Another serious hurricane has hit Puerto Rico, and the response is inadequate. I continue to see this as an indicator of U.S. decline as a competent modern nation. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the response was incompetent, and we were horrified. Our collective reaction to the inadequate response (can we say incompetent when there wasn’t even much effort) in Puerto Rico last time around was more of a shrug. This time, it gets maybe half a day of national media coverage and we barely notice. (Or maybe it was because I was listening to BBC World to find out about the world, and they were somewhat understandably focused on their queen’s passing? A significant historical figure to be sure, but Mikhail Gorbachev just passed away for crying out loud and even THAT only got a couple days of coverage.) We are coming to just accept mediocrity and incompetence as disasters keep hitting us, and our complacency will lead to decline as we do not demand anything better.

Speaking of horrific hurricane disasters, I was perusing this article about Myanmar, where things are pretty awful, and was then struck by the figure (nice tree map!) near the bottom showing the number of displaced people in the Philippines. That seems like a really bad situation, and it has gotten very little media coverage in the U.S., at least that I noticed.