The tsunami death toll is even worse than we've been told...

The Indonesian government is now saying that the city of Meulobah was completely destroyed and its population of 150,000 is unaccounted for. Likewise with Pulau Simeuleu and its population of 76,000: no signs of life.

Utterly mindboggling.

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v3/news.php?id=111574

 

I've heard that there were numerous small islands in Indonesia w/ populations of up to 50,000, that satellite imagery can no longer find any trace of...it's as if they never existed. Wiped from the face of the Earth. As a result of this, we'll probably never know how many people really died in this disaster. Nature is truly a terrible and awesome thing.

 

Very sad indeed. And the $35 million in aid was embarrasing, I'm glad we quickly saw how ridiculous that was and increased our aid to almost $400 million, which still pales in comparison to Australia's 800 million and Germany's 600 million.

 

A lousy 400 million, with millions more pouring in from private donations. Maybe we should just send over some of these money trees that apparently grow like wildfire in the US.

This is not directed at you JV, I like most of your posts. I am just tired of the US always getting sh!thosed internationally when we provide by far the most money for foreign aid.

 

Not to mention the costs of deploying military personell, military equipment, an aircraft carrier even...... That 400 mill from the US is just the "official" direct cash number.

I am sure that the 800 million pales in comparison to everything being done by the US, when calculated monetarily.

 

how much have you sent of your paychecks?

 

Not that it matters, but the original 10 million was pledged in the afternoon of the first day if I remember correctly. At that time the death toll wasn't even over 50,000 or even near that. It was raised to 35 million either that night or the next morning when the death toll was still nothing compared to what it is now.

 

...and congratulations to Rex, for not trying to somehow blame the tsunami on Bush.

 

his friends at one of his favorite websites, the democratic underground (same place rex gets election conspiracy theories) , were not so lucky. some of them managed to theorize that some sort of weapons were involved.