What I want to know is, why are the Burmese generals so paranoid and xenophobic?
Granted, having been part of the British Empire they might well still be pissed off at us British, but then again India and Malaysia were also and they've made a definite go of it since independence.
So what makes these generals tick? Burma used to be one of the wealthiest countries in SE Asia. Sad, very sad.
For reference--FWIW 4 million people is the entire population of Finland. Estonia has 1.5 million people. There are about 2.3 million people in the boro of Queens, and even if you guestimate a million unnacounted illegals, you STILL have fewer people than those who are now homeless in Asia from this earthquake.
Philadelphia metro is right around 5 million.
Trying to imagine philadelphia and surrounding counties Wiped Off The Map.
FYI: The American Red Cross has had trouble getting in to Myanmar -- but the Canadian Red Cross was on the ground pretty much as of the first day.
They're also in China now, too.
If you're looking for somewhere effective to put your money, the CRC will put it to good use.
Donate here.
If you want an idea of the kind of people who lost their lives and homes, James Fallows has some photos of ordinary Sichuanese that he took last year. I hope that somehow all these kids are alive.
http://
jamesfallows.theatlantic....le_in_china.php
Also, Rebecca MacKinnon has given money for China relief, and will donate $500 more if a few hundred more people donate at least $20.
http://rconversation.blogs.com/r...chinas-
qua.html
It has always been hard for me to get my head around numbers like this.
Try this trick, which I've found useful, thinking about it in terms of something we understand intuitively: time.
Think of seven friends, make each one represent a day. Seven friends, seven days, one week.
Now take that number of homeless people and make the calculation. At a person a day, 4.8 million homeless equals 685714 weeks, or a little over 13,000 years.
Does that bring it home?
This is China. Sadly, they're used to it; the country is just so big with so many people. Just to get an idea, for the last 2'000 years, a civil war or a foreign invasion which costs less than 20 million lifes has been the exception.
I mean, they had an earthquake that killed close to 1 million people in the 16th century...
Short-term profit is a large part of the reason why SLORC is such a xenophobic regime, their good friends in the forest industry drink with the toast "to the last tree" & they're not being facetious. They literally want to clearcut all of Burma, after which they'll presumably go into farming. They know just how unpopular their way of thinking is in the rest of the world, so they hide. So far, it's been working very well for them - before this disaster, when was the last time Burma was in the news? The monks in 2007, & Aung San Suu Kyi in circa 2002. Being invisible can be very good for business, if you're SLORC.
I think that to remove the focus from short-term profit, there has to be a global effort to change the trend in corporate culture toward legally binding fiduciary trust uber alles. Where products & services were once the predicate, now it is all about profits. When multinationals can hide behind a legal obligation to generate the maximum profit, they never need to so much as consider real fundamental change.
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