Haiti earthquake

[ haiti. all photos from the Times online Photo Gallery]





[ . Eduardo Munoz Reuters]

Thousands of homeless people sat on the darkened streets of Port-au-Prince in a daze or gathered in public squares, singing hymns.

The headlines did not lie. 12 January 2010 saw tragedy crush an ill-equipped yawing mousetrap of an island.

Comment from a blogger in Haiti:

I didn’t actually fall on the ground, but I stumbled around quite a bit. When the tremors ceased, a large dust cloud was rising from the building a few doors down.

A 3 story school full of teenage girls had collapsed. I stood around looking stupid for longer than I’d like to admit. I looked at the truck from Toyota, tried to call my wife (the service was out) and looked around me at people’s reactions.

Virtually everyone reacted in strange ways. Eventually, I went to the school and started working to pull trapped students from the wreckage.

The work was very hard because I was working by myself. People would come up and shout into the wreckage, “Is so-and-so inside?” at the top of their lungs repeatedly.

... I got one girl out, who was very frantic. I told her to stop shouting and pray for help.

She was about 10 feet deep under the collapsed cement roof of the building. At one point I went and borrowed a hammer from someone to break up the large piece of cement that she was trapped behind. The aftershocks scared the crap out of me, and I really didn’t like being under that cement slab. There was an obviously dead woman under the slab with us.

When the girl was out, I took my hammer and moved over to find the next trapped girl. All I could see was her face and left arm, and she frantically called out to me. I asked her to calm down because it would help me to work and asked her to pray for both of us.

... There was some sort of object behind that rubble and when I went to move it it turned out to be another girl’s bottom. The girl cried out but I could barely hear her – her whole head was underneath rubble.

At this point I began to realize that I was in over my head. All I had was a hammer, and it was quickly becoming pitch dark with twilight fading and no electricity anywhere. I tried to borrow a flashlight, but it was impossible.

I had a moment of feeling intense helplessness. After thinking and praying for a minute, I told Jacqueline that I had to leave her and find more help. I couldn’t do anything without a flashlight, and she needed to keep praying and remember that her parents were coming to look for her.

I walked 4 or 5 miles to a place where I could get a bus, then got on one eventually made it home just after 9pm. On my way home, I resolved to return to Port au Prince the next day with 2 trucks full of tools and workers to do whatever we could.

I met a guy on the bus who was holding a sandwich. He had left his house to go buy a sandwich when the earthquake hit. He returned to his home to find it flattened, then went to the school that he teaches at to find it flattened. With nothing left but a sandwich in his hand, and $7 in his sock, he set out for Cap Haitien to be with the rest of his family.

I slept a little bit last night even though I kept thinking of Jacqueline and her classmate stuck in the rubble, in the dark. This morning all of the workers enthusiastically loaded all the tools we could use into the trucks along with food and water and set off for Port au Prince.

I took them to the school and quickly made my way to the place Jacqueline and the other student were but both of them were dead.

-Chris Rollings

... On the bus he met a man named Amos who had gone out to get a sandwich and minutes later found his house was flattened as was the school where he worked. He took his sandwich and got on a bus headed for Cap Haitien because everything that had made up his life in Port was gone. Amos is sleeping in our dorms and when I took him sheets and towels and asked how he was doing he simply said, with a smile, “M’ pa pi mal, gras a Dieu. ” I’m not bad, by the grace of God.

-from his wife, Leslie Rollings

Stolen Auschwitz sign.

[ Poland, Auschwitz. from the BBC ]

Four dawns ago, the sign bearing the Nazi slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" was stolen.

It was neither murder nor rape. Nothing monied misplaced. But along with many others, I felt a quiet shock. And learned, again, that in the vast territory that is the human world, no one thing is uniformly sacred.

Today, the five thieves were apprehended. The 5-metre sign was found cut into three pieces.

We forget, dismember, pillage. And in undermining the markers of our humanity, we undermine our own.

And oh yes, those thieves were 'art thieves'.

fatvertising.

[ usa, ny. anti-obesity ad]

The ads — which cost about $277,000 to develop over three fiscal years, including money for creative work and focus groups — will run in 1,500 subway cars for three months. (The $90,000 cost of the subway advertisement comes through a private donor, the Fund for Public Health in New York.)


someone asks: but are these images we really need clogging the arteries of our subways every day?
i: yes, i think so. i think we sometimes need a jolt that things aren't sugar, nice, and everything innocent (everything that's put) out there.

it nicely ties in with the other bit we often have in our hands. the burger, otherwise to be known as the bad bits of unhappy cows genetically engineered by the companies.

make death.

[ uk. from may miles thomas' the devil's plantation]

-that reveals the hidden tracks that cross the city, connecting the old and new. Here May stumbles over the city's myths and stomps on its remains: city of murder, architecture, industry, ill-health, feral violence, petty corruption, neddery, new money, crime and the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Not so much Glasgow as Glasgone:

"Several years ago on a rare trip to London, I struggled to tell an acquaintance about an idea I had for a project based in Glasgow. I had only a loose notion – possibly some kind of film, possibly a piece of writing - about my love/hate relationship with my home city. At that time my Garnethill flat overlooked the middens behind a Hill Street tenement and my thoughts towards the city were dark. It’s about murder and architecture, I told my friend, unaware of my choice of words. Not death, but murder."

the arrogance of fools is a different breed

you remake into dust
what was grown by time itself.

and.

so we do,
but flippantly so? demeaningly so? must the play of life be a mechanical murder of being and principle.


[ .the cove. movie.]

advertising for human rights.

[ kim jong il. all images from eagereyes.org ]

(a data-ack!)

id recently been surprised that government communications and public areas were commissioned to private agencies (but- of course. if even water that flows is). more precisely, i was almost touched that simple figures such as train station 'exit' signs might have been produced by world leading graphic design companies- very lovely that functional pieces could be rethought for better expression, to go easy-on-the-eyes, and perhaps even lean into an art quirk or two..

so why not (one of) the world's biggest PR agencies do up an ad for the International Society for Human Rights Watch. as Data.gov goes live, german ogilvy and mather go funny:


[mahmoud amadinejad.]

...nice timing too, while kim flexes his nuclear/nuclear ambitions, and iran re-elects its dictator as president. perhaps we really do need the selling power of commercials to remind ourselves of what we ought to fight for, what we ought to be living for.


btw, despite the hype over his main rival reformist mousavi (and his equally reformist wife) and the supposed unpredicting gloom of iran's economy:

Az Zaqqum · 13 hours ago
Astagfirallah!! WTF??

What happened to the women's vote???

Can't believe it.....neither can my dog......woof!

For those who don't know, walking your dog is illegal in Iran.

what's it to me.

[ .NY Times ]

(terrorism that's personal: a woman whose ex-husband threw acid on her face after she'd divorced him. he was not caught; she is not unique in this. a piece by nicholas d. kristoff. short, unburdened by opinion, it was a narrative stuck to my mind like a damp feather caught in a weave.)

i saw her, and then him. or perhaps more accurately, i saw this picture. it seemed one of disturbing confrontation, the kind in which you squirm not out of aggressive defense, but because you feel complicit, responsible.

i felt uncertain. here is a woman, scarred. and my righteous self calls armies to the unjust lines, bounding this woman, her son, and others like them. trample the hurtful, and jail the hateful! protect the weak, and return law to law! but for herself, do i dare conjure too many ideas about her being? she is the wronged, the victim, the ever-marked.

how dare my compassion be muddied with my ivoried ideals.

i do not know her, or her life. i do care to know, but what is it to me?

what's it to you?

a man is drinking at a lonesome bar
his bruised knuckles are primed for more alcohol
his wife is at home, trembling, flipping through the phone book
his children lie in bed, fighting their nightmares

a phone rings at an attourney's office
his specialties are domestic abuse and divorce
his secretary is taking down notes for him
his daughter lies about homework and sleepovers

a foetus is growing in her abdomen
his father's favourite pastime is pornography
his mother, the attourney's daughter, is walking to an abortion clinic
his abortionist-to-be goes to church sometimes

a pastor is preaching about the meaning of life
his parishioners think the answer is meaningless
his cousin is staring at the water below the bridge
his brother, the attourney, is crying in his office

a soldier adjusts his rifle strap in Iran
his sergeant has just shot a bomb-strapped child
his sister, the secretary, is judging the wife-beater
his professor spends his saturdays sleeping with the attourney

a drug-pusher flicks his cigarette butt into the trash
his mortgage and debts forced him into the trade
his girlfriend, the abortionist, has liver cancer
his uncle, the soldier, hates all Muslims

a politician is calling the fire brigade
his home was set alight by the cigarette butt
his aunt is a discreet elections officer
his grandson is about to be aborted

the man drinking at the lonesome bar gets a call
his in-charge wants him to get into his fire rescue gear
his inebriated driving will run over the drug-pusher
his accident will be the topic for tonight's tabloid

a society is going through its motions
what's it to you?

- sineprole.blogspot.com

joe.

or more formally, joseph stalin jughashvili.


[.]

"man of the year" for 1942, said a january 1943 edition of Time magazine in the U.S,

"The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression 'tough guy' was the man of 1942... Stalin's methods were tough, but they paid off."

[film director roland emmerich's london home.]
...featuring a mural of Mao, and a sofa cushion with Stalin's face

"The reality was that the Soviet Union was a vital ally and the West needed to keep the Red Army fighting the Germans.

The trouble is that the legacy of these "expedient lies" has still not entirely left us. Which is why I hope people will come to realise just how appalling Stalin was, and students might think twice before hanging pictures of Stalin on their walls. "
- reporter Lawrence Rees

[. ]
with daughter Svetlana, 1935


joseph stalin.
comments::

This is something I have wondered about for years. I have a German mother, born 1927 and who therefore went through the Nazi education/propaganda machine and was in the BMD (girls' equivalent of the Hitler Youth). I can't talk about my "Nazi mum" in public, even though her involvement was way beyond her childhood & teenage control. Compare with my grandfather - active communist all his adult life. Stalin was his hero even when the pogroms were well known and the world saw the brutality of the suppression of the Hungarian uprising & policing of the Berlin Wall. However, it is OK to talk about my Commie grandfather, as Stalin and the whole brutal Soviet regime are considered "possibly wrong but definitely romantic" in polite society.
Ruth, London

...One thing is true about all these men, Guevara, Hitler, Stalin, Mao etc - they are all (for better or worse, mainly worse) iconic and were giants in their time in history.
Chris Burnell, Putney, London

I've always found it strange how Communist dictators and terrorists are viewed in a different light to their fascist counterparts. ...How is a mass-murderer of one political ilk any different than another? Stalin and Mao should be morally repugnant to any right-thinking person.
Owen Gibbs, Chesterfield

... murderous butcher.
Andrew V, Canada

We seem to have a blind spot where Stalin, History's greatest mass murderer is concerned. Our education system perpetuates this. History now is taught on the basis of The Tudors followed by the Nazis. Under the National Curriculum quite some time is rightly spent learning about the Holocaust. However no comparison is made with the Soviet camps, where extermination took place. More were murdered by the Soviet regime than under the shorter lived Nazi regime. ... As a parting comment should we not consider why didn't many of the academics who had either supported the Soviet Union or "made allowances", not admit they got it wrong when Communism finally collapsed?
Richard, London

Stalin had a very keen mind and a sense of humour absent in Hitler and Mussolini. His interview with H. G. Well is worth reading.
Steve Abrams, London

[baquba, diyala province. baghdad]
under a US soldier's hat and rifles


[kamenica. bosnia]
along with at least 100 full body remains and over 1,000 partial remains of bosnian muslims killed by the bosnian serb army in 1995.


[kibati. congo]
in an improvised refugee camp, away from fighting between rebels and the congolese army.


[philadelphia. usa]
before presidency.


[400 million light years away. cetus]
with another galaxy, and named arp 147

many, many

[ china, wulian, east shandong province. -the bbc]

gone past ten trillion debt dollars-

US debt clock runs out of digits

For the time being, the Times Square counter's electronic dollar sign has been replaced with the extra digit required.

... debt shade of green.