Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

[pzarquon]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

That convention center story is harrowing. And I remember hearing reports out of there more than a day ago. The NPR reporter calling in yesterday seemed genuinely distressed.

Hearing a major official say he had no idea is... well, about as apalling as a president saying, "No one imagined the levees wouldn't hold." When everyone was imagining the levees breaking as the storm approached, and in fact hundreds civil defense and other officials from across the region only months ago held a tabletop drill (with a fictional Hurricane Pam) that presupposed the levees failing to hold back a storm surge and a city fully flooded.

[Miulang]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Another harrowing thought: since there's no way of predicting when another hurricane might be spawned, or its intensity or where it will ultimately hit, is this the best the Feds can do to come to the aid of our citizens? If it is, then I think we'd all better prepare ourselves to have to go it alone for weeks if a natural disaster of a magnitude like this ever hit us.

Scientists believe that global warming has something to do with the numbers and severity of hurricanes. So why hasn't the Pres signed the Kyoto Protocol? Why have some States been proactive and signed their own version of this protocol because they also agree that protecting the environment is one way to stave off catastrophes of this kind?

Miulang

[Linkmeister]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Another harrowing thought: since there's no way of predicting when another hurricane might be spawned, or its intensity or where it will ultimately hit, is this the best the Feds can do to come to the aid of our citizens? If it is, then I think we'd all better prepare ourselves to have to go it alone for weeks if a natural disaster of a magnitude like this ever hit us.
Miulang

Er, more than a natural disaster, what about a suitcase with a dirty bomb?

[alohabear]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Another harrowing thought: since there's no way of predicting when another hurricane might be spawned, or its intensity or where it will ultimately hit, is this the best the Feds can do to come to the aid of our citizens? If it is, then I think we'd all better prepare ourselves to have to go it alone for weeks if a natural disaster of a magnitude like this ever hit us.

Scientists believe that global warming has something to do with the numbers and severity of hurricanes. So why hasn't the Pres signed the Kyoto Protocol? Why have some States been proactive and signed their own version of this protocol because they also agree that protecting the environment is one way to stave off catastrophes of this kind?

Miulang

Because a lot of proof on global warming is just theory. The earth has always warmed ( remember the Ice Age?). The planet goes through stages and it going through one now. Just like Hawaii is overdue for another hurricane or tsunami, Kyoto won't do Jack!

[Miulang]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

If you contributed money to aid the victims of the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami last year, please consider contributing the same amount---or more--to an organization like the Red Cross. If you didn't contribute anything to the relief efforts in Asia, please make a donation to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. These are our citizens, not people in some foreign country. Many of the victims will never be able to return to their homes; they will have to start over in some place hundreds of miles from everything they are familiar with.

Let's show the US government that individual citizens do care about their countrymen. After all, it might have been any of us who might have been subjected to this human disaster instead of the Gulf Coast.

Miulang

[Miulang]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Because a lot of proof on global warming is just theory. The earth has always warmed ( remember the Ice Age?). The planet goes through stages and it going through one now. Just like Hawaii is overdue for another hurricane or tsunami, Kyoto won't do Jack!

Here's some proof of global warming, out of the mouths of 4 Senators who toured the Alaska tundra area. You may say, "so what? Only a few Eskimos are being impacted..." the truth is, much like the canary in the coal mine, what the Eskimos are experiencing is a symptom of what lies ahead for us.

" "If you can go to the Native people and listen to their stories and walk away with any doubt that something's going on, I just think you're not listening," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Hillary Clinton of New York told reporters in Anchorage that Inupiat Eskimo residents in Barrow, Alaska, have found their ancestral land and traditional lifestyle disrupted by disappearing sea ice, thawing permafrost, increased coastal erosion and changes to wildlife habitat.

Heat-stimulated beetle infestation has also killed vast amounts of the spruce forest in the Yukon Territory, they said. ..."

And if the earth isn't warming up, why is the world's largest frozen peat bog in Siberia melting?

"...The world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow..."

Again, you might scoff and say that that area is uninhabited so what difference does it make? But the fact is, the world is getting warmer.


Miulang

[Miulang]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Here is a report from someone who just escaped the devastation that is in NO:

"...While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone who loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.

No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a desperate, starving city as a "looter," but that's just what the media did over and over again. Sheriffs and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue operations.

Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic; just as the eighties focus on "welfare queens" and "super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.

City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, the danger of flooding to New Orleans been widely known. The flood of 1927, which, like this week's events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger New Orleans faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black city. While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists' warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodwaters, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected leaders.

The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US President and a Governor and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long. ..."

Miulang

[Linkmeister]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Not to plug myself, but I've been posting a bunch of links to various stories at my place (Linkmeister), in case you're not finding enough.

[Palolo Joe]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city.

That link read like propaganda...

An interesting note from that radio interview that the mayor of New Orleans did, blasting Bush and other government officials.

He said it's drug addicts who are looting for guns and ammunition, then turning their sights on people/places that can provide them with a fix.

One CNN producer, holed up on the roof of a police substation, said these thugs are roaming the streets, taking shots at police officers and other authority figures.

Not only does the aid need to get to the hurricane-affected areas, but so do armed law enforcement officers. The stupid actions of a few are affecting the amount of help that get to the rest of those who need it.

.

[Peshkwe]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Here's a live blog from Michael Barnett:

http://mgno.com/

[Miulang]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Here's a live blog from Michael Barnett:

http://mgno.com/

Gawd...the latest entry in this blog says the NO police say Saks 5th Ave is on fire...that's right on Canal St., very near the Convention Ctr...

The troops are now out in force in NO. I saw on Fox that there were convoys of trucks not only with supplies, but with people who will be able to restore the landlines in the area. Fox was also the only network that was showing the huge airlift operations that were going on at the Convention Ctr this morning. I'm sure many of the evacuees never could have imagined in their lifetimes being ferried to the airport in a military chopper. Now that the people on the ground have been fed and given water, I didn't see any disorder at all...everyone was calmly getting into line waiting their turn to get on board a chopper. I don't know what it's like when the sun goes down, though.

Miulang

[cezanne]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Amen to the thread title... also to those in Mississippi.

[Miulang]

Bad foreign reviews of disaster relief efforts

No thanks to the immediacy now of electronic media, the world is weighing in on the ineptitude of the US government to quickly send assistance to the victims on the Gulf Coast.

What gets me is initially, the White House had declined offers of assistance from other countries, apparently believing that we could take care of the situation ourselves. Thank goodness Condoleeeeeza decided that accepting help from other countries was important, not just for the aid that was offered, but because politically it makes us look less like the big bullies and more like we can be humbled. Hell, even Sri Lanka, which was so devastated in the Dec. Asian tsunami, came up with $25,000 to donate to us.

Miulang

[Peshkwe]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Foamy got upset with the talking heads and armchair analysts:

http://www.illwillpress.com/kat.html

[U'ilani]

Re: Pray for the citizens of New Orleans

Did any of you watch Newshour last night on PBS? Very interesting discussion with David Brooks, Tom Oliphant and Clarence Page because they left their political bias at the door and gave an excellent analysis, as far as I could tell, of the politics after Katrina:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/polit...5/bop_9-2.html