Tag: Open Thread

Mar 02 2010

You Can’t Hijack This Thread

It’s a wide open thread. You can post on any subject you feel like talking about in here.

Politics, current affairs, war, earth changes, injustice, justice, good news, bad news, or even any kind of zoomed out off the friggin’ wall out to lunch in geosynchronous orbit or higher space aliens on acid poked in the third eye with a sharp stick whacked out stuff you can dream up!

After all…

For those who can master it, it’s a fine way to see the world. You get secret messages from the radio, TV, and most movies. You know God personally (so you don’t need Jesus as a go-between). The best ones can maintain their powers despite medication. Did you ever wonder about the existence of ghosts and angels and demons? Somebody had to have seen them, right? Now you know.

It begins for some when the trees start telling you their names. The flowers sing an inane little song like a children’s song that threatens to drone on indefinitely. There is another world, and it may contain well-organized squirrels. That famous karate guy doesn’t exist in the other world. But there’s plenty of paranoia to go around.

…

You would think that the ability to see angels, demons, and ghosts would give you special powers. Well, it doesn’t. You can’t usually talk to them. I prefer the plants. They speak clearly and use small words so the slower ones among us can follow. Unfortunately, most people aren’t even listening.

…

So let’s talk about heroes. Heroes are alive and well in the other world. Heroes love bats. Bats hate squirrels. Squirrels love trees. Trees love rain. Rain loves the night. The night loves heroes. Therefore, heroes know the insane who are being controlled by the squirrels. These people are insane, not Schizophrenic. True heroes know who they serve.

…

Cantor was a hero. And Godel was a hero. Godel saved us from the logicians (who had been influenced by the squirrels) by ending the tyranny of logic. Now not many people know this, but he simultaneously disproved ultimate logic while proving the existence of the other world. He saw it in a dream, which is, as we all know, the only way for a non-schizophrenic to experience the other world.

So enjoy! Knock yourself out! This thread is…

Safe As Milk

Well my cigarette died when I washed my face

Dropped some drops in an ashtray hit a wrong place

Woman at my blinds to see spiders spinning lines

It’s a safe as milk, it’s a safe as milk

I never heard it put quite that way

The shape I’m in is a gone a way

They called a day they called a day

Yesterday’s paper headlines approach rain gutter teasing rusty cat sneezing

Soppin’ wet hammer dusty and wheezing

Lusty alley whining trashcan blues

Children running after rainbows stocking poor

Gracious ladies nylon hanging on to line

Jumping onto leg looking mighty fine

Sorrows lollipop lands stick-broken on a dark carnival ground

Pop up toaster cracklin

Aluminium rhythm and sound

Ev’ry day pencil lazy and sharp

The icebox inside looking like a harp

E-lectric bulb been out for years

Freezer fumes feed the gas tears

Cheese in the corner with a mile long beard

Bacon blue bread dog eared (repeat twice)

I may be hungry but I sure ain’t weird

Mar 01 2010

Afternoon Edition

C’est moi, encore. ek is still resting from two weeks of boycotting NBC, so I am attempting to take his place. My version of the Afternoon Edition may not be as colorful but, hopefully, at least as informative.

The search for news about Haiti in the media is getting scarcer except for the rare analysis and comparison to the earthquake that occurred in Chile. Some of the analysis is thoughtful and well done, some of it is, well, tripe. The rains have arrived early and it has been raining everyday filling the streets with contaminated water and flooding the make shift camps that are home to over a million displaced people. The rain also adds to the difficulty of distributing food, clean water, shelter material and medical aid. If we thought it was bad in January, the early rains have compounded the misery.

Children’s Messages of Hope for Haiti

Haiti’s Futile Race Against the Rain

There were floods on Saturday in Les Cayes, in southwestern Haiti. It rained in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, and again on Saturday and Sunday night, long enough to slick the streets and make a slurry of the dirt and concrete dust. Long enough, too, to give a sense of what will happen across the country in a few weeks, when the real storms start.

Mud will wash down the mountains, and rain will overflow gutters choked with rubble and waste, turning streets into filthy rivers. Life will get even more difficult for more than a million people.

New misery and sickness will drench the displaced survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake – like the 16,000 or so whose tents and flimsy shacks fill every available inch of the Champ de Mars, the plaza in Port-au-Prince by the cracked and crumbled National Palace, or the 70,000 who have made a city of the Petionville Club, a nine-hole golf course on a mountainside above the capital.

The rainy season is the hard deadline against which Haiti’s government and relief agencies in Port-au-Prince are racing as they try to solve a paralyzing riddle: how to shelter more than a million displaced people in a densely crowded country that has no good place to put them.

This is an Open Thread.

Feb 27 2010

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Tsunami hits Chile as Pacific Basin braces for impact

by Talek Harris, AFP

19 mins ago

SYDNEY (AFP) – A tsunami crashed into Chile’s coast Saturday in a potential portent of disaster across the vast Pacific Ocean as nations went on alert for towering waves generated by a killer earthquake.

The ominous sound of evacuation sirens blared in Hawaii and French Polynesia as a tsunami raced around the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire” after the 8.8-magnitude quake in Chile, which left at least 122 people dead.

About 50 countries and territories along an arc stretching from New Zealand to Japan were braced for immensely powerful waves, not long after the fifth anniversary of the Indian Ocean disaster that killed more than 220,000 people.

Feb 27 2010

This Week In Health and Fitness

Welcome to this week’s Health and Fitness. This is an Open Thread.

Many staff members of most NGO’s that work in foreign countries are citizens if those countries. Such is the case with Haiti, where over 85% of MSF’s staff, medical and non-medical, are Haitian. They did so despite the losses they and their families suffered. Geraldine Augustin is one of those who is caring for her fellow Haitians.

Like thousands of Haitians, Geraldine Augustin started helping people just after the disaster. She is a young, passionate and energetic medical student who has just joined MSF. She belongs to the almost 1,500 Haitian staff employed by MSF in the country and who make our medical activities possible. She works in an MSF post-operative structure set in what used to be a girls school. She tells us about her life and work after the earthquake:

“I am Geraldine Augustin and I am finishing my medical studies. On the 12th January I was headed to university for a class. Suddenly the earth started to shake and the next second all the houses were under the earth, there were dead and injured people everywhere. I was lucky enough not to get hurt, but my mother was killed.”

As is now custom, I’ll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I’ll answer as best I can.  

Feb 26 2010

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Haiti aid effort marred by slow U.N. response

By Tom Brown, Reuters

Fri Feb 26, 9:07 am ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – Clutching automatic assault rifles, truckloads of U.N. troops patrolled the streets of Haiti’s shattered capital on the day after the earthquake hit last month, seemingly oblivious to the misery around them.

Cries for help from people digging for survivors in collapsed buildings were drowned out by the roar of heavy-duty engines as the troops plowed through Port-au-Prince without stopping to join rescue efforts, much less lead them.

A common sight since they were deployed in 2004, the U.N. troops huddled in the shade of their canopied vehicles.

Feb 25 2010

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Excuses but no Sarkozy apology for Rwanda genocide

by Philippe Alfroy, AFP

1 hr 43 mins ago

KIGALI (AFP) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy acknowledged that France made mistakes during the 1994 genocide, paid homage to the victims but stopped short of apologising during his landmark visit to Kigali Thursday.

“What happened here is unacceptable, but what happened here compels the international community, including France, to reflect on the mistakes that stopped it from preventing and halting this abominable crime,” he said.

Marking the first visit to Rwanda by a French president since the 1994 massacres, Sarkozy spoke at a joint press conference with Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who has repeatedly accused Paris of aiding the genocide.

Feb 24 2010

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 6 Haitian orphans who had been detained land in US

By CHRISTINE ARMARIO and KELLI KENNEDY, Associated Press Writers

1 hr 14 mins ago

MIAMI – Six Haitian orphans arrived in the United States on Wednesday, four days after Haitian police seized them out of fear they were being kidnapped.

The children arrived on a charter flight to Miami International Airport. They will be taken to a shelter and their new parents can take the children home Thursday, according to Jan Bonnema, the Minnesota-based founder of the Children of The Promise orphanage.

On Saturday, a group of 20 men blocked four women accompanying the orphans to the airport, shouting: “You can’t take our children!” Police briefly detained the women and the orphans – ages 1-5 – spent three night sleeping on the ground in a tent city. The U.S. Embassy official carrying the documents needed to take them through immigration had been running late.

Feb 24 2010

Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

Wednesday Morning Science Supplement is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Science

1 Kerry insists US to move on climate

by Shaun Tandon, AFP

Tue Feb 23, 9:16 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Senator John Kerry vowed the United States would overcome the odds and approve action on climate change, as the United Nations set talks for April to help break a diplomatic logjam.

Without offering a timetable, Kerry on Tuesday rejected assertions that it had become politically impossible for the Senate to finalize the first US nationwide plan to curb carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

“I’m excited. I know that’s completely contrary to any conventional wisdom,” said Kerry, a close ally of President Barack Obama and chief architect of the legislation.

Feb 23 2010

Afternoon Edition

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Haitian official: orphans given to US Embassy

Associated Press

17 mins ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – A top Haitian official tells The Associated Press that the U.S. Embassy now has custody of six orphans who were seized by Haitian police as they were about to board a plane for the United States.

Social Welfare agency chief Jeanne Bernard Pierre would not say when her office handed the children over to U.S. officials.

The children, ages 1 to 5, were seized by police Saturday from four women who were accompanying them out of Haiti, apparently with the correct legal paperwork. An angry crowd had accused the group of child trafficking.

Feb 22 2010

Afternoon Edition

ek is busy plotting his next take over of the internet, so I am your substitute host of the Afternoon Edition. This is also an Open Thread

Outside Haitian capital, survivor settlements sprout

BAS CANAAN, Haiti (Reuters) – At the foot of rocky hills north of Haiti’s earthquake-shattered capital Port-au-Prince, new settlements are sprouting as survivors flee the claustrophobic, rubble-clogged chaos of the stricken city.

Led by evangelical pastors, several thousand quake victims, some with little more than the clothes they stand in, have thrown up flimsy dwellings of wooden frames draped in cloth or plastic in plots marked out in the dry earth with machetes.

“There’s nothing here, it’s a desert, but we feel safer,” said Jean Oswald Estcyr, as members of his family put up the stick supports that will frame their new home. In the hills around, hundreds more such crude homes are going up.

The shanties look the same as the sprawling crowded tent encampments that cram every space and cranny of the wrecked capital — except that they are sited several miles (kilometers) outside the city in a parched no-man’s land not far from where mass graves hold the bodies of thousands of quake dead.

Haitian President Rene Preval now says the final toll from the catastrophic January 12 quake, one of the most lethal natural disasters in modern history, could reach 300,000.

Breaking News: Aftershock causes panic in Haiti

Feb 21 2010

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

Now with 30 Top Stories.

(Off to work on my early evening update for Olympic Alternatives VI.  I’ll try to get back to this when I have a chance.)

Update Complete.  Now on Late Evening Update.

40 Top Story Final.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 AP finds all Baptist group’s ‘orphans’ had parents

By FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press Writer

Sun Feb 21, 8:24 am ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Although a U.S. Baptist group said it was trying to rescue 33 “orphans” by taking them out of earthquake-ravaged Haiti, all the children have close family still alive, The Associated Press has found.

A reporter’s visit Saturday to the rubble-strewn Citron slum, where 13 of the children lived, led to their parents, all of whom said they turned their youngsters over to the missionary group voluntarily in hopes of getting them to safety.

Similar explanations were given by parents in the mountain town of Callabas, outside Port-au-Prince, who told the AP on Feb. 3 that desperation and blind faith led them to hand over 20 children to the Baptist group.

Feb 20 2010

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Haitians return to find family as commercial flights restart

by M.J. Smith, AFP

Fri Feb 19, 4:00 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – Haitians arrived Friday on the first commercial flight into their country since last month’s earthquake, desperately hoping to find family members alive and their homes still standing.

“I want to see my wife,” said Jean Felix as he waited to board the plane before takeoff in Miami.

“She’s living in the street and she’s told me by phone that we lost everything… I’m going there with my heart broken.”

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