Jenny was kind enough to forward this to me.  Very funny stuff.

BERLIN (Reuters) – German police called to a break-in at an apartment in the northern town of Itzstedt found the intruder still on the premises and hiding under a kitchen cabinet.

The "cat burglar" had somehow crawled into the ground-floor of the apartment, broken window blinds, torn down drapes and trashed furniture.

Police also found fish and fish remains from a broken aquarium scattered around the apartment, said Julika Reinhardt, spokesman for the police in the town north of Hamburg.

I'm sure you can guess where this is going.  Read the rest of the story here.

I've grown tired of the rhetoric from around the globe which blames Katrina's strength and devastation on global warming.  What pseudoscience books are you people reading?

Katrina was a category 4 storm — nothing more.  They happen regularly and are normal cycles of nature.  If Katrina was some kind of biblical storm, why does the hurricane rating system go up to 5?

What made Katrina so destructive was where it hit.  The warning over a catastrophic hurricane strike on New Orleans has been on the lips of scientists for many decades, spurred on by historical evidence which shows it has happened regularly in the past and the worry of what impact such a storm could have on the precariously weak levee system around the city.

There is no evidence to show that this is global warming.  On the other hand, there's more than enough evidence to show it's part of the planet's normal cycle and was predicted many decades before environmentalists jumped on the bandwagon.  Now that it's happened, those with political agendas are screaming Kyoto and global warming and the like.  How small minded.  How uninformed.

Where is the evidence?  There is none.  We as yet do not understand the planet's weather systems.  We can't predict what the weather will be like tomorrow, yet we feel as though we fully understand man's impact on the weather?

We know that decadal oscillations in the oceans cause dramatic and significant weather patterns.  We don't fully understand the mechanics that make El Niño and La Niña happen, but we do understand how they impact global weather.  We know the planet goes through weather cycles which span decades and are naturally occurring.  We know that the planet has heated up and cooled down — in dramatic ways that caused mass extinctions — many times in its history, all without help from man.

A perfect example of that is the decades-long season of increased hurricane activity we're now facing.  This is a normal cycle of the planet which we've known about for some time and predicted long ago.  This particular cycle occurs regularly based on many global variables which, from time to time, combine together to increase hurricane intensity and activity for, on average, 10-30 years at a time.  This is nothing more than Mother Nature doing her own thing as she's done for a very long time, something she's been doing since long before man arrived.

Hurricanes happen.  This was not a category 5 storm which would have been significantly worse.  It happens to have been a category 4 storm which hit an area of the coast that was susceptible to such an event and has been since the country was founded.  People have been warning of such a strike for a long time, since long before talk of global warming ever crossed a single human lip.

Yes, Katrina was bad.  It was a strong storm that hit us where we were weakest and most susceptible to a catastrophe.  But that's all it was.  Remember that Andrew was bad, too, and happened many years ago, yet we did not point and say "proof of global warming."

It disgusts me to see and hear of people saying things like "sorry 'bout that, but you got what you deserved because you won't follow Kyoto or act more dramatically on global warming."  That's just disgusting and is completely and absolutely inaccurate from a scientific point of view.  It's an unprovable and unsupported leap of faith, attempting to mask a normal weather phenomenon behind political ramblings.

Just shut the fuck up about it already.  Stop politicizing a horrific event with significant loss of life and property.  Stop spewing junk science like it's fact instead of fiction.

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

From an e-mail I sent to Jenny earlier today.  I thought it spoke for itself.

The more I see about Katrina, the more I realize this is very, very bad. It's going to hurt our country tremendously, not to mention the damage to life and property. I think things are going to get bad. It'll be hard to get gas in some areas, gas prices will continue to rise at some level in response to the shutdown of some big pieces of our infrastructure, the displacement is going to change the economics in neighboring states (and not in a good way), the health crisis in affected areas could give rise to outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever, the loss of significant business areas and operations, the massive rollout of national guard troops in affected areas and areas which have taken on significant increases in populations and need more police manpower (there's a need for at least 40,000 additional troops [or other uniformed police-enabled personnel] in Louisiana alone), and the list goes on. Amazingly, when it made landfall, it did not occur to me how bad it was going to be. I thought it was going to be pretty bad, but not like this. There are places where the devastation is absolute — there's nothing left.

It feels almost like 9/11 again, looking at the death and destruction (bodies floating in the water and lying in the streets), but, in this case, it's so much more significant because the damage is spread over more than 90,000 square miles at last estimate (roughly the size of the UK). In this case, unlike 9/11, entire cities have been completely disabled for months to come. Very disturbing, and watching the anguish of the people in New Orleans is difficult. Wow… That's all I can say; it's amazing in the worst of ways.

In this case, it truly is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The more time passes, the more we realize the magnitude and severity of the devastation and impact. Well, we know it was bound to happen, and they've been predicting this kind of storm in that area having that kind of impact since the early 1970s at least. It's horrible, but it's not a complete surprise. Based on history, it was due.

More and more I'm disturbed by this situation.  Congress returned to Capitol Hill on a Sunday night given very short notice in order to address the Terri Schiavo situation (to pass some kind of blah-blah-blah-bill to say that the feeding tube needed to be reinserted), yet they've stayed "out of session" all week even though the hurricane hit on Monday, although there is talk of a possible return to Washington tomorrow — on Friday — to address budget concerns with FEMA's response to the hurricane and possibly to make some other mention of the devastation their constituencies have experienced.

Our federal government has failed in its obligation to the American people.  Our local governments (in New Orleans, at least) have failed to provide proper disaster-recovery planning for a situation which, as I mentioned, has been predicted at minimum for decades.

And now we've engaged Bush version 1.0 and Clinton to help deliver private donations in an effort similar to their activities after the tsunami.  That's something, especially given that their efforts for tsunami victims was relatively successful.

Speaking of the countries impacted by the tsunami, I am pleased to tears in announcing that the president of Sri Lanka called Bush and offered to spearhead an effort to raise support in the countries we helped following that great tragedy.  It truly does move one to emotional response to know that what we did there was not unnoticed.  Those countries are terribly poor, so it's highly unlikely they could make a significant financial dent in the hardship, but the mere gesture can reduce one to tears.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

— Unknown