new orleans

Chris Knight's avatar

Dear people of New Orleans:

Right now Isaac is still a tropical storm. But we all know how fickle these Atlantic cyclone systems can be. It could still draw enough strength from the warm waters of the Gulf to intensify into a major hurricane. And at the moment most of the computer models have it following the same track that Katrina did seven years ago.

I blogged a lot about Katrina and its aftermath in 2005. Most of it had to do with the failures of government at various levels, from the mayor’s office on up. I don’t want to do that again in 2012.

So let’s be blunt…

Ray Nagin is not mayor of New Orleans anymore.

Kathleen Blanco is not governor of Louisiana anymore.

George W. Bush is not President of the United States anymore.

You folks still have time. My advice is to play it safe, take ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Five years ago tonight was when Hurricane Katrina roared ashore and beat the city of New Orleans to within an inch of its life. The photo is a now-famous one taken of the storm surge as Katrina made landfall.

Katrina started out life on August 23rd, 2005 as a tropical system in the southeastern Bahamas. It did substantial damage and caused a number of deaths as it went across the Florida peninsula. And then Katrina entered the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico… where it became the monster that would ultimately cause the worst natural disaster in American history.

Five years later and Katrina is being debated as hotly as ever. I thought at the time that the situation became one of the worst clusterf-cks ever for government at all levels (and both major parties, mind ya).

But there were also quite a lot of stories about the positive ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

From Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis…

The person who submitted the photo writes…

“Got the photo from a friend. The white sign that has been blacked out used to be the Toy Center. The biggest & best toy store in New Orleans in the late 50’s early 60’s. The Coca Cola bottling plant & Tulane Shirt Company were just to the left on S. Jefferson Davis Parkway. Times have changed.”

I remember back in the early Nineties when Haiti was being torn apart following the military coup that overthrew Aristide. People there became so hard-up for money, that they had resorted to looting cemeteries: digging up graves to steal jewelry, gold teeth and even silk casket linings to sell. That’s the kind of desperation that whenever I see a picture like this or hear somesuch else so similar, I have to wonder how far we really are from the ...

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