Location, location, location

Jane Galt has a number of great posts up on Katrina-related items. In this one, she addresses a number of the myths surrounding what created the immense devestation in New Orleans and the surrounding area. In particular, she drowns the notion that the tragedy is primarily due to the powers that be not caring about the poor (while conceding that the screwed up pretty royally in many ways) and actually more a result of the particular geography, climate, and land use patterns of the United States. Which seems pretty obvious, but you see a lot of people smugly implying that Europeans would have done so much better. Read the whole thing to see why this isn't necessarily the case.