Categories
Politics

Christmas Drop

Operation Christmas Drop

Most likely one of the more enjoyable training operations they get to participate in. From Wikipedia:

Operation Christmas Drop is a tradition that serves as a training mission for the United States Air Force which started in 1952. It has since become the longest running U.S. Department of Defense mission in full operation, and the longest running humanitarian airlift in the world. Supported by the local communities of Guam, it is primarily conducted from Andersen Air Force Base and Yokota Air Base.

Categories
In The News Politics

$350 Mil in Aid

About freaking time. It’s depressing it took so long.

Amazing how bias some of the media has been. $350 is the largest donation so far cash wise, but quite a few nations have cleared the effected countries debt’s away. That means the money those countries would have to pay can now be used for rebuilding. That’s substantial funds that don’t get accounted for. That’s millions of dollars of money saved. As the saying goes “a penny saved is a penny earned”. Those debts that have been erased will be very important as these countries try and rebuild their now destroyed tourism industries and get people back to work. This is going to take decades, not days, weeks, months or even years. This is decades worth of damage.

If tiny countries can give over 10 mil, I think the US can easily swing it. Were already funding Bush’s family feud with Saddam.

Kind of ironic how Bush needed hard evidence that the Tsunami actually happened before he could pledge this money (as if the world was pulling a prank). The US had to send personnel in to “evaluate” the situation first. Why didn’t that happen in Iraq? Instead we trusted faulty decade old intelligence. Even knowing that the intelligence was rather worthless, and conflicted with the findings of other nations also monitoring the situation.

I’m curious if the president will ever explain why the decision making process took so much effort for this disaster than it did to go into Iraq. Wasted time is costing lives.

Categories
In The News

Online Memorials, Fundraising

In the wake of this weeks events, I decided to spend several minutes browsing the home pages of the world’s largest companies, just to see how many made an alteration either as a memorial or to raise funds for disaster relief… I easily hit all the big brands here in the US, odds are I tackled most of the top 100 companies in the United States. Here were my findings:

Amazon.com
Apple
Google 1
Google 2
Marriott

Apple cleared the entire homepage. Amazon as usual took advantage of it’s ability to quickly collect payments. Google has a huge audience, and put a link to a page containing help info. Marriott did as well. eBay has setup a few things as well.

I was surprised how many have no indication of such events. During 9/11 several websites completely redid their corporate homepage. This isn’t anywhere near a US trend, as I checked many international companies as well. IBM, Intel, Microsoft, all have no mention or indication.