'I'll see what I can do!'

Christ.

The news just gets more and more appalling. Reeling from the stories and images, so just some random thoughts, really.

(So many people have more insightful things to say. Here's just one of them.)

Anyway, President Bush says the initial, shoddy response to the crisis, and the total absence of any kind of emergency infrastructure, is "not acceptable". There speaks a man who doesn't even know what "unacceptable" means.

"The incident in the already crippled city came after Louisiana's governor said 300 'battle-tested' National Guardsmen were being sent to quell the unrest.

'They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will,' Kathleen Blanco said."

BBC News, "Bush vows to step up Katrina aid"

"Yee-ha", she might have added.

Among the mailing lists and news sites struggling to understand what's happened, I got passed on this editorial from the Taiwan News:

"New Orleans may go down in history as the first major city in an advanced country to be lost to the process global warming [...] We sincerely hope that the Bush administration will take the call from Hurricane Katrina and reconsider its energy and environmental policies and replace ostrich-like escapism with leadership in the global effort to deal with the crisis of global climatic change."

Taiwan News editorial, "Katrina calls, Bush should listen"

Odd, probably-inappropriate thing: I'd been raving to a mate about Kim Stanley Robinson's "Forty signs of rain" only a week ago, which is about the US administration being forced to acknowledge the effects of climate change as one of its major cities is flooded out.

The follow up, "Fifty degrees below" is out on Monday, and couldn't be any more timely.