Crap Throwing Monkey

Different college. Duh.

So if I give money to a charity, they spend my donation, the government reimburses them...haven't I effectively then donated twice, since it's my tax dollars reimbursing them for spending what was my donation in the first place? This may quite possibly be the stupidest idea I've ever heard come out of the federal government.

Implicit in that is the assumption that all expenses are paid for on a cruise ship, somthing I don't personally know but rather doubt (at the very least...they have gift shops, right? They must have SOME way of separating passengers from their money via discretionary spending above and beyond the price of the cruise itself.) And also implicit is a single incorrect fact: not all cruise packages are $599 a person. Some of them are much, much more. I just did a quick search on cruise prices, and they range from $399 all the way up to $2000, depending on the package - or between $100 and $200 per day per person, which is a more accurate count. $1275/person/week is about $170-180 a day - well within the range, albiet at the high end...but of course it looks exorbitant when you only compare it to a $599 bargain package.

Randolph Scott, ridin' the range alone. Gene and Tex and Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid...

So what you're saying, in effect, is that the mayor of Milwalkee wasn't responsible when his entire city became ill with cryptosporidiosis because of faulty water treatment in the '90's...it was Clinton's fault, because municipal management is the responsibility of not just the federal government, but the executive branch of the federal government, and not the municipality itself. I'll bet the USGS and FEMA took too long to respond to the Northridge earthquake as well...? And it must be a bunch of presidents' faults that Buffalo's in receivership as well... The federal government is not responsible for municipal planning. Municipalities are, be it budgeting, public health infrastructure, or emergency response.

And the reasoning behind this bull sh-- idea is...?

But then I'd be unconscious, and she'd just leave... ...oh, wait...

Her abdomen could use a little tightening. And she's no Ashley Judd. Not that I'd kick her out of bed, though. Hell, not that a shmoe like me would ever get her INTO bed to begin with...

Uh, no. I blame Nagin because emergency preparedness is the responsibility of the municipality, and New Orleans wasn't prepared. Do you really think that FEMA maintains a plan for every single municipality in the country so that, in the event of an emergency, they can move in and say "We're taking over now."??? Believe it or not, the federal government is not responsible for everything. States and municipalites do have some responsibilities they have to fulfill.

Yeah, like that helps their case. "We don't have anyone there, so we're just going to copy someone else's report and hope they're not full of sh--." Good reporting that.

I passed on CORBA too when I was unemployed. I have $500 in medical bills on a monthly basis, half of which is prescriptions. CORBA coverage would have cost me $350, with a $250 deductible and no prescription coverage. Didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that paying $350 for the privilege of paying $500 out-of-pocket each month was a bad idea when I could simply pay the $500 out of pocket and NOT line some insurance company's pockets. Of course, CORBA would have covered major medical expenses like losing a leg in a car accident...but I don't believe I have a right to be treated if I lose a leg in a car accident. So if I had...oh, well. Would've sucked.

Didn't mean to sound like I'm criticizing; the space program is an obvious inference, and the first one that's going to jump to most people's minds (mine included). I think, though, the mythological explanation fits better with the general theme of the show as established.

Funny. I just did the same thing (with the logo on whassisname's jumpsuit), and I'm 100% sure it's a traditional yin-yang symbol. (I'll check the fuse box scene tomorrow; I'm too tired to go back right now.) Couldn't make out any words, though. And I'm completely, dead-nuts, you-can-rip-off-my-arm-if-I'm-wrong positive those are the I Ching trigrams. Given the meanings of the I Ching, and the show's notable penchant to heavily use references to philosophy...it makes a hell of a lot more sense being the yin-yang symbol than it does a swan. Unless the logo's different on the fusebox and jumpsuit, which I also doubt.

Way to screw up the friggin' punch line, dumbass. It's supposed to be: Now THAT'S funny!

And in regards to the Apollo candy bars...it might not have anything to do with the space program. Apollo was the Greco-Roman god of prophecy (for which the I Ching was used) and medicine ("quarantine").

That logo is in part based on the I Ching - specifically, the eight patterns of solid and broken bars around the outside. And now that I think of it, the "swan" couldn have been a stylized yin-yang. There aren't many good web sites on the I Ching; best I found is Wikipedia, but it's not very good. (Although this site has a pretty good diagram of the trigrams, very close if not identical to the logo.) Most of the others are concentrated on fortune-telling, for which the I Ching is used, but it's significantly more than that. The basics as relate to that logo, though, are that the eight patterns represent the "the constituents of the universe, which form the basis of a cosmological system [...] The Eight Trigrams, together with thei Sixty-four Hexagrams formed by their combinations, therefore, represent all the possible situations and mutations of creation, a universe in miniature. This offers a good illustration of the transformation from simplicity to complexity." (From one of my books on Eastern philosophy.) Or, put simply: "You All Everybody".

Plus, Mike Brown's experience with the horses' asses made him uniquely suited to manage a government agency.

Hypocrisy in government leadership and partisan politics? Why, that's almost unheard of...

Based on my experiences with management...no, I don't. I'd say management ability's more important. A good manager can (and usually will) lean on SME's for guidance...but a bad manager with subject matter expertise will be a bad manager. I've seen it many different times in many different industries; I have absolutely no reason to believe that it somehow wouldn't hold true in this one particular case. When you get to a certain level in an organization "management" ceases to be subject-matter specific and tends to generalization, it seems. I suspect, for example, that Bill Gates would ultimately be as effective managing an auto parts manufacturer as he is in IT, and conversely Ray Nagin would be as incompetent managing a McDonalds as he is managing a major metropolitian region.

Why government? Why not petition the industry to allow private agencies representing pools of small companies to do that? I don't see where that has to be a government program.

What, don't like FEMA?

Tom Brady in the "Terror of Turnovia" was the funniest thing I've ever seen! "Help! I'm trapped behind a line of figurative metaphors and I'm trying to throw deep to a soda machine!"

And imagine if the media didn't suck, and we could concentrate on real questions like that on a national level. The problem is, they DO suck. And thus, we can't reflect on the most appropriate way for a municipality to prepare for and respond to a monster hurricane, because we're too busy following the finger-pointing. The media may not be at fault, but they sure as hell don't help either.

My experience is that, too. I'm a lousy manager, and I'm pretty sure a fancy MBA isn't going to change that. It sure hasn't for all the other lousy managers I've known. On the other hand, I've known several good ones who'd be good without the MBA. Some of the best I've known didn't even have MBAs. The bottom line, though, is that while I don't know what Brown's management experience was like, I do know that it was more important than his emergency response experience for the position he was in. Likewise Ray Nagin...whose problem was that he clearly had no experience or ability in either.

We're talking about an august body that spent more time on Terry Schiavo than it did on FEMA oversight. Possible? I'd say it's f'in likely.