Tag: disasters

ramblings

A Very Un-Magic: The Gathering

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For anyone who is familiar with the card game Magic, or any other strategy based card game for that matter, I give you Katrina: The Ungathering. This is a flat out unbelievable effort. I wonder if anyone else is doing topical card sets, the same way that Monopoly has a version for every conceivable instance of life every real or imagined. Erik wants to print them and play them – as he puts it, “It really gets interesting once you realize that they actually have attempted to create a complete deck that can actually be played.” We’ll see if there is enough ink in the ink cartridge.

Via Neu

politics

He’s Just The Acorn – You’ve Got To Look At The Tree

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From “The Nation” comes a report on Barbara Bush’s Labor Day visit to the Astrodome:

Commenting on the facilities that have been set up for the evacuees — cots crammed side-by-side in a huge stadium where the lights never go out and the sound of sobbing children never completely ceases — former First Lady Barbara Bush concluded that the poor people of New Orleans had lucked out.

“Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them,” Mrs. Bush told American Public Media’s “Marketplace” program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home.

On the tape of the interview, Mrs. Bush chuckles audibly as she observes just how great things are going for families that are separated from loved ones, people who have been forced to abandon their homes and the only community where they have ever lived, and parents who are explaining to children that their pets, their toys and in some cases their friends may be lost forever. Perhaps the former first lady was amusing herself with the notion that evacuees without bread could eat cake.

Thanks Phyl for making sure that my anger doesn’t dissipate.

Remember, if you are in need of info on the Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort happening in NYC, go to www.nolareliefnyc.com for all the latest news.

politics

These People Are Not Refugees, They Are American Citizens

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Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick from Detroit, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus just said in a speech aired on CNN,

“We come to you this morning as a sense of urgency. First of all, these people are not refugess, they are American citizens. They pay taxes, they raise their families, they help America grow and I wish the media would called them American citizens and not refugess which relegates them to another whole status.“

Well, well said. I will be noting which channels and media outlets refer to these people as refugees from now on. See also said that Detroit is offering to airlift out 500 families immediately and to house and feed them. That is probably around 2000 people. While that isn’t a whole lot, if a few more cities did the same we would have one issue resolved immediately.

politics

Margins Of Society at Center of Tragedy

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Now this is where the story gets really political: many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy are people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society. Poverty exhibits a bizarre sense of equality – the poor, white and black, are now equally suffering. Here are just a few views on this aspect of the southern situation:

  • Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx wrote, “Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws? If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions.”
  • “We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random,” said Martin Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts and poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto Rican. “Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It’s dangerous to be poor. It’s dangerous to be black. It’s dangerous to be Latino.””Everything is God’s will,” said Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. “But there’s a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things.” That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve of crisis. “Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor,” he said. “So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It’s as simple as that.”
ramblings

Fallujah, LA (formerly known as New Orleans)

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It just keeps getting worse and worse. If I were to tell you about a city that: has no power, has no clean water, has no food, has no working infrastructure, consists mainly of rubble, has dead bodies laying about in the streets, has rampant lawlessness, is controlled by armed bands of people roving the streets and has people shooting at helicopters you might name a city in Iraq. You would never have named a U.S. city, until today that is: what I just described is happening RIGHT NOW in New Orleans. The reason why the scariest horror stories to me are books like The Stand and movies like 28 Days Later is because our society is so loosely held together – in the end it only takes so very little to rip it all to shreds. The animal side of humanity can take over so quickly and things can go from bad to worse to atrocious in no time. We are seeing this first hand by watching Nawlins become a third world country.

This is from an AP report dated today, filed at 2:02 PM:

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
“I don’t treat my dog like that,” 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “I buried my dog.” He added: “You can do everything for other countries but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can’t get them down here.”

To echo those sentiments, the NY Times published an absolutely scathing editorial lambasting our dear President’s performance over the past few days. To give you an idea of how angry the Times (and I am) is, here are the first 2 sentences:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed.

Again, we’re told with a smirk that everything will be alright by someone who has less than zero credibility. Where is the LA National Guard, which could have been deployed to help prevent what has happened from happening? Oh yeah, they are fighting a losing war in Iraq. The authorities should have very quickly realized that the poorest and most desperate (not just before this storm hit mind you) part of the city’s population was not leaving. Its tough to think that your citizens will become animals but you always have to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Seems as if that wasn’t done that well down south from where I’m sitting.

ramblings

Katrina

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First of all, I feel bad for all the women who have the name “Katrina” because now that name is associated with all sorts of grief and destruction. If you haven’t heard by now, Hurricane Katrina, which would have been a category 6 storm if there was a category six, has utterly destroyed parts of the deep south. New Orleans has been washed out and I feel lucky to have experienced Nawlins twice before this disaster occurred. I’m sure that after the weeks, months or even years it’ll take to dry out the Big Easy pass that the city will be forever different – that there always will be a dividing line around this event, sort of how 9/11 has changed NYC. You were either there before, during or after Katrina. Period.

I take offense to the idea that Hurricane Katrina was “our tsunami” (many media outlets are using this as a catchy headline) because the tsunami came out of nowhere with no warning. People knew for days that this storm was coming. People knew for decades that the levees in place would not support the city if a large category five storm hit. While the destruction of property was in some ways a given, regardless of what the authorities said or did, the loss of life could have been prevented if more people left when they could have. I myself have put off buying emergency supplies in case there is another blackout or disaster in NYC because I’ve been lazy (the worst excuse of all). Well, what’s happening in New Orleans is about as swift a kick in the ass as there can be. My next freshdirect order will contain plenty of gallons of water, batteries, etc. I’m on the 24th floor in my new building – even a simple blackout will cause big problems in my life.

Back to the storm. First, the NY Times has a very good map for those that want to know exactly what parts of Nawlins have been affected. It was helpful to know that the St. Bernard Parrish is totally under water while the French Quarter is relatively okay (aside from rampant looting – more on that later). Next, I found this photo gallery of the destruction from the San Fransisco Chronicle through Google News. To me, it provides the best look at how awful this event is and I suggest you look at all of them, especially the captions. Pictures as the most potent and powerful way to convey how bad things are. That large crowd stranded on a bridge? Those would be inmates from from the Orleans Parish Prison. Scary stuff.

There are just so many different ways that this is bad. Here are just a few:

  • 80% of New Orleans is under water, some of it over 20 feet deep. I love NO and feel as if a friend, not just a city, is drowning
  • Bixoli, Mississippi, the city made famous by Neil Simon among others, has been utterly destroyed as well
  • Tulane’s fall semester, and maybe year, is probably cancelled. Who knows how many other elementary schools, high schools and colleges, teachers, staff and students are affected not just in that region but nationwide. A friend’s daughter was supposed to start her freshman year at Tulane this week. The whole family was there as part of a big “goodbye and goodluck” deal and they were lucky enough to rent a car and drive to Houston before the storm hit or else who knows what would have happened to them. Maybe they would have gone to the Superdome, which as of now has no A/C and whose toilets are overflowing. I just heard that those in the Superdome are being evacuated to the Astrodome as of tomorrow. I guess for some right now its “dome sweet dome” until who knows when.
  • 25% of US oil refining happens in this region. Many people do not realize their are two parts of the oil issue to consider – production and refinement. Blowing up pipelines in Iraq affects production. Katrina has created a problem where while we do have oil, we do not have the ability to turn that crude oil into gasoline. Our country has lost a quarter of that ability for who knows how long. You know its bad when you see deep sea oil rigs just floating around and when oil tanks look like lily pads when viewed from the sky. I’m betting that gas will hit $4.00 a gallon by the end of the week.
  • Once again, the worst of humanity has surfaced in the face of rampant looting and violence. There are wide spread stories of people getting carjacked as they tried to make their way out of the city. Looting is rampant and in many cases occurring in front of overwhelmed police officers. “These are not individuals looting,” Colonel Terry Ebbert, the city’s director of homeland security, said. “These are large groups of armed individuals.” It’s not hard to imagine that parts of Nawlins are currently under militia/criminal control. I wonder how long they will remain that way.

One thing is for sure: I’ll be donating money, hopefully through my company as they have in the past matched donations when disasters have struck, as soon as possible. I encourage you to donate as well. If you have any views, opinions, thoughts and/or if you know someone affected by this tragedy, please share. Part of having a site is being able to form an instant virtual community. I know that this event has really affected how I feel about a lot of things and I’ve shared with you how I feel. Now, if you want, its your turn. Until then, I’ve provided after the jump the lyrics to “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin. I immediately started thinking of this song when I heard that the levees were giving way. The lyrics are pretty spot on to what a Nawlins resident must be thinking/facing right now.

“When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin from their fourth and untitled “Zoso” album:
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break, [X2]
When The Levee Breaks I’ll have no place to stay.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, [X2]
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.
Don’t it make you feel bad
When you’re tryin’ to find your way home,
You don’t know which way to go?
If you’re goin’ down South
They got no work to do,
If you don’t know about Chicago.
Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
Now, cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.
All last night sat on the levee and moaned, [X2]
Thinkin’ about me baby and my happy home.
Going, going to Chicago… Going to Chicago… Sorry but I can’t take you…
Going down… going down now… going down….

ramblings

Entrepreneurship: Jamaican Style

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….and I’m not talking about marijuana either. Hurricane Ivan decimated the island’s power grid and hundreds of thousands of people are still without power. As many of the island’s inhabitants rely on cell phones to communicate, some enterprising souls have turned their cars into mobile money making machines.

The photo below shows a car charging cell phone batteries from its own car battery. The owner of the car is selling this service for $50 a charge – see sign on the windshield.

Yes, I know the sign is sort of illegible but trust me, it was $50. I received this photo from a woman I work with who has family in Jamaica. Her relative brings 4-5 of his neighbors’ cell phones to work with him everyday to charge for free – each week he charges around 20 – 25 phones. Just looking at the photo, I see that there is about $500 – $1000 sitting on that car’s hood.

No matter what the occasion or circumstance, some people will always go out of their way to help and others will find a way to make money. Oh the humanity!