Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming
W.B. Yeats
The death toll from the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia is 226,000.
The Indian Ocean tsunami caused the global death toll from natural disasters in 2004 to triple from the year before to about a quarter of a million ? the highest total in almost 30 years, the international Red Cross said last week.
Hurricane Katrina’s death toll has climbed past 1,200, and there is ample doubt that the city of New Orleans will ever be the same again.
The body count from Hurricane Stan has reached 1,400 in Guatemala after rescuers retrieved 61 bodies from two mudslide-hit communities.
Smashed bridges, buckled highways and surging rivers have crippled the Mexico city of Tapachula that is normally a teeming gateway to Central America but now lies sodden and broken by rains from Hurricane Stan.
At least 3,000 homes were destroyed or damaged this week when the Coatan River burst its banks at Tapachula, washing away neighborhoods and smashing bridges in a deluge of brown water.
The 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck Northern Pakistan and India on Friday has thus far killed 18,000 30,000, according to estimates.
“I thought doomsday had fallen,” one shaken survivor in Kahmir told Time Magazine.
Northern Peru was hit with a 7.5 quake on September 29, leaving two dead and at least 500 homeless in Peru’s northern jungle and highlands.
An earthquake measuring 6.7 in magnitude rattled a remote part of Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific on the 29th, the same day as the Peruvian rattler.
Meanwhile, six drug manufacturers and 81 nations are searching for a vaccine for avian flu in advance of a feared pandemic.
Elsewhere, American scientists studying the Arctic icecap say the area covered by sea ice has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year.
A joint study by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) found that at the current rate of shrinking the icecap could completely disappear within 60 years.
The scientists say they are recording the lowest extent of polar ice cover for more than 100 years and warn that global warming could be accelerating.
Dr Mark Serreze from the NSIDC says he is alarmed that sea ice levels are not fluctuating like they used to.
“I’m flabbergasted, to be honest,” he said.
There are 20 less people on the planet to worry about the effects of global warming after sucide bombers strolled into restaurants on the island of Bali and blew themselves up last week.
In justifiably paranoid New York City, police and politicians brace for a real-or-imagined “team of terrorist operatives” to detonate baby strollers laden with bombs in the subway stations.
The tally of American soldiers slain in Iraq is reaching the 2,000 mark and the words “exit strategy” have apparently never echoed off the walls of the Pentagon.
Now, what is it you wanted to bitch about?
Wow. ‘May you live in interesting times’, indeed…
Our Great Leader Dubya STILL will not say the words “global warming”. I just hope and pray we get someone decent for president in the next election that will begin to fix the damage to the environment that Dubya has done. And his corporate buddies have done also.
Pat Robertson was on CNN this morning to discuss the Meiers nomination and right out the gate Wolf Blitzer — of all people — asked him if there was a apocalyptic component to the recent spate of disasters. The question seemed to take Robertson by surprise. He probably would have expected it from one of the chuckleheads at Fox but Wolf Blitzer?
Just goes to show that there is an End Days zeitgeist going around.
[...] Their Mouth
Wonderland’s “Apocalypse”
Someone woke up Saturday morning on the wrong side of bed… The Indian Ocean ts [...]
It’s too late. Bushco took office during a critical juncture and he made errors, which cannot be fixed. I would think this is so obvious that even optimists would be chastened by the empirical data.
The bureaucracy is gutted. It’ll take at least 2 terms to get it back to where it was when Clinton left office. The CIA has been ruined by Porter Goss et al ignoring 9/11 commission?s recommendations.
The Gulf Stream’s toast. Christian and partisan nuts have destroyed academic professionalism. Fact has been replaced with opinion, in no small part due to 30 years of lazy journalism.
We’re not screwed- we’ll find a new, horrible equilibrium, but it’s na?ve to think we can just ‘undo’ the damage Bushco has wrecked. He’s a Kaiser Wilhelm sized disaster for the USA. I can only hope this treasonous president will die in prison once the facts come out. But then again, who?s being na?ve there?
I hate the pattern: Republican gets in, destroys, then Democrat is elected and cleans it up. Economy gets good again, Republican gets in, repeat. I honestly didn’t know that some of the environmental things aren’t fixable at this point. I’m sorry to hear this. I don’t spend the time reading online about these things that I do on other subjects so didn’t know this. I wish if we had the situation we had with Nixon, when there were enough Democrats that got impeachment started, etc. John Dean who was in the whole Watergate mess said that Dubya broke the law by lying to Congress about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This is in the documentary “Uncovered: Iraq War Exposed”. I was so floored by that it just made me sick. He’s broken the law and is still in there. I never thought we’d have a president worse than Nixon, but Dubya’s surpassed that now repeatedly.