.
Recent updates from the area, via the Boston Globe:
Nepalese villagers struggle home amid chaos
Doctor near Mount Everest offers insight on Nepal quake
I do not underestimate the power of prayer, but I’m from the theological school that says faith without works is a meagre faith indeed. I asked for advice on donations to Nepal last night, and as always, the Balloon Juice commentariat came through.
Commentors including Dr. Luba, Omnes Omnibus, and Betty Cracker reminded me that Doctors Without Borders / MSF is never a bad bet when there’s a crisis on the ground.
Several people — Mrs. Whatsit, Weavrmom, Elizabelle — recommended Shelter Box:
They distribute boxes with a tent and supplies to families affected by disasters, and have a 4 out of 4 on Charity Navigator.
***********
“…A ShelterBox response team is heading to Nepal to get a first-hand idea of the scale of destruction and the level of need for shelter. We already have aid, including tents, prepositioned in the country, which could be used as emergency clinics, as well as shelters in the immediate aftermath…ShelterBox aid is tailored to a disaster but typically includes a disaster relief tent for a family, thermal blankets and groundsheets, water storage and purification equipment, solar lamps, cooking utensils, a basic tool kit, mosquito nets and children’s activity pack.”
Commentor Cervantes recommends the Nepal Recovery and Resilience Fund, and also the American Jewish World Service.
Commentor Origuy:
Remember that some employers match contributions of employees, especially large ones. I know HP does. Check your employer’s community relations information; there may be a special process you have to go through.
Commentor BerkeleyMom:
My husband treks in Nepal a couple times a year (he was there this past January). He has a good friend who is a doctor there who emailed this morning to ask for donations to “Friends of the Patan Hospital”.
Wilderness Travel (a Berkeley, CA based adventure travel company that has many employees in Nepal) has a list of donation sites that includes the Patan Hospital link.
Commentor Aleta:
This is a foundation headed by a Sherpa who became a climber/guide at a young age. Its projects are to enable education in the schools and orphanages in the villages in the area where he grew up (Thame Village). This happens to be where the quake has leveled entire villages. Before the quake, he and others were trekking there on foot to deliver a computer and money to a school, an orphanage, etc. (You can read their blog at the Apa Sherpa site.)
They’ve now just reached the village after a difficult trip, and tonight put out this request:
All the House are destroyed at Thame Village of @ApaSherpa No Rescue Operation happen yet We need food, tents, tarps, hygiene supplies, there has been no help in Thame. We need supplies flown in ASAP HELP.…
Commentor Meg: I just spread my donations between MSF, MercyCorps, Oxfam and World Food Program.
For readers outside the US, commentor Pseudonymous in NC suggests:
Give your money to organisations that are already working in Nepal with established projects (PHASE is UK-based for its fundraising operations, so less useful for American donors, but they’re a good example) or to organisations that are set up to do rapid-response disaster relief with low overheads like MSF / DWB…
Guest front-pager Adam L Silverman:
Since 2011 I’ve supervised and sponsored three Nepalese generals. I’ve emailed them and asked for a recommendation of a local charity or NGO to make donations through. As soon as I hear back, I’ll put up what they recommend.
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For news updates, commentor RSR suggests following the tweets of VOA reporters Jim Stevenson (On The Scene: Generosity Overwhelms Quake-Stricken Nepal”) and Steve Herman.
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I’m sure I missed a few suggestions, and you early birds probably have more, so leave a comment here and I’ll update (or do a new post) in the late afternoon / early evening.
raven
Facebook to match your donations to Nepal relief efforts after massive quake
raven
Anyone else having problems with BJ on Chrome?
Baud
@raven:
I’ve seen other folks complain about it.
raven
@Baud: I all of the sudden just started freezing and the giving a “do you want to kill the page” message!
Baud
@raven:
You should kill it … With fire.
Cole said he was going to muck around with the coding and there would be bugs.
raven
@Baud: Yea, it’s the least of my problems! It’s pouring again and it’s already double the rainfall for April. The best news for us is that they are going to lay out the addition Friday and start digging Monday. This will make it two years since this debacle started but we’re moving in the right direction.
You know what the new coding seems to include a spell-correct!
NotMax
As always, recommend donations to Operation USA. They’re rated among the very best insofar as percentage of donations actually going to aid.
Baud
@raven:
Will it wreak havoc or class up the place? We’ll see.
Baud
Vox
The whole piece is a hatchet job on Bill, who apparently is solely responsible for the current problem. In any event, Hillary taking this stance should lead to an interesting debate.
Baud
@Baud:
I also think it’s interesting that this speech must have been preplanned, and she’s not going to shy away from it based on what’s going in in Baltimore.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Bill Clinton: mass incarceration on my watch ‘put too many people in prison’
maurinsky
A co-worker of mine (with his wife and two kids) was in Nepal visiting family for a month. He was supposed to leave last Thursday, but extended his stay for a few days so he could attend a cousin’s wedding. They are now home, thankfully, but very traumatized. Inside the country, the information on casualties was very poor – he didn’t think there were many people killed, but as we know, this part, the post earthquake part, is when bodies start to be found. We did some direct aid by throwing money into a hat so when they came home, they would have a full refrigerator and some other niceties.
JPL
@Baud: When Clinton was President, I seem to remember that the crime rate was high. He sent federal money to cities to increase the number of police but he also sent money for recreation centers. There was one program called midnight basketball.
ThresherK
@Baud: Your word (“hatchet job”) is good enough for me, I don’t want to encourage them by adding my eyeballs.
But which “current problem” are they referring to? The war on drugs? The
big black bucks buying T-bones instead of working oogedy boogedy storieslies told to attract law’n’order (‘n not necessarily justice) voting demographic?And if Hillary planned a speech like this four or five weeks ago, that’s not something to shy away from. It’s prescience to be applauded. Let’s see who does.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
@JPL:
Right. As far as I recall, Bill’s record in this is mixed and complicated. But the problem goes back to at least the early 70s, but the article makes it seem as if it’s all Bill’s fault.
@ThresherK:
Incarceration. Obviously, a lot of that is related to the war on drugs.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
If Vox is doing a hatchet job on a Clinton, better Bill than Hillary. Bill isn’t running for anything.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
Sure. But will Hillary be able to talk about the issue, or will the media try to portray this as some sort of public marital spat that we can all gawk at?
germy shoemangler
@JPL:
I remember all the outrage over that. It was more evidence that those poors were living the high life on our tax dollars: They’d yell “how can they go to school and get jobs if they’re out playing basketball at midnight?”
Meanwhile, their own kids were up at midnight taking bong hits and playing video games.
germy shoemangler
@Baud:
Didn’t Nixon say (I don’t have the exact quote) about the war on drugs: “we need something we can target the blacks with, without it looking like we’re specifically targeting the blacks”?
Baud
@germy shoemangler:
I don’t know. Wouldn’t surprise me. Although I don’t agree with a lot of the policies that were implemented, the one indulgence I’ll grant is that crime rates did skyrocket during this period.
OzarkHillbilly
Over at LGM, bspencer has decided that I’m Just Gonna Call It: Rich White People Are the Worst
She’s right. “Baltimore is a shithole,”
debbie
@JPL:
It goes back further, to the 1970s when mayors like Ed Koch emptied out NYC’s mental hospitals in the name of austerity.
Germy Shoemangler
I remember it being sold as the …. humane… thing to do. There had been exposés on bad conditions in the hospitals, the warehousing, the poor care. “Give them their freedom”
Of course, they could have improved conditions in the hospitals. But that would have cost money.
Betty
@Germy Shoemangler: @Germy Shoemangler: What they were supposed to do then was create community-based programs for people who didn’t require full-time oversight. Of course that never happened.
Betty
I am seeing lots of RWNJ posts by a relative from a site called Western Journalism. Anyone here know anything about this particular “news source”?
Baud
@Betty:
Standard operating procedure for screwing vulnerable people.
germy shoemangler
@Betty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Journalism_Center
“The Center doesn’t include either an address or telephone number on its letterhead, but is believed to be headed by conservative author, speaker and media commentator Floyd Brown.”
mai naem
I donated some money to the Patan Hospital. I am leery of donating money because of the Red Cross fiasco years ago. I went ot the Apa Sherpa website and there is no IRS info. Nothing on Charity Navigator. I also remember reading Oxfam USA is not a great organization as far as efficiciency but the international Oxfam is really good. I also would like to donate to somebody thats already got a set up there and Im not sure Shelter Box already has a set up or not. BTW, I think it is disgusting that apparently lots of people knew there was a possibility of this happening and appear to have done nothing to prepare Nepal for this. Also, some idiot so called Christian preacher was on the twitter machine saying that this happened to Nepal because its a majority Hindu country, kind of like the idiot Christian preachers who were blaming the Haiti earthquake on the voodoo practiced there. Assholes.
Gene108
@JPL:
The crime rates in many places were at records highs, when Clinton came into office. His “tough on crime” policies addressed an actual problem and we saw crime rates drop, year-after-year, for the first time in a generation during his two terms in office. There were a mix of factors that got crime rates to drop, but they did drop, which people had believed was no longer possible.
I am glad Hillary and Bill are pushing to have the policies of 20 years ago changed. We have gone from record high crime rates to record low crime rates, but the laws do not seem to have caught up with the times.
Also, I wonder how people reconcile their fond glowing memories of a Reagan “restoring America”, with the fact crime rates, teen pregnancy rates, drug use and other social ills reached record highs during his terms in office (and continued to get worse, when Bush, Sr, was President), with their take on Obama “destroying America”, when those social ills, listed before, are at record lows, along with high school graduation rates at record highs.
Despite the media, there seems to be an awful lot of progress which does not get reported.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty: Yep. With counseling, housing and employment assistance, etc etc.
rikyrah
Baltimore protester Joseph Kent ‘kidnapped by police’ on live TV
A well-known protester was arrested after curfew on Tuesday night in Baltimore as CNN’s cameras rolled, and many want to know his fate.
Joseph Kent, a 21-year-old student at Morgan State University who rose to local prominence during the Michael Brown protests, was seen on live television standing with his hands in the air alongside a line of riot gear-clad police officers just before 11 p.m. Moments later, a National Guard humvee rolled up, and a swarm of officers swallowed Kent. The vehicle blocked the camera’s view of the arrest.
http://mashable.com/2015/04/29/baltimore-joseph-kent/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link
Baud
@Gene108:
It’s a failing of liberal blogs as well. In this instance, I don’t think we have much credibility in criticizing the media.
MrSnrub
@raven:
I don’t seem to have the problem with Chrome at home, but I do at work. For me, the culprit are the threads by Elon. Something about the audio embed is killing it. If there are no audio embeds on the front page, it loads in Chrome. My temporary solution has been to load the front page in IE, and copy the thread links to Chrome.
I have no idea why it works at home, but not at work, except that I have more plugins on my work machine. Haven’t had a chance to do a side-by-side comparison though.
Baud
@Gene108:
Really? I stopped wondering that long ago.
Gene108
@debbie:
I am not sure why people pine for the days of large mental hospitals. They warehoused people, without any intent to treat them so they could R’s-enter society at some level of functionality.
The problem was not moving to community based treatment, but the fact the government refused to fund that part of the bargain, which happened to coincide with the Reagan a Revolution and the anti-tax/social welfare spending.
raven
@MrSnrub: Yea I’d like to read his stuff but it so totally fucks up BJ that I just walk on by. I seem to be ok on Chrome on my PC but the mac is the issue.
Patrick
@Gene108:
For us people living in the REAL world, Bush was the one almost destroyed America. The economy was literally in a freefall when Bush left office, GM was about to go bankrupt. We as a country are still suffering 7 years later, but at least the economy has stabilized.
One culprit who tried to destroy America was still a free man when Bush left office. Bush himself stated that he didn’t care about bin Laden. Obama put an end to that.
It is just amusing that some people are so incredibly deranged that they have the audacity to claim that Obama is destroying our country. Obama has saved our country. At least when Hillary takes over, she doesn’t have to spend years wasting her time saving our country from the previous President.
OzarkHillbilly
@Gene108: Because of the media, there seems to be an awful lot of progress which does not get reported.
FTFY, you’ll be getting my bill in the mail.
Gene108
@Baud:
Good point.
Patrick
@mai naem:
When I hear offensive statements such as these I am reminded of what Mahatma Gandhi said:
I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
PurpleGirl
@mai naem: Yes, there were scientists who were expecting an earthquake but they never know when one will happen. They do happen frequently in the Nepal area but you can’t tell exactly when or of what magnitude one will be. You could say that the government should have had disaster plans in place but it is a poor country. (In fact, I watched a show about Everest and the mountain chain a few days ago on one of the Discovery channels and they mentioned that there hadn’t had a very powerful quake in something like 80 years.)
Punchy
Is there any precedent for this? Having the Texas State Guard (National Guard?) monitor and evaluate US Army exercises?
WTF?
Joy in FL
Deray McKesson in Baltimore interviewed by Wolf Blitzer.
It’s about 4 minutes long. I love how Mr. McKesson does not let his words be manipulated by Wolf Blitzer. I follow McKesson on Twitter. Some of you might like to add him to your resources.
Elizabelle
Thank you for putting up the links, Anne. Good to know about so many good groups.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah:
I saw that and my brain immediately turned it into “Kent State”, which is probably not a connection that would prove helpful to the powers that be.
Edit: I hope he’s okay.
Edit 2: I travelled to multiple states to volunteer for Barack Obama during primary season in 2007/2008 because I believed in him so strongly. How is that any different from nonviolent “outside agitators” who believe that fighting all these abuses is the cause of their time?
J R in WV
We don’t have cable or a sat dish for TV. So all we get is ABC/NBC and sometimes CBS and PBS, of that all we watch is local news sometimes.
I seem to recall some geologists being criminalized in Italy for not predicting an earthquake that happened… hope they got off on appeal. No one will admit to being a geologist in Italy if they didn’t, which won’t help identify volcanic problems OR earthquakes.
Call me Mr. Mineralogist, don’t know much ’bout no geology! What’s an … earthquake? The earth moves, you say? Don’t see how!
Have contributed before, Haiti, tsunami, things like that. Will attempt to ID the correct method of getting help to the villages. MSF and Shelter Box probably looking best right now.
Mrs J worked with Steve Herman 25 or 30 years ago, a good guy. We would meet at the sushi joint for lunch sometimes. He was very interested in Asia even then…
Cervantes
Suzanne:
It can be argued that MSF, because of “managerial” (read “financial”) requirements, used the wrong medications to treat drug-resistant TB in some of Russia’s prisons, and that this mistake led to a worsening of the epidemic. The story is more complicated, of course, but that’s the gist.
Renée Fox, emerita at Penn, has a book out about the organization. Discussion of the above criticism begins on p. 232. Here is the book:
You can buy it directly from MSF.
And for background material on multiple-drug-resistant-TB, I suggest this article.
Despite the above criticism, I would say that MSF is still good, and better than many (if not most) — but I would not choose it for the current crisis in Nepal, for which my suggestions are here.
Paul in KY
@Germy Shoemangler: The real problem was that people (usually rich ones) were getting rid of uncooperative relatives by declaring them insane & having them committed. Completely sane (if weird/jerky) people trapped in these mental homes, with no recourse to get out.
Yatsuno
@Punchy: He’s pandering to his wingnuttiest followers. Or he has extra Guard money laying around. For most of them it’s basically a paid vacation.
Cervantes
@Betty:
They’re toxic.
Other than that, do you have a specific question?
Barbara O'Brien
The Tzu Chi (“compassionate relief”) Foundation is a Buddhist disaster relief organization headquartered in Taiwan. They are very good at “first response” operations and getting supplies that are actually need to the people who actually need them. They pledge that 100 percent of funds donated by May 31 will go to disaster relief. http://www.tzuchi.us/bulletin/#nepal
rikyrah
Eyewitnesses: The Baltimore Riots Didn’t Start the Way You Think
After Baltimore police and a crowd of teens clashed near the Mondawmin Mall in northwest Baltimore on Monday afternoon, news reports described the violence as a riot triggered by kids who had been itching for a fight all day. But in interviews with Mother Jones and other media outlets, teachers and parents maintain that police actions inflamed a tense-but-stable situation…
…Meg Gibson, another Baltimore teacher, described a similar scene to Gawker: “The riot police were already at the bus stop on the other side of the mall, turning buses that transport the students away, not allowing students to board. They were waiting for the kids.…Those kids were set up, they were treated like criminals before the first brick was thrown.” With police unloading busses, and with the nearby metro station shut down, there were few ways for students to clear out.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/how-baltimore-riots-began-mondawmin-purge
Cervantes
@rikyrah:
And quite frankly, it does not matter exactly how “the riots” started in this one instance.
The problem is much larger and it is not the fault of children.
Amir Khalid
@Yatsuno:
I wonder, what does Governor Abbott propose to do if he decides the US military is using the exercises as a cover to invade Texas? (Man, that was a weird sentence to type.) Sic the Texas National Guard on them?
Cervantes
@Yatsuno:
I think this is correct. The paranoia is not the Governor’s own; it comes from the lunatics among the loblollies in Bastrop County, where the exercises are being held. Reasonably enough, the Governor felt obliged to respond. He could have told the idiots to just stop being idiots — but he’s not that kind of guy.
Mandalay
FoxNews smearing the Mayor of Baltimore using an unidentified “source“:
I’m not saying FoxNews made the whole thing up, but it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Robert Sneddon
@PurpleGirl: The area around Sendai in Japan got hit by similar levels of ground movements in 2011 during the great Tohoku earthquake but due to strongly enforced building codes for houses, commercial properties and such the loss of life due to structural failures, falling rooftiles etc. was minimal.
Nepal would have suffered many fewer fatalities if it had earthquake-region building codes and enforced them stringently. The same thing happened in Haiti during its 2010 earthquake when shanty towns built on unstable slopes just slid down the hills engulfing the residents. Estimates put the death toll in that earthquake at over 250 thousand people.
It’s another difference between rich and poor countries, the ability to plan for and mitigate the effects of natural disasters — the US mid-west has tornado warning systems and building codes that recognise the threat from extreme weather, Nepal and Haiti and other places don’t have the extra wealth needed to set up a system to prepare for such events.
The BBC has an article on the Sentinel spacecraft that has imaged the area around Nepal using incredibly-precise radar showing the ground movements resulting from this earthquake. It previously imaged the resulting ground movements from the Napa Valley earthquake last year.
rikyrah
Big oil vs The Pope…
yeah we know who REALLY looks out for the poor
…………………
Big Oil to Pope Francis: We Know What’s Best for the World’s Poor
By Rebecca Leber @rebleber
Over the course of this year, Pope Francis will ramp up his foray into the politically charged debate for action on climate change. It begins unofficially with Tuesday’s Vatican summit, co-hosted by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. This summer, Francis will publish his widely anticipated encyclical, a Catholic document that will examine man’s moral relationship with nature.
Unlike the usual discussions of climate change as an economic and scientific issue, Francis conveys it as a moral cause. His past comments—that it “is man who has slapped nature in the face”—frame the issue in vivid and urgent terms. He’s presented the fossil fuel industry with a challenge. Though they have a well-worn playbook for countering the economic, political, and scientific need for climate change action, industry is in relatively new territory with religion. How will they reply?
Here’s a hint: Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and climate-change denial, will send its own “experts” to the Vatican to argue against the Pope’s points in a side panel for reporters. These experts will no doubt parrot the usual Heartland line, distorting the scientific consensus of humans’ impact on the climate and its consequences. “The world’s poor will suffer horribly if reliable energy—the engine of prosperity and a better life—is made more expensive and less reliable by the decree of global planners,” Heartland Institute President Joe Bast wrote in a press release. The American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry’s lobby arm, reprised a similar theme, telling The Guardian, “fossil fuels are a vital tool for lifting people out of poverty around the world, which is something we’re committed to.”
In other words, an industry driven by profit above all is attempting to rebrand itself as a champion for the poor. If you take this logic a step further, like Alex Epstein, founder of Center for Industrial Progress (and fossil fuel consultant), did in his 2014 book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, it is the world that owes industry executives a debt of gratitude. “I believe that we owe the fossil fuel industry an apology,” he writes. “While the industry has been producing the energy to make our climate more livable, we have treated it as a villain. We owe it the kind of gratitude that we owe anyone who makes our lives much, much better.” Epstein is confident in fossil fuels’ ability to make the world “wonderful for human life.”
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121657/fossil-fuel-industry-responds-pope-francis-climate-encyclical
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: Big Oil is going to find out that a Jesuit pope will be able to talk circles around them.
Go Hippy Pope Francis!
PurpleGirl
@Robert Sneddon: On the off chance that you come back to this thread, thank you for this information.
WaterGirl
@Joy in FL: You’re right, the young man did a great job of not letting Wolf put words in his mouth even though Wolf was very persistent.
I do wish President Obama had not used the word thugs. Other than that, I though what the president had to say yesterday was wonderful.
i noticed that when wolf pulled what the president said into his questions to the young activist, Wolf only pulled the “thugs” and “the violence is criminal” parts and never said a word about 95% of what Obama said: acknowledging root causes, the fact that as a country we need to do some soul-searching.
Brachiator
@mai naem:
I hate stuff like this. Many of the structures in Nepal and similar countries are ancient, especially religious related structures. It would be impossible in the best of circumstances to retrofit them all to withstand exceptionally strong earthquakes.
And Nepal is not an especially prosperous country. This further complicates any notions of investment in infrastructure even in the best of circumstances.
It is not equivalent in any way, shape or form to some corrupt officials ignoring construction codes.
This is simply obscene.
Lastly, I have had the great pleasure to have been able to travel to Nepal. A blogger in a post elsewhere said it best. “I never met an unkind person there.”
Similarly, out of all the places I have traveled, the people of Nepal touched my heart the most. And it feels strange to have walked in areas that have been destroyed and to see the pain and misery inflicted.
I don’t know the best organizations to which one might contribute (maybe Doctors Without Borders), but I hope that those of you who might wish to contribute find a way to do so, to any worthwhile organization.