I guess she took the advice of an old Texas Republican, Claytie Williams: "If it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it".
Posted on 03/23/2011 7:22:13 PM PDT by WilliamHouston
January 12, 2010
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake strikes approximately 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It kills anywhere from 92,000 to 220,000 people, injures 300,000, and leaves approximately 1.5 to 1.8 million homeless.
Led by the United States, the international community launches a massive rescue operation to save the survivors, and puts helicopters into the air and ships to sea to distribute hundreds of thousands of meals and bottled waters to the victims.
World governments, NGOs, multinational corporations, and private individuals raise billions of dollars for the Haitian relief effort. The World Bank waives Haiti's debt repayment schedule for five years. Volunteer doctors and surgeons flock to the troubled country.
Haiti is a welfare state kept afloat by foreign philanthropy: three fourths of its economy consists of remittances and international aid.
Bleeding hearts soon flocked to the scene of the disaster - Sean Penn, Nicholas Kristof, a "human rights activist" and "Malcolm X scholar" named Amanda Kijera, who in "solidarity" with the oppressed went to Haiti to disprove exaggerated Western stereotypes of violence against women, and after suffering the misfortune of being raped all night on a rooftop by one of her Haitian hosts, returned home "grateful for the experience."
Bono, Jay Z, and Rihanna recorded a hit song called "Stranded" for the Haitian reflief effort. Collectively, Lady Gaga, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Madonna donated well over a million dollars.
A year later, Haiti is still a bottomless pit of death, poverty, and despair. This comes in spite of an unprecedented outpouring of world charity. Even Gabon pledged a million dollars to the recovery effort.
Before the earthquake, Haiti had more foreign aid workers than any nation on earth. After the earthquake, 12,000 NGOs operating in Haiti couldn't stop a cholera epidemic from claiming thousands of lives.
The national government is utterly paralyzed. In Port-au-Prince, a mere 5 percent of the rubble has been removed. Over a million people are living in tent cities. Thousands of criminals who broke out of prison in the chaos are still on the loose.
With the UN on the ground, Haitian women are being sexually exploited by gang leaders. Babies and toddlers are being sold as slaves to foreign sex tourists.
Within a week of the Haitian earthquake, looters and machete wielding gangs were preying on the weak, and in the months that followed the American media gradually lost interest in reporting on the story.
This is your nation on progressivism, liberal charity, and world government.
March 11, 2011
A 9.0 magnitude earthquake strikes 45 miles off the coast of Japan and 232 miles from Tokyo - an earthquake over 100x more powerful than the Haitian earthquake of 2010, and the 7th largest earthquake in recorded history.
The earthquake triggers a tsunami on par with the one that struck Indonesia in 2004. It hurtles toward the ancient city of Sendai which has a population of 1,031,704 people. Reeling from the damage of the 9.0 earthquake, the residents of coastal Northern Japan have less than 15 minutes to escape the tsunami.
Buildings sway in Tokyo, the Japanese capital, which unlike Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, the U.S. Air Force burnt to the ground in 1945.
The Japanese people, who manufacture more consumer electronics devices than anyone else on earth, are warned of the impending tsunami by countless electronic gadgets, products of their own technological genius - over 99.9 percent of whom in the affected region survive to tell the tale.
The Japanese government has officially confirmed the deaths of 9,523 people. 16,094 are still reported as missing. 2,755 are injured. The majority of Japanese citizens who died in the tsunami were the sick and elderly who didn't have enough time to escape.
In addition to a 9.0 megaquake and an Indonesian-style tsunami, the Japanese are also simultaneously struck by a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which (combined with the shutdowns at other plants) knocks out electricity to approximately 4.4 million people, and forces the evacation of a 12 square mile area.
Fueled by the U.S. media, hysteria breaks out on the U.S. West Coast as Americans consume anti-radiation capsules. Meanwhile, Japanese workers stoically endure the radiation, restore electricity to the damaged reactors, and appear to be increasingly successful in averting another Chernobyl- style nuclear disaster.
The Nikkei stock exchange takes a 16 percent haircut, but soon starts to rebound. By March 21, the Japanese have restored electricity to all but 242,927 people in Northern Japan.
After suffering the most expensive natural disaster in world history, Americans and Westerners (who subscribe to the leftwing theory that "all cultures are equal," vicious and virtuous ones alike, otherwise known as "multiculturalism") are amazed by the almost complete absence of looting in Japan - granted, there has been some "looting," people taking basic necessities from grocery stories, using gasoline from ruined vehicles, but the Japanese Police Agency say these incidents number only in the dozens.
Generally, by all accounts the people of Japan have endured their national crisis with almost unparalled grace and restraint. When Nicholas Kristof lived in Japan, he fondly remembers that the Japanese didn't use substitute teachers, because the Japanese children would convene at school and hold their own classes. So far it hasn't occurred to him to draw the logical conclusion.
As most of us expected, the Japanese reconstruction effort is already roaring along: for example, this section of Great Kanto Highway was completely destroyed on March 11, rebuilt by March 15, and traffic had been restored by March 19.
Two weeks after the 9.0 Japanese earthquake and tsnuami, the U.S. media has turned its attention to the U.S. intervention in Libya - the general assumption being that the Japanese are rapidly bringing the situation under control.
Although I know Anderson Cooper made a brief appearance in Haiti, I am not sure if Sean Penn has changed his mind and decided to live in Sendai for the rest of his life. Maybe Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will adopt a fashionable new Japanese orphan. Somehow I doubt it.
This is your nation on nationalism, culture, and self reliance.
Any questions?
Boy, talk about missing the point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but what you are saying is that if the US had fire bombed Port au Prince in 1945, the Haitians would still be living in the burnt out rubble in 2011.
They deserved every bit of it:
Partial list of B-29 missions against Tokyo
* 19 February 1945: 119 B-29s hit port and urban area
* 25 February 1945: 174 B-29s dropping incendiaries destroy ~28,000 buildings
* 4 March 1945: 159 B-29s hit urban area[3]
* 10 March 1945: 334 B-29s dropping incendiaries destroy ~267,000 buildings; ~25% of city[3] (Operation Meetinghouse) killing some 100,000
* 2 April 1945: >100 B-29s bomb the Nakajima aircraft factory
* 3 April 1945: 68 B-29s bomb the Koizumi aircraft factory and urban areas in Tokyo
* 7 April 1945: 101 B-29s bomb the Nakajima aircraft factory.
* 13 April 1945: 327 B-29s bomb the arsenal area
* 15 April 1945: 109 B-29s hit urban area
* 24 May 1945: 520 B-29s bomb urban-industrial area south of the Imperial Palace
* 26 May 1945: 464 B-29s bomb urban area immediately south of the Imperial Palace
* 20 July 1945: 1 B-29 drops a Pumpkin bomb (bomb with same ballistics as the Fat Man nuclear bomb) through overcast aiming at but missing the Imperial Palace[8]
* 8 August 1945: ~60 B-29s bomb the aircraft factory and arsenal
* 10 August 1945: 70 B-29s bomb the arsenal complex
Prior to that it was known as the Army Air Corp.
“The Politically Incorrect Earthquake (Are All Cultures Really Equal?)”
Of course they aren’t.
Whoever was foolish enough to come up with an idea like that in the first place?
Worse, who was foolish enough to BELIEVE it?
Yep, derailed the thread pretty well, too.
The history of WWII includes the unimaginable barbarism and cruelty of the Japanese, just as it does the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe, yet we are not taught the former. You have to go out of your way to read about them.
My Dad served in the U.S. Army in Southeast Asia in WWII, and he almost never talked about it, but I inherited his "trunk" of Army keepsakes and such, and know some of the stories behind them.
Those memories and that history are all true, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with the current Japanese people and their efforts to recover from the earthquake and tsunami, and deal with the reactor troubles.
I think it was rather gratuitous of the article author to throw in the line about Tokyo being burned in WWII, true or not, but it is even more pointless for us to be ruining this thread arguing about it.
As you say, the comparison between Haiti and Japan is the point...
Just...damn. It reads like The Onion.
Haiti made that deal with Satan to become liberated, remember? Voodoo is an official religion.
Haiti is no better or no worse than most sub-Saharan African nations. Why should anyone expect anything different from the population there? Or in New Orleans, for that matter.
I guess she took the advice of an old Texas Republican, Claytie Williams: "If it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it".
Of course, the fact that we did much of the rebuilding after defetaing their imperial rulers and civiling the Japanese population is glossed over.
You might have added a sarcasm tag on “Oh yeah - apropos of nothing, we just went over there and burned down Tokyo. What a bunch of crap!
I misinterpreted your comment twice.
However the author does make a valid point.
My comment
The difference between Haiti and Japan.
Japan knew that earth quake/ tsunami was a probability and prepared.
Haiti knew earthquake was a probability and did not.
World flooded Haiti with assistance and still have Haiti as was before.
Japan is back and getting back on its game. What has it been 2 weeks.
Prepare for the worst hope for the best.
But, what of the billions of dollars sent to Haiti? We've sent them enough for them to rebuild several times over. But they haven't.
Yes, we did!! And, we also rebuilt much of Europe also. But, when calamities strike in those formerly war torn areas you don’t see the same type of behavior that we’ve witnessed with Haiti. That is the point the author was making, and your derailment of that wasn’t necessary.
1945 - 2011 - let’s see, these two eras are separated by 66 years and a whole lot of changes within the Japanese people themselves. The same is true of the German people, who were just as, or even more barbaric than the Japanese in the 1940’s. The point of this author is not a rehash of what happened during WWII, but a comparison/contrasting of the behavior of the Haitian people and the Japanese people in the current era after suffering catastrophic damage.
I see your point, but the Japanese switched from fighting a bullets and guns war to an economic one, using our liberal free trade policies and the openness of our society against us.
True, but we are just as much to blame for allowing that as they are for engaging in an economic fight.
No need to defend your point. I have/had relatives from the WWII era that share/shared that same sentiment. Just thought the photo was a little “off topic”.
War is Hell. And that war is over.
I'll offer that we were preoccupied with fighting the Russians in the Cold War and got blind sided.
There is no wisdom in having the State Department set your trade policies.
Everyone knows how f****d up Haiti is; “kick ‘em when they’re down” - what a lot of people forget is that the Japanese attacked us as well as most of their Asian neighbors and were ready to fight us until we exterminated them like cockroaches; only their emperor came to his senses in time.
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