Tsunami.
Since everyone else is getting in on the story, what the hell. I might as well throw in my two cents.
The idiots are in full bloom. I’m not going to link to any of them, because I don’t want them climbing the rankings at Google. You can find them yourselves. It’s come to my attention that Fred Phelps (the one that blames everything on gays) has decided to comment on the tsunami. No doubt he is convinced that it was the hand of God come to smite the sodomites. As if. God don’t do things that small.
The moonbats, predictably, are blaming everything from capitalism, to western civilization, to the SUV (and it’s thirst for oil), to George Bush’s environmental policies. Hell, one moonbat theory even says that we have damaged the “skeleton” of the Earth with all our naught nuke tests, and the poor old gal gan’t take it. Right.
Some people have no sense of perspective.
The deepest oil wells are maybe 3 miles down. The planet is roughly 3900 miles from surface to center. You do the math.
There are two separate problems here. The earthquake/tsunami, and the aftermath. The aftermath was mostly predictable and preventable. Human failings didn’t cause the tsunami, but they caused an awful lot of people to die needlessly. The human tendency to focus on the short term leads to us not coming up with ways to protect ourselves from the next cataclysmic event. We know that earthquakes happen in California and Japan with astonishing regularity, so we build structures to survive them. However, in New England, we haven’t had a major earthquake in centuries. It could happen, but it is considered remote. A 5 or 6 Richter quake would level most of Manhattan. We aren’t prepared for that eventuality. And there’s no way to predict a quake.
But there is a way to predict the aftermath of one. We can detect an earthquake anywhere on the globe within minutes of it happening. It should have been a foregone conclusion that a wall of water was gonna hit something. But a lack of sensors and communications gear led to precisely no warnings being given.
Of course, that’s all moot now. Right now, there are people hurting and suffering. And there are people trying to help. And there are people trying to take credit for that help. Try to be a member of that second group.