Houston

I’ve seen the flooding in  Houston characterized as ‘biblical,’ which means, apparently, really bad, huge, massive, awesome, epic.  Well, as much  as I  dislike hyperbole, this is a big one, for sure.  The city has been turned into a lake.  Overpasses are underwater.  Boats glide the surface over entirely submerged cars.  People are dead.  Tens of  thousands are homeless, at least temporarily  and some probably longer than that.
And it’s still  raining.

You can’t actually blame Trump for the storm, but his anti-government attitude has made the recovery harder and will, going forward, make it harder still.  But Trump is a bump  in the road.  When Bush suffered no repercussion despite his criminal negligence during Katrina, it became almost inevitable that a Trump would come  along.
The larger issue, of course, is  global  warming, and  I still see people arguing that this hurricane is no different than other hurricanes and that we really shouldn’t worry about it.  It’s not the natural world  which  is killing  us.  The natural world is completely indifferent.  It’s the idiots among us, who are actually against trying to make sensible improvements, that will do us  in  in the end.
Here’s the part that  I  don’t understand:  we’ve had the technology to move water from one place to another at least as long ago as ancient Rome, and I’m sure the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians had some ideas  in  that direction as well.  We have pipes.  We have pumps.  How  is it we do not have a comprehensive, world wide system for moving water  from places where it is unwanted to places where it  is?  Why is it that when a city like Houston is suddenly inundated with water – salt or fresh – that that water isn’t immediately drawn off, filtered and purified, and dropped off  someplace where it could be used, like Kansas or Wyoming?
I’m sure it’s a bit more complicated than I’ve made it sound but, if we can put men on the moon, pinpoint planets that are light years away, and have thousands of robots dancing in perfect unison, we should  be able to do that.