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| 5/25 |
| 2006/8/22-24 [Science/Disaster] UID:44089 Activity:moderate |
8/21 "Less than half of people 65 and older abide by heat-emergency
recommendations like drinking lots of water. Reason: they don't
consider themselves seniors... There are four stages of denial, says
Eric Holdeman, director of emergency management for Seattle's King
County, which faces a significant earthquake threat. One is, it
won't happen. Two is, if it does happen, it won't happen to me.
Three: if it does happen to me, it won't be that bad. And four:
if it happens to me and it's bad, there's nothing I can do to stop
it anyway... Ours is a strange culture of irrational distrust--buoyed
by irrational optimism." Americans are stupid.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1229102,00.html
\_ Well yes, but it's not really surprising. The only bad things
that happen to most Americans are little things that are caused
by other people. (Like getting your car stolen.) Americans
just don't really believe bad things will happen to them.
Remember all the people standing around the WTC on 9/11? It's
like it never occured to them that it might fall down. A lot of
people didn't leave the second tower because they figured it only
affected the first. Actually, it's not just Americans, it's
affluent people who live in peaceful places.
\_ I think a lot of people didn't leave the second tower because
they were told that staying put were safer, and they were taught
they were told that staying put were safer. They were taught
they were told that staying put wwas safer. They were taught
that following instructions in emergencies (to stay put in this
case) were safer.
case) were safer, and better educated people are more likely to
case) was safer, and better-educated people are more likely to
follow instructions in situations like these.
\_ If I was in the second tower when the first one hit I'd haul
ass immediately as far away as possible. Following safety
instructions that don't make sense has a lot more to do with
wisdom or lack thereof than education level. I don't see
how education level has anything to do with this anyway, since
the towers are filled with workers from barely got GED to
Phd math/econ types.
\_ If you were in the second tower, you wouldn't know that the
fire was a plane hit until much later.
\_ I thought the second strike was about an hour after the
first? Everyone in tower2 should have known what had
happened to tower1 shouldn't they?
\_ Who in the tower would have thought that the hit was
not an accident by a terror plot, let alone a part of
a bigger terror plot involving more than one plane?
\_ I sent email after the first hit that I was going
to work from home that day. Self preservation:
it's a Darwin thing.
\_ Dude, have you ever seen videos of the stupid things people
do in third world countries? Stupidity is not governed by
socio-economic or political boundaries.
\_ Meh, I guess you're right.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5270118.stm
\_ "When Um Ali Mihdi returned to her home in the southern
Lebanese city of Bint Jbeil two days ago, she found a
1,000lb (450kg) Israeli bomb lying unexploded in her living
room. The shell is huge, bigger than the young boy pushed
forward to stand reluctantly next to it while we get our
cameras out and record the scene for posterity."
What the fuck? "Here kid, go stand there for scale. WE'RE
WAITING"
\_ Not that they wouldn't all die if it went off, but
still funny that some moron pushed the kid forward who
was too smart to volunteer.
\_ "Of course we want help from the government, but not the
Lebanese army - if it wasn't for the resistance, Bint Jbeil
would still be under occupation."
Yes, if it wasn't for the resistance, Israel's force that
invaded to quell the resistance would still be... oh wait.
\_ If Israel completely disarmed, they'd be genocided.
If their neighbors completely disarmed there would be
peace and economic prosperity throughout the region.
Everyone knows it but it isn't PC to say so. Pretending
otherwise makes people feel better.
\_ Bad guys never disarm by choice. It is silly
for good guys to try to teach by example in this
case. |
| 5/25 |
|
| www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1229102,00.html Give a Gift ANTHONY SUAU FOR TIME STILL DESOLATE: This section of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward is a mix of demolished houses and those still awaiting bulldozers. From the Magazine | Katrina: One Year Later Floods, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Wildfires, Earthquakes ... Picture 440 people obsessed with the tragic and the safe, people who get excited about earthquake "shake maps" and righteous about flood insurance. It's a spirited but wonky crowd that is growing more melancholy every year. After 9/11, the people at the Boulder conference decried the nation's myopic focus on terrorism. They lamented the decline of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) And they warned to the point of clich that a major hurricane would destroy New Orleans. This year, perhaps to make the farce explicit, the event organizers, from the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, introduced a parlor game. They placed a ballot box next to the water pitchers and asked everyone to vote: What will be the next mega-disaster? It was an amusing diversion, although not a hard question for this lot. Because the real challenge in the US today is not predicting catastrophes. The challenge that apparently lies beyond our grasp is to prepare for them. Dennis Mileti ran the Natural Hazards Center for 10 years, and is the country's leading expert on how to warn people so that they will pay attention. Today he is semiretired, but he comes back to the workshop each year to preach his gospel. This July, standing before the crowd in a Hawaiian shirt, Mileti was direct: "How many citizens must die? How many people do you need to see pounding through their roofs?" Like most people there, Mileti was heartbroken by Katrina, and he knows he'll be heartbroken again. "We know exactly--exactly--where the major disasters will occur," he told me later. Historically, humans get serious about avoiding disasters only after one has just smacked them across the face. Well, then, by that logic, 2006 should have been a breakthrough year for rational behavior. With the memory of 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in US history, still fresh in their minds, Americans watched Katrina, the most expensive disaster in US history, on live TV. Anyone who didn't know it before should have learned that bad things can happen. And they are made much worse by our own lack of ambition--our willful blindness to risk as much as our reluctance to work together before everything goes to hell. Granted, some amount of delusion is probably part of the human condition. In AD 63, Pompeii was seriously damaged by an earthquake, and the locals immediately went to work rebuilding, in the same spot--until they were buried altogether by a volcano 16 years later. But a review of the past year in disaster history suggests that modern Americans are particularly, mysteriously bad at protecting themselves from guaranteed threats. We know more than we ever did about the dangers we face. But it turns out that in times of crisis, our greatest enemy is rarely the storm, the quake or the surge itself. |
| news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5270118.stm Printable version Dangers await Lebanon returnees By Martin Asser BBC News, Bint Jbeil Interior of a bombed house Bint Jbeil is one of the worst hit areas in the south When Um Ali Mihdi returned to her home in the southern Lebanese city of Bint Jbeil two days ago, she found a 1,000lb (450kg) Israeli bomb lying unexploded in her living room. The shell is huge, bigger than the young boy pushed forward to stand reluctantly next to it while we get our cameras out and record the scene for posterity. The bomb came through the roof of the single-storey house and half-embedded itself into the floor, just missing the TV. There is a hole in the roof with exactly the same profile as the shell itself, like when a cartoon character runs through a wall. The tailfin - complete with skull-and-crossbones marking - still lies on the roof next to the hole where it broke off. This is just one of thousands of nasty surprises greeting those coming back to southern Lebanon after Israel's five-week war with the Hezbollah militant group. "But I have many other problems - there is no money, no work, my husband passed away two years ago." Fierce battle Bint Jbeil - a city of 60,000 inhabitants which styles itself the capital of Lebanon's liberation from Israeli occupation in 2000 - is one of the worst hit areas in the south. There is hardly a building left standing in the city's historic market or along its main roads. In pictures The eastern Mihaniya area, where Um Ali lives, is also largely destroyed, mostly the result of aerial bombing and artillery fire from over a hill which separates Bin Jbeil from the Israeli border less than 5km (three miles) away. For much of the time, the locals tell me, there were 2,000 people sheltering in the Mihaniya school, too frightened to leave because of bombing on the roads north. There was also house-to-house fighting here, after Israeli troops entered Mihaniya and were engaged by Hezbollah fighters at close quarters. A neighbour, Ghassan Dabaja, shows us congealed blood on the floor of his kitchen where an Israeli sniper was carried by his comrades after being hit by incoming fire or shrapnel. Pride in resistance As he takes around his three-storey house, Mr Dabaja warns us to be careful of an anti-personnel mine fitted with a tipping device that the Israeli troops left near the front door. Photo:Bent Jbail View a 360 panorama of damage in the village of Bint Jbail A joint team of engineers from Hezbollah and the municipality has sprayed a series of letters and numbers on the wall to indicate the building needs to be demolished and rebuilt, with Hezbollah footing the bill, because it is structurally unsound. During the fighting, Hezbollah fighters blew a hole through a wall on the ground floor with a rocket-propelled grenade, while the top floor was hit by Israel's aerial bombing. "Our boys came into the building at the ground floor and attacked them from below," Mr Dabaja says proudly. When I ask what he thinks of the government's attempts to wrest control of this area from Hezbollah, in line with the UN ceasefire resolution, he is adamant. "Of course we want help from the government, but not the Lebanese army - if it wasn't for the resistance, Bint Jbeil would still be under occupation." Fleeing again Israeli troops are still dug in at strategic points to the south and east of Bint Jbeil. To the east, some of the few people who have come back to the town of Aitaroun are thinking of fleeing once more. Fears over bomb clean-up One family has reopened their grocery shop, which was hit by Israeli rockets, and customers choose their purchases from among the broken shelves and shattered glass. "There's no security here, the Israeli tanks come and go all the time and helicopters fly over us at night," says the mother. "We came back yesterday but we will try and find somewhere to stay in Beirut again tomorrow." On the steep hill overlooking Bint Jbeil on the south side, the village of Maroun al-Ras has only received two families back since the ceasefire. Many of the houses in the main street and the orchards dotted in the village appear to have been bulldozed. Israeli troops are occupying the southern side of the village, and earlier in the day they opened fire to warn off a team from Medicins Sans Frontieres which had come to assess the situation. One of those returning, a 75-year-old who has come back from Tyre to check on his house, admits this was one of the most important assets for the "resistance" - high ground that offers a line of fire over a large swathe of northern Israel. Hezbollah still maintains a discreet presence in Maroun al-Ras, scouts crouching among what is left of the orchards with walkie-talkies, just a few hundred metres from the Israeli position. |