Quote:
Originally Posted by Brokinarrow
UN.......  |
LOL, no- I get it. But this seems like what the UN SHOULD be doing instead of the other things they actually do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Blur
I'll also put this out there. Which of the countries on this list are best prepared to help Haiti? Besides the proximity to the US, the fact that the US has the capacity to work on both terrible terrain and in terrible circumstances by taking advantage of advanced technology and damned good training makes the US the best candidate to help Haiti. If everyone on Earth had these capacities, there might not have been this disaster in the first place. On the other hand, it might not be as democratic a world if everyone else had this sort of military. Additionally, the US represents approximately 22% of the UN's annual budget based on their dues scale. Countries with a higher capacity to pay must pay more, and the US is the largest contributer. Even if the US were not to send troops to Haiti, the US would be paying for them. |
I don't disagree with this either. I know the USA is about the best prepared individual country to deal with just about anything anywhere. Let alone in a country that's pretty close to us.
However...our 22% doesn't seem to buy much.
Maybe a better way to say it is: you beat me hands down on logic, but my gut says that the UN should have been all over this instead of being these individual country reactions.
Interestingly I read this (regarding avoiding the severity of the disaster):
"
One group of scientists thinks so. Back in 2008, Eric Calais and Paul Mann, geophysicists who study fault lines in the Caribbean, predicted that Haiti would soon face such a devastating quake. The researchers reported that the Enriquillo fault, the line that Haiti sits upon, could produce a 7.2-magnitude quake if strained enough. Using GPS measurements, the team said that the fault was inching along at 7 millimeters per year, a moderate crawl in the realm of fault lines. But since this highly strung fault line has stretched several millimeters per year for the last 250 years, it was time for it to snap.
"Unfortunately our number is fairly close to what happened yesterday. If you think of the fault as a rubber band, as being pulled 7 millimeters per year at a constant rate, it will eventually break," Calais says."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...h/4342434.html
Not that I'd expect a government to jump every time they got a report like this, but apparently there wasn't any action of any kind.