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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!
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!"
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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make install -not war
Here's an actual story about what is happening.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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
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
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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make install -not war
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?