It isn’t immediately obvious, but Walter Brasch’s article about the media, Downsizing the News And Pretending to Increase the Quality, and Tom Lasseter’s about the oil industry, Russia’s oil boom may be running on empty, are both addressing the worst concept in business today, no matter what area that business is in: sacrificing long term survival for near term profits.

There are very few investors left in the business world, people who are making decisions that will provide profits for generations from research and development of new products or resources to keep the business viable. Today people with capital are gamblers looking for the maximum profit possible in the near term.

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So, what do you do when waiting for a storm and it’s three hours between updates [minor at 1 & 7, major at 4 & 10 CDT]? Well, you could actually get some work done and listen to some mood music:

Rain
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Night on Bald Mountain
Riders on the Storm
Who’ll Stop the Rain
Rainy Night in Georgia

Or, just ignore the whole thing…nah, that won’t work.

Position: 16.6 N 71.4 W. [10 PM CDT]
Movement: Northwest [310°] near 12 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 70 mph.
Wind Gusts: 85 mph.
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 50 miles.
Minimum central pressure: 990 mb.

It is 150 miles South-Southeast of Port au Prince, Haiti.

Gustav is obviously in a favorable environment for strengthening, and Haiti and the Dominican Republic are going to get pasted again with what currently appears to be an even stronger storm than Fay.

[10 PM] Gustav has an eyewall and will probably be a hurricane in the 1 AM update, if not before.

Position: 15.5 N 70.1 W. [10 AM CDT]
Movement: Northwest [305°] near 15 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 35 mph.
Wind Gusts: 45 mph.
Minimum central pressure: 1006 mb.

It is 260 miles Southeast of Port au Prince, Haiti.

Tropical Storm warnings up for Hispaniola. It will be Tropical Storm Gustav later today and is following a track very similar to TS Fay.

There isn’t a brain to be found anywhere in the world of “Homeland Security”.

Ellroon at Rants from the Rookery excerpts an article about coming through US Customs, which has become a degrading process as you are treated like a criminal. The process is supposed to be to “protect” the US, but no one really knows from what or whom.

Fallenmonk has a piece, Incompetence Cubed, that is concerned with a major problem for the entire system: the IT infrastructure that is supposed to be used to amass all of the data collected and to provide information about possible threats doesn’t work, and is unlikely to be of any use in the near future, if ever. Another failed Federal computer system.

They keep hoovering up all of this data on everyone, and they have no way of putting it in a retrievable format, they are just piling it up.

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