#2 2010-01-13 20:30:27
Well, shit. There go my vacation plans.
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#3 2010-01-13 20:34:10
Is that pic before or after the quake? I think that is the hotel we stayed at last fall. It looks about the same.
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#4 2010-01-13 20:41:43
I always feel a twinge of trepidation when I see photos like this. It's an unpleasant reminder of our own vulnerability here in California, where earthquakes happen often enough and back in Alaska, where they happen all the time.
At least we have building codes.
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#5 2010-01-13 20:45:49
Having been through a couple of large ones... The Ferndale Quake comes to mind, I am thankful for building codes in quake country. A lot to be said for wood construction, a bit more flexibility.
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#7 2010-01-13 20:58:49
Because Haiti is a corrupt kleptocracy and Turd World shithole, the immediate damage and subsequent disease outbreaks will be far worse than anything that would happen in California. Widespread riots and looting should begin fairly soon if it hasn’t already begun.
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#8 2010-01-13 21:08:45
karenw wrote:
I agree with not giving Haiti money, but not for the reasons listed in the petition. Haitians were already eating dirt cookies, and have stripped the land of most of its vegetation for charcoal. As a result, most of the land has eroded to an extent that makes farming impossible. Half of the people of Port-Au-Prince didn't have clean water, and only one third had access to a sewage system before the quake. This is a failed nation that depended on foreign aid in order to prevent a complete collapse. The people are just useless eaters who are a burden on the planet; a little Darwinian Selection would do the country a world of good in the long run.
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#9 2010-01-13 21:15:16
Whoa... 40 signatures. Fnord, you are indeed in an elite club of misanthropist!
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#10 2010-01-13 21:17:31
fnord wrote:
... far worse than anything that would happen in California.
I do not think so. It is a very fine line.
More weapons may be involved in southern California.
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#11 2010-01-13 21:35:00
fnord wrote:
Widespread riots and looting should begin fairly soon if it hasn’t already begun.
It's Haiti. What are you going to loot?
But it's sad to see the country suffer under devastation that caused tens of dollars in damage.
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#13 2010-01-13 21:37:28
Dmtdust wrote:
Whoa... 40 signatures.
You should go back and take a closer look at those "signatures." I think I saw maybe three that were actually in agreement with the petition; all the rest were...well, snarky.
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#14 2010-01-13 21:51:36
And of course, Pat Robertson has weighed in with a theory he got direct from God - that Haitian voodoo caused Haitian doodoo:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article … 04,00.html
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#15 2010-01-13 21:54:06
California is due for a big one, and even with the building codes, it still scares the shit out of me. I was right there for the Northridge one and that was said to be a 6.7
Not looking forward to the big one, thats for sure.
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#18 2010-01-14 13:50:55
Oooh. Asshatted by Dhal.
Must. Improve. Game.
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#23 2010-01-17 18:32:36
The Right Testicle of Hell:
History of a Haitian Holocaust
Blackwater before drinking water
by Greg Palast for The Huffington Post
Sunday 17 January 2010
1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That
was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the
President of the United States promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines
could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days." "In a few
days," Mr. Obama?
2. There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been
slaughtered by slum housing and IMF "austerity" plans.
3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her
father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, "My sister, she's under the
rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?" Should I tell her, "Obama will have
Marines there in 'a few days'"?
4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President.
China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right
there.
5. Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't know how this government
could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has." We know Gates
doesn't know.
6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go
potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief
on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the
task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the
Christian Science Monitor, "I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food
and water and start evacuating people." Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates
and the Defense Department missed school that day.
7. Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The
aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was
dramatically deployed - without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder
missiles and 19 helicopters.
8. But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and
self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric
tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication
equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.
9. Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said, there was no "structure
... to provide security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by
Obama, it's security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater
before drinking water.
10. Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the
ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It's treated
like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when
Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by
a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on
the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.
11. How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from
hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two fire stations in the
entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for
"nature" to finish it off?
Don't blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to
Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28
years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets -
with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their
voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won:
the Duvaliers' death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.)
12. What Papa and Baby didn't run off with, the IMF finished off through its
"austerity" plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by economists
zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services will somehow help
a nation prosper.
13. In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-
Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF's austerity diktats. Within months, the
military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him. History repeats
itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004, after
the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to
the applause of Baby Bush.
14. Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth more,
wrote Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky, cold colony known as New
England. Haiti's wealth was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves rebelled - and
have been paying for it ever since.
>From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee to reimburse the
profits lost by French slaveholders caused by their slaves' successful uprising. Rather
than enslave individual Haitians, France thought it more efficient to simply enslave
the entire nation.
15. Secretary Gates tells us, "There are just some certain facts of life that affect how
quickly you can do some of these things." The Navy's hospital boat will be there in,
oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!
16. Note just received from my friend. Her sister was found, dead; and her other
sister had to bury her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines. That's a fact of
life too, Mr. President.
***
Through our journalism network, we are trying to get my friend's medicines to her
father. If any reader does have someone getting into or near Port-au-Prince, please
contact Haiti@GregPalast.com immediately.
Urgently recommended reading - The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the
San Domingo Revolution, the history of the successful slave uprising in Hispaniola by
the brilliant CLR James.
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#26 2010-01-17 20:20:41
some guy via Dmtdust wrote:
Blah, blah, blah...
10. Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the
ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It's treated
like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when
Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by
a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on
the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.
If there's one thing the president of the United States is responsible for, it's Haiti's welfare. This guy pissed me off; I'll just take this one point of his. First, Haiti is on the left. Second, Bosch was leaning toward communism, and I don't really blame Johnson for being touchy about such things, especially three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly caused nuclear armageddon.
His other points all relate to how slow our response is, especially in relation to Iceland. Iceland can afford to have a niche military like this, sitting around waiting for something to happen, because it has no other use whatsofuckingever. The other, larger, problem I have with him is something I get into with liberals all the time. There's a notion that all poor countries are like political flotsam, acted upon by the whims of larger governments. That's probably true, but in denying any local responsibility (Papa Doc, Baby Doc, etc.), they're denying these citizens any agency or control over their destinies, which is as insulting and infantilizing as when Victorians treated colonies like children that needed their protection. If you want to stop neocolonial looting, are you better off getting all the thousands of governments and corporations in the world to do the right thing by Haiti, Nigeria, Congo, etc., or having one local government honest enough to tell all of them "Fuck off, these are our resources."
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#27 2010-01-17 20:37:03
A little touchy are we?
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#28 2010-01-17 20:51:12
4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President.
China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right
there.
Not really. RIP Rosie Roads
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#29 2010-01-17 21:07:20
GooberMcNutly wrote:
4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President.
China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right
there.Not really. RIP Rosie Roads
Also, isn't 48 hours a couple of days?
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#32 2010-01-18 21:40:10
Dubya looks like a muppet. I'm a bit surprised at how much hatred still stirs in my breast at the sight of him.
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#33 2010-01-18 23:26:31
tojo2000 wrote:
GooberMcNutly wrote:
4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President.
China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right
there.Not really. RIP Rosie Roads
Also, isn't 48 hours a couple of days?
Disaster teams started flying out of SoCal the next morning, with flight and layover time it would have taken them 48 hours to get there. The author of that article obviously lacks even a rudimentary understanding of logistics.
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#34 2010-01-19 08:59:03
fnord wrote:
karenw wrote:
I agree with not giving Haiti money, but not for the reasons listed in the petition. Haitians were already eating dirt cookies, and have stripped the land of most of its vegetation for charcoal. As a result, most of the land has eroded to an extent that makes farming impossible. Half of the people of Port-Au-Prince didn't have clean water, and only one third had access to a sewage system before the quake. This is a failed nation that depended on foreign aid in order to prevent a complete collapse. The people are just useless eaters who are a burden on the planet; a little Darwinian Selection would do the country a world of good in the long run.
Hate me all you want, but I agree with Fnord.
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#37 2010-01-19 17:14:18
Why the hell are the Scientologists getting involved? Haitians don't have any money for them to siphon off; and besides, Haiti already has its own batshit-crazy religion and won't be interested in another.
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#38 2010-01-19 17:30:39
George Orr wrote:
Why the hell are the Scientologists getting involved?
All the attention whores are going to get involved before this is all over. I expect the American Idol "We Are Haiti" music video to be available on iTunes within the next few days.
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#39 2010-01-19 19:57:40
One of my Senior Tech's hails from Jamaca (no she's not into Rasta but she does love NASCAR).
Her family's take on it was: "it's a bad place with bad religion, nothing good comes from there and you should stay away", they see it as sort of a karma thing.
But as you've noticed, none of the other islands have offered help; it is truly a bad place.
Our military has taken the proper approach, secure an area - bring in what we absolutely must to fulfill our responsibilities then get the fuck out.
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#40 2010-01-19 19:59:35
sofaking wrote:
Using his air miles is "digging deep"?? Fuck and I thought I was a jaded cynic - motherfucker just one upped me.
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#41 2010-01-19 20:04:31
#42 2010-01-19 20:04:38
The people are just useless eaters who are a burden on the planet. . . .
So what exactly is it that sets them apart? In your time of need, may you meet with the same generosity and decency that you purvey.
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#44 2010-01-30 00:49:09
I dunno.
Maybe it's just me.
But when I'm filthy, starving, thirsty and homeless, the last thing that comes to my mind is boffing some other filthy, starving, thirsty and homeless sheila.
I'd like to be real racist and say they are like animals.
But, then... even animals don't do that.
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#45 2010-02-02 10:32:22
sofaking wrote:
"I knew we were traveling with doctors and EMTs, but I didn't expect to see 50 scientologists...They were completely unprepared...One girl was in designer cowboy boots. I asked her if she'd brought any sturdier footwear. "Oh no, these'll be fine.""
If you don't wanna read the whole thing, I urge you to at least read the last paragraph.
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#46 2010-02-02 11:39:22
I found it funny that even those who buy into Voodoo can't abide booga booga of the Scientologists.
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#48 2010-02-05 12:53:43
The Booga Booga of Scientologist scares me, Voodoun, not so much.
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#49 2010-02-19 07:27:06
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