
       str(float(maf_wins)/float(maf_wins+com_wins)))

UPDATE 1 Sept: In comments, Andrew and AJ reminded me of a variation of the rules, wherein the Mafia get to secretly "hit" one Commoner in each round, after execution. I've fixed the script so that the HIT_VARIANT flag controls whether to play with this variation. The results are surprising --- see comments for details...

How Red America thinks

Digby points to one of Rose Aguillar's interviews with Oklahomans. Read the Mary Fowler interview and weep. It may have seemed that I was exaggerating when I wrote about how stupid and blind conservative thinking is; but if anything, I was understating the truth. It is as if some alien creature has eaten Fowler's brain and implanted a little alien worm in her skull to replace it.

Removing sound from video files

Just got back from a Bay Area trip, visiting my friend MS et al. While I was down there, we visited the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium, where, among other things, I found many reasons to play around with the movie recorder on my new digital camera. The results were impressive --- considering it's a camera and not a camcorder, the Canon PowerShot A95 takes really nice-looking videos at 640x480 --- but the ambient sound inside the aquarium was just crowd noise: murmuring strangers, screaming kids, and such. Sort of ruins the mood when you're looking at a video that looks like this:

The PowerShot A95 doesn't have a way to turn off the sound during video recording either. So, I wanted to strip the sound off my video files, without re-encoding the video (which would reduce the image quality).

"Surely," I thought, "this will be easy. The AVI file format stores audio in separate binary chunks from the video --- it's just a matter of erasing the audio chunks. Even if the software that comes with my camera can't do it, there will be multiple freeware utilities that can. Maybe not for Linux, but surely for Windows..."

Ha, ha.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I couldn't find a good free utility to do this under Windows. I found many programs that let me replace the soundtrack to a movie, but for some reason none of them could remove the sound altogether. I didn't feel like dropping a few hundred bucks on Adobe Premiere either. So, the best option turned out to be --- surprise! --- a Unix utility called transcode. I got mine via the freshrpms yum repository for Fedora Core 4, read the manual pages and the wiki, and came up with the following recipe:

transcode -i foobar.avi -P1 -o foobar_nosound.avi -y raw,null

Geeky details: this instructs transcode to read the video from foobar.avi, pass through the video track only, write the output to foobar_nosound.avi, and use raw encoding for the video and null encoding for the audio.

Here's a Python script that makes transcode batch processing easy; just give it a list of filenames of the format foobar.avi, and it will produce a list of silent video files named foobar_nosound.avi:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os.path
import subprocess
import sys

def splitExtension(filename):
    lastdot = filename.rfind('.')
    return (filename[:lastdot], filename[lastdot:])

infiles = sys.argv[1:]
for infile in infiles:
    (prefix, ext) = splitExtension(infile)
    outfile = prefix + "_nosound" + ext
    idx = 0
    while os.path.exists(outfile):
        idx = idx + 1
        outfile = prefix + "_nosound_" + str(idx) + ext
    print infile + " stripped to:" + outfile
    retcode = subprocess.call(
        ['transcode',
         '-i', infile,
         '-P1',
         '-o', outfile,
         '-y', 'raw,null'])

video, software, howto, linux, digital-photography