"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
An F5 tornado can rip asphalt off the ground, yet the wisdom at Baby Blue is that basements would have saved everybody, or nearly so.
There are reasons basements aren't commonly built in the Plains states, and it has as much to do with the soil as with the effort. And a tornado that can pull pavement off the ground can pull up a storm cellar, too, especially if it's only a few inches of dirt overhead.
I don't have a point except I'm so sick of people looking for someone to blame in the face of a natural disaster. Funny nobody over there complained about all the construction in the 100 year flood plain in New Jersey when Sandy walked all over the coastline.
Feh. My prayers are with the people of Oklahoma, no matter what their Senators think about global warming or what kind of building codes they have or don't have. This is the very definition of a "natural disaster."
Well, the reigning sentiment is that the people of Oklahoma are to blame for not making the government require storm shelters in every building and home in the state.
It's a very odd way of reacting to disaster.
You know, sometimes the ability to communicate on the internet makes you kinda sick......
Blaming the victims, it's not just for the right, anymore.
Let me guess, the people who live where tornadoes are rarer than winning the power-ball were telling you, a native Texan, all about them. It's that kind of thing that made me give it up.
Intellectual inbreeding? It's an ever smaller pool of ideas reinforcing each other. Maybe that's what happens on blogs that get an in-crowd as their main feature. An enforceable allowed point of view develops and anyone who doesn't say it gets excluded.
Maybe I could get a blog post by going back to check the time stamps on comments yesterday to see how soon they started blaming the victims on the basis of their presumed religious beliefs. I'll bet it wasn't five minutes after it was on cable TV.
Lots of carping about praying for the victims, too. In fact, the whole business came down to "blaming the victims," which in part may have been a reaction to the loss of life of children.
But mostly, it was just easier to blame the victims than to show compassion.
Their expertise extends to building codes. There are few basements in OK because of the soil: too moist, too much risk of mold, seepage, etc. The soil is simply too sandy and wet for basements.
But basements can be built in the north (where you have to build a foundation below the frost line anyway), so it can be done in the plains states. Thus speaketh their absolute knowledge of building construction/engineering.
And yes, you can build a shelter to withstand an F5 storm; it's a 6x6 concrete box, with 8 inch walls. Anything bigger than that, it'll get blown apart. IOW, they have no clue what the destructive power of a tornado is; but still they are experts.
And somebody from Canada told me we have the technology to track these storms and warn people well ahead of time. I pointed out that the 15 minute warning this time was extraordinarily early,that tornadoes are extremely unpredictable. But what do I know, I've only lived in "tornado alley" my entire life.
And now they are torn between their hatred for the politics of OK and the suffering of the people there; so should they get federal aid, or not? They send people like Inhofe to the Congress, so the state collectively is to blame for not recognizing global warming is the cause of this storm.
Even if it isn't. This isn't early or unusual for OK. But again, people who don't live there know best.
Did anyone point out the children who drowned in the basement of their school? I remember, years ago, when a river in the plains flooded one year and it first occurred to me that when you're on a truly flat plane, water doesn't drain like it did where there were hills and mountains. It was when I realized that someone who didn't live there could't expect their experience to be relevant to the conditions in those places.
Maybe it's a failure of sympathetic imagination. That's something I used to associate with those defined as being on the political right, but in those who believe themselves to be a liberal (but who are't) it's often a class based sterotyping, often based on what they mistakenly believe is a differential in intelligence. Maybe it's like what happened when many of the Northern anti-slavery types, after the civil war, had no sympathy for the labor movement in the North. I've read that Whittier was especially unmoved by the lot of the wage slaves. A lot of them would seem to have benefited from that economic system as certainly as many had from chattel slavery.
It's so ironic that the bulwark of the last successful wave of civil rights agitation was powered by the passion of people who were religious, many of them Southerners who were black. People who shared many of the same conditions as people that these Northern "liberals" would hold to be backwards sub-humans. I think that attitude is real and it is used by the right. It's not the only thing "wrong with Kansas" and other states but the attitude they react to isn't very helpful to bring about change and it's anything but smart on the part of a lot of people who love to believe they're oh, so smart.
I've learned a lot that is wrong with the official "liberalism" from reading comments like those. It's one thing that those guys share with the far right, seeing people as less than human, if not objects. Real liberals don't do that. I suspect "Scout" isn't a regular anymore. Neither is "Phila", he left before I did. Wise man.
Did anyone point out the children who drowned in the basement of their school?
Actually, I did; which seemed to stop the discussion of the safety of basements.
Having lived in a house in Illinois with a basement, I can tell you it's not the safest place to be in a tornado. Better than being above ground, but not exactly a storm shelter, especially if the tornado hits you directly. That floor over your head can go airborne pretty easily. What you want is an independent shelter, or one under the concrete floor of a garage. And then it has to be small, to withstand what could be a direct hit from an F4 or stronger, storm.
Those things can rip asphalt off the ground.
And most people in Moore had such shelters. One of the schools, per the Moore US rep on NPR this morning, was considered a "reinforced building" that was a tornado shelter. Until it got shredded. On the other hand, I understand all the children in that school when the storm hit, survived.
But massive storm shelters that will house many people at once, simple aren't a real option, if for no other reason than structural integrity and the likelihood of being buried in it.
Surprisingly, the people of OK know something about this. Despite who they send to the US Senate, and all.
About the only economically feasible structure I've read about that might stand a chance would be a reinforced monolithic dome and I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't reliably resistant to something that big and that ferocious. There are limits to what can be done. I wonder what they'd say about banning people on the flood plains in New Jersey from rebuilding there.
When Manhattan flooded last fall, almost immediately I remembered a movie of a man who lived in an unused and forgotten hole beneath the subway. I wondered how many homeless people might have died in places like that.
It was all I could come up with. It's stunning and there is no law of nature that says it couldn't happen again any time.
With some of the idiot politicians in other states, no section of the country has a monopoly on stupid. I remember that George McGovern came from South Dakota and think that wondering if the conditions that produced that result might, possibly, be worth encouraging instead of sitting in the North East feeling smug and conceited. You'd think that would get old after a time of being out of power for decades but, no, obviously it doesn't. I'll bet the same people believed they were for a 50 state strategy when it was Howard Dean who was following it.
Ah, well. I've got to go take my shift taking care of my mother. Will check in later. Good conversation, thank you.
An F5 tornado can rip asphalt off the ground, yet the wisdom at Baby Blue is that basements would have saved everybody, or nearly so.
ReplyDeleteThere are reasons basements aren't commonly built in the Plains states, and it has as much to do with the soil as with the effort. And a tornado that can pull pavement off the ground can pull up a storm cellar, too, especially if it's only a few inches of dirt overhead.
I don't have a point except I'm so sick of people looking for someone to blame in the face of a natural disaster. Funny nobody over there complained about all the construction in the 100 year flood plain in New Jersey when Sandy walked all over the coastline.
Feh. My prayers are with the people of Oklahoma, no matter what their Senators think about global warming or what kind of building codes they have or don't have. This is the very definition of a "natural disaster."
Well, the reigning sentiment is that the people of Oklahoma are to blame for not making the government require storm shelters in every building and home in the state.
ReplyDeleteIt's a very odd way of reacting to disaster.
You know, sometimes the ability to communicate on the internet makes you kinda sick......
Blaming the victims, it's not just for the right, anymore.
ReplyDeleteLet me guess, the people who live where tornadoes are rarer than winning the power-ball were telling you, a native Texan, all about them. It's that kind of thing that made me give it up.
I just looked at E-ton this morning, I see what you mean. They're not liberals, they're libertarians.
ReplyDeleteThey're loonies.
DeleteSeriously.
Intellectual inbreeding? It's an ever smaller pool of ideas reinforcing each other. Maybe that's what happens on blogs that get an in-crowd as their main feature. An enforceable allowed point of view develops and anyone who doesn't say it gets excluded.
DeleteMaybe I could get a blog post by going back to check the time stamps on comments yesterday to see how soon they started blaming the victims on the basis of their presumed religious beliefs. I'll bet it wasn't five minutes after it was on cable TV.
Lots of carping about praying for the victims, too. In fact, the whole business came down to "blaming the victims," which in part may have been a reaction to the loss of life of children.
DeleteBut mostly, it was just easier to blame the victims than to show compassion.
It was just sickening.
Their expertise extends to building codes. There are few basements in OK because of the soil: too moist, too much risk of mold, seepage, etc. The soil is simply too sandy and wet for basements.
ReplyDeleteBut basements can be built in the north (where you have to build a foundation below the frost line anyway), so it can be done in the plains states. Thus speaketh their absolute knowledge of building construction/engineering.
And yes, you can build a shelter to withstand an F5 storm; it's a 6x6 concrete box, with 8 inch walls. Anything bigger than that, it'll get blown apart. IOW, they have no clue what the destructive power of a tornado is; but still they are experts.
And somebody from Canada told me we have the technology to track these storms and warn people well ahead of time. I pointed out that the 15 minute warning this time was extraordinarily early,that tornadoes are extremely unpredictable. But what do I know, I've only lived in "tornado alley" my entire life.
And now they are torn between their hatred for the politics of OK and the suffering of the people there; so should they get federal aid, or not? They send people like Inhofe to the Congress, so the state collectively is to blame for not recognizing global warming is the cause of this storm.
Even if it isn't. This isn't early or unusual for OK. But again, people who don't live there know best.
I can't stand it anymore.
The arrogance, it burns.
ReplyDeleteDid anyone point out the children who drowned in the basement of their school? I remember, years ago, when a river in the plains flooded one year and it first occurred to me that when you're on a truly flat plane, water doesn't drain like it did where there were hills and mountains. It was when I realized that someone who didn't live there could't expect their experience to be relevant to the conditions in those places.
Maybe it's a failure of sympathetic imagination. That's something I used to associate with those defined as being on the political right, but in those who believe themselves to be a liberal (but who are't) it's often a class based sterotyping, often based on what they mistakenly believe is a differential in intelligence. Maybe it's like what happened when many of the Northern anti-slavery types, after the civil war, had no sympathy for the labor movement in the North. I've read that Whittier was especially unmoved by the lot of the wage slaves. A lot of them would seem to have benefited from that economic system as certainly as many had from chattel slavery.
It's so ironic that the bulwark of the last successful wave of civil rights agitation was powered by the passion of people who were religious, many of them Southerners who were black. People who shared many of the same conditions as people that these Northern "liberals" would hold to be backwards sub-humans. I think that attitude is real and it is used by the right. It's not the only thing "wrong with Kansas" and other states but the attitude they react to isn't very helpful to bring about change and it's anything but smart on the part of a lot of people who love to believe they're oh, so smart.
I've learned a lot that is wrong with the official "liberalism" from reading comments like those. It's one thing that those guys share with the far right, seeing people as less than human, if not objects. Real liberals don't do that. I suspect "Scout" isn't a regular anymore. Neither is "Phila", he left before I did. Wise man.
I'm the last "regular" there from the days of Scout and Phila; or very nearly so.
DeleteAnd creature of habit that I am, I'm out. Should have left long ago, but laziness is a habit, too.
No more. Can't see the difference now between the far right and them; as you say.
Did anyone point out the children who drowned in the basement of their school?
ReplyDeleteActually, I did; which seemed to stop the discussion of the safety of basements.
Having lived in a house in Illinois with a basement, I can tell you it's not the safest place to be in a tornado. Better than being above ground, but not exactly a storm shelter, especially if the tornado hits you directly. That floor over your head can go airborne pretty easily. What you want is an independent shelter, or one under the concrete floor of a garage. And then it has to be small, to withstand what could be a direct hit from an F4 or stronger, storm.
Those things can rip asphalt off the ground.
And most people in Moore had such shelters. One of the schools, per the Moore US rep on NPR this morning, was considered a "reinforced building" that was a tornado shelter. Until it got shredded. On the other hand, I understand all the children in that school when the storm hit, survived.
But massive storm shelters that will house many people at once, simple aren't a real option, if for no other reason than structural integrity and the likelihood of being buried in it.
Surprisingly, the people of OK know something about this. Despite who they send to the US Senate, and all.
Go figure.
About the only economically feasible structure I've read about that might stand a chance would be a reinforced monolithic dome and I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't reliably resistant to something that big and that ferocious. There are limits to what can be done. I wonder what they'd say about banning people on the flood plains in New Jersey from rebuilding there.
ReplyDeleteWhen Manhattan flooded last fall, almost immediately I remembered a movie of a man who lived in an unused and forgotten hole beneath the subway. I wondered how many homeless people might have died in places like that.
I pointed out at the time that all the flooding in NJ was within known flood plains.
DeleteVery few people seemed to like that point.
As I say, loss of life in OK was remarkably low; but not low enough. Tornadoes happen there, and there is only so much you can do to survive them.
But swearing at the politicians as if their politics caused an F4 tornado to be spawned in an OKC suburb is just....well, seriously.
Despite my carping here, I think your post says all that can truly be said about Oklahoma right now. Certainly all we have the right to say....
It was all I could come up with. It's stunning and there is no law of nature that says it couldn't happen again any time.
DeleteWith some of the idiot politicians in other states, no section of the country has a monopoly on stupid. I remember that George McGovern came from South Dakota and think that wondering if the conditions that produced that result might, possibly, be worth encouraging instead of sitting in the North East feeling smug and conceited. You'd think that would get old after a time of being out of power for decades but, no, obviously it doesn't. I'll bet the same people believed they were for a 50 state strategy when it was Howard Dean who was following it.
Ah, well. I've got to go take my shift taking care of my mother. Will check in later. Good conversation, thank you.
My thanks to you. Hope all goes well with your mother.
Delete