Monthly Archives: September 2005

Note to the editor of the FT: sack Amity Shlaes now

Amity Shlaes in the Financial Times: “The level of preparedness for a giant storm may not have been obvious outside the country. But the US was prepared for Katrina. All the old and new federal offices worked together and confronted the storm early.” (Thankfully available to subscribers only.)

I’ve always thought she was the world’s worst columnist for one of the world’s best newspapers. Her most recent column should be the last straw if Andrew Gowers is reading his own paper.

Just the facts

I look forward to receiving my weekly copy of The New Yorker, but I expect higher standards of fact-checking than they seem to muster at the moment.

The current issue has an article by Adam Gopnik which is largely about a restaurant called St John’s. The opening sentence refers to Smithfield market in the “East End” of London.

Anyone familiar with London will know that Smithfield isn’t remotely in the East End. It is in a western corner of the City of London. The East End lies to the east of the City.

The crucial timeline

Kevin Drum posts a devastating chronology of the Bush administration’s treatment of the likelihood of catastrophic flood damage in New Orleans. Read the whole, depressing timeline. His conclusion:

Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It’s the Bush administration in a nutshell.

I heard an interview on NPR yesterday with a Dutch civil engineering expert (the Netherlands is a a country that is largely below sea level). He noted that the flood defences around New Orleans were designed to protect against a once in a century event. The Netherlands, after tragic floods that killed 1,800 people in 1953, designed their defences to protect against a once in 10,000 years event. It cost a lot more, but compared to the cost of failure he said it was “peanuts”.

He's been reading his Walt Whitman

Howell Raines: “Oh, wondrous city of music that floats from the horn and poems drowned in drink! Oh, cheesy clip-clop metropolis of phony coach-and-fours hauling the drunken Dodge salesmen of Centralia, Illinois, of shaky-handed failed watercolourists hanging unloved pictures on the wrought-iron fence at Jackson Square, of gaunt-eyed superannuated transvestite hookers, of Baptist girls suddenly inspired to show their tits on Chartres Street in return for a string of beads flung by a drunken college boy on the balcony of his daddy’s $1,500 suite at the Soniat House – must we lose even these dubious glories of the only American city that’s never been psychoanalysed?”