Busy, Busy, Busy
Scout of First Draft has been busy as the second anniversary of Katrina approaches. She found an important and extensive Time magazine article by Michael Grunwald, The Threatening Storm:
The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn’t a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2.
It is a long article that looks at the reasons behind the disaster and the failure to adequately address it.
Then she found the charming article about insurance companies featuring Boxing Gloves and Alligators. Yes, they really are stiffing their policy holders, and you are going to be forced to take them to court to get what is in your policy.
Does anyone else think it’s a bit odd that if an individual defrauds an insurance company, it’s a crime and the full resources of the state are deployed against the individual, but if an insurance company defrauds an individual, the individual is required to pay for a lawyer and take the fraud to a civil court? You wouldn’t think that the state should be protecting the powerful from the powerless, but in fact the system protects the rich from the poor.
8 comments
the state already is protecting the powerful from the powerless. not that it should be that way.
Thanks, Hipparchia, I left out a “n’t” which I have a bad habit of doing.
once a proofreader, always a proofreader.
It is one of the weaknesses of working solo that you can’t effectively proof your own copy, even with the “help” of a word processor.
i’m a fallible proofreader of my own copy too, but i’m still better at it than my computer is.
Well, being smarter than Word is not exactly a challenge.
oh gee thanks.
Glad to oblige 😈