In wake of what appears to be the costliest US natural disaster in history, displacing and devastating hundreds of thousands of people, I have decided to donate 25% of my poker winnings for August to Huricane Relief. Im not sure which is the best charity, perhaps the American Red Cross? The situation is getting WORSE as flood levies have broken.

I'm not someone who goes around asking for money or playing on people's guilt; however, I would encourage everyone at BTP who has the means to please donate some portion of their poker BR. If you like, PM me and I'll keep a running total (anonymously or not). BTP is my "poker family" and I think it would be nice if we could make a contribution (no matter how small) as a group. If Tetsuo were not on vaction I'd advocate a link or a donation to the site and then to a charity. Does someone knows how to do this?

Watching the coverage has been terrible, but I really start to feel overwhelmed when I ask:

What do you do if you are lucky enough to be above water in NO, but you are running out of food and potable water and there's no way out because there are no roads anymore?

What do you do when you've been living in the Superdome for the past two days, you have no change of clothes or shower facilities, you're dehydrated, there is no air conditioning, the toilets are overflowing, you are not allowed to leave (and couldn't anyway), many of the 20,000 people with you are starting to panic, and you are one of the LUCKY ones?

What do you do if you live paycheck to paycheck, you left town with your family, and now have no job or home to return to and only have about 2 weeks worth of money to pay for hotel rooms and food out of town?

What do you do if you lived in Gulfport or Biloxi and 90% of the town is just gone?

What do you do if you have loved ones there you know stayed but "all circuits are busy" and you have no idea if they are okay?

What do you do if you just bought a home which is now destroyed, and you don't have any or enough insurance? Do you still have to pay your mortgage? Do you still have a job?

What do you do if you live in Dallas and you're just fine?

Tim

The American Red Cross is the organization that's going to do the brunt of the volunteer work for this thing.

Of course, FEMA's going to be there heavily as well, but we all donate to them already, involuntarily.

New Orleans is just... gone. Gone. It was my favorite city.

The folks I fear for are the old folks who live down there in the small houses. They had no means to leave. They probably didn't have a whole lot of capability to escape the water as it rose. I can't imagine being trapped in a house, water rising, no way to get up to the attic / roof...

Trodgers,

That is great to hear!

I think I will go with 10% in September (would love to give more but my wife is out of work taking care of the future bracelet winner!)

Tim, please give to the Red Cross, if you're going to give. They provided so much help to those of us who were devastated by Hurricane Charley, last year. Don't know what we'd have done if not for the RC and FEMA.

My wife, Lynn, is right now at the Red Cross here in Ft. Myers hoping to volunteer for 3 weeks. She wants to give back some of the help we received.

It puts it all in perspective, doesn't it?

Best wishes to you all,

CJ

If Saddam or someone like him ever gets control of the middle east AND gets nukes, the domestic problems that you say need tackled now, will pale in comparison to the absolute horror that the world will face.

Your counter does not seem to gel with the facts as we know them: Saddam did not have nuclear capability nor was percieved to be developing any, and in fact the 'clear and present danger' was biological/chemical, no?

But to my mind the combined might of the NSA, project Echelon, the CIA, the IAEA and whatever other covert intelligence operations were underway at the time failed miserably to assess or report the threat accurately (as here, in the UK, where it is popularly believed that the threat was 'sexed up' in a dossier, and which lead to the suicide of a whistleblower under a well-documented smear/shame campaign against his speaking out against an apparent travesty), and the consensus (correct me if I'm wrong) is that Saddam *wanted* the West to believe he had capabilities that he did not, and succeeded. A damning inditement in my book of intelligence failiure, or a textbook case of not wanting to see the truth in order to expedide ulterior motives.

I'm not an apologist of Saddam. If we had gone to war on a mandate of 'this dude is a badass who personally and actively sponsors killings, rapes, political and human rights suppression... well, I'd feel good about supporting an action against that, and in fact it annoys me that the UN does not think to take more radical action against other countries where genocide or famine presides due to a government unfit to rule but just powerful enough to suppress rebellion.

But, like many of the electorate, I don't like being told half-truths at best and lies at worst by my own government, as it makes a mockery of my support and erodes faith in the apparatus and standing of the whole enchilada, which is bad for democracy in general, no?

Man, that day is gonna SUCK. Cause there's no way we can keep nukes away from them forever... Gah, I hope I die before it all goes down, though.

Why do you think he wanted to invade Kuwait? Kuwait is one of the richest countries in the world because of all its oil.

You can say that we shouldnt be fighting over oil, but what do you think would happen if we had no access to oil. The world as we know it would be over.

I believe that Iran will have nuclear capabilities at some point in the not too distant future. Iraq probably wouldve had them already if we hadnt wiped out half their country in the original Gulf war.

People always say "why didnt the government do anything sooner?" They all wanted to know why we didnt stop the 911 attacks. Well, we ARE trying to do something sooner. If we did nothing and werent trying "to police the world", then 15 years from now when Iran or Iraq or Syria has nukes and is threatening to use them (or does use them) everyone would be saying "why didnt the government stop them when we had the chance?"

So what do people suggest be done about Libya? I haven't a clue really, but I would much prefer to see a UN-led initiative rather than a US-spearheaded one, which can only further damage the reputation of your country and its people even further in foreign climes.

I have met many Americans who whilst travelling have felt widely discriminated against on the basis of their government's actions, despite the fact that they do not agree with them. Whilst this is a failure of the discriminator to distinguish between the elected and the electorate, the policy and the individual, it is also to my mind a gowing concern and threat to US citizens abroad - America and its populous might find themselves ever-more entrenched in isolationism if care is not taken, and then support will fall away from even sympathetic countries like the U.K.

The Soviets developed nukes. Did we invade them? Nope. I tend to disagree with pre-emptive aggression, preferring massive retaliation in the face of an actual attack, or attack as defence in the *credible* face of threat.

Would the administrations of countries like Libya or North Korea use nukes? I strongly doubt it, as they would be committing national suicide on behalf of vast percentages of their peoples. I think maybe the worry with Libya is that nuclear armaments or the materials thereof may fall into the hands of terrorists with the warped belief systems that are compatible with actually using them, which is a whole different argument and one that I think makes a lot of sense. But then again look at Russia. Apparently nuclear materials were not hard to purchase from unpaid and under-maintained installations in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But did we see a nuclear calamity as a corollary? Not yet.

It's an impossible argument, as we're not privy to intelligence materials and are unlikely to ever be given the full story behind decisions of '(inter)national security'. But it's one I find interesting to discuss for me right now, probably as I've been in Costa Rica for 20 days and have had few conversations where I've been able to compose a sentence or debate a point with someone using other than basic words (my fault - I should have learned more Spanish)

Ach, whenever I think about politics I end up musing: I'm not well-informed enough to comment. What a cop-out?