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Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Oct 2005

Katrina did her worst. For many years geologists have predicted that the Mardi Gras city of New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. Situated between a river, a lake and the ocean, New Orleans is also significantly beneath sea level. There are levees (like the Dutch dikes) which exist to prevent the city from being swallowed by the sea. The old French settlers discovered that the city went under water in the summer and so built their houses on stilts.

Despite all such man-made attempts to turn back the basic rules of nature, hurricane Katrina, a force four, ripped through the barriers and destroyed a famous city at the end of August. The news and the pictures and the stories coming out of the area are simply horrific. Not now is there simply the natural disaster (of biblical proportions as one secular commentator noted), but there is also the human chaos inflicted on a society broken down, and rumours and eyewitness accounts of brutality and looting begin to abound.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Apr 2006

Readers of a certain ilk may recognise the reference to an album from the aged rock group Supertramp: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ The picture on that album ironically captured a man sunbathing with icons of industrial waste in the background.

For many today, the American establishment’s refusal to act on warnings of global warming has a similarly absurd, ostrich-like head in the sand feel. It would be funny if it were not so tragic.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Aug 2002

When I was an undergraduate at university in England, our college hockey team solicited corporate sponsorship from Arthur Anderson accounting LLC. The team used to sing, in raucous and irreligious fashion: 'Arthur Anderson had many sons' to the well-known church tune of 'Father Abraham had many sons'.

Little did I think at the time that Arthur Anderson would be the syndicated accountancy firm hired by Enron. Enron, famously now, has been caught up in an accounting scandal that destroyed the once corporate giant. Now, bad news following upon bad, WorldCom has declared that it overestimated its revenues by several billion dollars. Fast on the heels of that news, venerable stock-safe-haven Xerox has mentioned that it too has overestimated its revenues to the tune of a few billion dollars.