I understand that. And i am speaking in broad\general terms, this is all just something i have been thinking about for a decade or so.
for once here i compleatly agree with you, a good example is the rebuilding after Katrina. I herd an artical on it a couple of months ago where the goverment wanted to sell people there caravans as a solution to the fact that houses STILL havent been rebuilt. Compare that to the responce to cyclone larry (which caused HUGE devistation in the north of Queensland and happened shortly after katrina) and the black sat bushfires. In both of these cases i belive for the most part everything is firxed. There may still be some properties waiting rebuilding from black sat but that was only the begining of last year. I dont think the US is very good at disaster management and im not sure why. Look at both the disasters inside the US and Australia and the comparable relief efforts as well as when we have both responded to external diasters and you see a marked difference in how fast the aid is actually on the ground. It seemed (at least) that temporary morgues, hospitals and water were on the ground during the Tsnamie with in a very acceptable time frame yet there are complaints that this STILL hasnt happened in Haiti. There are complaints about bottle necks at the airports but surly there are other ways to get surplies and personal into the zone. One example could be a temporary helipad set up in a field and funnel at least personal through the US or cuba, and then onto a plane which could land on the carrier you have sitting off the coast and then onto a helicopter into Haiti and there by leaving the airport free for heavy flights. Another way would be to use a naboring counties airport and then transfer surplies to naval ships and come in by sea with the heavy stuff. I dont get why no one seems to have explored these sorts of options. Insted people are just wringing there hands and saying "its getting in to slow but the airports blocked"
they make the stacking to block the aid trucks. i make the telling of this to you as my relatives are there and tell me this things and I have this story also and they make the looting and stealing even before the earth quake liveleak.com/view?i=772_1263539068 the machine not let me make the link to you because i not have the enough postings to do it
There is no profit in disaster management - only collecting donations for disaster management. Managing the funds that is Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The USA is more socialist than Haiti. In some ways Haiti is like a capitalist's fantasy. Government spending is $92 per capita. Aid from all sources is $62 per capita but it never gets to the people but rather is stolen by people who believe that they are capitalists. The US's government's share of that aid is $22 per capita. US AID distributes the US aid mostly via it's favored NGOs. The US AID organization helped fund the coup against democracy in Haiti via NGOs and called that foreign aid. Even public education in Haiti only exists on paper. 60 percent of Haitian children go to school he other 40% can't afford to go to school. 90% of the children who go to school go to private school and even those who do go to public school where they exist must pay for heir own books and uniforms. Haiti has not raised it's minimum wage in about 30 years and employers don't even pay that minimum wage which technically they are legally required to pay. Aristide's threat to raise the minimum wage is part of why th coup happened. The socialists in Haiti are political prisoners who have sat in jails for the past 5 years without trials. The liberal party Lavalas which has the support of about 60+% of the population is not allowed to run it's candidates because some people who think they support capitalism feel that Lavalas is a danger to what they think is capitalism. Stealing from the middle class to give to a small politically active segment of the rich as Bush and Obama have done with their Wall Street bail-outs is definitely not socialism and is probably not capitalism but "Capitalism" has no clear meaning. "Capitalism" emerged into common usage only after Marx wrote Das Kapital and capitalism's only clear meaning was as an opposition to Marxist ideas. Both Feudal kleptocracy and libertarian free market idealists oppose Marxist ideas so both feudal kleptocracy and libertarian free markets are capitalist despite being incompatible with each other. That is why I think we would be better off if the word capitalist was replaced by two separate words on for libertarian economics and one for neo-feudal economics.
Today, the Haitians are responding to their tragic disaster by.... ...by running wild in the streets and looting every store in sight. They're even stealing candles, of all things. Why..? Because they're a bunch of backward, self-destructive morons. Instead of responding to this disaster by pulling together, it seems that these nitwits would rather use the disaster as a convenient excuse to riot and steal. They'll probably be gang raping women in the streets next. I suppose this sort of irresponsible and idiotic behavior is to be expected in the AIDS capital of the western hemisphere. So much for Haiti. When I see shit like this, I stop caring. Don't send a single penny to Haiti, folks. To hell with them. And I've even heard that half of the "Haitian relief" organizations are scams, anyway. So don't even bother.
All of the Haitians are doing this, Will? Or is it just a few violent ones which makes the news headlines? I must say, however, I never thought I'd live to see the day when there was someone posting on this site that had less, yes, LESS compassion than me. I don't know whether to start being even less compassionate, or simply bow in awe of your total, complete, absolute, ....LACK of compassion. I should go seek out James R just to show him your post, but....? He'd probably think that you're one of my sock puppets or something! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Baron Max
To hell with you! I'd like to see how long you could go starving and desperate before you steal some food.
You stop caring? Who are you kidding? You never did. Its not like you sent 1 thin dime to help. You just sat back and arm-chair quarterbacked a situation you'll never be in.
They're stealing candles, television sets and jewelry. And according to CNN, young girls are being sexually assaulted. So are they starving... or are many of them simply a bunch of idiotic monkeys, who are taking advantage of the situation and behaving like opportunistic criminals..? We've had massive earthquakes in this country, too. I've lived through one of them myself (the 1994 Northridge quake in SoCal). We didn't respond to the emergency by going on a looting and raping spree. Most of us responded by pulling together in a crisis and toughing it out until things could be rebuilt. Are we supposed to be sending them luxury items and whores as a part of an international aid package..? Well gee... no wonder they're desperate. Send them your money if you wish... and maybe -some- of it will actually get to the people with the most need in oh, say two months from now. After all of the corrupt Haitian bureaucrats finish skimming off the top, that is. There's a real source of pride for ya: fueling corruption.
what about it? I read through that page and another one specifically on the flood. Seems to me that a) as disasters go that was minor and b) with the amount of for knowlage they had they dam well SHOULD have been able to get the emergency services into gear. 5000 people evacuated and a $500million damage bill compared to: Ash Wednesday Black Sat Cyclone Larry Thats just the domestic ones. Then there are the international diasters like the boxing day Tsunami http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake#Damage_and_casualties So i fail to see your point, if you cant act on something you know is comming for 3 months, and its damage is comparitably minor (500mill is not that much) then you need a new goverment. We are talking diaster management over a much larger scale and with ALOT less warning. Yes Australia knows it will be hit by bushfires each year but they arnt predictable in scale, Same with Queensland and Cyclones.
Exactly. Disaster response was so quick and competent, recovery efforts so well managed, that the whole thing is just an interesting story now. A major surprise flood, in the cold, mind you - nobody is going to swim for very long - horizon to horizon for hundreds of miles through several fair sized towns and thousands of farms, killed no one and has been recovered from almost completely. They were surprised - by the rain, and the sudden warming melt. There was an inquiry into the lack of warning, but it seems that events were so far outside precedent that their forecasting models couldn't handle them. The residents had no more - probably less - warning than Australians get for their major fires. ? The damage was well into the billions, and more than 50,000 people were evacuated - on 24 hours notice - from Grand Forks alone, never mind all the farms and smaller towns in the Red River valley. It was the largest evacuation of a US community since Atlanta evacuated ahead of Sherman's army in the Civil War.
those were the figures from the wikipedia page, acording to that they had 2 months notice that it was comming (possably not as server as it turned out to be but they still knew a flood was comming) and only 5000 people were evacuated with 500m damage. Im sorry but even with less than 24 hours notice that still is only a minor hickup compared to Katrina or Black sat, and it doesnt even rate a mention compared to the boxing day tsnamie
You seem to have misread. The only figure of "5000" for evacuation, for example, refers to a small area in Manitoba, Canada. I don't know where the 500 million came from - that wouldn't even cover the crop damage, in the Red River valley, much less the burning of downtown Grand Forks and loss of numerous houses throughout the region. And Australia surely knew that some fires were coming, weeks before Black Saturday, no? The only point was, you can't judge the US disaster response on the performance of the federal government under W. At least, I hope that's not the new normal.
yes, we always expect SOME fires. At 16:00 the day before they would have known how dangerious the next day would be. However they cant know that a fire will or wont break out and where it will break out. They also cant know that 400 fires will break out that day (as happened in Ash Wed). Im not saying that there wernt things which couldnt have been done better (which is why the change to the danger ratings to add a Catastrophic rating for days which are above a 100 index and the changes in advice which goes with it (because houses are only designed to withstand up to 100 at most and black sat was somewhere around 500 from memory). However we seem to be much better at dealing with these sorts of disasters than the US is. Im sorry if that seems like an insult that the US isnt the best at everything but its the truth. Its possable that the incopitance from Katrina was just a Bush problem but the facts still stand that the US isnt the best at disaster management. Unfortunatly we have become experts at this because we seem to be hit with a major diaster every couple of years (fires, floods or cyclones)
This probably has to do with some 3000 prisoners who escaped from the jail because of the earthquake. Here is a couple of links: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/13/haiti.earthquake/index.html Edmond Mulet, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, told CNN that the 95-year-old, badly overcrowded National Penitentiary in the capital, collapsed and the inmates escaped, prompting worries about looting by escapees. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...to-rule-slums-after-escaping-from-prison.html More than 3,000 inmates broke free from the prison after the earthquake hit last Tuesday, brandishing assault rifles and mounted on motorcycles, before returning to the Cite Soleil shanty town. It is understood that the criminals, including a hardened killer known only by the street name "Blade", descended on the rubble of Haiti's collapsed Justice Ministry and set it on fire to destroy any records of their incarceration or criminal history.
Yes they are still people and yes they need help. But if they want help, then they should behave in such a way as to DESERVE our help. I watched CNN last night and at one point, newsman Anderson Cooper (who is on the scene in Haiti) had to put down his video camera and pick up a young boy from the streets and carry him to a safe area. You wanna know why..? Because the child was attacked by a wild gang of thugs in the streets and they busted his head open... for no reason whatsoever. He's just a little kid, no more than 8 years old. This kid had blood gushing all over his face from the wounds on his scalp and he was about to pass out from his injury. His entire head and neck was literally covered in his own blood. Take a look for yourself, folks. This was not an isolated incident, either. The rampant and senseless violence in Haiti continues to escalate as we speak. And this is how these miserable fucks respond to a crisis..? To kick the living shit out of each other..? To rape women, attack children and steal everything that isn't nailed down..? Well then, my response to their crisis is: HAVE IT YOUR WAY. Let them annihilate themselves, if that is all that they understand. I'm tired of thinking that we need to save the world from itself. As I said, I had been through a monster quake in SoCal back in 1994. Before that, we in the USA had a WHOPPER quake in Anchorage, Alaska that actually emptied out the harbor and then sent the water crashing back inland again... washing away half of the city in the process and killing thousands of people. And a few decades before that, we had another WHOPPER quake that destroyed two-thirds of San Francisco in 1906. Nobody responded to any of those disasters by looting and raping and murdering each other. That's because we're more civilized than the idiots in Haiti. Our culture is better than theirs, period. Save your charity for the people who deserve it. Those Haitian baboons don't qualify.
