Manila Under Water September 28, 2009

So my mom woke me up sometime on Saturday, she was watching Manila flooding.  Mom was trying to get her sister on the phone making sure she was in Baguio and not still in Manila.  Typhoon Ketsana, aka Ondoy, swept over the Philippines and dropped over 455 millimeter into the Manila area, 341 millimeters of that rainfall fell in only 6 hours, to put that in perspective Katrina had 350 millimeters fall in a 24 hour period.  The flooding as of today has left over 240 dead and thousands other homeless.

 

Here are some articles:

• Typhoon Wreaks Havoc on the Philippines
• Escaping Manila’s Floodwaters, Only to Find Fire
• Social Media Keeps Flood Victims Connected
• Philippines Storm Toll Rises; Government Criticized

Donation info outside of Philippines:

• BayanUSA
• Philippine Aid
• Pnoy Apparel – buy a any Sammy t-shirt and they’ll donate another to a child, plus $5 of your purchase
  • Men’s – Eggplant & Black; Women’s – Teal & Purple

Donation info within Philippines (you can use this if you live outside of the country as well)

• Philippine National Red Cross
• Kabataan Partylist
• Ondoy, You Fucking Asshole
• ABS-CBN Foundation more info here

For those of you in the Philippines they still need volunteers, and if you can’t donate money you can donate other goods.  via Philippine National Red Cross website:

 

Most urgent needs

Food items: Rice, noodles, canned goods, sugar, iodized salt, cooking oil, monggo beans and portable water
Medicines: Paracetamol, antibiotics, analgesic, oral rehydration salts, multivitamins and medications to treat diarrheal diseases
Non-food items: Bath soaps, face towels, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, plastic mats, blankets, mosquito nets, jerry cans, water containers, water purification tablets, plastic sheetings, and Laundry soap
Rehabilitation Programs: Shelter materials for house repair

 

If you’re someone who makes a concious effort to know where your money is going with regards to charity’s you might want to reconsider donating to the American Red Cross, here’s some reads.

And although I really don’t want to go there, I believe its worth mentioning, every countries leader(s) is(are) going to have to face some kind of disaster, its how you prepare before hand and how you react afterward that really measures your worth.  The Bush Administrations and Louisiana’s local government failed in the later during Katrina, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo failed in both, 800 million Pesos (almost $17 mill. US) in emergency money is meant for actual emergencies, not pocket money to gallivant across the globe.

 

If you live in the US and can’t donate there’s always people in need here in our own country.  You can donate blood to the American Red Cross, volunteer at your local shelter (women’s, animal, homeless, etc…), donate home goods to your local shelter (women’s, animal, homeless, etc…), donate or volunteer with The Salvation Army, help out the old lady who lives down the street from you, or just do something good today.

Guess what FO means and obama November 9, 2008

Sooooo, FO means “finished object” or something along those lines.  I finished the puff hat this morning, hooray!

And onto Obama!  Unless you’re living under a rock, or some isolated corner of the world, you pretty much know the President Elect of the United States is Barack Obama.  And you’ve probably read the news, something along the lines of “U.S. elects first African-American President…” blah blah blah.  Which, even if you’re not American, seems like a huge thing.  But you can never really comprehend what that means for us.  When you’re born and raised in the US you take history class and pretty much learn that we are a country built upon the backs of an oppressed people.  Most wanna shrug that off saying “the past is in the past”, but its not, its ingrained into the very fabric of our society.  Most of us grow up knowing racism, by experiencing it, by witnessing it, even by acting upon it.  It’s a history that’s as much a part of America as Blueberry Pie (XD because apple pie isn’t %100 American :p).

Honestly I wasn’t sure I’d be this young when a person of color is made President of the Unites States.  I thought I’d be a spry old lady snapping at my grandkids saying “Finally!  Finally!!  And dammit, and get that cat away from my steak >:”.  But when all of us dreamt of that moment, we dreamt of an election when that persons color didn’t really matter anymore.  Which was one of the greatest things about this election, it, for the most part, didn’t matter.  Most people (and definitely not all) voted for him because of other reasons (which I’m not going to get into ).

As for me, I didn’t vote.  A really long and convoluted story short, I was watching CNN before I left to go and they said “voting on the west will end around 10″ or something like that.  On Ortega Highway someone announced that the booths in California would close at 8 and I knew me and my dad weren’t going to make it.  We did drive the rest of the way in the hope that there’d be a line (since booths stay open if people are waiting) but I wasn’t sure since my voting area was in a “Retirement Community”, which pretty much meant cranky old people wanting to sleep early @_@.  I got there 34 min late :/  Lesson: be super obsessive when it comes to moving and making sure you have the right address -_- also go EARLY!!!  First time I didn’t vote since I turned 18, now I feel like I somehow cheated, entirely shamed and embarrassed, and mostly like I didn’t earn my right to feel something after the elections (which sounds odd but yeah).

Anyway, on the way back they aired McCain’s concession speech and that’s really when you realize he’s won, I mean really, truly, won.  You spend the day watching and listening to the news coverage and stay hopefully cautious, waiting for those electorates to go up, even at such a lead you remain cautious, but then realize he’s really won.  And that’s when history hits you.  That poster you spent your childhood staring at since kindergarten, that poster at the front of your classroom, the one with the old white dudes that ran this country, well they’re going to make a new poster, and its no longer going to be a poster full of old white dudes, its going to be a picture of old white dudes and a light skinned black dude with the name of Barack Hussein Obama.  And you remember all those old history classes, reading and writing on what shaped this country, the good bits and the bad, and all those debates in class on how fair people of color get treated in comparison to a white person, and you realize that all those problems are FAR from over, but Good God the United States of freakin America just elected a half black man named Barack Hussein Obama as the President!

If you haven’t grown up in the U.S., if you’re not American, you can never totally understand what he represents for us.  It transcends the politics of present day and goes straight into the annals of U.S. Government from the very nanosecond they announced it.  And as far as politics goes, when George W. ran for second term he used fear to capture the country, we’ve lived in that fear and uneasiness for far too long that it’s beyond a relief to have someone wanting for hope and change.  I can’t imagine how much pressure Obama is now under, I pray he doesn’t crack under it, and I pray he remains true to the heart of his campaign.

and btw Congrats America

FOX… July 10, 2007

FOX Attacks

It’s a petition site but they have a YouTube video on it that was pretty interesting. Granted FOX Attacks was founded by some members of the Sierra Club, where some of the members tend to be a tad too close to the “enthusiasm” of PETA member for my comfort. But still, for gods sake!  What right does FOX to be so biased?  I understand its in our nature to be biased, but when a national news organization cant even pretend to be is a very sad thing, and says a hell of a lot about why people are so fucking blind in this country.

“CO2 is not pollutants.”?
Its obviously polluted enough to rot your brain in order for you to say such an asinine thing =_=. Why doesn’t he go sit in his car with the windows rolled up and a hose sticking out of it that connects to his tailpipe. It’s just a blatant lie I don’t even know what to fucking rant about @__@ I’m speechless.

Just so you don’t get suckered into thinking you can dismiss global warming as a theory, think about this for a moment. Gravity is a fucking theory! -_- A Scientific theory isn’t a guess out of the fucking blue.

Yes Earth does have a history of warming up and cooling down, and yes, glaciers all over the world started melting at the end of the Ice Age. That isn’t what the debate is about. That warming up and cooling down period happens slowly, spanning hundreds and even thousands of years.
Look at the graphs, that rise that starts at around the turn of the century isn’t normal. Late 1800’s = Industrial Revolution = Rise in CO2 Emissions = The beginning of the Greenhouse Effect. Nature warms up in gradual steps, we do this in a little over a hundred years. Those CO2 emissions have gave by %35 then what it normally should be. This has an effect on everything. The melting of the glaciers up north are not supposed to melt that fast. These photos are not normal. Yosemite and Yellowstone (among others) were built by glaciers, but it took thousands of years for that ice to melt THOUSANDS OF YEARS!! The fact that people in the Maldives are building walls around their islands for a very real fear of being flooded out is not normal. A hurricane as large as Katrina and the storms in the Midwest are not normal! And guess what people, that has something to do with global warming. Melted ice in the North Pole means very cold water in the ocean, and cold water in our oceans mean a whacked out ocean current. In case you haven’t realized it before, our weather isn’t caused by four old men with beards blowing wind on the four corners of the world, the weather is the direct cause of the subsequent hot and cold ocean currents.

You can’t ignore the fact that you live on a very small earth, you affect one thing, you affect it all.

Denial?
CO2 Info
Glacier article SF Chronicle

o_o okay, back to your regularly scheduled interneting… ?_?

International Hypocrisy July 22, 2006

Have you ever donated money to a certain “international aid organisation”? The UN aid groups, the hundreds of christian foundations, all with the sole job of helping third world people. But have you ever wondered where your money is going?

I think we all do it, its in our nature to give, its ingrained in us to want to help. But if you start tracing the path that money takes you start to notice nasty patterns. And it makes you wonder who is actually responsible for the distribution of all those donations.

Cambodia has some of the most aid workers in the world ‘helping’ their country. Yet every year hundreds of Cambodians from the country side get displaced, losing their jobs because a large foreign corporation doesn’t want even the smallest amount of competition. These people end up moving to a larger city in order to make a living, only to end up living on the streets. And the worst of it, if they have children, girls in particular, they are more susceptible to being sold into prostitution, even kidnapped into sex slavery. Cambodia is the worlds leading source of child prostitution, both boys and girls. A foreign pedophile can land from his plain and within an hour be able to drive down to a house so he can pick a little boy or girl from a catalogue to molest.

The country? They’re doing very little to stop it, they turn a blind eye to the hundreds of visiting pedophiles every year. But what pisses me off the most are the aid workers.

It would be very simple to them to take some of that donated money, buy some land, and work something out with all the displaced people. So they can make some sort of living without having to live on the streets in a large city. At the very least they can put pressure on the country to do something, thats what they were CREATED for. These are the groups that are constantly preaching humanitarian rights, and yet they too turn a blind eye to children being robbed of their innocence. They make an average of $60+K a year in a country where the average yearly income is well bellow $1,000. They drive expensive SUV’s and live in million dollar mansions with pools the size of my home. They live a lifestyle of the rich in a country of the very poor. The people higher up the ladder will generously give themselves bonuses and raise their own salary for their “job well done”.

Next time someone donates money to an “aid” group, do some research on it. Most of them are watched by watchdog groups tracking the money trail. A lot of them pocket the money. There’s always a money trail, but does it lead to a new school in a remote part of Africa or does it lead to a BMW dealership?
Good Samaritans or Hypocrites?