I'm preparing a talk on "lessons learned" from the high-profile natural disasters over the past 18 months, and staking out a (possibly predictable) contrarian position that there have been no lessons learned as a result of these events. That is, for all the horrible consequences of these events and all the unevenness and ineffectualness of the responses, nothing unforeseen really happened. The vulnerabilities we worried about, the response pitfalls that kept us up at night, were the ones that manifested over the course of these disasters.
I remember a New Yorker cartoon from the late 1980s or possible early 1990s that evokes this sentiment, and I wanted to try to find it. So far I've not turned it up, and I was wondering if anyone has a suggesting of how to locate it. It shows a couple of men looking calmly out on a scene in which alien spacecraft are utterly destroying a city with cartoon-style ray-gun weaponry. The caption has one man saying "Of course the market had already discounted all this" or something like that. Thanks for any tips. Marc
