Over 18,000 dead in Asian Earthquake
 

That number has risen sharply since yesterday and will probably continue to rise as the days pass.
It seems as though there has been one tragedy after another in the world lately. Let's hope the survivors of this one make it through this ok.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051009/...pakistan_quake

wow.. that's alot more than i thought... it's quite fucked up to see so many natural disasters in so little time!!

edited after explaination.

Oh man.

This totally sucks.

You said the Red Cross is taking donations?

I did a search and it looks like you're right. I'll remove the request and we can just use this thread to discuss the tragedy itself.

It's funny how the media controls our lives. From memory, more people have died in this event then in New Orleans. I guess people have already donated enough.

Stupid media.

It's true, the media tells us what we should care about. That's why you should pay more attention to liberal media, local newspapers, et cetera.

Its funny, I donated alot of money to the people in Louisiana, felt "content" with my donations, and decided I had some money to buy myself a PSP. Well, I'm not going to now that this has happened. That money is going to our brothers and sisters in India. Probably more.

Wow... that's so nice of you.

Nice. So we get a little flooding in Lousiana, and the only people hurt by it were the people that were too stubborn to leave, even after they were repeatedly told to. They've seen hurricanes before, they know what they're like. They made a conscious decision to stay. And everybody is completely fucking heartbroken that they're in danger, right? Our entire nation comes to a standstill as everyone sits glued to his TV watching the same god damn 30 seconds of footage of flooding and rescue operations, pretending that they genuinely care what happened half way across the country.

Now, 18,000 (that's eighteen THOUSAND) people die in an earthquake, of which they couldn't have had any real warning, and we get a paragraph in Yahoo! news. What a beautiful fucking world.

it happens all the time. i'm sick of american news. they influence even canadian news. i guess if we saw a dumb asian saying how his house got ruined, they'd play it on every channel.

it's now about 20 000. it's sad.

i just missed being in India when it happened missed it by about 24 hours, but there wasn't much damage in the area where we were.

the UK people were ready to mobilize the moment it was announced...

I must say that the people that I encountered on this trip all wondered why the "poor" people in NOLA were so fat and had so much stuff and could still be called "poor". After seeing the total squalor and poverty of India and Philippines... well.. that is poor.

The numbers are now up to 30,000. Anyone following this at all or are we all "Katrina" and "Rita'd" out?

It's funny - the media, in the wake of Katrina, couldn't wait to yell "30,000 dead!", an enormous exageration. Yet the media has consistently under-reported the number of dead in this disaster, just as was done after the tsunami.

I wonder if the media is somewhat "chicken little" when it comes to domestic disasters, over-egarating the problem, and then kinda shrugs when stuff happens elsewhere.

Heck, Guatamala has more dead than Louisiana from their hurricane but again, small coverage and initial under-reporting.
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I just wonder how these third world countries with "super organized governments", and "advanced means of data collection", are able to get the numbers of dead just "spot on" every time in places where there is no real census, and people certainly aren't registered to vote.

Well, I don't think they are "spot on" but both India and Pakistan have large numbers of troops in the affected areas, due to long running border disputes. They are probably a reasonably good means of gathering data.

Meanwhile, back in Louisiana, we have what should be the world's most sophisticated means of gathering data, getting the numbers so far wrong it isn't funny.

Tsunami, Katrina, Earthquakes. What a crazy year, just a few days to Yom Kippur

The only consolation would be if Osama was one of the 30K.

Tip of the hat to the US government, for pledging $50 million in aid and reconstruction. The Aussies are contributing a lot, also, relative to their economy. Time for everyone else to really step up - Canada, EU, Japan, etc.

i read some where that one of the terror leaders guys who name escapes me was telling all his followers that the NOLA hurricane was gods way of punishing the americans. I wonder how they tell there followers why earthquake happened? will probably blame the americans for it, saying it was underground nukes or something. The earth seems to be fighting back against us humans. About time.

i blame bush.... bush or haliburton, whichever one the movie stars tell me to hate most.

I'm very saddened by this.

I'm hoping that this disaster will bring India and Pakistan closer together and perhaps bury the hatchet.

Sad to say, but when the earthquakes hit Turkey and then Greece a few years ago, the mutual aid they offered one another did indeed help to soothe their centuries long hate of one another.

So you never know...

from the cnn article that I read when I got up at 6 am saturday morning (and its still on the main page of www.cnn.com now at the bottom

Nice to see the aid coming forth now - $20 million now from Canada!

this isn't getting as much press here in the US as I'm seeing in the papers I was reading over seas and still reading here....

shame that we got what we wanted from Katrina and Rita... and the rest of the world it seems can just go to pot.

Is "shame" still in the dictionary? :)

They give us what we want: Elimidate, Fear Factor, News.

South Park's "Quest for Ratings" was a great commentary on coverage choices.