substitute

This was not a good day to shop at my usual shopping mall back in KC nor is it going to be a good day getting around the Bay Area for a very long, very very long time.

The photo gallery for the trucksplosion story is amazing.

Current Mood: nervous

Conservative religious types are saying that the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was an angry God's response to abortion, or homosexuality, or our failure to teach the Ten Commandments in schools.

A lot of countries abort, and tolerate gays, and fail to teach Biblical morality in schools. I haven't seen a lot of massive natural disasters in Sweden or New Zealand lately, though.

I wonder how many conservative Christians have considered that the Old Testament God of Wrath might be upset at us over the war?

Let's dare the nation's pastors to ask that question this Sunday. Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah would.

The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings. We weren't sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides, benzenes, phenols, hydrocarbons, or whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event, like the vivid scene in the switching yard or the people trudging across the snowy overpass with children, food, belongings, a tragic army of the dispossessed. Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious... {...} It was said that the governor was on his way from the capital in an executive helicopter. It would probably set down in a bean field outside a deserted town, allowing the governor to emerge, square-jawed and confident, in a bush jacket, within camera range, for ten or fifteen seconds, as a demonstration of his imperishability...

from White Noise, by Don DeLillo.

Famine in Niger, war and famine in Sudan, famine and disease after the tsunami, predatory landlords, dirty drinking water, the abuse of women and children, yet more war everywhere, AIDS, hurricanes, the impossible life of the subsistence farmer, drought, endless cycles of poverty and corruption, malaria, and still more war.

What's a person to do?

Give a few bucks to Oxfam if nothing else. 77% of their donations and 90% of their emergency fund donations go directly to operations. They help in emergencies and crises, and they fight the root causes of the world's miseries too. They do it locally, with global reach.

For those outside the U.S., the donation link is this one.

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In which bullets whistle past me

Unpopular suggestion

The Airborne Toxic Event

appeal.

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May 2009

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