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Alaska's Mt. Redoubt Has Erupted
alaskana98 writes "Alaska's Mt. Redoubt volcano has erupted 3 times, with the first event starting at 10:38 PM Alaska standard time.
The ash cloud is estimated to be higher than 50,000 feet. So far, only light ash fall is predicted for areas north
of Anchorage."
The web cam just shows blackness
Can Governor Sarah Palin see it happening from her house?
Sarah Palin reports she can see it from her house.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I guess we're finally finding out how Sarah responded to Bristol's breakup with her fiance...
Well this should clearly be illegal, dumping all of that ash and those greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
Of course there's a Republican governor.
Won't somebody think of the caribou?!
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
Finally, several months after the loss in elections, Sarah Palin let the steam out.......
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal mutters something about all this wasteful government spending.
i bet jindal feels like a doof
NOT from TFA:
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
2009-03-23 02:04:08
As of 2:00AM March 23, 2009, AVO has recorded FOUR large explosions [...]
2009-03-23 04:37:08
Another large explosion is occurring at Redoubt.
(which IS from TFA)
When Republican governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal took to TV immediately after President Obama's address to the Joint Session of Congress last month, he whined that the government funded volcano monitoring is "wasteful spending". Of course he was lying, since he said "$140M for volcano monitoring", when that money is for USGS "facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcano monitoring systems and national map activities", all kinds of important stuff for running and protecting our country.
Then Jindal went into some kind of weird story about his standing for sanity during Hurricane Katrina (which he was lying about, too - and it was a story about the lone Democrat getting things done, surrounded by Republicans including Jindal doing nothing but flapping their lips). Reminding us what happens when the government doesn't monitor predictable local natural disasters that kill thousands and destroy cities.
This was the official Republican response. Maybe they just want to keep secret their main competition for spewing filthy hot air that kills Americans.
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Not all government pork is bad - insert joke here - ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Here's an actual story about what is happening.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Just remember, all the debris kicked up into the atmosphere could actually cause global cooling. Reference the drop in average world temperature caused by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo awhile back.
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.
The Anchorage Daily News is reporting 5 eruptions here
/Former resident of Eagle River, AK
//Saw Mt Redoubt the last time it erupted.
///Well, at least until the ash obscured the view.
Mount Redoubt has blown its spout. Throwing ash and soot about.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
praying for forgiveness for upsetting her god...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only proper measurement here is how many MP3s would fit in a standard volcanic eruption.
Since everyone but Myanmar, Liberia and the United States use the metric system I just thought I'd point out the hight of the ash cloud.
In case you don't know this obscure "ft" unit. ;-)
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Why even bother to predicate hurricanes if government is useless at responding to them.
"Government is ineffective, vote for us and we'll show you how!" - traditional GOP motto.
Care to refute any of it...
Well, I can refute something in there pretty easily: We have no one in government called 'Chairman Obama'. So pretty much any statement that mentioned 'Chairman Obama' is blatantly wrong on the face of it.
Also, why'd you include links to the 2007 and 2009 budget? Obama, neither your imaginary 'Chairman Obama' nor the actual President Obama, had anything to do with those budgets. (Well, beyond the fact he was in the Senate at that time...but the House does the budget.)
Those were just the two things that it's trivially easy to disprove and not even up for debate.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
New Orleans don't need government waste like something called "volcano monitoring". We should all move to places like New Orleans where they dont need to waste all that kind of money monitoring something that may or may not happen. ...Good to know I'm not the only one who thought Jindel bashing volcano monitoring was highly ironic.
It's a imaginary place in the Simon & Garfunkel song.
Kinda like Shangri-La, El-Dorado, Hobbiton or New Zealand.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yes, you've nailed it exactly (though unfortunately there's more people than just the dwindling "right" that is stuck on the doomed path).
The debate over causes of climate change is worthwhile only as a means to the end of identifying what we can change here and now to avert disaster. We can't change the frequency and size of volcanic eruptions. But we can reverse the destruction of vegetation that naturally balances our atmosphere, but now synthetically unbalances us as we burn it instead of grow it. And even bigger and more changeable is the amount of ancient vegetation in fossil fuels that once stored Greenhouse gases, giving our atmosphere a stable, mild climate, that we now burn to "fire up" the Greenhouse.
The real answers don't come from finding someone to blame. They come from finding what we can change. And as hard as the beneficiaries (and irrational lovers/phobics) of petrofuels might make it to change, they're still easier than changing the volcanoes. And, as far as we can tell right now, probably sufficient. So it's worth identifying their contributions, then scaling them down.
If our climate change and energy debates revolved more around who can change instead of who to blame, we might get workable consensus much faster and more easily.
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Not 'pork', but spending directed to specific projects, as opposed to going into the general budget of an executive branch agency, are what they mean by 'earmarks'.
I.e., for Christmas, you got a 50 gift card to Barnes and Noble. An earmark would require you to spend 10 dollars of that money on a specific book.
The real joke is that the Republicans are complaining about it. Removing earmarks would simply remove Congressional restrictions on spending...
I find it exceptionally silly they criticized his signing a bill with earmarks in it. 'Hey, you sign a bill that required you spend money in certain ways. You promised you'd only sign bills that let you spend the money however you wanted! You liar!'. Well, maybe that's exactly the way he wanted to spend the money, who knows? Or, more importantly, who cares? He could have spent that money that way anyway.
In reality, the problem with earmarks is that they are almost always outside the budget process and hence the money is added to existing funds, not set aside from money already there, and it's not accounted for in any way. Also, they're often on very stupid things, and attached to unrelated bills, which is a general problem in both houses.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Well, your post was kinda flattering, if inaccurate. I thank you for the accurate flattery :).
I've been much less "partisan" since Republicans lost most of their power after holding way too much for way too long. I don't know how I look otherwise. FWIW, my "partisan" attitude is not so much a Democratic partisan, because I'm not a Democrat (I'm independent), as it is highly anti Republican, since that party has been such a damaging collection of bad people for so long, and we're so damaged by it.
In this case, you're going along with Jindal's Republican lie that $140M is spent by Democrats on volcano monitoring, when I pointed out the fact is that the monitoring gets only a (relatively small) fraction of that overall budget amount. And though Republicans did indeed spend some considerable money on volcano monitoring when they were the ones writing, passing and signing USGS budgets, I never complained - because I never saw evidence it was too much. In fact, if I'd seen evidence that it was too little, I probably would have complained. As I just did when Jindal attacked it, even if he has only lies and partisan posturing to offer, without power to screw up that budget (at the present time). Indeed, I could have pointed out the further Republican hypocrisy of Sarah Palin not only accepting the money Jindal badmouthed (but can't stop), but Palin's refusing to even comment on that dramatic divergence from the official Republican position on that budget, even as she continues to run for president. Because I'm talking about Jindal, disaster preparedness, and Republican refusal to learn from Katrina (or anything else), not the vaster and duller subject of mere Republican hypocrisy.
If you can show evidence that the current system (including the safety of USGS/contractor jobs in this Republican recession) "works fine" without the stimulus budget, I'd like to see it. All I can see is Jindal claiming he learned from his (imaginary, and self-defeating as a fable) Katrina experience that the government shouldn't fund monitoring for natural disasters. Katrina was predicted by government monitoring, too, but the full necessary system under Republican control and development didn't seem to "work fine". Except to Jindal, for whom it works fine as a (made up, self-defeating) story to tell on TV.
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First of all, you can't predict earthquakes, except in the case of aftershocks. We aren't 'monitoring' earthquakes to predict them, we're simply studying them to see if we can predict them, and to predict tsunamis and volcanoes.
Secondly, tsunami predictions have saved quite a lot of lives. The last disastrous tsunami, in fact, was predicted in plenty of time to help people, except that there wasn't a unified warning system for the area and that the various countries hit are still mostly third world and had no way to notify their people.
Tsunamis in general are incredibly easy to predict. You just wait for an largeish earthquake, which can easily see on semographs, and then look for swelling of the ocean at that place. It is sheer stupidity we don't have some sort of global monitoring for them. Two hours after the quake that caused the last one, four hours before it hit anywhere, radar satellites picked the damn thing up. We could easily just tie together existing systems and have fair warning of these things.
And, of course, the monitoring of Mount Pinatubo saved 10-20 thousand lives when it erupted in 1991. In total, the entire monitoring of that volcano, in the decade the US had done it, came to about 15 million dollars. (Or about the cost of having one guy from AIG work for them that entire time.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And this is why parents need to monitor their children's internet activity, at least until they're 14 or so.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Thanks, here's some more sense. Bush's "respect" for "states rights" saw him ignore Louisiana's request for allowing New Mexico's offered National Guard. The Posse Comitatus act protects states from a rogue governor colluding with a nearby state's invasion, requiring the Federal government to approve any accepted offer for "help" by other states sending their National Guard. Louisiana governor Blanco made the formal request the week before Katrina hit, as New Mexico governor Richardson had offered to send help. Katrina hit on Sunday, but the White House didn't even respond until the following Thursday, during which time New Orleans got whipped, then flooded, and lay drowning in the flood for several days. Though Bush didn't just "ignore" the request: he tried to force Blanco to give up control of the National Guard to Bush, by withholding permission until she agreed. Considering how many people were killed by Federal troops in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast unnecessarily, Blanco's restraint was exactly what our system provided for when it gave the governors the power to refuse to let their guard be "nationalized".
But that's just one example, the most immediate. Everyone knows how badly Bush's FEMA failed New Orleans at every step, including to date - 3.5 years later. Most should know that Bush and his Republican Congress, including one of Louisiana's senators, defunded the Federal levees and the other emergency/relief systems everyone counted on, severely once they got the chance. Leaving Louisiana to drown, and then rot while the rest of the Gulf Coast got funded to clean up, was a Republican policy.
Texas was more "prepared" during Katrina because Bush's Republicans continued funding Texas' preparations, since Texas was a wholly owned Republican corruption operation. But I don't know how prepared Texas actually was for Katrina, since all we have is Texans' word for it - and the Republicans who ran the whole operation, their political headquarters in Texas.
BTW, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is a Republican. Louisiana elections are nonpartisan for in-state offices. Nagin personally donates as much to Republican campaigns as to Democratic ones, but his Democratic donations are to people directly connected to Louisiana or himself personally. He donated to get Bush elected - not exactly a Democratic move. And I knew that he was Republican (he had been CEO of the local Cox cable corp) when I voted for him in 2002, when I lived there. Maybe that makes us both "nonpartisan", but there's nothing "Democratic" about Nagin, or how much I hate him.
"Big government" help is exactly what's needed in the biggest hurricanes in history. It's what was needed when Katrina hit, and in maintaining defenses. It's what was needed when Republicans instead deregulated our financial system. It's what was needed to protect us from the 9/11/2001 planebombs. Bush and his Republicans proved that "shrinking government to drown in the bathtub" just drowns Americans along with it, literally in the case of Katrina.
This whole conversation is weird. Everyone knows how badly Republicans failed Louisiana in Katrina. Jindal's own story is one of a whole bunch of Republicans failing to do anything except bureaucracy, except for the lone Democrat: Sheriff Harry Lee (who I also hated), who actually cut the BS to get people rescued. Jindal's story is a lie he made up for TV, but the facts it's loosely based on are true, and tell of universal Republican failure and a Democrat's heroic effort.
An ideal situation would be people choosing officials from the Democratic Party and at least one other party in competition to provide boring government competence, even in "exciting" events like volcanoes and hurricanes. With Republicans filling half the duopoly, we're getting nothing but neverending catastrophe.
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replaces Sarah Palin as the hottest thing in Alaska.