"Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die." — U2, Crumbs From Your Table

" The astounding tragedy in the Indian Ocean is not just a human disaster of unbearable magnitude. Nor is it a matter of fate. It is the consequence of years of underinvestment in the scientific and technical infrastructure needed to reduce the vulnerability of developing countries to natural and environmental calamity."  From an editorial by Art Lerner-Lam and Leonardo  Seeber, seismologists with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University and Robert Chen, a geographer with the Center for International  Earth Science Information Network. Maxx Dilley, Deborah Balk, and Klaus Jacob also contributed to this essay.  Full editorial at the Los Angeles Times (registration required.)

Give to the Red Cross courtesy of Amazon.

The Working Families party called the other night soliciting a contribution for their campaign to raise the minimum wage.  The New York State minimum wage is currently set at $5.15 an hour–a proposal in Albany would raise it by $2 to $7.15 an hour.  I’d given them a contribution for this cause before, but the act sent me back to my microeconomics textbook–wasn’t raising the minimum wage one of those policies that hurt more than it helped? 

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According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel Inc, the engineering firm selected by the US Agency for International Development to rebuild the infrastructure in Iraq, gave $1.3 million in political contributions to Democrats and Republicans between 1999 and 2002 . Not a bad investment considering the contract is immediately worth $34.6 million and could cost over $680 million over 18 months.

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1) Kerry was presidential. The president seemed like a cartoon caricature of himself. Think Cartman, of South Park, playing sheriff and shouting: “do not question my authoritah!!!” Bush seemed childish and resentful of Kerry’s critiques.

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Benjamin DeMott, author of Junk Politics: The Trashing of the American Mind, has an essay in the October 2004 issue of Harper’s entitled “Whitewash as Public Service: How the 9/11 Comission Report defrauds the nation.” In a nutshell, DeMott claims that since the report failed to place blame it is a failure.

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New, York, NY – “On Sunday, September 12, 2004, forty contemporary artists, working under the auspices of Downtown for Democracy, transformed the block of 22nd Street between Tenth and Eleventh avenues into the Liberty Fair.”–from the downtown for democracy website. We hired a writer to send Colin Powell a letter respectfully asking him to do the right thing and resign, got temporary tatoos, and one of us sort of wound up in the New York Times.