Pribek

I got to keep a closer eye on this trend. It’s beyond silly that every time there is a natural disaster, somebody, a politician or celebrity, blames the the disaster on somebody or, the actions of human beings. As if “Nature” no longer plays a part in “Natural” disasters. Now, this jive has been going on for a long time, it’s not new. But, these days, there isn’t one disaster that goes by without some politico or celeb showing their ass along with their insensitivity and ignorance.

I first saw this bit of news the other day. Sharon Stone discusses the recent earthquake in China, take it away Sharon Stone…

“I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else,” Stone said Thursday during a Cannes Film Festival red-carpet interview with Hong Kong’s Cable Entertainment News. “And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”

As if, after thousands and thousands of years of people dedicating their lives to studying the ins and outs of karma somehow, this woman….

…is now the arbiter of karma.

So, now Ms. Stone has pissed off the people of China, which means she has pissed off the largest emerging market for her dying industry and, pissed off the guy who owns the most theaters in China, who says he will never again show one of her films in any of his joints.

But, that’s not all…

During the brief interview, which has also surfaced on YouTube, Stone also said she cried when she received a letter from the Tibetan Foundation asking her to help the quake victims.

“They wanted to go and be helpful, and that made me cry,” she said. “It was a big lesson to me that sometimes you have to learn to put your head down and be of service even to people who aren’t nice to you.”

O.K., I saw the video a couple of days ago and, it’s really not worth sitting through but, it’s easy to find if you must. Stone mostly comes off as what we used to call “ditzy”, like she’s in over her head. She is pompous in that she seems of the opinion that she, as a celebrity, has a true impact on things like world affairs and natural disasters. She also has the audacity to name drop this guy.

Yep, the old Dalai Lama. Sharon Stone says something like; “The Dalai Lama who, is a good friend of mine.”, and then goes on to say the he asked for her help in all of this.

What is going on with the Dalai Lama? Is he hanging out at cocktail parties, eating goat cheese every night. The Dalai Lama knows more celebrities than Oprah. Maybe, he’s angling for his own talk show, I don’t know.

Anyway, keep watching folks. There will be more natural disasters, that’s nature, you know? And, when one happens, even before the dust has settled, somebody will be out there blaming it on somebody.

Update-5-27:

Reuters reporting today that Stone is continuing to feel the fallout from her remarks.

This is from a statement by Christian Dior, a company that Stone has a modeling contract with.

“Due to some customer reaction we have decided to pull her image from all of the department stores and from all of China,” Christian Dior China said in a statement.

“We just want our customers and fans to realize that her personal comments are not related to the company and of course we don’t support any type of commentary that will hurt the feelings of our customers,” Dior said.

The staff at askmen.com has compiled the “Top Ten: Hells on Earth” and, OKC is at number 5!

Here’s the list of the ten cities and each one’s particular brand of hell.

10 Baghdad, Iraq- Type of hell: Conflict
9 Dhaka, Bangladesh- Type of hell: Pollution
8 Yakutsk, Russia- Type of hell: Environmental extreme
7 Mogadishu, East Africa- Type of hell: Lawlessness
6 Chernobyl, Ukraine- Type of hell: Radiation
5 Oklahoma City, United States- Type of hell: Natural disasters
4 Pyongyang, North Korea- Type of hell: Oppression
3 Bujumbura, Republic of Burundi- Type of hell: Corruption
2 Linfen, China- Type of hell: Darkness
1 Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea- Type of hell: Disease

That’s some pretty fast company you’re running with there, OKC.

Here’s what Ask Men said about Oklahoma City.

While it may be all hunky-dory on the musical front, Oklahoma City isn’t the kind of place you’d want to hang out in for too long if you like to keep your feet on terra firma. The weather is frighteningly unpredictable, with blizzards often descending on the city and winds that could knock a high rise clean off its feet. It is, after all, located in the direct path of “Tornado Alley.”

The worst time to visit would be from March to August, when The Day After Tomorrow-style weather is pretty much expected. In fact, the severe weather season makes Dorothy’s Kansas look positively calm, with Oklahoma City being the city worst affected by tornadoes in the United States. One of the most powerful tornadoes on record — an F5 with wind speeds of 320 mph — devastated much of the city in 1999, securing its place on our list of hells on earth.

Well, I’ve never been to any of the other places on the list and, maybe it’s just me but, I’d take my chances with the tornado.

It’s a cold, grey, rainy day in the Ozarks. Some people might use the word dreary but, I don’t. I like this kind of weather. Maybe I’m a fan of the dreary, I don’t know. For some reason, to me, days like this have a calmative effect.

It’s a bad situation out in southern California with the fires and the Santa Ana winds. I always think of that Steely Dan song where they sing; “Here come those Santa Ana winds again”.

I was just reading this piece from Breitbart/AP that says 250,000 people have been evacuated in the San Diego area. From the article…

In many cases, crews couldn’t begin to fight the fires because they were too busy rescuing residents who refused to leave, fire officials said.

“They didn’t evacuate at all, or delayed until it was too late,” Metcalf (Bill Metcalf, chief of the North County Fire Protection District) said. “And those folks who are making those decisions are actually stripping fire resources.”

It strikes me that there is some deeply rooted instinct that makes humans resist evacuation. We have the illusion of a safe haven, maybe. Or, maybe we are just creatures of habit and don’t want to leave our comfort zones. If it is “instinct”, it’s clearly proof that you can’t rely on instinct.

I tend to look at these things through, what I perceive as cold reality. What have we actually learned from a situation like Hurricane Katrina? There’s a lot of blame to go around for what happened after the hurricane. You can blame local (city) government, state government, federal government, the Corps of Engineers, and FEMA all you want to for how things were handled before and after the event. But, the cold reality is that if the population had evacuated, then the impact of the tragedy would be far less.

That is over simplifying, I know that. I also know that it’s easy to reason; to see with cold reality from afar. I’ve asked myself the hypothetical; What I would have done if I was living in New Orleans before the hurricane? The honest answer is, that I probably would not have been anxious to uproot and evacuate.

In the case of Katrina and every other kind of disaster, the evacuation is not just a protection against that disaster. It’s protection against the aftermath, the effect of the disaster on the infrastructure.

As we go along in this world, all of these disasters will have more impact because the population is more concentrated. That being a fact, you can say that every level of government bears some responsibility for evacuation planning.

The final decision though is going to come down to the individual unless we are talking about forced evacuation. So, really it’s a question of will rather than preparation. You have to be willing to get out; willing to go against instinct possibly.

I was a child of the cold war. Growing up, I knew where the closest fallout shelter was at any given time. They were in public buildings, like schools and fire stations. Some were at private institutions like banks. The places to go were provided but the mindset, the idea that the bomb could come at any time and you need to know where to go; the mindset was instilled by family and society.

Maybe that’s what we need to work on. Maybe we need to have the mindset to leave if the situation occurs.

Planning only goes so far. How are you going to plan for an earthquake and what the effects are on the infrastructure? Even if you have a plan to evacuate, the plan is going to have to change.

You can’t plan everything. You do have to be willing to leave.