Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Between emails at work, I made my way through After the Deluge, a webcomic about Hurricane Katrina, pre, post and during. I read it from the beginning as recommended at MetaFilter, which I'm re-subscribed to after a few years of not following the still-incredible community site.

The New York Times Magazine has a long article by Michael Lewis about catastrophic risk, covering insurance analyst John Seo. I'm surprised there's no mention of Nassim Taleb and his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (which I have not yet read) about the very subject of forecasting events as unlikely and unpredictable as a hurricane devastating a major city .

Naomi Klein: “It certainly seems that ever-larger portions of the globe are under active reconstruction: being rebuilt by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs, government and UN aid agencies and international financial institutions. And from the people living in these reconstruction sites--Iraq to Aceh, Afghanistan to Haiti--a similar chorus of complaints can be heard. The work is far too slow, if it is happening at all. Foreign consultants live high on cost-plus expense accounts and thousand- dollar-a-day salaries, while locals are shut out of much-needed jobs, training and decision-making. Expert "democracy builders" lecture governments on the importance of transparency and "good governance," yet most contractors and NGOs refuse to open their books to those same governments, let alone give them control over how their aid money is spent.”

Klein decries what she calls "disaster capitalism", where after a natural disaster—her examples are Hurricane Mitch and the South East Asia Tsunami—and unnatural, such as the war in Iraq, leading to the World Bank or other non-govnernmental organizations pushing for privatization of state-owned assets. She wrote the article before Hurricane Katrina hit, but she no doubt would have found cause for concern, for example, the now-repealed "Gulf Coast Wage Cut".

I donated some money to the Canadian Red Cross and directed the money to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Unlike Sept. 11 or the Sri Lanka tsunami, this was the first disaster where we got a heads up about it a couple days beforehand. It was going to be bad, I knew, but I had no idea it would be this bad.