By Hanlon, on September 3rd, 2008 at 04:50 PM
 Sometimes it’s important to keep things in perspective. As bad as our natural disasters have been, we are still better off than those in the “third world”. Katrina’s aftermath paled in comparison to the tsunami in Indonesia. Likewise, while Gustav has left much of New Orleans and the surrounding area flooded but done little else, India has been devastated by floods.
The running total is that roughly three million (that’s million, as in three thousand-thousand) people have been displaced thanks to the water. In Bihal, the death toll is 100 at the moment, but steadily rising as bodies are being discovered washed up on dry land. It’s estimated the total will reach the thousands.
Gustav’s body count hit a climax of eight which, while tragic, is not immense. Particularly when placed next to this:
At least 15 people drowned in two separate accidents in Bihar when overcrowded rescue boats sank.
I realize that the reason this has gotten swept aside is that it’s in India while Gustav hit on our soil, but it is worth pondering that when a monumental event strikes in another country, people generally aren’t even aware of it. Instead, I’m writing about why Sarah Palin fired a librarian.
By Hanlon, on August 31st, 2008 at 12:42 PM
 This is looking like it’s going to be the big one, folks.
A lot of other blogs are taking potshots at the GOP, whether or not McCain is doing something or other as a photo op and almost gleefully making parallels to Hurricane Katrina, putting up photos of Bush playing guitar or McCain eating cake, whatever. Not the time for that, I don’t think.
Gustav is going to be a category 4 hitting smack into New Orleans, 900 miles across compared to Katrina’s 400. Mayor Nagin is aiming for 100% evacuation and I’m hearing from other areas that evacuations are happening even where the storm isn’t predicted to hit directly.
It’s worth remembering that the disaster of Katrina wasn’t the storm itself, it was flooding from the levees. Now it’s the storm coming down directly. Those levees aren’t finished rebuilding now, I just heard on ye old television that 84% of the reconstruction is behind schedule. If I were a religious man, part of me would think that God sent Katrina so everyone would get their shit in line for the big one.
Bush is about to make a speech, and I know I don’t want to get political at a time like this, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that the White House did snipe at Clinton’s “feel your pain” ethos as justification for why he didn’t make any immediate statements before.
The convention is looking to be delayed, turned into a Red Cross drive perhaps. You can say what you want about exploiting the situation to look good, but even if we want to look at it that cynically, just having a big party in St Paul while the Gulf gets annihilated would have looked even worse. I’m not sure what kind of a convention can actually happen with all of this going on, frankly. I just hope they don’t wrap themselves up in “outreach” too much.
By Hanlon, on May 13th, 2008 at 05:48 PM
 In my little break, one disaster on the other side of the globe has happened and compounded the tragedy of another. Not only did a cyclone devastate Myanmar, but an earthquake has rocked China.
Between the two of them we have an estimated 50,000 people dead. Nothing on par with the tsunami of 2005, but a mindblowing loss of life regardless. This is over twenty-seven times the death toll of Hurricane Katrina, over sixteen times the casualties of 9/11.
I don’t think many people have a real grasp of that kind of loss of life, of death on that magnitude. The United States has never had that many people die in one blow. In one Chinese village, it’s been estimated that a total of 19,000 people have been trapped beneath the earth.
19,000 people. Trapped underground. The city I live in has a population of 22,000 in the city proper (not counting the suburbs). The very idea of the entire city collapsing and the people buried alive beneath it is not easy to wrap my head around. When a fire takes out two houses around here, that feels like a disaster.
I don’t have much flowery language here, I can’t drum up a lot at the moment. I’m just floored that this can happen, and simultaneously sad that after talking about it for three minutes, the mainstream news media talks about the WV primary for 10.
By Hanlon, on April 18th, 2007 at 08:58 PM
You know, as the discussion about the Virginia Tech massacre goes along, a lot of debates have come up. Gun control, national security, the like. I expected all of that even if I don’t consider it terribly appropriate, but what surprised me was something that came up in a video I caught on ThinkProgress. It’s a comment on the situation by University of Michigan professor Juan Cole.
Remember that we’re all concerned, as we should be, about these events at Virginia Tech today. In Iraq this is a daily event. Imagine how horrible it would be if this kind of massacre were occurring every single day. And the people of Iraq feel that either the Americans are not stopping it or they’re actually causing it.
For the moment I’m going to ignore the last half of that, as it’s the beginning that really struck me. It’s entirely accurate, of course. Suicide bombers have killed over 100 students at Iraqi universities, a couple dozen civilians die daily from random attacks and about the same number of American soldiers die each month (give or take) in such incidents. Not shootouts on the battlefield, mind you, but sporadic attacks in the middle of cities. Not a real problem.
Around 43,000 people will die this year from car crashes. Between 15,000 and 20,000 will be murdered. Nearly 30,000 will kill themselves. Nearly 5,000 will drown. Over 3,000 will die of accidental poisoning. Roughly 3,000 more will die from complications related to medical care or surgery. This is even ignoring the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands dying from cancers, heart disease, etc.
In Darfur, the death toll climbs up closer and closer to one million, topping 600,000 so far. For every 10,000 people, there is more than one death per day. In a city the size of New York, with over 8,100,000 people, that would equate to 972 people violently dying every single day.
People die by the tens of thousands on this planet every day. Disease takes millions, starvation, murder, freak accidents. The human population shifts drastically by the hour. But reading and watching the news here one would conclude that the only deaths we’ve seen in a month or so have been the 33 in Virginia and Anna Nicole Smith.
Which is not to belittle either tragedy, they have their victims and my heart goes out to them. But is it really worth the national frenzy? Friends of mine said they were going to go and get guns right now so they could protect themselves. As though the nation were currently swarming with maniacs just waiting to break into homes and onto college campuses to recreate this tragedy.
George W Bush has recently made an appearance in Virginia, made an obligatory speech and posed for photo ops. He did the same for Terri Schiavo. When New Orleans drowned, Darfur sank into Hell, and a tsunami wiped out a chunk of Asia, Bush played guitar and sat around until forced to make a perfunctory statement.
We can’t simply say that domestic terrors grip us more than international, given that we watched Terri Schiavo more than even the New Orleans drownings, and we certainly don’t pay much attention to the deaths that occur every day. In fact, in the day that those 33 died in Virginia, more than 32 died elsewhere in the nation.
Again, the tragedy is real, the pain of the victims and their families is real. But is it worth the media circus, or is it more that the story is dramatic and exciting?
By Hanlon, on April 17th, 2007 at 12:10 PM
The VT tragedy has been all over the news for the past day and a half, and I haven’t really had it in me to sit down and write very much about it. We all know what happened, what can I add? Today, though, the killer was identified.
Virginia Tech police today identified the shooter who took 32 lives as well as his own Monday as student Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean national and resident alien.
The body of the senior English student was found in one of four classrooms in Norris Hall where he took most of his victims, said Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell R. Flinchum.
When the story came out that the killer was “Asian-looking,” my first concern was that it would turn out that he’s Arab. It’s strange, though, how our reaction to things changes on something like that. If he was Iranian? Pandemonium and the War on Terror would have gotten a giant kick in the ass. South Korean? Well that seems fairly incidental.
I must admit, this was fairly encouraging:
The White House declined to discuss calls for tighter gun control. “Today is a time to focus on the families, the school and the community,” she said. “The facts of the case need to unfold.”
Damn right. This issue has nothing to do with gun control. Even with strict regulations and background checks, people will get guns and people will get killed. Remember, every killer has their first victim. Up until then his record might be spotless, and a background check will be clear. I don’t want to see this turn into a gun debate any more than the O’Reilly vs. Geraldo debate should have been about illegal immigration.
A press conference held on campus this morning also left many questions unanswered in the worst gun rampage in U.S. history: What was Cho’s motive? Why did school officials not notify the student body of the early two killings before the disaster in Norris Hall? Did Cho have any help in preparing for his rampage?
I’d like those questions as well. A man doesn’t go on a spree like that for no reason. Rob a bank or mug one person, maybe. This was obviously planned, though, and I think we need to figure out what happened. The fact that the campus stayed open and police weren’t combing the area? That’s inexcusable and I truly believe those people deserve a piece of the blame in this.
I’m not a praying man, but my thoughts will be with the families and friends of the victims. Here’s to hoping this doesn’t turn into a media circus that focuses more on titillation and ratings than the well-being of the people affected.
By Hanlon, on November 19th, 2006 at 03:15 PM
 Now, I’m not the biggest fan of Henry Nixon-and-Vietnam Kissinger, but I do concede he’s a brilliant man. So I tend to take this take on the odds of victory in Iraq to be worth my consideration.
“If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp.
But Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam war who has advised President Bush about Iraq, warned against a rapid withdrawal of coalition troops, saying it could destabilize Iraq’s neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict.”
A dramatic collapse of Iraq – whatever we think about how the situation was created – would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region,” he said.
And there we see the true disaster this Iraq War has become. Not only is it impossible to win at this point, but we can’t leave without the country falling apart. To use a terrible, terribly overused pun, we are truly between a rock (Iraq) and a hard place. It’s a scary thought that where we’re at may be the best we can hope for in the area any time soon.
So now it’s going to come down to the Democrats. They have to deal with what may be considered the most bungled war in America’s history, beyond Vietnam even, and they have to make it work or they will be politically decimated in 2008. Maybe that was the plan all along: republicans knew it was a failure and let the Dems take the fall.
That’s a little paranoid for me, though.
By Hanlon, on October 11th, 2006 at 06:02 PM
 Fortunately this time it was an accident. In an odd, but sad, twist of fate, the small plane was piloted by New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle.
Authorities said the plane had not been large enough to be included in regular alerts for aircraft in places they ought not to be.
The building, at 524 East 72nd Street in Manhattan, is a condominium known as the Belaire. The 50-story tall, red brick building was built in 1986. It is on a major crosstown street, less than two city blocks from the East River, whch separates Manhattan from the borough of Queens.
Very sad thing, and I’m sure New York of all places doesn’t need this kind of stress. A rather conspiratorial and numerologically-oriented friend of mine pointed this out, though: 10/11/6, when flipped clockwise 180 degrees, becomes 9/11/01. No meaning, just a strange coincidence.
By Hanlon, on June 10th, 2006 at 11:30 PM
 I just got back from seeing An Inconvenient Truth, and… well, I have to say that it’s one of the scariest movies I’ve seen this year. I’ve never found line charts to be so fascinating and so terrifying.
The earth is changing a great deal in a very short amount of time, and the patterns indicate that this is beyond normal cyclical climate changes of any timeframe, unless you want to compare now to when the world was still cooling and the atmosphere was mostly helium and hydrogen. Correlation does not necessarily indicate causation, but there are so many chemical and physical processes that can be described that link our exponentially expanding release of greenhouse gasses to changes in the climate. The movie got a lot of great points across and I learned a great deal (and if any of the statistics or science in the movie is wrong, feel free to comment about it here. I always want to learn more, especially if they’re inaccuraces and misconceptions of what I think). It’s not a light-hearted romp you should watch when you’re bored, but if you’re at all interested in the issues of climate change, this is a fantastic movie. It’s also great if you want to spend two hours pretending that the intelligent man talking on the screen is our president. We could have had an environmentally driven scholar instead of a dimwit oil baron warmonger cowboy-wannabe. Sigh…
That said, it wasn’t a perfect movie. Gore’s presentation was repeatedly interrupted with a jarring meandering of his life. It gave the movie a bit more of a personal, folksy feel, but it often felt cloying and self-involved, and detracted from the actual information presented.
By Hanlon, on April 2nd, 2006 at 06:18 AM
 Things just get worse and worse for our president and his pet project war. People will accuse me of gloating over the failure of the Iraq War, since it means I get to throw it in the face of our president, and that’s just insulting. Sure I’m happy to see Bush fail, but not like this.
The civil war in Iraq has been an ugly situation for over a month, and things are taking a rather ugly turn. Specifically, the Iraqis are fleeing to segregated areas, effectively drawing lines between the Shiites and Sunnis in the country.
The Iraqi public’s reaction to the violence has been substantial. Since the shrine bombing, 30,000 to 36,000 Iraqis have fled their homes because of sectarian violence or fear of reprisals, say officials at the International Organization for Migration in Geneva.
This is a big giant no-joke, people. It seems like as the weeks go by the civil war gets more serious, and while violence and explosions and piles of bodies are dramatic and all, to watch the country slowly splitting itself in half is just astonishing. Maybe Bush and Rummy aren’t buying into this being a civil war, but apparently the Iraqis are.
I don’t even think I need to quote Major General Lynch, who is this instance’s guy who says it’s all al Qaeda trying to tear apart democracy. I must say, if everything we hear about al Qaeda turns out to be true, we are completely powerless to do anything about them. They turn our country upside down, destroy our efforts in Iraq and are probably the reason our SAT scores are screwed up.
It’s just amazing that absolutely no progress, according to the administration, has been made in slowing down al Qaeda’s ability to destroy everything freedom-related. Almost as amazing as the scores of people who continue to assert that Bush is tough on terror. And the solution?
American officials say the solution to the sectarian bloodshed lies in the Iraqis’ quickly forming a national unity government, with representatives of all major groups checking one another through compromise.
I agree. That’s the only way this will get any better. I don’t believe it’s going to happen, but I do agree it’s the only way things will ever improve. See, this is just highlighting a problem in Iraq I’ve been talking about since long before I set up this goofy little website: Iraq is a country divided. Period. All the elections and milestones we set up aren’t changing that.
That’s also probably the most obvious solution they could have possibly offered. The easiest way to stop a civil war is for both sides to unite? Thanks, Nostradamus, now how do I stop this aching feeling in my stomach after I drink Windex?
Has America solved anything? The war has bizarrely morphed from being an issue of protecting us from WMDs to setting up a democracy in Iraq. I’ve gone over that many times. But if the country completely collapses into civil war (meaning in all cities and militias on both sides form), we may have to grapple with the possibility that we did indeed make things worse.
I’ve noticed we haven’t heard as much about Iran lately, also. Apparently with this much of a disaster happening in Iraq, Bush hasn’t had much of a chance to start trying to pull things over into Iran. Which may be a silver lining, at least if things are going poorly there, we can’t worry too much about Operation How About Some Freedom.
Of course, now it’s time to wait for the next “this is the media’s fault” tirade to occur and for the Bush Clan to ask why no one’s focusing on that school that just got a shipment of calculators.
[tags]Iraq, civil war, terrorism, Bush, violence, sectarian, Iran[/tags]
By Hanlon, on March 25th, 2006 at 06:09 AM
![]() At least according to the LA Times. I’ll tell you, you’d think the media would be saturated with awful things to be throwing at us all day, but apparently not. Well, “the media” isn’t fair, it’s just this one paper, but the point remains. There aren’t enough terrorists and nuclear weapons to kill us all, I guess.
What’s our first flavor? It’s disease! No, we’re not talking about bird flu or mad cow disease. We get to revisit an old friend, TB. It seems that scientists have a “virtually untreatable” strain of tuberculosis, one that’s resistent to “five classes of antibiotics” apparently.
“The time to act is now to prevent a new pandemic,” said Dr. Marcos Espinal, executive secretary of the World Health Organization’s Stop TB Partnership.
Damn, and here I thought we were just about done with pandemics. But nope, we’ve got to worry about this one now. Is “pandemic” the new buzzword or is it just me? Apparently “epidemic” isn’t strong or scary enough now, so we’ve upgraded.
I’m not a “I hate the media” type of guy, but I almost have to agree with Rush that it seems they won’t let even good news fly. You see, general cases of tuberculosis have been going down annually, but there’s even a bad part to that.
“This decrease is one of the smallest declines in more than a decade,” suggesting that efforts to control the infection have reached a plateau, he said Thursday in a telephone conference.
Incredible. But don’t worry, in case you think you might not get tuberculosis, we’ve got global warming to kill everyone, as well. As the LA times warns us, the ice sheets are melting way too quickly.
…the researchers say that with the warming climate, melting ice sheets in Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctica could inundate coastal areas around the world.
Maps released with the studies show extensive coastal areas in Florida, New Orleans and Cape Cod, Mass., that the researchers say might one day be submerged.
Now, no one’s denying that global warming exists. It’s happening, we can see it, we can track it. But seriously, why terrify everyone with doomsday stories? I agree we need to work on our CO emissions, that greenhouse gases are a problem and we need to fix them, but I really don’t see what telling us that the coasts are going to be swallowed and death and destruction are coming will do.
So hold onto your hats, folks. It looks like we’re all in trouble.
[tags]disease, death, global warming, disasters, catastrophes, media, propaganda, armageddon[/tags]
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