The World is not Enough

Bush has been quoted saying over and over:

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

I remember talking to a friend of mine from Louisiana about this a year ago, in particular about how the funding to maintain and upgrade the levees was being cut because of the Operation Iraqi Liberty. In fact, he said that everyone in the state knew that without that money, under a strong Cat3 hurricane, the whole city will go the same way Atlantis went.

You don't believe me, or him? Well, read any of these instead.

[...] On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.

[...] "The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."

Why are threats based on lies and moved by economical interests of the presidents friends taken as true and acted upon? Why are threats well studied and document by scientists and engineers pissed all over killing more Americans in the U.S. than Saddamm could have ever killed? Why are so many Americans fine with this?

I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.
-Leó Szilárd

I just came back from a country whose history was full of natural disasters. The National Museum had a whole wing showing that even before the Tokugawa shogunate, the country as a whole started to get orgazined against them. Their buildings are flexible. Their bridges (and they have many in Tokyo) are built on ball-joints to make them earthquake proof. Their water and electrical system are typhoon proof too. Is this crazy?

Maybe, just maybe, I am not crazy, and a big part of the world is. Or maybe the whole world is crazy. Or maybe the world is not enough.