WHAT’S WRONG WITH SCIENCE REPORTING, from The Guardian. Rather a lot, really. “Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely – since they’ll be the ones interested in reading the stuff – people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it’s edited by a whole team of people who don’t understand it.”

In other words, it’s like the rest of the news . . . .

CONSPIRACY THEORY a-go-go.

FOUR YEARS LATER, THE QUESTION:

Four years later, terrorism remains a problem around the world, as we have seen in Bali, in Madrid, in Israel, in London, and, of course, in Iraq. Yet, it would seem, not in America. While America remains alert and, some would say, hypersensitive to the risk of another attack, none has come. Our buildings, our buses, our airplanes all are surely tempting targets to the likes of Al Qaeda and its sympathizers. Yet, four years later, they have not struck. In the tense days after 9-11, such a stretch of safety would have seemed like wishful thinking. And yet, that’s what happened.

Why?

Why?

A PACK, not a herd:

The Algiers Point militia put away its weapons Friday as Army soldiers patrolled the historic neighborhood across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. . . .

“I’m a part of the militia,” Boza said. “We were taking the law into our own hands, but I didn’t kill anyone.” . . .

The several dozen people who did not evacuate from Algiers Point said that for days after the storm, they did not see any police officers or soldiers but did see gangs of intruders.

So they set up what might be the ultimate neighborhood watch.

Read the whole thing.

IAN SCHWARTZ HAS VIDEO of Mary Landrieu’s TV meltdown this morning.

Her comments that Mayor Nagin “had trouble getting his people to work on a sunny day” seem a bit, um, dubious. At least, if a Republican said it, people would probably think it racist.

UPDATE: More on Landrieu’s remarks here.

MARK STEYN:

As part of their ongoing post-9/11 convergence, the left now talks about Bush the way the wackier Islamists talk about Jews. . . .

On this fourth anniversary we are in a bizarre situation: The war is being won — in Afghanistan, Iraq, the broader Middle East and many other places where America has changed the conditions on the ground in its favor. But at home the war about the war is being lost.

Austin Bay:

Terrorists can be a very small group of people or a politically weak organization. What makes the small and anonymous appear powerful and strong? In the 21st century, intense media coverage magnifies the terrorists’ capabilities. This suggests that winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately means accomplishing two things: denying the terrorists’ weapons of mass destruction and curbing what is currently Al Qaeda’s greatest strategic capability: media magnification and occasional media enhancement of its bombing campaigns and political theatrics.

Read the whole thing(s).

JEEZ:

Nagin did not tell everyone to leave immediately, because the regional plan called for the suburbs to empty out first, but he did urge residents in particularly low-lying areas to “start moving — right now, as a matter of fact.” He said the Superdome would be open as a shelter of last resort, but essentially he told tourists stranded in the Big Easy that they were out of luck.

“The only thing I can say to them is I hope they have a hotel room, and it’s a least on the third floor and up,” Nagin said. “Unfortunately, unless they can rent a car to get out of town, which I doubt they can at this point, they’re probably in the position of riding the storm out.”

In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a “dead-head” train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. “We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm’s way,” said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. “The city declined.”

So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers on board.

Jeez. (Via Brendan Loy, who has much more.)

THERE’S A 9/11 MEMORIAL SLIDESHOW at the Pajamas Media site.

DOG BITES MAN: Political bias at CNN.

STILL MORE ON THOSE BUSES, from Ed Morrissey.

He also notes this conclusion from hurricane experts in Florida: “Louisiana Failed To Follow A Flawed Plan.” He’s got a lengthy analysis, with links and quotes.

UPDATE: More here: “The Times’ reporters either don’t know the facts, and didn’t take the trouble to do any significant research in preparing their story, or else they know about the bus fiasco but don’t want their readers to know.”

BORIS BITTKER HAS DIED. Brannon Denning, who sent me the link, observes that it’s a shame there aren’t more people like him in the academy these days. He’s right. Boris was, quite literally, a gentleman and a scholar.

KATRINA DRUG RELIEF: “Victims of Hurricane Katrina who have lost access to their Pfizer medications can receive an emergency supply at any Walgreens, Rite Aid, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club or CVS pharmacy.” Seems like a good initiative.

ROGER SIMON IS highly critical of Yahoo! on its China-snitching policy.

Rebecca MacKinnon has more.

A BIG WIN FOR KOIZUMI IN JAPAN, which is a win for the Bush Administration, too:

His rise to power included the unusual promise to “destroy” the party that had made him its president so it could be rebuilt from the ground up.

His structural reforms, including capping government spending and cleaning up the country’s debt-laden banks, have been only partially successful.

Even so, he remains one of the most popular prime ministers Japan has ever had, consistently receiving 50 percent or higher support in public opinion polls.

While pursuing reform at home, Koizumi is not likely to change his approach in foreign matters.

A strong backer of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, he has dispatched non-combat troops to both areas. He also supports amending Japan’s pacifist constitution to give the military more freedom to act overseas, although he said late Sunday he would not pursue that goal in his final year as prime minister.

Japan also is one of the United States’ negotiating partners in the effort to disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons.

Japan needs restructuring, and I hope that Koizumi can do it.

UPDATE: Roger Simon — fresh back from Japan — observes: “What is surprising, although mildly, is that the most charismatic – and in many ways progressive – politician on the world stage today is Japanese.”

Daniel Drezner: “I choose to credit the lipstick ninjas.”

JEFF GOLDSTEIN isn’t buying the “plenty of blame to go around” thesis.

INSTAPUNDIT’S AFGHANISTAN CORRESPONDENT, Major Robert Macaraeg, sends these photos and reports:

Here are some images and a summary of a conversation from Afghanistan.

I was talking with one of interpreters yesterday and we were talking about the up coming parliamentary election. He stated that he would be voting and everybody he knew would do so too. When asked about the Taliban terror campaign to disrupt the election, he scoffed at them stating that the Afghan and American armies are disrupting the Taliban’s plans and the Afghan people will vote despite the Taliban’s efforts. I am thinking that the national participation in this election will have a higher participation level than some European or American elections. When I asked him why he and others will vote, he just pointed to the children hanging around interjecting with their views of the election.

A fitting 9/11 memorial of its own.

MICHAEL BARONE says there’s “blame aplenty” and points out people who are at fault, but also cautions:

But we should resist the notion that we can come up with some organizational solution that can prevent every mistake. Today, as we look back on World War II, we tend to think that everything worked smoothly. But that wasn’t the case. Rick Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn shows that U.S. commanders made many blunders in the 1942-43 North Africa campaign. There were constant complaints about bottlenecks and snafus in defense production, and President Roosevelt changed the organizational chart several times. In 2002, everyone agreed FEMA should be put under Homeland Security; now people say it should be taken out. Fortunately, we don’t depend just on government. Millions of citizens have contributed $500 million, thousands are taking Katrina evacuees into their homes and schools and churches, and private companies are hurrying free supplies to those in need. Government will never be perfect, but fortunately America is more than just government.

Not all of us were fans of Homeland Security, but it did pass rather handily.

“DOES ANYBODY KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT BUSES?”

UPDATE: Reader Vincent Flynn emails: “There were 21,000 buses in Louisiana. Her failure to procure them locally is bizarre.”

I’VE DONE THE 9/11 MEMORIAL POSTS EACH YEAR, and this one isn’t any easier than the ones before. You can read the earlier stuff here, here, and here. And this post from the morning of September 11, 2001 still holds up pretty well.

I’m observing the anniversary by giving shooting lessons to a Marine (my secretary, who says that the Corps trained him admirably as a rifleman, but not so well with a handgun, which turns out to matter for a combat engineer defusing IEDs and the like, he found). That seems like a good way for me.

Meanwhile, Winds of Change has a huge roundup. And Fritz Schranck has thoughts, too.

UPDATE: Related post here.

Bill Quick: “President Bush, if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon have a National Day of Rage.”

TODAY WAS THE ANNIVERSARY OF Jonathan Klein’s “pajamas” remark. I’ll bet he wishes he hadn’t said that, now.

READER JIM MARTIN EMAILS ABOUT DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY:

I read your PM article, it’s very good, and I recommended it to a friend in Virginia looking for a digicam to use in his work. What amateur-made documentaries and Katrina brought to mind is something I have been considering for a long time: documenting historic homes and buildings.

As inexpensive as digital images are and having the ability to archive them on DVD discs everyone should take the time to photograph, in detail, the histOric structures where they live. The huge damage Katrina wrought to the Gulf Coast is a hard lesson for the rest of the coutry. Most of the old antebellum mansions are totally erased and will never be recontsucted. It would have been nice to have had detailed photos of them for posterity in a safe place far from hurricanes.

There are hundreds of old buildings, some on the National Registry of Historic Sites, which need to be photographed from all angles: up close, inside and outside to show minute detail of construction methods. Molded ceiling plaster motifs come to mind. If any of these structures are damaged by fire or storms and enough remains for restoration, architects and builders will find photos taken as special projects by archivists a great advantage.

A weekend is all many would require, a great Fall project to get started. Go to the mountains and take photos of log cabins when the leaves have changed. Go to historic sites in your hometown, all of them, large and small. They aren’t important until they are gone and it’s too late.

Good suggestion.

AERIAL PHOTOS FROM GULFPORT AND BILOXI showing the damage. Roads and bridges are especially hardhit.

LAPEER LIVING is photoblogging hurricane damage in Biloxi.

UPDATE: Major John Tammes — InstaPundit’s Afghanistan correspondent turned Belle Chase, Louisiana correspondent — sends this photo and observation:

“I walked by a Louisiana National Guard signal unit and noticed their morale seemed to be OK. One of their NCOs invited me back to watch the LSU game but I had to politely decline…”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tammes was too modest to send a link, but I see he’s been posting pictures and reports to his own blog, too.

THE GUARDIAN seems to have scooped other media in reporting on the SENS2 aging and longevity conference at Cambridge:

Admittedly, yes, it’s a hard science conference, but when you have Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk, Michael West of Advanced Cell Technology and many others of equal note – such as Ellen Heber-Katz and Amit Patel – all coming to the same Cambridge conference on advancing a cure for aging, it is suprising to me that only the Guardian turned up to see what was going on.

Luckily, the conference was blogged.

HERE’S MORE ON THE NEW ORLEANS GUN-CONFISCATION, from Dave Kopel:

The good gun-owning citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding areas ought to be thanked for helping to save some of their city after Mayor Nagin, incoherent and weeping, had fled to Baton Rouge. Yet instead these citizens are being victimized by a new round of home invasions and looting, these ones government-organized, for the purpose of firearms confiscation.

It’s especially striking to see this at a time when New Orleans-area police have been abandoning their posts, engaging in looting, and trapping refugees in a flooding city at gunpoint. “Rely on the police to protect you” has never seemed like worse advice.

UPDATE: On the other hand, I might be persuaded to support efforts to disarm Sean Penn.