I found this interesting.

This is from the website of one of the most intelligent authors I've ever read. His name is Dan Simmons, and he's written what are widely considered to be superlatives in nearly every field he's tackled. I've cut-and-pasted because, come next month, this message will be no more...and it deserves to be preserved.

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In a landmark 1979 controlled psychology experiment, Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloy set up a simple game-show-like situation in their laboratory where subjects were placed in front of a panel that looked rather like the starship control boards on the first-season Star Trek shows – i.e. they held only a green light, a yellow light, and a single spring-loaded button.
The subjects were instructed to try to make the green light flash as frequently as possible. In one trial, the subjects won money each time they caused the green light to flash. In another, the same subjects lost money when they didn’t. After the “game,” the subjects were interviewed about how much control they had over making the green light flash.
Their answers, as one might expect, differed according to certain variables. Mostly, it depended upon whether they were winning or losing money. When they were winning, all the subjects thought they had quite a bit of control. Most rated their control between 60 and 65 on a scale where 0 indicated no control at all and 100 indicated total control.
When they were losing, the subjects felt that they had little or no control.
In other words, the subjects – who were in a group that Abramson and Alloy labeled as “normal,” meaning that the main thing they had in common was no history of depressive mental illness – took credit for the good scores and handed off the blame when their scores were poor.
Then Abramson and Alloy sent Igor out to find some “abnormal brains” – i.e. subjects whose one common shared experience was a history of serious depression.
After playing the same game for real money, in both its variations, these depressed subjects – to a man and woman – had different responses when debriefed. It didn’t matter whether they’d been winning or losing; these abnormal-brain people believed that they had no control at all. They didn’t even believe the spring-loaded button was hooked up to anything most of the time.
They were correct, of course. The “game” was a fiction. Abramson and Alloy had been carefully limiting the amount of real control and dishing out “wins” and “losses” themselves. Ask not for whom the green light flashes, it flashes for the guys wearing white lab coats there behind the one-way mirror.
In the new book LINCOLN’S MELANCHOLY by Joshua Wolf Shenk, the author quotes the science writer Kyla Dunn on the implications of this experiment:
“Previously, depressed people were believed to be drawing conclusions about themselves and their experiences that were unrealistically distorted towards the negative. Yet as this research suggests, one cognitive symptom of depression may be the loss of optimistic, self-enhancing biases that normally protect healthy people against assaults to their self-esteem. In many instances, depressives may simply be judging themselves and the world much more accurately than non-depressed people and finding it not a pretty place.”
Let’s let the implications of this statement on implications sink in for a minute.
Could it be possible that people who have chosen to live in a city that lies as much as 15 feet below the level of the water surrounding it – including the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, and a huge lake – and who have created a political structure dedicated to siphoning off money approved to improve such non-immediate-gratification infrastructure things as levees and wetlands and pumping stations for five decades and more – have little right to shout they that are “Shocked! Do you hear me? Shocked!” to discover that water flows in when their luck finally runs out, long after odds suggested it should, and the tip of a Level 4 hurricane finally taps their city and floods it?
Could it be possible that city and state planners who act as if “mandatory evacuation” means “hey, dude, if you’re in the mood to go, go, if not, cool” and who fail even to begin to act on their own emergency plans for providing vehicles to transport the poor and elderly and ill – and who then invite more than 19,000 of these poorest, least-self-enabling people in the nation to come huddle in their Superdome with no plans to feed them or provide air conditioning or sanitary facilities or security – have little right to scream “get off your asses” and “where the hell are you?” to either the federal government or the rest of the nation two days later?
Could it be possible that the mayor who told Oprah Winfrey – that arbiter of all things literary and moral and compassionate in America – that “They have people standing out there, have in that . . . Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people” might have some explaining to do when the coroner and saner authorities later report that there were no murders in either the Superdome or Convention Center?
Could it be possible that New Orleans Superintendent of Police Eddie Compass – later “self-evacuated” (to use his and Mayor Nagin’s favorite term) from his own position – was stuffed absolutely full of wild blueberry muffins when he announced on Sept. 1 that “We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten [in the Superdome and convention center]?” Follow-up investigations showed no such occurrences.
Nor did the media in the aftermath of Katrina show much restraint or professional discipline. It’s one thing to watch “reporters” such as Anderson Cooper or Geraldo Rivera or even Shep Smith break down and go buggy on camera after several days of standing on an overpass – but at one point I watched Geraldo, whom my daughter once described as “someone who’s always trick or treating at the dark houses,” grab a 10-month-old baby from its mother and thrust it at the camera lens and, while weeping, shout, “Here! What it’s about!! Baby! Baby!”
As we know now, the media rarely heard a story of wretched excess during this real tragedy that they took time to confirm before erroneously reporting –
there were 10,000 or more dead bodies in flooded New Orleans (Mayor Nagin’s statement soon taken as Gospel . . . the actual number will be in the low hundreds)
in the Superdome there were children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up like cordwood in the basement and – Mayor Nagin’s coup de grâce to Oprah – “babies being raped.”
according to an Ottawa newspaper, trigger-happy National Guardsmen gunned down one man simply seeking help. Nothing like that happened. The Associated Press picked up the story and ran with it
And everywhere the absolute outrage at the federal government in general and at “Bush” in particular. The Europeans know – and crowed about it in the press and official government announcements in France and Germany – that Bush had not only been incompetent in his reaction to Katrina and racist in his disregard for victims but had actually caused the devastation – the hurricane itself – by not signing the Kyoto Protocol.
When the green light doesn’t flash enough, it has to be someone’s fault. Nothing can be out of our control. Gambling casinos lined up for 30 miles like fat dominoes with their rear exits ten feet from the Gulf of Mexico have a God-given right to be there forever.
Many city residents who ignored a “mandatory evacuation order” – given in a bored monotone by a mayor whom one pundit succinctly described as “exhibiting the oddest extremes of detachment and agitation” – immediately after the flood began looting plasma TVs, electronics, sneakers, clothing, leaving nothing behind (besides their own shucked off clothing) in one Wal-Mart, according to its manager after the disaster, “except all the Country and Western CDs. If someone wants a Shania Twain CD, we can accommodate them.”
Are we to evaluate this as normal behavior given chaos and tragedy and flooding? If so, how are we to explain the massive flooding in the Midwest in the early 90’s when such cities as Des Moines IA, Lawrence KS, Hannibal MO, Quincy IL, and other cities were flooded and the residents turned out by the thousands to help one another until serious state and federal assistance arrived – sometimes weeks later – and during which there were almost no incidents of looting? Townspeople in one community along the Missouri or other tributaries would – after they sandbagged up their own makeshift levees and provided for their own temporarily homeless – move on to another town like Hannibal to help them fight the floods back and rescue and evacuate their people.
Perhaps the moral here is not WHO IS TO BE BLAMED FOR THIS? but rather the habitual melancholic’s view of “Most of the time events are not under our control” – only our reaction to events is.

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I myself have been guilty of taking media reports as truth, when I really should know better: the media, up here in Canada, knows that George Bush is an idiot, and his idiocy is self-evident no matter what he does. (Funny, the man scored in the 95th percentile on his S.A.T.s...okay, what to do with that factoid? Ignore it? Or insinuate he bribed somebody to get those marks?)

I've lambasted Bush on his Katrina response right along with the rest of the patsies, and while I stand by my criticism, it's obvious Bush alone wasn't responsible for Katrina's impact. Doing a little research, I read that the Sierra Club was instrumental in stopping a project to reinforce the New Orleans levees in the 1970s. Apparently they sued over the environmental impact. Isn't that funny? Yeah. You could die laughing.
This does not mitigate Bush's disdain for the environment, only shows that nothing is as simple as it seems. And it proves something else as well: the game is rigged, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't, and pessimists are actually realists. Who knew?