Katrina

[Cidien]

Just found out something that almost made my mom cry. Sri Lanka is among the countries that offered aid when the hurricane hit. Their country really couldn't afford it but they said because we were there for them they would be there for us. Gotta respect that.

[Cidien]

http://www.bungiestore.com/productcart/p...roduct=322

Another cool way to donate.

[Schultz]

Well seeing as America is the richest and most powerful nation in the world yet it's asking for aid from Europe etc it looks pretty bad. Even if they couldn't do anything before they could of got people out quicker and even the people they got out were only the rich white people. I'd compare sept 11th to this as they had proir knowledge of sept 11th yet did not act on it at all. There is a whole mess of lies around it and in general the American goverment look pretty bad.

I wouldn't say we are the richest. I think there are few countries that are richer (actually doesn't have a decipit). Also if we was the richest country our Doller would probably be stronger then the Euro or the Pound. But thats for a different discussion.

The one thing i will say.. Katilliya is actually working with FEMA here on base. She is one of the ones trying to figure out how to help those people. She is also one of the ones having to take calls of people trying to find out some information, trying to find lost ones and loved one. Her shop where they work on currently running 24x7 to keep everything going. So if anyone has a right to bitch i think she definetly has the right to bitch and complain and she has more incite into what is being down to support everything.

[vegeta76]

sorry if this is a stupid question, but whats FEMA :confused:

[Schultz]

sorry if this is a stupid question, but whats FEMA :confused:

I know this is a stupid answer but google is your friend..
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=FEMA

but besides that. FEMA is
Federal Emergancy Management Agency
Agency of the US government tasked with Disaster Mitigation, Preparedness, Response & Recovery planning.

[vegeta76]

I know this is a stupid answer but google is your friend..

lol point taken. sorry bout that

[Ka-Talliya]

I'm so sick of listening to these ungrateful evacuees bash all attempts to help them. People are working so hard to get these people water, ice, food and shelter. I know up here, people are working 12-18 hour shifts. We are starting to look like walking zombies. :eek: It's all kind of disheartening. We started off all gung-ho, ready to take this thing on, save the people, but when your efforts are scrutinized and you get told it's not good enough...makes you want to throw up your hands and walk away.

[Cidien]

Next person to criticize you tell them you'd be happy to walk away if they'd rather fend for themselves. Maybe that'll shut 'em up. =/

[Andromeda18_]

Go ahead and comment on how badly the "government" prepared for this. I've stopped listening. Where are the lines between Local government, state government and federal government, huh? So who do we blame? "Blame them all! They should have..." Blah, Blah, Blah!!!
I can tell you there are some agencies that are working their asses off to get some releif to those people down there, like FEMA.
It's a little difficult to get things in and out when the roads aren't in the best conditions. Granted, some agencies were not planning this hurricane to pan out the way it did, but who can predict or control nature.
So, stop blaming the government, that means you not from the US too. Just because things don't go the way you think they should doesn't mean you can stand there wagging a finger. GET OFF YOUR ASSES AND HELP!

Well, I personaly see things like this: I have no doubt everyone is trying their best to help the victims of the Katrina, the only thing that surprised me and it was just that, surprise, was the fact that everything was so poorly organized. I don't mean what's being done now but what should have been done before, I'm talking about prevention, year-round prevention, such as evacuation plans, etc. From what I've heard in the news it seems the reason for that lack of prevention was a lack of funds. Apparently after September 11th a lot of money, which was used in such things as prevention, was diverted to the fight against terrorism. That's a comprehensible move but has turned out not to be a wise one, or so it seems at the moment.
I can understand why you're so mad Ka-Talliya, you've been working hard to help people and you get nothing but criticism just hang in there.

I wouldn't say we are the richest. I think there are few countries that are richer (actually doesn't have a decipit). Also if we was the richest country our Doller would probably be stronger then the Euro or the Pound. But thats for a different discussion.

Rank Country GDP - per capita
1 Luxembourg $55,100
2 Norway $37,800
3 United States $37,800
4 San Marino $34,600
5 Switzerland $32,700
6 Denmark $31,100
7 Iceland $30,900
8 Austria $30,000
9 Canada $29,800
10 Ireland $29,600
11 Belgium $29,100
12 Australia $29,000
13 Netherlands $28,600
14 Japan $28,200
15 United Kingdom $27,700
16 France $27,600
17 Germany $27,600
18 Finland $27,400
19 Monaco $27,000
20 Sweden $26,800

Not the richest country in the world but the 2nd richest alongside Norway.

Just found out something that almost made my mom cry. Sri Lanka is among the countries that offered aid when the hurricane hit. Their country really couldn't afford it but they said because we were there for them they would be there for us. Gotta respect that.

If we all would give 1 dollar there'd be a lot of money to help people in need and there wouldn't be any need for poor countries like Sri Lanka to offer the little money they have. Portugal alone would raise over 10 million dollars. To people like us (from Europe, Canada and the USA) a dollar is nothing but spare change!

Someone on another forum posted 2 news reports from Yahoo news. Both accompanied with a picture of someone wading through the water with a bag of looted goods and one of them was white and the other black. With the white man the comment is he was wading through the water after "finding" goods in a local grocery store and you geuss what they said how the black man got these goods. On tv they only show black people looting and they repeat the same movies all the time. I don't know but to me it all seems on purpose, biased and not good for the already tense race relations in the south.

I'm not saying people in the US aren't racists, I know better than that, I was just explaining that since there are many more black people in New Orleans than there are white people you're obviously going to see more blacks than whites doing both bad and good things. I expect some racist news reports but I won't say they're racist simply because they show black people looting in a place where almost 70% of the population is black!

[Andromeda18_]

There is evidence that shows Global Warming is very real. No more than 2 weeks ago I watched a documentary on the subject. Global warming is altering the planet's climate in ways most people don't even imagine and what surprised me the most was that everything those scientists were talking about was what they talked about in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow". Have to say the movie's producers did their homework.
Our climate depends a lot on the warm water currents that run in the ocean, I learned this back in the 9th grade. The only reason why Europe isn't a rock of ice is the Gulf of Mexico's warm current. It so happens this and other currents are regulated by specific cold water points in the northern Atlantic where water from the glaciars converges. These points work as regulating buttons. Too much or too little cold water in those points and the warm water currents will be disrupted. Once that happens bye-bye warm weather, hello ice age. The problem is that due to global warming the glaciars are melting at an incredible speed and there's already too much cold water converging into those points in the northern Atlantic. This, among other things, is causing significant changes in our climate. Scientists know for a fact that there has been an abnormal amount of storms, floods, droughts (a region in southern Portugal is already turning into a desert because of frequent and abnormal droughts), etc and that their intensity and frequency is also abnormal, studies all point to global warming as the reason. Earthquakes have nothing to do with this, eathquakes happen for completely different reasons and there hasn't been an abnormal number of earthquakes.
As far as an ice age goes scientists expect that in 100 years Europe and Northern America will be once again covered in ice, but for normal reasons. Our planet has undergone several ice ages in the past and the occurrence of another one is expected. The problem is that we're speeding things up and if we don't do something about it, it might come sooner than we expect. Studies of previous ice ages show that certain conditions can make the climate change much faster than it normaly would. Normaly, a continent such as Europe would take quite a long time to be covered in ice but, as I said before, under abnormal conditions it can happen in the space of a year, which in my opinion is scary. Call me a tree hugger but this is the only planet we have and it's a beautiful planet, if we don't take care of it nobody else will and when the time comes we'll all be going down with it.
I must say I'm glad the world's oil reserves won't be lasting much longer. Humans will then be forced to turn to more environment friendly forms of energy.


If you still don't believe in Global Warming read this:

The National Academy of Sciences undertook its first rigorous study of global warming in 1979. At that point, climate modelling was still in its infancy, and only a few groups, one led by Syukuro Manabe, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and another by James Hansen, at nasa?s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had considered in any detail the effects of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Still, the results of their work were alarming enough that President Jimmy Carter called on the academy to investigate. A nine-member panel was appointed, led by the distinguished meteorologist Jule Charney, of M.I.T.

The Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, or the Charney panel, as it became known, met for five days at the National Academy of Sciences? summer study center, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Its conclusions were unequivocal. Panel members had looked for flaws in the modellers? work but had been unable to find any. ?If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible,? the scientists wrote. For a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels, they put the likely global temperature rise at between two and a half and eight degrees Fahrenheit. The panel members weren?t sure how long it would take for changes already set in motion to become manifest, mainly because the climate system has a built-in time delay. It could take ?several decades,? they noted. For this reason, what might seem like the most conservative approach?waiting for evidence of warming in order to assess the models? accuracy?actually amounted to the riskiest possible strategy: ?We may not be given a warning until the CO2 loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable.?

It is now twenty-five years since the Charney panel issued its report, and, in that period, Americans have been alerted to the dangers of global warming so many times that volumes have been written just on the history of efforts to draw attention to the problem. (The National Academy of Sciences alone has issued nearly two hundred reports on global warming; the most recent, ?Radiative Forcing of Climate Change,? was published just last month.) During this same period, worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions have continued to increase, from five billion metric tons a year to seven billion, and the earth?s temperature, much as predicted by Manabe?s and Hansen?s models, has steadily risen. The year 1990 was the warmest year on record until 1991, which was equally hot. Almost every subsequent year has been warmer still. The year 1998 ranks as the hottest year since the instrumental temperature record began, but it is closely followed by 2002 and 2003, which are tied for second; 2001, which is third; and 2004, which is fourth. Since climate is innately changeable, it?s difficult to say when, exactly, in this sequence natural variation could be ruled out as the sole cause. The American Geophysical Union, one of the nation?s largest and most respected scientific organizations, decided in 2003 that the matter had been settled. At the group?s annual meeting that year, it issued a consensus statement declaring, ?Natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures.? As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

In the same way that global warming has gradually ceased to be merely a theory, so, too, its impacts are no longer just hypothetical. Nearly every major glacier in the world is shrinking; those in Glacier National Park are retreating so quickly it has been estimated that they will vanish entirely by 2030. The oceans are becoming not just warmer but more acidic; the difference between day and nighttime temperatures is diminishing; animals are shifting their ranges poleward; and plants are blooming days, and in some cases weeks, earlier than they used to. These are the warning signs that the Charney panel cautioned against waiting for, and while in many parts of the globe they are still subtle enough to be overlooked, in others they can no longer be ignored. As it happens, the most dramatic changes are occurring in those places, like Shishmaref, where the fewest people tend to live. This disproportionate effect of global warming in the far north was also predicted by early climate models, which forecast, in column after column of fortran-generated figures, what today can be measured and observed directly: the Arctic is melting.

This was taken from http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050425fa_fact3 if you want you can read the whole article which is very intersting (as well as extense).

[Schultz]

Its not that i don't belive in global warming its that i don't belive all the scietists are 100% correct. since everything is theory. its kinda the hind site issue.. we think or say everything we are doing is causing it to go faster.. but we don't have anything to go off of.. we can look at past but then again just because its in teh past don't mean it would hold the same at current time even without our added stuff..

it always will be a chicken and egg problem..

[gubi-gubi]

The amount of gas that we make that ends up attributing to the greenhouse effect is something like 0.3%. The rest is mainly natural water vapour. The Earth warming is natural and happens after every ice age until the next hits. We might be speeding it up slightly but it's not 100% certain.

[JunkieJoe]

Global Warming and Kyoto are all bullshit.... its a scare mongering tactics just like Y2K was... billions of dollars wasted...

the same "scientists" that were screaming global cooling now changed their tune to global warming...
there is a petition of 16000, scientists and other intelectuals are say that science behind Kyoto is WRONG!

Carbon Dioxide is not polutant, we breath it out, plants consume it... too much of it? should be stop breathing or put tax on our breathing?

Climate changes happen, did Dinosaurs have coal burning plants that effected their climate and caused Ice age? earth had a few Ice ages and Warm ages... as recent as 1300-1400? was a mini Ice age... did the Technologically Savy Dark Ages cause it?? Give me a break...

Global warming = we all drown... ok Physics 101: if you have an Iceberg in the water... it ALREADY displacing the same volume it would be if it melted... aka, if you have a glass of water + ice cubes, when ice cubes melt the water doesnt overflow the glass...

second: you say that alot of Ice on the Poles are on land? and the above Archimede's Prinicle doesnt apply.. ok, I will skip telling you that the temptarute on the poles keeps dropping and the satelite images showing the ice on poles growing... I will tell you this, in order for the Ice in the poles to melt, temprature has to rise 50-60 degrees C, that would make tempratures around the Globe near and over the boiling point... thus humans would be long dead by then to worry about the flooding.

I rest my case.

Do not blindly accept all the bullshit that is spoon fed to you at Universities or the National Geographic Channel etc etc... there is billions of dollars at stake at researching this, the Computer Model that was used for Kyoto has been discredited and the "scientist" that wrote it is under investigation for fraud...


the money is better spent at cleaning up poluted areas etc etc... and dont take your science from Hollywood movies, heck there was a reel about "science of "the day after tomorrow" and real scientists talked about what kind of bullshit it was... I mean imagine flooding of new york and no flooding of mexico... go figure. (gravity must be pulling the water away from mexico and into the northen hemisphere! thats what Dr. Sukuzi would say, who is the primary driver behind Kyoto and whos "Scientific title of Dr comes from him being a BUG expert, not a climatologist)

[Andromeda18_]

Global Warming and Kyoto are all bullshit.... its a scare mongering tactics just like Y2K was... billions of dollars wasted...

the same "scientists" that were screaming global cooling now changed their tune to global warming...
there is a petition of 16000, scientists and other intelectuals are say that science behind Kyoto is WRONG!

Carbon Dioxide is not polutant, we breath it out, plants consume it... too much of it? should be stop breathing or put tax on our breathing?

Climate changes happen, did Dinosaurs have coal burning plants that effected their climate and caused Ice age? earth had a few Ice ages and Warm ages... as recent as 1300-1400? was a mini Ice age... did the Technologically Savy Dark Ages cause it?? Give me a break...

Global warming = we all drown... ok Physics 101: if you have an Iceberg in the water... it ALREADY displacing the same volume it would be if it melted... aka, if you have a glass of water + ice cubes, when ice cubes melt the water doesnt overflow the glass...

second: you say that alot of Ice on the Poles are on land? and the above Archimede's Prinicle doesnt apply.. ok, I will skip telling you that the temptarute on the poles keeps dropping and the satelite images showing the ice on poles growing... I will tell you this, in order for the Ice in the poles to melt, temprature has to rise 50-60 degrees C, that would make tempratures around the Globe near and over the boiling point... thus humans would be long dead by then to worry about the flooding.

I rest my case.

Do not blindly accept all the bullshit that is spoon fed to you at Universities or the National Geographic Channel etc etc... there is billions of dollars at stake at researching this, the Computer Model that was used for Kyoto has been discredited and the "scientist" that wrote it is under investigation for fraud...


the money is better spent at cleaning up poluted areas etc etc... and dont take your science from Hollywood movies, heck there was a reel about "science of "the day after tomorrow" and real scientists talked about what kind of bullshit it was... I mean imagine flooding of new york and no flooding of mexico... go figure. (gravity must be pulling the water away from mexico and into the northen hemisphere! thats what Dr. Sukuzi would say, who is the primary driver behind Kyoto and whos "Scientific title of Dr comes from him being a BUG expert, not a climatologist)

For starters CO2 isn't the only pollutant causing Global Warming, carbon monoxide is also to blame. Also, the CO2 doing all the damage isn't the one we exhale but the one produced by industries. And you say that plants consume it? Sure they do, but there's a limit to how much plants can consume and if we keep cutting trees down the way we do there'll be no plants left to consume the CO2 we exhale much less the one we produce. Between August 2003 and August 2004, Brazil lost more than 26,000 square kilometers of forest (an area larger than Israel) and since 1978, over 530,000 square kilometers of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed. There's a reason why the Amazon forest is called the Earth's Lung but we just keep on destroying it.

Now when it comes to taking my science from Hollywood movies, I don't! I saw a documentary and happened to noticed many of the things they were talking about were similar to what had happened in the movie. Similar, not equal, the movie obviously had a lot of stupid things going on. I'm quite able to tell the difference!
.
Now, if you don't want to believe in Global Warming that's your choice but if you read the bit of the article I posted before then you know that respected scientific organizations such as The American Geophysical Union and The National Academy of Sciences, which are neither Universtities nor the National Geographic Channel, have undertaken studies that show Global Warming is very real and have warned the world about it hundreds of times.
Yes, it's normal for the planet to warm up after an ice age but in 2003 The American Geophysical Union issued a consensus statement declaring, ?Natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures.?

As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

When it comes to the poles the truth is they are indeed melting. No matter how many theories say that it takes a rise in temperature of 50-60 degrees celcius it

can be measured and observed directly: the Arctic is melting

Assuming the Kyoto protocol is flawed that doesn't mean Globar Warming isn't real. The National Academy of Sciences is against the Kyoto protocol yet they alone have issued nearly two hundred reports on global warming. However, one thing must be said about this, scientists don't agree! You'll be lucky if you get them to agree at what time the sun will be rising tomorrow. Even in The National Academy of Sciences they don't agree with each other about this whole Global Warming thing but one thing they all know

that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise, etc.

( as said by Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT, one of the 11 people from the NAS who prepared a report on climate change, in response to a request from the White House).

Which scientists are right and which scientists are wrong? Only time will tell I suppose. The evidence of our pollution is overwhelming, the real cause of argument are it's consequences. Personaly, I prefer to believe it's real and take the necessary precautions. Better safe than sorry.

[evilomar]

What I have learned from this post:

1) America sucks, no wait it doesn't suck, but then again it might still suck....
2) Black people make up anywhere from 60% to 70% of the population in NO..
3) The military sucks, no it doesn't, wait it might suck a little....
4) Found out what FEMA was!
5) America is the richest country....no wait it maybe not....
6) Global warming isn't real, no wait it is...
7) And what the fuck ninjas aren't real? .....that one really bothers me the most!

Ah freedom of speech! Ohh and by the way, I think its very admidrable Ka-Talliya that you are donating your time, to help these people. I have made a few donations, I know what a natural disaster can do, I was in Lima, Peru when we got hit with a horrible earthquake. I'm surprised no one has mentioned Kanye West's comment about George Bush not caring about black people! Well Freedom of speech again, and he did donate his earnings, but then again I think if your ass is a movie star or musician you should donate some cash or something.