7.0 – magnitude of the January 12 Earthquake
Update: 14: the number of deaths from a magnitude 7.5 earthquake in Los Angeles where there a building codes, including those for earthquake resistance, and they’re actually enforced (via).
1593 – number of days since I’ve felt a spine-chilling feeling of descent into a Hobbesian state after hearing pleas for help. Only this time, it’s because
“Parliament has collapsed,” President Préval was quoted as saying. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.”
520 000: the number of $10 donations to the US Red Cross via SMS
1000: patients already treated by Medicins Sans Frontier, which has an inflatable hospital on the way. (Donate to MSF Australia here)
2: percentage of Haitians who stay in school beyond Grade 5 (h/t: Tyler Cowen)
1755: year of Lisbon Earthquake, a key catalyst of Enlightenment and conceptions of Natural Disaster.
Appeals:
AVAAZ: Stand with the people: 100% of funds to go to relief and reconstruction
Oxfam: Haiti Earthquake Appeal
PLAN: Haiti Earthquake Appeal
Update: Chris Blattman asks, ‘what is better than giving money?’ lobbying the US government to grant Haitians Temporary Protected Status.
Tyler Cowen: “… Very rapidly, President Obama needs to come to terms with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more.”
Horrifying images, stories. I was also struck by the thought that “the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more”.
Will there be much migration over the mountains to the relatively untouched Dominican Republic? Can there be a consolidation…
“Will there be much migration over the mountains to the relatively untouched Dominican Republic? Can there be a consolidation…”
The name “Trujillo” wouldn’t offer a whole lot of hope in that regard…
I believe there’s a certain amount of migration already, History Guy. The Haitians occupy a similar position in the economy of the Dominican Republic to that of Mexicans in the US …
Thanks dk.au. You’ve prompted me to send a donation which I’d been meaning to.
A colleague of mine, Rich Fleming, just wrote a piece on this in the National Times, making the important link between poverty in Haiti and the huge impact that this will have.
that quote from cohen sends shivers up my spine … i think there’s really something in it. The country has quite literally collapsed, and it’s going to take a decade at least of concerted international support to assist the Haitians to get their country functioning again.
Re – the updates. Part of the problem for Obama (and Haiti) is going to be the insane reaction from the Republican/Christian Right noise machine. This is just one sample:
http://www.dangerousminds.net/index.php/site/comments/pat_robertson_blames_the_haitian_tragedy_on_a_devil_pact/
If you go through the US blogs, it’s really really bad.
And then there are various neo-liberal Washington based thinktanks who want this to be a moment for “economic reforms”. It’s Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism writ large:
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#/notes/naomi-klein/haiti-disaster-capitalism-alert-stop-them-before-they-shock-again/274450041201
And Obama is going to have problems acting on this, because it’s about *black folks*.
1593 – number of days since I’ve felt a spine-chilling feeling of descent into a
Hobbesianstate of elite panic after hearing pleas for help.Fixed that for you.
it’s going to take a decade at least of concerted international support to assist the Haitians to get their country functioning again
Yeah, I don’t really like that Cowen line because it presupposes that the country has been functioning by any reasonable definition of the word for a certain period of time. And that’s untrue. (not to trivialise what’s happened).
In Nat Geo just last year there was a story about the country’s woes, and how people have been reduced to eating dirt, long before the earthquake. This is not a country felled by a disaster – it was already beaten – unless that disaster has been its interaction with the West for hundreds of years.
The comments on Tyler Cowen’s blog are laced with latent post-colonial racism. Yes, poor dears clearly can’t look after themselves and need another country (any country) to come and take over.
Mark@6 – Yep I didn’t want to name Pat Robertson, but that was my inspiration for the NYTimes reference about Theodicy (which I hope you’ll post something about
weaver@7 – Cheers for the link. The reports I’d heard on radio were that there was tremendous community spirit – people helping each other, no looting etc. Is it worth worrying about escaped inmates though?
And I certainly don’t endorse any comments on Marginal Revolution, nor the reduction of the country to economic indicators but the questions he raises are worth pondering. As for Shock Doctrine-esque intervention, well it’s certainly a possibility.
@10 – thanks, dk.au – you might have to remind me again!
@8 patrickg – yep, fair call.
Countering Robertson:
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/01/13/haiti_satan_pact
Another reponse to Robertson’s fundamentalist insanity – from France via the Christian Science Monitor.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0114/Pat-Robertson-Haiti-comments-French-view-theory-with-disbelief
Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber:
http://crookedtimber.org/2010/01/15/history-is-the-devils-scripture/
Update from MSF:
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/15/haiti-update-from-do.html
Haiti suffering “partly made in the USA”:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/blog/2010/01/haiti-suffering-partly-made-in-usa.html
Is it worth worrying about escaped inmates though?
Probably, though I suppose it depends on why they were inmates. But I’m not convinced even the most deranged ex-con could do as much damage to the place as the forces of “law and order”.
(Considering what said forces have done to the place in the past, after all.)
I don’t claim any specific knowledge of the country … care to elaborate a little?
What I had in mind was the economic and social consequences of Haiti’s long history of US sponsored coups and dictatorships (here’s one recent overview doing the rounds), which may be a tad broader meaning of the phrase “forces of law and order” than what you have in mind. But then, in any case, MINUSTAH and the police seem to have had a tendency to interpret their (not entirely unsuccessful) mission of countering criminal gangs to mean “shooting up poor neighbourhoods”. (Why, yes, those are both extremely left-wing sources.) Which is why we should be concerned by what people have in mind when they talk of “restoring order” in Haiti: historically the agents of extra-national interventions have defined Haitian civil society as the rich minority and everyone else as a problem to be dealt with.
See also. Updates in comments thread.
Update: 14: the number of deaths from a magnitude 7.5 earthquake in Los Angeles where there a building codes, including those for earthquake resistance, and they’re actually enforced (via).
I pray for those people who have been injured in Haiti. the earthquake in Haiti is one of the word disasters this year. I just hope that they would be able to recover soon.