Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Puckered Sphincters

Well, I picked up the Mrs. last night off a flight from Boston. As she approached me through the terminal, she had that look in her eye. As usual, she was happy to see me and I her and, after a kiss that drew comments from passersby, she looked at me and said, "they're scared".

Background: Mrs. F is an executive at a large insurance company and the only thing on anybody's lips is 'Katrina'. The last time I saw them get worried like this was right after 9/11 as they began to consider the payouts and liability. (My wife's company insured many of the companies occupying WTC.)

This isn't just a humanitarian disaster, it is an economic one. Fuck the price of oil going up, watch for a bunch of insurance companies to go under thanks to this hurricane. They're also seriously considering this:

[. . .]

Time to decide what to do next, rather than waste more money than absolutely necessary giving the once glorious, now hideously ruined, corpse the ICU treatment. Pull the plug. Now. Go inland a ways, either west towards Baton Rouge or north of Ponchartrain, and use that $25 billion to create a new city from scratch. Get today's incarnation of Pierre l'Enfant to lay out a liveable plan, and go for it. Because otherwise you're going to have Gaza On the Mississippi with refugees living in tents for years waiting to return to a town that just isn't there any more.


This is gonna hurt us more than we think. Not just the poor folks in the area but people all over the nation. It should completely unfold over the next couple months. Brace yourselves.

Update: As of 6:15 this morning, regular gas hits $3.41 on Eastern Long Island. And so it begins . . .

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