and we say we have no friends

People are always whining that we help the rest of the world but the rest of the world never helps us. 

Qatar offers $100m to relief fund 

Brief summary:  A stunning number of countries have offered the U.S. huge amounts of aid to deal with the damage from Katrina, but, "As of Friday, the White House had not accepted any offers..."  If I'm understanding the article correctly, quite a few countries are making donations to the Red Cross, anyway. 

Now, eor and I disagree as to how resources can best be defined, but his argument is that the U.S. consumes more than the entire rest of the world put together.  If one looks at this offered aid as them choosing to divert some of the resources which they would normally consume, and giving them to us, and then think about the relative amount we each, in this country, would have to choose to divert from our own needs in order to match the aid they are offering, it should, hypothetically, cause us far less bother. 

(My counter argument is that what we can give should be defined by what we produce, and that what we consume is largely influenced by planned obsolescence, but all that debate gets far to rambly to go into on this post.)

I spent the day reading about Katrina, and all I got was this lousy post.

I'm sorry, I can't help it.  I do think that all this should be put aside, for now, because people are dying.  But people like me, I can't go down there and haul people out of buildings.  So I get to sit here and obsess about things like this.  And I have no memory, just like the nation as a whole, so I don't want to forget about this, later. 

Memo to myself...

Someone at work, Friday, was telling me that FEMA couldn't go in to help in New Orleans until they were asked, and that when they were being yelled at about not helping, that was the first time they were asked.  Let's do the Time Warp, way back to August 26th, when a headline on CNN.com read "Forecasters: Katrina to aim for Mississippi, Louisiana"   A snippet from about halfway down the article: "In anticipation of a possible landfall, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco declared states of emergency Friday." 

Even better, FEMA doesn't actually have to wait to be asked, according to the National Response Plan (a Homeland Security public document dated December, 2004).

I never would have thought to track back on CNN if not for the coincidence of a chance comment by norseblue (a resident of Gretna, a city which is so close to being a part of New Orleans as to be indistinguishable to me), and eor mentioning the Talking Points Memo site which yonmei had linked to.