Tsunami Toll Jumps To 114,000

[dream_labyrinth]

Tsunami Toll Jumps To 114,000

They found people alive in a hotel after two days.
A 13 year old girl in India survived floating around on the water for two days, before being washed to the shore on her home island.

Among all those who died, the ones who lived are so much more of a surprise.

So much money has been promised, I hope it'll be paid also.
On a second try, Bush managed to promise more money than what he spends for his inaugration. How nice of him. His first try was about half of that sum, I have heard.

Comments

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

Of course, nobody is obligated to do anything. A country would have a political interest in the stability of other regions more than Bill Gates might, though.

[altonwings.livejournal.com]

Not to be blunt, but most people couldn't hope to find Sri Lanka on a map, even if they knew which hemisphere it was in. None of the affected countries are so politically important that they warrant any US concern. The people are poor so they are not economically important. They are not strategically important. They are not close enough to the US to be any kind of immigration threat.

As callous as it sounds, these people are not significant in the national role of things. It is only through human feelings that they have any worth whatsoever. But a nation does not run on feeling, it runs on the bottom line, on business. How many business would want to invest in an area as unstable as this one?

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

I don't thnk Indonesia or Thailand is all that unimportant. I can't really back that up with facts right now, though, so maybe it's just a feeling and wrong at that.
Which place is strategically important seems hard to say these days. It isn't as if the enemy is just east of the Iron Curtain like they used to be.
And the instability of the region does not seem to be a hindrance to the companies investing in Iraq. That region is much more unstable, as it is due to political reasons, not natural ones (which might turn into political reasons if nothing is done to improve the situation).

[altonwings.livejournal.com]

Iraq is a very strategic location for us, it is close to both oil and Israel. Having a second allied state besides Israel would be of tremendous important in the middle east. What resources does the US receive from Indonesia and Thailand?

Cheap labor. And if the people there remain poor and needy, the labor only gets cheaper. Sad, but a fact of life about capitalism is that for you to succeed, someone else is required to fail.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

Though if the people are sick and starving and quite upset about not receiving any help, they might not be very willing to work for anybody.