"almost prophetically"

yes just like a prophet /sarcasm

Your good at writing Mike. Tell you what, you write up a report that states 1) terror attack Frankfurt 2) nuclear reactor failure and 3) flooding in the southern Länder as major risks to Germany and we could split the cash.

That Sidney is writing such "tidbits" for political gain at such a time is almost as bad as the Guardian readers lapping it up to confirm all their prejudices. Sidneys got his market sussed though - starting with "biblical" was a stroke of genius. My favourite bit is this though:

"A year ago the US army corps of engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane"

Great that. So the USA isnt as paper obsessed as Europe but really the report alone might have taken a few years and come much too late anyways. Of course in Europe at least any such report would have come to the conclusion that the govt set it up to come to anyways but perhaps the US is different?

But of course: "No one can say they didn't see it coming". No of course not! I think its the scale of the thing that has caused the problem and not just the fact that storms hit this area now and again. Any school kid doing geography can tell us that.

Sad is that despite such a human tragedy the world has become so sickeningly prejudiced that even in such a tragedy the "Tätervolk" cant ever be sympathised with as the "Opfer" they are. Shame on Sidney, he should be following the lead of Clinton and leave political gain and his "advice" til after methinks.

It makes me so mad!
 

I was just trying to warn my friends in California that they were next on the list...

For the record, the last paragraph in the post is also part of the Houston Chronicle piece from 2001. Hence, I guess, the Biblical language.

You can pick on Sidney Blumenthal -- I like to do that, too -- but I wonder why it's not obvious that the federal response to the flood is a sickening betrayal of all the promises people heard after 9/11. FEMA's now under the Department of Homeland Security, which was supposed to make us more secure at home. What it seems to have done in practice is add a couple of layers of bureaucracy and strangled what used to be a working agency. Never mind "predicting" a really huge hurricane years in advance; why weren't (say) buses and shelters organized a few days beforehand, when everyone could see Katrina coming? Who was keeping emergency vehicles away from the convention center, when CNN cameras could get in? Why'd the National Guard have to aim guns at people who wanted to help hand out supplies? Sounds like a failure of leadership to me, and you can't blame that on the big surprising storm.
 

Amen, Mike.