The tsunami has brought Dan Drezner back from his blogging hiatus. Since he's written on the topic before, I hope he'll join the debate over whether the U.S. is "stingy" with disaster aid.
Meanwhile, the Amazon Red Cross total has topped $834,000.
Reading down the entries on the newly created SouthEast Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog, "the SEA-EAT blog for short," somehow brings home the magnitude of the disaster even more powerfully than the TV footage and growing casualty counts. All those little items, totalling such great tragedy, such great need, and so many efforts, small and large, to help...terribly sad and moving at the same time.
Amazon is collecting money for the Red Cross, charging no fees for the service. When I checked in and contributed, the total was more than $750,000 and rising rapidly. (Via InstaPundit.)
WaPost reporter Michael Dobbs, vacationing with his family on an island his brother owns in Sri Lanka, was caught in the tsunami. He reports here.
Michele at Command Post has a fairly comprehensive list of how to donate to help victims of the South Asian tsunami.
Here's an interesting A.P. article on how employers, notably Maytag, are snapping up people leaving the military:
DES MOINES, Iowa - Former soldiers, including those returning from Iraq or Afghanistan with disabilities, are finding that their military background can help them get jobs in civilian companies. Maytag Corp., for example, has an aggressive recruiting program turning recently discharged soldiers into repair technicians. Home Depot Inc. began Operation Career Front and Toyota North America started its Hire A Hero program in the past few years.
Companies say it's a win for them because they get high-quality workers.
"They have great discipline. They have great technical skills. They understand how to follow orders and follow procedures," said Art Learmonth, president of Maytag Services.
One of the biggest advantages of former soldiers is that they're used to learning fast.
If ever a company deserved to go out of business, it's US Airways.
In a memo to employees, US Airways chief executive Bruce Lakefield thanked those who helped "our customers during the operational meltdown we experienced over the weekend." However, he criticized those who exacerbated problems by calling in sick.
"I have seen lots of excuses for why people took it upon themselves to call in sick, such as low morale, poor management, anger over pay cuts and frustration with labor negotiations," Lakefield said. "None of those excuses passes the test. We all have our jobs to do."
Union leaders representing workers in negotiations with the airline over further pay and benefits concessions denied any organized effort to slow operations.
"It's poor management planning, that's my opinion," Teddy Xidas, president of the Pittsburgh branch of the Association of Flight Attendants, said Saturday. "We have sick calls every single year around the holiday."
If you hate your boss or just don't want to go to work, find another job. Don't deliberately ruin other people's holiday travel.
This Gina Kolata article is a must-read for anyone concerned about the quality of health care. Medicine does, of course, entail many judgment calls. But so do most occupations. That doesn't mean the concept of "best practices" can't apply in medicine, just as it does in other fields. Certain very basic practices save lots of lives if they're made routine. Yet doctors, like every other sort of worker, sometimes need to be reminded to do things they know they should do.
Using incentives like bonus pay and deterrents like public humiliation, it is a bold new effort by the federal government, along with organizations of hospitals, doctors, nurses, and health researchers, to push providers to use proven remedies for common ailments.
And it is a response to a sobering reality: lifesaving treatments often are forgotten while doctors and hospitals lavish patients with an abundance of care, which can involve expensive procedures of questionable value. The results are high costs, unnecessary medicine and wasted opportunities to save lives and improve health.
Simple things can fall through the cracks....
At Duke University's hospital, for example, when patients arrived short of breath, feverish and suffering from pneumonia, their doctors monitored their blood oxygen levels and put them on ventilators, if necessary, to help them breathe.
But they forgot something: patients who were elderly or had a chronic illness like emphysema or heart disease should have been given a pneumonia vaccine to protect them against future bouts with bacterial pneumonia, a major killer. None were.
All bacterial pneumonia patients should also get antibiotics within four hours of admission. But at Duke, fewer than half did....
"Medical care is one of those very strange parts of the economy where you get paid no matter what the quality of the service you provide," Dr. Asch said. "It is like you went to a car dealership and your Mercedes is going to cost you the same as your Yugo."
Read the article, check out the charts, and look up your own local hospitals' performance here.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said it best: "For all the huge advances in the control of our lives through science and technology, an earthquake on this scale is truly humbling as well as profoundly tragic."
Yes, natural disasters are less lethal in richer, more technologically advanced nations, and yes Pacific coast residents have the advantage of some warning of tsunamis. But don't kid yourself. As most Californians know, nobody is truly prepared for an 8.9 magnitude earthquake. (Every quake, no matter how far away, is a local story in L.A., which is why I always turn to the LAT for coverage.)
You can make a contribution to the Red Cross International Response Fund here.
It's called Democracy in Iraq, by blogger Husayn Uthman. He's eager to hear readers' comments.
Both the WaPost and the NYT published Christmas-pegged stories on USO visits with the troops. The Post article, by Tamara Jones, is a vividly written feature that sympathetically captures the strange life of soldiers who are far away from home and, because these troops are in Afghanistan, threatened more by boredom than enemy fire. The story, which deserves reading in full, has many moods but one thing it isn't is snarky.
Last week, though, out of the flat, white sky, a Chinook chopper appeared, swooping down on a handful of bases to deliver a quick dash of holiday cheer, courtesy of an organization famous for that: the USO. From the dust cloud, two men emerged. One was a graying punk rocker, the other an actor few readily recognized.
And with that, a strange war briefly got even stranger.
Politically, Henry Rollins and Patrick Kilpatrick occupy opposite corners. Rollins, the 43-year-old frontman for the '80s punk band Black Flag, focuses now on "spoken-word" tours peppered with rants against the Bush administration and its motives for war. Kilpatrick, a strapping 55-year-old who specializes in playing on-screen villains, defends as righteous both the president and the invasions he ordered.
But the two entertainers share common emotional ground, believing that the troops deserve unconditional respect and gratitude. Their determination to express that, in person, put them on the same handbill when the USO organized a five-day, seven-base holiday tour to Southwestern Asia. This would be just meet-and-greet, handshakes and autographs, chitchat -- but no show. A chance to connect, no matter how fragile, or forced, or fleeting....
Rollins has barely had time to uncap his Sharpie when he hears an urgent voice somewhere near his elbow.
"You're in the outside world . . ." A squirrelly Marine has executed a stealth weave-and-cut maneuver to the front of the autograph line. Rollins turns to him politely.
"I heard Dimebag Darrell got killed. That true?" the Marine blurts out.
"Yes, he got shot," Rollins replies, recounting how heavy-metal guitarist Darrell Abbott was gunned down recently during a bizarre melee in Ohio as his band Damageplan played. The Marine looks ready to cry.
"That's so depressing," he says.
"Really depressing," Rollins agrees. This is his fourth USO gig in a year, and he has come to realize that just showing his recognizable face to a generation of fans now in uniform brings reassurance: "You make them kind of think, 'Okay, the world is still there.' " He tries to resume signing autographs and posing for pictures, but the Marine hovers. He begins to ramble about his old Black Flag and Pantera CDs. Dimebag played for Pantera, too. Somehow when the Marine moved overseas, his prized CD collection got cracked. Now the discs are gone and Dimebag Darrell is dead.
By contrast, the Times article by Thom Sanker is much duller--they don't call the Times the gray lady for nothing--and much less interested in the lives of the troops. It's keeps mentioning Bob Hope and Vietnam and is careful to bring up race and gender. (The USO performers are all white males except for the obligatory eye candy.)
One thing the two articles agree on: Robin Williams is popular with the troops.