Tag: Disasters

Was It Fake Science?

By now all America has heard about the horrendous mudslide in Washington state…….I have been trying to find a site that will blame Obama for it…..but so far nothing….but it is early in the disaster……

I seems that some had warned about this particular hillside as being an accident waiting to happen…….

“This came out of nowhere,” a county official said yesterday of the landslide that killed at least 14 and left 176 more missing in Washington. “This was a completely unforseen slide.” But geologists have actually been making dire predictions about the hill that collapsed since the 1950s, the Seattle Times reports. A 1999 report filed with the Army Corps of Engineers warned of “the potential for a large catastrophic failure.” Report co-author Daniel Miller says he’s always “known it would happen at some point.”

“Frankly, I was shocked that the county permitted any building across from the river,” Miller says, particularly after a smaller slide hit in 2006. The risk is so well-known that geologists have given the hill nicknames like “Hazel Landslide,” and residents once called it simply “Slide Hill.” For much more on the area’s history of instability, see the source. Meanwhile, rescue crews are hoping to “whittle down” the missing list today, and officials tell Fox News that they doubt all 176 are dead. But rain and fears the hill will slide more are hampering the search, USA Today reports. “It’s like quicksand out there,” the county fire chief says.

I am just wondering that all the warnings were taken as “fake science”….you kinda like climate change?  Were there a bunch of people that wrote the warnings off as “doom sayers”?  Were the warnings made the light of jokes and accusations?

This will be an interesting story to follow….that is if you are bored with foreign affairs and politics……..I personally want to hear the excuses for the ignoring of the warnings……will make good fodder for future posts and conspiracies……ya think?

Now You See It…..Now You Don’t!

I am one of those people that relishes research…….I hear something and I find out as much as I can and possibly write about it……not an attractive trait to most people……but I love research!

Have you been watching the news?  Of course you have!  The whole world has stopped to see and speculate where flight #370 has gotten off…..did it go north….wait!  West?  Crap!  Now South?  Was it terrorism?  Maybe some glitch in the network?  Pilot error is always a good thing to blame….that way you (the media) can protect the dignity of the plane maker.  How does a 777 disappear without a trace?  David Copperfield was in Vegas at the time….cannot blame him.  So where is this damn plane?

Forget the Ukraine……never mind about some random building exploding in NYC.  NO!  We must know everything about this plane.  Even though there is absolutely nothing to be known at this time.

Damn!  Sounds a lot like an episode of the “Ancient Aliens”.  A normal flight that disappears from radar never to be seen again.  Were there special lights just before or after the disappearance?  Is there someone sitting around a table writing a new episode?

Maybe….but let me help the mental midgets with the story……this is NOT the first plane in recent history to have this occurrence…..

For those suggesting that the disappearance of Flight 370 is unparalleled in aviation history, Vocativ would like to remind them that another large Boeing jet took off from an airstrip in Angola in 2003 and hasn’t been seen since. Big difference: That jet had no passengers aboard, but the circumstances surrounding its disappearance are pretty strange nonetheless. Two mechanics—American Ben Charles Padilla and Congolese assistant John Mikel Mutantu—boarded the Boeing 727 on a Luanda airstrip to get it in shape for its next flight. Neither had a pilot’s license, which is why flight controllers were stunned when the plane taxied to the runway and then took off. Was it Padilla? Mutantu? Both? Hijackers who had slipped aboard? Investigators still don’t know, and no sign of the plane has turned up despite an intense international hunt. Some of the theories being tossed around in regard to Flight 370—it crashed into the ocean, it landed secretly, it got shot down by some nation’s military—were similarly floated back then. But “we many never know for sure where it went,” concluded an earlier investigation by Air & Space magazine. It was at the time the largest aircraft to go missing, but the Malaysian jet will take that distinction if it doesn’t turn up.

Where oh where has our little planes gone?

Now have I got your attention?

The End Is Near!

Nope this not a leftover post from the debacle of the 2012 predictions…..but we must admit that all good things must end and eventually this too shall pass…..

If that is correct …….how shall it pass?  I know you think I will go on about global warming….but you would be mistaken……there are other ways for this to end and global warming is only one possibility……there are others…….

From Planet of the Apes to After Earth, Hollywood has depicted Earth’s demise many a time—but scientists’ fears of planetary catastrophe are just as scary, LiveScience reports. Here are a few Doomsday scenarios as imagined by scientific minds:

  • Global warming: Scientists call this the biggest threat of all. Extreme weather, increased droughts, redistribution of diseases, submerged low-lying areas … future generations might live on a very nasty planet.
  • Pandemic threat: New pathogens come up annually, so why not? Think SARS, bird flu, and the recent coronavirus MERS. “The threat of a global pandemic is very real,” said Joseph Miller, who co-authored the textbook Biology.
  • Fungus: Fungal threats can be even more destructive than bacterial ones. “We’ve had a new amphibian fungal disease that has just had devastating effects,” said a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. A killer fungus of humans would be just as deadly.
  • Killer robots: Sounds nutty, sure, but the UN has called for a ban on them. And many computer experts say that the singularity—the moment when artificial intelligence outpaces human intelligence—is not far off.

Click to read about five more scenarios, including the “Snowball effect”—when multiple disasters come together in a not-so-perfect storm.

Pick one or pick several….not matter how one tries to deny it….this will end one day…..Personally, I kinda like the killer robot scenario………Peace out!

Is It Happening Again?

Remember a couple of years ago and the BP oil rig disaster?  Well, guess what?  Off the coast of Louisiana there is another situation that could be a disaster in the making……..

Crews worked Wednesday to seal an old oil and gas well off the Louisiana coast that began leaking during work to plug it permanently.

Eileen Angelico, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, said the bureau is reviewing plans to seal the well. She said it’s most likely that drilling mud will be pumped in to stop the small flow.

The well and production platform, in the Gulf of Mexico about 75 miles southwest of the oil depot at Port Fourchon, are owned by a subsidiary of Houston-based Talos Energy LLC. The company said the well had not been producing for years.

Talos President Timothy S. Duncan said saltwater and small amounts of natural gas and the light oil-and-water mixture called condensate escaped the well. A light sheen is expected to evaporate.

Duncan said Wild Well Control Inc. has been brought in to seal the leak.

The well did not blow out, and there was no explosion or fire on the platform, Coast Guard Lt. Lily Zepeda said.

The well is one of three on a platform in water 144 feet deep. Production from the other two wells has been shut down.

Talos acquired the platform and wells in its February 2013 acquisition of Energy Resources Technology GOM, which also is based in Houston.

But we still will have the whack-a-doodles yelling “drill baby drill” (a post to come) and no t one of them will pay any attention to the possible problems there support could cause……but what do you expect from clowns owned by the banking clan?  They are trained animals that do as they are instructed like any good beat down animal…….good boys!

But It’s Different

A killer tornado slashed through Moore, Oklahoma on 20 May…….if destroyed a lot of the same stuff that the tornado of 03 May 1999 trashed…….time for the country to step up and do that right thing for the victims….or should we play the same game that Congress played with the victims of Sandy?

If you recall the Repubs in Congress played a sickening game with the lives of people in New York and New Jersey……they held up disaster relief funds while playing politics……a thoroughly disgusting spectacle of partisan bullshit…….will that happen again?  Hell NO!  why?  It is different because it is the home state of the biggest douche in Congress, Inhofe…….the same person that demanded that the funds for Sandy be tied to some sort of crap legislation of partisan origins……

Inhofe railed against the relief funds……

Inhofe said the Sandy Relief bill “was supposed to be in New Jersey,” but “they were getting things … in the Virgin Islands, fixing roads there, and putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.” Both Inhofe and Coburn voted to slash aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy, with Inhofe saying he considered the full proposed aid amount to be a “slush fund.”

While Northeastern states like New Jersey and New York suffered some of the worst damage from Hurricane Sandy, the storm affected 24 U.S. states in total during October of 2012. Sandy carved a destructive path from the Caribbean Sea to the Great Lakes, where it produced 25-foot waves in Lake Huron.

The Atlantic walks us through more of the supposed “pork” in the bill that conservatives were complaining about:

  • $150 million for fisheries in Alaska damaged by the 2011 Japanese tsunami,which littered debris on Alaska’s shoreline
  • $41 million to repair military bases damaged by Hurricane Sandy (including ,controversially, Guantanamo Bay)
  • $13 billion for future flood preparations (that is, money that will not be spent on victims of Sandy but on preventing future, Sandy-scale disasters from occurring)

So those are all disaster relief, and disaster-related.  One, the Alaskan one, is for a past disaster that wasn’t addressed, and should have been.  So that’s not pork.  The National Review has more of the GOP argument against the bill, but to call any of what they write about “pork” is simply bs.

Inhofe has said the the tornado damage is totally different from the Sandy damage…….yes, it was…..Sandy effected blue states and the tornado effected people who vote in Oklahoma…..

I can respect Oklahoma’s Coburn who was against Sandy legislation and has said about the tornado damage….

Oklahoma’s other stingy Republican Senator, Tom Coburn, is also in a bit of a pickle over tornado relief.  Coburn has already said that any tornado relief bill must include cuts in the rest of the budget to pay for it, or he won’t support it.

Coburn may be stingy but at least he is NOT a screaming hypocrite like Inhofe……

This is all so typical of the hypocrites in Congress………those twats are a bad sitcom…..a joke around the world…..and it only gets worse year after year…….

I am waiting for my conserv readers to comment…….I want to hear the defense they will have for this douche…..I regret that I may be waiting and waiting……..it will most likely be a response written by Drudge or the like…..

Thoughts?

Was It A Message From God?

It is the weekend….Sunday to be exact….and since I do not post much on religious stuff…..I will change that today….the day before I return to the silliness of politics…….

To begin with…..this post may irritate my more religious of readers and if it does….I apologize that your beliefs cannot handle a bit of scrutiny…..onward!

I have heard that this or that was a message from God…..first of all, do you really want to follow a God that would talk to any of these attle brained morons?  Second, I am just following a logical progression…..

There have been many that say that God is sending us messages…in one form or another……First, I recall a message the Pat Robertson talked about…it was Katrina and its effect was, according to him, a message from God and our sinful ways……then there was everybody’s favorite right wing dumbass, Glenn Beck….he informed the world that the massive tsunami in Japan that wrecked havoc was a message from God……and then there is my favorite female nutcase, Michele Bachmann, who said that it was a message from God that she run for the GOP nomination….but she was not finished with her contact with God……just last week she said that the Hurricane Irene was a message from God to Washington D.C. for politicians to wake and listen to the people…….I never knew God was all that political…..oh well….live and learn.

I will bet that you are wondering just where I am going with this chain of thought, right?

Let us step back about a month or so…..remember Indiana state fair?  When a country band called Sugar land was about to go onstage for their performance and a freak wind gust collapsed the stage they were about enter?

Well if you think out the logical progression of thought that the right wing dipsticks have then you can postulate that it was a message from God that he hates or at least disapproves of country music….PERIOD!

Side note:  The loss of life in everyone of the cases I cited were horrific and I am by NO means making light of their deaths…I am trying to point out that anything can be attributed to a message from God…..the sooner that some realize this fact….the sooner they can get on with their lives and learn to be happy……

Oh Haiti! I Am So Sorry!

Think back about a year ago….a massive earthquake took out a large portion of the island nation of Haiti….you remember those days….celebrities getting their required PR photos taken….politicians handing out a couple of bottles of water so their photo-op looked good and so on….all the concern was basically a PR stunt…yes I said stunt…..

Only a small portion of the money pledged has made it to the country…..why?  Better yet…now that the sensationalism has subsided….NO one cares….it is sad and I apologize for the lack of compassion that the media and governments are showing toward the island….

And now…thanx for all the concern of the world a massive Cholera epidemic has engulfed the island….

Hundreds of protesters threw stones at UN peacekeepers, set up burning barricades and torched a police station in Cap Haitien.

Six UN peacekeepers were injured in the clashes, the UN said. At least 10 people were also injured.

As well as calling for UN peacekeepers to leave Haiti, demonstrators accused the government of “leaving the people to die”, the AFP news agency reported.

This will not be last incident of protesters and violence….the world has seen to it…….we should be proud of our governments….we opened our hearts and wallets to people that needed our help and the government have been nothing but pricks from the start……. after the photo-ops…….

The Sympathetic American

Daily Agitator

I am always amazed at the generosity of the American people……and they just cannot let a disaster go by without taking pity on the afflicted and trying to help when help seems to be in short supply……

When the bitch of a storm, Katrina, hit in my area….the American people to quick to come to the aid of the people of the Gulf Coast, with donations and volunteering and while the government was sitting around scratching their crotch, the American people we helping the Coastians get their lives back…..Americans are very compassionate and generous…..two qualities that have made this country great…..

The recent earthquake that destroyed Haiti, the American people once again showed their compassion and helped out whewre ever it was needed, most notably raising millions of dollars that would be spent in Haiti helping the people who have lost everything….they are very generous….once again…..

And when the health reform debate was raging they donated over a million dollars to fund a series of free health clinics across the US…..helping people that could not afford health insurance to find out about their personal health…..several people’s lives were saved because of this effort….once again the generosity of the American people knows no bounds….

And now I come to the meat of this agitation……the American people have done all that was asked of them and then some to help people in need around the world….and they have been unbelievably generous……but with all that said I would like to know why health reform is a dirty word?

We are talking about the lives of the American people and somehow the compassion was been lost on them….what did the uninsured people do to deserve this treatment by their countrymen?  Why is the people that are not so close to their hearts deserve better treatment than the people next door?

Please someone, anyone explain this to me….None of my questions are rhetorical…..I am listening!