The Chilean quake

i've been watching this story unfold since early this morning... i was stunned to hear that, according to one report, buildings shook as far away as the buenos aires microcentro (the core of the downtown area)... i also heard that some electricity and phones were out in mendoza, argentina... mendoza is just on the east side of the andes, several hundred kms from santiago with mt. aconcagua in between, so you can imagine how strong the quake was to pass through such a massif...

photos and text courtesy of yahoo news...


Map locating the epicentre of the huge
8.8-magnitude earthquake which has
rocked Chile, killing at least 78 people,
toppling buildings and triggering a
tsunami warning around the Pacific
rim of fire, President Michelle Bachelet
announced.


Vehicles that were driving along a highway
that collapsed during the earthquake near
Santiago are seen overturned on the asphalt
Saturday Feb. 27, 2010 after an 8.8-magnitude
earthquake struck central Chile early Saturday.
The quake hit 200 miles (325 kilometers)
southwest of the capital and the epicenter
was just 70 miles (115 kilometers) from
Concepcion, Chile's second-largest city.


An image generated by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) West Coast
and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center shows the
projected tsunami travel times following a 8.8-magnitude
earthquake that rocked Chile early February 27, 2010.

what disturbs me the most is that almost all of the photos and news stories so far are from santiago and other cities several hundred kilometers from the epicenter... there has been very little yet from the city closest to the epicenter, concepcion... this is going to be evolving for days, particularly when considering that an 8.8 magnitude quake is on the order of 8-900 TIMES more powerful than the earthquake that recently hit haiti...

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As long as we're talking about greed porn

here's more...

JP Morgan Chase reports $3.3bn profits

Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase has reported profits of $3.3bn (£2bn) for the last three months of 2009.

That compares with the $702m profits reported last year, at the height of the financial crisis.

Net revenues for the quarter totalled $25.2bn - higher than a year ago but below the previous quarter's.

Total profits for the year were $11.7bn, the bank said, up from the $5.6bn it made in 2008, with $6.9bn made from investment banking alone.

The bank paid a total of $26.9bn in pay and bonuses over the year, with investment bankers earning a total of $9.3bn.

and the ceo has the utter chutzpah to say this...

Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan's chairman and chief executive, said he was pleased with the bank's performance, but said it could perform better.

"Though these results showed improvement, we acknowledge that they fell short of both an adequate return on capital and the firm's earnings potential," he said.

what IS the matter with these fucking people...? is it possible they inhabit the same planet i do...? i guess if you want real live porn, see if you can catch them on a webcam creaming their pants as they open their bonus checks... better yet, do a split-screen with the bankers on one side and people sleeping on the street in haiti on the other...

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Hard-core greed porn: $145B Wall Street payout - 18% MORE than last year

obscenity rises to new heights...

In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart tried to explain "hard-core" pornography, or what is obscene, by saying, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . . "

well, see THIS...

Wall Street’s payout for 2009: $145 billion

If you still needed statistical proof that the folks on Wall Street have become entirely detached from reality in the wake of the massive taxpayer-funded bailout of their colossal mistakes, here it is.

The 38 largest financial institutions on Wall Street will pay out a total of $145.85 billion in compensation for 2009, an 18 percent increase over 2008 and "slightly more than in the record year of 2007," the Wall Street Journal reports.

(By "slightly," the Journal means a 6 percent increase over 2007, amounting to some $8 billion.)

Contrast this with the state of affairs on Main Street, where average earnings increased 2.2 percent in 2009 -- and that number excludes the 7 million jobs lost since the recession began.

over 1 BILLION people around the world don't get enough to eat... innocents are being slaughtered in afghanistan and pakistan... many tens of thousands are dead or dying in haiti... yet our super-rich elites continue to bleed the world of its riches for their own coffers... every day i say to myself, this cannot stand, and every day it continues to stand...

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Certainly one of the greatest disasters of the modern age

truly horrifying in a country that was a nightmare to begin with...

Tens of thousands of Haitians slept on sidewalks or wandered the streets of this heavily damaged city early Thursday, a sign of the vast homelessness emerging after the devastating earthquake.

[...]

Bodies lay everywhere: tiny children next to schools, women in rubble-strewn streets with stunned expressions frozen on their faces, men hidden beneath plastic tarps and cotton sheets. Desperate residents turned pickup trucks and wheelbarrows into ambulances and doors into stretchers, the Associated Press reported, trying to ferry the dead and wounded even as they acknowledged that help was almost impossible to find.

[...]

In the central Bel Air neighborhood, the streets and sidewalks were covered with people sleeping on mattresses, plastic chairs and bits of cardboard. Survivors set up camps amid piles of salvaged goods, including food being scavenged from the rubble.

[...]

Indeed, the neighborhood had largely been reduced to rubble. Flames licked from the shell of one ruined building. Balconies had crashed to the ground. Cars were buried under chunks of gray concrete the size of dining-room tables. The street was littered with bricks, shattered plastic chairs, glittering shards of glass.

Huge crowds swarmed through the city overnight, carrying meager possessions -- a cooking pot, a sack of vegetables -- and shoeless toddlers with terrified eyes. Many people had wrapped themselves in bedsheets, adding to the ghostly air.

it's a heart-wrenching experience to read of a disaster of this magnitude... i'm experiencing a depth of feeling for these people similar to what i experienced as the epic catastrophe of katrina unfolded...

what i don't get is how our erstwhile secretary of state, hillary clinton, can say something like this, an entirely true statement imho, without making the connection that the united states has produced precisely the same situation for the afghanistan people without benefit of an act-of-god natural disaster...

"In the wake of disasters like this, people do get desperate," Clinton said in a televised interview with CNN. "If you have a starving baby in your arms, you're going to find food wherever you can."

yes, hillary... desperate people do desperate things... when they can't feed or take care of their families and are left with no options, they are very vulnerable to doing things they might never otherwise consider... what happened in haiti and what's happening in afghanistan are both hugely tragic but the one was and is preventable...

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Delta/Northwest, Berlusconi, Zimbabwe, and food riots: waking to a string of unpleasant news

where to start...

Delta Air Lines Inc. and Northwest Airlines Corp., squeezed by record high fuel prices and a slowing economy, are combining in a stock-swap deal that would create the world's biggest carrier.

my experience with one of the previous holders of the "world's biggest airline" title, united, tells me that no good will come of this...

and that's the least of the gloomy news...

the europeans couldn't believe we re-elected bush, and i can't believe the italians were stupid enough to re-elect this annoying, corrupt piece of offal...

Media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi won a decisive victory Monday in Italy's parliamentary election, setting the colorful conservative and staunch U.S. ally on course to his third stint as premier.

meanwhile, another totally corrupt, to-hell-with-the-people dictator desperately hangs on to power while the leaders of neighboring countries do nothing...

President Robert Mugabe's security forces fanned out across Zimbabwe Monday on the eve of a general strike called by the opposition after a judge threw out its bid to force the election results.

[...]

At Saturday's emergency summit in Lusaka, regional leaders discussed the post-election impasse long into the night, but they stopped short of criticising the Zimbabwean government or Mugabe.

Regional leaders have been chided for their traditional reluctance to speak out against 84-year-old Mugabe, seen by many as an elder statesman who still deserves respect for his role in winning Zimbabwe's independence.

Some three million Zimbabweans have fled to neighbouring countries in the wake of the country's economic collapse under Mugabe, who has ruled uninterrupted since independence from Britain in 1980.

A one-time regional model, Zimbabwe is now groaning under the impact of the world's highest rate of inflation while even basic food products such as bread and cooking oil are scarce.

and soaring food prices are having the predicted result across the globe, most notably, in a country that hasn't had any genuine good news in seemingly forever...

The good news is that there hasn't been a coup d'etat in Haiti in the wake of violent protests over increased food prices. However Saturday's vote by 16 of the country's 27 lawmakers to oust Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis means that the country is in the middle of a severe leadership crisis - and that Haiti's Head of State, President Rene Preval, is now politically impotent, bereft of his chief executive.

and here's what really, really hungry people look like, courtesy of spiegel...


Haiti


Pakistan


Philippines

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