Forever A Fangirl

Hat Ari Lay Beach, Thailand Tsunami

Tourists try to rush to safety before the tsunami hit the Hat Ari Lay Beach in Thailand. The water had receded before the deadly wave struck.
EDIT for comment:

You didn't give the full story of that picture. The people on the left are a family, a Swedish family. If you look carefully, the woman on the right is running *towards* the tidal wave, and almost certain death. The three children on the left, further out, are hers.
It's an amazing picture of human spirit.

And even more amazing: they all survived.  :)

Posted by: Vanessa | January  6, 2005 04:18 PM

* Yes, an amazing picture I realized, but the backstory makes it even more so--and  certainly on another level, entirely. Thanks!  --Cyn

No, the US isn't stingy--just cheap.
Let's do as some other countries are doing and give more to help those that can't jet out of Asia to the warm comforts of their homes after surviving the biggest natural disaster of our lifetimes, than our own government is giving (which actually means we'll give twice).  (See below for agencies accepting aid dollars.)

EDIT: Bush Raises Tsunami Aid Tenfold to $350 Million
Fri Dec 31, 2004 04:01 PM ET 

By David Morgan

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President Bush, under pressure over the pace and scale of American aid to Asian tsunami victims, abruptly raised the U.S. contribution tenfold to $350 million on Friday...

The $350 million sum far outstripped relief contributions from any other country and increased total aid pledges from nearly 40 nations by about 28 percent to nearly $1.36 billion. Before Friday's announcement, the biggest donors had been Britain with $96 million and Sweden with $80 million.

But even the larger number did not insulate the Bush  administration from critics.

"It became more evident that $35 million was just not appropriate to the scale of the disaster. And $350 million is not appropriate either," remarked Brookings Institution analyst Ivo Daalder, who said the daunting humanitarian need required major involvement by the U.S. military and NATO.

"The administration's tendency has been to approach this  like any other natural disaster," he added.

Bush initially waited until Wednesday, three days after the tsunami struck 13 countries from Malaysia to East Africa, to announce $35 million in aid for the region where at least 124,000 people have died in the catastrophe.

Critics quickly compared the dollar sum to $13.6 billion in aid for hurricane-battered U.S. states that Congress passed speedily in the run-up to last month's U.S. elections...

On Thursday, the president announced that his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and Powell would lead a delegation of experts to the region to assess the need for further U.S. assistance...

Sometimes always having to be the biggest, if not necessarily the best, quite literally pays off. It's a good start, GW. Just keep it coming...

 

---

How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly

Can It Happen Again?

The op-ed piece below seems to makes some good points. The one that I can best understand is that we should look very far back to natural disasters in Earth's history to get a better understanding of current and future disasters. Without doing so, it is most likely  that we will again be unprepared for another epic event.

December 28, 2004

 

BIG earthquakes occur infrequently, but when they do they usually come unexpectedly and with horrendous power. It is, of course, dangerous to live in an earthquake-prone area, but what area in the world can we say is earthquake-safe? Surely the people in the Mississippi Valley feel they are safe, as do the people in New York City. Yet, New York has a fault line going across 125th Street...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

 

When Nature's Wrath Is History's Reminder

By DENNIS SMITH

   

SCIENTISTS, like art teachers who have not mastered anatomy or drawing, often assume that what they do not know is not important. And, when it comes to earth science, what they do not know is the pattern of geologic time, particularly what has happened beneath the ground in the 4.5 billion years that we assume the earth has existed. What have been the consequences of large waves and water movement to whatever life existed on its surface?

Humans might know that the universe is theorized to be 15 billion years old, or that the Milky Way was formed 13 billion years ago, but the way we feel about ourselves in relation to a 4.5 billion-year-old earth is not much different from the way indigenous people studying a night sky might have felt about themselves anywhere on earth 10,000 years ago. The subject of what can possibly happen on earth is simply too big for most of us to handle if we are to continue to be an optimistic race. And so we hope for the best.

Yet there are some things we should be thinking about in a more serious manner. There are facts that we should not let pass into an obscure scientific history, for remembering them will undoubtedly help ensure a safer future for all on our planet. This is harder than it sounds.

We have a tsunami warning system in the Pacific Ocean because, in recent history, we've experienced tsunamis there. We don't have a similar system in the Indian Ocean. This has something to do with the technologies developing nations can afford, of course, But it also has to do with the fact that our experience with the giant waves in this region is less immediate. Yet the single worst explosion in our known geologic history - an eruption of a 20-by-60-mile caldera some 71,000 years ago - occurred on Sumatra, just 100 miles from the epicenter of Sunday's earthquake.

The earlier eruption left a 10,000 square-mile sheet of volcanic rock, more than a thousand feet thick, and so filled the sky with ash that it probably created our last ice age. Still, the eastern Indian Ocean is thought to be an area of infrequent tsunami activity. Earthquakes as a rule occur at the ridge of land and water, where plates usually meet and either slide, thrust or pull apart, releasing awesome power. But there are exceptions.

Americans believe that earthquakes are a West Coast problem. But the largest earthquake ever in the United States that we know of, probably at least as large as the one that destroyed most of San Francisco in 1906, occurred in the area of the Mississippi Valley in 1811. Boats were thrown over in the river and people drowned. Whole islands simply disappeared. This earthquake, and its aftershocks a year later, were so destructive that Congress passed the first federal relief act in 1815 to support the farmers whose previously healthy and farmable land was turned to swamp, sand and mud.

The quake covered a much larger area than the San Francisco catastrophe, but fewer people were killed, for in 1811 the area was sparsely settled by fewer than 10,000, most living in log houses that would have sustained the shaking well. However, the seismological activity that caused it has never been explained in definitive terms.

Scientists speculate that the earth here tried but failed to separate 600 million years ago, creating a weakness of some kind beneath the ground. The United States Geologic Survey vaguely refers to the area as a plate boundary zone, which simply means that the agency doesn't know if there are plate boundaries in the vicinity. But we do have historical evidence of many substantial earthquakes in a wide area of the southern Midwest, from St. Louis to Memphis - an area where more than 10 million people live today.

The greatest cliché in geology is the question, Can it happen again? Sure. Will it happen again? Well, nature is never overdue, and we simply don't know. The earth has had many configurations of land, water and living inhabitants over the ages, and if we think of an earth-changing event as being "overdue," we are failing to understand geologic time. It is mind-boggling to think that only 200 million years ago the earth was one gigantic continent, and one can only imagine the explosions that broke it into today's continents. The plates beneath these continents continue to creep, and they don't need an earthquake to move them along.

We know that Baja California is moving away from Mexico at the rate of two inches a year - and that it has been doing so for four to six million years. We know that Europe is moving away from the United States at the rate of one inch every year, and that Maui is moving away from South America at the rate of three inches a year. Geodesy is the science of the shape of the earth and, with the advent in the last decade of global positioning systems, the geodesists in future will be able to map every movement of the land and sea with authority and exactitude.

Our observation and reporting periods cover far too brief a period of time to allow us to see any pattern. What's more, there are physical realities in our world that we are not paying attention to. For instance, in 1971 an earthquake of 6.4 magnitude occurred in the San Fernando Valley in California. It occurred on a fault that had not been known to exist, and so surprised scientists, as well as the 80,000 people who lived there.

At one end of this valley is the Van Norman Dam, which lost 30 feet from its top, and tons of water, during the shaking. Behind it is a reservoir larger than the one that created the famous Johnstown, Pa., flood that killed 2,200 people in 1889. Given the damage, cracks and weaknesses that resulted, engineers concluded that the dam would have collapsed altogether had the quake lasted another eight seconds. Today, almost half a million people live in the valley.

Sunday's tragic earthquake occurred miles beneath the Indian Ocean, and despite its 9.0 magnitude it was hardly felt in Indonesia, and not at all in Sri Lanka. Yet the water displacement caused by the thrusting of the Indian plate beneath the Burma plate created 30-foot waves that were to kill people on the African coast more than 3,000 miles away. This distance may seem hard to believe, but after the Great Chilean Earthquake of 1960, tsunamis traveled more than 6,200 miles to Hilo, Hawaii, where they killed 61 people and destroyed many buildings with waves of more than 35 feet.

Oddly, a tsunami cannot be felt as it passes ships on the open ocean, for the wave is usually small, one to two feet, and traveling very fast, as fast as airliners. It is only as it approaches shallow water that it begins to break; as the bottom of the wave slows, the top keeps traveling at the higher speed and increases in height, hitting landfall at 30 to 40 miles an hour. In 1958, an earthquake in Lituya Bay, Alaska, caused a landslide into the ocean that created a tsunami 1,720 feet high, a wave that could have swept over the Empire State Building. Fortunately it headed into a wilderness area and did not travel across the ocean to Hawaii or Japan.

The possibility of great landmasses falling into the ocean is always with us, and recently scientists found vertical fault lines through a volcano on La Palma, one of the smaller and more westward Canary Islands. The volcano has a crater about five miles wide and a half-mile high, and erupts about every 200 years. The last eruption was in 1948, but the newly discovered fault lines have convinced some scientists that eventually the huge crater will break apart and slide into the ocean, bringing more than a half-trillion tons of rock with it.

Since tsunamis are created in proportion to the amount of land that has fallen into the water, this event would likely create a wave mass never before known to written history, many times bigger than the wave at Lituya Bay. The wave would diminish a little as it crossed the Atlantic, but if it hit the Atlantic Seaboard it could be higher than the skyscrapers of Boston, New York, Washington and Miami. Scientists do not know if it will take one, four, or 10 eruptions to separate the landmass, only that the separation is inevitable.

The only good news is that volcanoes usually send signals before they erupt, and it would take eight hours for the wave to travel from Africa to the United States' eastern shoreline. It is not sufficient time, however, to move all the people who would be in its path. In any event, surely the mountain on La Palma should be reduced in size, to lessen the impact should it ever slide into Atlantic. But, who will pay for such a huge reduction of a landmass?

Please Help These People

 

An Indian man cries as he holds the hand of his eight-year-old son, who was killed in a tsunami in Cuddalore, southern India, December 27, 2004. The death toll in a tsunami that slammed into coasts from India to Indonesia topped 22,000 as rescuers scoured the sea for missing tourists and fears of disease grew as soldiers raced to recover rotting bodies. Photo by Arko Datta/Reuters

 

This is just beyond sad, horrifying, or tragic-- and there's absolutely nothing I can say but HELP these people...in any way you can.

Oxfam

Not One Damn Dime Day

EDIT:  Thought this info merited a shift in comment placement. All the comments are appreciated however.

New comment has been posted on your blog Cyn City, on the post Not One
Damn Dime Day.

http://cyncity.typepad.com/cyn_city/2004/12/not_one_damn_di.html

IP Address: 151.203.113.67
Name: JesseGordon
Email Address: JesseGordon@NotOneDamnDime.com
URL: http://www.NotOneDamnDime.com
Comments:

FYI, there's a website where you can post your comments and see others'
comments. The website http://www.NotOneDamnDime.com has a version of the
email and a large pile of comments (400 as of Jan 5). For the
tender-hearted who can't stand cusswords, there's a version called
http://www.NotOneRedCent.com

Begin original post:

Below is an email forwarded from a friend which explains why some people are considering the suggestion of not purchasing a single product on GW Bush's inauguration day on Thursday, January 20th. Not a problem for me. I'm tight with fundage already.  EDIT: This simply is my light-hearted way of saying that I'm broke, anyway. Sheesh.

Subject: A good way to protest the Bush inaugural

"Since our religious leaders will not speak out against the war in Iraq, since our political leaders don't have the moral courage to oppose it, Inauguration Day, Thursday, January 20th, 2005 is "Not One Damn Dime Day" in America.

On "Not One Damn Dime Day" those who oppose what is happening in our name in Iraq can speak up with a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer spending. During "Not One Damn Dime Day" please don't spend money. Not one damn dime for gasoline. Not one damn dime for necessities or for impulse purchases. Nor toll/cab/bus or train ride money exchanges. Not one damn dime for anything for 24 hours.

On "Not One Damn Dime Day," please boycott Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Target. Please don't go to the mall or the local convenience store. Please don't buy any fast food (or any groceries at all for that matter).

For 24 hours, please do what you can to shut the retail economy down. The object is simple. Remind the people in power that the war in Iraq is immoral and illegal; that they are responsible for starting it and that it is their responsibility to stop it.

"Not One Damn Dime Day" is to remind them, too, that they work for the people of the United States of America, not for the international corporations and K Street lobbyists who represent
the corporations and funnel cash into American politics. Not One Damn Dime Day" is about supporting the troops. The politicians put the troops in harm's way. Now 1,200 brave young Americans and (some estimate) 100,000 Iraqis have died. The politicians owe our troops a plan -- a way to come home.

There's no rally to attend. No marching to do. No left or right wing agenda to rant about. On "Not One Damn Dime Day" you take action by doing nothing. You open your mouth by keeping your wallet closed.

For 24 hours, nothing gets spent, not one damn dime, to remind our religious leaders and our politicians of their moral responsibility to end the war in Iraq and give America back to the people.

Sun Worshipper

Raven,  our 12 lb. Shipperke, likes to warm herself in the sun. Now that we are in the throes of Chicago-area early winter however, patches of sun are getting hard to come by.
I saw Raven in her fully relaxed mode , "sunbathing," and thought a snap would be cute. She was too quick for me though, whirling her head around at the sound of me approaching her.

Why Dioxin?

To follow up on this post.

Facinating historical summary of  how and why we poision, which draws ties to the whys and wherefores of the Russian leader's recent poisoning.

LINK

 

What if the intention was not to kill Mr. Yushchenko but to injure him in ways that mimic a fall from grace, like superimposing the ruined face of an alcoholic onto a once handsome man? This is a glimpse, I suspect, into the secret world of chemical warfare, the successor to the old poisoners' guild, and even, perhaps, a peep behind the shreds of the Iron Curtain. Steady doses of dioxin cause cancer and premature aging.

This is precisely what I wondered aloud to my spouse in discussing the poisoning. I remarked on the astonishingly change in Mr. Yushenko's appearance from appearing dashingly telegenic to having the face  of  a stereotypical old Russian drunk.

December 19, 2004

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Murder He Ate

By GAIL BELL

 Forresters Beach,

Australia

WHEN Viktor Yushchenko sat down on Sept. 5 to his bowl of soup at the summer house of the deputy chief of the Ukrainian government's intelligence unit (the successor to the old Soviet K.G.B.), he may well have been supping with the devil.

For weeks afterward he suffered a bizarre cascade of symptoms - prostration, crippling abdominal pains, a swollen liver and disfiguring lesions on his upper body and face-all indicative of a violent internal process that was variously described as an infection (possibly viral, and probably herpes) and gluttony (overindulgence in exotic foods). Mr. Yushchenko gradually recovered enough health to return to his campaign for the presidency of Ukraine, but the man who donned the orange scarf and stepped back up to the microphone had taken on the appearance of a scarred and bloated roué.

And there the matter stayed, until Mr. Yushchenko's protestations that he'd been poisoned were finally investigated outside his own country, by a team in a

Vienna clinic headed by Dr. Michael Zimpfer. When Dr. Zimpfer's findings were made public on Dec. 11, the world sat up and took notice.

The headlines gave us two vital pieces of information: poison, which we all understood, and dioxin. Dioxin? It sounded like some sort of chemical; it even sounded vaguely familiar, like something you'd buy at the plant nursery. As the days passed we read everything we would ever need to know about the properties of dioxin, without discovering the answers to the deeper, more troubling questions of who administered it, and why. Not, why try to hurt Mr. Yushchenko, but why use dioxin to do it?

It is curious and unsettling in 2004 to be reading about the attempted assassination by poison of a prominent political figure. Murder by poison has largely been relegated to the history pages, principally because science has overtaken the great advantage that the poisoner of old had over his pursuers: the ability to hide his work beneath the normal calamities that afflict human life.

Death by degrees of pain and wasting could (particularly in the 19th century) be laid at the door of organic disease, and there were few if any tests for the suspicion of poison. In the 21st century the game is desperately hard to play, unless, as in Mr. Yushchenko's case, you apply the first rule of the old poisoners' handbook. Choose a substance that nobody can identify. Find an obscure environmental pollutant that infects the air around smelting and recycling plants and concentrate it into a small vial.

Poisoning is not an amateur's game. There is art and a good deal of cunning to perfect before one can claim admission to the guild. Graduates of the old poisoning schools grappled with the same compounding problems as modern chemists and apprentice chefs in five-star hotels. Will the powder mix with the liquid? Will the oil separate into a greasy film? Have I cloaked the telltale smell under enough aromatic spices? And what about the taste?

Our senses are not trained to discriminate what is hidden under camouflage. Studying the contents of your plate looking for odd colors has never been a reliable gauge of what is normal. Arsenic, for instance, is red, yellow, green or white depending on its chemical bedfellow. And what of poison's smell? Prussic acid smells like almonds, hemlock smells like a family of mice, oleander like chocolate, and arsenic in cocoa like supper on a cold night: there are no reliable pocket guides to assist the novice. To his wife, dioxin smelled like "some kind of medicine" on Mr. Yushchenko's lips.

Poisoning is an up close and personal crime. The victim is deceived into swallowing a toxic dose concealed in a benign carrier like food or drink, thereby betraying one of the foundations of all social dealings between fellow humans, the assumption of benign intent. In Ukraine, the rules of hospitality demand that the guest eat and drink heartily at the host's table, even when he suspects the host of ill intent.

As a matter of course in an earlier century, Mr. Yushchenko might have taken his own poison-taster to the dinner party at the dacha. Poison-tasters trained their wizard eyes on every stage of meal preparation, following each dish from kitchen to table to mouth - sometimes adding a little theater to their performance by the application of crystals and feathers, but, in essence, using the highest acuity of their native senses.

I have in my own collection a poisoner's ring, which is hinged on one side and has a hollow compartment concealed under a large amethyst. With practice I have perfected a party trick of dropping a small piece of fizzing vitamin tablet into my dining partner's wine glass. It is surprisingly easy to distract someone long enough to flip the hinge, let the sliver fall and watch until the bubbles subside. How simple was it, one wonders, to slip dioxin, which is easily absorbed in fat, into the jug of cream destined for Mr. Yushchenko's soup, or, stealing from a later chapter of the poisoner's handbook, to coat his spoon, or plate, with an invisible layer of chemical?

A chemist at University College,

London, wondered why a peculiar substance like dioxin was chosen in the first place. "If you really want to kill someone you use cyanide or ricin or strychnine," wrote Dr. Andrea Sella in The New Scientist.com, "If you use something weird I guess it's just that much harder to find."

The 12 STIs Of Christmas Revisited

LINK

Deep Fried Mars Bar: Yum or Yuck?

 

 

A man eats a deep-fried Mars bar in Australia. Dipped in batter and then cooked in hot oil, the Mars bar is now on sale in more than a fifth of Scotland's 627 fish-and-chip shops according to a letter published in The Lancet(AFP/File/William West)

Okay, this um, stuff does not look good, does it?
I would try it though, though I'm thinking I'd feel my arteries constrict almost immediately.
So yea or nay on eating (trying) one of these things?

"This Guy's Our Guy"

"Everyone at the White House knew that Mr. Bush liked Mr. Kerik, placing him in the special category of  "this guy's our guy."...

Mr. Kerik has had to answer questions about his connections to a New Jersey company suspected of having ties to organized crime and his use of an apartment, donated as a resting spot for police officers at ground zero, where he conducted an affair with his book publisher...

From: http://tinyurl.com/45bjn
NYTimes.com

This is really not what I thought would be the first r-e-a-l-l-y big trip-up that the about-to-be-second term administration would have...

Kerik took the notion of resting spot to a new level,  don't  'cha think?

" Ooooh, honey let's go over to Ground Zero and get it on."* Ugh. ***spoken of course to his publisher, not GWB.

Viktor Yushchenko Poisoned By Dioxin

"We've never had a case like this — a known case of large, severe dioxin poisoning," Henry said, leaving it unclear whether the dosage of dioxin administered to Yushchenko was meant only to make him ill or to kill him.
-Rudolfinerhaus clinic hospital

Am I the only one who doesn't think the investigators in this case should spend a lot of time trying to discern whether the almost lethal dose of dioxin fed to Viktor Yushchenko was "meant only to make him ill OR to kill him?"

 

The picture combo shows Viktor Yushchenko in file photos dated March 28, 2002, left, and Dec. 6, 2004, right. The Ukrainian opposition leader and presidential candidate's mysterious illness that scared his face was caused by dioxin poisoning, doctors said Saturday Dec. 11, 2004, in Vienna, Austria. (AP Photo/Viktor Pobedinsky/Efrem Lukatsky)

http://tinyurl.com/463gy

By SUSANNA LOOF, Associated Press Writer

VIENNA, Austria - Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin, doctors said Saturday, adding that the highly toxic chemical could have been put in the opposition leader's soup, producing the severe disfigurement and partial paralysis of his face.    

 

Yushchenko was in satisfactory condition and was expected to be released from Vienna's private Rudolfinerhaus clinic Sunday or Monday to return to the campaign trail in Ukraine, said hospital director Dr. Michael Zimpfer.

Yushchenko, who faces Viktor Yanukovych in a rerun of a disputed presidential runoff on Dec. 26, has claimed that he was poisoned by Ukrainian authorities, who deny the charges. His supporters at home expressed little surprise over the doctors' conclusion.

"Everybody knew he was poisoned so we didn't really need official tests," said Anatoly Klotchyk, 19, standing in the sleet outside his tent near Kiev's Independence Square, where supporters have conducted a blockaded of government buildings since the dispute flared, grabbing international attention after the runoff last month.

Campaigners for his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, meanwhile, again rejected suggestions that the prime minister was involved in the poisoning.

There is "no logic in such an accusation," said Taras Chornovyl, Yanukovych's campaign manager.

Yanukovych was declared the winner of the Nov. 21 presidential runoff, but the results were annulled by the Ukrainian Supreme Court, which cited massive fraud and ordered a new vote.

Yushchenko fell ill in early September and had been treated at the Vienna clinic twice before. But it was the tests run since he checked in Friday night that provided conclusive evidence of the poisoning, Zimpfer said.

The 50-year-old politician also has suffered from back pain and acute pancreatitis.

"There is no doubt about the fact that Mr. Yushchenko's disease — especially following the results of the blood work — has been caused by a case of poisoning by dioxin," Zimpfer said.

"We suspect involvement of an external party, but we cannot answer as to who cooked what or who was with him while he ate," Zimpfer said, adding that tests showed the dioxin was taken orally.

Zimpfer said Yushchenko's blood and tissue registered concentrations of dioxin — one of the most toxic chemicals — that were 1,000 times above normal levels.

"It would be quite easy to administer this amount in a soup," Zimpfer said.

The substance containing the dioxin would most likely have been consumed the day Yushchenko fell ill, as dioxin is rapidly absorbed, Zimpfer said.

"This substance led to quite a significant increase in the (dioxin) level within just a few hours and this intake then led to the quite devastating effects that we have seen," he said. "The substance started to wreak havoc in the body."

A parliamentary commission that investigated Yushchenko's mysterious illness in October said he complained of pains after meeting with Ihor Smeshko, the head of Ukraine's Secret Service, but it lists other places he ate or drank that day. Smeshko promised the secret service would investigate.

The massive quantities of dioxin in Yushchenko's system caused chloracne, a type of adult acne produced by exposure to toxic chemicals that left his once-handsome face badly disfigured, hospital dermatologist Hubert Pehmberger told The Associated Press.

Chloracne can take up to two to three years to heal, but Dr. Nikolai Korpan, the physician who oversaw the Ukrainian politician's treatment, said Yushchenko is "fully capable of working."

Unlike earlier blood tests, the latest were sent to a laboratory in Amsterdam that uses a new analysis method that could test it for dioxin, Korpan said.

When first seen by the Austrian doctors Sept. 10, Yushchenko was in a critical stage but was "not on the verge of dying," Zimpfer said.

"If this dose had been higher, it may have caused death," he said.

Dioxin — a contaminant found in Agent Orange — is a byproduct of industrial processes such as waste incineration and chemical and pesticide manufacturing.

It is a normal contaminant in many foods, but a single high dose, usually in food, can trigger illness, London-based toxicologist John Henry said last month.

"We've never had a case like this — a known case of large, severe dioxin poisoning," Henry said, leaving it unclear whether the dosage of dioxin administered to Yushchenko was meant only to make him ill or to kill him.

Tension in Ukraine's political crisis has abated with parliament's adoption of the electoral changes aimed at preventing fraud in return for handing over some presidential powers to the parliament.

Yushchenko wants to move his former Soviet republic closer to the West politically and is largely backed by the Ukrainian-speakers who want to end what they say has been mass corruption during the previous decade. The pro-Kremlin Yanukovych, who had the backing of outgoing President Leonid Kuchma and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, draws his strength from the Russian-speaking, industrial east, which accounts for one-sixth of Ukraine's population of 48 million.

 

Laundry is not my idea of nirvana

Today overall, has been better than I anticipated.
I just thought it would be busy with un-fun things-- maybe it is my mood (well -rested) -- all the tasks are getting done. Both my oldest son and my spouse worked, (so half a household most of the day) and are now out Christmas & grocery shopping, respectively.

Chris has been helping out and staying on task with school work (he was out sick from school two days this week past) which makes my life easier as well (wonder if he's finally figuring it out--the self-motivation thing?)
But there's still piles to do. Day-into-night will be tomorow's scenario between Chris's choir's performances and my either being just a mom in the audience (the 2 o'clock show) or a kid catcher (the 7 p.m. show). Spouse again works the day--will be an audience member at night.
So we basically have to have all the weekend obligations done now, first thing in the morning,  ,  or late tomorrow night. I'd rather do 'em now.
Anyway...it's hours later now, from then ^ when I wrote that ^.
Have I ever mentioned that doing laundry is not my idea of nirvana?   
More hours later...

Ooh! Spouse just brought home a bucket of holiday cookies! Thankfully, I don't have taste for them as I've sucked down a couple kahlua & milk combos this evening.

So I'd best sign off before my luck runs out and this post goes ::poof::.

Peace and good karma,

--Cyn

Rumsfeld To Iraq-Bound Soldier: "Sit down...(for) a constructive exchange."

Rumsfeld: "I don't know what the facts are..." ( about lack of adequate protection for Humvees and trucks in the throes of the chaos in Iraq)--which is exactly why you had/have no right to be in the position you occupy.
You, the guy that assured America that Iraq would be a quick in and out, whilst ignoring those that knew much better, are personally responsible for the excessive deaths of  US  military and pro-American Iraqis, due to inadequate armor on their vehicles.

You say someone should "sit down and have a talk" with Spc. Thomas Wilson?
You arrogant  fop. You needed time to collect your thoughts when asked reasonable questions by the troops on their way to Iraq? I'll tell you what, get the fark out of the position that you are in no way qualified to handle, and you can have all the time you need to collect your thoughts.

Meeting with troops in Kuwait on Wednesday, Rumsfeld heard several complaints, including one from that U.S. forces were forced to dig up scrap metal to protect their vehicles in Iraq because of a shortage of armored ones.

"I don't know what the facts are but somebody's certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know, and that's a good thing. I think it's a very constructive exchange," Rumsfeld told reporters traveling with him on Thursday in India, another stop on a regional tour.

http://tinyurl.com/48ulf

IRAQ IN TRANSITION

   Faceoff on Iraq  

GIs confront Rumsfeld over lack of armor

U.S. defense chief taken aback by pointed questions

           By Eric Schmitt, New York Times News Service. Tribune news services contributed to this report

   December 9, 2004

CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came here Wednesday to lead a morale-lifting town hall discussion with Iraq-bound troops. Instead, he found himself on the defensive, fielding pointed questions from soldiers complaining about aging vehicles that lack armor for protection against roadside bombs.

Rumsfeld, seemingly caught off guard by the sharp questioning, responded that the military is producing extra armor for Humvees and trucks as fast as possible, but that the soldiers would have to cope with equipment shortages.

"You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time," he said.

Spec. Thomas Wilson (see photo above), a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit scheduled to roll into Iraq this week, was the first to step forward, saying that soldiers had to scrounge through local landfills for rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass--what they called "hillbilly armor"--to bolt to their trucks.

"Why don't we have those resources readily available to us?" Wilson asked Rumsfeld, drawing cheers and applause from many of the 2,300 soldiers assembled in a cavernous hangar here to meet the secretary.

A few minutes later, a soldier from the Idaho National Guard's 116th Armor Cavalry Brigade asked Rumsfeld what he and the Army were doing "to address shortages and antiquated equipment" that will affect National Guard soldiers heading to Iraq.

Rumsfeld seemed taken aback by the question and a murmur began spreading through the ranks before he silenced it. "Now, settle down, settle down," he said. "Hell, I'm an old man, it's early in the morning, and I'm gathering my thoughts here."

Rumsfeld, 72, said all organizations have equipment, materials, and spare parts of different vintages, but he expressed confidence that Army leaders are assigning the newest and best equipment to the troops headed for combat.

Moreover, he said, adding more armor to trucks and battle equipment doesn't make them impervious to enemy attack.

"If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up," he said. "And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up."

A lieutenant colonel told Rumsfeld that many of the soldiers in his unit are having trouble receiving all the pay due them, causing problems for families back home who are being badgered by collection agencies.

"Can someone here get the details of the unit he's talking about?" Rumsfeld asked. "That's just not right."

The soldiers' sharp questioning came on the day that the U.S. combat death toll in Iraq passed 1,000. According to an Associated Press tally, 1,278 U.S. troops have died in Iraq, 1,001 of them in fighting. November's U.S. death toll of 136 was the most of any month of the war.

The U.S. announced last week that it was increasing its force in Iraq to 150,000 to help the interim government conduct its election, scheduled for Jan. 30.

On Wednesday, officials at Iraq's Interior Ministry voiced support for the idea of holding the vote over a two- or three-week period so that Iraqis in different regions would vote at different times, allowing security forces to shift to where they are needed. But the country's top electoral official said he received no formal proposal for staggered voting.

Police station sacked

In Samarra, one of the most restive Sunni cities, guerrillas stole weapons Wednesday from a police station and blew it up, and a suicide car bomber attacked a Bradley armored vehicle. No U.S. soldiers were reported killed, but at least five Iraqis died, and the city's police chief resigned. Fighting also was reported in Mosul and Ramadi.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita, speaking in Washington after the Kuwait session, said the military is producing 450 armored Humvees a month, compared with 15 a month in autumn 2003, when the threat of roadside bombs emerged. He also said that three out of four Humvees in the war zones are armored, and that unarmored vehicles are used in back-up operations, inside bases.

It was difficult to gauge the scope and seriousness of the equipment problems cited by the two soldiers and by several others in interviews after Rumsfeld's appearance. A senior officer in Wilson's unit, Col. John Zimmerman, said later that 95 percent of the unit's more-than 300 trucks have insufficient armor.

Senior Army generals in Kuwait said they were not aware of widespread shortages and insisted that all vehicles heading north from this staging area 12 miles south of the Iraqi border would have adequate armor.

"It's not a matter of money or desire," Lt. Gen. Steven Whitcomb, commander of Army forces in the Persian Gulf, told the troops after Rumsfeld asked him to address Wilson's question. "It's a matter of the logistics of being able to produce it."

But the complaints voiced by the soldiers are likely to revive accusations that the Bush administration did not anticipate the kind of tenacious insurgency confronting troops in Iraq, and that the Pentagon is still struggling to provide enough basic supplies such as body armor, and fortified Humvees and other vehicles.

About 10,000 soldiers, many them reservists from Oregon, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina, are in Kuwait on their way to one-year tours in Iraq or passing through this camp on their way home after their stints.

In interviews after the meeting, the equipment issue resonated with many soldiers and commanders.

Spec. Blaze Crook, 24, from Cleveland, Tenn., said he and other members of his Tennessee National Guard unit felt shorthanded going into their mission in Iraq. "I don't think we have enough troops going in to do the job," said Crook, a truck driver.

In an interview, Wilson said the question he asked Rumsfeld was one that has been on the minds of many men in his unit, the 1st Squadron, 278th Regimental Combat Team.

"I'm a soldier, and I'll do this on a bicycle if I have to, but we need help," said Wilson, 31, who served on active duty in the Air Force for six years, including in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, before leaving the military, then re-enlisting in the National Guard after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Zimmerman, the staff judge advocate, or legal adviser, for the 278th combat team, said the unit's Humvees are sufficiently armored, but that most of its heavy trucks are not. He said Army supply officials have given the unit 70 tons of steel plates to attach to vehicles, but it isn't enough.

Double standard perceived

Zimmerman suggested that the Army wouldn't let this happen to an active-duty unit about to deploy into Iraq.

"We've got two armies," he said. "We've got the active-duty and we've got the National Guard. We're proud to serve. We just want what everyone else has. We're not asking for anything more."

Zimmerman said he appreciates the efforts by Army supply officials in Kuwait but that he and his troops fumed at the sight of the fully "up-armored" Humvees and heavy trucks put on display for Rumsfeld's visit.

"What you see out here isn't what we've got going north with us," he said.    

   Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune    

Broaching The Divide: Natalism

As I mentioned earlier, I believe it's critical to attempt to create a dialog with the  red section of the country. We do tend to lump them into a one-size-fits-all category--but this Op-Ed piece goes beyond the stereotypes, sketching a picture of people that are not all that odd in their viewpoints, though  the more "cosmopolitan" among us  may view them as "quaint."
I see them as extremely traditional in the old-fashioned sense, in re: their "home and hearth" values, but certainly there must be more to them then that.
Some room for common ground?

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The New Red-Diaper Babies

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: December 7, 2004

There is a little-known movement sweeping across the

United States. The movement is "natalism."

All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling - in Western

Europe, in

Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends.

They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling.

In a world that often makes it hard to raise large families, many are willing to move to find places that are congenial to natalist values. The fastest-growing regions of the country tend to have the highest concentrations of children. Young families move away from what they perceive as disorder, vulgarity and danger and move to places like Douglas County in

Colorado (which is the fastest-growing county in the country and has one of the highest concentrations of kids). Some people see these exurbs as sprawling, materialistic wastelands, but many natalists see them as clean, orderly and affordable places where they can nurture children.

If you wanted a one-sentence explanation for the explosive growth of far-flung suburbs, it would be that when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences.

So there are significant fertility inequalities across regions. People on the Great Plains and in the Southwest are much more fertile than people in

New England or on the Pacific coast.

You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe, "Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like

San Francisco,

Portland,

Seattle,

Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas."

Politicians will try to pander to this group. They should know this is a spiritual movement, not a political one. The people who are having big families are explicitly rejecting materialistic incentives and hyperindividualism. It costs a middle-class family upward of $200,000 to raise a child. These people are saying money and ambition will not be their gods.

Natalists resist the declining fertility trends not because of income, education or other socioeconomic characteristics. It's attitudes. People with larger families tend to attend religious services more often, and tend to have more traditional gender roles.

I draw attention to natalists because they're an important feature of our national life. Because of them, the U.S. stands out in all sorts of demographic and cultural categories. But I do it also because when we talk about the divide on values in this country, caricatured in the red and blue maps, it's important that we understand the true motive forces behind it.

Natalists are associated with red America, but they're not launching a jihad. The differences between them and people on the other side of the cultural or political divide are differences of degree, not kind. Like most Americans, but perhaps more anxiously, they try to shepherd their kids through supermarket checkouts lined with screaming Cosmo or Maxim cover lines. Like most Americans, but maybe more so, they suspect that we won't solve our social problems or see improvements in our schools as long as many kids are growing up in barely functioning families.

Like most Americans, and maybe more so because they tend to marry earlier, they find themselves confronting the consequences of divorce. Like most Americans, they wonder how we can be tolerant of diverse lifestyles while still preserving the family institutions that are under threat.

What they cherish, like most Americans, is the self-sacrificial love shown by parents. People who have enough kids for a basketball team are too busy to fight a culture war.

From M.B.A. To Grunt, To Chicago's Future Mayor?

	If I could talk to Daley Jr., I'd ask if he was in any way inspired by John Kerry. When I read the first few lines of this story in another news forum the other day, young Daley reminded me of Kerry in that his circumstances are that of someone that has many choices and none of them include literally putting his life on the line. At this point, the damage has been done in Iraq and even most of us doves believe that we have to clean up the mess we made. So the very best to him and all the brave men and women that are taking on the trecherous task of restoring (creating?) normality in Iraq.
	http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/opinion/05sun3.html?th  EDITORIAL OBSERVER A Soldier's Story: The Curious Transformation of a Son of Dynasty   By LAWRENCE DOWNES Published: December 5, 2004   Mayor Richard  Daley of Chicago and his wife, Maggie, have one son, Patrick. He is 29 and has an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. Until a few weeks ago, he was managing partner at Companion Capital, advising wealthy families on their private-equity investments and pulling down six figures. By next month, he'll be a grunt. Mr. Daley will report after Christmas to Fort Benning in Georgia, where he will begin basic training as a soldier in the United States Army's airborne infantry. He will start at $1,612.74 a month, with bonus pay if he is sent to a combat zone, which Army officials say is almost certain to happen. Mr. Daley's career change has launched him on a mind-bending transit between worlds - from a position of security and comfort to one of service and sacrifice, from one unrepresentative segment of society to another. His startling shift in social standing is about as stark a way as any to illustrate the debate about the ways that our volunteer Army mirrors our country as a whole. Which it doesn't. While the Army is integrated and diverse, its enlisted ranks are filled not by the very rich or poor, but by the sons and daughters of the working class, particularly black and Hispanic Americans. These are people who often lack options, for whom the military has long offered a choice: Serve your country in return for a job, for computer and technical skills, and a jolt of discipline, confidence and independence. The pay is low, the life regimented and exhausting. But serve your time and you will gain a future - if you aren't killed first. With young soldiers dying in Iraq every day, the choice is stark, and its consequences not at all theoretical. It's a choice the privileged Mr. Daley did not have to make. So why did he? A columnist in Chicago noted that an Army stint would do wonders to scrub the young man's résumé of teenage blemishes - giving a rowdy house party that became violent, having a run-in with the police, dropping out of West Point. Patrick the G.I. could eclipse his past and march home with honor to join the family business, which is running Chicago. The mayor's son says he was motivated simply by a sense of duty, which was reinforced by 9/11. He was in Manhattan that day, working for Bear, Stearns & Company. He describes himself as a military history buff and a friend and admirer of many soldiers, both from West Point and from his old neighborhood. His rationale for becoming an enlisted man and not an officer, in fact, seems torn from a management handbook: If you can start at the bottom, he says, you'll learn the most on the way up. But this does not sound like privilege talking. It sounds like Bridgeport, the old Daley family turf on the South Side, home to legions of the blue-collar dutiful: cops and firefighters, civil servants and servicemen, people who know all about respecting rank, paying dues and being a small part of something bigger than themselves. Patrick Daley says he is agnostic about the wisdom of invading Iraq, but believes the country needs to make the best of it, which he wants to do on the front lines, in the infantry. Whether or not he gets there, he has already scored a victory against elitism. He has given his famous father and distraught mother a visceral connection to the war shared by virtually no one in Congress or the Bush administration - or the editorial board of The Times, for that matter. Talking to reporters about his son's decision last week, Mayor Daley choked up. "It's a challenging time," he said, through tears. How odd to find Chicago's mayor-for-life, the most powerful man in the Central Time Zone, joining that suffering sliver of America - the men and women in the military and their families who are bearing the heaviest burden of this war.

No Great Lake Shall Be Left Behind

What the framework does not provide, however, is a financing scheme, asserting that those who signed the declaration acknowledge that participation "is subject to funding availability."

That raised concerns for some participants.

Representative Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat who has introduced legislation that would provide $4 billion over five years for essentially the same goals as those in the framework, said the new effort would fail without adequate money. The bill, a bipartisan effort sponsored by more than 100 House members, and a companion Senate bill are languishing in committee.

I read the headline and thought oh cool, maybe less sewage on the beaches that make up the extreme east side of Chicago. Maybe no more sewage on the shores of Toronto's Lake Ontario--and the same for the rest of the magnificent Great Lakes ( I believe Erie is the worst off, atm). But reading Emmanuel's comments drives home that we have yet another headline-making Federal "action" that has no real substance--at least not yet. I want to see the headline when the funding is in place and the "protecting and improving (of) this national treasure" is in full swing.

December 4, 2004

 

Officials Lay Groundwork for Cleanup of Great Lakes

 

By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

   

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - Dozens of officials from the

United States and

Canada signed a declaration on Friday that outlines a comprehensive plan to clean up the Great Lakes and the major waterways that feed them.

As one of President Bush's major environmental initiatives, the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration combines federal, state, local and tribal resources to broaden the continuing restoration efforts that have lacked such coordination.

"This is the largest formal collaboration of its kind focused on the environmental and economic health of the Great Lakes Basin," said Michael O. Leavitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, who presided over the signing ceremony in

Chicago. "Today, we are committing our collective organizations to protecting and improving this national treasure."

With cabinet officials, governors, mayors and lawmakers from Great Lakes States in attendance, the signing ceremony represented at least a symbolic success for the administration, which is generally viewed by environmental groups as having been a poor steward of the nation's natural resources.

The new collaboration has won early praise from environmental groups, large and small, however, for seeking input from an array of sources beyond a tight circle of policy makers in Washington.

In response to President Bush's executive order in May calling for a "regional collaboration of national significance" to clean up the Great Lakes, E.P.A. officials leading the effort have included tribal leaders, small-town mayors and local environmental groups in addition to elected officials from the eight states that border the five Great Lakes.

"This is a good idea. It's the right process at the right time," said Andy Buchsbaum, director of the Great Lakes office of the National Wildlife Federation.

"Dozens of other processes have been started by subsets of the participants here," Mr. Buchsbaum said, "but we've never wound up with everybody pulling in the same direction. This is designed in the right way to do that."

Will  Cwikiel,  policy director of the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, a small environmental group in northern

Michigan, said: "I'm cautiously optimistic. The last thing anyone wants to see happen is a collapse, just grips and grins, pomp and circumstance, without anything really happening on the ground."

The collaboration sets forth a framework for establishing committees, lines of communication and overarching goals leading to cleaner water - the Great Lakes contain about 20 percent of the world's fresh water supply and serve as a source of drinking water for more than 30 million people in the United States and Canada.

Specific targets include pollution controls for agricultural and industrial runoff into the lakes; new efforts to restore and protect wetlands, forests and indigenous species; and the elimination of invasive species, like the

Illinois carp, which Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois called "a terrorist of the Great Lakes ecosystem."

The framework also proposes deadlines, with a preliminary plan due in six months and a final strategy to put the plan fully in motion due six months after that. Mr. Leavitt describe the program as "not a redoing, but a redoubling" of existing efforts.

What the framework does not provide, however, is a financing scheme, asserting that those who signed the declaration acknowledge that participation "is subject to funding availability."

That raised concerns for some participants.

Representative Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat who has introduced legislation that would provide $4 billion over five years for essentially the same goals as those in the framework, said the new effort would fail without adequate money. The bill, a bipartisan effort sponsored by more than 100 House members, and a companion Senate bill are languishing in committee.

In an interview, Mr. Emanuel criticized Mr. Bush as promising more money for Great Lakes cleanup projects, only to back off in his budget requests. Mr. Emanuel also said that the framework's goals and partners were virtually the same as those in an effort proposed in 2002 by Mr. Leavitt's predecessor, Christie Whitman.

"If there are resources, then great," Mr. Emanuel said of the latest effort. "But if this is in lieu of resources, it's a cruel hoax and leaves us years behind."

Neither Mr. Leavitt nor any of the 46 officials who spoke at the signing ceremony discussed financing. That was deliberate, Mr. Leavitt told reporters after the event. He said, "No one knows how much money is currently being spent" on Great Lakes cleanup efforts.

Rather, he said, the intent of the framework is to expand on programs of the last 30 years, build coalitions and rank goals so that whatever money becomes available is spent appropriately.

"The type of collaboration we are launching is messy, messy and hard," Mr. Leavitt  said. "But it's absolutely necessary."
Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/04/politics/04lakes.html?th

More info:
http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?articleId=951&issueId=68

http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?articleId=929&issueId=68

The Continuing Culture Of Fear

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do." TOMMY G. THOMPSON, the secretary of health and human services, announcing his resignation. (from NYTimes.com) Continuing in the tradition that has been finely honed at this point, TT's exit comments reinforce what we've heard time and again--we need to be fearful--and at the same time he brilliantly gives the terrorists the heads up on  the best way to kill us.

Secretary Of Toady Affairs

View this photo

Har!