HERE’S A NEW ORLEANS WEBCAM — at the corner of St. Charles & Napoleon — that’s still working.

UPDATE: Some unpleasant thoughts about quality of life in the Superdome.

If the worst happens -and at this point it seems implausible that it won’t- the bottom 2 stories will fill with water. Dirty nasty foul water full of chemicals and raw sewerage. Further the bathroom facilities are only expected to function for the first day.

So in rough terms, 40,000+ people will be trapped in a building with no plumbing, little light and no air conditioning. The temps after the storm rolls thru will probably be in the low 90s. Considerably hotter in the building.

Let’s just hope that people are in a position to worry about that. Heck, let’s hope that the “implausible” happens and New Orleans doesn’t flood.

UPDATE: As of 6:16 Eastern time, the webcam is still working.

LOCAL NEWS reports that Knoxville hotels are filling with refugees from the Gulf coast.

IT’S A HEALTH BONANZA:

If your hand is trembling over your third coffee of the morning, do not despair. You could be getting more healthy antioxidants from your liquid fix than are from the fruit or vegetables you eat, according to a study of US diets. . . .

Helping to rid the body of free radicals, destructive molecules that damage cells and DNA, antioxidants have been linked to a number of benefits, including protection against heart disease and cancer.

The research is the latest in a number of studies to suggest coffee could be beneficial, with consumption linked to a reduced risk of liver and colon cancer, type two diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease.

“Americans get more of their antioxidants from coffee than any other dietary source – nothing else comes close,” said Joe Vinson from Scranton University in Pennsylvania, who led the research.

You should still eat fruits and vegetables, though.

REUNITING THE UNITED STATES: Advice from Australia.

STREAMING VIDEO from WWL-TV in New Orleans. (Via Jordan Golson).

There’s lots of news at Storm Digest, too, and at the Nola.com breaking news blog. And Terry Teachout has updated the post I mentioned earlier with a big list of hurricane bloggers.

Michele Catalano, meanwhile, is pretty unimpressed with the people who decided to stay in New Orleans and party through the hurricane. And Rob A. notes that Katrina is a Cat 5 while Andrew was only a 4: “Since I work in insurance, I can assure you that Andrew still scares the crap out of the entire industry.” [LATER: Several readers email to note that subsequent analysis led to Andrew being upgraded to a Cat 5.]

Jeff Masters at Weather Underground is worried. (Via SciGuy).

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails: “Michele is on the money. Evil Knevil wouldn’t stay in New Orleans right now. Everyone that prays should offer one for the gulf coast right now.”

Except for James Wolcott, I guess, who presumably is praying to Gaia as usual for an increase in wind speeds and storm surge. Me, I’m not as big a fan of “Mother Nature’s fist of fury.” Either as reality, or as really cheesy writing . . ..

MORE: Evacuations in coastal Alabama and Mississippi.

STILL MORE: A million left homeless? Gaia-worshippers will be ecstatic.

More here, from Bill Hennessy.

Huge Katrina link roundup over at Pundit Guy.

MORE STILL: Wolcott has pulled the roooting for hurricanes / fist of fury post, and is receiving praise from some quarters: “Some bloggers will no doubt criticize Wolcott for pulling the post, but it was the right move, and a classy one. It’s easy to make a bad joke. It’s a lot harder to admit it was bad.”

LATER: Hmm. Wolcott says he pulled the post, but it’s still there.

FRITZ HOLLINGS CONNECTS IRAQ TO 9/11 — Ed Morrissey notices something interesting.

A COUNTER-PROTEST at Walter Reed. More here.

DAVE KOPEL says that the press isn’t treating Cindy Sheehan’s actual views with respect.

JIM LINDGREN HAS THOUGHTS on law schools’ diversity problems.

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge has much more.

KATRINA HAS AN IMPACT and it hasn’t even made landfall yet:

U.S. crude oil futures surged more than $4 in opening trade on Monday, hitting a new record high above $70 a barrel after Hurricane Katrina forced Gulf of Mexico producers to shut in more than a third of their output. Katrina, which strengthened into a rare, maximum power Category 5 hurricane as it spun through key oil and gas fields toward New Orleans, shut in a total 633,000 barrels per day (bpd), according to company figures on Sunday. It also forced the closure of seven refineries and a major U.S. crude import terminal.

The refinery damage may be the bigger issue, if the storm performs as feared.

UPDATE: Here’s more on economic damage, including a map of refineries in Louisiana.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Comic relief via Shepard Smith. Crooks & Liars has the video.

MORE: TigerHawk has more on the economic impact of Katrina.

How do you know it’s time to evacuate? When The Weather Channel reporter bugs out.

BREAKING NEWS: It’s all Bush’s fault.

HERE’S A REPORT that Calorie Restriction won’t do much to make people live longer. Not that I was planning on trying it. . . .

SOME IMPORTANT PROGRESS in regenerative medicine. Even better, it’s likely to work for humans.

THE BBC is running reader reports on Katrina.

More blogging here and here.

Watching the TV footage of backed-up traffic trying to escape New Orleans, I’m surprised that they haven’t switched the inbound lanes over to outbound as well. And listening to interviews of people stuck in New Orleans I’m struck by how many people don’t understand that if you wait for orders to evacuate, by then everyone else will be trying to evacuate too and it will be much harder. I suspect, however, that part of people’s slowness to respond stems from the overhyping of previous hurricanes.

UPDATE: Reader Clifford Grout emails:

The inbound lanes of ALL major roads out of New Orleans have been switched to outbound. Called “contraflow”, it’s been going on for about 18 hours now. Working much better this time than the cock-up we had during Ivan.

I am in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and we are battening down the hatches here, too. My parents and in-laws, both living in New Orleans, left yesterday for parts north and west. As a child, I survived both Betsy and Camille, many more since then. This one scares me.

That’s not what I’m seeing on the TV feeds, but perhaps they’re not representative. There’s been so much hurricane hype in the past that I’m reluctant to make too much of this, but I certainly would have gotten out already.

Joe Gandelman has a roundup.

MORE: Reader Mark Hessey emails regarding the contraflow:

I did see a couple of clips where they had done it, but it appears to be piecemeal rather than universal policy. Yet the media keeps reporting that it’s been done, even as they show that it hasn’t on screen.

I hope the New Jersey OEM people are watching for future reference — they do have plans in place for taking that action in a number of shore communities, but if it’s not implemented in a timely fashion it does no good.

I’ve just posted an image from the WDSU webcam showing outbound lanes packed and inbound lanes empty. Doesn’t look like contraflow there. Listening to the reports on cable, it doesn’t sound as if the city of New Orleans has done a very good job of responding so far. The evacuation should have been ordered earlier, efforts to get people out of the city seem to have been inadequate, and the huge lines at the Superdome while people are searched for alcohol and weapons seem like a bad idea to me. I hope that it all works out.

Terry Teachout is rounding up links to webcams, etc.

And here’s an article that makes for sobering reading.

Also Brendan Loy is back.

STILL MORE: Reader Tom Nally emails:

In the New Orleans region, the state and the munipalities did activate plans for flowing people out of the city in both the inbound and outbound lanes of the interstates.

This is formally known as “Contraflow”.

My family escaped by taking I-55 north, and we are now in Memphis. On I-55, both the northbound and southbound lanes were used for northbound traffic, not only in the parishes immediately bordering Orleans Parish, but also going a good 60 miles or so into Mississippi. In fact, I-55 did not revert to its normal traffic flow until we were 62 miles south of Jackson, MS. I was stunned by this demonstration of interstate cooperation.

The problems evacuating New Orleans are due to the fact that too many evacuees have chose to evacuate to the west, going to Houston and points westward. Had they chosen to evacuate north, they would have had few problems. We had zero problems.

Interesting; I don’t know what accounts for these pictures. Enjoy Memphis!

Hog on Ice, meanwhile, has unfortunate information about the likely impact of Katrina on the petroleum industry. And here’s the NWS storm advisory, which doesn’t mince words.

MORE STILL: Stormtrack has a lot of useful links, too.

EVEN MORE: Mel Park emails from Memphis with a positive take on the evacuation:

Friends of ours from New Orleans made it safely to our home in Memphis. Who knows how long they will be here, however. As they said getting out of their car, they may be homeless in a few hours.

As your readers are pointing out, the evacuation planning that has occured since Hurricane Ivan has turned an impossible situation into a bearable one. During Hurricane Ivan our friends had tried to evacuate up I-55 to Memphis but that was impossible. Gridlock forced them west on secondary highways westward and they ended up weathering the storm in Lafayette, LA. This time they tried to repeat the shorter treck to Layfayette but this time gridlock forced them north. They left New Orleans at 6:00am this morning. One lane of I-10 leaving the city was designated for westbound traffic and it was not moving at all. Thousands of drivers were adding to the gridlock by speeding past on the right and cutting off drivers in that one lane. By the time they gave up and switched into the lanes designated for I-55, that is, for Mississippi and Memphis, traffic was surging. They had lost the advantage of their early start but traffic still moved at a reliable 40-50 mph. Traffic control was everywhere. For example, the I-12, I-55 intersection had been a practically unnegotiable choke point last summer during Ivan. Today it has been a well-controlled flow where the authorities are directing traffic along parallel routes in order to distribute the entry of merging traffic onto 1-55 over several intersections.

Besides the contraflow system lasting well into Mississippi, as a reader pointed out, forethought was evident by the signs already out at off ramps designating those where public shelters were being set up. This means that evacuees with not planned destination will be able to find shelter. Good planning.

Sounds like we’ll probably need it. I have to say, though, that from what I’ve seen New Orleans hasn’t been on the ball. The evacuation was too late, there don’t seem to have been many efforts to get people out of the city or to shelter, and whenever I see city officials on TV I get an unpleasant vibe, like in the first half-hour of a disaster flick. I hope that I’m wrong about this, and that everything goes as well as possible, which I’m afraid will still mean “not that well, really.”

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS about the Rolling Stones, from John Leo.

Brian Jones was the real talent in that band anyway; they’ve just been coasting since he died.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE notes that the Associated Press is spinning the Southern Illinois phony-Iraq-war story.

KATRINA UPDATE:

Coastal residents jammed freeways and gas stations as they rushed to get out of the way of Hurricane Katrina, which grew into a dangerous Category 4 storm early Sunday as it headed for New Orleans and the Louisiana coast.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a test. This is the real deal,” New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said at a news conference. “Board up your homes, make sure you have enough medicine, make sure the car has enough gas. Do all things you normally do for a hurricane but treat this one differently because it is pointed towards New Orleans.”

Let’s hope for a last-minute veer. Meanwhile here’s the TTLB Katrina aggregator page for links to lots of other blog posts. And this guy says he’s staying put, which strikes me as deeply unwise if true.

UPDATE: Via Terry Teachout, here’s a transcript of a report on how a major hurricane could affect New Orleans.

MICHAEL BARONE thinks that the age of polarization is coming to an end, and cites, among other things, the strong support for Giuliani in Patrick Ruffini’s straw poll.

THE BRITBLOG ROUNDUP — now renamed the Carnival of the Britblog Roundup — is up.

OUTSOURCING UPDATE:

The rural town of Sebeka, population 710, is not exactly Silicon Valley. It’s hardly the place computer programmer Dave La Reau expected to find employment.

La Reau, who had been job hunting for years, answered a help wanted ad from CrossUSA — one of a half dozen companies actively recruiting workers to small towns in at least eight states. . . .

The workers are part of a growing backlash against the thousands of white-collar jobs sent offshore to places such as India. High-speed computer lines now make it possible for farm country to compete with foreign countries.

Comment from Slashdot: ” I think the idea of moving to a larger house that costs less in a town with no traffic is a much better option than flying to Bangalore to train your replacement.”

Add to this the new ruralism created by boomers cashing out their urban/suburban homes (via NewsAlert) and you may have the beginnings of a rural renaissance. At least if someone can do something about the mountain lions. That’s been a problem before. And I can’t recommend David Baron’s book, The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator’s Deadly Return to Suburban America highly enough. And in light of the above, predator control might even turn out to have an important impact on rural economic development. Nobody’s going to want to settle in a place where they’re worried about kids being eaten.

UPDATE: Michael Totten was on top of the rural gentrification phenomenon months ago.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Frank Martin (better known as Varifrank) emails:

The phenomenon you are talking about is called “homesourcing”, the migration of workers from expensive centralized coastal cities to a distribution of small towns and cities throughout the US Homeland. Silicon valley companies have been going through this phenomenon for several years now, as a direct result of the effort to outsource work to India since 2000.

One thing that is not often discussed is how this movement of workers is a huge benefit to the employee. As a result of “Homesourcing”, Employees are often allowed to take their existing salaries and home equity to other parts of the country where they can have a far greater quality of life at no increase in cost to the company, this is the ultimate win-win for employer and employee. The employer gets a happy employee, and the employee gets a huge increase in real income by moving to a place where their money has more value at no cost to the employer except for the implementation of a VPN system.

The lesson to all small towns across America in regards to the internet is as clear as it was to small towns in the last century in regards to trains and highways, if you want people to come to your town, you need to have high speed internet. If you have it, you are part of the world, if not, your days are numbered.

The cable modem is the most liberating device to humanity since the automobile and its impact will be just as large. Once company management teams understand that they don’t have to be physically with their workers to determine their output, this phenomenon will grow.

One other benefit which is important is that there is no better gas saving device than the cable modem. Workers who are homesourced need very little gas on which to get to work, and as a result, their personal “cost of working” also goes down dramatically.

( full disclosure – I’ve been doing it for 5 years. On the cul-de-sac where I live, there’s only 2 out of 8 people actually drive to work, the rest of us work from our home offices for most of the day to day work. People ask us about how much gas costs and we just laugh.)

Yes, encouraging this sort of thing might well save more gas than an increase in CAFE standards.

UPDATE: Eric Scheie writes: “Not only are we going to reintroduce predators, but there’s a new movement: people belong in zoos.”

Read the whole thing. A few people write that fear of predators is overstated. That’s probably true — but the scenario in the story linked above is eerily similar to the one in Baron’s book, where people were eaten shortly thereafter. The bottom line is that predators used to avoid people because the alternative was being shot. Now that they’re protected, their behavior is different.

MORE: More perspective here:

Craig Packer, a University of Minnesota biologist who conducted the Tanzanian research, said attacks in North America are rare now, but that wasn’t always the case. “Our ancestors dealt with this problem in the 1800’s,” killing off large carnivores en masse, he said. Today, “we just aren’t used to it,” he added.

In Tanzania, by contrast, because of all the attacks on people, lions outside of the national parks are barely tolerated any more.

“A lot of people, especially the more dewy-eyed conservationists, think predators are cute and cuddly,” Mr. Packer said. “They’re not.”

“They’re territorial animals, and can breed rather quickly,” he added. The ultimate goal of his study is to reduce lion attacks on people, which would have the benefit of reducing the number of retaliatory killings of the animals.

In North America, with mountain lions roaming subdivisions all over the West, and black bears scaring suburbanites in New Jersey, Mr. Packer said, “You’re going to see a lot more hard-nosed attitudes about what to do with these animals.”

Here, Mr. Packer said, “the problem will probably be solved by the property owner, with a gun.”

Indeed.

BRENDAN LOY has lots more Katrina-blogging, and observes:

Traffic isn’t terribly bad on the roads leading out of New Orleans right now, according to Jeff Morrow on The Weather Channel. Specifically, he says the road to Baton Rouge is pretty clear. So now is still a good time to evacuate. When the idiot mayor finally announces the mandatory evacuation order tomorrow morning, that will change.

If I lived in New Orleans, I’d be gone by now, even before hearing Brendan warn of “another Camille.” More here.

BILL QUICK HAS A NEW NOVEL OUT: Follow the link for details.

FRED PHELPS MEETS A TENNESSEE EDITORIALIST:

Small, pitiful groups of perverse traitors cloaked in a warped, hate-filled and degraded version of Christianity are tirelessly traveling across America, cruelly protesting at the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq.

They are scheduled to stop in Middle Tennessee today, in Smyrna and Ashland City, to dishonor the solemn services and add to the horror and grief of those who mourn Staff Sgt. Asbury F. Hawn of Lebanon and Spc. Gary Reese Jr. of Ashland City. The Army National Guardsmen served together in the 278th Regimental Combat Team and died in an enemy attack Aug. 13 in Iraq.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., will be there, not to spread the comforting Gospel of Jesus Christ, but to spew a disgustingly vulgar and crude message of gay hatred while celebrating the death of U.S. soldiers.

“Pitiful groups of perverse traitors.” Sounds about right. Michael Silence has more.

TODAY’S MY BIRTHDAY, so blogging is likely to be light. For all of you emailing me about Able Danger, the story’s gotten complicated enough that I’m not sure I have a handle on it. But you can find updates at Kausfiles, The Strata-Sphere, Tom Maguire, and Ed Morrissey’s.

EVAN COYNE MALONEY IS INTERVIEWED at the new (temporary) Pajamas Media site.

SKEPTICISM REGARDING THE “METH EPIDEMIC:”

I’m going on the record now: Meth has peaked. For an epidemic to grow, more new people have to come in–of the current users, some will die or stop using. Just like being a heavy crack user (the “crack whore” phrase has persisted as a slang term), being a heavy meth user seems obviously and extremely unpleasant, so non-users looking for a drug will go elsewhere.

I think that’s right.