ShittyBeatlesFCPres

Just in time!

You guys can hate on this but I, for one, have always dreamed of unreliable search results with links to relevant businesses embedded within the text. If only a voice assistant could read them out loud and also remind me to drink Pepsi every other paragraph, we’ll finally have achieved the promise of the Internet.

We always say Katrina was a man-made disaster. I worry with climate change, that other places will be testing their infrastructure. Katrina should have been the canary in the coal mine and a lot of people just said, “Don’t live below sea level.” Old river damns can break just as easily as neglected levees.

Yeah, I’ve lived in New Orleans or on the East Coast my whole life and don’t recall that sort of movement speed. Usually, you want a fast moving storm so no one area takes on all the rain but Helene was going so fast and was so massive that it’s probably unprecedented.

Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall. 

To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)

Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.

I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.

If I woke up and wrote a whole article and got told the headline, I’d never come back into the office.

And one day we’ll have democracy in the South. I have no intention of defending the South. But get you a copy of an old Green Book or ask black people about Boston. There are racists everywhere. There were sundown towns in Oregon. Idaho is still like 30% white supremacists. C’oeur D’alene harassed Utah’s women’s basketball team last year.

I don’t live in the Bible Belt part and I agree with your views but there are more good people in the South than you’d think. It’s not like any party wins 99% to 1%. In New Orleans, I consider us more Caribbean than Southern. South Florida too. Everywhere is complex.

First of all, I have no respect for fascists. Most of them are afraid to drive into a city. They clearly own guns for fear reasons. These men are Nihilists, Donnie, there’s nothing to worry about.

But second of all, the south is not monolithic. Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, Houston, etc. are not the same as the state governments that have disenfranchised people for more than a century. Most people aren’t scum.

The South is like 30% black — majority black where I live — and the black churches organize around civil rights and charity. Jamelle Bouie recently noted that his religion professor once said, “In the black church tradition, Christians worship a Jesus who has been lynched. In the white church tradition, Christians worship a Jesus who could be forgiven for lynching"

I’m personally secular but actually living in the South, it’s more complex than election maps make it seem. People doing work in Georgia against the odds flipped it blue.

🔺🔺🔻🔻◀️ ▶️ ◀️ ▶️ B A Select Start

For those curious, even the Wikipedia page for “perverse incentive” has a picture of a cobra and that story. It’s something most Econ professors and textbooks will use as the classic example. It’s not the same as the Bengal famine. I just mentioned it as something we learned about India besides “Gandhi was like their MLK” or whatever.