Korean Job Discussion Forums

[rapier]

[Bulsajo]

[Gord]

[rapier]

Oh hello gordon, back again? Thanks for your wonderful pictures, they make a great contribution to the thread.
Did you lose your color crayons? The ones on the rainforest thread were better though.
I know a good art class in Seoul- they might let you on it if you could try a bit a harder I guess.

[Gord]

It was at night when I drew that and under very low light, so my cones weren't all together useful. Since I only had rods to work with and they are not sensitive to colour, black and white was the best option that didn't involve me turning on a light.

[TheUrbanMyth]

[rapier]

Dude..ward churchill was never my main source: In fact i never quoted him once. if you want to earnestly believe in America's sainthood and tell yourself the holocaust never happened before falling asleep every night, then i can't stop you.

Americans today, especially sheltered whities from middle class picket homes, find it hard to believe that their kin could ever commit atrocities. however it took a hurican to tear the flimsy veneer of civilisation off an American city to quickly reveal a tale of opportunistic rape, looting, armed gangs and savagery. Almost like being back a century or so ago.

Hurricane leaves America's reputation in tatters.



From the song "Little Boy Soldiers" by The Jam, circa 1980:

I'm up on the hills, playing little boy soldiers,
Reconnaissance duty up at 5:30.
Shoot shoot shoot and kill the natives,
You're one of us and we love you for that.

God's on our side and so is Washington.

Come out on the hills with the little boy soldiers.

Come on outside - i'll sing you a lullaby,
Or tell a tale of how goodness prevailed.

We ruled the world - we killed and robbed,
The *beep* lot - but we don't feel bad.

It was done beneath the flag of democracy,
You'll believe and i do - yes i do - yes i do -

[TheUrbanMyth]

[rapier]

-of course I've read the link, I posted it in the first place.

But you have cherry plucked maybe one sentence out of the whole, that disease killed a lot of indians.

but what about the rest?

As the United States expanded westward, such conflicts multiplied. So far had things progressed by 1784 that, according to one British traveler, "white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; and nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children."

Settlers on the expanding frontier treated the Indians with contempt, often robbing and killing them at will. In 1782, a militia pursuing an Indian war party that had slain a woman and a child massacred more than 90 peaceful Moravian Delawares. Although federal and state officials tried to bring such killers to justice, their efforts, writes the historian Francis Prucha, "were no match for the singular Indian-hating mentality of the frontiersmen, upon whom depended conviction in the local courts."


The discovery of gold in 1848 brought about a fundamental change in Indian-white relations. Whereas formerly Mexican ranchers had both exploited the Indians and provided them with a minimum of protection, the new immigrants, mostly young single males, exhibited animosity from the start, trespassing on Indian lands and often freely killing any who were in their way. An American officer wrote to his sister in 1860: "There never was a viler sort of men in the world than is congregated about these mines."

What was true of miners was often true as well of newly arrived farmers. By the early 1850's, whites in California outnumbered Indians by about two to one, and the lot of the natives, gradually forced into the least fertile parts of the territory, began to deteriorate rapidly. Many succumbed to starvation; others, desperate for food, went on the attack, stealing and killing livestock. Indian women who prostituted themselves to feed their families contributed to the demographic decline by removing themselves from the reproductive cycle. As a solution to the growing problem, the federal government sought to confine the Indians to reservations, but this was opposed both by the Indians themselves and by white ranchers fearing the loss of labor. Meanwhile, clashes multiplied.

One of the most violent, between white settlers and Yuki Indians in the Round Valley of Mendocino County, lasted for several years and was waged with great ferocity. Although Governor John B. Weller cautioned against an indiscriminate campaign—"[Y]our operations against the Indians," he wrote to the commander of a volunteer force in 1859, "must be confined strictly to those who are known to have been engaged in killing the stock and destroying the property of our citizens . . . and the women and children under all circumstances must be spared"—his words had little effect. By 1864 the number of Yukis had declined from about 5,000 to 300.

The Humboldt Bay region, just northwest of the Round Valley, was the scene of still more collisions. Here too Indians stole and killed cattle, and militia companies retaliated. A secret league, formed in the town of Eureka, perpetrated a particularly hideous massacre in February 1860, surprising Indians sleeping in their houses and killing about sixty, mostly by hatchet. During the same morning hours, whites attacked two other Indian rancherias, with the same deadly results. In all, nearly 300 Indians were killed on one day, at least half of them women and children.

Once again there was outrage and remorse. "The white settlers," wrote a historian only 20 years later, "had received great provocation. . . . But nothing they had suffered, no depredations the savages had committed, could justify the cruel slaughter of innocent women and children.�� This had also been the opinion of a majority of the people of Eureka, where a grand jury condemned the massacre, while in cities like San Francisco all such killings repeatedly drew strong criticism. But atrocities continued: by the 1870's, as one historian has summarized the situation in California, "only remnants of the aboriginal populations were still alive, and those who had survived the maelstrom of the preceding quarter-century were dislocated, demoralized, and impoverished."

Disease is one factor- and the populations were naturally recovering and bouncing back after initial exposure. They would have continued to do so- if it were not for the genocidal actions and mopping up operations, the rampant Indian hating attitudes widespread across America at the time- all tacitly supported right up to government heads.

*And a question i first adressed to gopher:
"If you accidentally drop a nuclear warhead on a city, killing millions, are your responsible for their death?"

[TheUrbanMyth]

[death from above]

hey rapier, the Animals quote is...

And the only things a gambler needs
Is a suitcase and a trunk
And the only time he's satisfied
Is when he's all a-drunk

...you offensive piece of shit

[rapier]

Criminals don't leave evidence..and you will do anything to wash your hands of guilt.

What we have here is a much less blatant, more underhand extirpation- designed to be overlooked, waved away with the dismissive'Oh they died of disease".
But a whole nation cannot be denied the dignity of truth at least. The germans don't deny what happened: neither should the Americans. i'm not saying we should all dwell on the past and carry a huge burden. But I am demanding a simple acknowledgement that America was built not only on black slavery (already well known, as their descendants are aroound to demand it) but an outright exploitation and rampant abuse of the native people- who were willing to co-exist, yet were hounded and intimidated at every turn by a mentality that saw them as vermin to be cleared away. had their culture and philosophy been properly recorded and preserved, they had 10.000 years of knowledge to pass on to the new intruders. Research the history of every known native group and tribe, and you will come upon the same story: a relentless and unjustified brutal extermination in vastly unequal combat, as well as a deliberate pryeing upon already surrendered/peaceful tribes. The slaughter of women and children usually equal to the massacre of warriors- rendering a population unable to recover.


So..step by step.. whats your opinion of the mass sterilisation programme, for example?

(1973 through 1976). Within those limits, 3,406 Indian women were sterilized, according to the GAO.
Another estimate was provided by Lehman Brightman, who is Lakota, and who devoted much of his life to the issue, suffering a libel suit by doctors in the process. His educated guess (without exact calculations to back it up) is that 40 per cent of Native women and 10 per cent of Native men were sterilized during the decade. Brightman estimates that the total number of Indian women sterilized during the decade was between 60,000 and 70,000.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/sterilize.html

The United Nations Convention on Genocide states that imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group of people...are acts of genocide...[such as] sterilization of women are direct attacks on nationhood. Sterilization must continue as a birth-control choice for women, but for Native people it should be seen in the context of national identity. If an Indian woman is a member of a 3,000-member nation, sterilization has serious consequences for the survival of [her] people as a whole.

Indians have for some psychpathic reason, been the lowest of the low in America for so long.If new orleans was a native American city, Bush would've taken even longer than he did to get aid sent. As it is we have just witnessed the deaths of thousands of minority race in New Orleans, (genocide by neglect?) as bush twiddled his thumbs and waited over a week to get even drinking water to the dying. All this as we witnessed civilized Americans degenerate into raping, shooting and looting after a day without electricity. Hmm, I wonder how people behaved to the native Americans on the frontier?

Symptomatic once again of the abuse of the natural environment: The missisippi historically kept the area around New Orleans above sea level by depositing tons of sediment constantly on the floodplain. Building a huge settlement right on such a coastal area is a lunacy not found in traditional societies.

[rapier]

Hurricane Katrina: a man-made disaster

The catastrophe unfolding on the US Gulf Coast is fundamentally a human
caused ecological tragedy rather than a natural disaster. When
President
Bush and others smirk at global warming, when developers destroy
wetlands,
governments channel rivers, and billions are wasted on war and tax cuts
for the rich - conditions are created where natural processes are
greatly
intensified.

America is witnessing an environmental catastrophe of historic
magnitude,
yet because of their myopic "modern" viewpoint can not recognize it as
such. When thousands of refugees from a climate change intensified
hurricane, huddle in wrecked cities along barren coastlines and
destroyed
water works, we are witnessing human-caused ecological collapse.
Hurricane Katrina's intensity and difficult aftermath is a direct
result
of habitat degradation, over-population and climate change.

I am not suggesting Katrina sprang directly from global warming. But
leading scientists have long warned that climate change creates an
environment prone to more violent storms and other weather extremes.
Nor
is it suggested that President Bush caused the hurricane. But his
obstinacy in refusing to address climate change and refusal to focus on
non-oil based energy perpetuates conditions that make these situations
more likely and more deadly.

Let me express my deepest sympathy for the victims. We owe it to them
to
identify the root causes of this disaster, particularly since
ecological
refugees of this sort will increasingly become the norm. Disaster
recovery must include learning and acting upon the ecological lessons
of
this tragic and historically unprecedented event.

Disaster Waiting to Happen

New Orleans being fed to a hurricane was the result of specific
"unnatural" policy decisions. It is not natural (or wise) to build a
city
below sea-level surrounded by water on three sides in an area where
hurricanes occur. A human intensified hurricane fueled by ocean waters
warmed by human emissions is not natural. Millions living along a
narrow
coast line cleared of natural vegetation and coastal ecosystems is not
natural. And destruction of wetlands and diverting natural water
flows,
which leads to sinking coasts, is indeed most unnatural and dangerous.

Katrina was especially deadly because it struck heavily populated
areas.
From 1980 to 2003, the U.S. coastal population grew by 33 million.
There
are far too many people living along the Gulf Coast relative to the
ecosystems that exist to support them. A few decades ago coastal
Louisiana and Mississippi were still covered in swampy wetlands,
natural
buffers to such storms.

The loss of such coastal wetlands may be the single preventable factor
that most exacerbated Hurricane Katrina's destructive power. Wetlands
along rivers and near the coast are vital for absorbing and storing
floodwaters, and slowing down storm surges. Coastal wetlands in the
Gulf
Coast have been lost to ill-planned and deadly commercial developments.
Louisiana alone has lost 5000 square kilometers of wetlands over the
past
seven decades - an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. This
equals 65 square kilometers of hurricane absorbing coast being lost
every
year.

The hydrology of the Gulf Coast has been dramatically altered. Natural
water flows have been tamed, including straightening the Mississippi
River. As a result, the low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers New
Orleans from the gulf, has been rapidly disappearing as less silt is
deposited. Together the Gulf Coast's drastic habitat and hydrological
changes have caused the coastline and New Orleans itself to sink.

While Katrina's existence can not specifically be linked to global
warming, warming oceans as a cause of stronger hurricanes is consistent
with current climate change science. All indications are that
hurricanes
are intensifying in strength. It has long been known that hurricanes
suck
energy from warm ocean waters to drive their winds. A recent MIT study
found average peak wind speeds of hurricanes over the North Atlantic
and
the western and eastern North Pacific has increased by 50% over past
decades. This increase in storm intensity closely aligned with rising
sea-surface temperatures due to global warming.

Global warming has also led to a sea level rise, which exacerbates
flooding such as occurred in New Orleans. Some one third of the
world��s
population lives within 100 kilometers of the ocean, and thirteen of
the
eighteen largest cities in the world are by the sea. When some two
billion
people are faced with rising sea levels caused by global warming, as
well
as intensified hurricanes, the potential for flooding and other
dramatic
disasters goes up significantly. This is why we must pursue policies
to
protect the climate as we further study these phenomena.

What It Means, What Must Be Done

It is not too early to find fault, or to diagnose long-term measures to
avoid such disasters. Those that are most at fault for this disaster
include the oil industry and their consumers, coastal developers and
their
occupants, and government officials that failed to heed science on
climate
change, the risk of flooding in New Orleans, and the importance of
coastal
ecosystems.

Human development that is planned and conceived without regard to
natural
ecosystems can not be sustained. The way to minimize future
occurrences
of this type is to embrace ecological sustainability, sustainable
development and ecological restoration as policies underpinning a
post-modern society. Blindness to human dependence upon nature is no
longer tolerable.

The United States simply can not go on with profligate use of oil. The
time when we could count on cheap oil is clearly ending. Important
aspects of both 911 and Hurricane Katrina are blowback resulting from
America's oil addiction. America has been shown to be a fragile place,
one environmental disaster or oil shock away from chaos.

What to do in the mid to long term? We must stop emitting carbon
dioxide.
We must stop financing development in coastal areas and flood plains.
We
need a ban on reoccupying storm wracked coastal areas, in order that
they
may be restored to living, protecting barriers from such storms.
Cities
must be placed and designed for sustainability over centuries.
Further,
all humanity must stop having more than one or two children a couple.

These ecologically based policies will not immediately help the hapless
victims - but over decades and generations we can maintain an Earth
that
is livable. Given current population, deteriorating ecosystems, and
diminished resources - there can be no other outcome other than mass
death
and anarchy unless we start changing our ways and preparing now. We
are
not owed a safe life secure from nature's vagaries. We earn it by
treating the Earth with respect, and living in an ecologically
sustainable
manner.

The whole world has seen how utterly horrible ecological collapse can
be.
The air-conditioned, highly mobile and wired reality that Americans
take
for granted is a thin veneer indeed. This past week has drummed home
to
me that global ecological collapse is going to mean misery and
suffering
for hundreds of millions if not billions of people. The anarchy that
sadly pervades so much of the World has come to America and, as I and
others have predicted, it is due to our ecological ignorance and
recklessness.

Learning to play by nature's rules

Hurricane Katrina's devastation of Louisiana and Mississippi last week offered a terrifying reminder of the impact of floods on human history. Almost every culture seems to harbor its own flood myth.

According to Greek folklore, early humans were punished for their wickedness by a vengeful god, who stirred up a torrential storm, unleashed the fountains of the deep and commanded the oceans to rise, thereby drowning every living thing.

In Welsh mythology, the lake of Llion overflows, swamping everything save the Celtic heroes Dwyfan and Dwyfach who escape the rising waters in a mastless ship packed with two of every species. (Sound familiar?)

And in Kenya, legend holds that the ocean once fit in a small pot owned by a poor married couple. The husband warned his daughter-in-law never to touch the pot, explaining that it held the remains of their honored ancestors. Naturally, she couldn't resist, the pot shattered, and - you guessed it - a flood drowned every living thing.

This is the general pattern: Heedless humans bringing on not only their own demise, but the demise of everything around them. But not all flood myths adhere to this formula.

Take the Confucian version. The story begins in the usual manner, with the king asking his faithful minister, Gun, to save the country from the rising waters. Unfortunately, Gun is an arrogant guy and thinks he can control nature. For nine years he labors, building dam after dam to stem the raging tide. As each dam falls apart, the waters rage ever stronger.

Eventually, the king wises up, banishes Gun, and orders Gun's son, Yu, to have a go. A humble man, Yu quietly studies the problem and concludes that attempting to constrain nature is futile. Rather than build dams, he gently channels the flood waters into an irrigation system. The crops bloom, the waters recede, the people are saved and Yu is anointed king.

Americans seem not to know Yu's story, for we insist on defying nature. We blithely set sail on churning seas and fly into stormy skies. We build homes on unstable hillsides, and communities in woodlands ripe for fire. We rely on technology and the government's largess to protect us, and usually, that is enough.

But sometimes nature outwits the best human efforts to contain it. Last week's hurricane was a horrifying case in point. The resulting flooding was an example of the fact that the efforts we have made over the years to contain nature - with channels and levees and other great feats of engineering - often lead to greater catastrophes.

Hurricanes of all sorts are a regular feature of coastal life, yet you would never know that from the nightly news. Breathless emanations from New Orleans include reports of the Superdome's roof getting ripped away, and a torrent of unleashed waters that covered 80 percent of the city, forcing the remaining residents to their rooftops. All of this is awful, but none of it should come as a surprise.

Nothing can stop a hurricane, of course, but humans can do much to worsen the impact of one. And humans have done plenty to set the course for this disaster.

Floods are part of the natural ebb and flow of life in lowland Louisiana, and, left to their own devices, flood waters can actually do good. They carry silt from the Mississippi River that replenishes the delta and keeps the coastland above the water line, creating a gradual buffer from the sea.

But we have short-circuited this natural process by constructing hundreds of miles of levees along the river, channeling the rushing water into the Gulf of Mexico, where essential sediment is dumped. As a result, the lowlands are sinking into the Gulf at a rate of 25 square miles each year. And as illustrated so disastrously last week, levees are not indestructible. Indeed, the higher and more strongly built they are, the greater the dangers that come from their being breached.

Until now, Mother Nature, even at her angriest, has not managed to dislodge our abiding belief that technology will protect us from our clumsiest acts of hubris. But Katrina made it impossible to ignore the power of prevention, to ignore the facts that our efforts to keep New Orleans dry have led to the erosion of the region's natural defenses.

Indeed, Katrina has sent us a sweeping message about learning to live with, instead of combating, nature: we might work harder to reduce our emission of the greenhouse gases contributing to climate change and dramatic weather events - like hurricanes - rather than investing so much of our effort in finding ways to protect ourselves from ever more powerful storms.

We might decrease our use of fossil fuels that create those gases by driving more efficient cars or developing alternatives, rather than attempting to draw still more oil and natural gas from the reluctant earth.

And, in the same spirit, we might distribute more precious healthcare dollars on prevention - health education, nutrition and other public health measures - rather than squandering them on high-tech medical wizardry that can create a host of new problems of its own.

None of this, of course, is easy. Part of our national optimism stems from the fantasy that brute technological force can triumph over almost anything - from deadly microbes to earthquakes that reach up the Richter scale. This explains why so many expensive homes come to be built on fault lines or in fire-prone forests. Because we think our high-tech methods will cure the ultimate problems, we allow ourselves to create situations that put us in inevitable conflict with nature.

When it comes to flooding, we almost learned our lesson. The Midwestern flood of 1993 broke flow records along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, causing an estimated $12 billion to $16 billion in damages. The havoc wrought by this disaster sparked a new emphasis on flood-damage prevention, including widely publicized government buyouts of flood plain properties.

But these buyouts were soon eclipsed by new construction on flood plains, many of them centered in the St. Louis metropolitan region, with an estimated $2.2 billion spent on new development on the very land that had been under water in 1993.

A study done at the University of Colorado at Boulder a few years ago found that in a presidential election year, there are twice as many federally declared disasters than in other years. Americans love heroes, and there is nothing more appealing to politicians, including presidents, than comforting victims of national disasters with promises of resources and money.

But these dollars are rarely earmarked for mitigation measures, such as recreating coastal flood plains and wetlands around New Orleans to provide some degree of natural defense. Nor do these efforts lead to a spurt of regulations to help prevent the damage from occurring again. This is not due to a lack of understanding - government officials know full well that people should not build on flood plains. They also know that overdevelopment creates huge swaths of impermeable surfaces like roads and parking lots, giving water no place to go, and making even moderate flooding more dangerous.

But when faced with a developer who might contribute to the community's tax base, they rarely have the strength to insist on sensible measures. Like Gun, they cling to the dangerous canard that nature can be tamed.

There is a more reasonable path. The Dutch, after a long, romantic history of battling back the sea, have in the past few years come to a sort of truce with a force they now acknowledge they cannot control. This is not to suggest that the Dutch are suddenly yanking their fingers out of the nation's massive dike system, but they are, as they put it, "making room for water," banning new building on flood plains and preserving essential wetlands.

The British, too, are adopting this holistic approach, replacing expensive and unsustainable "high walls" engineered to keep everything dry, with green space placed between houses and the river, and tiered flood defense systems that encourage the water to rise predictably, in steps. The goal is not to keep every drop of water behind a barrier, but to work with the flow, softening it from a seething torrent to manageable rivulets.

Katrina will not be the last hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast, and it probably won't be the most powerful one. But by the time the next one comes, let's hope we've learned to take Yu's approach and play by nature's rules.



Ellen Ruppel Shell, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, is co-director of the Graduate Program in Science Journalism at Boston University. - Ed.


(Washington Post Service)

[peemil]

This thread is too long to read.

Anyone want to sum it all up for me?

[Bulsajo]

That's easy- Rapier's an asshole. A big stinky flatulent one.
A bitter, spiteful disillusioned asshole who basically views his being in Korea as some sort of personal failure.
He is compelled to make North Americans feel the same guilt and pain that he feels.
And he wholeheartedly supports terrorism, just as long as it's not Islamic terrorism.

Gord drew a picture, but it wasn't one of his better ones. He said it was because it was dark, but I suspect it's more of a 'pearls before swine' stance. Can't say I blame him.

Gopher handed Rapier his ass in terms of evaluating American history, but Rapier- not being able to tell his ass from his elbow- steadfastly refused to notice.

Oh yes, I almost forgot- apparently my grandfather massacred people and committed atrocities against Native Americans; Rapier knows this but refuses to share the details or how he came by the information. It makes me sad that Rapier knows more about my family than I do.