I’M NOT SO OPTIMISTIC: Ida might tell us if we learned anything from Katrina.

UPDATE: It seems my lack of confidence was not misplaced.

Also:

When you have the political class of a banana republic, eventually things start to look like a banana republic.

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments: “To tie it back to another commenter’s point in another thread, we have a managerial class who have MBAs and other credentials from all the correct schools, but are utter incompetents. They learned to game the system, and have relied on decades worth of accumulated social, political, cultural, and economic capital to carry them through these crises. Now that capital is almost used up, and they’re discovering that they are vastly overleveraged.”